Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  In time, I was deeply submerged in a comfortably uncomfortable love affair. I still felt soft, but not as youthful, so things were looking up. Andrea gave me the energy she wasn’t using. I went to parties without having to be coaxed. Like the one over in the East Bay where I met a truly wise man.

  This was the routine: glasses on the floor, serapes on the wall, our host in a rubber Nixon mask, blue overhead bulbs, and a two-headed ax on the coffee table. Yosenabe came over to explain that the woman who’d brought him kept staring at me because she thought I might be one of the men involved in the theft of her Samoyed. He had a gray crew cut and wore steel-rim Tojo glasses right out of a WWII cartoon. I admired his nerve. When I said I came from New York, he revealed his shoulder holster, the plastic gun that shot green and red candy BB’s.

  Yosenabe was an art restorer, an expert on Japanese swords. Once he had made wildlife dioramas for the Museum of Natural History, but New York was not so good. He made too much money and the cold weather made him think too hard.

  “This city nice and boring,” he said. “Full of Japs.”

  It was several days later that I found an empty cigarette pack in my jacket, and Yosenabe’s business card tucked in behind the cellophane. Through the blunting residue of the recent drunk, I could call back the apprehension that Yosenabe might let me in on a few jokes.

  His studio was on the second floor of a wooden firetrap downwind from a mayonnaise factory. I went up the outside stairs and found Yosenabe chipping cotton practice balls with a nine iron. The place was crammed, a treasury, and I mentioned how very close to a porcelain vase he was coming on his backswing.

  “No worries. This a repair shop.”

  We had green tea and pretzel sticks. But Yosenabe was in a hurry, packing for a trip to Yosemite. Proudly, he displayed the shoes he was taking, brand-new sneakers with diamond-shaped holes cut in the canvas. It was late autumn, the midst of the rainy season.

  “You’ll get soaked if you wear those,” I said.

  Yosenabe smiled indulgently. “Holes are for water to run out.”

  The logic hit me like an injection. Here, finally, was someone who understood the modus operandi of the world. I bowed.

  Was this a turning point?

  Well, here are the facts: Two months later I was in Los Angeles eating fresh fruit all day long and teaching myself to dive. Before the year was out I married an anthropologist who was the greatest fuck of my life. We weren’t very happy together and came apart in the end like burrs from a blanket. Holes are for water to run out. Absolutely.

  11

  MY EX-WIFE CALLS from L.A. She’s a great one for staying in touch. Also, she has trouble getting to sleep sometimes, and it scares her.

  “Just lying here in bed thinking about you.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah. Me and the night and the music. I don’t have a thing on.”

  Violet gives good phone.

  I remember the way she’d talk to herself with an English accent in the mornings. I remember her smell of cosmetics and fear.

  I was new to Southern California and I fell in love with Violet’s driving. We’d go zipping through the canyons in her green sports job with the top down and the radio wailing, eucalyptus always in the air. Violet would tromp and slide and dig through that gearbox like a mole in a tunnel. She didn’t struggle with modesty, could do without conversation. She shot a bullet through my heart.

  It happened after a daylight banzai move along Mulholland Drive. Violet dodged a bottled-water truck by no more than a foot, Curtis Mayfield pouring from the speakers. My eyes watered and I knew I was right there at zero, had found what I was looking for: cathexis. She parked on some baked plateau below a water tank, beer empties and diapers strewn around, all the indicants of a True Detective scene-of-the-crime. She stared out over the hazy San Fernando tracts, her breathing steady as breakers. And she glistened.

  “Let’s drive to Vegas and get married,” I said.

  “Right now?”

  “By tomorrow I won’t want to.”

  Violet was embarrassed to be there in corduroy pants, but the minister told her not to worry. We had pink champagne at the chapel and a woman from Samoa took Polaroids.

  That night at the motel I woke up feeling chilled. I said to myself: You’re married to an anthropology professor and she’s allergic to shellfish. Violet reached over to me and her palms were hot and smooth. She whispered in my ear.

  “Right now?” I said.

  The honeymoon didn’t come until six months later, by which time I had my own car and Violet had renewed her prescription for antidepressants. She wanted to go to New Mexico to study Hopi sheep culturists, so we decided to call it a honeymoon and close the file on that. It was late July and we drank a lot of beer, got headaches. While Violet toured the pueblos with a Hopi activist in a rollbar Jeep, I watched Wheel of Fortune and Break the Bank. Actually, knowing how much she wanted to, I was touched she didn’t fuck him. I watched Password and General Hospital and Championship Bowling. She went all over the valley gathering oral histories with a tape recorder. Some of the old people wanted money, some were too drunk or crazy to remember even last year, last month. At night I would go all over Violet’s body looking for sheep ticks. After about ten days, we went back to L.A.

  The money on both sides of Violet’s family comes from long citrus holdings. But when I think about being married to Violet, I think of tangerines. I think of her slender toes, pink as grapefruit.

  “I’m on something new,” Violet is saying. “Not a tricyclic.”

  My mouth is dry and I’m drinking cold instant coffee. “Does it help?”

  “Who knows? It’s the ritual of the thing, mostly.”

  “Sure. Along with the artificial flavorings.”

  “Another thing is I have this paper with a publication review committee and I probably should have heard from them last week. So it’s tense. And I know one of the women on the committee, a cunt. She likes to scuttle careers.”

  “What’s the article?”

  “Don’t be polite…Textiles, it’s about textiles.”

  Stacked by the phone are some of the books Violet has sent. The one on top is called Poetry by Aphasics (Chain Mail Press, Rochester, Minn.). Her munificent intellect, her pitiable turns of phrase. “I’m afraid I’ll destroy you,” she’d often said.

  “Tense,” I say.

  “Exactly so. I cook these fancy dishes and then pour them down the disposal. I lie in the empty bathtub with my clothes on.”

  “You call up your ex-husband and get cute.”

  “But today I took off and went to the beach,” she says, changing the subject without changing the subject. “I got there early, around ten, so I caught all the high sun. The heat and the glare made me dopey. I passed out on the towel and when I woke up my shoes were gone. There’s the purse with my money and credit cards, there’s the watch I took off so it shouldn’t leave a white line around my wrist, and some lunatic steals my shoes.”

  “No getting away from it.” This is a sad fact about her.

  “Thought there’d be blisters from walking across the parking lot barefoot. But I feel just lovely since I got home. There was a little brandy left in the bottle and I had that, wrote some letters.”

  “Any of them to me?”

  “I send you books. I don’t send you letters.”

  “Yeah, why is that?” Do you begin to see how violently Violet she is?

  “Well, you know, we all have our avoidances. I’ve started letters to you; it’s not that it doesn’t occur to me.”

  I know it’s wrong, but I go: “You don’t like writing because it leaves evidence.”

  “Dammit, dammit. Don’t spoil it.”

  I recognize that voice. “I’m sorry. You want to tell me about the beach?”

  “No…no, it was afterwards. At night this flush came on me from so much sun, like a fever almost. And my head has been ringing slightly, not unpleasant at all. There are new she
ets on the bed and it’s like I can pick out every thread against my skin. See, my skin is so dried out, when I touch my shoulders or my legs it’s coming off like little flakes of cellophane. But here’s a bottle of baby oil. Don’t you think I should rub some on?”

  Like the sweet chromatic horns in a Joe Tex song. Violet gives the best phone in town.

  12

  THE SKY IS TURQUOISE and cloudless. I take Heidi out to White Tank Hot Springs for the day. There’s a little park there, sawbuck tables and cement barbecues, so we bring beer and a big steak from Opatowski’s kitchen. Heidi puts on clear nail polish as we drive and tells me a story about losing her kid at Sears, having to pick her up at the sheriff’s office.

  “They questioned me for an hour, like I wasn’t a fit mother.”

  We go past dark cinder hills the texture of macaroons and then the road begins to climb through piñon and juniper. The river runs in slow thin twists beside us and the car fills up with the smell of toluene.

  Parked in the shade, we open a couple of beers. Not many cars here, so it shouldn’t be a mob scene. Heidi’s wearing a green leotard to take the waters in.

  “Like a xylophone,” she says proudly, strumming her ribs.

  The thing I like most about her is the feel of knotted bones.

  She goes ahead of me down the path, carrying her strange necessities—magazines, aspirin, jumprope. Her legs are stalks that move smoothly but without give in landing and the musculature of her back surges like a horde of caterpillars on a wall. I begin to pick up voices and at the edge of the gravel, spoor: yellow foil packaging for a roll of film.

  Heidi picks up speed. “Come on, potato pants.”

  Ground water gathers heat from deep volcanic crust; it percolates down to the hot zone, then rises back up by convection. And that’s about the size of it. Only a few thousand years from start to finish.

  Heidi gets out of her clothes like they were on fire. She does a handstand, a cartwheel, and some of the puckered seniors applaud. We inch down into a natural caldron, lean on one another. Silvery gumball bubbles break the surface of the water and steam disappears in the sunlight. My head tilts back on its own and behind clamped lids it is flat, blank, orange.

  A finger touches me. “A perfect day,” Heidi says. “We’re together on a perfect day.” Then, a minute or two later, “You smell bad eggs?”

  I take her by the chin and turn her, point out the string of mudpots behind us where health addicts dangle themselves in faintly sulfurous ooze.

  “Natural gas.” I whisper it.

  “Yes, professor.”

  My finger curls around hers and we tug gently. Lately she wants more and more from me, I know. Her cautions are falling away. She calls me from her house during dinner, slides her arms around me in the street where her in-laws could be passing. Although the fantasies she harbors are never mentioned, I’m afraid of what they are. I open my eyes.

  Fleetingly I consider explaining myself, warning Heidi not to begin undoing the tangle of husband and kid, but I see it’s impossible, part of the problem. A sort of language barrier: We can only talk of immediacies.

  Her husband’s name is Wade. He works as an attendant at Cherry Ames Memorial Hospital. In a few more months he will be upgraded, allowed to administer injections.

  “This sure is different,” Heidi says, splashing herself. “I never take baths, only showers. Don’t suppose I’ve been in a bath since I was maybe ten years old and still playing with boats.”

  Her daughter’s name is Tasha. She spends a lot of time with the neighbor, a widow with failing eyesight. In another year or so she will start first grade and socialization.

  I think it’s the predictability that’s so difficult to face. Hard to detect much volition out there. Still, we gather by the water hole thirsty for something, wary of predators.

  The picnic area: matched poodles, a man in lederhosen who can’t keep his pipe lit. Heidi jumps rope deftly, clicking her tongue in rhythm. I make a fire, rub mustard into the meat, toss it on the grill. We squat in the grass to eat, one penknife between us, bread slices mushy with juice and fat. Heidi sucks her fingers after every mouthful. I watch her jutting teeth with wonder. More solid bone. Against all this geology she looks immovably elegant. I almost want to take back my thoughts and say, Let’s murder your husband.

  Down by the trash barrels there’s a hunched old ratnose with rubber-tire sandals and his white hair in a ponytail. He’s a harvester, picking out cans and stuffing them into a burlap sack. All business, he comes over to ask if he can have our beer empties. Aluminum scrap’s bringing a nice price right now, he says, but you’ve got to know the right people. Heidi, with her automatic solicitude, says, Why don’t you sit down and empty one yourself?

  There exist certain individuals who are born historians, detail men, nickname givers. They exude a kind of mental formalin in which unlikely remains are preserved. Adapted to such habitats as bus depots and cafeterias, they learn to move quickly and take advantage of the slightest opening. This E. L. Dobbs, age ninety-three, needs only a minute or two to surround us with rambling vines of talk.

  Do we know that this place, here where we sit, belonged to winemakers in Prohibition times? Beautiful vineyards all around and Judge Naylor had claim to the first pressings. You made your own way then or shriveled up. Wild days and up along those crags hundreds and hundreds of eagles, with nests five feet deep. So many birds they took all the fish out of the river and a posse went out to mop them up. Eagle feathers in the hatband of every dude after that. Sure, sell feathers or snakeskins or quail eggs hardboiled. Through the windows when the train came through. You did what you had to, whatever it was.

  “Now me, I had to quit pharmacy school when the diphtheria took my daddy off. And what could I do but jump up and take a job nobody wanted. About that time we had a woman killer, dropped her babies down a well. Tiny little thing and pretty as a saint, but the jury said do her. Had a hangman didn’t know his business and when the trap fell her head ripped right off her body. Helluva thing. I knew some anatomy and I said, Let me handle it. Fifteen years I was known up and down as the gentle hangman, and not one of my people experienced the slightest pain. Had a rope hand-woven out of soft bark fibers, kept her wrapped in special papers inside a moistureproof box. Hell, I did them all. Dr. Blount, Bill Tate, the Black Mesa Butcher, Joaquin Ramirez, and that anarchist…What was it? Greuber, yeah, and still singing when I put the hood over him. Tell you what, though. The job showed me something. Gave me the key to things early on.”

  He stops, waiting to be prompted, but we look blank. I’m wondering what song the anarchist was singing.

  “The whole thing is this: to go out of this world as late as possible.”

  “That’s it?” Heidi says, like someone’s just taken her last dollar with a pair of loaded dice.

  “Strive to survive and fight for every last day you can. That’s all there is, dearie.”

  “This shit I don’t need.” Heidi gets up and heads for the car. She’s genuinely pissed.

  No more than a mile since we passed a speed trap, but there’s her foot pressing down on mine and the gas pedal is to the floor.

  “Lighten up, sugar. We’ve got plenty of time.”

  “You always say that.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Well, it’s all so easy for you, isn’t it?”

  She has a taste for absolute terms—always, all, never—and I have neither the desire nor the arrogance to try and interest her in subtleties.

  “Sleepwalking through life, that’s me.”

  “You asshole, and you’re proud of it.”

  I start to touch her face and she plasters herself against the door. “There are things that matter, you know. It’s not all just a dance.” Her arms are folded tight, her lips stretched thin.

  I don’t understand this friction, do you? A perfect day. She said so herself.

  13

  ROMANCE IS FOR MOST of us like a career; we pursu
e it solemnly, unscrupulously, and meet its usual disappointments with ill grace. In the course of things I have slept with seventeen different women and the lies I told them were ones I myself believed. Complacence, inconsistency, self-defense—I am a thoroughly ordinary man. But think of this: The cruelest thing we can do to one another is to have expectations.

  Just now I am having an affair with the maid at my motel. Heidi is straitened, but a woman who breathes freely no matter what. She has hard eyes and a ninety-six pound whippet body. Her face is a battlefield—long nose, prominent teeth, and the acne scars that shame her, that she tries to disguise with Max Factor foundation, which cakes up like silt in the pits. There is ambivalence in her, but no confusion. Families are the affliction of her life. The family she came from, the one she helped to start. Heidi needs to be alone. I want to help her.

  She was fourteen in Zanesville, Ohio, when her mother died like this: Working part-time at a luncheonette, she was badly burned by the deep-fat fryer. A friend volunteered to drive her to a hospital but the manager said for insurance purposes she should go in an ambulance. The ambulance hit a patch of ice, flew into a lake, and all aboard were drowned. Heidi answered the phone and it was a state trooper calling.

  A couple of months later she moved west with her sisters and her father, the mine inspector. She went to high school in five different states and married the first man who thought to ask her.

  I had been at the Golconda less than two weeks. It was a Saturday morning and a girl let herself into my room with a key. I was naked in bed, smoking and watching the set: cartoons with no sound. Like a lush-worker on New Year’s Eve, wasting no time, she started right in on me.

  “You got any complaints about the room, mister, I’d like to hear them.”

  The best I could do was “No,” and spread out the sheet a little.

  “Okay then. Maybe you’re from Canada or somewhere, but we got a deal out here where you leave a little something for the girl who does up your room. I been waiting on you, figure maybe you’re one of those end-of-the-week, hide-it-under-the-pillow types. But nothing. Not gratuity one do I see from you. Maybe you think I don’t mind bending over to wipe scum off the toilet rim or pick toenails off the carpet. But it’s some shabby work moving through strangers’ crap every day. They pay me like an Indian and never once…”