Circle View

by Brad Barkley

  “I’m aware of the antenna,” I told Kate Warner. She shrugged, smiled again, and said something else I couldn’t hear as she turned away. When she was halfway down the block, I remembered to say thank you. I have the manners of a goat.

  Over the years, Agnes became the link in a line of transmittance by which Janey and I could communicate with one another. How else for me to describe it? Evenings, as I sat in my study working on reports, Agnes would tap on the door to let me know Janey needed money for a class trip, a candy sale, or some such thing.

  “Why didn’t she come to me herself?” I asked without fail. Agnes, God bless her, would shrug; she honestly did not know. I would open my wallet or pull out car keys.

  “Tell her to have a good time,” I’d say, and transmission of the message was complete. It was that way all our lives together. This was the best we could do. When Agnes died, we lost our link. Pete is a youth counselor for Social Services, and I believe he has been urging Janey to—how would he phrase it?—to try to deal openly with our relationship. Lately, she takes me to dinner so we can reminisce about such things as family vacations. I can recall only brief weekend trips to symposiums where I delivered papers on electromagnetic interference and ate lunches in banquet rooms and officers’ clubs. Janey’s favorite phrase is this: “We had our own kind of fun.”

  When Janey was still a baby I would take her with me to the field behind the Navy-Marine Corps Stadium, sit her in the grass while I swung a driver and five-iron, knocking shag balls. Hitting the ball seemed to me nothing but pure motion, a synergy of mind and muscle. I never enjoyed the game of golf—rides in little carts, bets on ten-foot putts. Keep it. An open field I needed, my woods and a five-iron, a shoebox of balls, a tree at which to aim. As I learned power, began to get behind the ball with all my spiraled energy, I found I could send them high over the wall of the empty football stadium, disappearing into its mouth. I felt like Zeus, raining hailstones down on the mountain.

  “You see that, Janey,” I’d say. She sat, in her clay-stained jumper, looking up at me. Before I realized, she was out of diapers and into dresses, taking off with boys in cars, and I could no longer knock drives over the stadium wall. Now and again I still whiff at balls in the backyard. Short chip shots, pitch and runs. It’s a diversion.

  Toward dusk, Janey called.

  “Dad, we couldn’t make it today,” she said. “Pete had an emergency at the hospital. Some kid in his Reach Out group tried to kill himself. Swallowed gasoline.”

  I couldn’t think of an appropriate response. “That’s very sad,” I said, and for a moment felt it. “My antenna is still down.”

  “None of this could be helped, Dad. You stay off the roof.”

  “Pshaw,” I said.

  “I’ll be very angry with you.” I could picture her as she said this, clicking her nails on the formica, twisting the end of her hair.

  That evening I sketched plans for a guy wire system to keep the antenna from falling once it was back up. When I looked out the window, the branches of trees, silhouetted against the streetlights, were shaking in the strong winds. I tried to recall from my sailing days the precise sound of those November gusts ripping off the bay, pushing brine into the streets downtown, right up to the front doors of the shops. I found I could not remember, and so turned on my stereo with the volume up full and for a few moments pretended that the hiss through the speakers equaled the sound of wind, the noise of sailing, the clatter of my past.

  By morning, a hard rain fell. I worried that the stuffed owl in the gutter might take on water, though it was made to be waterproof—the feather wings heavily waxed, insides stuffed with dacron, glass eyes cemented in place. In late afternoon, the rain stopped. Outside, a row of seagulls perched along the gutter and on the tines of the downed antenna. The owl looked no more threatening than a lump of wet laundry. When I clapped my hands, the seagulls moved their wings and lifted. I climbed two rungs on the ladder before it began to sink in the wet ground. I stepped down and went into the house. I phoned Janey and got her machine. I’ve never acclimated myself to this particular technology.

  “Janey?” I said, and then waited, as if she might answer. “I don’t want to make a pest of myself about this antenna, but I’m not one to put things off.” I hesitated. “This is your father,” I said, and hung up.

  Lately, Janey takes me places on Saturday afternoons—the Naval Academy museum, the City Dock to watch sailboats drift in and out of the bay. One afternoon, as she sat throwing cookie scraps to the mallards, she asked if I remembered a place, other than the stadium field, I used to take her. For a year, when Janey was ten, we lived in Greensboro, North Carolina. On a city playground there lay an old iron radio tower—a hundred feet long, fat as a barrel—mounted on its side atop concrete pedestals. A brass plaque explained it had been the antenna tower for WBIG, during the “golden age” of radio. Kids would dangle from the antenna, climb over and under it, walk its length with their arms held out. Occasionally I would take an hour off work and drive her to the park to see the antenna, to explain its parameters.

  Once we went there in the middle of the morning, when Agnes was laid up with the flu. Women in curlers stood talking and smoking in groups while their children played on the swings and seesaws. I sent Janey off to play while I read a journal on—I still remember—terrestrial radio waves. I found an empty bench near a group of mothers with strollers, reading movie star magazines. The secret world of women. When I sat, they stopped talking and looked at me. I straightened my tie and nodded at them; they moved their strollers away. I wanted Janey beside me then, to let those women know she was mine, to legitimize my presence. I put aside the journal and looked up in time to see Janey slip and fall off the top of the antenna and land hard in the dirt below. I ran and drew her up; she held her thigh, skinned beneath the pink hem of her dress. She screamed.

  “Shh,” I said to her. “You’re fine, it’s only a scrape.”

  Her face reddened; she choked on a gulp of air and screamed again. As I held her, the women stared at us. I wished for one of them to come help.

  “Please. Quiet, honey,” I said to Janey. She kept screaming, and I did not know how to make her stop. I couldn’t. The women watched me, shaking their heads and frowning. Sweat ran down under my collar, and I noticed I had somehow misplaced my journal. I lifted Janey and held her in a way I hoped looked paternal to the women, but was meant to muffle her cries against my suitcoat. That was my motive, to shut her up, this injured child. While the women watched, I carried Janey to the car and got her inside, then drove till she had quieted and we could go home.

  Now, as we sat on the dock, Janey smiled. “That place was the greatest,” she said, as if the incident never occurred, transformed by the alchemy of recollection.

  I shook my head. “It’s hard for me to remember it,” I said. Such lies come easily these days.

  Janey called back the next day to tell me that the kid from Pete’s youth group had lapsed into a coma.

  “I don’t understand why this is taking so long,” I said, thinking of the Wednesday night jazz show on WAMR.

  “The doctors are doing what they can,” she said, and I didn’t correct her misunderstanding. Outside, I again went up three steps of the ladder, felt a twinge of dizziness and climbed back down. That night I stood in the driveway wearing my overcoat and hat, watching the stars, trying to remember which of those winking lights are actually satellites in geostationary orbit. I craned my neck and blew white breath at the sky. Minus my hearing aids, I discovered the true sound of night: not crickets chirping or trains rolling past in the distance or anything the poets will give you, but silence, a noiselessness deep as all space.

  On Thursday, Janey stopped by to take me out for the day. Pete was at the hospital, talking with the fifteen-year-old, who was slowly finding his way out of the coma. Janey kept herself busy in my presence, fixing sandwiches and tea, wiping the counter, insisting that I eat mustard instead of mayonnaise.

/>   “What would you like to do today, Dad?” she asked, mixing artificial sugar into the iced tea. The new contact lenses she wore made her eyes unnaturally green. I noticed tiny wrinkles around her mouth.

  “I’d like to put my antenna back up.”

  She stopped stirring, and her face darkened. “It’s raining today, Dad. And you don’t belong on the roof.”

  “It’s my house.”

  “That boy who works on the lawn, why don’t you ask him?” Unconsciously, she rubbed at her stomach.

  “He wouldn’t know what to do. He’d get it wrong. And I’m asking you.”

  “We’ll get it fixed, Dad, but can we not talk about this just now? Let’s go have fun.”

  “You shouldn’t feel you have to do that.”

  “Do what?”

  “Insist that we have fun all the time.”

  She looked at me. “It’s probably better if we just don’t talk at all.”

  After lunch, Janey made the decision to drive us to the Armory, where the Ladies’ Auxiliary was sponsoring a show, Christmas Trees of the World. After we parked, I walked beside her, glancing sideways to notice if she was showing yet, if the curve of her stomach was visible through her sweater. Inside, the smell of pine sap mixed with the smell of candle wax and Russian tea.

  “So many trees,” I said in a whisper, careful in a crowd to avoid the loud speech deaf men are given to.

  The trees were decorated with native crafts from their countries of origin: tinwork angels and trumpets from Germany, paper lanterns from China, crystal snowflakes from Ireland, Appalachian corn-husk dolls and beeswax candles representing the United States. People pointed, sniffed the trees, snapped pictures of one another with the trees as backdrop. As we circled the room, Janey smiled and made comments I couldn’t hear against the drone of noise.

  Most impressive was the tree from Japan, each green-needled branch decorated with a small, white, origami swan, folded from paper that seemed fragile as moth wings. Tiny feats of engineering. Next to us, a Japanese man knelt beside his wife, at the height of his young girl. She wore red barrettes in her dark hair; she was fat, and her black eyes squeezed shut when she smiled. The man gestured toward the tree, talking and laughing, and soon had his girl spinning circles, giggling. Though I couldn’t hear, I knew him to be inventing some tale concerning the swan tree, and I felt a sudden stab at never having told such stories to Janey. It seemed in that moment the very business of fathers. I thought of the things I used to show Janey on our Saturday drives—sloping long-wire antennas, planned sites for new office buildings, radio towers I had helped design. Eventually, Agnes would say, “Janey’s tired, we should start home.”

  As I watched, the Japanese man pulled a dollar bill from his wallet, folded a perfect replica of the swans and clipped it to the girl’s barrette, which set her off like a wind-up toy, laughing again. I imagined the family at home, assembling their own swan tree. I remembered the aluminum tree we had every year—silver foil reflecting a revolving colored light.

  “We should’ve had a nicer tree,” I said to Janey. She stood smiling, watching the little girl, thinking, I knew, of her own baby.

  “Did you say something, Dad?” she said.

  I shook my head.

  “No,” I told her. “Nothing.”

  Last Friday, when I did not hear from Janey, I decided to fix the antenna myself. I carried my wooden tool box balanced on my shoulder. As I climbed the rungs my calves quivered and I had to close my eyes against a slight dizzying. Old age, I thought, is nothing more than an unwitting betrayal of the self. At the top I swung the tool box down against the gutter, braced my hand on the sun-warmed shingles and stepped across to the roof, crouching low to keep from falling backward. Gusts of wind stung my eyes, flattened my trousers against my legs. The asphalt shingles crunched under my shoes as I stepped to the yagi-uda. Several of its elements, the tines, were bent. I straightened them, lifted the antenna back into its brace, then reconnected the receiver wire, which had broken loose. My legs began to feel sturdier on the roof, despite a small ache in my shoulders.

  I pulled picture-frame wire and screw-eyes from the tool box to anchor the antenna, which still shook in the wind. When it was fastened down I shook the antenna myself to test its sturdiness, and plucked the new guy wires like banjo strings. It held.

  From that vista, I could see to the south the edge of Spa Creek and the tips of sailboat masts. To the east rose the steeple of the Episcopalian church and the white dome of the State House downtown. Two boys kicked a red ball down my street and disappeared around the corner. My antenna, I noticed, is the only one of all the rooftops in the neighborhood; everyone else has cable now, the signals sneaking into their houses from underground, the gray and black of their empty roofs scattered about like playing cards. The cover of clouds overhead made a white cotton batting. The whole, noiseless world stretched empty beneath me—no one raking leaves, walking dogs, jogging.

  I walked the pitched slope toward the front of the house to retrieve the stuffed owl from the gutter. The owl threatened to come apart in my hands, the feathers water-ruined and pulling out in clumps, the dacron stuffing squeezing through seams. It smelled of rot. I fingered one of the glass eyes and it popped out, bouncing into the rain gutter. I stood at the edge of the roof, figuring how to wire the owl back together, when a flash of white on the sidewalk caught my attention. The eave of the house obstructed my sight and I leaned out to see. Mindy, Kate Warner’s young girl, skipped rope in front of my house, her pink face blowing clouds of breath. She wore a hooded jacket, dull white fuzz circling the hood and cuffs, her shoes shiny in the gray light. As she twirled and hopped the length of rope, her brown bangs jumped beneath the jacket hood and her mouth moved with what I guessed to be the words to some children’s jump-rope song. As I walked up to gain a better view, the scuff of my shoes on the shingles made me remember myself as Santa Claus, on the roof, making a racket. Looking at Mindy, I realized that of all those times I had played the part of Santa, I never once saw Janey’s face, never witnessed what gladness my heavy steps must have produced in her.

  “Hey, you—miss,” I said. Mindy stopped and looked around, the rope coiled in a dead loop against the walk.

  “Up here,” I said, “Mr. Hopkins.” Her eyes found me.

  “I want to show you something. Stay there and don’t move.”

  I walked to the peak of the roof and stood beside the antenna. “I perfected this array,” I told her. “It’s called a yagiuda.” She looked at me.

  “My life’s work,” I said. Her face gathered in confusion. She tilted her head back and the hood fell away from her dark hair, revealing a red bow and a ponytail. I thought of the Japanese girl at the Christmas tree show.

  “Listen,” I started over, “how would you like to see this thing full of seagulls?” I patted the yagi-uda. “Picture a big metal tree filled with white birds.” For effect, I flapped my arms, slapping them against my sides.

  She nodded and laughed, and it seemed so easy, this small joke. I gave the rotten owl a final squeeze and tossed it into the backyard, by the trash bin. When I turned to the front, Mindy had gone back to her jump rope and rhymes. A gust kicked up and I grabbed onto the yagiuda. The antenna vibrated with the wind, and for a moment I imagined her skip-rope chant being transmitted to me, carried along invisible waves into the tines of the humming antenna, through the bones of my hand, along my arm, and throughout me. Such waves travel in skips and modulations, in swells of resonance. Basic stuff, I thought, first year engineering school. With this thought in my head I lifted a hand to Mindy, turned, and started back down the ladder, that long, shaky climb toward ground.

  SPONTANEOUS COMBUSTION

  MOST often now, I think of what happened that Saturday only because late at night, when we are in bed talking, my wife will ask me to tell her the story. Twenty years have slipped past since that cold February day in North Carolina, when my grandfather and I had started out to split more oak f
or the woodstove. My mother stood at the sink cleaning fish I had caught beneath the ice that morning. As a younger boy I had loved to watch her do this job, the way her apron would shine with scales, and how she would twirl around on the linoleum floor and ask if I liked her fancy ball gown. But now I was older and felt embarrassed when she did it.

  “Careful, Daddy,” she called after us. “Remember your blood pressure.”

  My grandfather clicked his tongue. “Foolish woman,” he said, pulling on his stiffened work gloves. I followed him out to the barn where he lifted the axe from the wall, and the two of us tromped out into the yard. The ground lay quilted with a crunchy snow, and I could smell suet we had hung out for the finches.

  “Now, look here, boy,” my grandfather said. “There is no such thing as what the common man calls accident. You might remember how that child murderer, Saul, on his journey to Damascus, was struck blind and fell prostrate in the road. Now, that was no accident, but was the working of the Lord. Saul was made blind that he might see.”

  A white breath, like steam, blew out of his mouth. He grabbed the head of the axe, held it at arm’s length, and turned full circle, like the weather vane on top of the bam.

  “Always keep such a circle,” he said, “that way there’ll be no mishap.”

  He steadied a log and spit into his gloves. On the first swing the axe rang a glancing blow off the side of the log and bit cleanly into the middle of his instep and halfway through his foot. I remember it looked so much like a Saturday morning cartoon that I almost started laughing. My grandfather sucked air through his teeth and his face turned white as the patches of snow on the ground. A coppery red pool darkened the snow beneath his foot.

  “It’s bad, son,” he said. “Run in and tell your mother to call the hospital.”

  A strange quiet enclosed us while we waited for the ambulance to arrive. I remember my mother leaning at the porch railing, looking down the street, the knife still gripped in her hand. The paramedics arrived and began attending to my grandfather’s foot while I explored the blinking, squawking machinery in the back of the ambulance. My hands were shaking, but more from excitement than fear. I was fourteen then, and such a gory accident seemed exhilarating. Finally, the ambulance drove off howling with my grandfather inside. My mother and Aunt Cleo piled into the Dodge to follow.