Circle View

by Brad Barkley

  So we paid our six bucks (children under five free) and, with Gina on her elastic leash, stepped into the humid gym hung with championship banners and the American flag, alive with pinkish arc lamps and cheerleaders tossing a rustle of pom-poms. The game had just started, Panthers led by four. We found a spot in the bleachers to watch the gangly and muscled boys backpedal up the court, block above the rim, drive headlong for out-of-bounds balls, take two dribbles on foul shots. We sat with other adults, parents of the on-court teens. They went gooey over Gina, not having witnessed babyness in their own kids for a good fifteen years.

  We stomped the bleachers, keeping time with the cheerleaders, who still wore dark blue short shorts under light blue skirts, snarling panthers chasing across their sweaters. Caught up, Marie stood to cheer, shouted at the referee, hugged a middle-aged woman beside her when we scored. I headed for the concession to see who held my old job. “Easy on the juice, kid,” I said to the chubby boy scraping my sno-cone. I felt like an old sea captain addressing his first mate. “Don’t want a soggy cup.” Tough but fair. The Panthers’ coach was not Coach Westafer, and when I asked I was told he’d moved to Charlotte four years ago, died of a stroke while stringing tomatoes in his garden.

  After the Panthers won, we went for ice cream, Gina asleep on my shoulder. Marie’s smile wouldn’t leave her face, like a window shade that won’t close.

  “Man, overtime and we pulled it out. You see that one kid, number eleven? Six-eight, I bet, at least. And no more saddle shoes, did you notice?”

  “So,” I said, “did you have fun?”

  She leaned across to kiss me. “The most,” she said.

  The excitement of the Panthers’ ball game began to draw Marie away from her news shows and headlines, but gave me worry in a new way. Her evenings were spent in 1974, thumbing the yellowed pages of Pine Burr, the Broadwater yearbook. While I read the paper, Marie would interrupt with high-school trivia.

  “Ethan Nash…whatever happened to him?”

  “Don’t even remember him,” I said.

  “Oh, you do, Warren. Always wore a leisure suit, never smiled.”

  Most evenings she’d end up on the phone with an operator in Texas or Illinois, tracking people she’d not seen in fifteen years. She began making plans to organize a reunion, and forgot Gina’s Polaroid for that week and the next.

  “Would you do something you didn’t want to, if it was something I wanted?” Marie sprang this one on me one night at dinner. She served up the question with a sly grin, the first I’d seen in weeks. I laid down my fork.

  “Sure I would,” I answered, unsure where this was headed.

  “I want to go to the Broadwater prom.” She blushed, eyes on her plate. I looked at her.

  “We’re a bit long in the tooth for that, don’t you think?” I winked at Gina in her high chair.

  Marie hadn’t gone to the prom as a student. (I knew her then, but only her name and the fact that she ran hurdles for the track team.) A nervous, too-tall girl, she’d contented herself with serving on the decorating committee, streaming the gym with crepe paper and Japanese lanterns with refrigerator bulbs inside. She pulled me to the bedroom to show me the teal bridesmaid dress she’d bought for Sandy Jenkins’s wedding, and my own wedding tux, both newly back from the dry cleaners. She didn’t lack for planning.

  “They won’t sell you tickets,” I said, finding an easy out. “You’re not a student.”

  “Don’t you worry,” she said, “I’ll get the tickets.”

  And she did. I dropped her at the door the next afternoon, after school let out, and sat in the truck listening to traffic reports. Twenty minutes later she reappeared, fanning the tickets and grinning.

  My Carolina Blue tux not only still fit but seemed big in the shoulders, like I’d shrunk. Marie emerged from the bedroom as if from a cocoon, gorgeous in the green dress (to match her left eye), her hair pulled up in a silky twist. I was struck beyond words.

  After we’d dropped Gina at Mrs. Gutherson’s, Marie told me the prom was not to be held in the gym but at Deer Run Country Club, tucked back in the rolling golf-course hills of the rich section. My battered Ford long-bed looked like some bastard son there in the curved driveway of the club, chugging and bouncing behind white stretch limos, an antique Rolls, and a flock of cars of a type I recognized from the tunnel: Daddy’s Mercedes.

  Inside pulsed a furious attack of colored lights and beat-heavy music that rattled my heart in its cage. Girls (blondes every one of them, it seemed) danced in ruffled and sequined Hollywood-premiere-type dresses Marie later guessed cost more than she’d spent to buy her wedding gown, the one that hung plastic-covered in the back of the closet to be handed down to Gina. I had to stop Marie from retrieving her coat and slipping it on over her dress. No 45s of Cat Stevens or Seals and Crofts played over the school PA, but instead a disc jockey danced on a platform in pink tie and top hat, shouting dirty jokes between the mortar blasts of drum-thumping music. Boys wore tails and hair mousse, carried ebony walking sticks, sported diamond studs in their earlobes. I stood there in my Carolina Blue tux with the dark blue piping and clip-on butterfly bow tie, trying to shout into the ear of my wife, who in her simple green dress still looked more beautiful than all the Zsa Zsas shaking themselves on the dance floor. What I might have told her, what I felt, is that you never really feel old till you bang your head up against youth.

  We walked out past the chauffeurs sitting smoking on the hoods of their cars—men in black uniforms, most old enough to be fathers to the kids inside. We climbed in the truck and I spun out of there.

  Marie sank down in her seat, slipped off her heels, and put her bare feet on the dash.

  “I’m just dumb. And embarrassed,” she said. “Why did I think that would be anything like what I missed?”

  “What’s that Stones’ song? ‘Time Waits For No One?’” I said. “I think they wrote that for us.” She half-smiled.

  “I made a fool of myself,” she said, looking out the window. I took my hand off the gearshift and laid it over hers. “You look beautiful,” I told her, and it was true. Her feet pressing the dash, green dress hiked up her thighs, wind at the top of her window trailing wisps of her done-up hair. She squeezed my hand, gave me a sad smile. We drove around, listening to the radio.

  “Listen,” I told her, “let’s fetch the youngster.”

  “Yes. We’re old, it’s past our bedtime.”

  We picked up Gina, a sleepy bundle, from Mrs. Guther-son, and wrapped her in the car seat. At McNair I passed our turn and headed out onto the highway.

  “Where are you going?” Marie asked. By now Gina was awake, making cooing sounds, trying out words.

  “I want to show you where I work,” I said. We were dressed up and the truck cab glowed faint green from the dash lights, night blew in the window warm and newly humid. A perfect spring evening, I didn’t want to end it by going home.

  “I’ve seen where you work a million times,” she said. “We drive through every summer.”

  “You’ve never seen it like this,” I answered. It was near eleven, traffic was sparse. Marie stared at me.

  “You’ve never seen it on foot,” I said.

  “On foot! Warren, I am not walking inside that tunnel. We’ll get hit by a car.”

  “We’ll stay on the catwalk, three feet above the road.”

  I parked at the tolls and waved to Sheila and Junior, who worked the only two booths open at night. We walked down the in-west side, against the slope, the familiar tightening spreading along the front of my thighs. Marie carried her heels and we held Gina’s hands between us. My steps reverberated off the walls as we descended to the level-off. Gina’s slate-colored eyes opened wide, taking in the pink bead of sodium lights that ringed the curved ceiling above us. I kept reaching for a gas mask that wasn’t there. With no traffic or heat, night wind pushed through the tunnel, moving the loose wisps of Marie’s auburn hair. The cement walls sweated with damp, giving off a brackish
, greenhouse smell. The sound of the wind was a faint whoosh.

  “Listen,” I whispered. Marie lifted Gina and the two of them were still.

  “Wind?” Marie asked.

  “Water,” I said. “Ocean. We’re in it, under it.” Marie shrank back, eyeing the ceiling above us.

  “We’re safe,” I told her, and rapped my knuckles on a concrete support beam.

  Marie stepped across the catwalk, hugging Gina to her chest, dangling the high heels by their straps. She leaned and put her ear to the wall, as if the tunnel were a huge conch shell. The wind pushed, I closed my eyes. The faint sound was like that of the ocean—not crashing waves but deep currents, mid-ocean swells. I opened my eyes, leaned in toward my wife and daughter.

  “The whole, big ocean out there,” I said.

  “Hear that, sweetie?” Marie said, jiggling Gina. “We’re under the water, in the sea. Hold your breath,” she told her, and made a show of drawing in air, puffing her cheeks. Gina laughed and copied her, and I did the same, the three of us making a game of it, holding our breath like swimmers and listening for the quiet ocean all around us.

  CIRCLE VIEW

  THROUGH gauzy curtains Red Burgess watched a man walk down the gravel road toward her house. His movements were slow, far off, waved by the heat, a mirage. Red bit her thumbnail and turned to look over her shoulder through the dust-coated hall out the back door. She saw her husband, King, on the asphalt lot, working the tangle of rusted wires that topped the speaker posts like stalks of dried-up corn. King Burgess, who had once made a game of calling her his queen—the Queen of the Circle View. Eleven years before, his easy words had lured her out of her senses and into a marriage.

  The man had reached the down side of the road toward the drive-in. A child or large dog loped beside him; from this distance Red could not tell which. Each year, two or three visitors found their door—men, usually, with broken down cars or bad directions, like paper scraps blown against a fence, drawn for miles off the flat horizon to the Circle View by the sagging brick projection tower. In winter, the tower dropped bricks on the roof of the house, loud thumps that on cold nights kept Red awake, staring at the ceiling, while in the next room King snored and muttered in his bed.

  A small child—a girl—trotted to keep up with the man. He moved like a bent wheel, Red thought. Then she saw: the man’s one leg worked inside baggy trousers, tightening and puckering the fabric, and the other leg was not there, had been amputated high up, near his groin, the way a dog has a leg missing. The trouser leg had been cut away, and the man propelled himself on a pair of aluminum elbow crutches.

  “My name’s John Shire.” The wiry man stood on her front porch, flashing bright movie star teeth. The pale, skinny girl, eight or ten, leaned beside him in a hounds-tooth dress. Her hair hung in dirty tangles to her shoulders.

  “Car broke down,” he said. The calluses of Red’s hand warmed on the brass knob. She watched him hook the crutch handles over his arm and stand balanced, unswayed.

  “No one lives out here,” she told him, leaning her foot on the door. John Shire ran his hand through his thin hair. His muscled arms were decorated with green tattoos beneath black hair, the designs of the tattoos uncertain and smeared, like ink pulled up by a blotter. His cutaway left trouser leg had been knotted up with twine.

  “Lost and gone, ma’am,” he said. “Headed for Texas and missed my turn.”

  A paper scrap, Red thought, like most of the visitors each year—the drifters, confused UPS drivers, broken downs from the highway into Tulsa. Parents sometimes dragged their bored children to the Circle View, to show them how things were in the old days. Those Red turned away—no movies had been run in fifteen years. She would point to the marquee out front, which displayed no titles, only rock holes, two broken letters, and an abandoned bird’s nest. King reminisced with those same visitors over the magic days of drive-in movies, and extracted from them a promise to return the next year, when, bet-your-bottom-dollar, he told them, he would be back in business.

  “We could do with a good pull of water,” John Shire said.

  A dust devil twirled like a child in the yard, circling toward the house. Red moved to allow the man inside. The girl followed, and Red closed the door.

  “How you drive without two good legs?” she asked him. John Shire grinned.

  “Still got two good legs,” he said. Red glanced at his knotted-up trousers and felt her face warm.

  “King will fix your car,” she said, pointing her chin toward the dirty window, toward King in the back lot. John Shire moved, leaning into the metal crutches, his arm muscles working like small animals beneath the skin. The girl sat in King’s worn leather chair and began playing with the fireplace poker. Out back of the brick house was the drive-in, or what remained of it. King was dressed like a golfer in madras pants, a yellow alligator shirt, and a Panama hat. He had looked the same the day Red met him, back in Shelby, when he’d come into her junk shop tracking down a commercial popcorn maker. She listened to him describe his plans for the Circle View, watched his fingers smooth across the mahogany top of a Victrola. Red could find no nostalgia, no longing or ache, in treadle sewing machines or washboards, only money for the light bill. What she couldn’t sell she’d discard. But in this King Burgess, big and ruddy-faced among the Flexible Flyers, oak rockers, and Elvis whiskey decanters, she had heard a pining love for the past and, more importantly, a chance for good business. She had left with him the next week.

  In the kitchen, Red blew the dust from two glasses and filled them with water, then topped off the jar of dark wine she had been drinking.

  “I get it,” John Shire said as he took the glass. “That’s your daddy.”

  “My husband.” She waved her wedding band, stuck on her finger.

  They watched King work to reattach one of the window speakers to its pole, the rows of speaker poles like a stunted orchard grown out of broken asphalt, clumps of weeds, and scattered chips of paint peeled off the house. The glass-bead screen at the back of the property, punched through with holes, had one white corner bent over, like a worn page in a story book.

  “I get it,” John Shire said again. “A real mom-n-pop operation. You cook chili dogs, the old man runs movies, boys park their cars and bird-dog their best girlfriends.”

  “There’s none of that out here,” Red said. She glanced at the girl, who still had not spoken. The girl looked at Red and blinked, then groped between the cushions of King’s chair, pulling out paper clips and linking them into a chain. John Shire grinned and stared openly at Red’s chest, which made her look down at herself—the torn T-shirt and faded jeans, slippers held together with duct tape. She gathered her hennaed hair away from her shoulders to pull it back, and immediately regretted raising her arms, which lifted her breasts. She looked away.

  “The drive-in isn’t working,” she said. “Hasn’t had any business for fifteen years, since before we owned it.” King convinced her they’d fill the place every night with family classics shown on the four-story screen, concessions sold in the booth lit by yellow bug lights. She’d auctioned off the junk store (except what King insisted they keep) and moved here with him. Factory layoffs in the area had been like opening a drain, the town and businesses, all the people, funneling away. Then changes to the county roads put them on a dead-end and stirred up the dust that settled like a blanket over the decaying body of the Circle View. King worked day and night the first year—patching pavement, rewiring, pulling weeds. Evenings, he would spill on the kitchen floor cardboard boxes full of four-inch plastic letters, arrange them to spell out titles of movies as they would appear on his marquee. Like a kid playing with blocks, she thought. He spent five thousand of what they had saved on a new projector, then, fooling himself that they were close to opening, blew the rest ordering from catalogs prints of his favorite movies—National Velvet, Citizen Kane, Swiss Family Robinson, Dr. Zhivago—before they had a new screen to show them on, or car speakers to hear them. Red thoug
ht the movies were awful, the kind people watched on Sunday afternoons with a hangover and baseball rained out. They’d do better money, she told him, with dirty movies, the X-rateds. Red knew business, what people would pay to see. But King said he wouldn’t have his lot full of men in smelly raincoats, and besides, he believed interest in sex was diminishing. Especially here at home, had been Red’s silent answer to this. Silent, because King’s worries over the difference in their ages and his inability to, as he put it, “satisfy her desires” had drawn her, those first years, into a habit of reassurance. King would hug her, pinning her arms and rubbing her back, her cheek pressed to the plastic buttons of his sweater, his pink skin dry and dark spotted.

  “I still need you like this, your companionship,” he would say to her. She had, for those years, kept her silence, then one night come to the end of it. King had hugged her, rubbed her back, told her what he still needed. She opened her dried lips against the wool and cold buttons of his sweater.

  “And I need a good fuck,” she said, biting the words.

  She felt the rush of heat rise in his doughy neck as she backed away from him. He turned from her, and had not touched her since; she had not wanted him to. They occupied the house like furniture. His Navy pension paid the necessities and not much else. King settled into tinkering with the Circle View the way other men his age puttered in a vegetable garden. The only difference, Red often thought, is that those men don’t rely on a garden for everything, won’t starve if it goes bad.

  Red introduced King to John Shire. King shook his hand and asked Shire if he’d come to be disabled while serving his country. John Shire saluted and answered “Yes sir,” then cut his eyes at Red and winked. He looked nice when he did that, she thought. Like someone who could turn trouble into a good time. King bent down toward his leather chair, the heat of sunburn radiating off the back of his neck.

  “And who might this be?” he asked the pale girl. She smiled, her lips pulled back like the skin of a cut.