Inner Tube: A Novel (22 page)

A momentous crash overhead, deep bellowing. The widower had snapped his tethers. Carla’s hands were like suction cups against my ribs.

“Let him alone. Please.”

I pulled free, got to my feet. The velvet dress had ridden up past her hips and her eyes were those of a doe under the gun.

“I live here too,” I said. “I don’t want him tearing the place up.”

My sister curled on the floor, palms over her ears. I turned from her and went up the stairs, toward the sound of breaking glass. There was a dreadful awareness of error, as in the elongated second or two before the car hits the stanchion. It was sheer expedience that placed me in the house and I really didn’t care if the old man raved until the very roof spun away across identical lawns and into the night.

“Feckless child! Parasite!”

I had reached the open doorway: Gordo in pajama tops amid a swale of destruction. He’d opened his hand on something; blood globs dropped from his fingers like candies.

“She died in shame…looking in a broken mirror. Shame!”

I had left a chance below, an opening.

“Worthless worthless world.”

It could have been a kiss alone, a few gasped words, or something far more reckless. It would have been a recognition, a barrier irrevocably passed after so long and contorted a wait. But not now.

Gordo advanced, babbling. Blood had dribbled onto his gray penis, which swayed like a toxic undersea plant.

“Bedtime for you,” I said.

“How much did you know about, eh, yardbird?”

I heard behind me the slap-slap of Carla’s running feet, the thundercrack of her slamming door. Not now. Not ever.

I weighed my fist, rocked back, and drove it into the bulge of my father’s jaw. He flipped backward onto a mound of clothing flung from the walk-in closet, and I left him there to come to or not. Either way.

The cigarettes I smoked downstairs tasted like jet exhaust, which was fine with me. I had one of those infected objects, a circular paperweight enclosing milky glass flowers, and I turned it and turned it in my hand until it was warm, remembering the day she’d bought it. A balmy October, mother and son driving out to check the foliage. We stopped in a little model-railroad town for refreshments, lemonade for her and a maple walnut cone for me. The junk store didn’t interest me, so I waited in the car. But through the crowded display window I could see her expressions flash, the motion of her arms as she haggled. Bouncing into the car, she sparkled breathlessly like a swimmer fresh from the pool. The glass ball rolled out of tissue paper and into my hand.

“Did I do good?” she asked.

It was misty outside, halfway to dawn. I walked to the end of the street where woods began, flung the paperweight high and far, heard it crash into the safety of some dirty thicket. I walked back as slowly as I could. I wanted to hang myself from an ornamental tree with a pair of black tights, but my eyes were dry.

Fighting the sun, I grope along the sidewall to a patch of shade where I can retch. The hiss of hot grease comes through the screen door near me. I remember that Tubbs is gone; over to Texas to train quarter horses, he said. A Cambodian émigré mans the kitchen now. Ton Wat, a former architect, a designer of schools and custom bureaus, and the only member of his family left alive.

“It hurts him to have been spared,” Opatowski said the day he hired this man.

I
GNOBLY, WITHOUT A WORD
of explanation, I stole away from the Golconda like a cowardly vagrant father, leaving behind only a kachina doll Heidi had given me and, perhaps, a crucial piece of my integrity. Or possibly departure was the only way to save what little of it is left. But no more questions now; I’ve abandoned them as well.

I drove south, filling the car with cigarette smoke and the sound of my own tired voice as it spoke the injured contempt of everyone else for my flight. And like the vagrant father, I found solace in their accusations, snug proof of my independence. It was well past midnight when I finally stopped, pulling into a small, deserted rest area where a historic marker shaped like the state recalled the capture of Mexican outlaws. Moths careened and the air crackled with ozone. I nestled on the back seat and slept for several hours, or at least was not awake.

The Pronghorn Bungalow Court is east of the reservation, just north of the dry lake where hot-rod boys race and fight. I paid rent in advance to a man for whom ownership of the place seemed to be a thing inflicted on him.

“Got a beef with the state, don’t bring it along.” He spat into dead yellow stalks by the toolshed. “People expecting me to go to bat for them, I’m only the zookeeper here.”

He wore tooled boots, gray whipcord trousers, stiff denim jacket. There was something unpleasantly fastidious in his manner.

“Stay here long and it’s going to bring you down. That’s a warning and I don’t give it to everybody.”

I thanked him. He rubbed his jaw expressionlessly, gazing past me at the single line of cabins, muttering about their needing paint. I was going to take this as a cue to cut a little deal, but he was already walking away, sliding into his long white car. He went off slowly, as though part of a parade.

Norbert Padilla. His name appears on my rent receipt in jagged lowercase letters. According to the only neighbor who will speak to me, Padilla’s mother was a painter, a tubercular German who came for the dry air and stayed to marry an older man who sold tortillas from a wagon. Believing in cure by climate, the ill swarmed here in those days. Epidemics swept the southern counties every winter, until the hotel people got the idea of boiling their silverware.

Mind you, this informative neighbor is a dipsomaniac who claims to have served as adjutant to General Omar Bradley and to have played first base for the Washington Senators. When his government check arrives, he rides to the liquor store and back in a taxi. He favors white wine over red because then he can tell when he’s vomiting blood.

“Right away I tells ’em I got files of my own,” he says, bright-eyed and emphatic, with new ears for the limitless epic of Dag and the Veterans Administration. “Which I’ve lost the combination to the safe, but not to worry.”

On he goes and all I hear are the circular sounds, like gamelan music. I sit here patching screen, calmed by the thinness of the wire, by the smallness of the holes, and I think of my father’s law office, brimming with files, of the great desk glowing with lemon oil, and the framed motto of a man who never miscalculated a risk-to-benefit ratio: “Be satisfied with yourself and so thus will be others.” I think of the entirely measurable distance between here and Lake Success, congratulating myself on all the subtractions I have worked so hard in my life to make.

“And if I told what them big poohbahs took out of the Reichsbank that night? What then?”

Dag releases my arm, satisfied with the weight of this threat. And I have no good reason to doubt casual pillaging by colonels. No further questions, remember? So I walk Dag back to his cabin, last in line, “the caboose,” with its unlockable door and cardboard windows. He is reluctant to let me go, extracts a promise to return in the evening for something to drink and “the real story.”

Fed by the sewage line, there are cottonwoods near the road and in their shade the Pronghorn’s one and only family unit plays. The tiny wife with blonde hair out of a bottle buffs the chopper’s chrome pipes and sips orange pop through a straw. Her jeans are embroidered at the knee with mushrooms. The husband lifts their baby high, making her gurgle and kick. He is shirtless, a rippled scar under his navel like he’d once been cut open with a breadknife. The impending gleam on their mean faces stops me in midwave. Never mind.

Over the sink in my cabin a magazine picture has been pasted. A boy sits at a piano, eyes shut, head tilted back. He bites his lip. The effort of playing from memory. Vertically arranged above him on the white wall are three ceramic fish. They are like thoughts bubbling out of his head, distractions from the tempo and the tune. I can feel him struggling, his fingers slippery on the keys, and I have to scrape him off the wall with a razor blade. Whoever put him up must have been harking back, dangling a piece of regret where it couldn’t be missed. Something in Padilla’s warning? But I feel fresh and clean, free of any urge to review past decisions. Fuck integrity. I know, I know—you’ve heard it all before. You ask in exasperation: Won’t he ever get off the dime? Patience. I’m in a staging area right now. Formulations first.

A) Initiate!

B) Experience doesn’t count

C) Recall sexual extremities, then forget

D) First aid

E) Resource checking

F) Catalysts &; anodynes

G) Research: desert botany

H) Body disciplines

I) Quicksand Syndrome (strive hard, fail fast)

J) Don’t speculate—sane limits

K) Deductive vs. Reductive

L) Below sea level?

M) Sleeping exercise

N) Carla’s black tights

O) Stick to this list and you will be okay

I can set myself a rigorous program. I can do that, sharpening myself on the small grinders of Padilla’s toy town, moving beyond slogans. So then do I betray Ellen by way of these ambitions as I have, in other ways, betrayed Heidi, Chris Bruno, so many others? Who cares. Waste motion. I can discount experience. I can let thoughts bubble out of my head and burst harmlessly at the surface.

But no more chores for today. I would rather rub myself against the greasy mattress ticking. I would rather take another
Reader’s Digest
from the pile and read of another Most Embarrassing Moment.

“T
HIS IS A GREAT
country,” says Norbert Padilla. “So big it can hold anything.”

Because I’ve given up on distinctions, I don’t get started on all the things it might want to let go of. Big country, mother country, underdeveloped country, Marlboro country—here or over there, it’s all just country. Fine tuning? What for?

Padilla looks into the distance. “Big enough to smile at trouble,” he says.

The air is cold and wet. We are standing at the mouth of the driveway where last night wind blew down the big metal sign. It is stippled with mud and more paint has flaked away,
P ON HO N BUNG OW C UR
is how it reads now. We blow on our hands. Padilla kicks a dent in the earth.

“I could replace it with neon,” he says brightly.

“You’d have to run current out here. An investment.”

“The only neon for miles.”

Great country of appetite, where a lunger’s son can dream of inert gas captured in tubes. Out where the sky’s a little bit bluer. Out where delusion’s a little bit newer.

Walking beside my landlord, I’ve got the shivers. Maybe it’s all too big.

My last conversation with Ellen came after she’d been beaten outside a roadhouse frequented by butch girls from the reservation. She had cracked ribs.

“It only hurts when I breathe.”

Other things hurt worse.

“The rest of the world. Everything rubs me the wrong way. I feel sometimes like I could float right off the planet and it really wouldn’t matter.” Finally she rested her hands, met my eyes through the smoke from her little cigar. “For a while there I thought you might provide me some gravity. Too much to expect.”

“From a man,” I added piteously.

“From someone who keeps missing the point.” She raked fork furrows in the top of her unnibbled coconut pie. “Who couldn’t get the point if it ran him through.”

Men nearby discussed megabytes and upload key sequences with evident fervor.

“The rest of the world,” she resumed. Her thumb went to her face, moved from scab to scab as if defining a constellation. “Could I be allergic?”

The commissary wallpaper featured Hollywood caricatures: Clark Gable, W. C. Fields, like that—something you’d find in an art house of the Minneapolis suburbs. A little bit of showbiz heaven, the faces smiling ferociously, as if at a malignant practical joke.

Ellen coughed, winced. “I find myself looking at children eight, nine years old. Little girls in sunsuits.” Her eyes lurked in caves of swollen tissue. “I think, ‘Well, they haven’t gone wrong yet.’”

“So that’s where you’re looking for gravity these days.”

“I think of myself at nine, sullen already. Up in my room, sleeping all day. From there to here isn’t so very far, either. Room to room to room. Isolation wards. I could be all sealed away. I could clock the next fifty years without a moment of pleasure.”

Ellen went for more coffee and didn’t come back. The last I saw was her brown pullover consumed by a squad of white shirts at the beverage station.

So, in the end, I had nothing to offer. Too much to expect. With a thankless kind of wisdom she had sought refusal while I, pretending not to, had imagined everything. Pearls for the asking, love in a hammock, wind in the palms.

Moments of pleasure? The gift of cruelty? How easy it is to forget, how easy to feign surprise. The years telescope and I cannot resist. Bravo. Hegel observes that what we learn from history is that no one learns from history.

It was August at its thickest. We had been to a pool party at the home of some gay blade who wrote travel guides and Violet had irritated me all day with her easy chatter and eagerness for gin. Then, as I drove home through Sunset Boulevard stop-and-start, she nagged me to stop at a ladies’ room. Her voice was a circular saw. I swung into a towaway zone, reached under her and pulled blue panties over her kneecaps. She giggled like someone in an Italian movie.

“Let go of it,” I said.

“What?”

I put my palm over her bladder, pressed hard, and the gin came hosing out of her, splattering her thighs and pooling on the upholstery. I said for her to sit still and shut up. She cried without a sound and as I turned north on Fairfax, reached between my legs.

You cringe and recoil? Very well. But here was a compatibility, awesome in its precision, from which she and I could not turn away. An absence of imagined pearls. What cleaved us to each other and ultimately cleaved us in two were these types of closeness, progressive as a disease. More thankless wisdom, but in time, in desperation, wouldn’t we have intertwined mortally, choking in unison? Isn’t that true?