Hob Broun - Inner Tube

Hard and fat, the first raindrops make my skin draw tight. Tiny craters appear in the dust and splattered rocks darken. I’ve sighted the Airstream now, a hunk of metal in a wide open space, a target. One speedy bolt could leave me crisped in there like a strip of bacon, but I’ll take that chance. The elements — everything falling off the periodic table at once. Hunched under a drenching roar, I move toward shelter like a man crossing a battlefield.

Enclosed, I wrap up in a blanket and roll a cigarette. Rain pounds unrhythmically, winds burst, but my silver shell is riveted tight, no rattles or leaks, solid on its blocks. In a few weeks I have become intimate with its every rib and seam. I pass my hand over some irregularity, comforting as the moles on a lover’s back, and feel sound. Firing up the stove, throwing black tea in a cup, I remember the gift of water and fly out the door with jars and pans, anything that will catch some. An edict of water, a decree. I spread my fingers and they’re like ten little faucets dripping. Stripping useless clothes, I squeeze them into a bucket already half full. I’m blind, as though standing under a waterfall, but not so entranced as to ignore my own advice: Come away from your senses, boy, before you get swallowed.

Strong tea and stale biscuits, a candle on the floor. Slowly, I go through my scavenge bag, the pickings of the day. One bleach jug, with cap. Five more brass rifle shells (soon I’ll hang them all for wind chimes). A roach clip dropped by some dirt biker. Baling wire, no rust. Crow feathers. Not all that bad, considering I never reached the road. Simple rules and small tasks keep me on my good behavior.

Still, old habits die hard. It is not enough to follow the progress of a wolf spider as I once did the sequence of postwar Italian cinema. In fact, it is too much. The student is at a remove, his curiosity a kind of heartless filtration. The further he evaluates, the further he lengthens his distance. The miser of knowledge never will merge. I know all about this. I could accept the accidental and the immutable both, but I kept trying to tell the difference. Humbug. Utility? A niche in the system? Learn to think with the blood.

I put out some pinto beans to soak. These legumes contain bacteria that take nitrogen from the air and inject it into their host soil. Today I found more evidence of cactus rustlers in the area. They drive out from the city in pickups and carry off chollas and saguaros sometimes twice their age to decorate the walkways of a condo high-rise, or to make the centerpiece in a florist’s window, strung with colored lights at Christmas. I might ask Sonny to lend me one of his guns.

The storm has nearly passed, a few plops on my roof, thunder muffled like a hostage in the cellar. The thinning air is laced with odors sweet and sour that rain has caused to bloom. Guiltily, I look for a rainbow. There is a rim of heavy mist round the horizon, but nothing more. I remember driving with Andrea up the coast to Mendocino, driving into one end of a cloudburst and out the other. There was a double rainbow, its farthest ends disappearing into the sea. I parked the Olds near a steep drop and we got out. Freshly emerged sun made everything glow. I went into the details of diffraction and spectral density.

“You”—Andrea, as usual, let everything show in her eyes—“you are a book-fed pig.”

Then she snatched the car keys and pitched them over the side.

No fresh sun here, and the only thing glowing is the candle on the floor. I have emptied as many rain containers as possible into the storage drum and covered the rest to keep out debris, protecting nameless banes leeched out of the sky from careless gnats, the odd crumb of drifting bark. Now I am sitting by the door in my director’s chair, empty and alert. Evening seems reluctant to come, but I’m in no great hurry. The storm has passed and all I see is safely illegible.

ROY ROGERS’ COOK HAD a jeep named Nellybelle. That’s all I can think of as this one comes at me across the sand, even after I spot the whip antenna and the painted emblem on the door. The closer it gets, the slower it seems to travel.

I have the sun at my back and a kitchen knife in my hand. He has the tall hat and the silver star. He knows my name.

“You aware you’re on private property?”

“That’s what I like so much. The privacy.”

He turns his head to smile, as if at a sidekick. His lower lip bulges with snuff.

I know my limits. And he knows my name.

The first time I was ever arrested, it was by a man in a Santa Claus suit. He cursed me through his nylon beard, led me past carolers from a “special education” school and back inside Bloomingdale’s. I had two jars of marrons glacés in my parka pocket. It had been a reaction rather than an impulse, brought on by four hours of zombie mobs and holiday smarm. Or at least that’s what I told them in the security office, itself mobbed with a gamut of boosters, sullen pros to weeping Brearley girls, where I was fingerprinted by a placid fat man named Vito.

“Ask for Sergeant Faedo,” he counseled. “A close personal friend.”

They took us up to the Sixty-seventh Street precinct station in an unheated lead-gray bus with grates over the windows, and, after an hour or two, let most of us go. Dramaturgy. A Christmas pageant.

It was dark outside. Jolly cops drew on panatelas. They loaded their car trunks with hams and foil-boxed fifths for the trip across to Queens. I walked home, looking for a crèche to kick over.

The second time around was so frightening I’m amazed to remember it. I had been out here only a few months, was still made uneasy by all the empty space, still a serf in the Monitor wing, a sensory receptacle squirting itself with eyedrops, someone invisibly contorted, floating between the same very few points like a quiet whitebread lunatic. I was bound to walk into a wall, and I did.

It was what they have for winter here: wind stirring up dust and straw, a flat chill in the night. I was staying at a place called Motel Chateau, fifty-some yards off a popular north-south truck route. It was about 10 p.m., overcast. Losing at canfield, working my way to the bottom of a bag of malted milk balls, I noticed a girl moving back and forth in front of my window. She was talking to herself. She grinned at me, ran away, came knocking at my door ten minutes later.

“Got any weed?”

No. But she came in anyway. Snarled wet hair, purple bruise on her neck, long, grimy bedspread skirt, a tarry smell. She belonged on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, whapping a tambourine.

“We’re just a couple doors down there. Transmission seals is leaking. Wayne says he can fix it and I should go sleep in back. I says fuck you, farmboy. Didn’t come through all this so we could live like bugs, you know?” She leaned close to the wall mirror and picked at her face. “But I’m not tired. I mean, Wayne, he just don’t care…for somebody thinks all the time, and how we’re called to help these people find where they belong.” She lay back on the bed, feet dangling over the end, kicking slowly. “But I let my mind alone so I won’t be tired. Got to be a free bird before something happens.”

The burn marks on her arm didn’t scare me, but something did. And it wasn’t Wayne, either.

“Yo, beautiful people.”

A six-pack under each arm, a high cartoon voice. He was jokey and round and vague, the fatboy clerk in the waterbed store, whose every sale was a reminder of why he slept alone. He dropped successive pink-and-gray capsules into successive beers, whispering, “Bombs away.” The girl kept teasing him about his penguin arms and living on candy bars all the time and he kept sipping, pawing the hair away from his eyes.