Tzar, came. He declare railroad open.
“I cut wood. I help carry cross-beams for track. Muscles get big. See?”
He flexed his arm, and a football-sized bicep leaped out.
“I also freeze my…”
He paused. He realized he was talking to a kid and didn’t want to get crude. It didn’t matter. Even at that age I knew what he meant. Mine got cold when the heat didn’t work in our tenement.
“No towns or pretty women, so hair get long. One day, other man hand me shears, tell me cut his hair. I cut. Terrible job. I cut more hair, get better.”
His expression darkened.
“Make much money cutting hair—more than railroad work. Go home to Papa. Give him money then go see Maria.”
His face fell, and his eyes moistened.
“You got brother, Berto?”
“No, Thomas.”
“Good! You lucky. I find out Maria now live with brother. So I leave Irkutsk. Travel Europe, emigrate Canada. Go Vancouver, work as logger. Muscles get bigger. Cut more hair. Go San Francisco...”
“Why’d you come here, Thomas?”
He smiled but said nothing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t pretty.
When we had finished our Moxies he cut my hair. Then I swept the rest of the shop and went home.
A year passed. Every six weeks I showed up at his shop. We didn’t talk about his family, but he did tell me more of his adventures helping to build The Great Siberian Railway—later called the Trans Siberian Railway and then just the Trans Sib. He described men freezing to death, getting crushed between railway cars, dying in fights, or being attacked by packs of wolves.
By then I was eight, and that’s when the dead lady called me. Soon after that I knew what I wanted to do, what I wanted to be. I started hanging around Dr. Agnelli’s clinic. But I kept showing up and sweeping up the barber shop, lulled by the snip-snip click of Thomas’s scissors.
I was sweeping up one Indian-summer day. As usual the shop door was wide open, the flies buzzed, and the fan rattled in a vain attempt to cool off the inside.
That was the day I first saw the butcher.
He walked in, white apron stained blood-red to brown—old stains covered by new ones. He held a large meat cleaver in his left hand. He said nothing. He just sat in an empty barber chair and waited.
Thomas also said nothing. He finished with his last customer, walked quietly over to the second chair, took a straight razor from the shelf near the sink, pulled out the razor strop attached to the chair, and began to sharpen it.
The butcher clenched his cleaver more tightly.
Thomas took a mug down, put a bar of shaving soap in it, took a lathering brush, and applied the white cream to the butcher’s face. As he brought the razor to bear on the man’s neck, the cleaver rose for a brief second then settled down once more.
Thomas didn’t even bother with the butcher’s scalp. There was no hair there to cut.
When Thomas was done, the man rose from the chair, threw two quarters on the counter, and walked out.
Thomas looked at me. He winked, but said nothing. Then he cut my hair. I finished sweeping then left.
Another year passed, and by then I was shadowing Dr. Agnelli’s coattails at the clinic. One day it had been relatively quiet, with only a few knife wounds, sick kids, and a lady going into labor unexpectedly. I once had joked that he needed to stock some Moxie in the refrigerator, and by golly he went out and stocked it!
I was always amazed at refrigerators. Like the barber, Mama and Papa had an ice box that needed a new block of ice at least once a week. But a refrigerator? Wow! Just plug it in, and things got cold!
Anyway, Dr. Agnelli and I sat there in the back room on a threadbare couch. He sipped a black coffee, and I luxuriated in a really cold Moxie.
Just then the outside clinic doors banged open, and loud shouts erupted. We ran to see a hysterical woman speaking in a foreign tongue followed by Thomas carrying the butcher in his arms. Dr. Agnelli immediately took charge.
“What happened?”
Thomas spoke quietly, but the tension in his voice was obvious.
“Chest. He clutch chest and fall.”
Dr. Agnelli steered Thomas and his burden over to an empty gurney cart, listened to the man’s chest, and then opened a drawer in the medicine cabinet and took out a brown bottle. He undid the cap, took out a tiny pill, and put it under the butcher’s tongue. Slowly, the man’s hand, which had been tightly clutching his chest, relaxed, and the sweat on his forehead stopped its heavy dripping.
By then the nurse had wheeled in a big wooden box, a new toy of Dr. Agnelli’s he had told me about a while back. She attached wide rubber bands with metal plates to the butcher’s hands and feet and placed one plate on his chest.
Dr. Agnelli turned on the machine and watched, as a two-inch-wide strip of paper unrolled with black marks on it.
“See, Berto, this is what a man’s life looks like.”
He held up the strip, and I saw the peaks and valleys that graphed out the electrical energy of the heart. I didn’t know it then, but the butcher’s pattern wasn’t good.
“Thomas,” Agnelli called out, “is that his wife?”
“Yes.”
“I need to speak with her. Will she understand me?”
“No.”
“Will you translate?”
The barber nodded then motioned the woman over to where the doctor stood.
“Your husband is very ill. He has had a heart attack. He needs to go to the hospital. I can call for an ambulance.”
Thomas spoke rapidly in the multi-consonantal language of his birth, and the woman started to shake and sob. He grabbed her by both arms and shook her, and she settled down. Again, rapid fire words poured from his mouth, and finally she nodded agreement.
The hospital ambulance arrived shortly afterward. Not as fast as today’s rescue squads, but in the end it made no difference.
That night, Nikolai Alexei Putchenkov, butcher, died.
Maria Ivanova Putchenkov became a widow.
And Thomas?
He went back to work.
Snip-snip click.
The Tick-Tock Man
There’s always one—that kid who’s slower than, not as sharp, not as coordinated as the rest of us. He’s the kid who’s picked last, even after the fat kid or the kid wearing glasses. He’s also the one who stammers in class, his every effort to speak a constipation of mind and body.
Today we’d call him developmentally delayed or a special-needs child.
Kids are not as kind.
They’d call him a sped, a retard, a spaz, or just stupid.
The favorite name in my neighborhood was dork.
Even now I’m ashamed to admit that I joined in such ritual childhood torture, taunting kids who couldn’t cut it, the ones at the bottom of the pecking order, something that seemed to construct magically without the aid or influence of adults.
That’s when I met Paolo.
I was nine—that fantasy age of unlimited energy and curiosity. School had just begun, and there was a new kid in class, a new kid to our tenement neighborhood.
“Paolo Cherubini?”