Circle View Read Online Free

the man propelled himself on a pair of aluminum elbow crutches.
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œCar 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.
    â€œNo 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.
    â€œLost 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.
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œHow you drive without two good legs?” she asked him. John Shire grinned.
    â€œStill got two good legs,” he said. Red glanced at his knotted-up trousers and felt her face warm.
    â€œKing 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.
    â€œI get it,” John Shire said as he took the glass. “That’s your daddy.”
    â€œMy 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.
    â€œI get it,” John Shire said again. “A real mom-n-pop operation. You cook chili dogs, the old man runs movies, boys