Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“Let’s head back to your office.”

He sags resignedly, but with a hand on my shoulder pushes me toward the glass doors. Whatever’s bothering the boy…

“There really isn’t any book, but I suppose you already knew that.”

I shrug, disarrange files on my desk.

“The way it is, I sweat a pint of blood just to finish a two-page letter.”

“And you’ve never been to Bowling Green in your life.”

“Oh, no, all that’s genuine. Even my stupid name.” He shows once more that mixture of fatigue and insistence. “Why I’m here is to get something out of Katy’s mother. Think you could get me a key to one of the editing rooms? Just for an hour.”

“Settling a score, is that it?”

“I promise, an hour and no more. In the interest of justice.”

I’m not the least curious as to the details of this familial extortion. I have no qualms about furnishing the key.

Cornmeal pie with jalapeno sausage, pitchers of beer half off. That’s the Wednesday night special at Boot Hill, and I’m taking advantage. Old ladies waltz to Conway Twitty and linemen play poker dice at the bar. Very homey. So what’s Opatowski doing here, I wonder. He and the ex-postmistress who owns the place are supposed to be mighty feuders.

“Nobody cares about appearances in a town this small.”

He pours off the dregs of my pitcher to go with his double bourbon, looks blank when I thank him for the fixup on my TV, says he didn’t hire any Frank Goodhue.

“I didn’t dream the guy. Somebody’s going around your motel with a bag of tools and…”

“So okay. It’s the same as why am I in here when I can drink free in my own joint.” He aims a patient, paternal smile. “People are funny.”

“Not to me.”

HAD A FIGHT WITH Heidi in place of breakfast. Floating instinct: I sensed trouble at the scratch of her passkey, knew how she’d attack when I saw the rag twisting in Ajax-white hands. The indictment popped out of her like bread from a toaster. I didn’t play anymore, hardly spoke. I was sullen and distant, made her feel exploited.

“You’re about as much fun lately as choir practice.” An admiring disgust was visible on her face.

I told her she had a husband to absorb her whines and demands, to leave me clear. Heidi flung a toilet brush at me. I caught a lank twist of hair and spun her around. She scratched the back of my hand. I called her a cheap cunt.

Hard to guess which of us took the greater pleasure from it. For me the effect was of a violent morning fuck, raspy but quenching, with a pleasant absence of mind. I smoked a joint on the way to work and took the long way round.

The early sun brought out strips of orange and verdigris green in the terraced slag at the Apex II mine. I curved south through Government Camp, the refurbished ghost town where a squad of retirees clustered around the largest motor home swilling coffee and loading cameras. See America first. Then came the dead farms: rusted tin and crumpled wire, slanting walls. Something had come through here like a plague. Cutting west on blacktop with no center line, I cranked up the radio and downed the windows, loosed Jerry Lee Lewis into the clear, dry air. Ruins normally soothed me, but not today. Everything I saw made me thirsty: sheepskins drying on a fence, even swaybacked ponies snorting water from a halved oil drum. I passed a Papago in a John Deere cap. He wasn’t looking for a ride, just squatting on the shoulder like he had a cottonwood for shade and a slow brown river to watch. What he had was nothing but time.

The guard waves me through and I look for a parking space. I put fruit gum in my mouth and sunglasses over my eyes. This day is too sweet to spoil. Then I meet Foley coming up the center aisle of the lot. He looks a little wobbly.

“Got one for you,” Foley says, pulling my arm like a bell rope. “These two programming veeps, see, they’re on their way to a convention when the plane crashes in the desert. Only survivors. Desolate, pitiless sun. They’re crawling on hands and knees, praying for an oasis before they shrivel up and die. And can you beat it, there’s a certified miracle on top of the next dune. It’s an ice-cold can of peaches and an opener right beside. With trembling hands, they pry the lid up and there’s fruit bobbing in chilled syrup. So the one turns to the other and says, ‘Let’s piss in it.’”

While Foley chuckles harshly at his joke, I notice for the first time a torn segment of a woman’s picture emerging from his shirt pocket and the ink splotch in his hair.

“You know where I grew up?”

“Uh, Foley…”

“Troy, New York. It snows there. It snows there every year.”

Then he brushes past me as if I were a stranger in a hotel lobby. He doesn’t stop when I call to him, or even slow his pace when the torn picture flutters to the asphalt. I watch as he slides into a dented Japanese car and rolls slowly out the gate. I won’t be seeing him again.

A puff of dark hair, one apparently indifferent eye, the upper slope of a thick nose, a triangle of sweater, and a suggestion of pearls. The photograph has been severed diagonally. From its yellowed border and almost pulpy texture, I judge it to be more than thirty years old.

I’m examining it under a magnifier at my desk when Ellen comes up behind me. I summarize the Foley encounter without turning around. Ellen’s fleshy hands appear on the desktop and her head comes to rest on my shoulder. She sighs. She explains that Foley’s been canned, how he’d found his office empty this morning, not so much as a paper clip left on the carpet.

“Been here long as anyone,” she says with a certain irrelevancy. “I think he’d built up a sad attachment.”

“And the picture?”

“A wife or a sister. Maybe something he found in the trash. Who knows?”

She comes around in front of me. Framed by the chrome edges of my central monitor, by the tight chaos of her own hair, her face takes on the stiff and joyless beauty of a German religious painting.

“Anyway,” she says, looking past me, “I don’t think he cares about women.”

“Let’s drink.” I pull out the tequila,

Ellen dips a finger into her cup, sucks on it. Her eyes are still on the distance. “My father has an unpleasant view of the world. He suspects everyone. But he has a story he tells after a couple of Manhattans. It’s about Hiroshima.” She shakes her head, gives me the cup to finish. “He was with Armed Forces Radio and went in with an inspection team right after the blast. They gave him a jeep and a driver and permission to go wherever he wanted. Bouncing through the ruins, describing into a microphone. Mister Reporter doing a job. Then they happen on a couple of survivors, a father and son who are living in a hole in the ground with a tin sheet for a roof. The driver gives them a pack of cigarettes. Great confusion. Custom requires that the gift be reciprocated, but they have nothing to give. An idea hits the son. He jumps into the hole and comes out with a C melody saxophone on which he proceeds to play, quite badly, ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and ‘My Blue Heaven.’ Sometimes my father can’t get to the end of the story because he’s crying too hard.”

I cannot prevent myself from asking what this has to do with Foley. Her eyes finally engage mine; they are curiously neutral, pupils nearly disappearing into speckled green.

“Lonely men. Resentment. Old pictures.”

I’m chastened and take a long enough drink from the bottle to create air bubbles in the glass neck.

Arms folded, elevating her loose breasts, Ellen again shakes her head.

“You drink,” she says. “I’m going to go lock my door.”

“What for?”