The Funeral Barber

A short story by
Jeff Frawley

It gives you vertigo, he told the customer, that big desert sky. Crushes you with loneliness. Hums. Mama calls it the great reminder, meaning we’re all closer than we think to being scattered by wind. 

•

Alamogordo’s a bad place for Hispanics—not like Las Cruces or Deming or El Paso, where whites are outnumbered, where English gets drowned out by Spanish and Spanglish. It’s because of the Air Force base, because of the Texas oil rigs and the med-tech startups crazy about tax breaks—you get the sense, just walking downtown, that ranchers and oil-men and Air Force cadets are this close to spitting in your face. Mama and Josue, on the phone, say I’m crazy. I tell them after thirty years living in the Midwest, I know when a city’s being overtaken.

•

In seventy-nine, Luis and I drove from Alamogordo to Indiana. He’d been kicked out of his family’s house and had an aunt living up here—Indianoplace, Luis said she called it. But to us, twenty-four or twenty-five years old, it sounded promising and new. The day I told my parents, Mama wept and Pops tried to talk me out of it but ended up weeping too. (Of course, he told the customer, when I started mailing home cash from cutting hair, they didn’t complain.)  

Back then, Hoosiers honked and shouted at us on the street. We never held hands, Luis and I, forgoing affection in the name of self-preservation. I found a mentor, Mister Bruce, who took me under his wing, taught me to barber, eventually sold me this shop. But long before that, after just two years in Indiana, Luis and I split. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. One day I got a call: Come home, son, said Pops, I’ve got a pain in my stomach. Real bad. 

He was the first. Auntie Carmen came next, then Carmen’s second husband, then Uncle Richard, not to mention all those friends across Alamogordo. It’s the bombs, Mama said, he told the customer. And nowadays it’s her turn, though she’s fighting tooth and nail, whereas poor Pops lasted just weeks.

•

The night before his burial marked the first occasion on which I gave a corpse a haircut. Auntie Gina had complained to the funeral director that Pops’ bangs looked shaggy. Something in the air changed and they all turned to me. Please, say no, I remember thinking, but the funeral director shrugged and said, If that’s what the dearly departed’s family wants. He fetched a scissors kit. 

I’ll tell you, he told the customer, I stood there for some time, alone with Pops’ body, shaking. Even today I get a sort of dread, which I steady by studying old photos of the deceased provided by families. That day, as I snipped, I heard a sigh and turned: there stood Mama, clutching her purse. He looks better, she said. Then she said, You shouldn’t have left us. When she leaned in to kiss his makeupped forehead, stray hairs stuck to her lips. 

That marked the start, he told the customer, of my career as a funeral barber. Or part-time, a moonlighter—funeral-home beauticians don’t like to do hair. I returned to Indiana insistent on proving something; I phoned everywhere to offer my services: Lippert’s in Meridian Hills, Holmann’s on 38th, Lativian in Plainfield, Walsh-Buckner on Kessler, Usher and Prynn near Fall Creek Parkway, even Crown Hill Cemetery. Soon my phone rang off the hook. (Luis, meanwhile, didn’t return my calls. But as I told Josue, he told the customer, I’d be damned if I crawled back to Alamogordo with my tail between my legs.)  

I insisted on never cutting in embalming labs with their awful sights and smells, only in the viewing rooms. I was quick, discrete, impeccable with length. I hated doing children but didn’t mind the elderly; I even stuck around for viewings if attendance was sparse, to comfort solitary mourners. I can listen for hours, he told the customer, hardly need solace myself.

One day in ‘84 or ‘85, Luis phoned me up, and thus marked that brief, happy period when we dated again—nothing serious, as he stipulated. On Valentine’s Day he gave me a candleholder made from a cat’s skull dipped in copper. I brought it on jobs, burned candles while I cut. Luis, upon learning this, looked appalled. He asked how frequently I cut corpses’ hair. Soon after that he stopped calling, and I didn’t see him again until he passed away years ago. To my surprise, he told the customer, funeral directors didn’t seem to mind the candles. But then I tried a bit of smudging and a daughter of the deceased, sniffing angrily, burst into the room and shrieked, What is he, some sort of Pakistani?  

It breaks my heart, Mama told me on the phone, you alone with the dead. I said the silence was nice. Mama started weeping. Josue, sounding worried, asked if I talked to corpses. I’d perfected my spiel, the dignity of grooming, at which some funeral directors rolled their eyes, while others praised my tact. I never snapped photos for a portfolio, as I hear some do. 

•

I moved into the residential towers on Riley Street, still hoping to reunite with Luis—how he would have loved the sunsets from that balcony. I’d heard he wasn’t doing well, barely making ends meet, that he’d moved back in with his aunt. Those apartments, even then, were filled with young white professionals overtaking downtown, squeezing out the poor and the Mexicans and the Black folks. By then, my mid-thirties, I’d emerged from my shell, strolling into St. Clair’s Pub and going right up to some handsome face. There was Jack, a friendly biologist who sometimes traveled home to Tipton or Tetersburg, one of those shitty T’s, to perform autopsies because the town had no coroner. As you might imagine, we had lots to discuss. 

Then one night a woman in the towers phoned the police, claiming I’d broken into the building. Another night, two guys threatened Jack in the elevator. I found a condom filled with lotion outside my door. Which sealed the deal: I’d saved enough for a down payment on a house on 14th, where I’ve lived ever since.

•

On my forty-first birthday I received a call out of the blue, from Luis’s aunt, who said he’d passed away. She didn’t divulge particulars. I fell to the floor and threw up. Then I phoned back. Of all of Luis’ friends, she said, I liked you best. (That’s what she’d always called us, friends.) I asked to trim his hair, explaining my work. She hesitantly acquiesced. The next day, entering the lobby of Usher and Prynn, I nearly fainted. Luis’s aunt rushed up, slipped an arm through mine, led me to the casket, a cheap walnut number suited for cremation. She whispered that Luis’s long-lost parents were flying up from El Paso. I think I blacked out, came to touching his hair, which in the intervening years had turned a startling grey. 

In the end, he told the customer, I cut a millimeter at most, pocketing the trimmings and thanking his aunt. Then I left and, in a trance, drove to an electronics store across town to buy my first TV. I suppose you might say things haven’t been the same since: I’ve spent my forties and early fifties surfing those wonderful electronic dreams. In Indiana local access is best, all those endless strange programs shot in cornfields and basements, in murky studios, in garages: messed-up religious stuff, eccentric small-town talk shows, hunting and fishing shows, spoofs of hunting and fishing shows, disturbing sketch comedies, variety hours put on by queer kids, variety hours put on by rednecks, documentaries and mock documentaries, high school football analysis, homemade horror hours way more disturbing than Tales From the Crypt or Twilight Zone, veterinary tutorials, puppet shows—it’s remarkable, he told the customer, all these dreams, sometimes soothing, sometimes terrifying, so many souls spread across the heartland. A local access host with a show on quirky professions even asked me to come on, which I declined, afraid of denigrating the dead.

Recently I stumbled upon a program on the tradition of sky burials, of which I knew very little. Although there’s only so much that could be shown on TV, the program ended by promoting a website that features a live camera situated above charnel grounds in Quinghai, China. For educational purposes. I began logging on each night, he told the customer, watching the silent grainy footage, those dark spots that looked like logs or rocks at first but were soon descended upon by vultures and buzzards and crows—big black death birds I once lumped together but now understand as utterly distinct, utterly essential to dispersing corpses. I told Josue about dwindling vulture populations due to impurities in human bodies or pesticides or cell phone towers, like the bees and migratory shorebirds along the Rio Grande. My brother, always worrying, asked to borrow money for a plane ticket to visit. But once here—it was springtime, the tulip trees and peonies in bloom—he marveled at the farmland, he hung around my shop and even visited a funeral home; he watched those public access shows with me and one night even the sky burial webcam, all before returning to Alamogordo touting Indiana. 

•

Around this time, he told the customer, my early fifties, I met a neighborhood man named Heath, a retired public school vice superintendent who spends his days gardening. Heath’s husband travels the country as a legal representative for large-scale architectural projects. I see that look on your face, he told the customer, and I assure you our only intimacies were conversational. I’ve never even seen the inside of his house, a beautifully restored Victorian. We sometimes met at St. Clair’s for hamburgers and wine, and still do today. Heath seems someone I’ve known my entire life, and I compliment him by saying his husband, who I’ve only met twice, is lucky to have such companionship.

I once noticed a tattoo of a green calavera skull underneath his bicep. He said he and his husband had visited Santa Fe during Dia de los Muertos, and while such a thing on a gringo in the Midwest would normally cause me to snicker in derision, when Heath explained it, beaming in his earnest way, I couldn’t help but smile. I invited him, if he ever returned to the Southwest, to visit my family en route to White Sands, which everyone must see at least once in their lifetimes. (I stopped short, he told the customer, of saying I might join him.) When I told Heath about cutting the dead’s hair, he bubbled with questions, and to this day, whenever I see him in his yard or at St. Clair’s, he’ll think of some new, thoughtful inquiry about the process. When a mutual acquaintance, a man named Victor from the pub, passed away last year, Heath recommended I perform the clean-up cut. 

In fact, he told the customer, it was Heath who pushed me towards involvement with the detention center up in Terra Haute, a big prison-like complex packed with families awaiting immigrant status decisions. He’d heard through a former colleague that volunteers were needed to help with daily routines, maybe even barbers. Thus I began my monthly visits to the facility, which stands like some slaughterhouse out in the corn. I do not wish to describe the pitiable conditions of the families inside awaiting their fate, though I can say it is boredom that most crushes spirits. The children hardly seem like children anymore, despite the fact they’re taught by volunteers in Spanish and English, several grades mixed together, and they’re allowed to play with toys in a padded room like some mental ward. The only time they truly seem like kids is when volunteers hand out devices on which they play games. And when I give them haircuts: they want mohawks and zig-zags and flattops and fades, even the girls, all those kids laughing as I attack them with clippers, until I hiss to keep quiet—I’ve been reprimanded for not following haircut parameters outlined in my laminated, board-certified guide. 

Recently, he told the customer, an outbreak of illness has shut the place down. Only essential services are allowed, which I didn’t learn until I was turned away at the gate, but not before the guard asked if maybe I was supposed to be locked up inside, at which I called him a fucking gringo, or a fucking Hoosier gringo, or a fucking inbred sister-kissing Hoosier gringo, then I spat on the ground and left. I couldn’t help think, as I watched crows turn circles over the corn, of those sky burials. Which got me wondering if they dragged detainees who died in custody—a statistic never reported—out into the corn. 

When I told Heath about my visit, he pounded the pub table and said he’d do what he could to get haircuts on the essential list. Without thinking, I reached across the table and cupped my hand over his. Yes, he told the customer, only once have I succumbed to the desire to tell him my feelings, and before the words left my mouth I could see from the change on his face what he’d say in response. Heath is too kind and cordial to give flat-out rejections. Instead he stumbled over a gentle excuse about our difference in age, about his dragging me down, as he put it, when he knew full well we’re only a handful of years apart.

•

The next week, still embarrassed over that moment, I decided to drive down to Alamogordo to visit Josue and Mama, who suffers terrible pains in her legs and back. I’ve only just returned. 

While there, I accompanied Mama’s church on a service trip to El Paso, where I cut the hair of several old men in a hospice center while Josue helped the pastor unload bags of rice. A woman, the hospice director, thanked me in Spanish for bestowing much-needed grace. 

The next day we drove Mama out to the national monument, the white sand, where a mile from the entrance we encountered one of those highway roadblocks put up during missile tests. Josue said he knew a spot a few miles back where the dunes had spilled over the fence. So we headed that way, passing halted cars. He pulled over at a spot where, sure enough, we helped Mama up a hill of snow-white sand, lifting her swollen legs over the fence. Then we were in that endless dry blizzard, domineered over by a blinding blue ceiling, mountains in the distance. Josue and I began shouting in distress or glee or both, the sound deadened by all that sand and space, until Mama said to knock it off and act our age. That’s when it dawned on us, he told the customer: my brother and I were over fifty, as old as Pops when he passed. 

We didn’t stay long atop the dune overlooking that kingdom of sand, afraid Border Patrol or a state trooper or Alamogordo police or a monument ranger—so much goddamn police for the middle of nowhere!—might see Josue’s van. Plus, after just ten or fifteen minutes, we realized we didn’t have much to say or do in this place, this miraculous perpetual winter we’d seen all our lives. Josue said it wasn’t a big deal anymore. I said after a few actual blizzards up in the Midwest, including one along the shores of Lake Michigan that Luis and I once witnessed, this fake snowstorm splayed across the desert was a little less impressive. I’m talking eight feet of snow, I told them, he told the customer, piled along the shoreline. Mama said to hush, we were talking blasphemy; she and our father had worked hard their whole lives to allow us to grow up in such a place, this town in the desert surrounded by miracles, and at least they hadn’t moved us to Dallas or Phoenix or Denver or Tulsa, or any of those other big, whitewashed cities where so many friends and distant relatives ended up. You should never take a place like this for granted, she said, looking at each of us but lingering longer on me. And then, when my fifty-four-year-old brother and I went silent, she stared at that blank expanse and said that, when the time came—and it wouldn’t be long now, so great were the pains in her back—she wanted us to drive her back out here, where she’d say her goodbyes before setting off into the desert. She’d find her perfect place to settle down, she didn’t want to be touched—no haircuts—she wanted to remain undisturbed except for by the wind and beetles and flies. Such a thing was fine with her, she told us, he told the customer, and with her long ashen hair whipping about, Mama said she’d be damned if she had to do any more explaining on the matter; she’d made her decision, her time was coming, it was looming on the horizon, just over there.

Jeff Frawley's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Gettysburg Review, Faultline, Portland Review, Crab Creek Review, South Dakota Review, Storyscape and elsewhere. A former Fulbright scholar in Budapest, Hungary, he now lives and teaches in the mountains of southern New Mexico.