180
GEORGE DEAUX
"In the country where there's a lot of dust a black car shows
the dirt, but not in the city."
"Huh?"
But the dead have blown away and up his nose. He twitch
and he sneeze.
"You gotta watch that. I knew this guy he die just like that.
Inhale hair it punch holes in your lung and man you're done for.
Old Indian trick. Whiskers from a tiger. Kill you quick by it punch
holes in your lung. That's a India type Indian."
The professor blows his nose and settles himself back into the
chair. Light from the window gathers in the dented brass spittoon
- red and green - and swirls away, up a carved walnut table leg.
There is a faint buzz, muted shears, a low voice. Laughter. Magazines.
The double chins jiggle. Fingers snap, plucking at a freshly shaved
jowl.
The shoeshine boy climbs down from his chair mounted high on
a wooden platform, folds the comic book carefully and stuffs it into
his pocket. He swept the corner. He swept around the table with the
magazines, he swept under the feet of the pimpled lad behind
Knight.
In the second chair the salesman with chins coughs and hauls
himself erect, blinks at his reflection in the mirror: newly shaved
and pumped full of thick blood. He smacks his lips and shoves his
tongue into his cheek, stretching it out, then rubs the skin critically
with his thumbnail. His barber, lean and tall, bends at the waist to
sight over his shoulder, grinning at their two-headed reflection. The
fat salesman scratches his head, looks at the clock and orders a sham–
poo. The barber lean man nods and begins to arrange the instruments.
"What I can't figure," Claude's barber says, "is why we let
them get away with it. Those bums down there in Washington."
Could this be his friend in the desert? A downtrodden worker,
country boy exploited, ready to rebel? Slipping his hand out from
under the sheet, Claude lays it gently upon the young man's arm.
Revolutions are built from just such small encounters between men
who
think
alike. Such modest beginnings. In the next chair the red–
neck salesman coughs and spits while the lean barber's fingers work
a lather into his scalp. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand
and says, "Those bastards never made a payroll. That's their trouble."
And the professor nods to his barber. He senses something in the
