The Bottoms Read Online Free PDF Page B

men.
    Tom liked him too, and in fact had a girlish crush on him, and sometimes she came down to the barbershop just to hang around him, and if he was in the mood he’d flatter her a bit and now and then give her a nickel. Which was good. It meant I’d probably get one too.
    What was most amazing about Cecil was the way he could cut hair. His scissors were like a part of his hand. They flashed and turned and snipped with little more than a flex of his wrist. When I was in his chair, pruned hair haloed around me in the sunlight and my head became a piece of sculpture, transformed from a mass of unruly locks to a work of art. Cecil never missed a beat, never poked you with the scissor tips—which Daddy couldn’t say. When Cecil rubbed spiced oil into your scalp, parted and combed your hair, spun you around to look in the closer mirror behind the chairs, you weren’t the same guy anymore. I thought I looked older, more manly, when he was finished.
    When Daddy did the job, parted my hair, put on the oil, and let me out of the chair (he never spun me for a look like he did his adult customers), I was still just a kid. With a haircut.
    Since on this day I’m talking about, Daddy was out, I asked Cecil if he would cut my hair, and he did, finishing with hand-whipped shaving cream and a razor around my ears to get those bits of hair too contrary for scissors. Cecil used his hands to work oil into my scalp, and he massaged the back of my neck with his thumb and fingers. It felt warm and tingly in the heat and made me sleepy.
    No sooner had I climbed down from the chair than Old Man Nation drove up in his mule-drawn wagon and he and his two grown boys came in. Mr. Ethan Nation was a big man in overalls with tufts of hair in his ears and crawling out of his nose. His boys were redheaded, jug-eared versions of him. They all chewed tobacco, probably since birth, and their teeth that weren’t green from lack of cleaning were brown with chaw. They carried cans with them and spat in them between words. Most of their conversation being tied to or worked around cuss words not often spoken in polite company in that day and time.
    They never came in to get a haircut. They cut their own hair with a bowl and scissors, and it looked like it. They sat in the waiting chairs and read what words they could out of the magazines before their lips got tired, or they complained about how bad times were.
    Daddy said they had bad times mostly because they were so lazy they wouldn’t scratch bird mess out of a chair before they sat in it. Customers came in for a haircut, they wouldn’t move and give them the chairs, even though they didn’t have any interest in a trim. They had, as Daddy said, the manners of a billy goat. I once heard him say to Cecil, when he thought I was out of earshot, that if you took the Nation family’s brains and wadded them up together and stuck them up a gnat’s butt and shook the gnat, it’d sound like a ball bearing in a boxcar.
    Cecil, though no friend of the Nations, always managed to be polite, and, as Daddy often said, he was a man liked to talk,even if he was talking to the devil about how much fire was going to be set between his toes.
    No sooner had Old Man Nation taken a seat than Cecil said, “Harry says there’s been a murder.”
    I wondered what Daddy would think of my big mouth. Daddy was a man liked to talk himself, but it was usually about something. When it wasn’t any of your business, you didn’t hear it from him.
    Once the word was out, there was nothing for me to do but tell it all. Well, almost all. For some reason I left the Goat Man out of it. I hadn’t even told Cecil that part.
    When I was finished, Mr. Nation was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Well, one less nigger wench ain’t gonna hurt the world none.” Then to me: “Your Pa’s lookin’ in on this?”
    “Yes sir,” I said.
    “Well, he’s probably upset about it. He was always one to worry about the niggers. He ought to