SUPERWORM
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light weight training. He is forty-four years old and he has come to
fear lately that his face is getting puffy. Still he has something of the
look of a younger man. His hair is cut in the English style, rather long
over the ears and in back, and, although it is beginning to get gray,
it is still quite full - where it has receded over the temples he combs
it loosely and you hardly notice that it's thin. He wears Clark's desert
boots and Rooster ties, and shirts with buttondown collars. Although
today his jacket and trousers match, that is not usually the case.
This is a man who, until recently, has had hope. He grew up
with hope, married in hope, left to fight Our Nation's enemies in
hope, returned to find his wife run off with a chiropractor, but still
hoping, married again, raised a family on hope and the G.!. Bill,
taught in hope, and once in that famous time went to Washington to
serve Government in hope. Now he is having his hair cut in a kind
of despair. Hope now is all in his secret costume, his clever under–
wear, and in his mission to Make Them See the Light by Leaping.
He don't reveal this to no man, being as he in disguise (underneath
the tweed, he is black, black!). But he laying low in there, still
hoping somehow.
"Black car show the dirt, black does," the barber says.
Is he a country boy? Claude wonders. From the land of dust and
mud. Does he know we are being poisoned? Even suspect what they
are doing?
Thinks Claude Flowers, this professor-avenger. How does he
come to be here, a country boy, in the midst of this reaction? Barber–
shops, Claude is convinced, are the American equivalent of Munich
beerhalls. In truth, he always cuts his own hair, except today, when
he enters the enemy camp. Gonna leap on the bastards if he can't
l'eason with them. He's chosen this shop because it smelled of wrong–
thinking all the way into the street. His nose, sensitive to evil, slammed
on the brakes and broke out the Worm gear the instant it had felt
the fetid wave of wrong thought.
Under the sheet he flicks his thumb to make the little balls of
hair jump up and scatter. He worked on one trying to push it back
up over his belly, up his chest, back up there. The great man and
his heroic never-ending labor. It came apart and he says, "Not in the
city it doesn't."
"What's that, professor?"
