Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“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.

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.