Inner Tube: A Novel by Hob Broun

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.
    Dawn Boyers was glaringly blonde, round-faced, heavy-breasted. A sly, burly couple they made, two escapees from a beer stein bas relief. She wore the same dappled fatigues, but a blue chiffon scarf girdled her solid neck and lumpy turquoise earrings hung like beetles from her ears. The two silent, unboyish boys stood on either side of her, grade-school sentries with recalcitrant eyes.
    “One for all,” and Sonny combined wink and smile without completing the motto.
    How to fit in? Yucca stalks, erosion, hard perimeters, children in combat regalia. The only reassuring thing was their truck. It had wide tires, hydraulic suspension, and probably enough juice under the hood to pull my car free.
    The boys started the fire with a bow drill and blackened hot dogs at the end of forked sticks. Lemonade was yellow powder shaken with water in a plastic jug. Portions were carefully equalized and Dawn said grace.
    “Make blessed what we are about to consume. Help us in our struggles to reach strength, but guide us, too, in the path of your safekeeping. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
    The reverent commando family ate with eyes downcast, in silence, chewing warily as if alert for broken glass. How to fit in? I understood that I was among people quelled by belief, for whom irony was no base metal. They saw clearly. They moved along an unwavering white line. I had only to ask a stupid question or two and the precepts were delivered, all glossy and round, like nuggets from the transparent globe of a Kiwanis gumball machine.
    Societal collapse was imminent