Circle View

by Brad Barkley

  “New kitchen?” my mother asked. David looked at me across the table and nodded.

  “Janice, I talked to a contractor today. We can redo every square foot of this house—add on rooms, finish the basement, new appliances, carpets—for half the cost of buying. We’ll be building equity.”

  My mother smiled. “I never wanted to leave this house anyway,” she said.

  “When the work is all finished,” my father said around his food, “I guess we’ll be the only house in the neighborhood with a new swimming pool.”

  My mother clapped her hands while I jumped up and down and shouted. My father went into the next room to get the sketches the contractor had made.

  “Well,” my mother said, her face flushed. “I suppose we’ll have to learn to swim.”

  “I can hold my breath underwater in the bathtub,” I said. David looked at me and narrowed his eyes.

  “Remember this, Carlton,” he whispered from his bunk that night, “if you paint over shit, underneath you still have shit.”

  For the next month we lived with the noise of power saws and hammers. David and I camped on the den floor in our sleeping bags, watching TV late into the night. When the work was finally completed, it looked as if someone had taken away our old house and left a different one in its place. The outside was covered in yellow aluminum siding. Paper runners guided our steps over thick baby blue carpets. The basement had been redone, with rows of saltwater tanks recessed in the paneled walls. All the rooms smelled of paint and caulking, the plastic wrap covering unfamiliar furniture. Heavy brass deadbolts had been placed on all the doors and windows.

  Upstairs, two rooms had been added on: a sewing room for my mother and an extra bedroom for me. The bunk beds were gone; I now had my own furniture, decorated with “Washington Redskins curtains and bedclothes.

  “You don’t even like football,” David said to me. His room, our old one, also had new furniture, and a telephone extension on the desk.

  “So, boys, not too bad, huh,” my father said. “David, it’s like you have your own bachelor pad, right?” He grabbed David and squeezed his bicep. This was part of what David had always called my father’s “Dad act”—ruffling our hair, squeezing our muscles. Affection had never come naturally to my father, or seemed natural, and there was the strain of longing in his attempts. He had never been athletic, never funny; he’d always possessed a kind of shyness such that it startled me when I’d walk past his bedroom and see him naked from the shower, or when he tried to hug me on birthdays, slapping my back with his open palms. The money allowed my father to indulge his shyness; he no longer had to attend company cookouts, or play on the company softball team. He and my mother quit going out to movies on Friday nights, opting instead to stay in and watch TV movies on their new entertainment center, or dance to records on the new stereo.

  David picked up his phone and listened to the dial tone. “Where’s all our stuff?” he asked my father.

  “Boxed up, in the closet.”

  Most of our old things—what my mother called her knick-knacks—were gone: the photo cubes on the mantle, my mother’s matchbook collection, the King’s Dominion poster in the den. Everything was replaced by framed prints and macramé wall hangings.

  “Listen,” my father said, “we saved a lot of money by not moving, so everybody gets a gift. Anything you like under fifty bucks.” He looked at us.

  “I’ll take the cash,” David said. My father frowned and turned to me.

  “Me too,” I said.

  My father frowned again. “That doesn’t show much imagination, boys,” he said. “But hey, cash it is. Let’s go downstairs and I’ll give you the grand tour of my new aquarium room.”

  “We’ll catch up in a minute,” David said.

  When my father left, David pulled me into his bedroom and shut the door. He went to his duffel bag, unrolled a gym sock, reached inside and drew out a roll of hundred-dollar bills.

  “Damn, David,” I said, “where did you get that?”

  He grinned. “From Dad’s dresser drawer. A couple bills a night, while he’s downstairs doing his Jacques Cousteau act. You should see the stack he keeps in there.”

  “You’re stealing it? I thought only those first two.”

  “Just calm down, Carlton. He’ll never miss it. I’m saving for this guy’s Camaro. Man, it is one bitch of a car. Four barrel, headers, mags. Give me your fifty bucks and I’ll drive you around anytime you want.” He smiled. “It’s only money.”

  I ended up giving David my fifty dollars. A week later he rumbled up in the driveway with the battered car, low-slung and bright orange, rattling the windows. He said he’d made a deal for it, and cut his eyes at me. My father ruffled David’s hair and went outside with him to kick the tires and peer under the hood. I knew, as I watched them through the front window, that David intended to keep stealing the money, for gas and insurance, I guessed, but somehow it didn’t seem so terrible, as if my father’s supply of money were a well-spring that could fill itself from below. My father had said that by staying in our house we had built equity. Though I didn’t know what the word meant, something about the sound of it gave me comfort. I watched the car spew up a cloud of blue smoke. We’re living in equity, I told myself.

  At my mother’s urging, my father set up an account that paid out regular, anonymous donations to area charities. Our next door neighbor, Mr. Stone, came by at least once a week, and he and my father would stand talking around the swimming pool hole, then come inside for beer and iced coffee. He seemed to be the only friend my father still allowed himself. I sometimes crouched outside the living room and eavesdropped on their conversations, which mostly had to do with investments, mortgages, and home improvements. One time I heard Mr. Stone say to my father, “You’d better watch how you set this thing up, Dade. You’ll have the IRS after you.”

  I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about; it sounded to me as if he’d said “iris,” which I knew was one of the flowers that my mother had instructed the Lawn Medic men to plant in our new yard. I ran out the door and stood at the edge of the flower bed. I stared at the browned stalks of the plants, trying to figure out which one was the iris, and just how it might be after my father. I knew the idea of it was stupid, and I laughed at myself standing there. But, to be safe, I bent over, pulled up all the plants by the roots, and left them on the curb for trash.

  The addition that had been built to accommodate my room stuck off the house into the side yard, next to a large elm tree. When David came in late at night, the downstairs doors and windows would be bolted shut, and he would sneak into the house the same way he’d gotten out: through my window by way of the elm tree. He stayed out till two or three every morning, allowing the Camaro to coast down the last block of our street. Many nights I’d hear his mag wheels scrape the curb, hear him drag himself over the windowsill as I lay beneath the blankets in a kind of half-sleep. Other nights I would wake up and talk to him awhile. He told me I should take notes, that I’d be following him in a few years. One night when I was awake, he came through the window whispering and shushing someone behind him. In the dim light I saw him pull a girl in past my Redskins curtains, saw her long blond hair settle across the rug as she fell into the room. In silhouette her legs were long and thin; she wore tight jeans and a shiny necklace that swung down and tangled with her hair. Her smell—honeysuckle perfume and cigarettes—cut through the dark like a beam of light. She whispered and laughed, and I pretended to sleep, watching her through half-closed eyes.

  David paid me to leave my window unlocked. We never discussed any plan for me to do so, but every Saturday when I got up, the ten-dollar bill was on my dresser; I hid them away rolled up inside a gym sock. It would have been payment enough, I thought then, if every night he brought into my room girls with long hair and a honeysuckle smell, girls whispering up out of my dreams. But after that night he never brought another one; they belonged to the larger world I felt looming beyond the walls of
our house.

  My father decided to build a cave in his basement aquarium room. He hammered out a large opening in the back concrete wall where our dart board had once hung, and together we tunneled out the red dirt from behind it. The hole we made was big enough for my father to stand inside. Around the opening we built a frame of two-by-fours and screenwire, which we planned to cover with plaster and paint. My father promised that when we finished, our cave would look exactly like the caves we’d seen at Hanging Rock Park. “A bear wouldn’t know the difference,” he said.

  He designed the cave to house an oversized aquarium filled with a species of eyeless fish, and other fish, he said, with lights built into their heads. I pictured goldfish wearing tiny coal miner’s helmets, like the sea monkeys with their crowns. By this time he was spending entire days in his basement room, feeding and watching the fish, reading about them. He had traded his milk crate for an office chair with casters, so he could roll about the room from tank to tank. The tanks were as big as our console stereo, alive with nurse sharks, lionfish, seahorses, pink coral, and skates. On the carpeted floor moved patterns of light, shadows of the swimming fish. The air in the darkened room churned with the smell of salt, the loud gurgle of aerators. It was like being under the ocean.

  He mixed a bucket of plaster, while all around us the fish circled and darted in their tanks. We dipped our hands into the warm plaster and layered it on the screenwire, spreading it around with our fingers. For a long space of time we did not speak, the only sounds those of water bubbling, the slap of wet plaster, and our own steady breathing. David sat behind us on the carpet, smoking a cigarette, flicking ashes into the cuffs of his jeans. The basement was the only place at home he was allowed to smoke, even though my father complained it affected the water quality of his tanks. I watched him blow smoke rings and then stick his finger through them.

  “Carlton, how did you spend the fifty dollars I gave you?” my father asked. He didn’t look at either of us, but concentrated on his work. With a glance at me David stood and crushed out his cigarette against the bottom of his shoe. We heard his footsteps on the stairs.

  “I’m saving it,” I said. “For a rainy day.”

  “Well, that’s how a wise man would go about it.”

  I grabbed a thick handful of plaster and moved around the opposite side of the frame, beside a tank of seahorses. My father followed.

  “Carlton,” he said. He stopped working and wiped his face on his sleeve. “Son, you wouldn’t take money from me, would you?” He looked at me. The plaster felt like wool gloves trapping my hands.

  “No sir,” I said. “I wouldn’t.”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said. “But your brother I’m not so sure about.” He turned toward the tank of seahorses bobbing in the greenery.

  “Hippocampus,” he said, reading the plastic label he’d attached to the steel frame of the tank. “You ever noticed how they anchor themselves against the currents? Prehensile tails.” He shook his head. “Just amazing.”

  “I guess it is,” I said. He still had his back to me.

  “Dad, why don’t you just move the money?” I said. “Hide it somewhere he can’t find it?” The plaster began to dry on my hands; when I wiggled my fingers it cracked.

  “It’s not the money,” he said. “The money is a symptom, like sneezing when you catch a cold. He has to stop taking it himself,” he said. “He has to want to stop, or it doesn’t mean anything. Do you see that?” I looked at the clipped hair on the back of his neck.

  “I guess so,” I finally answered. He turned to face me, drawing a deep breath. Then he looked away, and for a minute did not say anything.

  “I was thinking,” he said, “if those fish live in the dark, it won’t matter much to them if they have a cave or not.” He laughed, and I let myself laugh with him. I bunched my hands into fists, and all the dried plaster fell away, leaving my fingers and palms bone white.

  “This cave is for us,” he said. “But what the heck, we’ll give them a good home.”

  We finished my father’s cave by covering it with brown and gray house paint. While we worked my mother brought us trays of turkey sandwiches and iced tea. She called us “my two cavemen.” When we were done painting, I stepped back, amazed. It looked as if I could walk through the wall of our basement into endless underground caverns, lose myself inside the earth. The aquarium for the cave had been special ordered, with glass an inch thick. My father told me that the fish would live as they were meant to, in water buried in the earth, beyond the reach of light. Within a week the new aquarium—three hundred gallons—bubbled inside the cave. White sand layered the bottom of the tank, the clear water empty of fish. The blind cave fish were to be flown in from the Atlantic Ocean, the electric fish from the Nile River. The exoticness of it all numbed me. I asked my father if I could keep the canceled stamps after the packages arrived.

  We stood together, staring at the empty tank, its light on our faces. My father nodded. “Electric fish,” he said. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” I thought it sounded like the name of a rock band. Bubbles in the tank rose like jellyfish and broke at the surface.

  “Two species surviving in the dark, Carlton. One learns to live without light, without eyes finally. Doesn’t need them, right?” He looked at me. “So long, eyes,” he said, and I laughed.

  “But this other group of characters, petrocephalus bovei, decide they’ll just make light, so they can see. Think about that, Carlton. They make light. Like you or me making an omelet.”

  “Pretty cool,” I said.

  “It’s amazing. They adapt. That’s what this whole setup is about.”

  “What if the kind with the light ends up eating the blind ones because they can’t see to get away?”

  My father pressed his lips together. “That could happen, I guess, couldn’t it?” He looked suddenly defeated.

  “Well, it probably won’t,” I said.

  He stared at the empty tank.

  “Probably not.”

  That same week, David bought a hunting bow and set up a practice target at one end of the hole that had been dug for the swimming pool. Cold weather had prevented completion of the pool, and the hole that was left behind ran halfway to the property lines in our backyard, the red dirt piled around it. Gone were the remnants of our old yard, the brick barbecue grown over with vines, the wilted clothesline tangled with tree branches and spider webs, the picnic table covered in lichen, birdhouses rotting away. I could remember times when the four of us had spent our summer evenings in the yard, playing lawn darts, eating fried chicken, my parents sharing sweaty drinks in tall glasses. Somehow, without our noticing, our lives had moved indoors.

  On Saturday morning I awoke to the sound of aluminum arrows thumping into the target and clinking into one another. The target was a cardboard cutout of a deer, with a bale of hay set up behind to take the arrows. I watched David through the bare branches of the elm tree. Though it was November and cold, he wore only jeans and sneakers—no shirt. A quiver of arrows hung strapped across his back. All his stolen money was spent this way now—bow and arrows, a new set of barbells, a tennis racket—as if he wanted to be extravagant and didn’t know how. I went outside for a closer look.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked him. As I leaned over the edge of the pool, clumps of dirt fell in. David stood at the deep end, pulling arrows from the target.

  He grinned at me. “Water’s fine, junior. Come on in.” I walked to the shallow end and jumped onto the packed dirt. The red clay gave off a dampness, a fertile, wormy smell. Pale fingers of tree roots grew from the walls. It reminded me of when we’d dug out my father’s cave.

  David walked toward me offering the bow and an aluminum arrow, which had small dents along the shaft and a wide, razored tip.

  “Cool stuff,” I told him. “What’s it for?”

  “Here,” he said. I notched the arrow into the string, as he showed me, sighting the deer target at the far end of the pool.<
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  “Keep both eyes open,” David said. I sighted and pulled, but lacked the strength to draw the bowstring back more than a few inches. I shrugged and handed it to David. His bicep rose as he drew back steadily and opened his fingers. The arrow pierced the cardboard deer through the leg. He looked at me.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. He licked the tips of his callused fingers.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Montana, New Mexico maybe, somewhere out in the wilds.” He shrugged. “To not-here,” he said.

  He drew an arrow from the quiver and sent it into the face of the deer. “You could end up spending your entire life in Greensboro. The money buys our way out.” Before I could speak he said, “I know, you’re in love with it here.” His skin bristled with goose bumps, and his small nipples puckered.

  “It doesn’t sound like such a great idea,” I said.

  “What the hell do you know about it?”

  “I know the only time you ever spent out in the wilds was in a pop-up camper with a refrigerator.” He didn’t answer, but stood thrumming the bowstring with his fingers. I imagined him out there trying to find his way to places we’d seen on TV, but ending up lost somewhere on the highway or in the woods. For a moment I felt sorry for him. I started away and he grabbed my arm, pulling me back.

  “Listen, don’t forget to leave your window open tonight,” he told me. His grip relaxed. “I’ll float you an extra twenty.” This was the first time either of us had mentioned the money he was giving me. I already had nearly two hundred dollars rolled up inside my gym sock, money I would sometimes look at behind my locked door, slowly unrolling each bill.

  “I counted last time, Carlton,” David said. He scraped dirt from one of his arrow tips. “You know how much money Dad leaves in his sock drawer? Almost nine thousand bucks.”

  I kicked the dirt at my feet. “He knows you’re taking it, David.”