Free Inner Tube: A Novel by Hob Broun

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.

17
    C ULVER TUBBS HAD