Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  I open the bathroom door and Heidi’s hands come up over her breasts. Indignation has dissolved the casual laxity of fifteen minutes ago. Her mouth is tight and her lungs are pumping hard. On the edge of speech, she changes her mind and shoulders past me. Silently, and so vehemently I’m worried they’ll tear, she gets into her clothes.

  “Heidi. We’ve been divorced for over three years.”

  “And you still talk to her that way. ‘Ooo, Violet, it’s been such a long time.’” Her imitation is fruity, singsong.

  “Am I obliged to hang up on her?”

  Heidi curses the zipper on her dress, turns her back to me. “I don’t really care what you say or how. Forget that part. What hurts is you made her a secret.”

  “Not like that, not like I was purposely keeping anything from you.” She jerks away from my hand as if it’s electrified. “So I was married for a while. That doesn’t amount to shit right now, right here.”

  Heidi gains momentum as she untangles her hair, smears blusher on her pitted cheeks. “Right here. It’s like a coded message when I’m with you. We never talk. You never tell me things.”

  “What is it you’d like to know?”

  “Miss the point, go ahead.” She pops the p and a mist of saliva settles on my chin. “This thing or that thing, it’s not the facts I’m after. An even chance is all. You’re supposed to be so smart and I have to lead you by the nose. What does it come down to when people make secrets? What do you suppose it means when two lovers…We are supposed to be lovers, verdad? Or am I in the dark on that too? I’m not a pickup, goddammit.”

  I know it’s a mistake, the contrition I give her. I know I should protect her from expectations. But I’m not a complete prick. Heidi’s entitled to some comfort. On any reasonable scale of operation, this comes under the heading of being polite.

  I hold her, rock her. I promise not to hide things anymore. Running my hand up the back of her dress, I come upon a dot of crusted secretion, hers or mine. She says all I have to-do is trust her like a friend, and I say okay. We’re standing by the window, saturated by the yellowish light of the Golconda sign. WEEKLY & MONTHLY RATES. A trailer truck rolls past, air brakes snuffling. Dishes clank in the cafe and the jukebox comes on; someone’s pushed the buttons for a ranchero.

  At last, Heidi peels herself away. “I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “I know.”

  Her skin is cool, she’s smiling, and her eyes aren’t the least bit moist. “Get some sleep. You’ll need it.” She hurries toward her car, then turns back, rotating one finger against her skull. “Thank God.”

  “Thank God what?” I’m standing in the doorway holding a towel closed around my waist.

  “Thank God my casserole only needs to be heated.”

  16

  WAKE UP THIS MORNING with pizzicato Lunchtime Movie music running in my head. It won’t stop. Implanted violins follow me in and out of the shower. I Q-tip my ears extra hard, but the plinking doesn’t leave with the wax. Turn on the radio to drown it out and a baritone reads to me:

  “Puerto Rican terrorist Concepcion Buendia said today that he spared the life of Treasury Secretary Richard Goodyear when Secret Service agents made their dawn raid to rescue the kidnapped official because he couldn’t bring himself to hate him.

  “‘I had all the time I needed to shoot,’ Buendia told investigators. ‘But I could not succeed in seeing him as an enemy, only a man who was sleeping.’”

  I think that once or twice watching a woman sleep, overcome by her stillness, I have wept. Not something I am particularly proud of, but there it is. Every tub on its own bottom. Every lonely beast in its own separate bed.

  No time for coffee, have to get moving right away. This Lunchtime Movie room is like something pressing on my throat. I’ll drive with all the windows open and the speedometer pinned. A couple aspirin for my stiff neck and then I wrestle clothes on over my wet skin. Boots in case I feel like hiking, a hat to shade my eyes. On the way out, I check one of my experimental stations. Day 10 for the mold garden, if I haven’t flubbed my count, and a good crop of cottony mycelium growing on the Little wedge of papaya; thousands of light-gray spores so it resembles mouse fur. In the other mayo jar, beginning liquefaction of a freestone cherry indicates the presence of larval maggots. Some things are running smoothly and right. The speechless things.

  Mrs. O. is folded into the cement bench by the office, waiting for a cab. Her feet dangle in the air. She looks ready to turn to powder inside, and seeing her just now, for some reason I imagine small birds spit-roasted over an open fire. I pick her lumpy red handbag up out of the petunia bed.

  “Took no notice when I put it down,” she says. “Been fasting and I’m just a bit lightheaded.”

  “Fasting?”

  “Fruit juice four times a day. I needed to move out all the starch that was clogging me up.”

  Mrs. O. is planning to spend the afternoon at her breath alchemy workshop with Master Han. Self-healing, she explains, is the only kind that works, but at the same time you need to be guided.

  “Master Han believes in reeducating the brain by tracing how a person moved in infancy from prone to standing up. He tries to discover gaps in your movements supported by the endocrine system. Glands can reflect mind states, you know.”

  “You want to save the cab money, I’ll ride you over.”

  She grins and runs her knuckles up my arm. “You’re a good New York boy, anyone can see that. Generous. No, you go ahead your way. I like to talk to Mr. Suarez on the trip and I brought him kugel.”

  One of the lumps in her bag, cold starch. So I leave her there by the petunias with the sun sparking yellow on her stainless steel cane.

  I head west out of town, a squirrel’s jawbone swinging from my rearview mirror on black thread. I picked it from desiccate remains near a convenience grocery, just a few feet beyond the asphalt apron in a snarl of sticks and paper. Kneeling there, smelling the exhaust of cars left running for the quick-stop shop, I tugged at the small worn teeth and they came away in my fingers. I head west toward itching thirst and the air force test range. The matinee violins are still with me, but the tempo has slowed.

  The topography of space operas. Except for what my three thousand pounds of Detroit steel displaces, the air is motionless. But something in it seems to bend the light, angle it into my face so that even behind my defenses of tinted glass, visor, and hat I must squint. As I go straight and hard down the blacktop I pass a million invisible roads of lizard, millipede, coral snake, tarantula, giant hairy scorpion. Scattered plants are spiked or spined or even venomous. No escape from this landscape, its inaudible ferocity.

  Now begins the barbed fencing, the fat red lettering of NO CIVILIAN ACCESS Bleak buzzard acres you could prospect for spent casings and pilots’ bones, where the shallow soup holes are poisoned with radon and sulfur. Far off, below the rusty red foothills, I sight a line of sheds. Hard glare on metallic roofs, and tan smudges that must be plywood nailed over doors and windows. Haunted barracks, maybe a nerve gas depot now, heavy drums all sealed away. Another mile of fencing, AUTHORIZED PERSONELL ONLY, a corroded and de-tired Jeep—human earmarks more ominous than forlorn. And somewhere it can’t be seen, so Opatowski says, they’ve built a replica of Saudi oilfields for paratroop maneuvers, and a dummy target range of silos.

  I pull over to consult my map. Nothing ahead, for thirty miles at least, until a place called Holy Smoke. But not the tiniest blister in the black line that represents the road, only the name floating above it. A cartographer’s prank? Holy Smoke. I’d rather try for it than turn around.

  A good twenty minutes without billboard or marker before I find a turnoff. A crude wooden sign says: THIS IS NOT A ROAD. That’s good enough for me. I head up the gravel track, steering wheel wobbling in my hands. It takes very little time to establish the bona fides of that sign, the conscientious citizen who scrawled it. Dry gulches intersect the nonroad, logs and cobbles in them I have to clear away. Revvin
g and swaying, revving again, I lunge across. The pungent aroma of scorched hardware reaches me. Now the washouts are rougher and the stones sharper. I stop to check the undercarriage for wounds. Nothing yet. Then I remember my spare is low on air, also bald. A cooler head would prevail, but that’s something else I didn’t bring.

  Starting upward now into jumbled hills, I ignore what the dashboard gauges tell me. My tongue is a spoiled oyster, sour and thick. And too weary to tell me what a fool I am. On these steeper grades the rear wheels hesitate and spin, but I make the crest; then down, which is just as bad or worse, slewing into chuckholes, sledding over loose rock when the brakes lock up.

  In what passes for a valley here, a barely sloping trench between low sills of rock, I stop for something to chew: juniper needles. A trifle dizzy, but it’s easier to focus from this small wedge of shade. Those dark lumps, yes, it’s there just a few hundred yards down the line (like all good explorers, I had to find it by mistake). Holy Smoke…or something. Not the trim oasis I’d let myself imagine. No oil company logo rising on metal stilts, no hope of iced pop. I think I hear the wail of a dog, lovesick or dying. Maybe just a streak of wind in the remnants of a useless place.

  Leaving the machine to recuperate, I step out for dereliction with a cautious stalking pace. Apprehension fades the closer I get. A street full of sage balls and dead wood, two rows of tilted buildings, no more than lumber teepees, some of them. I announce myself by drumming on a mangle washer halfway buried in sand. No answer. A ghost town even the ghosts have left. Like all good explorers, I’ve been betrayed by my map. And by my zeal to move forward. I remember a character man on Gunsmoke pulling his whiskers and drawling, “This country is hell on a Christian.” I remember the story of a boy scout who survived Death Valley by drinking his own urine. But long as I’m here I might as well poke around. The amateur enthuses in the implacable face of error. I ease my head through windows fringed with cobweb, look over great floorboard holes in which biting things are lurking in the cool. With a piece of glass I carve the date and my initials in a soft gray doorpost. Splintered furniture, buckshot patterns on old tin, are signs that more than weather has pulled this place apart. But not lately. The shotgun holes are rusted, the liquor bottles milky from the scouring of blown sand. In the last house on the left, a brick chimney all that’s holding it up, I find under gummy fallen shingles a toy shovel and a 1952 issue of Field & Stream. Rats have chewed the pages up for nesting fodder and the rest comes apart in my hands. But I wonder what the people in this house so far from water thought as they read of salmon climbing a waterfall, walleye in the deep blue lakes of Michigan. Probably not much. Living on the edge of things this way, you give up the capacity to envision. The rest of the world gradually disappears behind layers of fuzzy curtain, while on your side there is nothing but the abuse of the sun and this fierce, racking ground that extends on and on to the ocean, wherever that might be. Day-to-day survival becomes a kind of madness. This comforts me as I squat in the rubble with my hat sweat-pasted to my head, trying to keep myself from staring into the sun. The nothingness comforts me. It is pristine.

  A ruthless hiss that echoes. I look up. Above me five combat jets in a V indite white lines across the sky like a trail of poisoned bait. Time to go. Definitely time to go. Back to my machine, to paving and noise and ice.

  At least the violins are gone.

  17

  CULVER TUBBS HAD EIGHT professional fights and lost them all. Now he’s a happy, lumbering heavyweight in the Golconda kitchen and a deacon of the Assembly of God church up the road in Organpipe. His fire-and-brimstone pork chops jab at my stomach, unpacified by the Jose Cuervo I’ve been pouring over them. Opatowski and I are alone in his bar. He looks out the one small, high window and shakes his neat head.

  “The wide open West. How about it. Never missed a Saturday matinee when they had Hoot Gibson or Bronco Billy. It all looked so good from a shitty little Pennsylvania mill town. I said, ‘Won’t eat soot all my life. Gonna go where the skies are not cloudy all day.’ Only took me about fifty years to do it.”

  And only because they told his wife to go ahead and write up her will. Opatowski didn’t bother with questions. (All doctors are liars, he says.) They sold everything but their clothes, drove off for air that was light and warm, bought this place at a sheriff’s auction for cheap.

  “The one good thing about her sickness is it scared us into being brave.”

  I’ve seen him with a rip chisel in his hand, chasing obstreperous drunks into the parking lot and growling like a badger. I’ve seen Mrs. O. heading out on a rock hunt with collecting bag and slender hammers, pushing along a green oxygen bottle on the rack her husband has specially customized for the rough terrain.

  “Hard or easy, you have to keep on learning,” Opatowski says. “What did I know before about portion control or scaled rentals? Zero. But out here, with that feeling of being pitted, man against the elements, you really want to apply yourself.”

  He sucks at crushed ice drizzled with bourbon, chips away at the pressed pulp of an Olympia coaster. There is comfort in this hard-lit space, both of us supposedly preoccupied, no apprehensiveness of the empty public room, but instead the happy tedium of a family dinette. His left hand, the one with four and a half fingers, lies on the friction-smooth black table as if it’s died there. His small, neat head makes one of its slow angles, eyes wide without really taking anything in.

  “Slow and steady wins the race,” he says, as though the phrase, after long deliberation, has just now come to him. “One foot in front of the other.”

  My glass is empty, but I have a little salt anyway, replaying the night Opatowski came to my (his) room and confronted me over Heidi. The tracery around his eyeballs told me he’d had a few belts first, but he was steady as magnetic north.

  “You just better know what you’re doing.” He sidestepped, blocking my view of the television. “She’s probably more curious than someone her age has any business being, and maybe not so strong as she ought to be. But so far strong enough. That Wade she’s got is a pretty good man, worked eight shifts a week when they were saving up for the baby….”

  I interrupted to say I had no ambition for home-wrecking, that my attention span was too short. This did not reassure.

  “Fuck ’em and forget ’em, is that it?”

  “Look, this is as much her idea as it is mine,” I said, and it was close enough to the truth.

  Opatowski grimaced with impatience. Two zebras nuzzled on the screen behind him.

  “What if it is?” he said.

  Not actually suspecting him, but irritated, I said, “Are you protective or just jealous?”

  His voice was even, calm, potent. “I’m putting you on notice, that’s all. An inkling, one false rumor that you haven’t treated her right, and you’re out on your ass without so much as a razor blade.”

  He folded his arms with the gravity of an Arapaho elder, and then, in another few seconds, had fallen puffing and pale into the other chair. Then he fell for several minutes into wheezing sleep, his legs thrown out stiff and straight like a little boy’s in a pew. He woke up nostalgic, helping me shell and eat a sack of peanuts while describing his two years of ceaselessly headphoned Signal Corps service in Wales.

  “Well, hey. That sweet old hound,” Heidi said when I told her about the cautionary visit. “And I was even thinking he might can me when he found out.”

  She brought him a chess pie the following day.

  Opatowski looks over lemon and lime wedges that are drying out in their Tupperware bowls. He nudges fanned-out cocktail napkins, cups his palm over the goblet of red stir straws.

  “Might as well clear out,” he says.

  “But it’s only quarter of eight.”

  “You want to wait for the nobody that’s coming, it’ll have to be by yourself.” The neat head rolls resignedly backward. “I’m gong back to the apartment and listen to my Ezio Pinza records.”

  He reaches behind a tr
ellis of plastic grapes and flicks a breaker switch that kills everything but the refrigeration. I follow him out into the thin blue chill. The stars are too bright, like bulbs around a makeup mirror.

  “Vacancy, goddammit,” he shouts at a passing Camaro.

  Motor chuffing, lights beaming into featureless outback, a provisions truck has parked by the kitchen entrance. Tubbs, in an apron with Appaloosa markings of old grease, is helping the driver unload.

  “Supposed to have been here a couple hours ago,” Opatowski says without annoyance. “Got lost probably. It happens all the time.”

  I lend a hand while the slow-and-steady seigneur gives instructions that no one hears. Frozen blocks of hash browns, rime-coated cartons of breaded veal from a plant in Wyoming, enough to lay the footings for a small patio. Portion control?

  “Got an uncle moved down from Wisconsin, carves duck decoys,” chummy Tubbs is saying. “Not a lot of call for them around here.”

  “I’m a quail man myself.” The driver has turquoise bracelets on each wrist, a trim vice-squad mustache. “Even though there’s not much on ’em but the breast.”

  “I like something big enough to stuff. Then you wrap it in bacon and bake it nice and slow to keep the juices in.”

  “What part of Wisconsin?”

  “Fond du Lac.”

  Opatowski grabs a bag of fish fingers and we walk back to his place. I can use the company as much as he can. We tip quietly through darkness to the living room with its sunburst carpet and mounted horse skull. Mrs. O. is asleep, Pinza’s “Some Enchanted Evening” barely audible. Opatowski peers into the shoebox bedroom, recloses the door. We whisper, both of us, moving with the soft and wary foot placements of burglary. Parchment-colored light seems not to flow from the little gooseneck lamp but to escape. I take out my cigarettes, but Opatowski shakes his head. He slumps, the Jim Beam bottle braced on one knee, hand wrapped around the neck like it’s some kind of control lever.