Hot Towel
I had the sign flipped to CLOSED and the broom halfway round the second chair when the co-op truck pulled up out front and sat there with the engine running.
It was ten after five on a Saturday in May, and hot the way it gets in Hartselle before the summer’s even started, the air so thick you could wring it. I leaned on the broom and watched through the window. The truck was one of those big white bucket rigs from Joe Wheeler Electric, mud to the door handles, and the man behind the wheel wasn’t getting out. He was just sitting there with both hands on the wheel and his head tipped back against the rest, like he’d pulled over to die.
I knew that truck, and I knew the man in it.
I propped the broom against the counter and went out and knocked on his window. Wade Sutter about jumped out of his skin. Then he saw it was me and rolled the window down, and the cab breathed out a smell of sweat and diesel and wet red clay.
“Hey, Earl.” His voice was shot. “You’re closed.”
“I’m closed to folks that come in during business hours. You ain’t folks.” He hadn’t shaved in six days, and his eyes were so red they looked sunburned. “When’d you last sleep?”
“Wednesday, I think. Maybe Thursday.” He rubbed his face, and I heard the stubble rasp under his hand. “We got the last of Falkville back on about two hours ago. That’s everybody. Every house on the grid.”
That tornado had come through last Sunday night, an EF-2 that took the roof off the Methodist church and laid about three hundred poles down across two counties like matchsticks. The co-op had crews in from all over. Wade was a line foreman, thirty-five and the one every out-of-state crew wanted to work under, and I’d seen his truck go by the shop at every hour of every day since.
“Come on in,” I said.
“Earl, I look like hell.”
“That’s why you’re coming in. Park it round back. I ain’t having the Baptists see a co-op truck outside my shop at suppertime and thinking the power’s going out again.”
He laughed. It came out cracked, but it was a laugh. And he put the truck in gear.
He came in the back door with his hard hat in one hand and his boots unlaced, and the whole shop seemed to get smaller. He had to turn those pole-climber’s shoulders a little to fit through the doorway, and his hi-vis shirt strained over a middle his mama’s cooking had filled out. He stood there dripping sweat onto my clean floor with his reddish beard grown in wild, scratching at a forearm burned brown to the elbow, and swayed a little on his feet.
“Sit,” I said, and pointed at chair one.
He sat. The old Koken creaked under him like it was glad to see him. I pulled the blinds down on the front window and turned the lock on the door and got a towel into the steamer, and when I came back he’d let his head fall back against the rest with his eyes shut.
“What are we doing?” he said.
“Shave. You look like you been living in a ditch.”
“I have been living in a ditch.”
“Well, now you’re living in my chair.” I unbuttoned the top of his shirt so I could get the cape round his neck, and my knuckles brushed his collarbone, and he opened his eyes. They were green. I always forget how green, till he’s close.
I’d been cutting Wade Sutter’s hair every third Saturday for four years, ever since he moved back from Birmingham after his divorce and started showing up at nine sharp for a high and tight and staying till eleven to argue about the Braves. Four years of him in my chair with my fingers on the back of his neck. I’d had forty-nine years to get sure what I was, and I’d got sure early. I was never real sure what Wade was, except that he always sat a little longer than he needed to, and he always went quiet when I trimmed round his ears.
I got the hot towel out with the tongs and shook it and laid it over his face, and pressed it down around his jaw with both hands, and he let out a groan that went straight to the backs of my knees.
“Oh, Lord,” he said through the towel. “Oh, Earl. Oh, that’s good.”
“Just breathe. Let it work.”
I left my hands on it, one on each side of his face, pressing the heat into that beard. He breathed slow. His big chest went up and down under the cape. I watched it and made myself think about the lather.
I shaved him with the straight razor. I don’t do that for everybody anymore, the insurance man says I oughtn’t, but I did it for him. I took the towel off and his face was pink and soft underneath all that red. I lathered him up with the badger brush in slow circles, round his cheeks and under his jaw and down his throat, and he kept his eyes on my face the whole time.
“Hold still for me,” I said, and opened the razor.
He held still. I tipped his head with two fingers under his chin, put my thumb on his cheek to pull the skin tight, and took the first stroke down from his sideburn to his jaw. The blade rasped through six days of beard. I wiped it on the towel over my shoulder and went again. Most days, with a blade in my hand, I can’t think about a thing but the edge and the skin.
That day I could. I could think about how warm his face was under my hand and how his breath came out slow across my wrist.
“Swallow for me now,” I said. “Then don’t.”
He swallowed. I went up his throat with the razor, careful, and I felt the pulse under my fingertips going fast, faster than it should for a man sitting still in a barber chair. When I got to the soft place under his chin I glanced down and saw it. Under the cape, down in his lap, his work pants were tented up high as a pup tent.
I stopped with the razor against his skin.
“Earl,” he said. Real quiet.
“Hold still, darlin’. I’m holding a blade to your neck.”
He held still. I finished the stroke. My hand was steady, and I don’t know how. I wiped the razor and folded it and set it on the counter, and I took the towel off my shoulder and wiped the last of the lather off his jaw, slow. He sat there bare-faced and flushed with his chest heaving, and neither of us said a word.
Then he reached up and took my wrist.
“I been sitting in this chair four years,” he said. “Every third Saturday.”
“I know it.”
“I ain’t come in for the haircut in a long time, Earl.”
I looked at his hand on my wrist, nicked and scabbed from a week of wire, the nails black with clay. Then I looked at his mouth, which I hadn’t been able to see properly in six days.
“You sure about this, sugar?” I said. “You’re dead on your feet. I ain’t gonna take advantage of a man that ain’t slept since Wednesday.”
“I’m sure. I been sure since about the second haircut.” He pulled my hand down against his smooth cheek and held it there. “I just never had the nerve. Then this week I was up a pole in the rain at three in the morning, and I thought, if I fall off this thing I ain’t ever gonna know. So I’m asking. Do you want me or not?”
I bent down and kissed him.
He tasted like coffee and sweat. His face was smooth and hot from the towel, and the minute my mouth touched his he grabbed the front of my shirt in both fists and hauled me down into it. I had to catch myself on the arms of the chair. He kissed me like he’d been saving it up four years. He pushed his tongue in my mouth and moaned into it, and I got a hand on the back of his head where I’d been cutting his hair for four years and held on.
“Lord have mercy,” I said when I came up for air.
“Keep going.” He was tearing at the snaps of the cape. “Get this thing off me.”
I got it off him. I got his hi-vis shirt off too, and the undershirt under it, and I stood there between his knees and ran my hands over him for the first time. He was hot as a stovetop and slick with a week of sweat, and I followed the reddish hair down his chest to where it ran thick over his belly and pressed in, and found him soft on top and hard as fence wire underneath from climbing all day. He shivered under my hands like a horse.
“You’re filthy,” I said.
“I know. I’m sorry. I’ll go shower.”
“You ain’t going nowhere.” I bent and put my mouth on his neck and licked the salt off it, and he groaned. “I like you filthy. You smell like a man that’s been working.”
“Earl.” His hands went to my belt. “Earl, I need to see you. Please.”
I let him undo it. Big runs in my family. My daddy and his daddy before him stood behind this same chair with their bellies pushing at their barber smocks, same as mine does. Wade got my shirt unbuttoned and pushed it off my shoulders and put both hands on my gut like he’d been wanting to do it for years. Then he pushed them up into the grey hair on my chest and squeezed.
“God, the size of you,” he said. “And your chest.”
“You like it?”
“I’m about to come in my pants just touching you, Earl.”
“Well, we can’t have that.” I reached down and pulled the lever on the side of the chair, and the old Koken tipped back slow with a sigh, until he was lying nearly flat. His eyes went wide. “Hold still for me. I told you. I’m working.”
I got his boots off, and his socks, and then his belt and his work pants, all caked with clay. I peeled them down those thick thighs with his boxers, and his cock came up out of that red hair hard and flushed and leaking. It slapped his belly and stood there. It was a real nice one, thick and uncut with the head peeking out wet.
I got down on my knees on my own shop floor and put my mouth on it.
Wade shouted. It bounced off the mirrors. His hips came up off the chair and I pushed them back down with both hands and took him deeper, all the way down, till his hair was scratching my nose. He tasted like a week of work, salty and rank and good. I sucked him slow and heavy, working the foreskin back with my lips, and he grabbed the arms of the chair and hollered.
“Earl. Oh, Jesus. Oh, God, Earl, your mouth. Suck it, please, don’t quit.”
I pulled off. “Hush. The Carters live over the hardware store.”
“I don’t care. I don’t care who hears. Don’t stop.”
I didn’t stop. I sucked him till he was shaking, till his thighs were trembling on either side of my head, and when I felt his balls pull up tight I pulled off and squeezed hard at the base. He let out a sound like I’d hurt him.
“No, no, please, I was right there.”
“I know you were, sugar.” I stood up and wiped my mouth. “You ain’t coming yet. I got plans for you.”
“What plans?”
I didn’t answer. I got him by the hips and turned him over on the reclined chair. He went easy. He knelt up on the seat with his arms folded over the headrest and his broad back to me and his ass sticking out pale over the edge. I stood behind him and just looked a minute. He was white as milk where the sun never got him, furred with red, round and right there for me.
“Earl?” he said, muffled, into his arms.
“I’m looking.”
“Well, quit looking and do something.”
I laughed and spread him open with my thumbs and put my tongue on him.
He came off that chair about an inch. A sound tore out of him, raw and breaking in the middle, and then he just started begging. Oh please oh God oh Earl don’t stop, your tongue, oh fuck, your tongue. I held him open and ate him out slow and wet and thorough, the way I’d lather a man, till he was pushing back on my face and gasping. I worked my tongue into him. Then I got the jar of pomade off the counter, the water-based kind that washes out of anything, and slicked two fingers with it and pushed one in slow, and then the other.
“Oh,” Wade said. “Oh. Oh, fuck.”
“Been a while?”
“Never.” He was panting. “Never had anybody. Never let anybody.”
I stopped. I leaned over him and put my mouth against his ear. “You want to stop here? We can stop here. I’ll still shave you every third Saturday.”
“Hell no.” He turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder, and his green eyes were wet. “I climbed a hundred poles this week thinking about you. Quit on me now and I swear to God I’ll cry.”
I went slow with him. I’m not a small man anywhere, and he was tight enough to make me sweat, and I took my time. I worked him open with my fingers till he was loose and slick and pushing back for more, and he was cussing soft every time I spread them.
“Please, Earl. I’m ready. Put it in me.”
I shoved my pants and drawers down and stepped out of them. Then I got a rubber out of the drawer where I keep the neck strips. Don’t ask me why it was there. I’d put it there two years ago and felt like a fool. I rolled it on and slicked it with pomade till it shone, and set the head of my cock against him.
“Easy now, darlin’,” I said. “Push back on me slow.”
He pushed back, and I went in.
He cried out, and I stopped. I held there with only the tip of me inside, ran my hand up and down his back and waited, and felt him slowly unclench around me.
“How’s that feel?”
“Lord, Earl, that’s a lot of man. God, it hurts. Don’t stop.”
“I’ll go slow.”
“Don’t stop,” he said again, and pushed back onto me.
I went slow, an inch at a time with a breath between. The old barber chair creaked under us. He was so tight and so hot I had to grit my teeth and think about the price of shaving cream. When I finally got all the way in, with my gut flat against that pale ass and my balls resting on his, we both let out a noise at the same time.
“There,” I said. “You got every bit of it.”
“You’re clear up in my belly.” He sounded amazed. “Earl, you’re clear up in there.”
“Bet you ain’t tired now.” I pulled back slow and pushed in again, and he moaned. “Not one bit, are you?”
Then I got to work.
Slow first, long and deep, same as a good lather. He was kneeling on my barber chair with his head on his arms, rocking forward every time I went in, and I held him by those thick hips and watched us in the big mirror on the back wall, the one that lets a man see the back of his haircut. The whole shop was in that mirror, the combs in the blue jar and my granddaddy’s license on the wall, and me in the middle of it, big and grey and sweating, with my belly slapping against a line foreman’s ass.
“Look up,” I said. “Look in the mirror.”
He lifted his head and looked. He saw us. I watched it hit him, his mouth falling open.
“Lord Jesus,” he said.
“That’s you.” I drove in harder and his mouth went slack. “That’s you on my chair getting fucked. Four years of third Saturdays. You like what you see?”
“Yes. Yes. God, yes, I love it. Harder, Earl, please, harder.”
I let him have it. The chair started rocking on its base. The hydraulics hissed every time I slammed in, and the combs rattled in their jar, and Wade was hollering now with nothing held back at all. Fuck me, Earl, oh God, fuck me, right there, don’t stop, I’m gonna, I’m gonna. I leaned down over him and put one hand flat on the middle of his back and pinned him to the headrest. I drove into him with short hard strokes, my whole weight behind them, and sweat was pouring off me onto his back.
“There you go, sugar. You been wanting this cock four years, now you got it.”
“I got it. Oh God, I got it. Don’t ever stop.”
“Grab hold of yourself, sugar. Make a mess of my chair.”
He got a hand under himself. It took about four strokes. He came with a shout that rattled the front window, shooting all over the leather seat, and his ass locked down on me so hard I lost it. I drove in deep and held there and came, grunting like I’d been punched, with my forehead dropped on his sweaty back. I held on to him through every pulse of it, while he shook under me and sobbed a little into his arms.
We ended up in the back room, on the old couch where my daddy used to nap after lunch, with the ceiling fan going slow over us. Wade lay stretched out on top of me with his head on my chest, bare-assed and boneless, and I had my hand in his hair.
“You need a haircut,” I said.
“You just shaved me.”
“That was a shave. That ain’t a haircut.” I rubbed my thumb behind his ear. “Third Saturday’s two weeks off.”
“I know it.” He was quiet a while. The fan ticked. “Earl?”
“Mm.”
“Is it gonna be every third Saturday? Or can I come by other days?”
I looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain up there shaped like Tennessee that had been there since the first time my granddaddy handed me this broom.
“Shop’s closed Sundays,” I said. “And Mondays. I got a house on Crestline with a real bed in it and a shower you could drive a bucket truck into.”
He lifted his head and looked at me. His face was still pink from the towel, and he had a grin coming up that I’d never seen before, not in four years of that chair.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” he said.
“I know it.”
“I’m off till Tuesday.”
“I know that too. I read the paper.” I pushed his hair off his forehead. “Go move that truck off my back lot before Pastor Holloway sees it and calls your supervisor. Then follow me home.”
He got up. He got dressed any old how, hi-vis inside out and boots on bare feet. He stood at the back door with his hard hat under his arm and the evening coming in gold and hot behind him, and the cicadas going like a power saw.
“Earl?”
“What.”
“Thank you for the shave.”
“Get in the truck, Wade,” I said, and he did, grinning. And I locked up the shop for the night and went out front to my car, and I sat there a second with my hands on the wheel, like he had, before I could make them stop shaking enough to drive.