The Barbershop                A short story by Dave Howe                June 23, 2026

Howe’s Barber Shop, in the middle of Arbuckle’s Main Street, was first opened by my grandfather in 1926. Herb Hanson, who ran the bar and restaurant next door, leased him a room, barber chair, some benches and a red and white striped barber pole.

When my father got out of the Army in 1945 there was a new sign in the window. Howe and Son Barber Shop. Dad went to barber school and Herb bought a second barber chair for the shop.

It was the end of summer, 1957 and school was about to begin. Mom had a new job and decided I should go to the barber shop after school until she got home at five.

I walked the two blocks to the shop with pride, turning east down Fifth Street past Grandma and Grandpa’s house and the big oak tree. The sidewalk ran alongside a warehouse beneath a heavy awning that kept the sun off the concrete. Weathered wooden hitching posts for tying up horses stood like sentries between the support poles. Where the hitching posts were missing, rusted iron rings were embedded in the concrete—relics meant for tying up horse-drawn carriages. I never saw an actual horse there.

At the end of the awning my path turned left, heading north past the five-and-dime. The door to the barber shop was just after Herb’s bar. I smelled Herb’s before I got there. The place smelled like cigars, even from the sidewalk.

Once in the barber shop Dad always made me feel welcome. My grandpa wasn’t there much but when he was he always smiled. My first job was to take the push broom and sweep up the hair on the floor. The shop wasn’t very big so it was easy. When that was done I usually went into the back room and picked out a comic book from the shelf.

I sat on the red plastic benches alongside men waiting for their haircuts and read my comics. The men didn’t seem to mind.

A massive round mirror hung directly across from the chair, catching the reflection of the identical mirror behind my bench. Looking into it meant falling down an endless, silver-tinted tunnel where the back of my own head repeated into infinity.

Dad had a part-time job with the post office, meeting the train and picking up the mail. My job was to go watch the tracks and come get Dad when the train was about to arrive.

My post at the tracks was a quiet one, at least until the distant signals changed color. Sometimes I pressed my ear flat against the cold iron of the rail to catch a distant hum, but the electric signal lights were always faster. Waiting was a lazy game of watching that colored light. If I sat there until the locomotive whistle actually echoed through the town, it was already too late—Dad would never make it to the station in time. The second that green lens flipped to a sharp, glowing red, I lunged off the tracks and bolted toward Main Street.

When I burst through the door with the news, Dad would excuse himself, leaving his customer sitting under a white sheet with half a haircut. “Be right back,” he said as he rushed out the door.

The freight train stopped by the old station and someone would hand a mail sack out. Dad would put it onto a hand truck and wheel it to the post office, then get back to barbering.

Things changed when a streamliner replaced the old freight train. It never stopped in Arbuckle anymore. Instead, someone from the post office hung the outgoing mail pouch from a steel crane jutting out near the station, and the streamliner snatched it on the fly. The new diesel engine tore through the valley dust with a stark red face, a bright orange stripe, and gray sides—a vivid contrast to the drab Southern Pacific freight trains that used to ply the tracks. As the cars roared onward without slowing down, a dark green incoming sack came flying out of the baggage car door. Dad would already be driving his pickup alongside the rails, bouncing down the dirt road ready to retrieve it; sometimes the train crew timed the throw so perfectly the canvas sack landed right in the bed of his truck. After a quick stop to drop the mail at the back door of the post office, he would walk back into the shop and pick up his shears without having missed a beat.

        In the back of the barber shop there were two doors. Inside the left door, right beside the shelf where I found the stack of comic books, stood a rack of dry cleaning. People dropped their clothes off to be picked up by the cleaners and when the clothes returned they were wrapped in clear plastic or white butcher paper.

        Inside the right door was a bathtub surrounded by plastic curtains. I never saw anyone use it, but sometimes the bottom of the tub was slick and wet. I asked Dad about it and he said some people didn’t have running water so they paid 25 cents to take a shower or bath.

One day I noticed a gallon jug with some twigs in it. On one of the twigs sat a big, fat, black widow spider. “That’s the champion,” Dad said. “When someone catches another black widow they can bring it in and we have a challenge. The two spiders fight. If theirs wins they get a dollar. If mine wins I get a dollar.”

        At home I got my own gallon jug and everyone in the neighborhood brought their own spiders. None of us had any money so it was just for fun. The champs were brown jumping spiders, not black widows. The jumpers took no prisoners.

        Eventually, Dad decided I was old enough to stay home by myself after school. That’s when I discovered the trapdoor. But that’s another story.