Inner Tube: A Novel by Hob Broun Read Free Book Online Page A

price right now, he says, but you’ve got to know the right people. Heidi, with her automatic solicitude, says, Why don’t you sit down and empty one yourself?
    There exist certain individuals who are born historians, detail men, nickname givers. They exude a kind of mental formalin in which unlikely remains are preserved. Adapted to such habitats as bus depots and cafeterias, they learn to move quickly and take advantage of the slightest opening. This E. L. Dobbs, age ninety-three, needs only a minute or two to surround us with rambling vines of talk.
    Do we know that this place, here where we sit, belonged to winemakers in Prohibition times? Beautiful vineyards all around and Judge Naylor had claim to the first pressings. You made your own way then or shriveled up. Wild days and up along those crags hundreds and hundreds of eagles, with nests five feet deep. So many birds they took all the fish out of the river and a posse went out to mop them up. Eagle feathers in the hatband of every dude after that. Sure, sell feathers or snakeskins or quail eggs hardboiled. Through the windows when the train came through. You did what you had to, whatever it was.
    “Now me, I had to quit pharmacy school when the diphtheria took my daddy off. And what could I do but jump up and take a job nobody wanted. About that time we had a woman killer, dropped her babies down a well. Tiny little thing and pretty as a saint, but the jury said do her. Had a hangman didn’t know his business and when the trap fell her head ripped right off her body. Helluva thing. I knew some anatomy and I said, Let me handle it. Fifteen years I was known up and down as the gentle hangman, and not one of my people experienced the slightest pain. Had a rope hand-woven out of soft bark fibers, kept her wrapped in special papers inside a moistureproof box. Hell, I did them all. Dr. Blount, Bill Tate, the Black Mesa Butcher, Joaquin Ramirez, and that anarchist…What was it? Greuber, yeah, and still singing when I put the hood over him. Tell you what, though. The job showed me something. Gave me the key to things early on.”
    He stops, waiting to be prompted, but we look blank. I’m wondering what song the anarchist was singing.
    “The whole thing is this: to go out of this world as late as possible.”
    “That’s it?” Heidi says, like someone’s just taken her last dollar with a pair of loaded dice.
    “Strive to survive and fight for every last day you can. That’s all there is, dearie.”
    “This shit I don’t need.” Heidi gets up and heads for the car. She’s genuinely pissed.
    No more than a mile since we passed a speed trap, but there’s her foot pressing down on mine and the gas pedal is to the floor.
    “Lighten up, sugar. We’ve got plenty of time.”
    “You always say that.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Well, it’s all so easy for you, isn’t it?”
    She has a taste for absolute terms—always, all, never—and I have neither the desire nor the arrogance to try and interest her in subtleties.
    “Sleepwalking through life, that’s me.”
    “You asshole, and you’re proud of it.”
    I start to touch her face and she plasters herself against the door. “There are things that matter, you know. It’s not all just a dance.” Her arms are folded tight, her lips stretched thin.
    I don’t understand this friction, do you? A perfect day. She said so herself.

13
    R OMANCE IS FOR MOST of us like a career; we pursue it solemnly, unscrupulously, and meet its usual disappointments with ill grace. In the course of things I have slept with seventeen different women and the lies I told them were ones I myself believed. Complacence, inconsistency, self-defense—I am a thoroughly ordinary man. But think of this: The cruelest thing we can do to one another is to have expectations.
    Just now I am having an affair with the maid at my motel. Heidi is straitened, but a woman who breathes freely no matter what. She has hard eyes and a ninety-six pound