Inner Tube: A Novel (24 page)

T
HE MARGIN FOR ERROR
is thin. Beware of moods. Ignore quick decisions. Balance, proportion. I learn to walk all over again, canting forward on the lead foot for a gradual transfer of weight. I learn to conserve energy. Information shaped like an arc, my eyes sweeping back and forth across the steadiness of the landscape. Caution, deep cover. I learn to recognize danger signs.

A dust devil swirls off to my right, then replicates itself close by. Light has muted, the temperature is dropping, and the smell of ozone is sharp. Storms blow up fast with so few obstacles in their way. Home is a good half mile away, but the spiraling of larger wind doesn’t hurry me, nor the first distant lightning, a yellow crack on three branching legs like a music stand. Time is a broad generality. Water is a gift. Seeds long dormant will sprout; brine shrimp will breed in puddles.

Hard and fat, the first raindrops make my skin draw tight. Tiny craters appear in the dust and splattered rocks darken. I’ve sighted the Airstream now, a hunk of metal in a wide open space, a target. One speedy bolt could leave me crisped in there like a strip of bacon, but I’ll take that chance. The elements—everything falling off the periodic table at once. Hunched under a drenching roar, I move toward shelter like a man crossing a battlefield.

Enclosed, I wrap up in a blanket and roll a cigarette. Rain pounds unrhythmically, winds burst, but my silver shell is riveted tight, no rattles or leaks, solid on its blocks. In a few weeks I have become intimate with its every rib and seam. I pass my hand over some irregularity, comforting as the moles on a lover’s back, and feel sound. Firing up the stove, throwing black tea in a cup, I remember the gift of water and fly out the door with jars and pans, anything that will catch some. An edict of water, a decree. I spread my fingers and they’re like ten little faucets dripping. Stripping useless clothes, I squeeze them into a bucket already half full. I’m blind, as though standing under a waterfall, but not so entranced as to ignore my own advice: Come away from your senses, boy, before you get swallowed.

Strong tea and stale biscuits, a candle on the floor. Slowly, I go through my scavenge bag, the pickings of the day. One bleach jug, with cap. Five more brass rifle shells (soon I’ll hang them all for wind chimes). A roach clip dropped by some dirt biker. Baling wire, no rust. Crow feathers. Not all that bad, considering I never reached the road. Simple rules and small tasks keep me on my good behavior.

Still, old habits die hard. It is not enough to follow the progress of a wolf spider as I once did the sequence of postwar Italian cinema. In fact, it is too much. The student is at a remove, his curiosity a kind of heartless filtration. The further he evaluates, the further he lengthens his distance. The miser of knowledge never will merge. I know all about this. I could accept the accidental and the immutable both, but I kept trying to tell the difference. Humbug. Utility? A niche in the system? Learn to think with the blood.

I put out some pinto beans to soak. These legumes contain bacteria that take nitrogen from the air and inject it into their host soil. Today I found more evidence of cactus rustlers in the area. They drive out from the city in pickups and carry off chollas and saguaros sometimes twice their age to decorate the walkways of a condo high-rise, or to make the centerpiece in a florist’s window, strung with colored lights at Christmas. I might ask Sonny to lend me one of his guns.

The storm has nearly passed, a few plops on my roof, thunder muffled like a hostage in the cellar. The thinning air is laced with odors sweet and sour that rain has caused to bloom. Guiltily, I look for a rainbow. There is a rim of heavy mist round the horizon, but nothing more. I remember driving with Andrea up the coast to Mendocino, driving into one end of a cloudburst and out the other. There was a double rainbow, its farthest ends disappearing into the sea. I parked the Olds near a steep drop and we got out. Freshly emerged sun made everything glow. I went into the details of diffraction and spectral density.

“You”—Andrea, as usual, let everything show in her eyes—“you are a book-fed pig.”

Then she snatched the car keys and pitched them over the side.

No fresh sun here, and the only thing glowing is the candle on the floor. I have emptied as many rain containers as possible into the storage drum and covered the rest to keep out debris, protecting nameless banes leeched out of the sky from careless gnats, the odd crumb of drifting bark. Now I am sitting by the door in my director’s chair, empty and alert. Evening seems reluctant to come, but I’m in no great hurry. The storm has passed and all I see is safely illegible.

R
OY ROGERS’ COOK HAD
a jeep named Nellybelle. That’s all I can think of as this one comes at me across the sand, even after I spot the whip antenna and the painted emblem on the door. The closer it gets, the slower it seems to travel.

I have the sun at my back and a kitchen knife in my hand. He has the tall hat and the silver star. He knows my name.

“You aware you’re on private property?”

“That’s what I like so much. The privacy.”

He turns his head to smile, as if at a sidekick. His lower lip bulges with snuff.

I know my limits. And he knows my name.

The first time I was ever arrested, it was by a man in a Santa Claus suit. He cursed me through his nylon beard, led me past carolers from a “special education” school and back inside Bloomingdale’s. I had two jars of marrons glacés in my parka pocket. It had been a reaction rather than an impulse, brought on by four hours of zombie mobs and holiday smarm. Or at least that’s what I told them in the security office, itself mobbed with a gamut of boosters, sullen pros to weeping Brearley girls, where I was fingerprinted by a placid fat man named Vito.

“Ask for Sergeant Faedo,” he counseled. “A close personal friend.”

They took us up to the Sixty-seventh Street precinct station in an unheated lead-gray bus with grates over the windows, and, after an hour or two, let most of us go. Dramaturgy. A Christmas pageant.

It was dark outside. Jolly cops drew on panatelas. They loaded their car trunks with hams and foil-boxed fifths for the trip across to Queens. I walked home, looking for a crèche to kick over.

The second time around was so frightening I’m amazed to remember it. I had been out here only a few months, was still made uneasy by all the empty space, still a serf in the Monitor wing, a sensory receptacle squirting itself with eyedrops, someone invisibly contorted, floating between the same very few points like a quiet whitebread lunatic. I was bound to walk into a wall, and I did.

It was what they have for winter here: wind stirring up dust and straw, a flat chill in the night. I was staying at a place called Motel Chateau, fifty-some yards off a popular north-south truck route. It was about 10 p.m., overcast. Losing at canfield, working my way to the bottom of a bag of malted milk balls, I noticed a girl moving back and forth in front of my window. She was talking to herself. She grinned at me, ran away, came knocking at my door ten minutes later.

“Got any weed?”

No. But she came in anyway. Snarled wet hair, purple bruise on her neck, long, grimy bedspread skirt, a tarry smell. She belonged on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, whapping a tambourine.

“We’re just a couple doors down there. Transmission seals is leaking. Wayne says he can fix it and I should go sleep in back. I says fuck you, farmboy. Didn’t come through all this so we could live like bugs, you know?” She leaned close to the wall mirror and picked at her face. “But I’m not tired. I mean, Wayne, he just don’t care…for somebody thinks all the time, and how we’re called to help these people find where they belong.” She lay back on the bed, feet dangling over the end, kicking slowly. “But I let my mind alone so I won’t be tired. Got to be a free bird before something happens.”

The burn marks on her arm didn’t scare me, but something did. And it wasn’t Wayne, either.

“Yo, beautiful people.”

A six-pack under each arm, a high cartoon voice. He was jokey and round and vague, the fatboy clerk in the waterbed store, whose every sale was a reminder of why he slept alone. He dropped successive pink-and-gray capsules into successive beers, whispering, “Bombs away.” The girl kept teasing him about his penguin arms and living on candy bars all the time and he kept sipping, pawing the hair away from his eyes.

“Make it far as the ocean, okay?” he said.

This irritated her—something heard over and over. She looked across at me and slipped her tongue side to side.

“Go on, go on,” Wayne said. “Long as we’re here.”

She bunched the skirt above her grub-white hips and rocked at the end of the bed.

“Reach that water.” Wayne snickered and nodded. “Reach the water and that’s all.”

“You shut up.” The girl bent her knees.

“Touch her. She wants you to.”

Wayne’s eyes were filmy but hard; he nodded some more. Scary enough; plain enough. I was going to get hurt if I didn’t follow instructions. The girl held out her hand, but she was staring in anger at the ceiling. I cupped her and she was cool, like a shucked oyster.

And then the door was splintered, the windows, by a blast of frantic men. The room whirled with cutting light and noise, Wayne begging them to shoot, the girl shrieking. A gun barrel struck me in the mouth.

They held me in a cell barely large enough to stand in, where slogans of defiance and revenge had been charcoaled on the walls. An FBI agent interviewed me in the morning. His method was laborious and his suit was shiny. Wayne Lopat and Lori Dee Carman were to be charged with aggravated murder, aggravated assault, rape, arson, armed robbery, and grand theft auto, all multiple counts. The agent had cheeseburgers brought in, but I wasn’t hungry. Well into evening, I repeated answers to irrelevant questions, sick with measuring how close I had been to some unspeakable mutilation. I walked around for hours after my release, watched a plain, metallic sunrise from the doorway of a fire-damaged laundromat, understanding there was no such thing as safety. Things went around, like debris in space, and avoidance was a matter of chance.

“You have any idea what my life would be,” says the man with the silver star, “if I had to enforce everything gets printed up?”

“Shorter,” I suggest.

He doesn’t smile for long. “So you let stuff be. You ain’t no beef thief. So a bunch of Japs is on the deed and for them I don’t give a flying fuck. But this out here is part of my area and I got to know what you’re doing in it.”

I’m blank, stopped, since at first I want to tell the truth and don’t know what it is. Won’t do. I need incoherence of an acceptable type. So I talk about renunciation and retreat, how particle physics had estranged me from God. I describe at length the inspiration of St. Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-five years atop a pillar of the desert, seeking His grace through abnegation in the sun.

The lawman squints, takes off his hat and looks inside as though crib notes are there.

He says, “I’m not inclined to question a man’s choice of worship,” shooting a gout of brown snuff juice well past me. “You can pray to the wind and the rocks and the creosote bushes, can’t nobody tell you no. Just don’t come lookin’ for me when you get in trouble and I won’t come lookin’ to give you any.”

I point with my knife at the pair of black snakes hanging from the awning pole and ask if he’ll stay for lunch. But already he’s swung up into the jeep, next to the pump-action twelve-gauge. He stares at me momentarily through the spotless windshield, the process of forgetting already begun, and wheels away in a long arc.

I’m not thinking of Roy Rogers this time, but of the saint on his desert platform. Maybe he tried to make himself a target up there. Maybe he was waiting for something to come from the heavens. Something like a meteor.

“N
OT THAT I KNOW
what it is,” Sonny told me this morning.

“But what you’re trying out here is bound to lead somewhere new.”

Before, where the earth now stands, say the First People, there were only Cyclone, Water, and Darkness.

I reminded Sonny that everything has already been tried. He smiled dismissively, kneeling to ream the generator’s feed line. Why disappoint him? He had brought snare wire and tobacco, sliced fruit Dawn had put through their dehydrator. He’d brought green operating scrubs from a uniform shop, billowy tops and pantaloons. No more jeans, no more heat rash. I thought to return his kindness by clearing away a little worry, by telling him I had a plan, a program.

1) To conserve moisture by day

2) To conserve warmth by night

Of course, he took this for mockery. I was looking at simplified life-forms and passing on the message: Accept, adapt. But Sonny wanted more.

“Resources,” he kept muttering.

Why the opacity? Why now? Could it be no more than the usual clog of jargon and cross-purposes? I thought not. I pictured Violet field-tripping past, brisk in sandals and shorts. Overwhelming her face would be the heavy, black-framed sunglasses of a Communist film critic; dangling from her white neck like a piece of life-support equipment would be the ubiquitous Pentax; between her toes would be calcareous grit millions of years old. And Violet would be no more out of place than a centipede.

No, this spate of bad reception between Sonny and myself, our mouths moving around static, must emanate from a source both less and more fundamental.

“How you go about this ought to be your own business,” he said.

We slackened, sat next to each other, touching at the knee. This was better, wiser. Not talking, we could be as placid as two Kool penguins.

He has promised to return before dark with a pair of tenderloin steaks. A gesture? A stance? I bewilder myself, turning over suspicions of my last link of a friend, pettily resenting his sustenance. I have nothing that needs to be guarded so selfishly. Still and all, this is not a venture and I’m not looking for partners.

Sonny has a new parabolic dish antenna which he wants to bring out here for me. It is enormous in his hard rutted yard, a pulsating ear with the delicate, blossomy contours of something formed by wind. It is a mechanical extrapolation of the omnivorously versatile human, unable to adapt and so bound to subdue, to capture and control even the air. And, Sonny fervently believes, it is a crucial tool for whatever I am trying.