Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“Fill ’er up, huh? You’re all dried out, I can see that.”

Dag gets another cooling cup into me before I pass out. Quite a bedside manner. His yammering seeps through the wall of my doze, drenches me as I wake.

He stops, frowns into the scraped-clean bowl, and I can see old stitches like a zipper alongside his head. The Beanball Incident he’s forever reciting — but Padilla says he got whanged by a horseshoe-pitcher at a church picnic.

“Get you some fresh air,” Dag says.

He hoists me, gets me out the door. Daylight overwhelms my eyes. I subside into crunchy dry grass and feel around with my hands.

“Where are my toys?” I say. Stimulus and response.

Not looking up, Dag points to hazy blue sky. “Worry about getting’ some a that, and that’s all.”

The big gas ball. I can have all I want.

“Who’s worried?”

Across the path, motorcycle parts soak in a pan of oil and a young cat claws at tar paper hanging from Padilla’s toolshed. A vista. Farther out, the land is careless and uncolored, has been for so long that its present is as invisible as its past.

As words come out of me and pass through Dag like water through a sieve, I come to see how it will be.

“I’ll go out where few things are possible. Where most things are inevitable. I’ll give it all up to that place and I’ll have a new shape.”

“You lookin’ for work?” Dag is puzzled as only he can be.

Steep hills to the north, a broken-glass profile. No more intimidating than an afterthought. To the east, where scrub thickens in a gray-green crescent, root webs extend no more than an inch below ground. The cat, coming toward us now, carries a limp brown snake in its mouth. Science can be such a comfort. I explain to Dag that we are just coded strands of nucleic acid.

“Brain fever,” he says. “You need dousing down.”

But one look tells me it’s been a long time since any water has passed through that cracked black hose. Grumbling and spitting, Dag kicks fruitlessly at the spigot.

I sink deeper into the grass. Fading again, that sensation of being hollowed out. But soon I can get to an uncolored place. Already on my way.

I don’t mind the heat or the dry grass spiking me or the insects traversing my bare back. My memory is as quiet as a dead snake. I must be getting well.

I AM HERE ON the desert floor, alone in a silver pod. I have no telephone, no mailbox. I have no heat, no plumbing, no qualms. The land under me was an inland sea until it dried up a few million years ago. Now it is government land leased to a Japanese corporation, From my window, roughly the size of a picture tube, I can see as far as I might want. Quiet, haggard space. The sky is huge. Nothing moves. But I believe in tidal rhythms here among fossil fish long ago powdered and dispersed on the wind. Nothing moves and I contemplate beginnings: the first men to see patterns in the stars, the discovery of coal, the creation of blue glass, the invention of the Nipkow disc.

For this silver Airstream trailer I gave cash and my car to a newly retired Spec/4 who’s leaving the base to live with his daughter in Beaufort, South Carolina. Citizen Sonny towed it out here, his face wrinkling like a sandwich bag with what I took to be envy. He showed me the well a mile or more to the west that I share with some shabby shorthorn cattle. He placed in my hand a copy of “Survival for Desert Commandos.”

The old man knew confined space at its best — in Beaufort they should let him get jolly on bourbon and sing the grand-kids to sleep. I have brackets for a kerosene lamp. I have a Primus stove, niches and shelves, a writing desk that folds out. From a director’s chair, with tequila bottle in hand, on a black-and-white powered by an army surplus generator, I am watching Perry Mason ruin a witness with unfounded and argumentative questions.

So at last I have taken steps, made the final subtractions. Citizen Sonny chastises me about planning, but I have confidence in the undesigned campaign. My belief in grace is firm. That is to say, I take things lightly.

There was my first true experience of sand: soft, warm, and easy. I moved on my stomach like a turtle between Long Island dunes and thought of burying myself. My mother appeared in tears and snatched me. That is to say, you are lost only so long as someone is looking for you.

So I don’t worry about being found. I don’t worry about dehydration or changing my mind. I remember the old man walking in a tight circle as I counted out his money. “What I’m going to miss is the big picture.” Would he find Beaufort tight and foolish, the grandkids a nuisance? Would he yearn for the crush of the mess hall and artillery fire echoing among the rocks and the soft flicker of his kerosene lamp? Let Sonny envy that.

“But you returned that night, didn’t you?” Mason says. “You went back determined to destroy the lipstick formula.”

I turn from the weeping admission and look out my window. The chemistry of industrial espionage is contained in these pale wastes, in layers of the ancient sea. Sonny claims the Japanese are expecting to take uranium out of here, and are being fleeced. Fuck integrity, eh? Elementary. But is this place as lifeless as it looks? There might be secrets here just waiting to be looked for, a primeval rectitude I can’t even guess at.

I built a fire my first night, roasting sweet potatoes in the embers, and wondered who the unfamiliar light would attract. I was expectant, not fearful, peering into watery shadows. But it was something I heard rather than saw that taught me right off to respect this place. Wet wind put out the flames of my fire as though aimed. The slow prefatory scraping was like two algae-covered slabs pulling apart, and then came a sound both mechanical and animal, an admonitory rumble and roar that had me crouching in the illusory safety of the pod, reduced. I stayed awake while the sky shifted from black to blue, without hearing so much as an elf owl, and this gravid silence was worst of all.

Try as I might, I could not keep myself from interpreting the experience, could not in the now ominous daylight hold down the conviction that my choices were to leave and be doomed or to stay and be absorbed. I felt as though I were being closely examined from above like something in a petri dish. When I said before that I took things lightly, I lied. But you must be used to that by now. In cities where I have lived, candor makes licit all sins: Go ahead and fuck me around, just be honest about it. So, in the current style, I could wrap things up by confessing to solipsism. But a swindle is a swindle. This is what I mean by the doom that awaits me everywhere but here.

Inside my pod there are seeds. I fold down the writing desk, align pencil and paper. What am I going to put down? A grocery list? A letter? Do I want to draw heads or play hangman with myself? Outside a thousand absorptive processes are taking place. Leaves suck sun and make sugar. Maggots take nutrition from pus. I am still wary, still uncomfortable. But at last I have something to write.

Q: Are we not men?

A: No, we are animals

All the consoling fabrications must be waived.

THE MARGIN FOR ERROR is thin. Beware of moods. Ignore quick decisions. Balance, proportion. I learn to walk all over again, canting forward on the lead foot for a gradual transfer of weight. I learn to conserve energy. Information shaped like an arc, my eyes sweeping back and forth across the steadiness of the landscape. Caution, deep cover. I learn to recognize danger signs.

A dust devil swirls off to my right, then replicates itself close by. Light has muted, the temperature is dropping, and the smell of ozone is sharp. Storms blow up fast with so few obstacles in their way. Home is a good half mile away, but the spiraling of larger wind doesn’t hurry me, nor the first distant lightning, a yellow crack on three branching legs like a music stand. Time is a broad generality. Water is a gift. Seeds long dormant will sprout; brine shrimp will breed in puddles.