Hob Broun - Inner Tube

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.

“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.”

“The only neon for miles.”

Great country of appetite, where a lunger’s son can dream of inert gas captured in tubes. Out where the sky’s a little bit bluer. Out where delusion’s a little bit newer.

Walking beside my landlord, I’ve got the shivers. Maybe it’s all too big.

My last conversation with Ellen came after she’d been beaten outside a roadhouse frequented by butch girls from the reservation. She had cracked ribs.

“It only hurts when I breathe.”

Other things hurt worse.

“The rest of the world. Everything rubs me the wrong way. I feel sometimes like I could float right off the planet and it really wouldn’t matter.” Finally she rested her hands, met my eyes through the smoke from her little cigar. “For a while there I thought you might provide me some gravity. Too much to expect.”

“From a man,” I added piteously.

“From someone who keeps missing the point.” She raked fork furrows in the top of her unnibbled coconut pie. “Who couldn’t get the point if it ran him through.”

Men nearby discussed megabytes and upload key sequences with evident fervor.

“The rest of the world,” she resumed. Her thumb went to her face, moved from scab to scab as if defining a constellation. “Could I be allergic?”

The commissary wallpaper featured Hollywood caricatures: Clark Gable, W. C. Fields, like that — something you’d find in an art house of the Minneapolis suburbs. A little bit of showbiz heaven, the faces smiling ferociously, as if at a malignant practical joke.

Ellen coughed, winced. “I find myself looking at children eight, nine years old. Little girls in sunsuits.” Her eyes lurked in caves of swollen tissue. “I think, ‘Well, they haven’t gone wrong yet.’”

“So that’s where you’re looking for gravity these days.”

“I think of myself at nine, sullen already. Up in my room, sleeping all day. From there to here isn’t so very far, either. Room to room to room. Isolation wards. I could be all sealed away. I could clock the next fifty years without a moment of pleasure.”

Ellen went for more coffee and didn’t come back. The last I saw was her brown pullover consumed by a squad of white shirts at the beverage station.

So, in the end, I had nothing to offer. Too much to expect. With a thankless kind of wisdom she had sought refusal while I, pretending not to, had imagined everything. Pearls for the asking, love in a hammock, wind in the palms.

Moments of pleasure? The gift of cruelty? How easy it is to forget, how easy to feign surprise. The years telescope and I cannot resist. Bravo. Hegel observes that what we learn from history is that no one learns from history.

It was August at its thickest. We had been to a pool party at the home of some gay blade who wrote travel guides and Violet had irritated me all day with her easy chatter and eagerness for gin. Then, as I drove home through Sunset Boulevard stop-and-start, she nagged me to stop at a ladies’ room. Her voice was a circular saw. I swung into a towaway zone, reached under her and pulled blue panties over her kneecaps. She giggled like someone in an Italian movie.