SHORT STORY WEDNESDAY: CHARLIE THE BARBER

 "Charlie the Barber" by Joe R. Lansdale (first published in Alive in Shape and Color:  17 Paintings by Great Artists and the Stories They Inspired, edited by Lawrence Block, 2017: reprinted in Lansdale's collection The Senior Girls Bayonet Drill Team and Other Stories, 2023)

To say that Joe Lansdale is a unique writer is akin to saying that water is wet.  Lansdale is a wordsmith of great talent and imagination.  He can write crude.  He can write lyrical.  He can be meaningful.  He can be silly.  He can take the human condition, dissect it. stomp on all its parts, then put it back together, giving you an experience unlike any other you have ever had.  He can give you "The Night They Missed the Horror Show", Hap and Leonard, Bob the Dinosaur, Ned the Seal, or The Thicket.   I truly believe what he writes depends on what they're putting in the Texas water that day.

For his contribution to Alive in Shape and Color he chose Norman Rockwell's The Haircut, which appeared on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post for August 10, 1919.  It depicts a barber giving a young boy his first haircut while an anxious mother looks on.

Charlie Richards is a barber, talented in his small-town craft.  He enjoys his job, he enjoys his craft, and he enjoys working with his daughter Millie.  Millie will be heading off the big city, Dallas, next year to study as a beautician, learning how to cut a woman's hair as well as she now cuts men's hair.  For now, however, Charlie basks in the knowledge that he and Millie are the only father and daughter barber team that he knows about.

Charlie closes his shop at five on the dot everyday, putting up the closed sign, locking the door, and drawing the shades.  Any person waiting in the shop for a haircut at five will be served, then he and Millie will go home to relax for the evening with his wife, Connie.  On this day, Millie has just finished cutting crusty, retired postal worker Mr. Weaver's hair, and Charlie is working on young Billly Thompson's hair.   Billy is the high school quarterback and, because he has cowlicks both in the front and in the back of his head, Charlie has to extra careful in order to give him a decent haircut.  It's just a few minutes to five and Charlie is about to put up the closed sign when two young men, cocky and self-assured, walk in.  They've just attempted to rob the local bank but something went wrong and a guard was killed and a bystander shot, perhaps also dead.  They pull out guns and hold Charlie, Millie ,and Billy prisoner, robbing them of all their money and taking Charlie's car keys.  their plan is to wait until things are quieter, then make their getaway.  What they plan to do with their prisoners is unclear, but Millie sure is awfully pretty...

The story is told through three crises in Charlie's life.  The most pressing is the two thugs who have taken over his shop.  Then there is Charlie's experiences in the war when he was held prisoner at the interment camp at Palawan, where the Japanese guards burned, bayonetted, and slaughtered all the prisoners but Charlie, who was left for dead but managed to escape with lasting physical and psychic scars.  The third crisis was back long before the war, when Charlie gave his first professional haircut; it was to a young boys who did not want his hair cut.  That was the day that Charlie learned patience, as well as how to perform the most difficult task he had ever faced until then.  All three of these crises merge in Lansdale's masterful tale.

Whatever they put in the East Texas water that day was mighty powerful.