When she reached the parlor, she was momentarily blinded by all the light streaking in. The morning light hit the stained-glass windows, creating a million refractions of the ivy leaves unto the floor. Dust bunnies danced and floated through the air, somehow in sync with the music.
Bird sat at the piano. August saw his back sway gently with the classical tune. A trickle of smoke rose from a cigarette caught in his mouth. August saw his fingers move deftly over the keys. Then, with a slight awe, she noticed that his head was not bent forward. He wasn’t even looking at the keys. He knew the melody perfectly by heart.
Part of August didn’t want the song ever to end. She wanted to stand in that parlor illuminated by morning light and listen to this Black man beat away at a classical French ode on an old, untuned piano.
August waited until the song was over before she spoke. It broke her heart to ruin such a moment. “You looking rough,” she said.
Bird sat on a small stool and he spun it around quick to face August. He smiled.
To August, Bird was the damn-near clone of Jax. But there was something that she had always liked about Bird, ever since she saw him stride into her sister’s wedding reception, pistol-whipping white men and dancing with her all night. August looked him up and down and tried to figure how this small, dark man who badly needed an edge up and a shave ran most of Chicago’s South Side.
“Yeah? I could do with a cut.” Bird ran a hand down the back of his neck. “I heard your shop was famous.”
“That all you Yanks do? Lie?”
Bird’s smile never faded. “Don’t be like that, sis.” He drew from his cigarette.
“Ah, I forgot,” August said, crossing her arms, “y’all hit women, too.”
Bird had risen to discard his ashes in August’s white teacup turned ashtray, perched atop the mantel, but he stopped midstride.
“I’ve never—”
“Come on, then. Follow me. Can’t have no half kin of mine walking ’round looking like Kunta Kente. Let’s at least get you looking like the Ike Turner you is.”
He trailed her into the kitchen. “Hey now, didn’t your son kill some women?”
August froze. How did he—？ She answered her own question mid-thought: Mya, the only one who talked to Jax anymore. She wondered briefly what Jax had thought when he heard, but she pushed the ugly thought out of her head and rounded on Bird, ready to attack, when it suddenly struck her what he hadn’t said. He was trying to give as good as he got, but he wasn’t aiming to kill—just to spar.
“Again, you lucky we kin,” she said.
Bird held up his hands as if August had aimed an actual gun at him instead of her eyes.
She let him wait for a minute, keeping up their play fight, letting him sit with the possibility that she might kill him right there in her kitchen. Then she opened the door to her shop and led Bird inside.
“Wow.” He whistled, then pointed to a framed All ’n All LP cover hanging on one wall. A large pyramid and a series of Egyptian pharaohs chiseled in gold were set against a pale blue sky. “I saw them niggas in Chicago, and when this had just come out. Whew, they could spit fire.” He began humming.
“Mm-hmm. Sit.” August pointed to a plush red barber’s chair.
Bird hesitated. “Déjà vu,” he said, slowly taking a seat.
“What’s that now?”
“This chair.” Bird settled himself into it. “It takes me back.”
“Back where?”
“Midnight on the corner of King Drive and Sixty-third.”
“That’s awfully specific like.” August laughed.
“Jax killed his first man that night.”
August’s laughter died quick. With a seasoned stylist’s flare, she threw a vinyl cape around Bird.
“Lost a man, too, goddamnit. Lost a good one.”
August reached into a drawer and pulled out her clippers. Bird’s hair was a nest of thick, coiled curls. She eyed it, placed her hands in it, selected a number five.
She wasn’t sure what it was about her chair, but it could bring out the innermost secrets of the most hardened individual God ever made. The Black women of Memphis confessed to her everything: their infidelities, the children they loved and the children they did not, their hallucinations in the morning, their prayers at night. August knew the favorite psalm and favorite sexual position of every woman worth a damn within a ten-mile radius. Stylists in the South were priests. And this was the only religion August felt she ever needed.
“Your hands in my hair feel damn good.” Bird’s back was to the large mirror, August facing him, so she knew he could see her eyebrows rise to an extreme point.
“Again, Bird. We kin,” August said stressing the last syllable.
“Half kin. My brother and your sister no more…”
August felt something that she had to steady herself to compute: Bird’s hand was sliding up the front slit of her kimono. She waited a bit too long to move back from it, and she knew it.
“Don’t mean we can’t be friendly,” Bird continued. He winked and withdrew his hand, leaving room for August to let it be a tease, nothing more—if she wanted.
August swiveled the barber’s chair around so that Bird faced the mirror. She stood behind him and turned the clippers on. She felt his eyes on her in the mirror. She pretended to be busy with the clippers.
“Remember the last time I was here? The wedding? You killed in that yellow.”
“Who’d y’all kill?” August, ever the expert conversationalist, knew how to steer him toward safer ground. She could tell there was something he wanted, needed, to get off his chest, and though she wasn’t sure if she cared to hear what he had to say or, more important, if he deserved to be witnessed by her, it felt less like a choice and more like the inertia of ritual. If he hadn’t been in her chair, it might have been different. But he was. And she, too, was in position, attendant.
Bird relaxed in the barber chair and he confessed all.
“It was 1976,” he said, regarding himself in the mirror while August got to work, “and not yet spring. I remember the look of the dirty brown snow smeared on the dead grass along the curbs. Chicago’s South Side stretched around us, like a patchwork of intersections. Brick row houses lining both sides of King Drive. The barbershop wasn’t anywhere near as nice as yours—just a one-story lean-to directly underneath the Line station that shook every time a train passed overhead, every three minutes.
“At the time we killed that nigga, Jax and me was only twenty-one years old. He was going through this phase where he wore a mustache that desperately wanted to be thicker. My black leather bomber jacket was lined with thick shearling, but I was still freezing. Had forgotten my gloves. Jax was wearing a wool caramel coat he’d just gotten for Christmas—I’d forgotten about that coat. Went with his whole mustache look.
“It would wind up being the second time me and Jax would steal that day. Earlier, we were rummaging through shelves at the local library, Jax had slid a faded and beaten, spine-long-gone, second edition of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby in the long front pocket of his coat. He’d checked it out enough times, told me he figured he pretty much owned it by then, anyway.