Coated Chain

1Coated Chain

There are two kinds of people who tell you about a dead body, and you can sort them in about four seconds.

The first kind is upset. They lower their voice. They touch your arm. They say did you hear like they’re hoping you’ll say yes so they don’t have to be the one who tells you.

The second kind has been waiting all week.

Charlene Furtado was the second kind. Charlene Furtado has been the second kind since the Clinton administration.

“You hear about the body?”

I had her sectioned and clipped and I was maybe three minutes from the part where I stop being able to hold up my end of a conversation, so I said, “What body,” and started on the left side.

“Washed up out by Mokulēʻia. Tuesday.”

Huh, I thought.

Coated chain floats. Not a lot. Enough.

Which is the whole difference between a thing nobody ever hears about and a thing Charlene Furtado hears about from Kaimi’s cousin.

“They’re saying he was a fisherman.”

“Could be.”

“He wasn’t a fisherman.” She said it the way people say they’ve been to Rome. “Kaimi’s cousin works dispatch.”

“Kaimi’s cousin told you that.”

“Kaimi told me. But Kaimi’s cousin told Kaimi.”

I tipped her chin down with two fingers. “Little lower for me, sweetheart.”

She went lower. Charlene will fight you on the color, the length, the price, the parking, and the weather, but she has never once fought me on the chin, and I’ve never asked myself why. Some things about people you just take.

“How’s Marisa?” I said.

And that was the end of the body.

Because there is nothing on God’s earth Charlene Furtado would rather discuss than her daughter’s divorce, and I have never had to ask twice.

She talked. I worked. Marisa had gotten a lawyer, and the lawyer was aggressive, which Charlene approved of, and expensive, which she did not, and there was a boat involved that neither of them had ever wanted and both of them now needed to win. I said mm in the right places. Around the fourth mm I stopped listening in the way where you take in words and started listening in the other way, the one where you just track the weather of it — where her voice goes up, where it flattens out, where she stops to see if you’re still there.

That’s most of the job. People think it’s hair.

The shop is called Salt & Shears. I paid a guy four hundred dollars for that sign thirteen years ago and in thirteen years I don’t believe I have heard one human being say it out loud. Everybody calls it Jonathan’s. My accountant calls it Jonathan’s. The woman at the bank who has my loan calls it Jonathan’s. It says Salt & Shears on the loan and it will say Salt & Shears on the loan until 2031.

By ten-fifteen we were loud.

Bree had a bridal party down at the bowls — four girls and a mother, and it is always the mother — and every couple of minutes she’d come up over the top of the shampoo chair looking for me with a face I can read from forty feet through two other people’s conversations.

You’re fine, I told her, with mine. Let her talk. She’s not mad at you. Her daughter’s leaving and there’s nowhere to put that.

Bree’s twenty-four. She still thinks the job is hair.

The phone went all morning. It goes all morning. She answers it with wet hands, drying one on her apron, saying the same sentence in the same order until it stops sounding like English.

“Six weeks for Jonathan. I’ve got Malia today at two, she’s really good — okay. Okay. Six weeks, then. Last name?”

She writes the last name down phonetically and then asks them to spell it anyway. Both, every time.

Twice a week somebody argues with her. Once a month somebody offers her money. She has never taken it, which I appreciate, and which I have never mentioned, because the day you thank somebody for not stealing from you is the day they start thinking about it.

“They wanted to know if you do house calls,” she said, hanging up.

“I don’t do house calls.”

“That’s what I told her.”

Eleven o’clock was a root touch-up. Eleven-forty-five was a men’s cut, kid going back to school on the mainland, mother crying about it in the waiting chairs where he couldn’t see. Twelve-fifteen was a woman named Lani who has been growing out a decision she made in March and who needed to be told, kindly, that it will be March again before it’s finished.

You learn how to say that. There’s a way to tell somebody a thing is going to take a year that makes them feel taken care of instead of sentenced. It’s mostly timing. You don’t say it while they’re looking at themselves. You wait until they look at you.

Guy came in around one without an appointment.

Mid-forties. Aloha shirt with the fold lines still creased into it. Shoes that had never been on a beach and weren’t going to be.

Bree didn’t look up from the register. “He’s booked through September.”

“I’ll wait.”

“You’ll wait until September.”

He stood there a second. Then he did the thing where a man decides that he is going to be very calm at you until he gets what he wants. He looked past her, down the room, and found me.

So I set my shears on the towel and walked over and shook his hand.

“Where you from?”

“Sacramento. Here for a wedding.”

“When’s the wedding?”

“Sunday.”

“You want Malia. Two o’clock. She’s better than me on straight hair and she’ll be nicer to you than I would be, which isn’t saying much.”

He laughed. They always laugh. He took the two o’clock, and he tipped Malia forty dollars, and I would bet you this building he tells somebody about me before he flies home.

Somebody at his hotel had told him about this place. They always tell you that in the first eight seconds. He did not tell me, and I did not ask.

Bree watched the door swing shut behind him.

“Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Make them happy about not getting you.”

“Because they remember it,” I said, and went to wash my hands.

The place emptied out around twenty after, the way it does. Four chairs to zero in ten minutes, no warning, like somebody pulled a plug in the floor.

Bree got the broom going in long pulls, humming something. The radio was on the station that plays the same six Iz songs forever, which neither of us has ever changed, which at this point is less a habit than a marriage. Outside the window the light had gone that flat gold it gets around four-thirty in August, and a car went by too fast, and then another one, and then nothing for a while.

The four-forty-five was Mrs. Nakata, and hers is a wash and a set and a comb-out. It takes me fifty minutes and could take a competent person thirty.

You don’t rush a set. Not because it’s rude. Because the shape doesn’t take. The hair learns the shape while it dries, and if you pull it out early it learns something else instead, and after that you can’t argue with it. Everybody wants to argue with hair after. You can’t. It’s already made up its mind.

So I put her under the dryer and gave her the magazine she likes, and it is not so much a magazine as a stack of coupons with a horoscope in it, and I went and did the towels.

She’s eighty-six. She has had the same hair since somewhere in the seventies and she is right about it. Twice a year one of the granddaughters comes in with her and works up to suggesting something shorter, and Mrs. Nakata lets her get all the way to the end of it, and then looks at me in the mirror, and I say we’ll think about it, and we don’t.

When she came out from under the dryer she said, “They painted the crosswalk.”

“By the bank?”

“By the bank. It’s blue now.”

“Huh.”

“It was white before.”

“It was.”

“I don’t know why they’d do that.”

I set the rollers out on the towel in the order they came out, a habit and not a system, and combed her through, and she looked at herself for a while in the way she does. Not checking it. Visiting.

She tips eleven dollars. It has been eleven dollars for nine years. I have watched that eleven dollars go from generous to a joke to something I would genuinely miss.

“Same time,” she said.

“Same time.”

My phone buzzed face-down on the counter.

we’re out of the good coffee

not out. there’s some. it’s the other one

the one you like or the one you tolerate

tolerate

i’ll stop

I put the phone in my back pocket.

Cinder blocks. There’s a pile of them behind the shed that came with the house, and they’ve been there long enough that grass has grown up through the holes, and I have walked past them probably a thousand times.

That’s one.

And the shelf. You go out past the shelf, and that’s twenty minutes more on the water, and twenty minutes is twenty minutes. It is not a hardship. It is not, in the scheme of a night, anything at all, and I don’t know what I thought I was saving.

Nine feet away. In a bucket. Nine dollars at the hardware in Waialua.

I got the dustpan and swept up the last of Charlene Furtado off my station and dropped her in the bin, and then I wiped the chair down, and then I did the shears — apart, alcohol, dry, oil, back together, the way you do, the way I have done at the end of every day for thirteen years.

“Lock the back?” Bree said.

“I got it.”