“Give me the works,” he said to the barber, not looking at him. “A shave first, I feel itchy and mean, then a haircut. You men there, starting on the right, tell jokes. Make ’em good jokes. I want entertainment while I’m being shorn. Ain’t been entertained in months. You, there, mister, you start.”
The man who had been evicted from his comfortable chair unfroze himself slowly and rolled his eyes at the other men and talked as if someone had hit him in the mouth.
“I knew a gent once who . . .” he said, and word by word, white-faced, he launched himself into a tale. “That gent, he . . .”
To the barber, James Malone now said, “Listen, you, I want a shave, I want a beautiful shave. But I got a fine-skinned face and it’s a pretty face with the beard off, and I been in the mountains for a long time and I had no luck with gold-panning, so I’m feeling mean. I just want to warn you of one little thing. If you so much as nick my face once with your straight razor, I’ll kill you. You hear that? I mean I’ll kill you. If you so much as bring one little speck of blood to the surface, I’ll plug you clean through the heart. You hear?”
The barber nodded quietly. The barber shop was silent. Nobody was telling jokes or laughing.
“Not one drop of blood, not one little cut, mind you,” repeated Mr. James Malone, “or you’ll be dead on the floor a second later.”
“I’m a married man,” said the barber.
“I don’t give a damn if you’re a Mormon with six wives and fifty-seven children. You’re dead if you scratch me once.”
“I happen to have two children,” said the barber. “A fine little girl and a boy.”
“Don’t hand me any of that,” said Malone, settling back, closing his eyes. “Start.”
The barber began to get the hot towels ready. He put them on James Malone’s face, and under them the man cursed and yelled and waved his pistols under the white apron. When the hot towels came off and the hot lather was put on his beard, James Malone still chewed on his profanity and threats, and the men waiting sat white-faced and stiff with the pistols pointing at them. The other barbers had almost stopped moving and stood like statues by their customers in the chairs, and the barber shop was cold for a summer day.
“What’s wrong with the stories?” snapped James Malone. “All right, then sing. You four there, sing something like ‘My Darling Clementine.’ Start it up. You heard me.”
The barber was stropping his razor slowly with a trembling hand. “Mr. Malone,” he said.
“Shut up and get to work.” Malone tilted his head back, grimacing.
The barber stropped his razor some more and looked at the men seated all around the shop. He cleared his throat and said, “Did all of you gentlemen hear what Mr. Malone said to me?”
Everyone nodded mutely.
“You heard him threaten to kill me,” said the barber, “if I so much as drew a drop of blood to his skin?”
The men nodded again.
“And you’d swear to it in a court of law, if necessary?” asked the barber.
The men nodded for the last time.
“Cut the malarkey,” said Mr. James Malone. “Get to work.”
“That’s all I wanted to be sure of,” said the barber, letting the leather strop fall and clatter against the chair. He raised the razor in the light and it gleamed and glittered with cold metal there.
He tilted Mr. James Malone’s head back and put the razor against the hairy throat.
“We’ll start here,” he said. “We’ll start here.”
COLONEL STONESTEEL’S GENUINE HOME-MADE TRULY EGYPTIAN MUMMY
THAT WAS THE AUTUMN THEY FOUND the genuine Egyptian mummy out past Loon Lake.
How the mummy got there, and how long it had been there, no one knew. But there it was, all wrapped up in its creosote rags, looking a bit spoiled by time, and just waiting to be found.
The day before, it was just another autumn day with the trees blazing and letting down their burned-looking leaves and a sharp smell of pepper in the air when Charlie Flagstaff, aged twelve, stepped out and stood in the middle of a pretty empty street, hoping for something big and special and exciting to happen.
“Okay,” said Charlie to the sky, the horizon, the whole world. “I’m waiting. Come on!”
Nothing happened. So Charlie kicked the leaves ahead of him across town until he came to the tallest house on the greatest street, the house where everyone in Green Town came with troubles. Charlie scowled and fidgeted. He had troubles, all right, but just couldn’t lay his hand on their shape or size. So he shut his eyes and just yelled at the big house windows:
“Colonel Stonesteel!”
The front door flashed open, as if the old man had been waiting there, like Charlie, for something incredible to happen.
“Charlie,” called Colonel Stonesteel, “you’re old enough to rap. What is there about boys makes them shout around houses? Try again.”
The door shut.
Charlie sighed, walked up, knocked softly.
“Charlie Flagstaff, is that you?” The door opened again, the colonel squinted out and down. “I thought I told you to yell around the house!”
“Heck,” sighed Charlie, in despair.
“Look at that weather. Hell’s bells!” The colonel strode forth to hone his fine hatchet nose on the cool wind. “Don’t you love autumn, boy? Fine, fine day! Right?”
He turned to look down into the boy’s pale face.
“Why, son, you look as if your last friend left and your dog died. What’s wrong? School starts next week?”
“Yep.”
“Halloween not coming fast enough?”
“Still six weeks off. Might as well be a year. You ever notice, colonel. . . .” The boy heaved an even greater sigh, staring out at the autumn town. “Not much ever happens around here?”
“Why, it’s Labor Day tomorrow, big parade, seven cars, the mayor, maybe fireworks—er.” The colonel came to a dead stop, not impressed with his grocery list. “How old are you, Charlie?”
“Thirteen, almost.”
“Things do tend to run down, come thirteen.” The colonel rolled his eyes inward on the rickety data inside his skull. “Come to a dead halt when you’re fourteen. Might as well die, sixteen. End of the world, seventeen. Things only start up again, come twenty or beyond. Meanwhile, Charlie, what do we do to survive until noon this very morn before Labor Day?”
“If anyone knows, it’s you, colonel,” said Charlie.
“Charlie,” said the old man, flinching from the boy’s clear stare, “I can move politicians big as prize hogs, shake the Town Hall skeletons, make locomotives run backward uphill. But small boys on long autumn weekends, glue in their head, and a bad case of Desperate Empties? Well. . . .”
Colonel Stonesteel eyed the clouds, gauged the future.
“Charlie,” he said, at last. “I am moved by your condition, touched by your lying there on the railroad tracks waiting for a train that will never come. How’s this? I’ll bet you six Baby Ruth candy bars against your mowing my lawn, that Green Town, Upper Illinois, population five thousand sixty-two people, one thousand dogs, will be changed forever, changed for the best, by God, some time in the next miraculous twenty-four hours. That sound good? A bet?”
“Gosh!” Charlie, riven, seized the old man’s hand and pumped it. “A bet! Colonel Stonesteel, I knew you could do it!”
“It ain’t done yet, son. But look there. The town’s the Red Sea. I order it to part. Gangway!”
The colonel marched, Charlie ran, into the house.
“Here we are, Charles, the junkyard or the graveyard. Which?”
The colonel sniffed at one door leading down to raw basement earth, another leading up to dry timber attic.
“Well—”
The attic ached with a sudden flood of wind, like an old man dying in his sleep. The colonel yanked the door wide on autumn whispers, high storms trapped and shivering in the beams.
“Hear that, Charlie? What’s it
say?”
“Well—”
A gust of wind blew the colonel up the dark stairs like so much flimsy chaff.
“Time, mostly, it says, and oldness and memory, lots of things. Dust, and maybe pain. Listen to those beams! Let the wind shift the timber skeleton on a fine fall day, and you truly got time-talk. Burnings and ashes, Bombay snuffs, tomb-yard flowers gone to ghost—”
“Boy, colonel,” gasped Charlie, climbing, “you oughta write for Top Notch Story Magazine!”
“Did once! Got rejected. Here we are!”
And there indeed they were, in a place with no calendar, no months, no days, no year, but only vast spider shadows and glints of light from collapsed chandeliers lying about like great tears in the dust.
“Boy!” cried Charlie, scared, and glad of it.
“Chuck!” said the colonel. “You ready for me to birth you a real, live, half-dead sockdolager, on-the-spot mystery?”
“Ready!”
The colonel swept charts, maps, agate marbles, glass eyes, cobwebs and sneezes of dust off a table, then rolled up his sleeves.
“Great thing about midwifing mysteries is, you don’t have to boil water or wash up. Hand me that papyrus scroll over there, boy, that darning needle just beyond, that old diploma on the shelf, that wad of cannonball cotton on the floor. Jump!”
“I’m jumping.” Charlie ran and fetched, fetched and ran.
Bundles of dry twigs, clutches of pussy willow and cattails flew. The colonel’s sixteen hands were wild in the air, holding sixteen bright needles, flakes of leather, rustling of meadow grass, flickers of owl feather, glares of bright yellow fox-eye. The colonel hummed and snorted as his miraculous eight sets of arms and hands swooped and prowled, stitched and danced.
“There!” he cried, and pointed with a chop of his nose. “Half-done. Shaping up. Peel an eye, boy. What’s it commence to start to resemble?”
Charlie circled the table, eyes stretched so wide it gaped his mouth. “Why—why—” he gasped.
“Yes?”
“It looks like—”
“Yes, yes?”
“A mummy! Can’t be!”
“Is! Bull’s-eye on, boy! Is!”
The colonel leaned down on the long-strewn object. Wrists deep in his creation, he listened to its reeds and thistles and dry flowers whisper.
“Now, you may well ask, why would anyone build a mummy in the first place? You, you inspired this, Charlie. You put me up to it. Go look out the attic window there.”
Charlie spat on the dusty window, wiped a clear viewing spot, peered out.
“Well,” said the colonel. “What do you see? Anything happening out there in the town, boy? Any murders being transacted?”
“Heck, no—”
“Anyone falling off church steeples or being run down by a maniac lawnmower?”
“Nope.”
“Any Monitors or Merrimacs sailing up the lake, dirigibles falling on the Masonic Temple and squashing six thousand Masons at a time?”
“Heck, colonel, there’s only five thousand people in Green Town!”
“Spy, boy. Look. Stare. Report!”
Charlie stared out at a very flat town.
“No dirigibles. No squashed Masonic Temples.”
“Right!” The colonel ran over to join Charlie, surveying the territory. He pointed with his hand, he pointed with his nose. “In all Green Town, in all your life, not one murder, one orphanage fire, one mad fiend carving his name on librarian ladies’ wooden legs! Face it, boy, Green Town, Upper Illinois, is the most common mean ordinary plain old bore of a town in the eternal history of the Roman, German, Russian, English, American empires! If Napoleon had been born here, he would’ve committed hara-kiri by the age of nine. Boredom. If Julius Caesar had been raised here, he’d have got himself in the Roman Forum, aged ten, and shoved in his own dagger—”
“Boredom,” said Charlie.
“Kee-rect! Keep staring out that window while I work, son.” Colonel Stonesteel went back to flailing and shoving and pushing a strange growing shape around on the creaking table. “Boredom by the pound and ton. Boredom by the doomsday yard and the funeral mile. Lawns, homes, fur on the dogs, hair on the people, suits in the dusty store windows, all cut from the same cloth. . . .”
“Boredom,” said Charlie, on cue.
“And what do you do when you’re bored, son?”
“Er—break a window in a haunted house?”
“Good grief, we got no haunted houses in Green Town, boy!”
“Used to be. Old Higley place. Torn down.”
“See my point? Now what else do we do so’s not to be bored?”
“Hold a massacre?”
“No massacres here in dogs’ years. Lord, even our police chief’s honest! Mayor—not corrupt! Madness. Whole town faced with stark staring ennuis and lulls! Last chance, Charlie, what do we do!”
“Build a mummy?” Charlie smiled.
“Bulldogs in the belfry! Watch my dust!”
The old man, cackling, grabbed bits of stuffed owl and bent lizard tail and old nicotine bandages left over from a skiing fall that had busted his ankle and broken a romance in 1895, and some patches from a 1922 Kissel Kar inner tube, and some burned-out sparklers from the last peaceful summer of 1913, and all of it weaving, shuttling together under his brittle insect-jumping fingers.
“Voilà! There, Charlie! Finished!”
“Oh, colonel.” The boy stared and gasped. “Can I make him a crown?”
“Make him a crown, boy. Make him a crown.”
The sun was going down when the colonel and Charlie and their Egyptian friend came down the dusky backstairs of the old man’s house, two of them walking iron-heavy, the third floating light as toasted cornflakes on the autumn air.
“Colonel,” wondered Charlie. “What we going to do with this mummy, now we got him? It ain’t as if he could talk much, or walk around—”
“No need, boy. Let folks talk, let folks run. Look there!”
They cracked the door and peered out at a town smothered in peace and ruined with nothing-to-do.
“Ain’t enough, is it, son, you’ve recovered from your almost fatal seizure of Desperate Empties. Whole town out there is up to their earlobes in watchsprings, no hands on the clocks, afraid to get up every morning and find it’s always and forever Sunday! Who’ll offer salvation, boy?”
“Amon Bubastis Rameses Ra the Third, just arrived on the four o’clock limited?”
“God love you, boy, yes. What we got here is a giant seed. Seed’s no good unless you do what with it?”
“Why,” said Charlie, one eye shut. “Plant it?”
“Plant! Then watch it grow! Then what? Harvest time. Harvest! Come on, boy. Er—bring your friend.”
The colonel crept out into the first nightfall.
The mummy came soon after, helped by Charlie.
Labor Day at high noon, Osiris Bubastis Rameses Amon-Ra-Tut arrived from the Land of the Dead.
An autumn wind stirred the land and flapped doors wide not with the sound of the usual Labor Day Parade, seven tour cars, a fife-and-drum corps, and the mayor, but a mob that grew as it flowed the streets and fell in a tide to inundate the lawn out front of Colonel Stonesteel’s house. The colonel and Charlie were sitting on the front porch, had been sitting there for some hours waiting for the conniption fits to arrive, the storming of the Bastille to occur. Now with dogs going mad and biting boys’ ankles and boys dancing around the fringes of the mob, the colonel gazed down upon the Creation (his and Charlie’s) and gave his secret smile.
“Well, Charlie . . . do I win my bet?”
“You sure do, colonel!”
“Come on.”
Phones rang all across town and lunches burned on stoves, as the colonel strode forth to give the parade his papal blessings.
At the center of the mob was a horse-drawn wagon. On top of the wagon, his eyes wild with discovery, was Tom Tuppen, owner of a half-dead farm just beyond town. Tom w
as babbling, and the crowd was babbling, because in the back of the wagon was the special harvest delivered out of four thousand lost years of time.
“Well, flood the Nile and plant the Delta,” gasped the colonel, eyes wide, staring. “Is or is not that a genuine old Egyptian mummy lying there in its original papyrus and coal-tar wrappings?”
“Sure is!” cried Charlie.
“Sure is!” yelled everyone.
“I was plowing the field this morning,” said Tom Tuppen. “Plowing, just plowing! and—bang! Plow turned this right up, right before me! Like to had a stroke! Think! The Egyptians must’ve marched through Illinois three thousand years ago and no one knew! Revelations, I call it! Outa the way, kids! I’m taking this find to the post office lobby. Set it up on display! Giddap, now, git!”
The horse, the wagon, the mummy, the crowd, moved away, leaving the colonel behind, his eyes still pretend-wide, his mouth open.
“Hot dog,” whispered the colonel, “we did it, Charles. This uproar, babble, talk and hysterical gossip will last for a thousand days or till Armageddon, whichever comes first!”
“Yes sir, colonel!”
“Michelangelo couldn’t’ve done better. Boy David’s a castaway-lost-and-forgotten wonder compared to our Egyptian surprise and—”
The colonel stopped as the mayor rushed by.
“Colonel, Charlie, howdy! Just phoned Chicago. News folks here tomorrow breakfast! Museum folks by lunch! Glory Hallelujah for the Green Town Chamber of Commerce!”
The mayor ran off after the mob.
An autumn cloud crossed the colonel’s face and settled around his mouth.
“End of Act One, Charlie. Start thinking fast. Act Two coming up. We do want this commotion to last forever, don’t we?”
“Yes, sir—”
“Crack your brain, boy. What does Uncle Wiggily say?”
“Uncle Wiggily says—ah—go back two hops?”
“Give the boy an A-plus, a gold star, and a brownie! The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, eh?”