Inner Tube: A Novel (21 page)

The early sun brought out strips of orange and verdigris green in the terraced slag at the Apex II mine. I curved south through Government Camp, the refurbished ghost town where a squad of retirees clustered around the largest motor home swilling coffee and loading cameras. See America first. Then came the dead farms: rusted tin and crumpled wire, slanting walls. Something had come through here like a plague. Cutting west on blacktop with no center line, I cranked up the radio and downed the windows, loosed Jerry Lee Lewis into the clear, dry air. Ruins normally soothed me, but not today. Everything I saw made me thirsty: sheepskins drying on a fence, even swaybacked ponies snorting water from a halved oil drum. I passed a Papago in a John Deere cap. He wasn’t looking for a ride, just squatting on the shoulder like he had a cottonwood for shade and a slow brown river to watch. What he had was nothing but time.

The guard waves me through and I look for a parking space. I put fruit gum in my mouth and sunglasses over my eyes. This day is too sweet to spoil. Then I meet Foley coming up the center aisle of the lot. He looks a little wobbly.

“Got one for you,” Foley says, pulling my arm like a bell rope. “These two programming veeps, see, they’re on their way to a convention when the plane crashes in the desert. Only survivors. Desolate, pitiless sun. They’re crawling on hands and knees, praying for an oasis before they shrivel up and die. And can you beat it, there’s a certified miracle on top of the next dune. It’s an ice-cold can of peaches and an opener right beside. With trembling hands, they pry the lid up and there’s fruit bobbing in chilled syrup. So the one turns to the other and says, ‘Let’s piss in it.’”

While Foley chuckles harshly at his joke, I notice for the first time a torn segment of a woman’s picture emerging from his shirt pocket and the ink splotch in his hair.

“You know where I grew up?”

“Uh, Foley…”

“Troy, New York. It snows there. It snows there every year.”

Then he brushes past me as if I were a stranger in a hotel lobby. He doesn’t stop when I call to him, or even slow his pace when the torn picture flutters to the asphalt. I watch as he slides into a dented Japanese car and rolls slowly out the gate. I won’t be seeing him again.

A puff of dark hair, one apparently indifferent eye, the upper slope of a thick nose, a triangle of sweater, and a suggestion of pearls. The photograph has been severed diagonally. From its yellowed border and almost pulpy texture, I judge it to be more than thirty years old.

I’m examining it under a magnifier at my desk when Ellen comes up behind me. I summarize the Foley encounter without turning around. Ellen’s fleshy hands appear on the desktop and her head comes to rest on my shoulder. She sighs. She explains that Foley’s been canned, how he’d found his office empty this morning, not so much as a paper clip left on the carpet.

“Been here long as anyone,” she says with a certain irrelevancy. “I think he’d built up a sad attachment.”

“And the picture?”

“A wife or a sister. Maybe something he found in the trash. Who knows?”

She comes around in front of me. Framed by the chrome edges of my central monitor, by the tight chaos of her own hair, her face takes on the stiff and joyless beauty of a German religious painting.

“Anyway,” she says, looking past me, “I don’t think he cares about women.”

“Let’s drink.” I pull out the tequila,

Ellen dips a finger into her cup, sucks on it. Her eyes are still on the distance. “My father has an unpleasant view of the world. He suspects everyone. But he has a story he tells after a couple of Manhattans. It’s about Hiroshima.” She shakes her head, gives me the cup to finish. “He was with Armed Forces Radio and went in with an inspection team right after the blast. They gave him a jeep and a driver and permission to go wherever he wanted. Bouncing through the ruins, describing into a microphone. Mister Reporter doing a job. Then they happen on a couple of survivors, a father and son who are living in a hole in the ground with a tin sheet for a roof. The driver gives them a pack of cigarettes. Great confusion. Custom requires that the gift be reciprocated, but they have nothing to give. An idea hits the son. He jumps into the hole and comes out with a C melody saxophone on which he proceeds to play, quite badly, ‘Someone to Watch Over Me’ and ‘My Blue Heaven.’ Sometimes my father can’t get to the end of the story because he’s crying too hard.”

I cannot prevent myself from asking what this has to do with Foley. Her eyes finally engage mine; they are curiously neutral, pupils nearly disappearing into speckled green.

“Lonely men. Resentment. Old pictures.”

I’m chastened and take a long enough drink from the bottle to create air bubbles in the glass neck.

Arms folded, elevating her loose breasts, Ellen again shakes her head.

“You drink,” she says. “I’m going to go lock my door.”

“What for?”

I hold out my hand to her. She looks at it as if it were something from an archaeological dig.

A line of explosions, small puffs of smoke. One woman clawing, another hiding. A man with ink-stained hair and a man nestled in roadside trash. But no straight line, or I’m too wasted to tell. Nothing in my stomach to sponge up the alcohol, proud essence of the cactus. Ambushed. A long warm spike hammered through the top of my head. Okay, no excuses. Still, everything looking soupy right now. There, where Ellen was standing, is a jagged black outline of her body. Maybe I should lock my door too?

Better. No security leaks now. I put my ear to the intervening wall, listening for Ellen. She might be one of those silent weepers—fear and loathing without relinquishing control. It wouldn’t surprise me. Very precise in her choices. Don’t I remember her telling me of a museum in the city which insisted its
Mona Lisa
was genuine, the one in Paris a fake, and that she’d applied for a job there? Or is this an invention of mine? A groove worn into the mind during sleeplessness? It wouldn’t surprise me.

The shoddy remorse of the boozer, the inflated sentiments, could be plotted on a graph. Does that stop me? I lift the phone and punch out Violet’s number. Buzz, buzz, and that’s all. Probably off showing slides in a lecture hall. Early back east, but all I get is Carla’s answering machine. “I’m unreachable now….” Muddy stride piano backing her up. In character, red lips, black pumps, and bobbed hair. I don’t wait for the tone.

“She ain’t here,” Opatowski says.

“How long ago did she leave?”

“No timeclocks here, my friend. Why not try her at home?”

A truly unctuous quality in his voice. This could be the highlight of his day. I picture him sprawled in front of the office TV, fingering a cheroot. I picture him, in lime-green golf pants, on the cover of a chamber of commerce brochure above the legend “Ask Me About the Good Life.”

“Is Mommy home? Can I talk to her, please?”

The child squeals and drops the receiver; a long dead space then, punctuated by barking and the surging audio of a game show. Heidi comes abruptly onto the line.

“Yeah?”

“How’s every little thing?”

“You miserable fucking—”

“Can we meet somewhere for lunch?”

“Get bent. I wouldn’t meet you on top of a diamond mine.”

But I can tell from her seesawing inflection that really she’s glad to hear from me. Takes only another ten minutes to talk her into it. She’ll stick Tasha next door, says she has to go back to the motel for something.

“We can start from scratch. The whole thing, I mean.”

“My mind’s open,” she says.

No more explosions today. All is defused by right thinking. I picture her working spray polish into the Mediterranean finish of her home entertainment console. I picture her bending over the edge of my bathtub with nothing on but her running shoes.

Hot in here. Feel like lead balls are hanging from arms and shoulders. For now, stretch out alongside baseboard. No harm. I have plenty of time. Be there first. Resting up briefly is all. In control. Eyes shut for a few minutes only. Minutes. No harm.

I
’M DOZING IN FRONT
of the box, light but no sound, when I hear it. There is a vibratory tingle in the glass when I step inside the drapes and tip my head against the window. First thought, what a gorgeous piece of rolling stock—a green-and-white ambulance from Cherry Ames. I see Wade jump out and dash into the office. Right then I snap to who they’re going to be carrying out. Fuck all. I want to stay inside with the covers over my head, but really, I can’t.

The outline under the sheet could be a child’s. They retract the stretcher wheels and slide her on in like a safety-deposit box. Opatowski has no shoes on. The bottled-in-bond Potts-town hard guy doesn’t answer me, fights when I try to sit him straight on the bench. His sobbing is so violent, I’m afraid he’ll throw a seizure.

“Can’t you give him something?”

This is as close to Wade as I’ve ever come. He has the same pitted cheeks as his wife, the same pallor.

“Like what?” he says.

“Like a sedative. Just look at him, for Christ’s sake.”

“Yeah, I see. The man just lost his wife.” He looks to his partner, a burly guy with a cheek distended by tobacco. “We got no liability coverage for that, right?”

Opatowski is choking on grief, tries to get her name out but can’t.

“That don’t make me crazy about it. Hell, I know these people personal, and anything else…” Wade shrugs. “I wouldn’t even be here except for two fellas called in sick.”

I throw him against the ambulance door, jerk him back again by the belt.

“Take care of him now, you jerkoff. Right now.”

He could flatten me in seconds, but I must look rabid enough to alarm them both, convince them to take the easy way. Wade nods, spits, mumbles something about legalities. They hit Opatowski with something from an ampule and take him inside. I ought to stay with him, but really, I can’t.

The sun is high and the road is flat and black as a griddle. I walk over to Boot Hill and subside into a brown booth. Two other thirstys in the place, Virg from the gas station, and the owner’s crooked boy. We don’t say hi. I have a shot and a beer, then two more.

Then come stinging tears, concentrated, as though I’ve been holding them a long, long time.

It was cherry blossom time in our nation’s capital. The Washington correspondents, who were always fighting for air time, searched out bosky spots to film their opens and closes. Ratings for the Evening News had never been better; I thought of asking for a raise.

It was daffodil time in Lake Success, and they were burying my mother in a memorial park spruce as a tournament golf course. The headstone was white marble. The casket was polished copper, a plush capsule that could have been boostered into space.

Three rows of folding wooden chairs had been set out, but it was still SRO. Aunt Rita, who’d been pinned under a horse, arrived in an electric wheelchair, a slit-eyed chauffeur in attendance. Sonia Brooks, whose Christmas cards had been returned unopened, was there without her husband. My mother commanded loyalty, at least that day—her tennis teacher came, her hair stylist, and a housekeeper she’d fired for drinking. And there was the English character actress she’d toured with one summer, who wept and trembled uncontrollably: On her way to the service in an open convertible, she’d crossed the Verrazano Bridge and a rat had dropped from a girder onto the seat beside her.

My father read some Swinburne and a Unitarian minister mused about “interdependence.” A circuit court judge, who, as far as I knew, had never met her, described my mother as a bright clear light. Union workers lowered my mother into ground that belonged to white grubs and blind moles. Flowers were tossed in with her. Strangers embraced me. I felt sick to my stomach but my eyes were dry.

Carla was next to me, silent and still, but her eyes overflowed. She had driven down from Maine, from the cabin she’d fled Boston for, three days earlier, and had barely slept since. Her bloodless face was seraphic, frozen white above a mourning costume improvised from closet depths: black velvet minidress, black tights, pointy shoes with functionless buckles. Back at the house, I spent a long time in the shower.

Gordo said we oughtn’t to sink too deep in sorrow, how she would have been the first to say so. He wanted to take us to the Princeton Club for drinks and dinner. We had soup and toast instead and took turns answering the phone.

“Anything at all we can do,” offered curious townsfolk.

“There are no words,” said bar dwellers from the country club, prefacing advice.

We were dazed, wary of each other, and the sentences we found to speak were museum specimens. Gordo roamed between kitchen and living room, knocking things over. He seemed to be regressing, melting into himself. He played with toast crumbs and told us how proud we made him. The longer he held back the more horrific it would be. Carla, whom he’d always frightened the most, turned stricken eyes to me when he tottered over to ruffle her hair like some stickpinned bachelor. (“You seem like nice kids. Here’s a dollar for each of you.”) But soon he wandered off, decanter in hand, to their room, their bed.

Not that it was any easier for the two of us. Every surface held her imprint, every object was infected with her presence. We sat on the floor and smoked. Carla drank coffee like it was medicine and talked about Maine, the cold clear nights and the piney air.

“Sometimes I forget to eat for a while and I see things.” Her voice was hoarse.

“Things?”

Carla did not elaborate. The house had grown suitably cold and she wrapped up in a blanket, teeth clicking on the rim of her cup. I felt angry and protective and uneasy. It was a sleet storm of impulse and recollection through which there was no visibility. I heard my mother laughing, scolding. She pulled me from a pile of dead leaves and swung me toward the sun.

“If you could hold me for a minute.”

Carla opened the raveled wings of the blanket and I crawled inside, smelling her exhaustion. She felt hard and shell-like at first as I held her tightly. Then as I loosened, so did she, her face turning into my neck. Each tear was discrete on my skin, an emission squeezed out of her with the pain and effort of birth. That my mother could have caused such misery seemed unforgivable just then. I had no sympathy to spare for her. Carla’s mouth opened against me and I disappeared inside the jagged cadence of her breathing. For an immeasurable time then she ceased to be a sister or a woman, became simply a fellow creature, and I glided up and up a sparking wire, ecstatic with purity of feeling.