Circle View by Brad Barkley Page A

my mouth full of gray fillings. Dr. Neuman bends over me, moves his face near mine; his breath has the same sweet cinnamon smell as his office. Beneath thin hair his scalp glows pink. He isn’t dressed like a dentist; under his white lab coat hang faded jeans and a beat-up alligator shirt.
    I need a new crown. Dr. Neuman—Alex, he asks me to call him—fits a temporary till the new one can be ordered. He draws novocaine into a hypo, stings my palate with a quick jab. Then he sits and waits for my jaw to numb. We talk about dentistry and oral hygiene, my job at the bank, the weather. Every so often, he reaches up and touches my face, testing for numbness. I ask about the silver tools lined up on the machine beside me, and accidentally spray a stream of water on the green wall. Alex laughs. His thin hair and build are close to Ray’s—with a small paunch dimpling above his belt—but he has those blue eyes and a voice that lifts when he speaks, a sound like fresh-hung laundry snapping in the wind.
    I want never to leave this vinyl chair—laid back, carrying along my end of the conversation. About the only men I’ve talked to in ten years are the moon-faced jokers that orbit Ray, all like rowdy school boys on a field trip. As I speak to Alex, the novocaine spreads over my face like sweet cream spilled on a tabletop.
    â€œDo you like sports?” I ask.
    â€œSailing,” he says. “I like the ocean, riding the waves. I make time for it.”
    He fixes the temporary tooth, smiles, pats my arm.
    â€œTake care of that crown,” he says, taking me in with those eyes.
    â€œThank you,” I tell him. “I will.”
    At home I decide on the knot tying class; it meets only one night a week, on Ray’s poker night. As I fill out the application, it occurs to me that knot tying would be useful if I ever went on a sailboat. I tell Ray I’ve signed up.
    â€œHow much?” he asks. “Why in hell do you want to learn that?”
    I tell him I will pay from my bank bonus, that knots are a part of everyday life and knowing how to recognize them might be helpful someday. He shakes his head, turns back to his VCR to watch a Braves game he taped two days before. He does that, watches yesterday’s games. I couldn’t watch a game where the box scores have been posted, cleats hung in lockers, knees untaped, stadium emptied. Old news. Ray will replay Atlanta games three or four times.
    â€œI was almost a Brave,” he likes to say. “That close.” His cronies eat it up.
    Things with Ray got worse when I thought they’d get better: after he quit baseball. When the Braves wouldn’t offer him a coaching job, he went to work for Boren Brick, loading trucks. No more playing for a living, I thought, and I was right—playing became a full-time hobby. I lived with the pranks, his buddies, because I thought he would outgrow them—when you plant a bulb, you expect a tulip to sprout up. He quit the team six years ago; I had just turned twenty-three, Ray was thirty-two, too old to play, by then his chance at the bigs something long since behind him, something lost in his youth the way tonsils are removed from children. Since then we’ve been through twenty-four seasons of the year. I’ve worked to love him, and he’s buried himself in his pranks.
    The class meets in a yellow concrete-block room at the YWCA. Our instructor walks in late wearing a noose of thick rope loosely hung around his neck. He rolls his tongue as he tells us his name: Wolfgang Kubler. Wolf, he asks us to call him, wears steel-frame glasses on his wide face; when he speaks strands of gray hair shake across his forehead. He says he worked thirty years in the German merchant marine, and tells us knots are a matter of life and death. His mastery of knot tying came after a badly hitched guy rope securing a lifeboat on his ship snapped, severing his pinky finger down to the first