Circle View Read Online Free Page A

park their cars and bird-dog their best girlfriends.”
    â€œThere’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.
    â€œThe 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œAnd 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