“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.