Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“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 from 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.

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.