by Christopher Bundy
Christopher Bundy’s fiction and essays have appeared in Atlanta Magazine, Glimmer Train Stories, The Rambler, and many other publications. He is a teacher and a founding editor of the journal New South in Atlanta, Georgia. He joins us for the first time with a story that explores the mystique and magnetism of The Beatles. A small kernel of fact helped to inspire this story: there were actual accounts of barbers going out of business in the 1960s because of the popularity of the popularity of the Beatle cut.
Where the Cul-de-sac Met the Railroad Tracks
When Dobson Johns found Donny Palmer by the railroad tracks, Lake Claire, Georgia, embarked upon a change, just like the world beyond that had begun to surface in the newspapers and on TV. The citizens of Lake Claire thought the con-fusing headlines from Atlanta, Washington, and abroad, however forbidding, wouldn’t make it to their town; and for the most part the town stood still. But then, among the odd rhythms of the summer of 1966, even blue sky was fleeting, buckets of rain submerging pastures and overflowing streams and rivers. Not a patch of solid ground to be found. Lake Claire, which never had a lake, only a few places where water seemed to collect more than others, went swampy. As soon as you rested on firm earth it gave way beneath. Inside the houses of the small south-Georgia town the sheets were damp and towels never dried. Clothes clung to warm backs and it was best to sit still and let the sound of rain quiet your heart. And for the first time it seemed even the television went muddy, revealing, nightly, a window onto a more and more inconceivable and unpredictable decade.
For the Love of Mary Hooks
Through the curtain of constant rain, Mary Hooks caught her second look at Donny Palmer. Hidden in the shadows of the entranceway to Drucker’s 5 & 10 on the opposite side of Corbett Street, she watched as the boy and his mother dashed into the Dairy Queen. Mary had seen the boy only once before, when his father, Don Senior, had showed up to tell her he had to stay home that night—something had come up and his wife Dale expected him. In the rain, Don Senior had stood hovering in the doorway to keep her from his son’s view. But she saw the boy, a beautiful blur behind the streaked glass of his father’s Pontiac LeMans, shaggy blond bangs over his eyes. From the Dairy Queen, mother and son sprinted to Carmello’s Barbershop where, under the awning, they shook off the rain. The boy’s mother pushed open the shop door, but Donny shook his head and refused to enter, stepping back from the meaty figure of the town barber and into the rain.
The truth about Carmello DeNino was that ever since The Beatles first appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show he stopped liking boys altogether. The barber scowled from behind his chair, disgusted with the boys of Lake Claire who had let their hair grow long: first the front and sides, over the eyes and past the ears, and to their collars, where it curled like a girl’s. Then they stopped coming altogether. The Palmer boy, an oddball already, Carmello told anybody who would listen, was the first to refuse a haircut. But others followed. And here the boy was, standing in the rain, again refusing a haircut.
For eighteen years Carmello stood each morning before the American flag that flew from his barbershop. His massive hand spread over his swelling chest as he recited the Pledge of Allegiance with a solemn shake of his head, to show the people of Lake Claire he was an American, the best you could possibly be. But after two decades of running an honest business in Lake Claire, Carmello spoke painfully of the declining number of young customers in his shop each day.
Mary Hooks watched as the boy’s mother appeared to plead with her son to enter the shop, angry, yes, Mary thought, but more disheartened than anything else. Donny remained steadfast in the rain, as if to underscore his defiance. The boy’s mother dropped her head in surrender and entered the barbershop, nodding apologies at the immigrant barber, who had a moustache like Stalin, the cheeks of a bulldog, and a head like a fuzzy pumpkin. Donny stepped back under the awning and out of the rain. Crossing the street to get a better view of the rain-soaked, shaggy-haired boy, Mary sought shelter under the same awning.
“Just can’t stay dry these days, can we?” she said to him as she shook water from her umbrella.
“No, ma’am,” Donny answered, his eyes still on his mother and the big barber inside, who stood with his beefy arms folded across his chest.
Mary stirred at the boy’s formal “ma’am.” At twenty-two she was not used to hearing such formal greetings. “Not ready for a haircut yet, I guess.”
Donny acknowledged the pretty stranger with rosebud lips, brown eyes, and short dark hair with a puzzled glance her way. But he didn’t hold his gaze; he pushed wet bangs from his eyes and looked away, barely grunting a reply. Donny’s mother talked inside, with her back to the window, while the Italian barber glared at the boy over his mother’s shoulder.
“My name’s Mary.” She dipped her head to catch the withdrawn boy’s eyes again.
“Yes, ma’am. I’ve seen you.” He shuffled his feet from side to side, kicking at the wet sidewalk with the toes of his sneakers.
“I’m going to make a guess here—and I’m usually right about these things—I bet you like The Beatles, don’t you. Is that it?” she asked, the hope of a reply in her smile. Donny looked up with eyes wide. “Uh-huh.”
“Is that why you don’t want to get your hair cut?” Moving closer to the boy, Mary hummed the melody from “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away.”
“Uh-huh.” He ran his hand through wet hair, his eyes returning to her in recognition.
“Your parents making you? Is that it?”
“Uh-huh.” He glanced at his mother again and back to Mary. “Mostly my dad, he doesn’t like it one bit. But he’s not here right now.”
Mary Hooks nearly answered that she knew his father was away on business in Atlanta, but caught herself in the middle of a nod. She knew because she had met Donny’s father, Don Senior, just yesterday during her lunch break, at home, and right before he had left for Atlanta. I’ve only got a few, Mary-girl, Don Senior whispered in her ear as he pressed his hips into hers. They didn’t eat lunch but instead made love on Mary’s rose-colored sofa, Don Senior murmuring promises of gifts from Atlanta, of a time when they would be together, of a ring on her finger. Don’t worry, honey, I’ll make you honest. Just, things have to move slowly in delicate situations like this. When he had exhausted himself, he kissed Mary’s forehead and hurriedly dressed, cursing the clock on the wall. Don’t you move from here until I get back. Mary knew he thought he was being romantic.
“Is that right?” Mary turned back to the boy.
“Uh-huh.”
When she asked the sixteen-year-old if he had heard the new Beatles single, “Paperback Writer,” Donny shook his head. Mary Hooks smiled and touched the wet bangs that had fallen again over his eyes, before jerking her hand away in shock at her own action.
“I like your hair,” she added, as if saying so would explain away her immodest gesture.
Through the large plate-glass window of Carmello’s Barbershop, Dale Palmer, frustrated and tired from the latest battle between father and son, leaving her, as always, in the middle to mediate, watched as a stranger, a curiously familiar young woman, reached out to touch her son’s face. Dale noticed that the young woman wore capri pants in the latest fashion, something her husband Don had forbidden her to wear. It’s not proper. I don’t care what they’re doing in Atlanta, he told her. Without understanding why she needed to return to her son so suddenly but knowing that she did, Dale Palmer apologized to the bearish barber again.
“I’m sure we’ll be back,” she said and left the barbershop.
Donny waited under the awning, grinning oddly at his mother. There was no sign of the young woman with short hair who had touched her son’s face with such affection.
“Who was that?” Dale Palmer asked her son.
“Some lady,” Donny replied, turning from his mother and the offer of her umbrella. “Said she liked my hair.”
* * * *
Donny Palmer had a pretty face for a sixteen-year-old boy: the eyelashes, the yielding blue eyes, the smooth, clear skin of his mother, the fine fair hair that fell well past his ears to the collar of his shirt. While most of the boys of Lake Claire wanted to be like Aaron, Alou, or Matthews as they cracked balls into the hot, humid air of Fulton County Stadium, Donny wanted to be a Beatle. Ever since he, like seventy-three million others in America, had gotten his first glimpse of The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, Donny felt something stir inside that he could hardly name, an enthusiasm that rose up from within and brought tears to his eyes as it swelled to a scream. He had no idea why, but he knew he wanted to keep that feeling. Watching The Beatles sing on television in their neat black suits as they strummed guitars, heads bobbing, Cuban heels tapping to the backbeat, Donny wanted to jump around. It was a fantastic noise, not unlike music on the Negro station he heard when their housekeeper Mrs. Jackson thought no one was around. Listening to The Beatles gave Donny the idea there was something beyond the borders of Ball County, beyond the stifling walls of his father’s house and the needy hands of his coddling mother. When Donny heard The Beatles, he danced, and not the dances he had been forced to learn at junior cotillion where, dressed in dinner jacket and dark trousers, he hid in gymnasium corners waiting for the evening to end. In his bedroom, Donny danced like the kids on American Bandstand, where everyone danced together, where stylish city kids knew the latest hit songs and pretty girls cried out for pop stars like The Lovin’ Spoonful, The Turtles, and Love. Donny couldn’t stop himself and he didn’t care. He didn’t care that his father had forbidden him to listen to The Beatles or any music like it.
“What good could possibly come from that nonsense?” Donny’s father asked.
Donny didn’t care that only days before his father had taken the few records he had ordered from a shop in Atlanta and burned them all in an oil drum out back. He didn’t care that his father was planning to lead a Stamp Out The Beatles campaign in Lake Claire in response to a Datebook magazine story in which John Lennon said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ.
“No one, you hear me, no one’s bigger than Jesus,” Don Senior preached.
Donny didn’t care that his father had ordered him to have his hair cut before he returned from a sales trip to Atlanta on Friday, because on Thursday a strange, pretty woman with dark hair who knew The Beatles said she liked his haircut, and that was enough for him.
* * * *
Don Palmer, Senior, had disliked The Beatles from the moment he first saw them on television. He sat behind his son and wondered aloud what sort of baloney Donny watched.
“What do they call that racket?”
“They’re from England,” Donny answered, not taking his eyes from the television. Don Senior, lead salesman at Quality Stone Supply, alderman, usher at Mt. Zion Baptist Church, and a man who thought no music finer than a Roger Williams number, believed English fellows in tight, shiny suits like monkeys on show, their hair cut long and dandyish like Dr. Tweedy’s boy, who had the body of a man and the mind of an idiot, were surely a temporary foolishness. It was possible, he conceded, the English hooligans were worse even than the crude black singers he’d seen shaking and shrieking under a giant tent out by the fairgrounds last summer, the many and varied voices of the devil inhabiting the bodies of a hundred Negroes so they too shook like the possessed. As The Beatles grew in popularity, and Don heard more of them in his own house and around town, he liked them less—the screech of electric guitars and the hypnotizing effect the longhairs had on his mollycoddle son.
“I’ve had enough of this noise,” Don finally told his son. “How am I supposed to rid Lake Claire of this garbage when my own son’s parading around town looking more like a girl than a boy?”
Don watched his son’s head bob back and forth like a jack-in-the-box freshly popped, inches from the television. Donny’s hair hung in his eyes, fell below his ears, and curled at the back. Such a susceptible nature behind those weak blue eyes. Donny had the soft features of Dale’s father, a yielding man who had surrendered easily to a death of something Don could never remember: infection, pneumonia, obstruction. Don had tried to interest his son in those summer activities he knew and loved so well: baseball, and with the Braves so close by in Atlanta; Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories; and the rewards of youth ministry. But God had provided him with a different son: a girlish, gawking boy, who bobbed his head back and forth to the clatter of electric guitars. Preacher Avery suggested to Don that God wanted him to love his son no matter the differences, this was a new generation of kids, and that was all right. But Don recalled his relationship with his own father, a man who expected a son to carry on the traditions of his elders. Was this not the way families worked? Despite his irritation with Donny, Don tried to understand his son’s passions, but he also knew that as his father it was his responsibility to intervene when he felt the boy was being misled. Certainly this infatuation with a boy band was temporary, just like the electric guitars they played. And even as he searched his heart for the love he knew Christ encouraged, he could not remove the image of his bob-bobbing son.
“He looks like a bird,” he told Dale, hardly a sympathetic ear when it came to his concerns about her only son. Watching Donny bounce before him, Don was embarrassed, though he tried not to be, and he wanted to smack his son’s bob-bobbing head, which he did, his hand like a snake striking and faster than he could stop it, as if his hand had shot out from somewhere behind him, someone else’s hand, someone else’s girlish boy fueling his rage with half-witted dancing about. Just as quickly, he pulled his hand back with the snap of regret. Surely God encouraged his lessons in obedience and modesty but what good did it do to hit the boy? His son just looked so wayward, moving in front of the TV as if under a spell, not turning to look at his father when he was addressed and finally struck.
“Donny, are you ignoring me? If all this music does is encourage disrespect, then I think you’ll understand when I turn it off,” Don said.
“No sir,” Donny answered without turning around, his shoulders tensed in anticipation of what might come next. “I don’t mean any disrespect. It’s just I don’t want to miss this.”
“Well, look at me when I’m talking to you.”
When his son turned to face him in silence, Don intended to tell him it was about time he had his hair cut, too, feeling his hand rise at his side, ready to strike again. But the boy’s watery eyes, barely visible beneath his bangs, left Don despairing of his defiant son. He felt cheated by the boy’s refusal to acknowledge him or the slap across the back of his head. His mother’s son. Dale’s babying of the boy had been a sore point between them since he was born—hadn’t his own father’s sense of discipline better prepared Don for the realities of life? Don felt weakened by the stranger before him, at odds with and abandoned by a wife gone soft.
“I don’t want to hear any more in this house. You hear?” Don said.
“You can’t...” Donny turned to his father.
“Sure I can,” Don said. “As your father, it’s my responsibility to keep this sort of Godless trash out of our home. You think I burned your records for the fun of it? I didn’t like it anymore than you did, but sometimes a father has to do unpleasant things in the hopes his children will grow up decent.”
“But Dad...”
“Starting ... right ... now.” Don reached over his pouting son’s shoulder and switched off the television with as much fuss as the little knob allowed. “And come Friday,” he said, “you’re going to cut your hair. When I get back from Atlanta, I want to see your hair cut, you hear. If your mother won’t take you, I will. And you better believe it will be a haircut fit for a boy.”
Don returned to his chair and his newspaper, relaxing with the satisfaction that he had finally put a stop to his son’s disrespect. But Donny turned back to the dark television in silence, his head resuming its aggravating bounce as if the music still played. Not for the first time, Don silenced his rage with thoughts of Mary Hooks: daydreams of her mouth as she chewed slowly at the caramels he bought her settled him in a state of impatient pleasure, each sensation of her driving his desire for another.
When Don first realized his feelings for the supply clerk who processed his sales orders, he was surprised by how hungry he was, by how much pleasure he found when he finally let himself go to her bed. He must have been famished, he reckoned. Surely God would recognize his need for the affections of a woman, even if she wasn’t his wife. It was not something he could talk about with Preacher Avery, not like he did about Donny. He reasoned the guilt he suffered upon leaving her house, the very stealth of his entry and exit, was God’s punishment enough. And each night he prayed for forgiveness and guidance. What was he supposed to do? He loved the girl, loved every inch of her. Don loved Dale too, but he could not recall ever feeling as high as he did when he was with Mary—a sky-scraping sensation of matchless joy. There was life in that girl. In weaker moments, Don actually let himself imagine a time and place, in another city, another state, where he and Mary might finally be joined under God’s eyes.
Don’s mother had been a distant woman who spent her days in Bible study and charity work, though she never seemed to share her dedication with Don. He married Dale in part because she seemed so different from his mother, attentive and devoted to him and their home. But after Donny was born, her attentions shifted to her son, and the interest she had once saved for him never returned. Once he fell for Mary, Don gradually withdrew from Dale, finding either exhaustion or frustration or both stealing any desire he might have felt for her. There was little pleasure when he went to her in the darkness of their bedroom, no newness in her body. And not a word from her, as if she were merely fulfilling a duty. Don knew too that Dale would not do the things Mary did, never unearth in him the bliss buried within for so long. Don wondered with some irritation whether she was watching the same idiocy on television.
He still hadn’t forgiven her asking him for The Beatles tickets. What in hell could she hear in that so-called music? She had been dizzy with excitement—seen usually upon the gift of a new appliance—when she asked him. Can you, Don? Can you get me those tickets? I’ll do just anything to see The Beatles in Atlanta. And then, when the God-awful noise came over the transistor radio by her bed, she turned it up so loud his whole mood was ruined. A gift from him, too, that radio. He endured the same foolishness from Donny, but it was Mary’s request that sent his uppers and lowers into a grinding clash so his neck and jaw troubled him the next day. He would have to put his foot down about the music, a small favor she could surely do for him. Hadn’t she had her eye on a jadeite-green waffle iron from Rival?
* * * *
Mary Hooks, age twenty-two, stone supply clerk and Beatles fan, convinced her lover Don Palmer, Senior, to get tickets for her and a girlfriend when The Beatles played the new stadium in Atlanta. At first he had refused, upset with her over the small request. But Mary Hooks had learned at fifteen how to quiet men. And Don was no different. Don was a real puppy dog, though he could hardly look her in the eyes afterwards. She knew he believed God looked down on them with displeasure, that what they did was a sin. She also knew Don would not resist, just as she could not resist the spark of joy she recognized in his eyes when she came to him. There was goodness in Don, such that she let herself believe him when he offered promises of marriage, a life together one day—so often made as he searched her naked body with his eyes, reluctant, it seemed, to touch her, as if she were some hallowed ground that might disappear if his eyes left her.
Other men she had known were all as easily quieted. As a teenager there had been boys in high school, a few from the junior college in Columbus, and one from the chemical supply. There were strangers, too, older men of business on the road. Mary was eager to indulge a few restless nights when it felt okay, less of a sin under the light of loneliness, her father long gone, her mother dead, the aunt who raised her always too tired to be any sort of genuine company. And then Don: such a serious man in brown trousers and starched white shirt, always a tie, who came undone with the slightest affection, who claimed his love like no other could. He bought her things. He got her tickets to see The Beatles in Atlanta. All she had to do in return was a few small favors.
* * * *
“I want to hear The Beatles, please,” Donny told Mary from the other side of the screen door, rain coming down around him. When he looked at her with watery blue eyes, Mary Hooks knew she was going to cross a line that was about more than maintaining small favors and finding a new Featherweight sewing machine in the mail.
“I’m supposed to be getting my hair cut, and my dad gets back tonight,” Donny added before stepping up into Mary’s two-bedroom bungalow, as if with this information she might reconsider letting him inside. “He’s going to kill me if I don’t do what he asked,” Donny said, still inside the doorway.
Mary wondered herself what Don might do. Over the course of their love affair, now six months deep, she had endured endless complaints about his son. She wondered why such little things like a haircut and electric guitar music were worth souring a relationship with your only son.
“I’m sure he’ll come around. He’s just ... I mean, I’m sure he’s just old-fashioned, that’s all. Give him time.” She held out her hand. “You’re soaked. Let me get you a towel.”
“Thanks. You want a cherry sour?” Donny offered her the bag.
“Aren’t you sweet,” Mary said, taking the bag from him, a few of the candies spilling to the kitchen floor.
“Now, that towel. You want something to drink? Iced tea, milk? I got chocolate syrup.”
“No, I mean ... no, thank you. I just want to hear The Beatles, please. You said I could hear The Beatles.” Donny shuffled from foot to foot, nearly dancing before the music had been played.
Mary brought Donny a towel that smelled of jasmine. “You want to sit down?”
Donny ran the towel over his head and arms, and sat down on Mary’s Chippendale sofa, faded rose damask more at home in her aunt’s house. But as soon as she had put the needle down on the A-side of The Beatles’ new single, “Paperback Writer,” Donny stood to dance. He moved with an abandon she had rarely seen from folks in Lake Claire. She marveled at the freedom the boy, so nervous in her doorway with his bag of cherry sours, displayed in her living room, hardly aware, it seemed to her, he was in a stranger’s house. Donny’s arms, legs, and feet moved wildly, his head bounced as if it might fly off at any minute, and his eyes remained shut. His face revealed an easy joy Mary recognized as the same she had seen from Don when she kissed him. The stereo needle lifted automatically from the record, and Donny beamed at Mary, sweat glistening on his smooth, hairless face.
“Play it again.”
Mary obliged, replacing the arm of her Magnavox stereo console, a present from Don three months earlier. She returned to the sofa and watched Donny dance again, his long blond hair whipping in the air, his eyes closed as he absorbed the music. When the song had finished again, Mary put on the B-side, “Rain,” and moved with the rhythm of the otherworldly song, enjoying the sense of a previously unimagined place far from Lake Claire, the jangle and thump of guitar and drum, the drone of ghostly voices in harmony like she had never ever heard. With thoughts of otherworldly rain, so unlike the dismal steady soaking that came down around them, Mary reached carefully for the boy, finding behind girlish bangs the same hunger she had seen in his father’s eyes, the same hunger that drew her to them all.
Can you hear me? John Lennon sang in a voice of vapor and mystery.
* * * *
Driving southwest along Interstate 85 from Atlanta, Don Senior’s thoughts were on Mary Hooks as he hummed Frank Sinatra’s “Strangers in the Night,” and indulged in thoughts of her rosy skin, her dark hair, the curve of her lips, the way her pants fit her narrow hips, and the false eyelashes she had begun to wear that reminded Don of Brigitte Bardot. He had picked up the Sinatra single for Mary in Atlanta; he planned to play it for her when he stopped by as a surprise before going home. A steady drizzle kept the summer dusk gray, but Don had the car window down. He enjoyed the cool, wet breeze, one Tareyton after another, and a bottle of Old Crow he had planned to open with Mary but, in a good mood, opened early, taking long drinks from the quart bottle. Don wasn’t a drinker, but he knew Mary liked a taste now and then, and, like his father, he believed the occasional nip good for the body. By the time he turned off of I-85 onto a two-lane state road, however, Don had finished a third of the Old Crow and smoked half a pack of cigarettes. With the easy rhythms of the Sinatra song in his head, the warmth of bourbon in his belly, and the idea of Mary waiting for him, Don smiled, right hand on the wheel, his left holding a cigarette out the window as a cool mist fell across his arm.
In her bed again, the smell of jasmine would stir him, the sight of her often more than he could take without his throat tightening so he could hardly breathe. For this he would lie to Dale and probably later have to cover for that lie and the one before it too, his list of fictions long enough that most wives would have already stumbled upon the obvious. Not Dale. Before returning home, Don would have to smoke at least another half-dozen cigarettes to hide Mary’s perfume. And he managed their checking account, not that Dale ever looked, to hide the money he spent somewhat recklessly on Mary: from bottles of peach brandy to the chiffon housecoats and the latest appliances from General Electric and Zenith she pined for. All of this for the love of a short-haired supply clerk named Mary Hooks.
* * * *
When they had listened to “Rain” three more times, dancing slowly to the last two, Mary pulled a record from a stack on top of the stereo cabinet and placed it on the turntable. She took Donny by the hand and pulled him towards her bedroom as the first strains of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” came through the console speakers. Mary was no fool; she knew where this evening led, and she knew it was wrong. Yet the desire she saw in the boy’s face, whether for the simple pleasure of dancing in her living room, away from the repressive air of his father’s house, or some more fundamental yearning, driven by curiosity and nature, was irresistible. Mary could satisfy that hunger, which filled a hole that always threatened to tear her in two. In quieter moments, when she surrendered to a head-hanging shame for the things she had done, she wondered what devils her parents had been, what sins they had committed and left for her to bear. It was then she wanted most to drown in her troubled waters, to put an end to her own longing, to fill the hole up with red clay and silence.
Donny stopped and smiled in recognition, his blue eyes wide with gratitude and a flicker of hesitation. “Rubber Soul,” he said. “My mother gave me this record last Christmas, just like I asked. Made my father madder than hell.”
“Your mother sounds like a very nice lady.” Mary smiled at him again. Outside, the rain came down harder; thunder growled overhead.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Donny said, his stomach knotting at the thought of his mother at home. Donny looked beyond Mary to her bedroom and back to her, a question on his lips he could not ask. He guessed what might happen in there, but his feet seemed fixed to the pineboard floors. Dancing with Mary, Donny felt swaddled in the scent of her, a scent he couldn’t name, though it felt as familiar and calming to him as the smell of his mother’s dressing room. With the curl of her hair on his neck, her breath in his ear, and the sound of rain outside and in, Donny felt at home and wondered how he would ever return to his parents’ house.
Mary held out her hand to him. “Don’t worry, honey. I won’t burn your records.”
* * * *
Outside Mary Hooks’ kitchen door, Don Palmer, Senior, stood in the rain with the bottle of Old Crow and a bag of caramels in one hand and the Sinatra record in the other, listening to the heavy beat of rock-’n’-roll music and grinding his top canines into his bottom ones. When he tried the door, he found it locked. Peering in through the kitchen window, Don saw no one. But hearing the sound of rock-’n’-roll music drained the pleasure he had nurtured on the drive home right out of him. He had cautioned Mary about listening to such garbage, this hoax on the ears, this foreign fashion—for wasn’t that all it was, a fad—but here she was, behind his back, doing just that. He held his finger on the doorbell for nearly a minute so she might hear it over the music. When Mary finally answered the door, the music had stopped and she stood there as if he might be a traveling salesman trying to unload a vacuum cleaner.
“It’s me, Mary-girl. What’s going on?” Don’s face had gone red, his jaw locked so in aggravation he didn’t notice she bit nervously at her bottom lip.
“You’re back.” Mary opened the kitchen door, but the screen door stood between them.
“Of course I’m back, honey. It’s Friday, like I told you. I’m getting soaked out here.”
“Of course. Just ... I wasn’t expecting you.” She straightened her blouse, clutching it at its neck, unlatched the screen door for him, and let him inside. She smelled the whiskey on him.
“I know. I wanted to surprise you. Got you something from Atlanta.” He pulled the Sinatra record from a paper bag.
“That’s nice. Have you been drinking? That’s not like you.” Mary moved to the kitchen where she put on a pot of water to boil, hardly listening to Don at all.
“I only had a taste of this Old Crow I bought for us to share. Just enough to put me in a fine mood—that is, until I heard that racket. You know how I feel.”
“This isn’t exactly a good time, Don. I’m not feeling so good. All this rain, I guess.” Mary kept her back to Don as she fumbled with teacups.
Sensing an unusual nervousness in his mistress’s behavior, Don offered her a candy from his bag of caramels as a peacemaker. Since he was already at her house, he didn’t see the harm in wrapping himself in her intoxicating smells and staying longer than he had planned. He would just have to dream up a bigger lie for Dale when he got home.
“Well, I got something might make you feel a whole lot better. You’re going to love this so much more than that noise. Bring us a couple of glasses and some ice. And sit down, I don’t need any tea.” Don moved to the living room, sitting down on the sofa as if he lived there.
The bag of cherry sours on her coffee table gave Don Palmer his second feeling of out-of-placeness. He couldn’t figure out if it was he who felt out of place or the bag of cherry sours. He had never seen Mary Hooks eat anything but caramels and this bag of cherry sours looked like they had just then been plopped down on her coffee table and offered up.
“I didn’t know you liked cherry sours,” Don said, picking up the bag of candy, examining it as if the answer might be inside.
“I didn’t,” she said, “but I do now. I’ve had enough of caramels, anyhow.”
“Is that so?”
“It is,” Mary answered. “A person needs change once in a while.”
“Is that so?” A familiar resentment rose in Don’s throat as he recalled the music he had heard coming from her living room.
“It ain’t Christian.”
“What?”
“That music.”
“And this is?” Mary could hardly believe the words spilling from her mouth. But she recognized their truth.
“What’s that?”
“You and me. That’s Christian?”
“You know what I mean.
“Just saying, that’s all.”
Don didn’t like the defiance he recognized in his Mary’s face. “Just saying,” he said. “What’s gotten into you? Are you mad at me? Did I do something wrong, because you know I’ll do anything for you, honey. Didn’t I get you those tickets, even though you know how much I hated the notion of you sitting inside a baseball stadium, of all places, listening to that abomination?”
Don was right. Mary didn’t know what had gotten into her. She was scared; she felt like someone had come along and loosened up her head so all the pieces of it fell to the floor and she only had time to pick them up in a scramble, not one fitting together like it had before. Why had she encouraged the boy to come to her house? What good could possibly come from his being there? And how many times had she asked herself these same questions when she had encouraged other men to do the same? And Don loved her so. What devils drove her to invite his son into her home? Something was coming to an end tonight, but Mary was afraid to see just what it might be. From the kitchen, she felt detached from Don in the other room, his words like a voice on television, unreal and far away.
When Don realized the cherry sours weren’t Mary’s—he wasn’t sure how he knew, but he knew—he stood up too quickly, the taste of whiskey rising in his throat and leaving him feeling sick. He noticed Mary’s bedroom door was closed. Who would she close the door to?
“What’s going on, Mary?” Don’s sense of out-of-placeness grew. “Is somebody here?”
“What do you mean?” she answered from the kitchen. “Of course not, Don.” She steadied herself against the kitchen counter.
“Good Lord, Mary, if you’re lying to me,” he said and went looking, determined, nearly delirious with the sureness of finding something he hadn’t expected.
* * * *
From the moment Don found his only son in Mary Hooks’ closet, all felt like a memory just out of reach, fuzzy and quick, a confusion he couldn’t quite sort out, as he watched himself from the outside: the quiet and determined rage that settled over his body—this was God’s punishment, he understood; a cool sweat and a subtle ache in his bones that left him feeling later as if he had come down with a cruel summer cold—drained; to the car, dragging the boy by his arm, leaving a bruise like a three-fingered plum; and home where he sat Donny down in the kitchen, holding him in the chair with one remarkably strong hand as he tied his son’s arms and legs; the hunt for scissors—in the gift-wrapping drawer, Dale answered, confused and sleepy from a nap—and the way Donny’s fine hair fell to the ground in great crescent-moon glides, piles of it scattered across Dale’s spotless linoleum; the screams of a mother; the silent but sure wrath of a father; and the dark red blood of a boy that spilled to the floor as scissors met flesh.
What Dobs Found Where the Cul-de-sac Met the Railroad Tracks
What Dobs found where the cul-de-sac met the railroad tracks was so twisted and bruised it no longer looked human, he told anyone who asked. Cut clean in two by a Southern, I suspect. Dobs found Donny Palmer as the rest of Lake Claire listened on the radio to the Atlanta Braves play baseball. And that included most of the boys in Lake Claire. They were supposed to be out searching for Donny; but it would have to wait for the game. There was no sense of urgency even after he had been missing a full day. Many figured Donny-Mop, the nickname he had been given for his over-the-ears and curled-at-the-neck hair, not to forget the bangs all the way beyond his eyebrows and nearly so he couldn’t see at all, had left town altogether, already an unbalanced teen driven by the whims of a changing nation. Always a quiet boy, most figured he had simply wandered off to Atlanta or worse. When Dobs found Donny, it felt like a run of bad luck through a good place. And a week later the people of Lake Claire found themselves a villain in Carmello the Barber.
* * * *
Inside Carmello’s Barbershop the forty-six-year-old barber bent over the head of a frightened teen. Carmello’s giant hairy hand held him still in the chair, a leather strop fitted across his legs, while the other hand gripped electric shears that brought down the girlishly long locks like a thresher across a field of hay. The teenager wailed like a little boy, his father watching with a mixture of satisfaction and alarm as the giant Italian yelled, Boys is boys is boys is boys ... as if to convince himself as well as others. From across the street citizens of Lake Claire saw a large immigrant barber standing anxiously in the doorway watching and waiting for adolescent heads to cut, business slow and passions aroused.
It Was No Surprise to Anyone
No one thought much about the haircut—Donny’s hair was freshly shorn when they found him—including Sheriff Gerdts, who didn’t even note the detail in his report. Until two days later when King Roper pointed out that Donny had been seen in front of Carmello’s refusing to have his hair cut just a day before he disappeared. And it came as no surprise to anyone in Lake Claire, including, once again, Sheriff Gerdts, that Carmello DeNino had been griping up a storm about the boys of Lake Claire who no longer came for his chair, his scissors, and his razor. Carmello DeNino, a foreigner, and who knew what went through the mind of an Italian with the face of Stalin and a head like a pumpkin.
“Don’t you find that surprising?” King Roper asked Don Palmer.
But Don hardly grunted a response, his mind, to King Roper and others, at least, lost in grief, his only son so brutally taken. Only Mary Hooks wondered at the coincidence of Donny Palmer’s death to the events at her house. And she didn’t do that long, keeping her thoughts to herself, because Mary took to the road with a young rock-’n’-roll band from Macon, leaving Don Palmer and Lake Claire, Georgia, for good.
* * * *
Four days after Donny Palmer’s body was found, word spread that Sheriff Gerdts had gone to Carmello DeNino with questions. And then it took less than twelve hours before a posse of fathers, mothers, and those who had simply quickened at the flurry of righteousness blowing through Lake Claire gathered at King and Jane Roper’s house to make sure no evil went unfound or unpunished. These were their children. From the Ropers’ house it took less than two minutes in a steady rain to ride in cars and trucks to the DeNino home, where Caterina DeNino listened to her husband’s booming protests in Italian about the ridiculous questions Sheriff Gerdts had asked him in regard to the poor boy who had fallen under the wheels of a Southern locomotive.
“No accident, he says. Murder, he calls it. These boys no longer come for my chair. So what if I complain nobody wants a haircut like boys should have? Why does this Mr. Sheriff Gerdts ask me? Carmello DeNino is a barber. I cut hair, not little boys.”
Caterina heard the rumble of cars outside and knew why they had come. She had wondered when this day would arrive and here it had. Her husband refused to recognize himself as a foreigner in this dull place, but they hadn’t. Carmello opened the door to see what caused such noise outside his home. His beefy body filled the doorframe; with the light of the house behind him and a curtain of rain in front, his silhouette stood like Frankenstein’s monster, the right of his barber’s hands holding out the day’s newspaper he read each night to practice his English. He raised his arm and opened his mouth to speak to the crowd that had gathered on his lawn and in the street.
* * * *
Sheriff Gerdts closed the case of Donny Palmer’s murder just as he did the case of Carmello DeNino’s murder. It was simple. In his mind, in everyone’s mind, it all added up, and Lake Claire settled back into the summer of 1966. The citizens of Lake Claire who were present at the shooting all insisted Carmello DeNino had pointed a gun, or at least something that looked like a gun, when someone, no one was saying who, fired a shotgun from the street that cut the big Italian barber in half and left buckshot in the pale green armchair behind him. Don Palmer was remembered for his own pleas for calm outside Carmello’s house, his cool head in the midst of such grief and anger. Pastor Avery pointed out Don’s willingness to forgive, as God asks of us, while others noted Don’s own modesty in the wake of his heroics. Hank Aaron hit forty-four home runs by the close of September and Tony Cloninger threw twenty-seven wild pitches. A few teenaged boys left town for college and university and only then grew their hair out long. A few others wound up fighting Communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia, Lake Claire losing three boys to the conflict in Vietnam. Caterina DeNino returned to Italy a widow, where she learned to speak again and forgot the people of Lake Claire, Georgia. Mary Hooks left her Georgia rock band for San Francisco, where her pacifist boyfriend accidentally beat her to death only two days into the new year. As a New Year’s resolution to settle sins of the past, Mary had written a letter of confession and apology to Dale Palmer. It began, I suppose it was the sweets at first ... And Dale Palmer, who never read Mary’s note, scrubbed at the linoleum of her kitchen floor from morning to night each day until her husband finally had her admitted to the state hospital in Milledgeville. In the fall, Don Palmer led the Stamp Out The Beatles campaign in Lake Claire, just as he had promised, a renewed fervor in his convictions. A ghostly glaze over his eyes suggested to Lake Claire residents that this ordinary man made extraordinary by unimaginable loss had replaced grief with a profound faith in God’s goodness, with a selfless devotion to service in God’s name. Nobody’s bigger than Jesus, he preached again, convincing twenty-four kids to contribute their board games, records, pins, stickers, stamps, plates, and photographs to a bonfire that rose roof-high.