Inner Tube: A Novel

by Hob Broun

  The passage levels off and angles to the left. I intersect buried waste ducts: soup, suds, the urine of receptionists. I cross the path of coaxial cable. Things converge at this depth, a good spot for sabotage. More echoes of school. Small resentful boy.

  But I’m a grownup now, selfish. Prove it? Sitting cross-legged on this cold gray floor, I challenge myself to remember the store credited with supplying George Burns’s wardrobe on The George Burns and Grade Allen Show. Rappaport’s? Bienstock’s? Tavelman’s. There you are. With the miraculous adult mind, I can put myself inside there, ca. 1956. Mr. Lou, the tallis-like measuring tape around his neck, offers a hamantasch and weak coffee. He displays bolts of cloth, leads the ritual fingering. “Let us fit you special for a nice herringbone two-button.” I feel languid, serene, with no urge to buy. Radio comes softly from the front of the store. The Polynesian Hour. As Mr. Lou takes my inseam, I feel I could stand here forever.

  39

  HE WAS WEARING AN agate bolo tie and blue coveralls and he was in my room when I came back from a double shift at the facility.

  “Afternoon, brother.”

  He seemed quite comfortable in my director’s chair, feet propped on the round white table. He pointed with his chin at a Conestoga wagon making its way slowly from right to left across the color console screen.

  “Clear as a mountain lake, eh?”

  “Do we know each other?”

  Needlenose pliers snapped back and forth at me. He ventriloquized: “Frank Goodhue, television doctor with the zeal to heal.”

  I clicked off the set and turned on the air conditioner.

  “Mr. O. has me in several times a year and I give everyone a checkup.”

  I noticed a plastic bag of brownies under the bedside lamp. Heidi. I felt new fatigue.

  “You ought to stretch out,” Goodhue said, reaching into his tool bag for a stick of gum. “Just disposed of a body, from the look of you.”

  How the world’s wise guys plagued me. I threw the brownies at him. “Have all you want.”

  He smiled, rolled up his gum like a prayer rug before crushing it in his molars. “Really. Take a load off.”

  I undid buttons, closed my eyes. The refrigerated air felt nice and heavy. Goodhue’s voice was quick and thin and straw-dry as he told the old story no one ever asked to hear. Eleven years in the monastery hard by Lake Huron, dipping candles and making cheese. Dreadful winters, ice in the washbasin and carillon bells cracking the air. The abbot who sang to his cat, who was exposed in a national magazine as a war criminal, an officer in the Iron Guard. And finally surreptitious correspondence courses, a determination to get out and do something useful.

  “Learning to make decisions again was no picnic, I’ll tell you for sure.”

  I pictured Heidi smoothing the sheets, thin babydoll hair hiding her face. My limbs buzzed with imminent sleep. This TV doctor was better than a lullaby

  “And after that?” I murmured.

  “Hired on with a high-volume appliance store in Grand Rapids. Very first house call I went on, the husband had blown out their picture tube with a deer rifle.”

  The facts of his life passed over me like gas. Marriage to a grocery checker, disintegration and aimless flight. Drinking bouts and the stink of charred tubes, the sharp intimacies of uncounted dens and rec rooms where anxious clients waited out the restoration of their sets.

  “You’d be amazed at the amount of gratitude…”

  Goodhue was gone when I woke up. Dim, agitated light in the black room—TV back on—and there was the brownie bag rising and falling on my chest. Heidi would be calling soon, wanting to be teased. I unhooked the phone, wedged open the door so warm night haze could come inside. Cars went by too fast, radios harsh and windshields splattered with moths. I had brownies and root beer, watched a documentary on Islamic architecture, and had to admit the picture was as clear and clean as a picture could be.

  He’s wearing a nylon workout suit and eating a taco over my desk.

  “You weren’t expecting me?”

  He seems quite comfortable with my signaled annoyance. The frames of his glasses are of thick lime-green plastic; the embossed card he passes to me is creamy and thin.

  KEVIN LUIS DUKES

  SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW

  THE CENTER FOR POPULAR CULTURE AT BOWLING GREEN

  He swivels in my chair as I read and reread, brushes shredded lettuce onto the floor.

  “No, I’m not expecting you.”

  “And I was hoping to start right in.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you start with what you’re expecting.”

  His soft, ballroom dancer’s face becomes more credible as it pinches down. Strumming a rubber band stretched between thumb and ring finger, he describes in some detail the assistance promised him in certain investigations necessary to the completion of a book. No outsider gets that kind of access, I think. Not without a reason.

  “Who is it you know?”

  He mentions the operations director of another department, someone with a reputation for malicious mischief.

  “I married her only daughter,” he says blandly.

  “Nice going.”

  But, of course, he’d rather talk about his book.

  “There’s an essay on professional wrestling, and another on the evolution of outdoor advertising. I’ve done a long piece examining the semiotics of Japanese pornography, and a reappraisal of Sammy Davis, Jr., called ‘The One-Eyed Man Is King,’ and…”

  We move briskly down a long corridor carpeted with plastic grass. I nod and shift my eyebrows as though listening, while his voice blends with piped music and the sighing ventilators. I’m replaying this morning’s phone call to Ellen, who has now exhausted her allotment of emotional leave days.

  “I ran out of food over the weekend,” she says from the bedroom of her company apartment. “So I drink lots of tea and chew toothpicks.”

  “But you’re all right? I mean…”

  “Me and my memory.” She coughs, moves inside rustling sheets. “Crazy what you file away. Little ordinary things that keep clicking into place, out of my control for certain. Probably I belong in a nursing home. Among my souvenirs.”

  Never have I heard her voice quite this way. I’m uneasy, wanting her sullen and strong.

  “What I can’t get through is why you choose the different bits. Can you sense it maybe? Catching one moment from a sideways kind of angle and there’s an essence that…”

  “Unfuckingreal,” K. L. Dukes blurts out.

  I’ve taken him into the South Monitor Wing. He seems genuinely impressed by the long wall of screens, the long motionless line of headphoned workers, the galaxy of control buttons.

  “Looks like the war room.”

  “Someday might be.” And I direct him to the data belt streaking green overhead, runic as a stock ticker.

  He wipes his glasses in slow, diminishing circles, and reads:

  “BMANILA 20/05 F1 MODE.”

  “There’s a political address in five minutes on Philippine state TV.”

  “How much do they pay for doing this?”

  “Not enough.”

  We tube down to the deepest level of hexagonal stacks and I take him through a few of the basics. How to run different searches, excerpting protocol, like that. He rattles his fingers back and forth across black container spines, looking undecided. The face is pinched again, the eyes suspicious. He grabs a tape at random, the 1978 Rose Bowl Parade, and examines it thoroughly, touching every part as if expecting a secret message in braille. Likably, his rhetorical smile is gone. I smell the salsa cruda on his breath.

  “It’s insidious,” he says. “Like cancer cells proliferating.”

  “You could look at it that way.”

  “But you can’t, I suppose.” His expression is half sour, half amused. “One analogy too many.”

  “I’ve been at it so long I’m immune.”

  Fine and dandy, you’d think, with his beige GUEST badge and his conn
ections-in-law. Whatever’s bothering the boy, it’s no research topic. Anyway, my nose is clean; I’m cooperating. We ascend two levels and I show him catalogs, decipher some of the categorization codes. He feigns interest incompetently, his eyes tracking the movements of everyone else in the room in apparent expectation of seeing someone he knows. Hoping to see them before they see him?

  “Let’s head back to your office.”

  He sags resignedly, but with a hand on my shoulder pushes me toward the glass doors. Whatever’s bothering the boy…

  “There really isn’t any book, but I suppose you already knew that.”

  I shrug, disarrange files on my desk.

  “The way it is, I sweat a pint of blood just to finish a two-page letter.”

  “And you’ve never been to Bowling Green in your life.”

  “Oh, no, all that’s genuine. Even my stupid name.” He shows once more that mixture of fatigue and insistence. “Why I’m here is to get something out of Katy’s mother. Think you could get me a key to one of the editing rooms? Just for an hour.”

  “Settling a score, is that it?”

  “I promise, an hour and no more. In the interest of justice.”

  I’m not the least curious as to the details of this familial extortion. I have no qualms about furnishing the key.

  Cornmeal pie with jalapeno sausage, pitchers of beer half off. That’s the Wednesday night special at Boot Hill, and I’m taking advantage. Old ladies waltz to Conway Twitty and linemen play poker dice at the bar. Very homey. So what’s Opatowski doing here, I wonder. He and the ex-postmistress who owns the place are supposed to be mighty feuders.

  “Nobody cares about appearances in a town this small.”

  He pours off the dregs of my pitcher to go with his double bourbon, looks blank when I thank him for the fixup on my TV, says he didn’t hire any Frank Goodhue.

  “I didn’t dream the guy. Somebody’s going around your motel with a bag of tools and…”

  “So okay. It’s the same as why am I in here when I can drink free in my own joint.” He aims a patient, paternal smile. “People are funny.”

  “Not to me.”

  40

  HAD A FIGHT WITH Heidi in place of breakfast. Floating instinct: I sensed trouble at the scratch of her passkey, knew how she’d attack when I saw the rag twisting in Ajax-white hands. The indictment popped out of her like bread from a toaster. I didn’t play anymore, hardly spoke. I was sullen and distant, made her feel exploited.

  “You’re about as much fun lately as choir practice.” An admiring disgust was visible on her face.

  I told her she had a husband to absorb her whines and demands, to leave me clear. Heidi flung a toilet brush at me. I caught a lank twist of hair and spun her around. She scratched the back of my hand. I called her a cheap cunt.

  Hard to guess which of us took the greater pleasure from it. For me the effect was of a violent morning fuck, raspy but quenching, with a pleasant absence of mind. I smoked a joint on the way to work and took the long way round.

  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 a
t 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.