Circle View (2 page)

Marie's depression kicked her into reminiscence on the same day a 240 Volvo climbed the tunnel wall. Rain fell on Ocean Tides, cars entered the tunnel with wipers slapping. Pavement at both ends of the tunnel darkened with water pulled in by tires, the tires hissing as they ran through it. On the out-east side, the Volvo hit the darker stretch of asphalt as the blowout rebounded off the tunnel walls and reached my ears; it is a sound I know and am afraid of, not gunshot-loud but muffled, like a fat man punched in the stomach. I heard the fat-man punch, the rabbit squeal that followed, then felt the shake of ground beneath me as the crunch sounded, and I worried there might be children in the car. When I lifted my mask, the smell of gasoline was immediate, which meant foam trucks from OTFD.

After I'd radioed in, Joe Kreeger from the tollbooths ran down to describe the accident for me, the Volvo end-up against the tunnel wall, driver with a broken leg. By then, traffic had backed up past the in-east side, and drivers stood outside their cars, on the bumpers, trying to see the trouble. In-west traffic slowed from rubbernecking. I flashed a MAINTAIN POSTED SPEED for the west side, a FOR SAFETY'S SAKE, REMAIN IN YOUR VEHICLE for the east side. The CO level clicked off like a digital stopwatch, the motionless traffic making no breeze to wipe away its own poison. Colorless, odorless. Words I had memorized during training, till CO meant death to me in the simple way that for children death is a bad man, a bogeyman, for Marie is hornets and the evening news. I remembered Ole Butt, my supervisor, who on the day he gave us the masks held a number two pencil between thumb and forefinger.

“A hole this big,” he said, “and you're breathing your own grave.”

Those words bobbed to the surface of my brain as I watched the red LED blur, and I felt then the tonnage of seawater above and around me, felt myself enclosed in the poison air, buried like Jonah from Gina's
Golden Treasury of Bible Stories
—in the belly, praying for deliverance. Colorless. Odorless. But you can't bolt the door against gas any easier than hornets, and what else for Jonah to do—in the ocean, shadow of the whale behind him—but swim and swim and not look back? I set to work, trusting the mask and the men who made it.

At home Marie had Broadwater High School yearbooks spread across the rug, running her fingers over photos of boys in puka shells and earth shoes, girls in bandannas and mood rings, reading the faded autographs.

“Cleaning the attic?” I asked.

“Our parents never had to have us fingerprinted,” she said. “Milk cartons had pictures of Elsie the Cow.”

“So now we have ways to locate runaways. Progress.”

“There.
Right
there,” she said, standing, pointing at my chest. “Exactly the point. There
were
no missing kids then. Everyone stayed home. Things were safe.”

“My uncle got killed on a bow-hunting trip in 1965.”

“Accident,” she said. “No one slit his throat in his bed. Sharon Beeler and I used to camp outside on the front lawn overnight. One year we hitchhiked to Myrtle Beach. Our front door stayed unlocked. No deadbolts.”

“Everybody says things used to be better but it's not true,” I said. “I helped my father dig a bomb shelter in our backyard, stocked it with gallon water jugs and C rations. He kept a rack of loaded twelve-gauges in the front hallway.”

“You're remembering wrong, Warren,” she said. “Deliberately remembering wrong.”

Marie didn't speak much the rest of the evening, and I kept remembering wrong. The Wilsons, friends of my parents, whose boy suffocated in an abandoned refrigerator. The night at the drive-in when my father took away a jack-knife from a teenage boy, snapped off the blade, and handed it back to him. Marie was watching a TV special, “Murder in Our Nation's Capital,” and I picked up the senior yearbook to thumb through and find my own squirrelly picture. Someone had blackened out my front teeth. I found the picture of Coach Westafer, who cut me from roundball the first day out. “No such thing as a damned five-foot basketball player,” he said. He wore a red T-shirt and a silver whistle. I can still hear him. I made all the games selling concessions, popping corn, and scraping sno-cones. After the last game of the season I walked up to Coach Westafer. “Five-foot-
four
,” I told him.

I got up from my chair and turned off the TV.

“Listen,” I said to Marie, “let's us three go to a basketball game.” I grinned watching the notion settle over her face.
“Gooo
Panthers,” I said.

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.

T
HROUGH 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.