Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  “Yeah?”

  “How’s every little thing?”

  “You miserable fucking—”

  “Can we meet somewhere for lunch?”

  “Get bent. I wouldn’t meet you on top of a diamond mine.”

  But I can tell from her seesawing inflection that really she’s glad to hear from me. Takes only another ten minutes to talk her into it. She’ll stick Tasha next door, says she has to go back to the motel for something.

  “We can start from scratch. The whole thing, I mean.”

  “My mind’s open,” she says.

  No more explosions today. All is defused by right thinking. I picture her working spray polish into the Mediterranean finish of her home entertainment console. I picture her bending over the edge of my bathtub with nothing on but her running shoes.

  Hot in here. Feel like lead balls are hanging from arms and shoulders. For now, stretch out alongside baseboard. No harm. I have plenty of time. Be there first. Resting up briefly is all. In control. Eyes shut for a few minutes only. Minutes. No harm.

  41

  I’M DOZING IN FRONT of the box, light but no sound, when I hear it. There is a vibratory tingle in the glass when I step inside the drapes and tip my head against the window. First thought, what a gorgeous piece of rolling stock—a green-and-white ambulance from Cherry Ames. I see Wade jump out and dash into the office. Right then I snap to who they’re going to be carrying out. Fuck all. I want to stay inside with the covers over my head, but really, I can’t.

  The outline under the sheet could be a child’s. They retract the stretcher wheels and slide her on in like a safety-deposit box. Opatowski has no shoes on. The bottled-in-bond Potts-town hard guy doesn’t answer me, fights when I try to sit him straight on the bench. His sobbing is so violent, I’m afraid he’ll throw a seizure.

  “Can’t you give him something?”

  This is as close to Wade as I’ve ever come. He has the same pitted cheeks as his wife, the same pallor.

  “Like what?” he says.

  “Like a sedative. Just look at him, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Yeah, I see. The man just lost his wife.” He looks to his partner, a burly guy with a cheek distended by tobacco. “We got no liability coverage for that, right?”

  Opatowski is choking on grief, tries to get her name out but can’t.

  “That don’t make me crazy about it. Hell, I know these people personal, and anything else…” Wade shrugs. “I wouldn’t even be here except for two fellas called in sick.”

  I throw him against the ambulance door, jerk him back again by the belt.

  “Take care of him now, you jerkoff. Right now.”

  He could flatten me in seconds, but I must look rabid enough to alarm them both, convince them to take the easy way. Wade nods, spits, mumbles something about legalities. They hit Opatowski with something from an ampule and take him inside. I ought to stay with him, but really, I can’t.

  The sun is high and the road is flat and black as a griddle. I walk over to Boot Hill and subside into a brown booth. Two other thirstys in the place, Virg from the gas station, and the owner’s crooked boy. We don’t say hi. I have a shot and a beer, then two more.

  Then come stinging tears, concentrated, as though I’ve been holding them a long, long time.

  It was cherry blossom time in our nation’s capital. The Washington correspondents, who were always fighting for air time, searched out bosky spots to film their opens and closes. Ratings for the Evening News had never been better; I thought of asking for a raise.

  It was daffodil time in Lake Success, and they were burying my mother in a memorial park spruce as a tournament golf course. The headstone was white marble. The casket was polished copper, a plush capsule that could have been boostered into space.

  Three rows of folding wooden chairs had been set out, but it was still SRO. Aunt Rita, who’d been pinned under a horse, arrived in an electric wheelchair, a slit-eyed chauffeur in attendance. Sonia Brooks, whose Christmas cards had been returned unopened, was there without her husband. My mother commanded loyalty, at least that day—her tennis teacher came, her hair stylist, and a housekeeper she’d fired for drinking. And there was the English character actress she’d toured with one summer, who wept and trembled uncontrollably: On her way to the service in an open convertible, she’d crossed the Verrazano Bridge and a rat had dropped from a girder onto the seat beside her.

  My father read some Swinburne and a Unitarian minister mused about “interdependence.” A circuit court judge, who, as far as I knew, had never met her, described my mother as a bright clear light. Union workers lowered my mother into ground that belonged to white grubs and blind moles. Flowers were tossed in with her. Strangers embraced me. I felt sick to my stomach but my eyes were dry.

  Carla was next to me, silent and still, but her eyes overflowed. She had driven down from Maine, from the cabin she’d fled Boston for, three days earlier, and had barely slept since. Her bloodless face was seraphic, frozen white above a mourning costume improvised from closet depths: black velvet minidress, black tights, pointy shoes with functionless buckles. Back at the house, I spent a long time in the shower.

  Gordo said we oughtn’t to sink too deep in sorrow, how she would have been the first to say so. He wanted to take us to the Princeton Club for drinks and dinner. We had soup and toast instead and took turns answering the phone.

  “Anything at all we can do,” offered curious townsfolk.

  “There are no words,” said bar dwellers from the country club, prefacing advice.

  We were dazed, wary of each other, and the sentences we found to speak were museum specimens. Gordo roamed between kitchen and living room, knocking things over. He seemed to be regressing, melting into himself. He played with toast crumbs and told us how proud we made him. The longer he held back the more horrific it would be. Carla, whom he’d always frightened the most, turned stricken eyes to me when he tottered over to ruffle her hair like some stickpinned bachelor. (“You seem like nice kids. Here’s a dollar for each of you.”) But soon he wandered off, decanter in hand, to their room, their bed.

  Not that it was any easier for the two of us. Every surface held her imprint, every object was infected with her presence. We sat on the floor and smoked. Carla drank coffee like it was medicine and talked about Maine, the cold clear nights and the piney air.

  “Sometimes I forget to eat for a while and I see things.” Her voice was hoarse.

  “Things?”

  Carla did not elaborate. The house had grown suitably cold and she wrapped up in a blanket, teeth clicking on the rim of her cup. I felt angry and protective and uneasy. It was a sleet storm of impulse and recollection through which there was no visibility. I heard my mother laughing, scolding. She pulled me from a pile of dead leaves and swung me toward the sun.

  “If you could hold me for a minute.”

  Carla opened the raveled wings of the blanket and I crawled inside, smelling her exhaustion. She felt hard and shell-like at first as I held her tightly. Then as I loosened, so did she, her face turning into my neck. Each tear was discrete on my skin, an emission squeezed out of her with the pain and effort of birth. That my mother could have caused such misery seemed unforgivable just then. I had no sympathy to spare for her. Carla’s mouth opened against me and I disappeared inside the jagged cadence of her breathing. For an immeasurable time then she ceased to be a sister or a woman, became simply a fellow creature, and I glided up and up a sparking wire, ecstatic with purity of feeling.

  A momentous crash overhead, deep bellowing. The widower had snapped his tethers. Carla’s hands were like suction cups against my ribs.

  “Let him alone. Please.”

  I pulled free, got to my feet. The velvet dress had ridden up past her hips and her eyes were those of a doe under the gun.

  “I live here too,” I said. “I don’t want him tearing the place up.”

  My sister curled on the floor, palms over her ears. I turned fr
om her and went up the stairs, toward the sound of breaking glass. There was a dreadful awareness of error, as in the elongated second or two before the car hits the stanchion. It was sheer expedience that placed me in the house and I really didn’t care if the old man raved until the very roof spun away across identical lawns and into the night.

  “Feckless child! Parasite!”

  I had reached the open doorway: Gordo in pajama tops amid a swale of destruction. He’d opened his hand on something; blood globs dropped from his fingers like candies.

  “She died in shame…looking in a broken mirror. Shame!”

  I had left a chance below, an opening.

  “Worthless worthless world.”

  It could have been a kiss alone, a few gasped words, or something far more reckless. It would have been a recognition, a barrier irrevocably passed after so long and contorted a wait. But not now.

  Gordo advanced, babbling. Blood had dribbled onto his gray penis, which swayed like a toxic undersea plant.

  “Bedtime for you,” I said.

  “How much did you know about, eh, yardbird?”

  I heard behind me the slap-slap of Carla’s running feet, the thundercrack of her slamming door. Not now. Not ever.

  I weighed my fist, rocked back, and drove it into the bulge of my father’s jaw. He flipped backward onto a mound of clothing flung from the walk-in closet, and I left him there to come to or not. Either way.

  The cigarettes I smoked downstairs tasted like jet exhaust, which was fine with me. I had one of those infected objects, a circular paperweight enclosing milky glass flowers, and I turned it and turned it in my hand until it was warm, remembering the day she’d bought it. A balmy October, mother and son driving out to check the foliage. We stopped in a little model-railroad town for refreshments, lemonade for her and a maple walnut cone for me. The junk store didn’t interest me, so I waited in the car. But through the crowded display window I could see her expressions flash, the motion of her arms as she haggled. Bouncing into the car, she sparkled breathlessly like a swimmer fresh from the pool. The glass ball rolled out of tissue paper and into my hand.

  “Did I do good?” she asked.

  It was misty outside, halfway to dawn. I walked to the end of the street where woods began, flung the paperweight high and far, heard it crash into the safety of some dirty thicket. I walked back as slowly as I could. I wanted to hang myself from an ornamental tree with a pair of black tights, but my eyes were dry.

  Fighting the sun, I grope along the sidewall to a patch of shade where I can retch. The hiss of hot grease comes through the screen door near me. I remember that Tubbs is gone; over to Texas to train quarter horses, he said. A Cambodian émigré mans the kitchen now. Ton Wat, a former architect, a designer of schools and custom bureaus, and the only member of his family left alive.

  “It hurts him to have been spared,” Opatowski said the day he hired this man.

  42

  IGNOBLY, WITHOUT A WORD of explanation, I stole away from the Golconda like a cowardly vagrant father, leaving behind only a kachina doll Heidi had given me and, perhaps, a crucial piece of my integrity. Or possibly departure was the only way to save what little of it is left. But no more questions now; I’ve abandoned them as well.

  I drove south, filling the car with cigarette smoke and the sound of my own tired voice as it spoke the injured contempt of everyone else for my flight. And like the vagrant father, I found solace in their accusations, snug proof of my independence. It was well past midnight when I finally stopped, pulling into a small, deserted rest area where a historic marker shaped like the state recalled the capture of Mexican outlaws. Moths careened and the air crackled with ozone. I nestled on the back seat and slept for several hours, or at least was not awake.

  The Pronghorn Bungalow Court is east of the reservation, just north of the dry lake where hot-rod boys race and fight. I paid rent in advance to a man for whom ownership of the place seemed to be a thing inflicted on him.

  “Got a beef with the state, don’t bring it along.” He spat into dead yellow stalks by the toolshed. “People expecting me to go to bat for them, I’m only the zookeeper here.”

  He wore tooled boots, gray whipcord trousers, stiff denim jacket. There was something unpleasantly fastidious in his manner.

  “Stay here long and it’s going to bring you down. That’s a warning and I don’t give it to everybody.”

  I thanked him. He rubbed his jaw expressionlessly, gazing past me at the single line of cabins, muttering about their needing paint. I was going to take this as a cue to cut a little deal, but he was already walking away, sliding into his long white car. He went off slowly, as though part of a parade.

  Norbert Padilla. His name appears on my rent receipt in jagged lowercase letters. According to the only neighbor who will speak to me, Padilla’s mother was a painter, a tubercular German who came for the dry air and stayed to marry an older man who sold tortillas from a wagon. Believing in cure by climate, the ill swarmed here in those days. Epidemics swept the southern counties every winter, until the hotel people got the idea of boiling their silverware.

  Mind you, this informative neighbor is a dipsomaniac who claims to have served as adjutant to General Omar Bradley and to have played first base for the Washington Senators. When his government check arrives, he rides to the liquor store and back in a taxi. He favors white wine over red because then he can tell when he’s vomiting blood.

  “Right away I tells ’em I got files of my own,” he says, bright-eyed and emphatic, with new ears for the limitless epic of Dag and the Veterans Administration. “Which I’ve lost the combination to the safe, but not to worry.”

  On he goes and all I hear are the circular sounds, like gamelan music. I sit here patching screen, calmed by the thinness of the wire, by the smallness of the holes, and I think of my father’s law office, brimming with files, of the great desk glowing with lemon oil, and the framed motto of a man who never miscalculated a risk-to-benefit ratio: “Be satisfied with yourself and so thus will be others.” I think of the entirely measurable distance between here and Lake Success, congratulating myself on all the subtractions I have worked so hard in my life to make.

  “And if I told what them big poohbahs took out of the Reichsbank that night? What then?”

  Dag releases my arm, satisfied with the weight of this threat. And I have no good reason to doubt casual pillaging by colonels. No further questions, remember? So I walk Dag back to his cabin, last in line, “the caboose,” with its unlockable door and cardboard windows. He is reluctant to let me go, extracts a promise to return in the evening for something to drink and “the real story.”

  Fed by the sewage line, there are cottonwoods near the road and in their shade the Pronghorn’s one and only family unit plays. The tiny wife with blonde hair out of a bottle buffs the chopper’s chrome pipes and sips orange pop through a straw. Her jeans are embroidered at the knee with mushrooms. The husband lifts their baby high, making her gurgle and kick. He is shirtless, a rippled scar under his navel like he’d once been cut open with a breadknife. The impending gleam on their mean faces stops me in midwave. Never mind.

  Over the sink in my cabin a magazine picture has been pasted. A boy sits at a piano, eyes shut, head tilted back. He bites his lip. The effort of playing from memory. Vertically arranged above him on the white wall are three ceramic fish. They are like thoughts bubbling out of his head, distractions from the tempo and the tune. I can feel him struggling, his fingers slippery on the keys, and I have to scrape him off the wall with a razor blade. Whoever put him up must have been harking back, dangling a piece of regret where it couldn’t be missed. Something in Padilla’s warning? But I feel fresh and clean, free of any urge to review past decisions. Fuck integrity. I know, I know—you’ve heard it all before. You ask in exasperation: Won’t he ever get off the dime? Patience. I’m in a staging area right now. Formulations first.

  A) Initiate!

  B) Experience doesn’t
count

  C) Recall sexual extremities, then forget

  D) First aid

  E) Resource checking

  F) Catalysts &; anodynes

  G) Research: desert botany

  H) Body disciplines

  I) Quicksand Syndrome (strive hard, fail fast)

  J) Don’t speculate—sane limits

  K) Deductive vs. Reductive

  L) Below sea level?

  M) Sleeping exercise

  N) Carla’s black tights

  O) Stick to this list and you will be okay

  I can set myself a rigorous program. I can do that, sharpening myself on the small grinders of Padilla’s toy town, moving beyond slogans. So then do I betray Ellen by way of these ambitions as I have, in other ways, betrayed Heidi, Chris Bruno, so many others? Who cares. Waste motion. I can discount experience. I can let thoughts bubble out of my head and burst harmlessly at the surface.

  But no more chores for today. I would rather rub myself against the greasy mattress ticking. I would rather take another Reader’s Digest from the pile and read of another Most Embarrassing Moment.

  43

  “THIS IS A GREAT country,” says Norbert Padilla. “So big it can hold anything.”

  Because I’ve given up on distinctions, I don’t get started on all the things it might want to let go of. Big country, mother country, underdeveloped country, Marlboro country—here or over there, it’s all just country. Fine tuning? What for?

  Padilla looks into the distance. “Big enough to smile at trouble,” he says.

  The air is cold and wet. We are standing at the mouth of the driveway where last night wind blew down the big metal sign. It is stippled with mud and more paint has flaked away, P ON HO N BUNG OW C UR is how it reads now. We blow on our hands. Padilla kicks a dent in the earth.

  “I could replace it with neon,” he says brightly.

  “You’d have to run current out here. An investment.”