Circle View

by Brad Barkley

  “Rose,” she said. “Rose Shire.” They were the first words she had spoken.

  “What brings you out to visit me?” King asked her.

  “Daddy’s car broke down,” she said. “We’re playing a joke on Mama.” Red and King both looked at John Shire.

  “Where she gets these ideas,” he said.

  They walked out to examine the broken-down Chevy Nova, Red drinking wine from her jar, King carrying his big wooden toolbox. John Shire made small grunts with the effort of working the crutches amid bits of broken concrete. Red walked behind him, watching the jump of muscle beneath the taut, brown skin of his arms, following the rhythm as he worked the crutches, his elongated triceps twitching like snakes. His smell was a mix of cologne and cigarettes.

  Inside the yellow car was a homemade rigging of ropes, coat hanger wires, and levers made from two-by-twos, slick and dirty with wear. King deemed it all worthy of Rube Goldberg; John Shire said no, he’d thought it all up himself. It allowed him to drive with just his hands.

  “Here, Ace,” John Shire said to King. “Let me show you what works.” The engine had quit on him, he explained, and would not start. King soon found the problem under the hood. A coat hanger wire leading from a small lever on the dash, through the firewall, to the choke had kinked and caught around the fuel line. In two minutes, it was fixed and running.

  “What’s the heart of an engine?” King asked, his head still under the hood. Flecks of grease dirtied the tail of his golf shirt.

  “Not a clue,” John Shire answered.

  “Carburetor—yours is black, carbon fouled. Stay for dinner, I’ll clean her up for you.”

  “Okay,” John Shire said, his voice empty of gratitude. King scratched his head under his hat.

  “Or stay the night, and in the morning I’ll patch that muffler for you, before you go deaf.” He shouted over the engine noise to emphasize his point.

  “Ain’t got anywhere to be.” John Shire looked at Red and smiled big. A swirl of dust kicked up and blew around them. She squinted against the flying grit, her eyes blurry with tears. The white of John Shire’s movie star teeth shone like snow in the sun, nearly blinding her before she shut her eyes completely.

  After King had the carburetor apart and soaking in kerosene, he went out back to finish his job on the speaker stalks. Rusted out connections had to be resoldered, and new wiring was needed leading to the main switch box in the projection tower on the back of the house. Rose followed him out and knelt on the tacky pavement beside him, her hands curled like dried leaves in her lap. King explained every step as he performed it, named for her the different tools in his box so she could hand them to him when he asked. She said nothing, would offer her smile, gums and small teeth, when he looked at her. He began asking for the tools with made-up names—Sammy Screwdriver, Wanda Wirecutters—trying to coax a laugh from her. One of the stray cats, the flop-eared one, appeared from around the house. The cat’s ear was bent over, King told her, to mark its place in a fight. She grinned. To King it seemed somehow as if she wanted to laugh and simply didn’t know how, the way he’d like to be able to play piano and couldn’t.

  “We get this all wired up, see,” King said to her. “Patch up the screen and rebead it, crank the projector, fire the marquee, open the gates and boom!—we’re in business.”

  “What’s it for?” Rose asked.

  “What’s what for?”

  “Screen,” she said. “Rebead, marquee, protector.”

  “Projector,” King said. “For showing movies, of course.” She looked at him.

  “You know movies?” King asked. “You’ve seen them.” She shook her head.

  “Then you’ve seen them on TV. Not the same, but better than nothing.”

  “Daddy busted out the TV,” she said.

  King could only look at her, her pale face reddening from the sun and heat of asphalt. How to describe movies for her? He might as well try to describe the ocean to a blind man.

  “Movies are stories,” he started.

  “Tell me one.” Her pinched face brightened. “Tell me a movie.”

  “Stay here,” he said. She stood, her thin knees red and dimpled with bits of gravel. King walked to the garage and pulled his Olds 88 to the lot, steering around chunks of pavement and broken bottles. He slid into the space beside the newly wired speaker. Dusk was near, the sky a liquid blue, the parking lot giving back its saved heat to the cool evening. King motioned to Rose; she came around to the passenger side and climbed in, slamming the door. King rolled down the window to unhook the speaker from its post. He stretched the coiled wire and hung the metal box on the window ledge.

  “Watch the screen,” he told her, and she slid forward on the seat, hands against the dash. “Once upon a time,” he said—and realized he hadn’t thought of what to tell her, that he had never, in fact, told a story to a child. Rose cut her eyes at him. He could think only of his favorite movie, Citizen Kane.

  “Once there was a rich man,” he began.

  “Like you,” Rose said, and grinned.

  “Well, okay.” King smiled at her and pulled off his hat to keep it from hitting the headliner. His hair, he saw in the rearview, was the color of a honeydew melon. The hat had left a dent in his hair, circling his head.

  “The man’s name was Kane, and he was old, but when he’d been a boy his father wasn’t nice to him, and beat him.” Rose lowered her face and looked into her lap. “Watch the screen,” King said quietly.

  “Kane had a sled he loved very much, and when he grew up he got to be rich as a prince and sold newspapers. He had a wife and a son who died, then he married a singer.” King faltered, realizing it might not be the right story for a child, trying to leave out parts about divorce and adultery, about Susan leaving Kane, Kane sliding into despair, dying alone. Instead, King played up Kane’s glass ball with the snow scene inside, the fact that at the end of his life he still loved his sled, which—King made a big show of telling her—had been called Rosebud. He did not tell her the glass ball got broken, the sled burned.

  “That’s almost your name,” he said. “Rosebud.” At this she did laugh, the car too dark for him to see her.

  “I wish I could tell it better,” he said. At times he had tried to describe his favorite movies for Red, but she wasn’t interested in hearing, or in movies at all, for that matter. Why pay three dollars for a movie, she always asked, when you could read a book for free? But she never read books, only watched soap operas on her little black and white TV, the screen no bigger than King’s hand. She watched them all day now, a vinegar jar and rag in her lap to wash dust from the tiny screen. When King passed through the room she said nothing, or worse, spoke sentences that had nothing in them. This was the way it had been since he last touched her. I need a good fuck. Nights, her words came back to him, stealing his sleep. He would rise from bed in darkness, step quietly to the latrine and remove his pajamas to study himself in the mirror—the flabbiness he had aged into, his lifeless, flaccid penis. His body, still sturdy, had turned against him, been derelict in its duty. He would silently curse it, curse Red’s unhappiness with him and his dislike for her, before he drew on his pajamas and got into bed, trying to find sleep before morning.

  “I like that snowball,” Rose said. In the dark her shining eyes still watched the giant screen, which glowed in the dusk like a sheet that had been forgotten on the line and left out overnight.

  Inside, King watched Red unfold his old Navy cot and throw sheets over the couch for their guests. She warmed the food and called everyone in, blowing dust off the table before setting the places.

  They sat to dinner, Shire leaning his arms on the table, hovering over his plate. The muscles in his face worked with chewing. He clutched his fork, shoveling in the food. Shire looked up and saw King looking at him.

  “So, Pop,” he said, “I see you pulled your car around. We having a show tonight? Open for business?”

  “Well, no. Not exactly.” King felt
the sunburn on his face.

  “C’mon, Pop, you can tell me. A little Deep Throat, huh? Choke your chicken? Red knows what I’m talking about.” King watched John Shire smile and wink at Red. To his surprise, she blushed and grinned as she swallowed wine from her jar. He thought of the first days of their marriage, when she would come to him, naked and flushed.

  “How’s the car, boss?” Shire said. “Don’t know what I’d do if I got stuck here.” He smiled at King, knife and fork in his fists.

  “Your car will be driveable first thing in the morning,” King said, “if you’d care to leave.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “Do you have a snowball?” This came from Rose, her skinny arms, like her father’s thick ones, propped on the table. The question seemed not to be directed toward anyone in particular.

  “Snowballs in July. What a dumbshit.” John Shire snorted a laugh. Red gave him a smack on the arm. King looked at her.

  “A snowball, Mr. King,” Rose said. “Like the man in the movie.” King mentally sorted through the boxes they had saved from the junk shop; the closest thing to a snow dome he could remember seeing was a set of Currier and Ives plates.

  “We’ll have to see, sweetheart.”

  “I’ll fetch dessert,” John Shire said, and hopped to the cabinet beneath the sink, brought back the bottle of Wild Turkey. King could never remember where to find the bottle himself, and was startled by this man’s familiarity with their kitchen. John Shire uncapped the bottle, poured into the cups that had been set out for coffee. As he raised his cup, Red raised hers and they clinked.

  “Hi-de-ho,” he said.

  Red laughed, shook her head. “John, you’re a stitch.” Her face shone with high color, and her teeth, when she laughed, were wet and bright. “King, don’t you think John’s a stitch?”

  John Shire lifted the bottle and refilled the cups, doubling the untouched portion in King’s cup. He lowered the bottle, then, as a second thought, raised it to pour half an inch into Rose’s empty milk glass.

  “Drink it down before it swims away.” Rose lifted the glass and licked her lips. King laid his hand across her wrist, not much thicker than the grip of his putter.

  “Honey, no. Not for children.”

  John Shire gestured, sloshing drink across the chicken bones on his plate. “Hell, let her drink it. I started younger than her, never hurt me.”

  “Maybe she shouldn’t,” Red said. “But when I was little and had a cough, my mama used to give me a tiny shot of whiskey.”

  “Well, there you go,” John Shire said. “She gets the hooch and doesn’t even have to bother with a cough.”

  Rose lowered her face to the rim of the glass, sniffed, wrinkled her nose.

  “Honey, please,” King said. She looked at King and grinned, handed the glass over to him.

  “Suture yourselves,” John Shire said. “More for me.”

  After dinner, King and the girl headed for the concession booth out back, where King had promised to let her see the cotton candy machine. King left holding her skinny hand. The kid bothered Red, nothing but pale bones and that gash of a smile. It always surprised her how much King liked children, how they reacted toward him. She’d seen it before, on trips to the grocery store with him. Kids would search him out, as if in his bright clothes he were a clown sent to entertain them. Early in their marriage he had asked Red for children, spoken the words to her back as she lay curled to the side of the bed they once shared. Now, even if she did want children, he wouldn’t be able. His problem, he called it. Her problem too.

  “That kid’s in for a disappointment,” Red told King. “Nothing to spin in that machine but cobwebs and dust. If the damn thing worked.”

  “My dear, you forget the power of pretend,” he said. No, she hadn’t, she thought. Her own happiness had operated on it for eleven years.

  After King and Rose left, Red poured a bourbon for herself and another for John Shire. The day had produced on him a shadow of beard, like a backdrop to those white teeth. When he scratched his neck, the coarse whiskers rasped, brown skin taut across his jutting Adam’s apple. Red thought of King with his golf shirts buttoned to the neck, the roll of flesh pushed out, soft as wet sand. John Shire seemed solid and flat as an ironing board, his muscles connecting hard angles of bone and sinew, his movements as exact and purposeful as the rope and levers rigged in his car. Such easiness and grace she saw in how he tilted a glass, set his elbows on the table, smiled, that she forgot, sitting with him, that part of him was missing.

  “How did you lose your leg?” she asked. He looked at her several moments without speaking; she began to think it was the wrong question, something he didn’t talk about.

  On his twenty-eighth birthday, he explained, he and some friends sat on the tracks in the woods near town, smoking dope and flinging beer bottles at trees. When the headlights of the sheriff’s jeep found them, they scattered. John Shire took off across the trestle, where the jeep couldn’t follow. He stepped quickly in the dark, smelling the creosote that made his boots tacky on the ties. A hundred feet below shone the creek, dark as oil in the moonlight, against which he saw the ties in silhouette, feeling his way with his feet to avoid the ten inches of open space in between. With too much to smoke he began to watch the moon reflected in the water, floating there like a ball dropped down, and twenty feet from the end of the trestle he stepped between and down through, his thigh wedged hard between the ties. Stuck. He stopped his story and grinned.

  “So, what do you think happens next?”

  “God,” she said, and shut her eyes. A chill pricked her spine. “The train.”

  “Nothing. I waited for the damn train, got myself ready for it, even prayed for it once or twice, but nothing. Sun came up a couple times. I slept and passed out, shouted when I could think of it. After three days I’d lost enough weight or the leg had withered enough to wedge it back out. Dead when I pulled it out, gangrene. I hauled it back to town and it weighed heavy as a young’un.” John Shire reached and with his hands shaped in the air his missing thigh.

  “It hurts, what’s missing. Hurts like a bitch.”

  Red’s own legs had gone numb where she sat at the edge of her chair. She closed her eyes, trying to hear the sound of the creek, the groan of wooden beams beneath the trestle. But there was only the familiar silence, a dust-heavy quiet. Red opened her eyes and put her hands around John Shire’s fingers, both of them now holding the missing limb.

  “You ain’t stuck,” he whispered.

  As he entered the projection tower and started up the wooden stairs, King held Rose’s hand, tiny, fragile as bird bones. At the top was the projection booth, a room he’d not visited for a year. Insulation was gone from the lightbulb wire that dangled from the ceiling—chewed away, he imagined, by mice. Dust coated the room, the movie print boxes stacked on the floor, the plastic tarp thrown over the projector. Stacked in corners were crates of things they’d saved from Red’s junk shop: washboards, odd pieces of depression glass, wind-up toys. Rose found the toys and set them off, let them clatter on the floor, stirring dust.

  King emptied a box marked “Odds and Ends” in what he recognized as his own handwriting. Inside, near the bottom, he found what he’d searched for: a glass snow dome. When he lifted it he discovered it was not glass but plastic; inside, an elephant held in his trunk a banner that read “Goldwater in ‘64.” Liquid in the dome had evaporated, and the snow scratched inside like grains of sand.

  “Look what I found,” King said. Rose looked up from the toys, reached to take the snow dome. She held and then shook it, frowned. This was not the magical item he’d described for her, was not at all like Charles Kane’s talisman; it was, simply, a piece of junk. King shrugged and took it back from her, set it on the ledge of the glass projector window.

  “Come look.” He turned over a crate for her to stand on to see out, held her shoulders and pointed. He remembered he had shown Red this same view the first day he brought h
er out here with him.

  “A beam of light comes out of the machine,” he said to Rose. “Travels over the heads of the people in their cars, shines on the screen. People watch the light on the screen, the stories carried in it, and they laugh or feel sad.” She stood without speaking, her gaze focused toward the square of white screen. Behind her, King saw her pale face reflected in the tiny window, could see the shine and flicker of her eyes searching the dark. Below, he heard the back screen door click shut, and cupped his hands to the window to see. He patted Rose on the shoulder.

  “You go on to bed now, honey. You’re tired.”

  She leaned and kissed his cheek before she stepped off the crate and headed downstairs toward the cot set up for her by the open front window. King snapped off the bulb, cupped his hand to the glass, and, as his eyes adjusted to the dark, saw the slow-moving figure of Red, the pale blue of her shirt—beside her, the drunken ease with which John Shire moved on his crutches. They stopped, and Red swung a bottle to her lips. It glinted in the moonlight like a blade and made him think of a sword swallower in a movie he’d once seen. Red held the bottle for John Shire to drink, then wiped his chin with her finger. King watched them pick their way across the lot and swing open the door of his Olds, still parked beside the speaker in the expanse of black pavement littered with bright shards of glass. They bent and climbed in the back seat, the oily glint of John Shire’s hair visible beside flashes of her white skin. They moved in close to one another, then sank, past where he could see them, as if sinking in a pool.

  “I won’t allow it,” he whispered, aware of Rose downstairs. He pressed his fingers to the glass, and watched for several minutes. They did not reappear. As King turned from the window, his elbow knocked the snow dome and he caught it before it fell. He thought again of Citizen Kane, of what he’d left out as he told the story to Rose. King tipped his hand to let the plastic snow dome fall to the floor, where it did not shatter but skitted across the floor in the dark, the dried bits of snow rattling inside.