Circle View

by Brad Barkley

  “I wanted to see how you’re doing,” I said. I felt awkward, standing with this man I’d known for seventeen years.

  “You’re not remarried are you?”

  “Not yet,” I said, as if I had any prospects. I had last spoken to Debbie three months before, drunk one night, a conversation that showed me only that I had nothing left in me to say to her. I hung up and, staggering, penciled in a hundred zeros beside the last dollar figure at the baseboard, then pulled out all the Bic pens and put them away.

  “Are you strong, Robert?” Purvis asked. I thought he meant emotionally, following the divorce, Eck’s death.

  “Yes, Purvis. I’m fine.”

  “But are you strong? Make a muscle.”

  He felt my muscle, such as it is. “You’ll do,” he said. “I have a bad tooth and I want you to pull it.”

  I looked at him. “Purvis—I don’t—I think you’d better see a dentist.”

  “I’ve seen him. I need a tooth pulled. I paid for a diagnosis, why not hire on the muscle gratis?”

  I suspected that he hadn’t seen a dentist, that rent increases were eating up his Social Security, that he was living on goat cheese and the cooking sherry he was drinking.

  “What would I have to do?” I said.

  From a cigar box filled with pliers, scissors, and picture hangers he pulled out an antique dental tool, which looked like an old iron corkscrew but with a hook at the end. “Tooth extractor,” he said. “Picked it up at a flea market.”

  Before I had a chance to speak, he poured sherry over the hook and began packing his cheek with Kleenex.

  “One quick turn and the damn thing’s out,” he said, his voice muffled. He sat in a straight chair, leaned back his head, and opened his mouth, exposing his yellowed, cracked teeth. He pointed to the bad one, the gum below it red and swollen. I had to fight the urge to walk out and leave him there. Purvis positioned the extractor against his tooth, the handle sticking out of his mouth like a propeller. He braced his hands on the chair and looked up at me. I took a breath, gripped the handle of the extractor, then held steady the side of his head and twisted. Purvis grunted and shut his eyes. Blood soaked into the Kleenex. The extractor handle refused to move, like it had been cast in cement. I tightened my grip on the extractor and tried again. Just as I decided to give up, his jaw popped, the tooth tore loose of its flesh, and blood pooled in the space beneath his tongue. He went into the bathroom where I heard him spit and rinse.

  I stood next to Eck’s cot and petted Desdemona, the extracting tool in my hand. On the floor between my feet was the tooth, bloody and pulpy.

  “Sit, Robert,” Purvis said from the bathroom. “Let me pour you a sherry.”

  Before I sat, I took up his rotted tooth from the floor and started cleaning it with my handkerchief. Purvis walked out of the bathroom, fresh blood in the corners of his mouth.

  “You’ll stay, won’t you?” Purvis asked.

  “Here it is,” I said. I held the tooth out to him, and he squinted to look at it. It had shined up like a seashell, yellowed and scarred, jagged against my palm. I looked around at all the things Purvis had saved, and knew he would want to keep this as he had kept his trick ashtrays and globe banks and books, Eck’s clothes and bicycle. I thought of such things that are kept, or lost, or happened upon by accident. I lifted the tooth to the light.

  “Can I keep this?” I said.

  CLOWN ALLEY

  NED Samuelson is his real name. Every two hours I part his toes and push a needle through his skin, his veins as familiar to me as my own. He uses up his days shriveled in vinegar bedding. The nalprozene runs the streams of his blood, empties into his brain. He rides away his hurt. There are days I let it get to me, let this dust and wet stench choke me. I choke on the ragged life Ned clings to, on not taking myself out of here for good. Then the alarm on my watch beeps, and I withhold his needle. Ten minutes, fifteen. The game into overtime. Ned watches while I toss the glass syringes into the wall filled with yellowed eight-by-tens, the glossy photos of Emmet Kelly, Otto Griebling, Lou Jacobs, Paul Jerome. The greats, Ned calls them, the gods. Dead, they love him in faded autographs. The syringes quiver in their vaudeville faces. Ned raises himself on shaky arms.

  “Now, Johnny,” he says. “Right now, the shot, or you’re nothing, you never work again.” His voice runs thin. “Please,” he says, “the needle. Don’t wait.” An angel of mercy, I part his toes. If I withheld for a day, he’d shatter.

  He circles my neck with his arms and I lift him, the skin casing his bones threatening to tear. The smell in his mouth is black. I stand him behind his walker, help him move to the window so he can look down at the passing lunchtime crowd and wave. The brats from his Yahoo Brigade are all grown up now, fat and balding, oily-haired in cheap suits, the women in pants hiding C-section scars and spider veins. Ned stares, propped by the aluminum tubing. I know in his fragile mind the people gather to cheer him, the famous tramp clown, waving the Hobo Ned hats and Hobo Ned plastic cigars they’ve kept all these years in shoeboxes, in the dark corners of attics. They are all ten years old again, bleached angel children in crinoline and clip-ons, cast in waves through the air on live TV, from studio bleachers to boxy Philcos, and set down through the years below our windows, on the sidewalk across from the Plasma Center.

  “They don’t forget,” Ned says. He looks at me, eyes gone milk. “Twenty-three years I’m off the air, and who says I’m nobody? You tell me, Johnny.” He bends in blood coughs, wheezing at the tube in his neck.

  “What’s the big deal?” I say. “Lawyers and secretaries out for lunch, they see some crazy old bastard at an apartment window, and they wave. So what?”

  “So what the hell do you know? You work for me, doc. Understand? You know what I tell you to know. You want to go across the street and sell blood to buy your dope?” His walker scrapes, stirring layers of dust.

  He’s figured it out about me, the H I buy on Lombard Street. Not enough to feed a habit. I have a small itch and I scratch, nights when Ned is sleeping and the syringes are cold in the walls. And I’m no doctor. Two years as a med-tech taught me to pop a bleeder. Stealing from hospital pharmacies put me on the street for a while. A vein collapsed and I lost the tip of my little finger. I can feel the finger still there, throbbing, tickling. Push the plunger and you say, I want. My veins, pumping through those empty hours, grow hungry. I feed them like babies.

  Ned taunts me with big promises, all his shopping-mall and racehorse money one day raining on me. Like buckets of confetti, he tells me, that old gag. I pass for family. No one else is left alive to name in his will. While he’s asleep I search the place, turning up bankbooks, notarized certificates, old bond issues, nothing hard.

  We share two rooms above the Carolina Theatre, where Hobo Ned first got his start in the business. So now he’s come back here to die. In the corner of the big room stands a television camera, black matte and chrome, laced with cobwebs, bent like a giant at the neck. Camera One from Ned’s first morning cartoon show at WFMY. Among my many duties—buying mackerel in sour cream, emptying bedpans—is keeping the lens of the camera polished up. Ned finds his reflection there and smiles at the world. At night the broken glass of marquee bulbs shines like ice on the tar paper roof below us, the streets empty, the buildings around us boarded up. Dead town. Across from us, winos line up to sell their blood. I watch, sleeping in snatches on the window seat, feeding him oxygen when he rattles. From above drifts down the dirty fluff of pigeon nests. I bend over Ned, touch my ear to his chest, stroke his parchy skin, breathing his ammonia. “Anytime,” I whisper into his sleep, could leave you.”

  Restoration begins on the Carolina Theatre, filling our days with the noise of power saws and hammers. The vibrations below us push the dust to the corners of our rooms, shake chalk from the sheetrock. Camera crews arrive from the local TV news. Ned wants the needle every half-hour, so he can stand and watch the trucks pulling in. He pays me extra and I shoot him up. I lift him like
something to drape around me, get him to the window. He pulls his old top hat from the wall and wears it to wave at the work crews. They laugh, turn their faces up to him. It’s 1954 again. Ned’s pale eyes dilate. I spend the money on Lombard Street, two bills bet on a white horse.

  The newspaper runs file photos of Ned in the early days at the Carolina, the sad clown with his hat and cigar, his fingerless gloves, tattered clothes, and two-string mop, painted-on stubble and a broken heart. Ned has me cut out the article and tape it to the wall, where the old ones curl and yellow.

  The day after the photos appear, a woman calls to ask Ned to cut the ribbon on stage at the restored Carolina, where he got his start doing bicycle lotteries, juggling cigar boxes at Saturday matinees. The woman asks me if Ned will need a wheelchair ramp to the stage, if he has any “special needs.”

  “Like what, for instance?” he says when I repeat her question to him. “A pine box? Brass urn for my ashes?” He decides to surprise them all, to stand and give them the full seven minutes of his old mop routine.

  “My makeup kit,” he says. “Find it. I have to rehearse.” Everything here is preserved: the camera, dirty mirror framed by lights, mahogany wardrobe. Clown alley held in dust. The latches on the makeup kit are rusted shut. I snap them and open the box, releasing the smell of greasepaint and spirit gum, still fresh and wet after eighteen years.

  Ned smears his face with the pancake, and the whiteness of it makes his eyes look yellow. It bleeds into the fringes of his brown hair, stops at the wattles of his neck. He lifts a grease pencil to trace his eyebrows, to outline his sad hobo frown. The sleeve of his pajama top slips down to his elbow. He shakes, holding one hand with the other.

  “I can’t,” he says. He looks at me, his mouth a wound in his white face. “You’ll have to do it,” he says.

  “I don’t want to, so forget it.”

  “But you will, Johnny. You’ll do it whether you want to or not. Now get your ass over here.”

  I look at him, thinking of Lombard Street, the needles in the wall. His lips move like gills. Beneath the grease pencil his skin feels wooden, slick from the pancake. From the posters around us I make his face, fill in his eyebrows, trace the wide frown around his mouth, blacken his lips, redden the tip of his nose. It is Hobo Ned, looking as if he could still do his backflip or chase baby chicks around the sound-stage. Twenty-three years erased.

  He looks at himself in the makeup case mirror. “Not bad, Johnny boy. You’re a natural.” Shrunk in his bed, all made up, he looks like a bad dream.

  He asks for a shot. “Make it a double,” he says, and I oblige, hoping it won’t kill him, hoping it will. The nalprozene filters through him and I lift him from bed. He stands without the walker, held by the drug. From the wall he pulls down the two-string mop, the act that made him famous on the Red Skelton Show.

  After I juice him up we make the walk down the hall to the freight elevator. The hall is full of dust and graffiti, the walls peeling, the floor dotted with moths and rat shit. We find our way to the stage and Ned limps across with his two-string mop, wearing a topcoat over his pajamas, leaving his trail in the sawdust.

  “You got a part in this,” he says to me. “My stooge.” His voice echoes in the empty hall. On the ceiling are tangles of wire where the lighting fixtures will go. “You get paid double,” he says.

  “What do I have to do?”

  “Here’s the sketch. I work in this pet shop as a janitor, right? We need a big sign says ‘Pet Shop.’ I’m mopping around, cleaning up dog hair or whatever, then I pantomime dropping and breaking my specs. That’s the set-up, you with me?”

  “So far.”

  “Then you come from the wings carrying a big box marked ‘Poultry’ and you trip and let these baby chicks run loose. A hundred or so. My glasses are busted, so I think the chicks are dust balls or whatever, and I chase them all over hell trying to clean them up with this crummy mop. You try and stop me, and by the blow-off I’m after you with the mop.”

  “Sounds hilarious.”

  “It’s a great gag, let me tell you, bub. A classic.” From somewhere in the hall sounds the pounding of a hammer.

  “Where are we supposed to get baby chicks?” I ask.

  He hasn’t thought of this. For a moment, his eighty-three years bleed through the makeup.

  “Besides that,” I tell him, “they won’t allow it. The animal rights people.”

  “Animal rights? You’re shitting me.” He sits on the stage, wheezing in the dust. I wonder if he might lie down and die right here. His bony ankles stick out of the cuffs of his pajama pants. He doesn’t move.

  “Listen,” I say. “What about ping-pong balls?” Ned looks up at me. “The sign says ‘Sporting Goods’ and I spill a box of ping-pong balls?”

  Without my help, he stands, and walks over to pat my cheek. “You got a future, kid,” he says.

  Back at the room, he is wound up and will not sleep. There is tingling in my hands, my lips numb.

  “I’m going out,” I say. “You lay down and I’ll give you a pill to put you out.” We no longer keep any schedule with his medications. Downstairs the workers have quit for the day; there is silence and the smell of turpentine.

  “No time. We’re in the rushes now, pal,” Ned says to me. From his night table he withdraws a cigar and lights it, striking the match on his iron bed frame, using his thumb to plug the tube in his neck so he can inhale.

  “We got rehearsals. Somebody—you—has to feed me straight lines. I met Chaplin once in New York. He told me, you practice till it looks like falling off a log.”

  “Sorry, Ned. I have to go.” My lips buzz. My hands, the joints of my fingers feel elongated, stretching out the way nights do when Ned is wheezing and I am alone watching Lombard Street, watching light pool on the darkened windows of the Plasma Center and thinking about the frozen bags of blood inside. When the itch grows, you need a bigger scratch. I follow my hand to the knob while Ned watches me. The room is cold.

  “I want you to stay,” Ned tells me. The makeup looks as if it has slid on his face. He raises his hand and pulls money out of the air, tosses it to me. The hundred-dollar bills flutter down.

  “Give me one hour, doc,” he says, “then you’re welcome to go out and kill yourself.” We rehearse until he falls asleep, which every night seems more like he is passing into a coma. The pancake and black frown smear gray across his pillow. I take the bills from the floor and go.

  The next morning he is hard to wake. The shots pass right through him. With a stiff rag and ajar of cold cream I wipe away his makeup. The clown-white fills the tiny cross-hatched ridges in his skin. My own arms are dotted with yellow bruises inside the elbow. I finish cleaning him up, rolling him to change the sheets and wipe away his bile. He sleeps during it all, wheezing through his tube. I sit on the edge of his bed and watch him. With my thumb I plug the tube, hold it closed till he begins to quiver, then pull my hand away. “I keep you alive,” I say. I hold his hand till his eyes flutter open.

  He looks at me. “What’s your name, young soldier?” he says. I feel bad for taking away his makeup, giving him back his old age.

  “Don’t have a name, Hobo Ned. I sold it.” Slowly his fog lifts and his eyes dish around the room, his posters, dead friends, his old life.

  “The shot,” he says.

  “Stabbed you right before you woke up, boss. Give it a few.” He closes his eyes and winces.

  “Tell me again,” he says.

  “You remember. You got a gig. Ribbon cutting downstairs and everybody turning out to see you before you die.”

  “You talk out your ass,” he says. “I’ll outlive you, and you’ll never see a dime.”

  I squeeze his hand and he calls me a fairy. His pupils are turning the color of eggshell.

  “Hey, listen,” he says. “Man walks into a bar, he’s got a duck shoved down the front of his pants…” His words melt into slur, and he sleeps.

  Nights after my visits to Lomb
ard Street, the veins in my arms won’t shut. The blood, unable to clot, runs in thin ribbons over my clothes while I sleep. In the mornings I clean myself up, shivering, praying not to lose another finger. The money gives out while my arms are still hungry. After Ned passes into his nightly coma, I turn the rooms out, searching for the stash he keeps drawing out of thin air with his parlor trick bribes. I peel the walls and pry up loose floorboards, search his pockets, his dresser drawer, the wardrobes and makeup tables in clown alley. Nothing turns up but dust, old playbills, wingtip shoes and dark suits, a smell of loose tobacco and mothballs, of burnt cork and greasepaint.

  I can only wake him now with a fat shot of the nal-prozene; I have long since stopped measuring out the cc’s. The drug is fouling the work of his brain as he spirals down larger doses. Awake, he can move without the walker now, sweep the stage with his two-string mop during rehearsals, even manage a tottering soft-shoe. He is numbness walking, the pain washed out of him.

  “I need more money,” I tell him. There is a looseness in my bowels, and I try to think how long it has been since I have thought of food.

  “You’re dropping weight,” he says, as if reading my mind. “You look worse than I do, like you’re a ghost or something.”

  “I said I need cash, Ned. I’ll fucking walk out of here.”

  “Shut your hole, Casper, and get me the makeup kit. We need to rehearse. I can’t remember anything.”

  “No. More bread. Cough it up.” As I say it, he bends forward in the bed and coughs into his sheet. The stain left there is dark red.

  “Hey, good one there, Casper. I oughta start charging you for straight lines.” He reaches into the night table drawer, draws out a cigar, and lights it. The smoke curls in bluish streamers toward the ceiling. He puffs again and the cigar explodes. From the ragged end he withdraws and unrolls a hundred-dollar bill.