Hob Broun - Inner Tube

“Anyhow, something for nothing.”

I correct him again. “Nothing for nothing.”

He’s slack in the canvas chair; I’m stiff on the ground. His face, lined like river mud, is steady on me. It isn’t the wary face, nor the stern one, but I have to answer it.

“Things that stuck to me I want to be rid of, see.”

“On the house.”

He fishes out a pack of mentholated filtertips, the gentle hangman preparing a victim. He snaps the match alight on his teeth and holds it for me. I blow a solemn chain of smoke rings.

“A thing I can tell you — and it ain’t for me, since to do it I always felt fine — is I never once pulled the trap on somebody wasn’t just as glad at the very end to go.”

To believe in a man who’s known only clean cases all his life is something I couldn’t have done before. Today I can let hard facts go soft, become tractable as a bosun’s dream of the Mojave.

Dobbs says, “Maybe you could wrap up a little more sugar in a bag?”

I take time with the old man’s bundle, folding corners precisely, but he’s gone when I bring it outside, gone without telling me there is nothing to find here.

Birds are low and loud in the sky. Their noise bends around me like water. I take heart. I unfold corners precisely. Wind billows up out of its troughs and blows white grains away, leaving the paper clean.

ISOLATION DISTORTS AS IT toughens. It shrinks and magnifies, reroutes, subverts the normal controls. I recognize in myself certain disturbances, reactions that are powerfully wrong. Misplaced objects infuriate me. The faint trail of a jackrabbit fills me with wild, hopeless panic.

But now, I think, I have the sort of companionship that will steady me and smooth me out. Three days ago clanking woke me and I tumbled out the Airstream door to face a scrawny goat with a bell around his neck. I gave him water, and called him Rosing, after the inventor of the cathode-ray receiver. I didn’t know how to remove the red plastic clip in his ear that marked him as someone’s property, but I cut loose the bell. We shared a tin of sardines and slept in the shade of the awning like comrades of a prolonged desert campaign.

Scarred and underfed, a battered range refugee, Rosing is tranquil. He is unperturbed to the point of hospitality by flies that crawl along his snout, so incurious that only repeated yelling will cause him to turn his head. He consumes cactus methodically, with a nearly circular chewing motion that causes him to resemble a fastidious mandarin. I take comfort in his exemplary resignation. Aid and comfort.

Chuff-chuff-chuff: the soundtrack for embassy evacuations. A bulbous black helicopter passes over our heads, carrying, with equal probability, soldiers or hunters or survey geologists. Or eager Japanese in rayon cowboy shirts, satraps of the company that hopes to feed its reactors with what it can extract from this land. I’d like to take them out of the air with my slingshot, then sit and watch black smoke plume, listen to the sounds of melting. Righteous glory, a boy’s idea. These two-legs, eh, Rosing? Fucking parvenus. One blink of biologic time and they zip around as if the place were theirs to own, strewing dead certainties like the rest of their garbage. Sunlight glints and blurs on the rotor blades. Chuff-chuff-chuff.

I lift Rosing’s damp muzzle from my lap, probe his expressionless gray eyes. Comrade, is there still time to get away? He blinks. He dips his head. He lifts and lowers one little black hoof, a hoof as cleanly split as any dialectic proposition. It’s not my fault they picture Satan with a goat’s horned head, then talk about the lamb of God. White woolly innocence versus rancid concupiscence? Not my idea. Everything works together — tendon, ligament, and bone — as Rosing subsides into a drowse. Different genotypes, comrade, different protein codes. It’s none of my doing.

I brew chili pod broth on the stove, hot vitamins. The generator’s low on fuel, not too many viewing hours left. I dial rapidly around and around, a pinwheel of incoherence, maximum heat load. I stop on the prettiest face.

“Call our eight hundred number now and help us feed the world. Call right now.”

A nisei flower with hair to her hips in a tank suit with peekaboo cutouts. Rear projections flash behind her. Bounty of the ocean, kelp farming, krill-based soft drinks. Metal rings hang from her nipples.

“Take an all-important support posture. Please call right away.”

Images recycle, coral and spume, begging bowls. I’m right in my place. Her eyes, shiny as bits of ormolu, as piercing as nipple rings, are fixed on me and me alone. Why do you stay away? they ask. We miss you so. Her tongue slides around the roof of her mouth, waiting for me to open up so she can slip me guilt to suck, grit wrapped in mucus. Women always want to haunt. She speaks of the internment camps so far from water, the dusty barracks, the glare, the heavy stink of trucks.

“I wasn’t there, but I can feel the pain,” words leaking through her heavy lips. “Pain, if only you’ll call right this minute.”

It isn’t really me you miss. Inviting and inflicting pain are insufficient. You want to understand, to pursue every forensic detail.

“Call.” She tugs hard on the rings. “Help us feed the world.”

Porpoises leap and plankton luminesce. Poor men pull nets by torchlight. I wasn’t there, but…She tugs. Her eyes insist. She raises and lowers one open hand, a hand as rigidly flat as any technician’s rule.

Drinking heat from a tin can, squatting in front of a pretty face, who am I to refute those eyes? I wasn’t there, but I want to see her lap up cold rice, rinse shirts in a bucket, weep beside the wire fence. So I give in, match point conceded. All tracks converge; feast and famine, solitude, solicitude, appearance made weightless, expectation pared — all finish up in pain. Then I click her off.

Getting away like a bug down the slot of a toaster, and staying away. All women want to haunt. Every kiss contains a gift. Each joy may be the last.

OCEANIA. I WAKE UP more hounded than haunted. The taste in my mouth is like jetty sludge. Hard sun thuds away, saying the same to me as to someone stranded on an atoll: Here again, here forever. No breeze, no breakers, ground zero only. I swallow aspirin dry. I say to myself, You really ought to be keeping a diary. In there you could be thorough. You could talk about animal companionship or bitter women or great blind sea depths impenetrable by light. You could write in a forbidden alphabet, with charcoal.

Unfathomable. And just when I thought everything was under control. Law of the desert: Don’t turn around. Anyway, I ought to have suited myself enough by now to the waiting game so as not to need an audience to play to, a little book to fill.

Treading water. I move through the hard, comfortless sun with no determination other than to be on the move. My arms hang limp. Green surgical pants hang low on my hips. I start to remember my sister crying on the beach, stung by…But I click that off. The atoll man goes crazy from too many swipes at an irretrievable life. Forever here, nowhere else — hold on to that and don’t let yourself sink. White clouds hang at the edges of the sky. Shadows hang in abeyance. I press calluses on the soles of my feet, pleased by their thickness. I feel droplets sliding down my neck like seepage from vestigial gills.

Red tide. Drink from the ocean, so it goes, and you thirst forever. Without thinking, I’ve veered over onto the path leading to the well. In a hounded condition, you gravitate to the familiar, and this is a route I can navigate in the dark. How far could I walk without resting? How long could I rest and still be able to stand up? Already I can smell the cows who loiter near the well like cleaner fish around a reef. Scarred and scrawny like Rosing (part of somebody’s write-off herd, I assume), they approach expectantly, with lolling, pebbly tongues, as I climb the fence. I read “help us starve the world” in their eyes; tight gray hide under my hand…But now there is an evil, uncow smell thickening the air, and I’m drawn along like a cartoon hobo by the fumes of a cooling pie. Corpses swollen with gas float in the well water, coyotes beheaded and skinned.