Inner Tube: A Novel (8 page)

I pull over to consult my map. Nothing ahead, for thirty miles at least, until a place called Holy Smoke. But not the tiniest blister in the black line that represents the road, only the name floating above it. A cartographer’s prank? Holy Smoke. I’d rather try for it than turn around.

A good twenty minutes without billboard or marker before I find a turnoff. A crude wooden sign says:
THIS IS NOT A ROAD.
That’s good enough for me. I head up the gravel track, steering wheel wobbling in my hands. It takes very little time to establish the bona fides of that sign, the conscientious citizen who scrawled it. Dry gulches intersect the nonroad, logs and cobbles in them I have to clear away. Revving and swaying, revving again, I lunge across. The pungent aroma of scorched hardware reaches me. Now the washouts are rougher and the stones sharper. I stop to check the undercarriage for wounds. Nothing yet. Then I remember my spare is low on air, also bald. A cooler head would prevail, but that’s something else I didn’t bring.

Starting upward now into jumbled hills, I ignore what the dashboard gauges tell me. My tongue is a spoiled oyster, sour and thick. And too weary to tell me what a fool I am. On these steeper grades the rear wheels hesitate and spin, but I make the crest; then down, which is just as bad or worse, slewing into chuckholes, sledding over loose rock when the brakes lock up.

In what passes for a valley here, a barely sloping trench between low sills of rock, I stop for something to chew: juniper needles. A trifle dizzy, but it’s easier to focus from this small wedge of shade. Those dark lumps, yes, it’s there just a few hundred yards down the line (like all good explorers, I had to find it by mistake). Holy Smoke…or something. Not the trim oasis I’d let myself imagine. No oil company logo rising on metal stilts, no hope of iced pop. I think I hear the wail of a dog, lovesick or dying. Maybe just a streak of wind in the remnants of a useless place.

Leaving the machine to recuperate, I step out for dereliction with a cautious stalking pace. Apprehension fades the closer I get. A street full of sage balls and dead wood, two rows of tilted buildings, no more than lumber teepees, some of them. I announce myself by drumming on a mangle washer halfway buried in sand. No answer. A ghost town even the ghosts have left. Like all good explorers, I’ve been betrayed by my map. And by my zeal to move forward. I remember a character man on
Gunsmoke
pulling his whiskers and drawling, “This country is hell on a Christian.” I remember the story of a boy scout who survived Death Valley by drinking his own urine. But long as I’m here I might as well poke around. The amateur enthuses in the implacable face of error. I ease my head through windows fringed with cobweb, look over great floorboard holes in which biting things are lurking in the cool. With a piece of glass I carve the date and my initials in a soft gray doorpost. Splintered furniture, buckshot patterns on old tin, are signs that more than weather has pulled this place apart. But not lately. The shotgun holes are rusted, the liquor bottles milky from the scouring of blown sand. In the last house on the left, a brick chimney all that’s holding it up, I find under gummy fallen shingles a toy shovel and a 1952 issue of
Field & Stream.
Rats have chewed the pages up for nesting fodder and the rest comes apart in my hands. But I wonder what the people in this house so far from water thought as they read of salmon climbing a waterfall, walleye in the deep blue lakes of Michigan. Probably not much. Living on the edge of things this way, you give up the capacity to envision. The rest of the world gradually disappears behind layers of fuzzy curtain, while on your side there is nothing but the abuse of the sun and this fierce, racking ground that extends on and on to the ocean, wherever that might be. Day-to-day survival becomes a kind of madness. This comforts me as I squat in the rubble with my hat sweat-pasted to my head, trying to keep myself from staring into the sun. The nothingness comforts me. It is pristine.

A ruthless hiss that echoes. I look up. Above me five combat jets in a V indite white lines across the sky like a trail of poisoned bait. Time to go. Definitely time to go. Back to my machine, to paving and noise and ice.

At least the violins are gone.

C
ULVER TUBBS HAD EIGHT
professional fights and lost them all. Now he’s a happy, lumbering heavyweight in the Golconda kitchen and a deacon of the Assembly of God church up the road in Organpipe. His fire-and-brimstone pork chops jab at my stomach, unpacified by the Jose Cuervo I’ve been pouring over them. Opatowski and I are alone in his bar. He looks out the one small, high window and shakes his neat head.

“The wide open West. How about it. Never missed a Saturday matinee when they had Hoot Gibson or Bronco Billy. It all looked so good from a shitty little Pennsylvania mill town. I said, ‘Won’t eat soot all my life. Gonna go where the skies are not cloudy all day.’ Only took me about fifty years to do it.”

And only because they told his wife to go ahead and write up her will. Opatowski didn’t bother with questions. (All doctors are liars, he says.) They sold everything but their clothes, drove off for air that was light and warm, bought this place at a sheriff’s auction for cheap.

“The one good thing about her sickness is it scared us into being brave.”

I’ve seen him with a rip chisel in his hand, chasing obstreperous drunks into the parking lot and growling like a badger. I’ve seen Mrs. O. heading out on a rock hunt with collecting bag and slender hammers, pushing along a green oxygen bottle on the rack her husband has specially customized for the rough terrain.

“Hard or easy, you have to keep on learning,” Opatowski says. “What did I know before about portion control or scaled rentals? Zero. But out here, with that feeling of being pitted, man against the elements, you really want to apply yourself.”

He sucks at crushed ice drizzled with bourbon, chips away at the pressed pulp of an Olympia coaster. There is comfort in this hard-lit space, both of us supposedly preoccupied, no apprehensiveness of the empty public room, but instead the happy tedium of a family dinette. His left hand, the one with four and a half fingers, lies on the friction-smooth black table as if it’s died there. His small, neat head makes one of its slow angles, eyes wide without really taking anything in.

“Slow and steady wins the race,” he says, as though the phrase, after long deliberation, has just now come to him. “One foot in front of the other.”

My glass is empty, but I have a little salt anyway, replaying the night Opatowski came to my (his) room and confronted me over Heidi. The tracery around his eyeballs told me he’d had a few belts first, but he was steady as magnetic north.

“You just better know what you’re doing.” He sidestepped, blocking my view of the television. “She’s probably more curious than someone her age has any business being, and maybe not so strong as she ought to be. But so far strong enough. That Wade she’s got is a pretty good man, worked eight shifts a week when they were saving up for the baby….”

I interrupted to say I had no ambition for home-wrecking, that my attention span was too short. This did not reassure.

“Fuck ’em and forget ’em, is that it?”

“Look, this is as much her idea as it is mine,” I said, and it was close enough to the truth.

Opatowski grimaced with impatience. Two zebras nuzzled on the screen behind him.

“What if it is?” he said.

Not actually suspecting him, but irritated, I said, “Are you protective or just jealous?”

His voice was even, calm, potent. “I’m putting you on notice, that’s all. An inkling, one false rumor that you haven’t treated her right, and you’re out on your ass without so much as a razor blade.”

He folded his arms with the gravity of an Arapaho elder, and then, in another few seconds, had fallen puffing and pale into the other chair. Then he fell for several minutes into wheezing sleep, his legs thrown out stiff and straight like a little boy’s in a pew. He woke up nostalgic, helping me shell and eat a sack of peanuts while describing his two years of ceaselessly headphoned Signal Corps service in Wales.

“Well, hey. That sweet old hound,” Heidi said when I told her about the cautionary visit. “And I was even thinking he might can me when he found out.”

She brought him a chess pie the following day.

Opatowski looks over lemon and lime wedges that are drying out in their Tupperware bowls. He nudges fanned-out cocktail napkins, cups his palm over the goblet of red stir straws.

“Might as well clear out,” he says.

“But it’s only quarter of eight.”

“You want to wait for the nobody that’s coming, it’ll have to be by yourself.” The neat head rolls resignedly backward. “I’m gong back to the apartment and listen to my Ezio Pinza records.”

He reaches behind a trellis of plastic grapes and flicks a breaker switch that kills everything but the refrigeration. I follow him out into the thin blue chill. The stars are too bright, like bulbs around a makeup mirror.

“Vacancy, goddammit,” he shouts at a passing Camaro.

Motor chuffing, lights beaming into featureless outback, a provisions truck has parked by the kitchen entrance. Tubbs, in an apron with Appaloosa markings of old grease, is helping the driver unload.

“Supposed to have been here a couple hours ago,” Opatowski says without annoyance. “Got lost probably. It happens all the time.”

I lend a hand while the slow-and-steady seigneur gives instructions that no one hears. Frozen blocks of hash browns, rime-coated cartons of breaded veal from a plant in Wyoming, enough to lay the footings for a small patio. Portion control?

“Got an uncle moved down from Wisconsin, carves duck decoys,” chummy Tubbs is saying. “Not a lot of call for them around here.”

“I’m a quail man myself.” The driver has turquoise bracelets on each wrist, a trim vice-squad mustache. “Even though there’s not much on ’em but the breast.”

“I like something big enough to stuff. Then you wrap it in bacon and bake it nice and slow to keep the juices in.”

“What part of Wisconsin?”

“Fond du Lac.”

Opatowski grabs a bag of fish fingers and we walk back to his place. I can use the company as much as he can. We tip quietly through darkness to the living room with its sunburst carpet and mounted horse skull. Mrs. O. is asleep, Pinza’s “Some Enchanted Evening” barely audible. Opatowski peers into the shoebox bedroom, recloses the door. We whisper, both of us, moving with the soft and wary foot placements of burglary. Parchment-colored light seems not to flow from the little gooseneck lamp but to escape. I take out my cigarettes, but Opatowski shakes his head. He slumps, the Jim Beam bottle braced on one knee, hand wrapped around the neck like it’s some kind of control lever.

He says: “What I’ve got to do is get ready for when she won’t be around at all.”

I
TURNED THE CLOCK
away from me, wanting to sleep in. The air in #6 was heavy and my dreams were irritating, full of vouchers and memos. Sleep here and there, but no rest. Noise began to mount up—motors, voices. I lay awake with my eyes closed and imagined spies at the foot of the bed, roasting me with motionless eyes.

“Thirty-five hundred deaths per kiloton isn’t even in the ballpark,” Sonny insists.

Sunday brunch at the Golconda Cafe. Fried ham and French toast, a lake of syrup on my plate. Glucose opens the flaps of my metabolic carburetor and I’m all in a hurry with nowhere to go. From Sonny’s silvery tape machine, between us on a chair of its own, come highlights of a Nuclear Survivability Conference.

“Don’t worry about civilization,” says a curiously accented voice. “Concentrate on staying alive to enjoy it.”

I went out prowling for relics. A garrulous Mormon, one of those Old West hobbyists who sometimes pass through, had tipped me to a likely site and drawn a map on a Golconda napkin. I was moving along a shale track toward dark lava tongues emerging from the sand like mummified brontosaurs, paying more attention to the elementary ballpoint diagonals of the map than to what was right in front of me. It took a second or less for the offside tires to slip from the troughs, over the unbanked lip of shale, and dig themselves in. I was alarmingly tipped and stuck fast.

Opatowski told this one: Two years ago, in the next county, an old man had lost himself, blown his engine on a forgotten length of ranch road. Some pitiful, turtlish instinct made him stay inside his car and in a day or two he’d baked to death in his underwear. They found a note on the dashboard asking that someone inform his grandson, who ran an air charter service in Valdez, Alaska.

But I had a two-quart canteen and the sense to start moving, shirt knotted over my head. No sleepwalking, stay on the offensive mentally. I took up, in order, the following: ultraviolet rays so intense in Antarctica that the atmosphere is nearly germ-free; the scheme, continuously discussed, to squeeze petroleum from hidden terraces of Rocky Mountain shale; long-vanished swamps and three-story tree ferns turned now to coal; sulfates and alkali and the sweat that was burning my eyes. Be watchful too. Avoid confinement in a narrowing corridor of heat. But I didn’t find any arrowheads or pot pieces along the way, no shapely bits of bone. I saw a hubcap half buried, a chuckwalla retreating into a crevice of porous yellow rock. My tongue contorted and my head was clanging, clanging hard. Mission bells,
campanas,
responded my obedient brain. What fun.

Following the curve of a dry wash, I heard a whang and watched sand spit over my feet.

“No sweat, amigo. Just holding my perimeter.”

The man was jug-eared and thick through the chest. He wore camo fatigues and a black beret, held the AK-47, now aimed at the sky, against his cheek.

“That was a fucking bullet,” I said pointlessly.

“You’re fine. Gun control means being able to hit your target.”

I spread my arms and threw up a smile just as wide, the way you’d handle a guard dog.

“Regular army?”

“I’m just a citizen,” Sonny Boyers said. “Like you.”

I looked flat fucked out, he thought. I should come back to camp, meet his family, share some lunch. Why disagree? He resembled, with his shiny black boots and oiled rifle, a breakneck mercenary, but moved with the diffidence of an art student, and I followed along. He fired into the air as we approached the camp, and an answering shot came.