3 Days in 63 Read online

- From “Brownsville Girl” by Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard

  August 16, 1987

  Gregg thumbed mindlessly through a year-old Field and Stream magazine that boasted an article on Trophy Deer, as his father, seated to his left inside the overly-warm Macon Barber Shop, made the capacity crowd of geriatric scarecrows guffaw at his imitation of the way one of his fellow police officers drove his squad car. Placing both of his hands on an imaginary steering wheel before him, one firmly atop the other, Gregg’s father, Jimmy Clark, the Assistant Chief of Police in their sleepy, little, mountain town of Franklin, North Carolina, animating his eyes to Don Knotts’ status, acted as if he was driving erratic and fast around a serpentine mountain curve. The barbershop roared with laughter. Gregg grinned. He couldn’t for the life of himself figure out why his father’s imitation was belly-laugh-worthy, but he’d learned years ago that what old people thought to be funny was quite different than that of young people.

  The maroon, duct-taped, barber shop chairs were hot and sharp, failing to see a ten minute window without a warm backside cooking them all day. Where the seasoned tears weren’t taped or the tape had pulled to one side or the other, exposed at least a portion of the sharp tears.

  The hot room smelled of aftershave, chewing tobacco, day-old sweat, and cigarette smoke. Though Frankie, the barber, no longer allowed smoking inside the shop, many of the old-timers, his father’s present cheering section, wore their day-old smoke in their hair, on their big callused hands and all over their clothes like a spider’s web.

  The radio was on, barely audible behind the big tales, jokes, and eruptions of laughter but loud enough to tug Gregg’s attention into a standing position at the mention of Elvis. Joe Cunningham, a female Disc Jockey on Franklin’s WFSC station, was asking Brenda Wooten, her DJ partner in crime, where she’d been ten years before when the news had broken about Elvis.

  Gregg couldn’t quite make out Joe’s reply in full, as another gong of laughter drowned out the radio, but he sat up straighter and lowered the magazine he was feigning to read to his knees.

  “Suspicious Minds,” a late 1960s Presley hit, poured forth through the ancient green radio speakers like a welcome whisper from an old friend. Gregg instinctively jerked his eyes in the direction of the grinning barber, whose left shoulder was unintentionally blocking his view of the Bryant Funeral Home calendar that hung slightly crooked behind her, a calendar that everyone he knew and had ever known had lived and died by. Bryant Funeral Home calendars had been to Macon County residents in the early 20th century what family Bibles had been to residents of the county a century prior. Their twelve long pages with twenty-eight to thirty-one-day squares recorded it all: babies who’d lived and babies who’d died, wedding days, anniversaries, birthdays, Easters, church revivals, funerals, and homecomings. The calendars even aided in feeding families, as they also held the moon phases used for planting, and rarely was a family’s calendar without the seasoned flyswatter, most often sharing the same nail.

  Gregg waited impatiently for Frankie to move. Frankie Bowers, the lovely thirty-something-year-old barber with a wild shock of white hair splitting the middle of her otherwise glowing strawberry blonde hair—a characteristic Gregg had had ample time to ponder on, seeing as she’d given him his first haircut, his last haircut and every haircut in between—wasn’t the town’s only barber, but by reputation, setting, routine, and comfort, she had become the queen. Unlike other barbers Gregg had seen while easing past their sad and ghost town shops, male barbers, barbers who sat alone in their own raised chairs reading newspapers with glasses on the tips of their noses, Frankie’s shop was never barren, never void of life. Gregg began tapping his right index finger on the magazine’s cover as he silently waited for the amiable barber to lean into a sideburn cut, lean back into a laugh or step back to scrutinize a line or a fade, anything to expose the calendar date she was unwittingly concealing.

  When an old relic in clean bib overalls, starkly contrasting others in the room, began to robustly mimic the thick accent of a Boston Yankee who’d made the dire mistake of asking for directions at a gas station he’d been haunting earlier in the day, Frankie finally leaned forward. Comb erect in hand, as if to smack the old fool for his devilment, the barber’s lunge revealed the calendar page Gregg’s eyes had been hungry for.

  August 16th, Gregg whispered to himself. Gregg’s father, upon hearing his son’s breathy exclamation, glanced his way but didn’t inquire. It had been ten years since Elvis Presley had died, and WFSC was remembering him through story and song.

  Gregg knew the date well, as Elvis had been an obsession with him for at least three years; however, due to the mid-day baseball game he’d been begrudgingly pulled from bed on a Saturday morning to play and the rush to the barber shop thereafter, and given that his nerves were stripped raw due to school fast approaching, he hadn’t realized the significance of the day.

  Gregg’s friends often teased him for liking old people music. He’d even been to Graceland in Memphis, Tennessee earlier in the summer. Gregg’s teachers always smiled when he showed up to class in Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis t-shirts.

  Drinking in the guitars and backing vocals of “Suspicious Minds,” after the calendar page’s validation, Gregg began easing out of the present. His father’s words and gestures, so raucous beside him, quickly became white noise, so too the laughter and outbursts. Gregg slowly but surely began slipping his setting like a Cicada slips its shell. Gregg flew on the winds of his own imagination. In his mind’s eye he soared over darkening mountains, fields, trains, towns and rivers, and though his form, clad in an itchy gray polyester baseball uniform that read, Tourists, across the back and with tangle-tied dirty cleats, still filled a chair in the Macon Barber Shop, Gregg had gone back to Graceland.

  Amid the spongy carpets and fabric-wrapped walls, Gregg could see the gleaming casket through the doors bedecked with colorfully stained glass Peacocks. He saw the profile of the King, the bridge of his nose, his forehead, his dark hair brushed back. He smelled coffee brewing somewhere in the house, and the aroma of cool flowers was overpowering. He heard phones ringing. He heard muffled, disjointed conversations from distant rooms. He heard youth running upstairs, and he was alone. He was alone with the dead body of Elvis Aaron Presley. He felt the carpet give beneath his size sevens, as he moved in closer, wringing his baseball cap in his hands. He could see the white shirt collar now. He could see the deep-as-a-well, facial pores. His fingertips touched the squeak-shiny casket. He smelled Brut aftershave wafting up from the dead singer. He was so close. He could count his eyelashes, his ears were….

  “I’ve got to go in a minute,” Gregg’s father blurted out while grabbing his son’s left knee, never realizing the chest-tightening shock he’d just delivered to his boy, oblivious to the fact that he had just pulled him from Graceland, flung him forward in time, back to a barbershop, back to old men and cigarette smoke, squarely back to 1987.

  Gregg and his family, which consisted of his father, Jimmy, his mother Audrey, who worked at a local grocery store and his six-year-old brother, Scott, had just recently returned from Graceland, the home of the late Elvis Presley in Memphis Tennessee. Gregg had begged for three years, as he was a mammoth Elvis fan, to go to Memphis, to see the home of his hero, to walk the halls and see the stage suits, records, and cars.

  As Presley, with passion, told an unknown someone that they couldn’t go on together with suspicious minds, and amid the spurts of laughter, outside, a heavy rain had begun to fall. The wide picture window that started at Frankie’s right elbow and ended near the front door’s frame, bedecked in bold red letters reading, Macon Barber Shop, revealed to the room filled to capacity, a virtual torrent, a mountain deluge, and the sky that had been overcast and strangely foreboding all day was darkening with haste, like the closing of an eye.

  “Here she comes!” An old man called out above the horde. Frankie turned away from the clean-shaven man in her barber chair, comb in one hand and clippers in the other, to look upon the rain. After placing the clippers upon the sink’s edge, she pumped, with her freshly free hand, the boost release of her barber chair, easing her most recent customer to the ground.

  “Hit’s a gully warsher ain’t it?” The clean and clipped old man piped up as he climbed spryly from Frankie’s chair, pulling the thin crisp paper collar from his neck Frankie had neglected to retrieve as she’d been watching the storm arrive.

  “Lord, I pray my winders are up,” Frankie said with raised eyebrows and lowered mouth corners.

  “If you need somebody to run and roll em’ up Frankie, …. Bob Tallent will!” The oldest looking man in the filled-line of chairs croaked, while pointing a crooked finger down the row of wrinkles, denim and crossed lean legs to another old man sporting an aged gray fedora with a turned up brim and a wide toothless grin. The room, like before, filled with laughter just as a warm glow of lightning lit the dark street outside. Gregg’s father checked his watch.

  “Damn!” The off-duty lawman barked. “I’ve got to go jump off your momma’s car. I figured we’d be done by now.” He whispered the last part.

  Gregg had spent the morning with his father, as his mother was working, and that wasn’t the norm. Usually, it was his father who was working or getting ready to go to work or hanging out at work. He loved his job, but it did make for too much time apart Gregg felt.

  Gregg’s mother had taken a break at noon. She had planned on running errands, but her car wouldn’t start. She’d called Gregg’s father who’d told her he’d be there to jump it off when she got off work.

  “You stay here!” Gregg’s father commanded. “I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  “No Daddy, I’ll go with you.”

  “No, you won’t either. Your momma will kill us both. School’s just about to start, and you gotta get that haircut.”

  Gregg’s father gently took his son’s left knee again in his right hand and squeezed then stood up.

  “Frankie, I’ve got to run meet Audrey. I’ll be back to get him in a little bit.” Gregg’s father spoke without looking in the barber’s direction, a bodily sign of his perfect ease with her, the men, the town and the time.

  “It’ll be a little while,” Frankie said with a toothy grin, gesturing with her comb to the full house before her.

  “Be good.” Gregg’s father instructed before pushing open the door.

  “Now don’t you melt out thire Jimmy!” A snaggle-toothed old man with snow-white hair and deep-socketed eyes said with a gaping grin.

  “Cecil,” the lawman said in reply while lowering his head in preparation for the downpour, “Steel don’t melt, it rusts.” Another round of laughter from the room and he was gone, swallowed up in sheets of blowing rain.

  As the old barbershop door swung to a close, a fresh flash of lightning lit the world outside for what seemed to Gregg an obscenely long time, creating, in its wake, a mirage of high noon in the eye of the storm and illuminating, in its lengthy glow, two men in the street outside. One man, heavy-set and hunched over, running with a cardboard box over his head was making quick time toward the open door of the tiny grocery store that sat across the street. The other man, spare of frame, straddling a bicycle, seemed, for all the world to be ignoring the rain altogether. With his head held high, and by the look of his leg rotations, just a shade faster than a clock’s hands turn, he wasn’t paying the rain any mind at all.

  As darkness again took its turn after the glow died, it didn’t surprise Gregg at all when an old man leaped to his feet, slung open the rain-spattered door and yelled, “As much as you charge for Ground Beef Shorty, a man might figure you could afford you an unbreller!” Ribald laughter once again lifted the ribs of the room, as the old character continued, “and Ted, damn it, ain’t you got the sense to git in outa’ the rain?”

  Gregg could hardly appreciate the gravity of the booming thunder that followed the next wild light due to the exclamations of the loud old comic and the simultaneous explosion of laughter, large, dirty, slapping hands, stomping work boots, thigh slaps, whoops, whistles and coughs his bellowed comments had elicited from the crowd that filled the storm-darkened barbershop.

  The old jokester eased back into his seat, gripping the exposed metal armrests with both of his pale liver-spotted hands, and without missing a beat, continued his satirical diatribe.

  “Ole Ted, I’ll tell you what’s the truth don’t even know it’s a rainin’ no more than a dead man. They ain’t no tellin’ what he’s been a drankin.”

  The howling crowd soon settled. It seemed the roller coaster of tomfoolery was slowing down, and the cars were coming to a stop. Gregg just listened and watched. It would be a hand-full of years before he’d understand what had been so funny about the man with the box and the man on the bicycle. Shorty Mason and Ted Love meant nothing to Gregg yet.

  All of a sudden a fist of wind coldcocked the door halfway open, bringing with it the rain and a macabre late-summer chill. Gregg watched as several of the old locals shivered and lifted their shoulders. Frankie hastily jumped to the door, pushed it shut, turned the open sign to closed and flipped the top lock so as to prevent the mid-August storm from again crashing their party that had thus far been as lively as any Gregg had ever known.

  Upon completing her task with the door and the clamorous wind, the grinning barber addressed the new old man who’d seated himself in her chair.

  “Well Troy, I’m glad you got to see me today.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” The old man drawled.

  “You been up to snuff?” Frankie queried her customer, as she placed a worn stripped apron over him and pinned it behind his neck.

  “Oh, I can set up and take nourishment, but I ain’t fit to work.” He replied without the benefit of any recognizable expression in his tone or on his face.

  Another loud gust of wind blew against the building, and somehow the room that had been sickeningly warm, grew cool, and several of the old men gestured to such by gently grabbing their elbows or blowing through pursed lips.

  “Thank somebody just walked cross all our graves Frankie.” The old man nearest the door slowly drawled, while watching the pouring rain through the window. The day grew darker, and inside the tiny archaic barber shop, despite the month and despite the body heat, the room put on a thin veil of ice.

  Headlamps, broken in shards by the rain, like Picasso-painted light, slowly passed outside. Elvis, so faint, was singing, “It’s Midnight, and I miss you,” and for the first time since Gregg had arrived with his father over an hour before, the barbershop grew silent and still.

  “Let me tell you one on your daddy.” An old man in the middle of the row piped up, splitting the silence. He’d leaned forward and craned his neck toward Gregg with a rolled up newspaper in his claw of a hand, acting as if he were attempting to smack Gregg’s knee, though the newspaper was a good three feet shy of its target.

  “My daddy?” Gregg responded with a gentle smile, again lowering the magazine to his knees.

  “Your daddy.” The old man declared with verve.

  “Now don’t go tellin’ tales, Clayton!” Frankie reprimanded with a pointed comb.

  “Ahhhh!” The old man replied, waving his rolled Franklin Press in Frankie’s direction as if swatting at a bothersome fly.

  “I could tell a passel of em’ on your daddy,” the old man continued, remaining in his novel position, his left boney elbow digging into the top of his left thigh. Several of the other old men grinned but stared at their feet or their hands, as if joining the old man in his merry yarn would somehow be risky, as if stories passed around about Jimmy Clark, the same man just moments before they’d laughed with, at, and beside of was somehow taboo now.

  “Hit was bout two year ago, ole CD Jenkins’s boy, way up in high school, rear-ended this feller down round Zickgraf Lumber. Well, this feller’d been goin’ around town doing that, bowin’ up on people, trying to git em’ to hit him. Well, CD’s Boy, I don’t recall his name right off.”

  “Patrick,” Frankie said, never taking her eyes or scissors off of her fresh customer.

  “Patrick!” The old tale-teller went on as if he’d just remembered the name himself and hadn’t been told.

  “Now ole Patrick had done hit his breaks three, four times. This feller’d gun it and stop, gun it and stop. Finally, ole Patrick clipped him. Oh, that feller come a tearin’ out a thire.

  “You’ll pay for my car! You’ll pay for my damn car!”

  “Ole boy bellered, swangin’ em arms, mad as an ole wet hen. Well here come Jimmy. I’s a standin’ ire talken’ to Cowboy, your grandpa, Virgil Rice, in the parkin’ lot bout havin’ me a hoe handle made when here he come. Well, it weren’t but a breath, ole Jimmy had at loud-mouth sombitch backin’ down.”

  For the first time since the stranger’s story had started, the other old local color, who’d grown uncomfortably sullen, seemed to grin and agree with what the tale-teller said. The storyteller, as further evidence of what Gregg sensed was occurring, turned away from him and began looking down the row of faces toward the rain-peppered door, then, leaning further than when he’d begun the tale the other way, back in Gregg’s direction, but beyond him, to the three old men sitting to his right. The old man was obviously seeking collective affirmation and concurrence from the gaggle of scraggly old timers wiling away their evening at Frankie’s barbershop.

  “Well,” The old spinner went on, “CD, Patrick’s daddy, he’d been at home workin’ in his garden when he’d got the call tellin’ him Patrick had been in a wreck, and hit weren’t two minutes, here he come. He fishtailed that ole truck, skeered to death, and here come ole CD, huffin’ and a puffin’, that chest out, dirt all ore him, rollin’ that baccer round his mouth, and there was Jimmy, all arned and tucked, shined up like a new penny, cause your daddy’s always lookin’ like he’s got a funeral to get to. Man can see hisself in your daddy’s shoes. Well, Jimmy put that hand up in ole CD’s face.”