Circle View (21 page)

By this time, he said, he'd taken all his pills and had started on the handful of aspirin I kept in a shoebox in the bathroom. But he said that the aspirin was thinning his blood, that there was new bleeding in his bowels and in his cough.

“What's the brave thing? Die at home?” he said. Purvis and I said nothing.

“This pain's not getting any better,” Eck said. He looked at the floor, as if embarrassed to admit pain.

“So where's this place you want to go?” I asked, thinking of Washington, the beat around Pennsylvania Avenue and Dupont Circle Eck had walked during the Depression, or even the White House, where he'd guarded Roosevelt and once played cribbage with the president in the Rose Garden. Those were the times out of which Eck brought the stories I remembered, the photographs he passed around and carried in his wallet. Washington was a six-hour drive away. I knew he would never make it. The pain of all those miles would be too much.

“I'd like to see the Reynolds Tobacco Company, Robert,” he said. “The Number 12 plant downtown.”

It had been eight years since Reynolds moved its corporate headquarters to Atlanta (the day the news hit the papers, Eck paced the hotel room shouting: “Bastards, bastards,
bastards
. You think they'll rename their damn cigarettes ‘Atlantas'?”). The work of all the old factories moved to new computer-run facilities out in Tobaccoville and Clemmons. All of the red-brick plants had been left abandoned downtown.

“I thought you were going to tell me you wanted to see Washington,” I said.

Eck shook his head. “That job was like eating your dessert first. Riding around on a motorcycle, marching in parades.” He shook his head. Purvis nodded.

“But Reynolds is closed,” I said.

“I'd guess there's a hundred ways in and out of that building. We used to call them coffee-break exits.” He smiled. “Trust me,” he said.

The chain link fence around Number 12 lay broken in half a dozen places, the NO TRESPASSING signs bent and rusted. Plywood boards had been cut to fit inside the brick window frames, and the front doors were chained and padlocked. The pavement around the building was spattered white with the droppings of pigeons that roosted in the exhaust grates of the ventilation fans. Eck pointed to a window beside the last platform of the fire escape. When I climbed up and pushed, the window pivoted open. I looked inside, at the factory lit here and there by shaded bulbs that hung down on long cords from the rafters. It smelled like someone's attic. I was startled to see the machinery still in place. I eased through the window and found footing on a narrow ladder mounted on the wall, then climbed down and pried open one of the big delivery doors for Eck and Purvis.

“Never heard it so quiet,” Eck said. Our entry had stirred a layer of dust from the floor, swirling it into truncated cones around the shaded bulbs. The machines were covered with streaks of dust-filled oil and rust. I shouted
hello
to hear the echo.

Purvis cleared his throat. “It's interesting that many trace the origins of the Industrial Revolution to the early perfection—” He glanced at Eck and was quiet.

Eck turned and stood a moment, then moved away from us, rubbing the back of his neck. We followed, not speaking. The gray machines filled the room, several hundred of them in neat rows, like pianos in a warehouse. Eck moved along the row of machines, touching each one as he came to it.

“Paul Holcomb, Mark Vernon, Lee Hines, Tim Lewey, Bill Tatum, J. T. Reid,” he said, naming the men who had run the machines. He stopped at the next-to-last one in the row and thumped it with his knuckles. “Eck Voight,” he said.

He walked around his machine three times, wincing as he bent to peer underneath. He fingered the gears and spit on the glass dials to wipe them clean with his thumb.

“A thousand smokes a minute,” he said. “How many is that times eight hours a day for twenty-eight years?” I could see Purvis doing the math in his head. Behind one machine was a wheeled canvas trolley, cut tobacco still left in the bottom. Eck lifted a clump of it, sniffed it and made a face, then dumped it into the hopper of the making machine.

“Fix those rusted parts, calibrate it, and this thing could work good as new,” he said. He tapped the machine with his fist. “Crank it up and roll a tray full. Wouldn't that be something.”

“No cure for obsolescence,” Purvis said. Then he flushed and looked away for having said it.

I heard the cops before I saw them—the jingle of key rings, the squeak of leather holsters. I pulled Eck and Purvis by their arms and headed out of the light. Eck led us to a corner behind a brick furnace. We watched the two cops walk out of the next room, their radios squawking. In the dim light their badges glinted and the beams of their flashlights cut all around us.

Eck leaned toward me. “Sorry, Robert,” he whispered. “No run left in me.”

“They'll assume we're juveniles, that we've high-tailed it,” Purvis said. “You watch.” And we stood, waiting for what he said to come true. In the dark, Eck's eyes shone; I heard Purvis breathing behind me. The cops tried the doors, shined their flashlights into the rafters, and then left. We heard them drive away.

We walked back into the faint light. “We'd better move along now,” Eck said.

“I think so,” Purvis answered.

“Hold it,” I said. I put my hand on the making machine, the pale green paint cool and slick. “You said you wanted to make a cigarette, I think you ought to make one.”

Eck shook his head. “First off, there's no paper in the rollers, no blade in the cutter, and the moisteners are dried up.”

“Then we'll just run the damn thing, for the sound of it.” I grabbed the red handle on the side of the machine and pulled the rusted switch to ON. Nothing.

“This plant went power off eight years ago, Robert,” Eck said. “You're smarter than that.”

I worked the lever back and forth, then put my ear to the power box. I heard a faint hum, like a wasp trapped inside.

“It's got juice,” I said. I leaned against the machine and slid my hands between the rollers under the hopper, trying to force them. My hands slipped out, black with oil and dust. I jimmied the switch again, banged it with my fist, then stretched fully across the line of rollers and wedged my hands in as far as I could, pulling until I shook, breathing the burned oil smell of the machine. My fingers began to slip, and then I felt Eck's hands grip my shoulders and jerk me backward.

“What in hell is wrong with you, Robert? If that thing did crank up, you'd lose half your goddamn arm.”

I wiped my face on my sleeve.

“Just leave it alone,” Eck said. His voice echoed. I hadn't seen him as angry since I was fifteen and he caught me cheating at poker. We stood there in the quiet.

Purvis cleared his throat. “Well,” he said.

My hands shook and I pushed them into the pockets of my jeans, nearly crushing my cigarettes.

“Wait a minute,” I said. I took the bent pack of Camel filters from my pocket, shook one out, and offered it to Eck.

“It's an Atlanta cigarette,” I said. For a minute he looked at me, then he took the cigarette and studied it, held it familiarly between his two fingers where the nicotine stains had long since faded. He sniffed it, broke off the filter, and lifted the cigarette to his mouth.

“Fire it up,” he said.

I lit it for him, cupping the match the way he'd shown me twenty years earlier. The tip flared, the paper crackling and falling away in ash. Eck pulled deep and held it, suppressed a cough, then exhaled as fully as he could, the cloud of smoke twisting in rags.

“Good as the first one?” I asked.

“Better,” Eck said. “It's the last one.”

He laughed, threw the cigarette to the concrete floor, and stamped it out.

“Let's get the hell out of here,” he said. He lifted his arm around my shoulder, his motion scattering the last tatters of smoke like he'd chased them away.

Eight months after we buried Eck, I drove downtown to the Robert E. Lee and found Purvis, still the same, milking Desdemona. He answered the door with his shirt sleeves rolled up.

“Trying my hand at cheese making,” he said. “An ancient art, Robert. My eyes won't let me read much anymore.” On the floor sat a copper bucket with an inch of the milk in the bottom. Desdemona stood sniffing the hot plate. Purvis moved around the room straightening piles of books, stuffing trash into his pockets. A fan rotated on top of the TV, the breeze from it slowly turning the front wheel of Eck's bike, still suspended from the ceiling.

“I wanted to see how you're doing,” I said. I felt awkward, standing with this man I'd known for seventeen years.

“You're not remarried are you?”

“Not yet,” I said, as if I had any prospects. I had last spoken to Debbie three months before, drunk one night, a conversation that showed me only that I had nothing left in me to say to her. I hung up and, staggering, penciled in a hundred zeros beside the last dollar figure at the baseboard, then pulled out all the Bic pens and put them away.

“Are you strong, Robert?” Purvis asked. I thought he meant emotionally, following the divorce, Eck's death.

“Yes, Purvis. I'm fine.”

“But are you
strong?
Make a muscle.”

He felt my muscle, such as it is. “You'll do,” he said. “I have a bad tooth and I want you to pull it.”

I looked at him. “Purvis—I don't—I think you'd better see a dentist.”

“I've seen him. I need a tooth pulled. I paid for a diagnosis, why not hire on the muscle gratis?”

I suspected that he hadn't seen a dentist, that rent increases were eating up his Social Security, that he was living on goat cheese and the cooking sherry he was drinking.

“What would I have to do?” I said.

From a cigar box filled with pliers, scissors, and picture hangers he pulled out an antique dental tool, which looked like an old iron corkscrew but with a hook at the end. “Tooth extractor,” he said. “Picked it up at a flea market.”

Before I had a chance to speak, he poured sherry over the hook and began packing his cheek with Kleenex.

“One quick turn and the damn thing's out,” he said, his voice muffled. He sat in a straight chair, leaned back his head, and opened his mouth, exposing his yellowed, cracked teeth. He pointed to the bad one, the gum below it red and swollen. I had to fight the urge to walk out and leave him there. Purvis positioned the extractor against his tooth, the handle sticking out of his mouth like a propeller. He braced his hands on the chair and looked up at me. I took a breath, gripped the handle of the extractor, then held steady the side of his head and twisted. Purvis grunted and shut his eyes. Blood soaked into the Kleenex. The extractor handle refused to move, like it had been cast in cement. I tightened my grip on the extractor and tried again. Just as I decided to give up, his jaw popped, the tooth tore loose of its flesh, and blood pooled in the space beneath his tongue. He went into the bathroom where I heard him spit and rinse.

I stood next to Eck's cot and petted Desdemona, the extracting tool in my hand. On the floor between my feet was the tooth, bloody and pulpy.

“Sit, Robert,” Purvis said from the bathroom. “Let me pour you a sherry.”

Before I sat, I took up his rotted tooth from the floor and started cleaning it with my handkerchief. Purvis walked out of the bathroom, fresh blood in the corners of his mouth.

“You'll stay, won't you?” Purvis asked.

“Here it is,” I said. I held the tooth out to him, and he squinted to look at it. It had shined up like a seashell, yellowed and scarred, jagged against my palm. I looked around at all the things Purvis had saved, and knew he would want to keep this as he had kept his trick ashtrays and globe banks and books, Eck's clothes and bicycle. I thought of such things that are kept, or lost, or happened upon by accident. I lifted the tooth to the light.

“Can I keep this?” I said.

N
ED Samuelson is his real name. Every two hours I part his toes and push a needle through his skin, his veins as familiar to me as my own. He uses up his days shriveled in vinegar bedding. The nalprozene runs the streams of his blood, empties into his brain. He rides away his hurt. There are days I let it get to me, let this dust and wet stench choke me. I choke on the ragged life Ned clings to, on not taking myself out of here for good. Then the alarm on my watch beeps, and I withhold his needle. Ten minutes, fifteen. The game into overtime. Ned watches while I toss the glass syringes into the wall filled with yellowed eight-by-tens, the glossy photos of Emmet Kelly, Otto Griebling, Lou Jacobs, Paul Jerome. The greats, Ned calls them, the gods. Dead, they love him in faded autographs. The syringes quiver in their vaudeville faces. Ned raises himself on shaky arms.

“Now, Johnny,” he says. “Right now, the shot, or you're nothing, you never work again.” His voice runs thin. “Please,” he says, “the needle. Don't wait.” An angel of mercy, I part his toes. If I withheld for a day, he'd shatter.

He circles my neck with his arms and I lift him, the skin casing his bones threatening to tear. The smell in his mouth is black. I stand him behind his walker, help him move to the window so he can look down at the passing lunchtime crowd and wave. The brats from his Yahoo Brigade are all grown up now, fat and balding, oily-haired in cheap suits, the women in pants hiding C-section scars and spider veins. Ned stares, propped by the aluminum tubing. I know in his fragile mind the people gather to cheer him, the famous tramp clown, waving the Hobo Ned hats and Hobo Ned plastic cigars they've kept all these years in shoeboxes, in the dark corners of attics. They are all ten years old again, bleached angel children in crinoline and clip-ons, cast in waves through the air on live TV, from studio bleachers to boxy Philcos, and set down through the years below our windows, on the sidewalk across from the Plasma Center.