Inner Tube: A Novel by Hob Broun Page A

that Gordo had been sleeping at his office a lot and had come upstairs as we were packing to present us each, amid motions of great secrecy, with a salami.
    “You’ll need to keep your strength up.”
    Florida, my mother informed me as we taxied to the terminal gate, was unique in all America. All I knew was that the Dodgers held spring training in Vero Beach and that alligators were known to slip by night into backyard swimming pools.
    Cordelia Bontempi was blind in one eye, which to an eleven-year-old was the most interesting thing about her. Tim and Dan, the twins, had bad teeth, white-blond hair, and all the latest toys. They were eight and consequently of no interest whatever. Eggplant fingers were dispensed as treats and the wooden wall around the swimming pool was too high for an alligator to climb.
    “Ten whole days,” Carla moaned that night. “I may just die.”
    She had come to my small room from hers across the hall and, unwilling to sit, paddled around the end of my bed in flannel pajamas she’d outgrown. Her fledgling cones had never been pointier.
    “You know there’s not a TV anywhere,” I said incredulously. “Those two little saladheads aren’t allowed.”
    “Oh, God.” Carla gripped the sides of her head as if steel balls were clacking inside. “Why can’t Momma ever have friends who are just regular?”
    “Let’s eat salami,” I said.
    I slept poorly that night, thinking of my sister’s cones and how salami grease had made her mouth so shiny. I knew we couldn’t be real friends anymore and it scared me.
    “Why don’t you show them your racing dive,” my mother said, pulling me across the flagstones to where the twins were scraping paint off little metal trucks.
    She wore a loose shirt patterned with red and yellow flowers. Well out away from her, like something that might claw or bite, she held a frosty glass.
    “Don’t be such a mope,” she said impatiently.
    In I dove, surfacing at the shallow end with a victorious grin though chlorine burned my eyes and I had water up my nose. The twins waved excitedly, my mother pressed frosty glass to face, and Carla, awkwardly hunched in a narrowing strip of shade, her new bathing suit out of sight behind a quilted robe and a copy of Mademoiselle, said, “Your watch, stupid.”
    Condensation had already started beneath the crystal of my little man’s Timex.
    This, along with Mother’s fainting over lunch (zucchini fritters) an hour or two later, more or less set the tone for the rest of our tropical sojourn.
    “Now I know why Daddy stayed home,” Carla observed as we nibbled cold hot dogs outside the examining room where an intern was removing the treble hook that had lodged in Dan’s cheek during the climactic minutes of our deep-sea fishing trip aboard the Tina Marie III.
    “Maybe it’ll leave a hole,” I said, really far more interested in clear tears dripping from Cordelia’s milky eye and onto my mother’s sunburned neck.
    “Great.” Carla twisted her lips. “He can blow baked beans out the side of his face.”
    My sister’s hormonal shift rendered her mordant and sharp rather than nervy and shy. This would hold true for some time to come, and, as now, would bring her grief. As now, overhearing the remark, Mother came forward to swat Carla across the mouth, and not the behind, befitting her incipient womanhood.
    All of which left me the only dry-eyed passenger for the ride home.
    So it wasn’t much of a pleasure trip. A field trip, then? A research project? That “unique in all America” line had a distinct textbook flavor. Wasn’t Mother always pointing, naming trees and flowers? It seemed reasonable to suspect we’d been set up for one of those enriching experiences. Anyway, here came three days of uninterrupted rain, and what could we do but observe?
    Steamy drizzle outside, puzzlingly overcast inside—the house was large enough to have its own weather. Long and heavy silences were forces to be overcome by the