“The Calm” is a short story by Raymond Carver that appeared in his 1981 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. It’s about a man who’s getting a haircut while a waiting customer tells a hunting story that leads to an argument with an older man who’s also waiting. The incident sparks the narrator to make an important decision. Here’s a summary of “The Calm”.
“The Calm” Summary
The narrator is getting a haircut. There are three other men waiting—an older one smoking, a man in logging boots, and a heavy-set man with a toothpick. The narrator recognizes the heavy-set man, Charles, as the guard at the bank.
The barber asks if Charles got his deer. Charles says he did and he didn’t, which gets everyone’s interest, and the barber prompts him to tell the story.
Charles was on Fickle Ridge with his father and his son, whom he calls “the kid”, who was hungover. It was afternoon and they hadn’t gotten anything. They hoped some hunters in the valley would flush a deer toward them. The older man knows the valley; the deer hang out in the orchards.
They hear shooting and a big old buck appears out of the underbrush. The kid starts shooting wildly but misses them all. Charles fires once and hits it in the guts. It trembles and Charles fires again, but misses. The buck retreats into the brush.
The man in the logging boots knows they must have had to trail it because they always find a hard place to die. Charles and the kid did trail the buck. The kid slows them down because he has to stop to throw up. There was lots of blood, though, so it was easy to trail.
Charles reprimands the kid for missing all his shots and cuffs him on the head for talking back. It soon got too dark to trail the buck any more. The man in the logging boots says the coyotes got it by now. Charles agree. They still had venison because his old man got a young buck and had it prepped when they got back to camp.
The older man tells Charles he should still be out trailing that buck. They argue and threaten each other until the barber intervenes. He tells them to stop it, invoking his long-standing relationship with Charles and his son. The man in the logging boots wants them to go outside and fight. The barber wants Charles to drop it, tells the older man he’s next, and asks the man in the logging boots to stay out of the argument.
Charles is upset and says he’ll come back some other time, and closes the door hard on his way out. Soon after, the older man, Albert, apologizes and takes his leave too. The barber watches through the window as Albert walks off. He’s dying of emphysema. He and the barber go back a long way.
The man in the logging boots is agitated. He’s looking all over the room, at the pictures and anything else on the wall. He abruptly says he’s going too. The narrator almost feels like the barber implies he’s the cause of the problems as he continues with his cut.
The barber finishes the cut and frames the narrator’s face with his hands as they look in the mirror. The barber runs his fingers through the narrator’s hair, slowly and tenderly.
This happened in Crescent City, California, where the narrator was trying out a new life with his wife. Sitting in the barber’s chair that day, he decided to leave. He remembers the calm he felt when he closed his eyes and the barber ran his fingers through his hair.
I hope this summary of “The Calm” by Raymond Carver was helpful.