Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  Enhancement mechanism: I close in and in on the trompe l’oeil skyline until the benday dots of the composite photograph are like a galactic cloud of dust and gas within which time stands still, all motion is perpetual. Negro elevator boys flinch and roll their eyes, powerful men spray frustration through thatchlike mustaches, taxicabs lurch and revolving doors revolve.

  With the frame advance control I achieve a kind of lurching space travel, hopping from blur to blur until, deactivating gridlock, I retreat and retreat…. And here’s Margie in an elfin sportswear creation—white shorts and tunic with saucer-size black buttons—practicing her conga moves in preparation for a trip to Havana with Dad, who’ll be closing a big deal with Señor Mercado, owner of vast sugar plantations. (I remember eating flan in a Cuban place on Eighth Avenue with a girl who admired Angela Davis.) Margie’s boyfriend, the human ashtray, Freddy Wilson, watches disconsolately from the candy-stripe sofa.

  “Sure I want you to have a good time, but what about all those shiny-haired caballeros down there?”

  “Honestly, Freddy, do you think I’d fall for…”

  But wait. Here’s Vern emerging from the elevator, puffed with pride at having just been named to a seat on the Traffic Commission.

  “Oh, no, it’s Dad! Freddy, you’ve got to hide!”

  (I remember part of an old dream: On the lam in bayou land, paying for roadhouse tamales with a Calvin Coolidge twenty-five-dollar bill.)

  Freddy crouches on the terrace. Tipsy with civic triumph, Vern decides to view the beauties of Manhattan, to fill his lungs with sweet spring air. Wretched craven Freddy, born to lose, would sooner dangle from a chrome railing eleven stories over Park Avenue than jeopardize little Margie’s Havana spree.

  I look to my manifest for a client name, but the space is blank. Curious. Paperwork, repellently, is a strong point of mine. Up to my elbows in the long gone, but what I can’t remember is why I’m here so late, whether there really is a client, if I’m just running myself through a maze again.

  Vern grabs the phone like it’s a rainbow trout about to get away.

  “But, Mr. Honeywell!”

  The Mercados are in town and, of course, Honeywell’s invited them to stay at the Albright apartment, given them a key, they’re on their way now…

  “But!”

  (I remember thick, loud people who came one summer, and how the man put me on his lap, said, “Little fella, put up those dukes.” Later, I poured bacon grease in his bathrobe pockets.)

  Margie chirps and gurgles like a drive-time dj.

  “Oh, Freddy, you’re so wonderfully brave.”

  She packs him away in the foyer closet, but Vern has the damning evidence of Freddy’s straw fedora, and teeters in his righteous advance like he’s just fallen out of a hammock.

  “We had a bargain, baby, and you’ve broken it.”

  “But, Dad!”

  “And as of now, I’m taking that Havana trip alone.”

  (I remember a dozen collisions with El Gordo, more, and all his rigid relish. How he would rise up like a man pushing darkness away; how, in my night mind, I’d have him begging me to pull the trigger.)

  “That must be Freddy now. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget,” Vern bleats, greeting Señor Mercado with a windmilling uppercut.

  Mrs. Mercado, cocooned in wine-red sateen—or what I imagine to be wine-red sateen (Ella Dean, my algebra tutor, and her soapy breath)—faints through the doorway and into Margie’s arms.

  “Well, Dad, looks like we can cancel your travel plans too.”

  “You’ve got to think of something, baby. I’ll be ruined.”

  Vern whines pitifully; the sick undercurrents of this father/daughter bond have become impossible to ignore.

  Enter now Roberta, Vern’s girlfriend, conveniently situated across the hall in apartment 10B, totally out of place among these overwound toys. She is lithe and cool; her thin smile emerges from out of a fog of Virginia tobacco.

  “Looks like fun. Can anyone play?”

  “Roberta, this is no time for…”

  (Betsy from up the street who took me down to the cellar to watch her sit on a pop bottle, smiling thinly as the glass neck disappeared inside her.)

  I imagine Roberta growing up in a Boston townhouse, learning High German from her nanny, attending Mount Holyoke and being seduced by a lit. prof, with the highest, blackest heels. Now she writes articles for gardening magazines and takes Vern for all she can.

  Margie has that hophead gleam in her eye. (Carla’s nostrils pouring smoke like tailpipes and me thinking: Yes, she’s older.) “We can say there was a prowler.”

  “They’ll come to any second now.”

  “Don’t worry, I know just who can play the part.”

  Freddy gropes out of the closet, puckers faithfully when Margie tells him to close his eyes. Throwing mums over her shoulder (wet aromas of the Lexington Avenue florist where I worked, boy chants from the Catholic school next door), Margie crowns him with a vase.

  Roberta looks bemused, as though observing a square dance in the West Virginia hills. (A man told me, at a truck stop outside Wheeling, that bears had stolen furniture from his house.) “Why don’t you phone the police, Vern. Before we’re all unconscious.”

  Margie kissing the adhesive tape she’s plastered over Freddy’s mouth, Señor Mercado gesturing ethnically, his hand-painted tie flapping like a second tongue, the perky violins. Produced by Hal Roach, Jr.

  I shut down all the machinery I can and sit in almost-silence. It turns me backward, pushes me and pushes me into places everyone has been: up against the picture window that overlooks the lives of Bat Masterson and Huckleberry Hound, among the pages of glossy magazines, along overlit streets and in the vicious parking lots of doughnut shops, outside and inside of uneasy photographs, under a Christmas tree, behind a fixed expression, above the clouds. I remember that the man who played Molly Goldberg’s husband was blacklisted and subsequently killed himself; I remember the first appearance of a gourmet entree you could boil in a bag. And, turning backward, I remember that all experiences are equally synthetic.

  I sit so very still because it is dangerous to move. I am like a little old man in a hard chair on a decrepit porch, and memory is a tumor pressing against some vital spot. If it were possible, I would close my eyes. But I’m mean with fatigue and sick from remembering. I roll tiny sips of sour mash around in my mouth and aim evil thoughts at anything that passes by my porch.

  37

  I’VE BEEN ABSENT FROM work three days and nobody has called. That I find this disturbing shows how hard I am to please. Too ego-bound to favor anonymity as I claim? Oh, well. I got to beat Opatowski at chess, and hear from Tubbs, the cook, of his week as a Sonny Liston sparring partner in Miami Beach. I got to play with Heidi all yesterday, letting her put me in makeup, exploring her mouth like a dentist, lollipopping her icy toes. All this easy leisure and I feel like there’s a high, rough wall at my back. Too indulgently morbid to accept pleasure? Que sera. I can let today flap by with the wings of magpies rioting for beer nuts, or with the pages of The Charterhouse of Parma. But I need to cadge a little spirit. Right now, Sonny Boyers seems as kindred as they come.

  Coils of wire, buckets of roofing sealant—there’s more salvage in the yard than usual. To one side of the garage, where the boys’ swings used to be, is a corral holding goats with red plastic tabs in their ears. Dawn comes to the door, a bowl of raisin-flecked dough braced in front of her, to say Sonny is out testing products, if I feel like hiking after him. She points to a web of arroyos behind the house and I look at the web of cellulite on her arm. She doesn’t invite me in. The more I learn about her…

  Her first year as a wife, Dawn held a job in a penitentiary kitchen supervised by a 280-pound schemer off a Calgary wheat farm who took enough kickback money from the meat and produce suppliers to think about opening a restaurant. He wanted Dawn for his hostess. In the worst way. He reached to measure her and she pushed his hands
into a vat of bubbling minestrone. The trusties cheered.

  My legs are disobedient and stiff as I climb. Under thin dust the earth is baked hard and I slide back, paddling my hands in the air. From the ridge Sonny is probably watching my struggle, thinking: Another unprepared chump.

  “Hoss, you got to stalk quieter than that,” is what he says when I finally reach him. “You could be dead more ways than a cat has lives by now.”

  He is trollish, kneeling by some shiny rig, a mess-kit pan of water balanced on top of it. Solar cookstove that won’t boil water, he grunts. His boots are cracked, the black beret slipping forward. Troll in a quandary. Just beyond are straggling pines, trash mounds along the fire road.

  This is not the picture. This is not the man admirable for his coherent (or just consistent?) ethics. Oh, well. Learn to settle for less.

  “I have to waste my time with crap.” Sonny, in annoyance, pitches the unboiled water against a rock and watches it evaporate. “The small businessman is all on his own.”

  That’s more like it—those conversational slogans.

  “What did you do before?”

  “Different things. Nothing important.”

  I’m kneeling now too. “For instance.”

  “Back in Fort Wayne I assembled clock-radios. It was good money for the time. Out here I painted houses, worked some road crews. Then I got into the necktie stuff. Debt collection. Selling hydraulics and office supplies.”

  “Job variety is good for you,” I recite. “Job monotony can be a real serious danger.”

  “Wasting your time with crap.”

  A breeze comes up and we turn to it, letting it dry our faces. The resinous scent of the trees is like a drowsy little meal. What’s coherent now is saying nothing, scanning the houses below, the flat black roofs. A stillness of anticipation, uncomfortable. The sky bears down and bright cars are mortar targets in the streets.

  “If we had a little more breathing room…”

  Then Sonny speaks proudly of his goats, of the boys learning to make cheese from the milk, veers inevitably into technical details of rennet content and humidity control. I must know that closely as we kneel in the dirt, as close a resemblance as our fixations sometimes bear, I will never trust as does Sonny with all his heart.

  We stroll back into the trees where a plywood sheet is propped. The practiced salesman demonstrates an aluminum blowpipe, placing darts in a line on the pale wood. Silent force, the best kind. “Can’t you shut up?” Heidi kept repeating yesterday. She should see me now, my darts arcing, falling silently short of the target.

  “It’s focus,” Sonny instructs, “not lung power.”

  And learning to settle for less means learning to shut up. Okay. That’s a new job.

  38

  THE URGE TO BUY terrorizes you. I saw this in spray paint on a viaduct this morning and it turned me right over. A merciless conditioning network and nowhere to hide. Depths of torment and compulsion, a moment’s relief at the checkout counter before beginning all over again.

  Into this concept, as I drove, everything seemed to fit. Cacti became part of a bar-b-q sauce label; rock formations were objects to be conquered with the latest in climbers’ gear. I passed children playing around a woodpile and they seemed like little tools designed to open, like secret agents of color film and popsicles. Anywhere I looked there were nothing but commodities. To feel, even to breathe, was to consume.

  Approaching the facility at half speed, window-shopping along, I ran up on new product. Delusions of the marketplace, poisonous beguilements. There was no getting without some giving up. And so nothing felt strange or uncomfortable anymore since artificial flavors, recreations, and synthetics were all over and done with by way of complete acceptance. Safe as milk. Our bulwark was the imitation of life.

  One of those days. I was too full of ideas and should have gone home to Golconda, where people know me better. But I went to my minimart of a desk, which was exactly as I had left it: rubber brontosaurus, eyedrops, yellow water pistol, rolling papers, coupons, dog skull, lockknife, cards. The console was dusty with ashes and the swivel chair’s indentations were mine and mine alone. Looking things over, I felt likable. I read my last bit of paperwork.

  Annotations: JUGGERNUAT (docu-special re: US industrial birth). Still photos, Ellis Island. Proud past, our heritage of strength./Steam power. Railroad, shipping $$$/ Smokestacks & brick kilns (male & female). / Soft-eyed girl in knitting mill. White spools. Narrator: “The pathos of drudging children.”

  Exactly as I’d left it. Except that some someone had printed below: “Who asked you? History—we used to grow plants, now we work in them.”

  Who asked me? Who wrote large in red felt pen? I won’t fret about it because that is precisely what they want me to do. Devious but not subtle. As stringent as these overseers try to be, one must be lenient in return, slack. Dispassion denies panic and leaves no marks.

  “It has your sound, your style,” Ellen says. “Maybe you wrote it yourself and forgot.”

  “Possible but not plausible.”

  We are picnicking on the floor of a subarchive editing room, her smoked turkey sandwiches and my thermos of margaritas. Lighting is recessed, the air chilly, this bat cave atmosphere just what we’re after.

  The barometer lately has been on the rise, a high pressure system. Blooming like a dark stain, ire emerged from between the lines of First Tier memoranda. There were spot checks and speedups; there were interviews conducted by a team of “outside consultants,” all of whom wore the same indecipherable lapel pin. Rumors cascaded: an investigation by the SEC, a takeover bid from Coca-Cola, top execs on the brink of indictment for peddling high-tech designs to the Soviets. So now oblique looks are everywhere. People comb their offices for bugs, erase tapes, shred paper. They talk of exposure and reprisal. Karen Silkwood’s name has come up.

  Cage behavior, Ellen has called it, in reference to the aberrations shown by animals long in captivity. But then everyone is entitled to deal with pressure in ways of her own. She, for example, has altered her hair; now garish red and cropped close, it looks filched from the costume trunk of a Peruvian circus.

  “Don’t you wonder,” I ask, “why you’ve been assigned to do nothing but watch Channel Tomorrow?”

  Channel Tomorrow is a pirate cable operation out of Baja California which televises a mix of industrial films, gay pornography, and political harangues from an old man in safari clothes. He bellows and whispers and twirls a leather quirt. Behind him are gilt-edged chromoliths of Qaddafi and Pol Pot.

  “I’m like a hick,” Ellen says. “Suspicious but not curious.”

  “One out of two isn’t bad.”

  She bends a crust of pumpernickel into a bridge and walks two fingers over and back.

  “Thousands and thousands of hours going nowhere,” she says. “Still, I remember my first sight of this place. I’d slept all the way on the plane coming out and this was like more dreamland. Ancient wisdom, a temple in the sun. I promised myself a life all wired up and painless. Some schmaltz, huh?”

  Janos, the editor who goes with the room, comes in with his lunch on a tray, potato salad and four milks.

  “The good life for five minutes,” he says, looking at our white cloth spread on his floor. Janos bounced paving stones off the oncoming tanks in Budapest in 1956. His loyal father, withstanding purges and Party shakeouts, still maintains himself as a regional minister of state fisheries. After thirty years in America, most of them in Hollywood, Janos should retain his Slavic sense of machination and deceit, a decoding ability lodged in the genes.

  His big insight on the recent intrigues? “For worker ant there is only work and ignore the rest.”

  “Worker ants are female,” Ellen says helpfully. “Without exception.”

  Janos flips a toggle and monitors blink on, burning squares in a crossword. With the logical elegance of bones, across and down, the images are locked together and the puzzle solves itself, saying: Have a stylish fa
ce. Drive a shiny car. Working in reverse, it is possible to retrieve the clues. These are the contradictions, the things not shown. They have no shape unless taken one at a time, saying: Where is the prize? What are the rules? Who asked you?

  Janos is describing the Navajo pollen paintings that he bought only last week from the artist himself. He praises their sophistication of design. Ellen listens with interest, compressing her lips. For art of this quality, he says, it was a deal.

  I slip out without their noticing, the liquor coming and going in my head like surf. Something in common there. Maybe they even like each other. So what to do after the art discussion is over? No sense in it. But who says you have to do anything? Being attractive, just being pleasant—more buying and selling is all. Selfish. I should track back to the Golconda and give all these words a rest, but instead I prowl.

  This passageway, curving downward, ramplike, frightens me a little by being empty. Somewhere nearby is the pistol range where Delvino practices; and on weekends he goes out hunting snakes with a Buntline. Delvino, whom I’d run from if I saw him now, or bash his face. These nude gray walls, the rusty smell (steam pipes? but there aren’t any), are like this little door here with the red light above—they remind me of school. School in late afternoon when halls lengthen, empty rooms and stairwells whisper, and you sense the gathered madness which noise covers during the day. The red bulb reflected in gray paint is like blood underwater. When I put my ear to the little door, I can hear relays clicking inside; I can envision ceramic insulators and copper switches, strands of wire lashed thickly together into color-coded muscle. Simple schematics that function in darkness, while up above in offices whose tinted windows filter sunlight there are short circuits, a chaos of fear and rumor, a fixation on security.