Circle View (3 page)

The man had reached the down side of the road toward the drive-in. A child or large dog loped beside him; from this distance Red could not tell which. Each year, two or three visitors found their door—men, usually, with broken down cars or bad directions, like paper scraps blown against a fence, drawn for miles off the flat horizon to the Circle View by the sagging brick projection tower. In winter, the tower dropped bricks on the roof of the house, loud thumps that on cold nights kept Red awake, staring at the ceiling, while in the next room King snored and muttered in his bed.

A small child—a girl—trotted to keep up with the man. He moved like a bent wheel, Red thought. Then she saw: the man's one leg worked inside baggy trousers, tightening and puckering the fabric, and the other leg was not there, had been amputated high up, near his groin, the way a dog has a leg missing. The trouser leg had been cut away, and the man propelled himself on a pair of aluminum elbow crutches.

“My name's John Shire.” The wiry man stood on her front porch, flashing bright movie star teeth. The pale, skinny girl, eight or ten, leaned beside him in a hounds-tooth dress. Her hair hung in dirty tangles to her shoulders.

“Car broke down,” he said. The calluses of Red's hand warmed on the brass knob. She watched him hook the crutch handles over his arm and stand balanced, unswayed.

“No one lives out here,” she told him, leaning her foot on the door. John Shire ran his hand through his thin hair. His muscled arms were decorated with green tattoos beneath black hair, the designs of the tattoos uncertain and smeared, like ink pulled up by a blotter. His cutaway left trouser leg had been knotted up with twine.

“Lost and gone, ma'am,” he said. “Headed for Texas and missed my turn.”

A paper scrap, Red thought, like most of the visitors each year—the drifters, confused UPS drivers, broken downs from the highway into Tulsa. Parents sometimes dragged their bored children to the Circle View, to show them how things were in the old days. Those Red turned away—no movies had been run in fifteen years. She would point to the marquee out front, which displayed no titles, only rock holes, two broken letters, and an abandoned bird's nest. King reminisced with those same visitors over the magic days of drive-in movies, and extracted from them a promise to return the next year, when, bet-your-bottom-dollar, he told them, he would be back in business.

“We could do with a good pull of water,” John Shire said.

A dust devil twirled like a child in the yard, circling toward the house. Red moved to allow the man inside. The girl followed, and Red closed the door.

“How you drive without two good legs?” she asked him. John Shire grinned.

“Still got two good legs,” he said. Red glanced at his knotted-up trousers and felt her face warm.

“King will fix your car,” she said, pointing her chin toward the dirty window, toward King in the back lot. John Shire moved, leaning into the metal crutches, his arm muscles working like small animals beneath the skin. The girl sat in King's worn leather chair and began playing with the fireplace poker. Out back of the brick house was the drive-in, or what remained of it. King was dressed like a golfer in madras pants, a yellow alligator shirt, and a Panama hat. He had looked the same the day Red met him, back in Shelby, when he'd come into her junk shop tracking down a commercial popcorn maker. She listened to him describe his plans for the Circle View, watched his fingers smooth across the mahogany top of a Victrola. Red could find no nostalgia, no longing or ache, in treadle sewing machines or washboards, only money for the light bill. What she couldn't sell she'd discard. But in this King Burgess, big and ruddy-faced among the Flexible Flyers, oak rockers, and Elvis whiskey decanters, she had heard a pining love for the past and, more importantly, a chance for good business. She had left with him the next week.

In the kitchen, Red blew the dust from two glasses and filled them with water, then topped off the jar of dark wine she had been drinking.

“I get it,” John Shire said as he took the glass. “That's your daddy.”

“My husband.” She waved her wedding band, stuck on her finger.

They watched King work to reattach one of the window speakers to its pole, the rows of speaker poles like a stunted orchard grown out of broken asphalt, clumps of weeds, and scattered chips of paint peeled off the house. The glass-bead screen at the back of the property, punched through with holes, had one white corner bent over, like a worn page in a story book.

“I get it,” John Shire said again. “A real mom-n-pop operation. You cook chili dogs, the old man runs movies, boys park their cars and bird-dog their best girlfriends.”

“There's none of that out here,” Red said. She glanced at the girl, who still had not spoken. The girl looked at Red and blinked, then groped between the cushions of King's chair, pulling out paper clips and linking them into a chain. John Shire grinned and stared openly at Red's chest, which made her look down at herself—the torn T-shirt and faded jeans, slippers held together with duct tape. She gathered her hennaed hair away from her shoulders to pull it back, and immediately regretted raising her arms, which lifted her breasts. She looked away.

“The drive-in isn't working,” she said. “Hasn't had any business for fifteen years, since before we owned it.” King convinced her they'd fill the place every night with family classics shown on the four-story screen, concessions sold in the booth lit by yellow bug lights. She'd auctioned off the junk store (except what King insisted they keep) and moved here with him. Factory layoffs in the area had been like opening a drain, the town and businesses, all the people, funneling away. Then changes to the county roads put them on a dead-end and stirred up the dust that settled like a blanket over the decaying body of the Circle View. King worked day and night the first year—patching pavement, rewiring, pulling weeds. Evenings, he would spill on the kitchen floor cardboard boxes full of four-inch plastic letters, arrange them to spell out titles of movies as they would appear on his marquee. Like a kid playing with blocks, she thought. He spent five thousand of what they had saved on a new projector, then, fooling himself that they were close to opening, blew the rest ordering from catalogs prints of his favorite movies—
National Velvet, Citizen Kane, Swiss Family Robinson, Dr. Zhivago
—before they had a new screen to show them on, or car speakers to hear them. Red thought the movies were awful, the kind people watched on Sunday afternoons with a hangover and baseball rained out. They'd do better money, she told him, with dirty movies, the X-rateds. Red knew business, what people would pay to see. But King said he wouldn't have his lot full of men in smelly raincoats, and besides, he believed interest in sex was diminishing. Especially here at home, had been Red's silent answer to this. Silent, because King's worries over the difference in their ages and his inability to, as he put it, “satisfy her desires” had drawn her, those first years, into a habit of reassurance. King would hug her, pinning her arms and rubbing her back, her cheek pressed to the plastic buttons of his sweater, his pink skin dry and dark spotted.

“I still need you like this, your companionship,” he would say to her. She had, for those years, kept her silence, then one night come to the end of it. King had hugged her, rubbed her back, told her what he still needed. She opened her dried lips against the wool and cold buttons of his sweater.

“And I need a good fuck,” she said, biting the words.

She felt the rush of heat rise in his doughy neck as she backed away from him. He turned from her, and had not touched her since; she had not wanted him to. They occupied the house like furniture. His Navy pension paid the necessities and not much else. King settled into tinkering with the Circle View the way other men his age puttered in a vegetable garden. The only difference, Red often thought, is that those men don't rely on a garden for everything, won't starve if it goes bad.

Red introduced King to John Shire. King shook his hand and asked Shire if he'd come to be disabled while serving his country. John Shire saluted and answered “Yes sir,” then cut his eyes at Red and winked. He looked nice when he did that, she thought. Like someone who could turn trouble into a good time. King bent down toward his leather chair, the heat of sunburn radiating off the back of his neck.

“And who might this be?” he asked the pale girl. She smiled, her lips pulled back like the skin of a cut.

“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.