Hob Broun - Inner Tube

Those darkening hills, hot mud cooled before it could puddle, are closer than they look, but there aren’t any illusions in the land they enclose. I recall a man from that era of silence in our house, of misapplication and bland, lonely bike rides, a man, named after a freshwater baitfish, who compared television content to “a vast wasteland.” Such a man would be as oblivious to the furious life of the desert as to the explosive collision of disaster film and cat food commercial. He would be the valuable son, the example forever cited, and certain he had so much to lose that fear would rule him.

“Business has never been better,” Sonny says, cupping his hands over the fire. “Those nuclear survival maps, where we pinpoint the twenty safest areas of the country? We can’t keep the damn things in stock.”

His entrepreneurial glow, reinforced by wine, is overbright. With scattered stars and a new moon, darkness beyond the rim of the fire is like a barrier you could crack your face against.

“We’re doing an all-new catalog. Fifty pages, offset printing. Pro all the way.”

His belt jangles with keys and useless little tools.

“There’s pressure out there. People are feeling it and that’s good for you.”

“Pressure? Population increases geometrically and food supplies increase arithmetically. That’s pressure, my friend.”

Citizen Sonny has been reading Malthus. I find this disquieting.

“Anyone who’s hungry for more than food, they ought to call it a privilege,” he says.

He stretches lazily like a lizard scratching its back, a lizard replete with small bugs. And it’s thanks to him that I have fresh supplies, a tub of peanut butter, sacks of beans and rice, that I’m picking strands of meat from between my teeth with a peeled, bone-white stick. Yes, Sonny, protein runs the world. Ethics, rights, liberty — these are leisure pursuits.

“When I start to think of the things I’ll never see and the stuff I’ll never find out…” He looks out and down, as if for a caption.

“Just stop talking,” I say somewhat recklessly. “Stop filling my head with reruns.”

He spits into the coals. “Poor Sonny,” Sonny says. But he’s quiet after that.

I understand that appeal has been coming from him all along. And I think I understand that he has no more idea than I do of what the appeal is for. More miscellaneous signals, noise from another disappointed son. The best I can do is forgive the intrusion. The most I can do is nudge him toward home, toward the loyal eyes of his children and the resigned arms of his wife.

He grips me like a priest, winces with goodwill. “You gonna be all right.”

It is neither a question nor a statement, only a small collection of sounds.

We push cold mist in front of us as we walk, mist we will find condensed on the chrome of Sonny’s four-by-four, squeezed down to its heavier essence. We walk in the long shaft of Sonny’s flashlight until, chuckling, he snaps it off. Even then I can make out the strip of his bumper, white Gothic letters, one word: BLESSED. Sonny inserts the ignition key slowly, as though apprehensive of a wired bomb. Gold eyes flash and a low shape wheels away when he clicks the headlights on. Exhaust hangs in the air, condensing on my skin.

HAWKS RIDE HIGH ON the thermals, drifting in lazy loops. Their wing adjustments are so slight, their head swivels so quick, and they can spot a rodent’s eyes from so far. But for now they’re only passing time, floating under the sun.

I sip frugally from the canteen, just enough to smooth the burr at the back of my throat. Wouldn’t want to run short on a day like this, have to make it through to sunup, when I could lick dew. This air is so thin and dry that it seems to become powder in the lungs. Sweat disappears in an instant, leaving the pores tight. Kalahari bushmen bury water in empty ostrich eggs along their routes of travel. Saharan nomads drink the urine of their camels. Specialization comes easily to a man without choices, and tends to elude those whom choice has covered like the measles. So we consult texts, carry compasses, shield our eyes behind darkened plastic. And we sip frugally.

According to my compass, a northeasterly diagonal will lead me home. This feels wrong, but I must rely on instruments. My head is a heavy melon and my blurring eyes might be etched with dark spirals like the props of a hypnotist. Far too easy to become a subject of this flat land of mirage. Like right now. What I take for a watchful man couldn’t be more than a slender branching bush. I’ll be seeing Rommel in his command car next.

It must be time for a drink. I swirl water in my mouth, dribble it into my hand, spread it across my face. The pause that refreshes. And yet the bush has moved, is moving, draws closer. Under a felt hat, a hem of white hair, the face is the color of sand. A wary face.

“Hey!”

I wave but he doesn’t wave back. His expression is stern and distant both, and it makes me remember.

“Dobbs,” I say. “The gentle hangman.”

He folds his arms. “I know you, bub?”

“A few months ago at the hot springs.” I flip my sunglasses up. “We had some beers.”

“Don’t fancy the new beer. Tastes like mop water.”

“You wanted the cans for scrap.”

He grunts, tipping back, as if memory is a well bucket he’s pulling up. “Had a weedy little gal along. Wouldn’t leave you alone.”

“Dobbs.”

“Dobbs,” he confirms.

After which there’s nothing else to say. We could be in line for food stamps or waiting on the platform for a train. Afternoon is well along, but the sun feels perpendicular. The gentle hangman, humming, strikes the pediment of his chin. He declines when I offer the canteen.

“Best way to clean out the system is leave it empty awhile. Don’t let your minerals build up.”

The bandanna round his neck has faded from red to pink with countless washings, but the felt hat and the checked shirt are improbably crisp, store-fresh. Here he’s shaped in my mind as a natural growth on the land when the mirage could easily stretch as far as a nursing home he walks out of all the time.

“I don’t just pick things up from the funny books,” he says, reading my thoughts. “It’s a way of things sticking to me as I go. Like when the Baxter twins was running sheep all through here, eight, maybe nine hundred head, this was before they shot each other about a second term for Senator Mack, but at the same time there was a lady worked at the hotel who wore her own teeth on a bracelet. And I remember all that together.”

All right. Dobbs, in his time and place, is as true as parthenogenesis.

“Gonna take a whole lot of past with me. And soon.”

I can’t help wanting to be briefly vivid, another deposit in his alluvial mind. I invite him to come and see my spot and warily, conditionally, he accepts.

“Long as that little gal won’t be present. Her and her temper.”

He motions me impatiently ahead, but his pace is slow, wandering, and it’s hard not to distance him. He stoops over rocks, examines the roots of some weed he’s pulled, not out for scrap today, but reassurance instead. And, of course, he’s disappointed when we get there.

“This ain’t no layout, bub. Where’s your damn corrals?”

But he seems glad of the shade under the awning, settles into my director’s chair with a comfortable exhalation. Watching me gobble jerky, all the gentle hangman asks for is a little sugar to lick from his hand. He nods; his tongue is quick as an anteater’s.

“Don’t got even an outhouse,” he grumps, surveying from under his brown hat. “What are you, one of them bag-packers?”

“Backpackers.”