Beast, I thought, go away.
Beast, I said to the shape. I know you’re not there. You’re nothing. You’re my old bathrobe.
The trouble was, I couldn’t see it clearly.
If I could just reach my glasses, I thought, get them on, jump up.
Lying there, I was eight and then seven and then five and then four years old, getting smaller, smaller and smaller as the Beast on the door got bigger and darker and longer.
I was afraid to so much as blink. Afraid that that motion would make the Beast float softly down to …
“Ah!” someone yelled.
Because the phone, across the street, rang.
Shut up! I thought. You’ll make the Beast move.
The phone rang. Four in the morning. Four! Christ. Who…?
Peg? Trapped in a Mexican catacomb? Lost?
The phone rang.
Crumley? With an autopsy report I would hate to hear?
The phone rang.
Or a voice of cold rain and running night and raw alcohol raving in the storm and mourning terrible events, as the great train shrieked on a curve?
The phone stopped.
With my eyes clenched, my teeth gritted, the covers over my head, turned away against the sweaty pillow. I thought I heard a drifting whisper. I froze.
I kept my breath, I stopped my heart.
For, just now, at that very instant . . .
Hadn’t I felt something touch and, weigh itself . . .
On the end of my bed?
A. L. Shrank was not the next victim.
Nor did the canary lady suddenly fly around her room once and expire.
Someone else vanished.
And, not long after dawn, the bright glass eyes across the street from my tired apartment saw the arrival of the evidence.
A truck pulled up outside.
Sleepless and exhausted, I heard it, stirred.
Someone knocked on my coffin door.
I managed to levitate and balloon-drift over to crack the door and peer gum-eyed into the face of a great beefy ox. The face named me, I assented to the name, the ox told me to sign here, I signed something that looked like a D.O.A. slip and watched the delivery man hoof back to his half-truck and wrestle a familiar, bundled object off the back and wheel it along the walk.
“My God,” I said. “What is it? Who…?”
But the big rolling bundle struck the doorjamb and gave off a musical chord. I slumped, knowing the answer.
“Where do you want it?” said the ox, glancing around Groucho Marx’s overcrowded stateroom. “This as good as any?”
He heaved the wrapped object to one side against the wall, looked around with contempt at my Goodwill sofa, my rugless floor, and my typewriter, and cattle-trotted back out to his truck, leaving the door wide.
Over the way, I saw the ten dozen bright blue, brown, hazel glass eyes watching, even as I ripped away the covering to stare at …
The Smile.
“My God!” I cried. “That’s the piano that I heard playing…”
The “Maple Leaf Rag.”
Wham. The truck door slammed. The truck roared away.
I collapsed on my already collapsed sofa, totally disbelieving that big, vacant, ivory smile.
Crumley, I said in my mind. I felt the lousy haircut too high in back, too short on the sides. My fingers were numb.
Yeah, kid? said Crumley.
I changed my mind. I thought, Crumley, it’s not going to be Shrank or the old bird lady who vanishes.
Gosh, said Crumley, who?
Cal, the barber.
Silence. A sigh. Then . . .
Click. Buzz.
Which is why, gazing at this relic from Scott Joplin years, I did not race forth to telephone my police detective friend.
All the glass eyes across the street examined my haircut and watched me shut my door.
God, I thought, I can’t even play “Chopsticks.”
The barber shop was open and empty. The ants, the bees, the termites, and the relatives had been there before noon.
I stood in the front door looking at the total evisceration. It was as if someone had shoved a gigantic vacuum cleaner through the front door and sucked everything out.
The piano, of course, had come to me. I wondered who had gotten, or would want, the barber chair, the liniments, the ointments, the lotions that used to color the mirrored wall with their tints and tinctures. I wondered who got all the hair.
There was a man in the middle of the barber shop, the landlord, I seemed to recall, a man in his fifties moving a pushbroom over no hair, just gliding over the empty tiles for no obvious reason. He looked up and saw me.
“Cal’s gone,” he said.
“So I see,” I said.
“Bastard ran off owing me four months’ rent.”
“Business was that bad, was it?”
“It wasn’t the business so much as the haircuts. Even for two bucks they were the lousiest, won awards, in the whole state.”
I felt the top of my head and the nape of my neck and nodded.
“Bastard ran off owing me five months’ rent. I heard from the groceryman next door Cal was here at seven this morning. Goodwill came at eight for the barber chair. Salvation Army got all the rest. Who knows who got the piano. I’d like to find and sell that, get some of my money.” The landlord looked at me.
I said nothing. The piano was the piano. For whatever reasons, Cal had sent it to me.
“Where you think he’s gone?” I said.
“Got relatives in Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, I hear. Someone was just in said he heard Cal say two days ago he was going to drive until the land gave out and then pitch right into the Atlantic.”
“Cal wouldn’t do that.”
“No, he more likely will sink somewhere in the Cherokee Strip country and good riddance. Jesus, that was bad haircutting.”
I wandered in over the clean white tiles through no-hair territory, not knowing what I was looking for.
“Who are you?” said the landlord, half-raising his broom into artillery position.
“The writer,” I said. “You know me. The Crazy.”
“Hell, I didn’t recognize you. Did Cal do that to you?”
He stared at my hairline. I felt blood rush along my scalp. “Only yesterday,” I said.
“He could be shot for that.”
I wandered across and around behind a thin wooden partition that hid the backside of the barber shop, the trash barrels, and the restroom.
I stared down into the trash barrel and saw what I was looking for there.
The photograph of Cal and Scott Joplin, covered with a month’s supply of hair, which was not much.
I reached down and picked up the photo.
In the next five or six seconds my whole body turned to ice.
Because Scott Joplin was gone.
Cal was still there, forever young, smiling, his thin fingers spidering the piano keys.
But the man who stood over him, grinning.
It wasn’t Joplin.
It was another man, black, younger, more sinful looking.
I peered very close.
There were marks of old dry glue where Scott’s head had once been.
Jesus God have mercy on Cal, I thought. None of us ever thought to look close. And, of course, the picture was always under glass and hung rather high on the wall, not easy to reach or take down.
Sometime, a long while ago, Cal had found a picture of Scott Joplin, razor cut around it, and pasted it over this other guy’s face, head on head. He must have forged the signature as well. And all these years we had looked at it and sighed and clucked and said, “Hey, Cal, great! Aren’t you special? Looky there!”
And all those years Cal had looked at it and known what a fraud it was and he was and cut hair so you looked as if you’d been blown dry by a Kansas twister and combed by a maniac wheat harvester run amok.
I turned the photograph over and reached down into the barrel, trying to find Scott Joplin’s decapitated and missing part.
I knew I would not find it.
Someone had taken it.
And whoever had peeled it off the photo had telephoned and sent a message to Cal. You are known! You are naked! You are revealed! I remembered Cal’s phone ringing. And Cal, afraid, refusing to answer.
And coming into his barber shop, what? Two days, three days ago, casually checking the photograph, Cal had been kicked in the gut. With Joplin’s head gone, Cal was gone.
All he could do was Goodwill the barber chair, Salvation Army the tonics, piano me his piano.
I stopped searching. I folded the photograph of Cal without Joplin and went out to watch the landlord broom the hairless tiles.
“Cal,” I said.
The landlord paused his broom.
“Cal didn’t,” I said. “I mean, Cal wouldn’t, I mean, Cal’s still alive?”
“Crud,” said the landlord. “Alive about four hundred miles east of here by now, still owing seven months’ rent.”
Thank God, I thought. I won’t have to tell Crumley about this one. Not now, anyway. Going away isn’t murder, or being murdered.
No?
Going east? Isn’t Cal a dead man, driving a car?
I went out the door.
“Boy,” said the landlord. “You look bad coming and going.”
Not as bad as some people, I thought.
Where do I go now? I wondered, now that the smile is there, filling up my bed-sitting-room and me only able to play an Underwood Standard?
The gas station telephone rang at two-thirty that afternoon. Exhausted by no sleep the night before, I had gone back to bed.
I lay listening.
The phone wouldn’t stop.
It rang for two minutes and then three. The more it rang, the colder I got. By the time I lunged out of bed and floundered into my bathing trunks and trudged across the street, I was shuddering like someone in a snowstorm.
When I lifted the receiver, I could feel Crumley a long way off at the far end, and without his speaking I could guess his news.
“It’s happened, hasn’t it?” I said.
“How did you know?” Crumley sounded as if he had been
