The Third Talmage Powell Crime MEGAPACK™: 25 Classic Mysteries

Next!

Originally published in Manhunt, March 1957.

I had the shakes before the day had started. Joyce came into the bedroom with that vim and briskness that’s especially detestable when you’ve got the shakes.

She opened the blind and sunlight scalded my eyes.

“Well, it was quite a night, wasn’t it, Marty?” she said.

I lay still, wishing she would go away, wishing that dawn hadn’t come.

“Getting to be quite a habit, isn’t it, Marty?” She was there and she wasn’t going away until I got up. “What is it you’re running away from, Marty? What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” I growled.

“Oh, yes, there is,” she said. “You’ve become moody, developed quirks — and your drinking is getting out of hand. I think you ought to see a psychiatrist.”

I sat up at that. I had a good laugh; then sat shaking my head.

“It’s only because I love you, Marty,” she said, coolly.

I guess she did, in her way. I looked up at her. At forty-two she was still attractive. Figure and face that knocked ten years off her age. We’d been married twenty-five years. I was still on the same job, same grind, same routine. It suited Joyce fine. She liked things well ordered, without emotion. I didn’t know what I liked. I’d never really had the chance to find out. I’d accepted the routine and anytime the inner steam had come bubbling up I’d managed to clamp the valves tight enough.

There’d been Robby of course. Thinking about him, I still wanted to cry. Joyce hadn’t cried, even at his funeral, three years ago after the accident at Wright Field. A fine lad, Robby. He’d always wanted to be a jet pilot.

Joyce’s self containment at the funeral had made me feel like a weak-minded small boy.

“We must accept life, each day, for what it is, what it offers,” she had said. “Can I bring Robby back by brooding?”

She was right, I guessed. She was always right.

“Marty!” her voice snapped me out of my reverie. “Will you get dressed! You have to go to—”

“Don’t say it,” I said.

“What? Say what? You see how strange you’re acting?”

I opened my mouth. But I didn’t speak. You live with a woman for a quarter of a century, you know what they’re going to say before they say it. And I knew her well enough to know I’d never make her understand that a person could be afraid to go into a barber shop, so scared their insides knotted at the very idea.

I don’t know when the thought first came to me. Perhaps one day during a shave.

Maybe you’ve never had such a thought. Maybe you have. You’re stretched out there in the chair, comfortable, relaxed, a hot towel over your face. Everything is fine. You listen to the barber whet the razor... snick... snap... snick...

You wonder how many thousands, even millions, of times he’s pulled that razor across the leather strap. Doesn’t he ever get tired of it, the same grind, the same routine?

Then the whisper of the gleaming razor over the leather begins to take on a sinister sound. Maybe he is tired of it. Maybe he’s got a shrew of a wife and more debts than he can ever pay. Maybe all sorts of things are all bottled up inside of him.

The towel is lifted. The lather goes on. He is breathing rather heavily. He’s tired, that man, deep down tired. Who knows what’s bubbling around in his mind at this moment.

The razor touches the skin. It slips easily down the side of the face, lifting just before it reaches that soft flesh under the jawbone.

He wipes lather from the razor. His nostrils flare with each indrawn breath. He’s not talkative, this barber. There is a brightness, a sort of heat, deep in his eyes. All the cares and worries of the world are back of those eyes, the frustrations, the memories of missed opportunities, the regrets. The whole weight of the past.

Now he’s looking down. He’s seeing that pulse, steady and strong beating beside the Adam’s apple under his hand. He’s standing there holding the razor. It’s made of the finest steel, sharper than the sharpest knife. Is there a thread of racial memory deep within him of tribal raids, of the high elation of seeing an enemy fall, bleeding, on the edge of a sharp sword? How soft the flesh, how sharp the weapon.

He stands over the supine creature in the tilted-back chair. The razor comes toward the flesh. The pulse beats, throb, throb, throb...

The razor touches the flesh. This barber is master at that moment of life and death. The supine man is helpless. A twist of the wrist... a sudden pressure... death is only a fraction of an inch away.

Has he ever considered his power, this barber? Does the soft flesh and the helplessness of the supine man and the sharp glitter of the razor hold any kind of fascination for him?

He is tired. He has been on his feet all day. He has trimmed heads of every size and shape, massaged diseased scalps and healthy ones. He is tired of the whole mess. Yet at this moment, he is master of life and death and it gives him a lift.

What if he should choose this moment to snap?

Then he is finished. The chair tilts upright...

“Marty, your breakfast is going to be absolutely cold!”

“Yes, dear.”

I knotted my tie, slipped into my coat. I really had the shakes. I needed a drink, a bracer, but there was none in the house.

I overcame the urge to run from the nauseatingly healthful and beautiful breakfast of ham and eggs. I gagged a little food down.

“Really, Joyce,” I said, holding the edge of the table. “I don’t feel so good today. I think I ought to go back to bed.”

She pierced me with her eyes. “Marty,” she said quietly, “there’s not a thing wrong with you. You just keep trying to run from life itself, is all.”

I couldn’t explain. She’d never understand.

I dragged myself out of the house, got in the car. I had to sit there a minute. I was gasping; there was a pain in my head. My mouth was terribly dry. I needed a drink bad.

Backing out of the driveway, driving down the street, I tried to think of the business of the day ahead. But I didn’t want to think about it. I knew what it would be — the repetition of a million other days. All I could think about were the dreams and ambitions and plans I’d had a long time ago. It seemed that a different man had dreamed them, not Marty starting the day with a trip to a damn barber shop.

The parking lot was just ahead. My foot was shaking when I applied the brakes and drove into the lot.

I remembered to give the attendant a calm, pleasant good morning. Really, I wanted to tell him to go to the devil, because the lot was across the street from the barber shop.

Traffic was heavy, and I had to control a sudden urge to dash through it to reach the shop.

I got across the street all right, but just outside the shop. I found that my feet wouldn’t move.

This was ridiculous.

I needed a drink, all right.

I was suddenly dizzy and leaned against the building a moment for the dizziness to pass.

Then something snapped inside of me. It was like a little explosion at the base of my skull.

I could make it now. I straightened, walked inside the shop.

As I passed the long wall mirror I glimpsed my face. It didn’t look so tired right now. There was a small, secretive smile on my lips.

I said good morning and took off my coat. Then I donned my white coat and took my place beside the chair, the same spot where I’d stood for twenty endless years. Well, almost the same spot. In twenty years I’d advanced from sixth chair to second. Old man Routher was still ahead of me, at chair number one.

I was as much a fixture as the shoe shine stand in the rear of the shop. Nobody paid any attention to me. Nobody asked why I started working right away on my razor.

The answer was perfectly clear — to me. I wanted the razor very, very sharp for my first customer this morning...