Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  He says: “What I’ve got to do is get ready for when she won’t be around at all.”

  18

  I TURNED THE CLOCK away from me, wanting to sleep in. The air in #6 was heavy and my dreams were irritating, full of vouchers and memos. Sleep here and there, but no rest. Noise began to mount up—motors, voices. I lay awake with my eyes closed and imagined spies at the foot of the bed, roasting me with motionless eyes.

  “Thirty-five hundred deaths per kiloton isn’t even in the ballpark,” Sonny insists.

  Sunday brunch at the Golconda Cafe. Fried ham and French toast, a lake of syrup on my plate. Glucose opens the flaps of my metabolic carburetor and I’m all in a hurry with nowhere to go. From Sonny’s silvery tape machine, between us on a chair of its own, come highlights of a Nuclear Survivability Conference.

  “Don’t worry about civilization,” says a curiously accented voice. “Concentrate on staying alive to enjoy it.”

  I went out prowling for relics. A garrulous Mormon, one of those Old West hobbyists who sometimes pass through, had tipped me to a likely site and drawn a map on a Golconda napkin. I was moving along a shale track toward dark lava tongues emerging from the sand like mummified brontosaurs, paying more attention to the elementary ballpoint diagonals of the map than to what was right in front of me. It took a second or less for the offside tires to slip from the troughs, over the unbanked lip of shale, and dig themselves in. I was alarmingly tipped and stuck fast.

  Opatowski told this one: Two years ago, in the next county, an old man had lost himself, blown his engine on a forgotten length of ranch road. Some pitiful, turtlish instinct made him stay inside his car and in a day or two he’d baked to death in his underwear. They found a note on the dashboard asking that someone inform his grandson, who ran an air charter service in Valdez, Alaska.

  But I had a two-quart canteen and the sense to start moving, shirt knotted over my head. No sleepwalking, stay on the offensive mentally. I took up, in order, the following: ultraviolet rays so intense in Antarctica that the atmosphere is nearly germ-free; the scheme, continuously discussed, to squeeze petroleum from hidden terraces of Rocky Mountain shale; long-vanished swamps and three-story tree ferns turned now to coal; sulfates and alkali and the sweat that was burning my eyes. Be watchful too. Avoid confinement in a narrowing corridor of heat. But I didn’t find any arrowheads or pot pieces along the way, no shapely bits of bone. I saw a hubcap half buried, a chuckwalla retreating into a crevice of porous yellow rock. My tongue contorted and my head was clanging, clanging hard. Mission bells, campanas, responded my obedient brain. What fun.

  Following the curve of a dry wash, I heard a whang and watched sand spit over my feet.

  “No sweat, amigo. Just holding my perimeter.”

  The man was jug-eared and thick through the chest. He wore camo fatigues and a black beret, held the AK-47, now aimed at the sky, against his cheek.

  “That was a fucking bullet,” I said pointlessly.

  “You’re fine. Gun control means being able to hit your target.”

  I spread my arms and threw up a smile just as wide, the way you’d handle a guard dog.

  “Regular army?”

  “I’m just a citizen,” Sonny Boyers said. “Like you.”

  I looked flat fucked out, he thought. I should come back to camp, meet his family, share some lunch. Why disagree? He resembled, with his shiny black boots and oiled rifle, a breakneck mercenary, but moved with the diffidence of an art student, and I followed along. He fired into the air as we approached the camp, and an answering shot came.

  Dawn Boyers was glaringly blonde, round-faced, heavy-breasted. A sly, burly couple they made, two escapees from a beer stein bas relief. She wore the same dappled fatigues, but a blue chiffon scarf girdled her solid neck and lumpy turquoise earrings hung like beetles from her ears. The two silent, unboyish boys stood on either side of her, grade-school sentries with recalcitrant eyes.

  “One for all,” and Sonny combined wink and smile without completing the motto.

  How to fit in? Yucca stalks, erosion, hard perimeters, children in combat regalia. The only reassuring thing was their truck. It had wide tires, hydraulic suspension, and probably enough juice under the hood to pull my car free.

  The boys started the fire with a bow drill and blackened hot dogs at the end of forked sticks. Lemonade was yellow powder shaken with water in a plastic jug. Portions were carefully equalized and Dawn said grace.

  “Make blessed what we are about to consume. Help us in our struggles to reach strength, but guide us, too, in the path of your safekeeping. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”

  The reverent commando family ate with eyes downcast, in silence, chewing warily as if alert for broken glass. How to fit in? I understood that I was among people quelled by belief, for whom irony was no base metal. They saw clearly. They moved along an unwavering white line. I had only to ask a stupid question or two and the precepts were delivered, all glossy and round, like nuggets from the transparent globe of a Kiwanis gumball machine.

  Societal collapse was imminent through war, revolution, economic disintegration, natural catastrophe, whatever came first.

  “I don’t know when it’s going to happen,” Sonny admitted. “Noah didn’t know exactly when the flood would come. He just knew it would.”

  A family prepared could renew and rebuild. The boys had been taken from school so they could be properly taught in the home. All worked together toward the goal of a self-sufficient unit. Knowledge was the tool that couldn’t be stolen: herbal first aid, knots and lashings, shelter construction, orientation by sun and stars, firearms training, tracking and reconnaissance.

  “Survivalism is misunderstood,” Dawn squeaked like a cork twisting in a bottle. “We aren’t paranoid and we aren’t bloodthirsty. We just want to live.”

  The boys plinked cans with their .22’s. Sonny didn’t mind pulling my car free, but first he wanted to show me how to draw water from cactus pulp and set deadfall traps for lizards.

  “You might not be so lucky next time,” he said. “To have somebody come along like I did.”

  Sunburn bloomed on my forehead. I thought of a family trip to the Adirondacks. My mother sprained her ankle sweeping out the cabin. My father went under some birches with Dubonnet and a canvas chair and read through the works of Charles Evans Hughes. Carla sat for hours by the lake, afraid to go in because of sharp rocks and leeches.

  Velma, in the black acetate waitress outfit Opatowski asks her not to wear, freshens my coffee. She looks dubiously at Sonny and his tape machine.

  “What we’re talking about are plans for the conquest of this planet,” he says. “While they’re promoting this detente business with one hand, they’re stockpiling warheads with the other.”

  “The Russians then?”

  “Who’s predicting? I just say study the evidence, the patterns. The inevitable…Okay, like a big curl of a wave coming in and it’s casting a shadow on the beach. We’re right now standing in that shadow.”

  “You want high, swift drama. Glorious climax. But I’d bet on something much slower, degenerative.”

  “What, you mean like cancer?”

  This is like the time Sonny told me you could make an emergency radiation suit out of plastic trash bags and duct tape. He can be as literal as a chunk of laterite.

  “Entropy. The second law of thermodynamics.”

  “Stick to the facts,” Sonny says irritably. “Anyhow, time’s coming when there won’t be any laws.”

  Velma says, “You got music tapes for that thing?”

  “There’s some Johnny Paycheck out in the truck. Some Allman Brothers.”

  I say, “Sonny, it’s real simple. People don’t want to hear bad news.”

  Velma says, “Just put the damn music on.”

  19

  I WAS TEN YEARS old when I saw Khrushchev on the Saw Mill River Parkway. My mother was driving me to camp, where I didn’t want to be, when the pace of traffic slowed abruptly.
I hoped for a flaming crack-up, something to turn us back. Cars pulling onto the grass verge, people aligning; we joined up. A woman in tennis whites told us who we were waiting for.

  “How theatrical,” my mother said, her ultimate accolade.

  We all waited in cruel, quiet sun for the godless tubby who’d promised to bury us. A million happy families turned to landfill. The motorcade roared into view; we screamed, jumped, waved, and it was already gone. But I’d seen Khrushchev, a pale split-second smear inside the black car.

  I see him now on my screen, horse teeth and rumpled suit, stale piroshki easily imaginable on his breath. Quaint postures of 1959, the American National Exhibit in Moscow, the Great Kitchen Debate. Nixon, with his sturgeon eyes, talking up a Washday Whiteners Gap, an Electric Can Opener Gap, reminding the man who gaveled the UN with his shoe how many work-hours it takes the average Ivan to buy a pair of his own.

  Or something. I’m running the clip without sound, fascinated by the Supreme Soviet face, that touching, hog-farmer gramps face all round and warty, the nose a prize root vegetable, the skull shiny as ice in a washbasin.

  I remember my mother saying, “He could be such a star. Like Red Skelton.”

  I remember her mysterious tears when she left me at camp, the smell of perfume spilled in her handbag, the ideology of withdrawal that saw me through the summer.

  “Coming?” Ellen atwitter with notepad and reading glasses.

  “Nice hair. What’d you do?”

  “Slept on it wet. Come on or we’ll be late.”

  She’s still new here, still worries about demerits. We chase up to the West Tunnel conference room, but nothing much is going on. Familiar faces browse over platters of sliced fruit. Familiar turns of phrase: “Another strategic fallback.” “He’s a razor blade in the waffle batter.” “Pissing up my back, telling me it’s rain.” “More proof that galaxies are moving outward.”

  Ellen gazes in dismay at her black pumps, like broken glass on the rug amid all the bright nylon recreation shoes. She takes my hand in her cold one and flattens the edges of her mouth.

  “I need to slow down.”

  A grimacing brunette slinks by with handouts and it’s clear from the title page that we’re in for a slow afternoon—The Framed Cognitive Model: A Metastrategy for Systems Performance. Ideology drifting, ubiquitous as soot.

  We look for seats in the back, end up next to Foley.

  “Behold the jewel in the lotus.”

  Foley, the ruined newsman, the idealist deformed by dreams of conspiracy, once a public relations man in Haiti, now sending alimony checks to a nurse in Oklahoma. He wants you to think he’s older than he really is, wants you to ask what the hell he’s doing here so he can say, “Well, it’s better than writing for the airline magazines.”

  “Behold.”

  He shows Ellen the overhead autocam that records all meetings. She tries unsuccessfully to reflect mischief into his grave eyes.

  A rustling as of choir robes. Mounting the lectern is our Section Director, the gray and immutable Dr. George Borrow. He semaphores his tufty eyebrows, smooths his text. The autocam beams down.

  “Our Framed Cognitive Model is a self-refining road map for organizational development with applications that entail both enhancement and modification of core options usage. Shifting complexities must be charted and triaged, thereby clearing the path for a truly expansive…”

  I scan appropriate, still faces around the room. Wrapped in attention. Foley conducts self-palmistry, staring down into open hands. Ellen writes the same sentence again and again on her notepad: I will not exert my intelligence. Her thick fingers surround the pen like tentacles, her thickness everywhere a sign of bravery. I admire her nihilism, its vitality. But here she is, like me a moving part, and neither one of us with the dangling logic of Foley at his tether end.

  The hunger injected into this room is for purity and control. Abide and conquer, a pride of arrogance. Arguably, my desires are just as cold, areas of the heart selectively deadened as in a procedure to correct arrhythmia. I detail myself as the accommodator, the soft self watching its every motion, and Ellen shames me with her strength of dread. But aren’t things more difficult for her? More sapping? I will not exert my intelligence.

  It’s late when I get back to #6 and I’ve had too much alcohol for what I find there: socks and underwear washed and hanging from the shower rod, roadside flowers by the bed, red lip imprints on the mirror where her note is taped.

  Maybe the joke’s on me, but decided to pretend today was Valentine’s. Took a soak in your tub, pictured you on the other side of the door getting ready to take me out. So tonight on your new sheets you’ll maybe dream of me?

  I love you—

  Heidi

  I love you, that useless incantation; the thing she’s never said before, not even while coming. And Heidi signed with two hearts to dot the i’s. So full of impulses, this unfair maid. (“You let me be aggressive,” she says with gratitude.) Ambushing me unfairly at the edge of this unpleasantly thickened night. Shifting complexities. Right.

  I avoid the bed, pulling from the swamp of books Diane Di Prima’s Revolutionary Letters, full of words that sizzle, of defiance I wish I still could summon. Much as I need distance, distraction, the type bleeds away off the end of the page and I get up to pace the room, which, I suppose, in our mimicked domesticity, is as much Heidi’s as it is mine. Striated, intricate as fingerprints, her careful kisses on the mirror form an ideology of their own. It hovers, a cloud, appealing for belief.

  I unmake the bed she’s made, settle onto new sheets the color of pistachio ice cream. I undress myself in darkness with her sharp, impatient hands. My eyes travel to Heidi motionless and white under the trellised roses of sheet music. I can dream of her if I can do no more.

  20

  HEIDI’S MOTHER KNEW HER parents from pictures. She was two when they dropped her off at Grandma’s, said they were going to the races in Wheeling for a couple of days. The sole trace of them after that came six summers later from an uncle who thought he’d seen them boarding the Lake Erie ferry. So she grew up in the brick house across from the Lutheran church with a woman who was easy to fool and too old to care.

  Heidi’s mother never was pretty, but she knew how to be popular. She wore tight sweaters and high heels that made her toes blister. She taught herself to play bumper pool, and Patsy Cline songs on the guitar. In Zanesville in the 1950s you could make a name for yourself without giving it all up. Men stocked her grandma’s freezer with game. They let her tell lies and drive their cars. One night she knocked someone down outside a roadhouse called Pogo’s Hi-Life and kept going. When the cops came for the apprentice barber whose name was on the registration, he went quietly. That’s how popular she was.

  And, predictably, the first man she fell for, a teetotaler nearly twice her age at thirty-six, had her bedded and wedded in a matter of weeks. She called him Popeye because of his forearms, and he called her all sorts of things, but only in a whisper. They bought everything on time.

  Heidi was supposed to have been a spring child, but came prematurely. A week’s weight of ice took the lines down and the incubator she was in had to be powered by a backup generator. Finally they brought her home and were frightened; the baby didn’t cry, would not even blink. Heidi’s mother doted happily until speech came to steal her little pet and leave her feeling swindled. Heidi’s father worked for a coal company. He went to look at mines in West Virginia and Kentucky, sometimes for a few weeks. Further swindle. There was much “us girls” talk around the house, but it didn’t seem to help. The bits Heidi’s mother read from the paper were about women abandoned or molested or beaten. She would curl up her mouth and nod, as if to say, “Your future. Get used to it.”

  Heidi wore T-shirts and high-tops, chopped her hair short with blunt scissors, burned caterpillars. Her father was bewildered, but saw this was his only chance. He bought a football and tossed it to her in the concrete alleyway that separa
ted the garages from the kitchen doors. So skinny her hipbones were like little holsters, but she could throw three garages. And they’d see her mother coming through the dusk from work in her stiff aqua uniform, coming home just long enough to change out of it and then float off, never a word, toward the taverns.

  Heidi wriggles, sighs, continuing to pull me down the damp aisle between her buttocks.

  “I always remember that slow nod of hers when something bad would happen. Like she got some perverse enjoyment out of it. ‘Another pound of flesh.’ So was she wrong? Drowned in an ambulance, just barely thirty-two.”

  I breathe into the taut nape of her neck, sink further into the amorous mist amid which I have received this family history. Heidi sighs again, relaxes everything but her grip on me. I suppose the exposition, her release of it, is meant to represent some new increment between us.

  “Once more, love. Let me.”

  “We came out of the high country,” I begin. “Tall timber.”

  Squabble noises intrude, child whines and thunking car doors, a tourist family working out a history of their own. An out-of-state station wagon…

  “I’m listening. Go on.”

  Hands that have scrubbed a hundred miles of bathroom tile, exactly right.

  “My one grandfather owned a planing mill and the other one built boats. Rugged capital. Hymns. They both died in nursing homes, not remembering a thing. My dad went to England to study, except the war happened and he had to come back. They said astronomy, okay, you must be good at maps, put him in some underground Washington war room where he pushed little plastic battleships around like a croupier. He heard my mom singing on the radio and went AWOL to follow the band… Hey. Watch your nails.”

  Heidi says to keep talking. Her face is hot and fever-dry when I touch it, her eyes trying to penetrate my viscera.