Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“Make it far as the ocean, okay?” he said.

This irritated her — something heard over and over. She looked across at me and slipped her tongue side to side.

“Go on, go on,” Wayne said. “Long as we’re here.”

She bunched the skirt above her grub-white hips and rocked at the end of the bed.

“Reach that water.” Wayne snickered and nodded. “Reach the water and that’s all.”

“You shut up.” The girl bent her knees.

“Touch her. She wants you to.”

Wayne’s eyes were filmy but hard; he nodded some more. Scary enough; plain enough. I was going to get hurt if I didn’t follow instructions. The girl held out her hand, but she was staring in anger at the ceiling. I cupped her and she was cool, like a shucked oyster.

And then the door was splintered, the windows, by a blast of frantic men. The room whirled with cutting light and noise, Wayne begging them to shoot, the girl shrieking. A gun barrel struck me in the mouth.

They held me in a cell barely large enough to stand in, where slogans of defiance and revenge had been charcoaled on the walls. An FBI agent interviewed me in the morning. His method was laborious and his suit was shiny. Wayne Lopat and Lori Dee Carman were to be charged with aggravated murder, aggravated assault, rape, arson, armed robbery, and grand theft auto, all multiple counts. The agent had cheeseburgers brought in, but I wasn’t hungry. Well into evening, I repeated answers to irrelevant questions, sick with measuring how close I had been to some unspeakable mutilation. I walked around for hours after my release, watched a plain, metallic sunrise from the doorway of a fire-damaged laundromat, understanding there was no such thing as safety. Things went around, like debris in space, and avoidance was a matter of chance.

“You have any idea what my life would be,” says the man with the silver star, “if I had to enforce everything gets printed up?”

“Shorter,” I suggest.

He doesn’t smile for long. “So you let stuff be. You ain’t no beef thief. So a bunch of Japs is on the deed and for them I don’t give a flying fuck. But this out here is part of my area and I got to know what you’re doing in it.”

I’m blank, stopped, since at first I want to tell the truth and don’t know what it is. Won’t do. I need incoherence of an acceptable type. So I talk about renunciation and retreat, how particle physics had estranged me from God. I describe at length the inspiration of St. Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-five years atop a pillar of the desert, seeking His grace through abnegation in the sun.

The lawman squints, takes off his hat and looks inside as though crib notes are there.

He says, “I’m not inclined to question a man’s choice of worship,” shooting a gout of brown snuff juice well past me. “You can pray to the wind and the rocks and the creosote bushes, can’t nobody tell you no. Just don’t come lookin’ for me when you get in trouble and I won’t come lookin’ to give you any.”

I point with my knife at the pair of black snakes hanging from the awning pole and ask if he’ll stay for lunch. But already he’s swung up into the jeep, next to the pump-action twelve-gauge. He stares at me momentarily through the spotless windshield, the process of forgetting already begun, and wheels away in a long arc.

I’m not thinking of Roy Rogers this time, but of the saint on his desert platform. Maybe he tried to make himself a target up there. Maybe he was waiting for something to come from the heavens. Something like a meteor.

“NOT THAT I KNOW what it is,” Sonny told me this morning.

“But what you’re trying out here is bound to lead somewhere new.”

Before, where the earth now stands, say the First People, there were only Cyclone, Water, and Darkness.

I reminded Sonny that everything has already been tried. He smiled dismissively, kneeling to ream the generator’s feed line. Why disappoint him? He had brought snare wire and tobacco, sliced fruit Dawn had put through their dehydrator. He’d brought green operating scrubs from a uniform shop, billowy tops and pantaloons. No more jeans, no more heat rash. I thought to return his kindness by clearing away a little worry, by telling him I had a plan, a program.

1) To conserve moisture by day

2) To conserve warmth by night

Of course, he took this for mockery. I was looking at simplified life-forms and passing on the message: Accept, adapt. But Sonny wanted more.

“Resources,” he kept muttering.

Why the opacity? Why now? Could it be no more than the usual clog of jargon and cross-purposes? I thought not. I pictured Violet field-tripping past, brisk in sandals and shorts. Overwhelming her face would be the heavy, black-framed sunglasses of a Communist film critic; dangling from her white neck like a piece of life-support equipment would be the ubiquitous Pentax; between her toes would be calcareous grit millions of years old. And Violet would be no more out of place than a centipede.

No, this spate of bad reception between Sonny and myself, our mouths moving around static, must emanate from a source both less and more fundamental.

“How you go about this ought to be your own business,” he said.

We slackened, sat next to each other, touching at the knee. This was better, wiser. Not talking, we could be as placid as two Kool penguins.

He has promised to return before dark with a pair of tenderloin steaks. A gesture? A stance? I bewilder myself, turning over suspicions of my last link of a friend, pettily resenting his sustenance. I have nothing that needs to be guarded so selfishly. Still and all, this is not a venture and I’m not looking for partners.

Sonny has a new parabolic dish antenna which he wants to bring out here for me. It is enormous in his hard rutted yard, a pulsating ear with the delicate, blossomy contours of something formed by wind. It is a mechanical extrapolation of the omnivorously versatile human, unable to adapt and so bound to subdue, to capture and control even the air. And, Sonny fervently believes, it is a crucial tool for whatever I am trying.

The free life (not what I’m trying) means noise. Countless signals vie for attention — in one ear, out the other, on to the next ear — signals that in this zone fracture and bend, fly blind, fade in and fade out, that shower magically like particles from a child’s divinely smiling planet. Tenderness, fury, amazement. Trial by jury, soccer from Oslo, the cross-talk of pilots. I can have all this in a dish, signals needing no answer, muddy music of the spheres. This is the intrusive gift Sonny wants to bring me. I discourage him as firmly as possible, but he’s made it a focal point and hangs on. No compromise. His faithful insistence is liable to crowd me toward something drastic. A matter of preservation, and, probably, another row of spines on my penitent’s crown.

Through my pitted window I see lowering clouds shot through with evening tans and coppers. Stepping outside, I come instantly against a vibratory wall composed of nothing measurable, no sawtooth waves launched from towers, bounced off orbiting metalware, but rather of inaudible, invisible motion, the chemically dictated formations of the mass.

Evening light curves listlessly away while a breeze wraps me tightly and the silence of the desert transmutes into the silence of our house on Windsong Terrace. Inside an air of desertion are separate traces of the family, burnt coffee, sweet grass, chlorine from a pool. The silence is pressing and it seems dangerous to move, to climb the stairs and pluck the fruits of Carla’s laundry basket. So a motionless son squints into the melancholia of summer and wonders about other sons moving from room to room, bludgeoning anyone they find. Is it the cool silence that they want all to themselves? Take command. Be the son of whom nothing more is ever said.