Circle View Read online

  Circle View

  Brad Barkley

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 1996 by Brad Barkley

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  The stories in this collection first appeared in the following publications: “Under Water” in the Greensboro Review; “Circle View” in the Florida Review; “EAT” in the Oxford American; “Porter’s Dodge” in Cimarron Review and Republish; “Knots” in Tampa Review; “The Extent of Fatherhood” and “The Singing Trees of Byleah, Georgia” in the Georgia Review; “Clown Alley” in Willow Springs; “The New Us” in Southwest Review; “Yagi-Uda” in Chattahoochee Review; “Spontaneous Combustion” in Other Voices; “Smoke” in Glimmer Train; and “Escaping” in the Virginia Quarterly Review

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to quote lyrics from “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” Words by Gus Kuhn, Music by Wilbur Schwandt and Fabian Andree. TRO © 2003 1930 (Renewed) 1931 (Renewed) Essex Music, Inc., Words and Music, Inc., New York, Don Swan Publications, Miami Florida and Gilbert Keyes Music, Hollywood, Ca. Used by Permission.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-80-5

  eBook Cover Design: Steven Seighman

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  This book is for Mary.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to my mother and father, to Lucas and Alex, and to Susan Perabo. Thanks also to Randolph Thomas, Steve Yates, John Thompson, Sidney Thompson, David Pratt, Jay Prefontaine, and the rest of the Saturday group. Also Skip Hays, Jim Whitehead, Joanne Meschery, Heather Ross Miller, Bill Harrison, Michael Heffernan, Brian Wilkie, Fred Chappell, Jim Clark, Lee Zacharias, and to Marie France and everyone in the Monday night Maryland group. Finally, I would like to thank the Maryland State Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts for their financial support.

  CONTENTS

  Under Water

  Circle View

  EAT

  The Singing Trees of Byleah, Georgia

  Porter’s Dodge

  Knots

  The Extent of Fatherhood

  The New Us

  Yagi-Uda

  Spontaneous Combustion

  Smoke

  Clown Alley

  Escaping

  UNDER WATER

  I WORK my shift in the tunnel, so the Public Works boys stuck me with a nickname: “Mole.” If they’d asked, I might have picked “Captain Nemo”—working beneath the tidewater, switching the dials, breathing by a gas mask in this drive-through submarine. My job is to keep traffic moving, flash speed limits and warning signs. Long, sodium-vapor days are spent manning the control board, hearing my own breath, and watching the numbers flash: average MPH, leak warnings, and what Ole Butt calls God’s own LED, the CO level. On a given weekend, 143,000 passenger vehicles loop through Ocean Tides Tunnel, tourists bent on surf, sand, and knee-walking drunks. I swim in their fumes, live by the mercy of the mask.

  The first commandment from Mole: Stay In Your Lane. Convertibles run zigzag, radios louder than all hell—wreck bait, headaches for yours truly. Sedans heed the signs our PW boys erect; two-wheelers won’t make up their minds. Station wagons? Thank you, Lord, for station wagons. Above and beyond the call of traffic safety. Usually old people or young mothers, close enough to the tapered ends of life to have a feel for how eggshell fragile it is.

  I learned that again myself, this past Sunday, at home with Marie and Gina. Marie turned her head and set aside her crossword, then drew my attention to the nursery-room wall, to a hepped-up whirring that hovered behind the sheetrock. A Waring blender on puree, I heard. A kazoo the size of a saxophone. With the corkscrew of my Swiss Army knife I managed a hole in the wall, and the wasps poured out like spent shells from an automatic, lofting to the ceiling full of pissed-off whining, bouncing off walls, off Gina’s Snoopy mobile and tea set. Gina slept in her crib as the wasps, big and dark as peach seeds, found the soles of her tiny feet.

  I snatched Gina off the mattress, flicking away wasps like cigarette butts and ignoring a sting I caught on my forearm. Marie jumped out the door shaking insects from her hair. I ran after and slammed the door behind me with the wasps ticking against it, a hailstorm in the spare bedroom. Marie shivered and Gina cried while I held them both, thinking what one wasp sting might do to a thirteen-month-old girl. I chewed cigarette tobacco and pressed it to Marie’s wounds, then taped over the keyhole so none of the flying hell-bugs could escape.

  “Warren, they could have killed her,” Marie said. She leaned her ear against the nursery door, still shivering.

  “But they didn’t,” I told her, stroking her hair. “We’re safe.”

  Most that work the tunnel quit from claustrophobia. But Mole has too much of the real world (wasp attacks, cotton versus disposable) to let head-grown ideas take root. The walls of the tunnel sweat the brackish seawater and no sunlight finds me, but halogens carry their own light and the mask lets me breathe. So where, friends, is the claustrophobia when a man can see, hear, smell (the rubber of the mask), touch, taste (half-hour in the O booth for tuna on rye), and feel the big outdoors of family love in his chest? That night, Gina slept between us, her own bedroom still held hostage by mud daubers. Like an Allied spy in a war movie, I crept on hands and knees to the nursery door, snatched it open, and pitched a spewing insecticide bomb inside, then shoved the door closed. Two wasps escaped; one ended shoe-smacked against the smoke alarm, the other left its sting beside the perfect freckle below Marie’s green eye (her other eye being blue). She screamed and cursed, grabbed the wasp and tossed like a crapshooter, dashing it against the wall.

  By evening Marie looked the victim of a schoolyard bully and had shot a tube of Maybelline Cover-All to no avail (I told her she looked, as ever, beautiful). Gina needed clothes till we could get at her old ones, in the nursery-room dresser, so that night we made for Crabtree Mall. As we pushed the stroller, a short woman with choppy hair stepped up to us, looked at Marie’s swollen and blackened eye, then stood on tiptoe, forehead to my chin.

  “You bastard,” she said to me. “You pig.” She walked away, leaving me guilty as charged for allowing the wasp to escape. Then I understood—my own fists and temper had been accused of this crime. I laughed and shook my head, then saw the tears spill over Marie’s swollen cheek like dew on an apple.

  “Listen,” she said at home. The bug bomb hadn’t quieted the nursery-door hum. I thought of a thousand wasps wearing their own tiny gas masks.

  “I hate this,” she said. “It scares me, Warren. We aren’t safe in our own home.” And I understood. After the wasp attack, I spent the entire workday leaning over the catwalk rail, peering into passing cars to check that parents had their children safely buckled in car seats. When I saw a fat-kneed baby balanced on someone’s lap, I jumped down and ran after, surprised to find myself thinking not one thing of babies and car seats, but of those wasps on Gina’s feet. That night, Marie sent me to the hardware store to buy deadbolt locks for our doors and windows. I offered the obvious, that locks would not keep wasps out. “Wasps are a symptom,” she said.

  At the suggestion of Arco Exterminating, we vacated two days while they stormed the place like a SWAT team, a joke I found funny enough to repeat to the men who arrived on our porch with their yellow jumpsuits and pump jugs. We checked into Jou
rney’s End Econo-Stay, which featured a Wednesday night all-you-can-eat catfish buffet and Swirl-a-Jet bathtubs. The men from Arco found our entire house infested, I was told over the phone. We were lucky to be alive, the man said, those were no mud daubers but hornets; a swarm half the size of the one in our rafters could down a Jersey cow in five minutes. I didn’t volunteer this for Marie, given her recent state. Besides, she seemed to enjoy the Journey’s End, walking Gina down the hallways past the maid carts, throwing leftover biscuits to the gulls using the pool for the off-season, and taking long soaks in the Swirl-a-Jet. Though my days were spent in the tunnel, the rest of the time reminded me of my honeymoon: undertable hand-holding, fifty-one channels of cable, the magic of wrapped soap and maid service. One night, the three of us wore bathing suits and took turns splashing in and out of the churning bathwater. Marie, my mermaid, I said to her. Gina, my tadpole.

  We returned to punchholes in the ceiling and sheetrock, the smell of insecticide, and the carcasses of what looked to be a million hornets littering our floor—our loveseat, shoetrees, and kitchen table—like spent firecrackers after a Chinatown parade. The workmen had left black thumbprints on the closet doors, half-empty styrofoam cups of coffee on the table. One hornet still buzzed against the windowpane in the looping throes of death, a terminal survivor of this bug battleground. Marie held Gina off the floor and minded her tiny grabbing hands, the dead insects crunching beneath Marie’s sandals, blowing away at the breeze of her skirt. Two minutes of this erased two days of semi-honeymoon at the Journey’s End. As Marie swept, her long hair spilled across her face, nearly hiding from my view her eyes and their thread of new tears.

  For a week after, my arms sprouted gifts, flowers. I cooked that weekend, big shish kebabs for Marie and myself, and Gina’s favorite, stewed carrots. Dessert wine followed, and “Yellow Rose of Texas” on my beat-up six-string. Marie sighed, rubbed my cheek with her palm. “You’re trying too hard,” she said.

  “Follow the bouncing ball,” I said to lead the sing-along, head wagging like a spring-neck dog in the back window of a Chevy. “Sing along with Mole.”

  “Don’t call yourself that,” Marie said, and my six rusty strings hummed to silence as she closed herself in behind the bedroom door.

  The next night I arrived home from work and found Marie in the nursery, wiping ink from Gina’s fingers, each stubby one tipped black.

  “What’s all this?” I asked.

  “I’m fingerprinting her,” Marie answered, not looking at me. On the dresser, a half-dozen Polaroids of Gina leaned against the Holly Hobby lamp, pictures in flat light, from the front and in profile, like most-wanted shots on the post office wall. A YWCA pamphlet lay on the bed, “Danger-Proofing Your Child.”

  “What are you charging her with?” I asked, trying for a joke.

  “I’m protecting her,” she said. “Making sure no one takes her.”

  “No one will take her. She’s ours.”

  “You don’t read the paper, Warren. You don’t watch the news. You spend all day buried in that tunnel, no idea of what goes on.”

  She took new Polaroids once a week and bought an elastic leash to connect her wrist to Gina’s for our trips to the mall or the park. She’d sit, biting her thumb, watching special news shows on inner-city drug gangs, and docudramas where they reenacted real-life crimes. One evening, when I’d had enough of sirens and sheeted bodies, I stood and snapped off the TV. Neither of us spoke to fill the quiet. Some nights I would wake at two or three to an empty bed and find Marie in the nursery, not feeding or changing Gina, but just looking at her from the doorway.

  Saturday, the first day of spring, was the annual Public Works/Traffic Safety Iwo Jima Day at the Route 450 Survival Games Park. I boot-clomped downstairs for pancakes, decked out in camo, green face paint, goggles, and oak twigs pinned in my hair. Gina pointed, laughed, and said “Twee.” That’s right, Daddy’s a tree, I told her, and scooped her into my arms. Tree frog, I called her.

  “You’re scaring her,” Marie said, chenille bathrobe belted tight around her. My plate of cakes slid across the table.

  “No, I’m not,” I said, and raised in my defense my armload of giggling baby.

  “No, you’re not,” Marie agreed. “I just wish you wouldn’t go.”

  “I go every year.”

  “You don’t have to go this year, Warren. It’s dangerous. You fire bullets at each other.”

  “Paint balls,” I said. “Harmless as rain.” She shook her head. In past years Marie would kiss and salute me as I walked out the door, have chicken in the Weber and Bud on ice when I got home. The first year we’d dated she’d come with me, joined our squad, and shot Jim Munsun square in the butt.

  Traffic Safety nabbed the PW flag in two hours. I got killed three times, one a clean headshot that left my hair stiff with paint, like old brushes in the basement. At home Marie was hanging laundry, skinny legs sticking out under a sheet. I pictured her sweet face, hidden, mouth full of clothespins. Still feeling combat-ready, I coasted to the end of the drive and slipped out the door, lifted Gina off the ground where she sat by the empty clothesbasket, tossing grass blades into it. I crept up, hoisted her, held her close to me. Tree frog, I whispered, then lifted her away from me and saw the red paint I’d forgotten about smeared across her head, and right then Marie stepped from behind the sheet, saw the bloodied two of us, and screamed so the pins fell from her mouth and disappeared in the grass. Before she calmed, before her hand could hold a cup steady, I had to box my camo and CO2 gun, set them on the curb for Monday trash.

  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 nev
er 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.