Rose Madder by Stephen King

Above the mirror were photographs of Michael Jordan, Charles Barkley, andjalen Rose.

Jordan was wearing a Birmingham Barons baseball uniform. Above his picture was a slip of paper with THE ONCE & FUTURE BULL typed on it. Norman pointed. ‘Do me like that,’ he said.

The black barber looked at Norman carefully, first making sure he wasn’t drunk or stoned, then trying to make sure he wasn’t joking. The second was harder than the first. ‘Whatchoo saying, brother? Are you saying you want a cleanhead?’

‘That’s exactly what I’m saying.’ Norman ran a hand through his hair, which was a thick black just starting to show flecks of gray at the temples. It was neither exceptionally short nor exceptionally long. He had worn it at this same length for almost twenty years. He looked at himself in the mirror, trying to imagine what he was going to look like, as bald as Michael Jordan, only white. He couldn’t do it. With luck, Rose and her new friends wouldn’t be able to, either.

‘You sure?’

Suddenly Norman felt almost sick with the desire to knock this man down and drop both knees onto his chest and lean over and bite his entire upper lip, cool moustache and all, right

off his face. He supposed he knew why, too. He looked like that memorable little cocksucker, Ramon Sanders. The one who had tried to cash in on the ATM card his lying bitch of a wife had stolen.

Oh, barber, Norman thought. Oh barber, you’re so close to being nothing but taillights. Ask one more question, say one more wrong word in my face, and that’s all you’ll be. And I can’t say anything to you; I couldn’t warn you even if I wanted to, because right now my own voice is all the firing-pin I’d need. So here we are, and here we go.

The barber gave him another long, careful look. Norman stood where he was and let him do it. Now he felt composed. What happened would be what happened. It was all in this jiggedy-jig’s hands.

‘All right, I guess you are,’ the barber said at last. His voice was mild and disarming.

Norman relaxed his right hand, which had been shoved deep into his pocket and gripping the handle of the laser. The barber put his magazine on the counter beside his bottles of tonic and cologne (there was a little brass sign there that said SAMUEL LOWE), then got up and shook out a plastic apron. ‘You wanna be like Mike, let’s do it.’

Twenty minutes later, Norman was staring at himself thoughtfully in the minor. Samuel Lowe stood beside his chair, watching him look. Lowe seemed apprehensive, but he also seemed interested. He looked like a man seeing something familiar from an entirely new perspective. Two new customers had come in. They were also looking at Norman look at himself, and they wore identical expressions of appraisal.

‘The man be handsome,’ one of the newcomers said. He spoke in a tone of faint surprise, and mostly to himself.

Norman couldn’t get entirely straight in his mind the fact that the man in the minor was still him. He winked and the minor-man winked, he smiled and the minor-man smiled, he turned and the mirror-man turned, but it didn’t help. Before he’d had the brow of a cop; now he had the brow of a mathematics professor, a brow that went into the stratosphere. He couldn’t get over the smooth, somehow sensuous curves of his bald skull. And its whiteness.

He hadn’t thought he had anything like a tan, but compared to his pallid skull, the rest of his skin was as brown as a lifeguard’s. His head looked strangely fragile, and too weirdly perfect to belong to the likes of him. To belong to any human being, especially a male. It looked like a piece of Delft china.

‘You ain’t got a bad head ‘tall, man,’ Lowe said. He spoke tentatively, but Norman had no sense he was trying to flatter him, and that was good, because Norman was in no mood to have someone blow smoke up his ass. ‘Look good. Look younger. Don’t he, Dale?’

‘Ain’t bad,’ the other newcomer agreed. ‘Nossir, not half.’

‘How much did you say?’ Norman asked Samuel Lowe. He tried to turn away from the minor and was distressed and a little frightened to find that his eyes tried to follow the top of his head, to see how it looked in the back. That sense of disassociation was stronger within him than ever. He wasn’t the man in the minor, the man with the scholar’s bald head rising above heavy black eyebrows; how could he be? This was some stranger, that was all, some fantastic Lex Luthor up to no good in Metropolis, and the things he did from here on out didn’t matter. From here on out, nothing mattered. Except catching Rose, of course. And talking to her.

Up close.

Lowe was giving him that cautious look again, breaking it off to dart glances at the other two patrons, and Norman suddenly realized he was checking to see if they’d help him, if the big white man — the big bald white man — suddenly went berserk.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, trying to make his voice soft and conciliatory. ‘You were talking, weren’t you? What did you say?’

‘I said thirty sounds about right to me. How’s it sound to you?’

Norman took a folded-over packet of bills out of his left front pocket, slid two twenties out from under the tarnished old moneyclip, and held them out.

‘Thirty sounds too low,’ he said. ‘Take forty, along with my apologies. You did a great job.

I’ve just had a bitch of a week, that’s all.’ You don’t know the half of it, buddy, he thought.

Samuel Lowe relaxed visibly and took the money. ‘No prob, bro,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t kiddin — you ain’t got a bad-lookin head at all. You ain’t Michael, but ain’t nobody Michael.’

“Cept Michael,’ the newcomer named Dale said. The three black men laughed heartily and nodded at one another. Although he could have killed all three of them without turning a hair, Norman nodded and laughed along with them. The newcomers in the barber shop had changed things. It was time to be careful again. Still laughing, he went out.

A trio of teenagers, also black, were leaning against a fence near the Tempo, but they hadn’t bothered doing anything to the car, possibly because it was too much of a dog to bother with. They eyed Norman’s pallid white head with interest, then glanced at each other and rolled their eyes. They were fourteen or so, boys without much trouble in them. The one in the middle started to say ‘You lookin at me?’ like Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver. Norman seemed to sense this and stared at him — just at him, it seemed, ignoring the other two completely. The one in the middle decided that maybe his De Niro imitation needed a little more work and quit it.

Norman got into his freshly washed stolen car and drove away. Six blocks in toward the center of the city, he went into a used-clothing store called Play It Again, Sam. There were several browsers in the store, and they all looked at him, but that was okay. Norman didn’t mind being looked at, especially if it was his freshly shaven skull they were paying attention to. If they were looking at the top of his head, they wouldn’t have the slightest fucking idea what his face looked like five minutes after he left.

He found a motorcycle jacket that gleamed with studs and zippers and small silver chains and creaked in every fold when he took it off its hanger. The clerk opened his mouth to ask two hundred and forty dollars for the jacket, looked at the haunted eyes peering out from beneath the awesome white desert of that freshly shaven skull, and told Norman the jacket was one-eighty, plus tax. He would have gone lower had Norman dickered, but Norman didn’t. He was tired now, his head was throbbing, and he wanted to go back to the hotel and go to sleep. He wanted to sleep right through until tomorrow. He needed all the rest he could get, because tomorrow was going to be a busy day.

He made two more stops on the way back. The first was at a store which sold ostomy supplies. Here Norman bought a motorless second-hand wheelchair which would fit, folded up, into the trunk of the Tempo. Then he went to the Women’s Cultural Center and Museum.

Here he paid six dollars to get in but looked at no exhibits and did not so much as peer into the auditorium, where a panel discussion on natural childbirth was being held. He made a quick trip to the gift shop, then left.

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