The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  He waited for me at the top. When we’d been up there for a minute, looking down at a valley of fir trees while I caught my breath, he said, “Do you remember when you called me up and said nothing was working out but it was okay?”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago. You said it had to be okay because that was what was happening. You were losing your job.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Ohio.” I hugged myself, trying to stop my teeth from chattering. “I was there to see a woman who made crochets.”

  “Was that the woman you weren’t getting anywhere with?”

  “What?”

  “When you called, you said, ‘There’s a woman I’m not getting anywhere with, either.’”

  “Oh. No. That was a business trip. I was working for Crochet Life.”

  “I think I missed that one.”

  “I was only there three days.”

  “Wow. Was that the shortest?”

  I nodded.

  “Who was the woman you weren’t getting anywhere with?”

  “She worked at Kite Buggy. Why?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded bad. What was her name?”

  “Jillian.” He nodded and looked sympathetic. It was like being back on the science fair balcony, except that I was afraid he’d jump off this time. “Should we go back?” I said.

  “Yeah. I was thinking down there.” He pointed down the rocky hillside, where there was no trail.

  “I don’t think we should do that,” I said.

  “Are you sure? The suspension on these is pretty good. You guys gave it three sprockets.”

  He started down, bouncing over rocks and tree roots, before I could answer. I tried to go slowly, but the hill was steep, my vision blurred as the cold made my eyes tear, and the scree kept catching my front wheel and steering me toward rocks and trees. When it aimed me at a car-size outcropping I panicked, hit the brakes, locked the front wheel, fell over with the bike, and slid six feet into a tree. The bike’s frame slammed into my crotch but at least I’d stopped moving. Barney, at the bottom, yelled, “Are you okay?”

  I croaked back that I was. He pedaled a slow schoolyard pirouette, his ass hovering over the seat, as he waited for me.

  I got out from under the bike and stood up, my mouth full of a copper adrenaline taste I couldn’t spit out, and walked the bike down to where he was. He said, “Wasn’t that great?” with a fifteen-year-old’s oblivious smile. I couldn’t remember him smiling it even once when he was fifteen, but he was smiling the hell out of it now.

  I rode back to the hotel behind him, scraped and wet but on mercifully paved roads. We returned the bikes and went to a drugstore to get alcohol and bandages “for your road rash,” Barney said. It was a depressingly chipper phrase, and I knew exactly where he’d gotten it.

  The cold had anesthetized me but the pain blossomed in the shower while I thought, Is Barney crazy? Too long at the science fair? Or just happy for once? Even with the roller skiing he’s no crazier than the people I’ve been working with all these years, and what a helpful gauge that is.

  It’s like he likes me now,” I said to Patti when I got back to San Jose.

  “Of course he likes you.” She’d paused the DVD she was watching on a guy coughing blood in an alley while two guys kicked him. She was in a gritty-crime-drama cycle.

  “Not of course,” I said. “I’m worried that he’s trying to hurt himself.”

  “Why would he want to hurt himself?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but he’s going down a mountain sixty miles an hour on a sled and he doesn’t know how.”

  “You could glue noodles on his sled and give it to another child,” she said.

  “Look,” I said.

  “No, you saw how it is there. He has to do something.”

  “You and Deirdre always got along before,” I said.

  “Getting along with people gets less exciting,” Patti said, and started the movie again.

  The next day I called Barney in Idaho and told him I’d had a good time. “Yeah, I’m sorry you had to leave,” he said. “There’s whitewater here. I’ll call you next time I go someplace.”

  I said that sounded good and hung up. The Barney-is-happy and Barney-is-crazy theories took turns in my head, like parallel universes vibrating five minutes apart, and I remembered something Gerald had said in college. “When automation started happening, all these movies came out that had robots in them. They’d have this scene where the scientists were testing the new robot they invented. It was like, ‘Gentlemen, the robot is a creature of pure logic. Everything has to add up. Observe.’ And they’d tell the robot, ‘The sky is blue,’ and then they’d tell it, ‘The sky is green.’ So the robot would start turning its head back and forth, trying to reconcile that, and then smoke would come out of its ears and a few springs would burst out of its head, and then it would just flop over. They had that in a few different movies. You know, variations on it. People loved it. They thought it was hilarious. They thought it was about robots.”

  13

  We just bought this,” Walter Denise said, handing me a magazine called Exotic Pets. “Tom wants you to go tomorrow.”

  The cover photo showed a woman’s hand with long pink fingernails and six rings, scratching the head of a monkey-like animal whose amber eyes asked what it had done to get itself into this situation. The main line was LEMURS AS PETS? THE CONTROVERSY CONTINUES!

  “I can’t take another one,” I said.

  “I realize,” Walter said, and pointed at the magazine. “It’s in Montana. They have like seventy animals at their office. You’re not one of those people that pass out from methane, are you?”

  When he left I called Ingrid Saperstein, the editor of Exotic Pets, to introduce myself and tell her I was coming. “We’ll be so happy to meet you,” she said. “Everybody’s going to be on their best behavior. You’re going to be on your best behavior, aren’t you?” I started to answer but realized she was talking to someone on her end. “Yes, you are,” she said. There was cawing.

  We hung up and I flipped through the issue, past photos of pythons on sofas and ferrets dressed up as Houston Astros. If nothing else, there had to be a better name for the editor’s column than “Off the Beaten Pet.”

  In the morning I flew to Bozeman, rented a Focus, and drove to the small town nearest the magazine. I was hoping for a “Meet Me Under the Big Clock” hotel, but there were only chains. I checked into one, drove another hour, and turned onto a long dirt driveway with a damp zoo smell. At the end of it were two doorless garages, dark inside, with twenty pairs of green and yellow eyes looking out. Outside were long tables of labeled cages full of wallabies, rat snakes, and bush babies.

  I entered the main building through a door with a NO DOGS sign and almost stepped on a foot-long turtle. It snapped at me and I backed into the art director, who pointed out Ingrid. She was thirty and short, with frizzy brown hair and a film of hairs and feathers on her clothes. “It’s so good to meet you,” she said. “Henry, this is Edward. Edward’s a fennec fox.”

  The panting animal on her wrist looked as fake as a jack-alope on a gag postcard, but it was real, with a bat’s face, a Chihuahua’s body, and ears so big I couldn’t see how it held its head up. “Edward comes from the desert,” Ingrid said. “These big old ears keep him cool. Yes they do. And this is Frankie. Frankie is a kinkajou.” This one, its own worst enemy with a cat’s body and a rodent’s head, sat on Ingrid’s shoulder with its tail curled up in her hair. “Frankie has a little problem with peeing on my desk blotter, don’t you? Shake hands with Henry, Frankie.”

  At the staff meeting the people sat in chairs while the animals roamed the layout table, scattering sunflower seeds and defending territory. The photo editor pitched a feature on Nile monitor lizards. “They’re amazing looking,” he said. “They get up to seven feet.”

  “There are problems when they get that big, though,�
� the reptile editor said. “You buy it as a hatchling, and they don’t tell you it can take your cat’s head off one day. You can get one without a temper, but you have to go to Gerald Hauser.”

  “I don’t think it’s a feature,” Ingrid said. “I think it’s a Spotlight. Do you think it’s a Spotlight?” she asked the prairie dog at her breast. “Yes, you do.”

  I wondered if the Gerald Hauser they were talking about could possibly be the one I knew. We hadn’t spoken since I’d been a jerk to him in New York six years earlier. Could he have gone from strategic metals to exotic pets? He could talk to anyone, but did that include seven-foot lizards? It was too weird an image not to check.

  When the meeting was over I asked the reptile editor what his Gerald looked like. “We had a picture of him a few months ago,” he said, and opened a back issue to “Petting Parties,” a spread of small photos taken at pet shows and zoo openings. There was Gerald, with a woman and a jerboa at a convention booth. He was talking with the avidity I remembered, his floor-trader hands in the air.

  “I think that’s the only thing we have on him,” the reptile editor said. “He’s very low profile. You’ll see him at something like Species Showcase next month, but he doesn’t do most of the shows. He’s got the calmest animals I’ve ever seen, though. The red porcupine boom? That was him.”

  I was nervous about seeing Gerald again, but what he’d said in New York about me having something up my ass seemed like a dare now, and I got on a plane. Species Showcase, in Anaheim, was my thousandth trade show, a noisy small town of booths under a convention center’s vaulting struts. I found Gerald’s location on the program map and worked my way there past bikers with fat snakes on their shoulders and tween girls buying possum milk substitute.

  His booth was the classiest one, its partitions faced in smooth ceramic instead of acoustic cheese. A beautiful young woman at a desk in the middle of the space watched Gerald talk to a couple in their twenties next to a wire-mesh enclosure eight feet long.

  He’d put on an extra ten pounds, mostly swallowed up by his height, and gone back to the 1947 shirt and pants but had kept the New York blazer. When he saw me coming he held his hands up in mock surrender and said, “I don’t want any trouble. Unless it’s interesting trouble. Some way of doing trouble we haven’t seen before.” He laughed and put an arm around me. “My man. This is Henry Bay. A very old friend of mine. You look wonderful. Can I show you something in a mandrill? Something with a big purple ass?” The couple laughed and introduced themselves.

  “This is Leonard,” Gerald said to me, pointing into the wire enclosure. “Leonard’s an ornate Nile monitor. These guys are thinking about having Leonard move in with them.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “I know,” the woman said, “it’s pretty major. But look at him.”

  Leonard was six feet long, with bands of yellow spots circling his fat green body. His house, open on top, had heat lamps, a humidifier, and a rock bridge for him to lie on. He looked up at me with cautious black eyes as his tongue, a bright pink reed, shot eight inches out of his mouth. “That’s Henry, Leonard,” Gerald said. “Henry’s with me. Leonard’s smelling you with his tongue.”

  He leaned down and put his arm into the enclosure. Leonard climbed on to it and rested his head on Gerald’s shoulder as Gerald stood up. The young couple sighed, and people passing by stopped to watch.

  “You don’t want to do this unless Leonard knows you very well,” Gerald said. “You might not want to do it at all. Certainly not without protective clothing.” He knelt, and Leonard slid back in to the enclosure and on to the rock bridge. “We’re going to do some basking now,” Gerald said.

  The young guy handed Gerald some snapshots of a big yard with banana trees and a pond. “This is our backyard,” he said. “He could pretty much go around out there.”

  “Watched at all times,” Gerald said.

  “Definitely,” the woman said.

  “Because if he climbs this tree he’ll fall and break his head,” Gerald said. “They’re good climbers but they’re even better fallers.”

  He held the photos up to the lizard’s face. “Look at that nice backyard, Leonard. Do you think you’d like to live there?” He turned to the couple. “Leonard has no idea what he’s looking at or what I’m talking about. Whatever you do here today, don’t let anyone run that kind of shit on you.” The couple nodded. He gave the pictures back.

  “Now, I can’t sell you guys Leonard,” Gerald said. They looked stricken. “What I can sell you is the time I’ve spent with him that’s made him feel like no one’s about to make him into cowboy boots.”

  “Right,” the guy said. “That would be great.”

  “Why don’t you walk around and think about it?” Gerald said. “I think you and he are good together, but you should take your time.”

  The couple nodded solemnly, thanked Gerald several times, and left. Gerald showed me around his booth, introducing me to a sugar glider, a redheaded iguana, and the woman at the desk. “Henry, this is Katie. Henry and I are going to the disgusting café. Would you like a spoiled brownie wrapped in vinyl?” She said no thanks and we started walking.

  “I’m sorry about New York,” I said.

  “You think you’re sorry about New York,” he said. “I thought New York was going to come through for me. I thought New York and I were going to grow old together.”

  It took us fifteen minutes to cross the hall, with people stopping Gerald to praise his animals or say they’d been wanting to meet him. A guy in a loud sweater, with a little monkey on his shoulder, came toward us. Gerald spoke under his breath: “Look at this fool. Look at the sweater. He looks like one of those guys who fuck with Batman.”

  “That’s a great monitor you’re showing,” the guy said. “Did I see him go up on your shoulder? That’s amazing.”

  “Leonard constantly surprises me and I constantly disappoint Leonard,” Gerald said. “That’s our deal.”

  “That’s great,” the guy said. “Have you met Justine?” He pointed the monkey at Gerald.

  “Hi, Justine,” Gerald said, and nodded goodbye. When the guy was out of earshot he said, “A colorful fact about the playful marmoset is that people who take them out of their habitat and sell them ought to be shot.”

  The café was a stockade of partitions with wilted chef’s salads for $11.50. We bought coffee and sat at a table. “How’d you locate me?” Gerald said.

  “I work for the company that publishes Exotic Pets.”

  “Clean Page,” Gerald said, shaking his head like when he’d said, “Controlled Dynamics,” the day I met him. “We don’t dig the brother Tom Patrick, but he doesn’t need us to. I like that editor, though. Ingrid. She’s a little ‘Whose nose is it,’ but all these people are. They talk baby talk to animals that could disembowel them. You live there? San Jose?”

  I nodded. “How about you?”

  “Not far. Mill Valley.”

  A fancy Marin County suburb. “Can you get propane there?”

  “Sure. Health propane.”

  “Did you get tired of the metals?” I said.

  “Not tired, no, but…when I saw you was after jihad, right? But we didn’t talk about it.” I shook my head.

  “The idea of jihad is that it sweeps away everything in its path,” he said. “It certainly did that with me. I ran thirty blocks uptown with that cloud coming after me, and of course I had no idea what I might have been running toward. I didn’t know what they might have going in Times Square. I just ran. That was the fucked-up Pamplona out there. It was the fucked-up Mardi Gras.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have asked you about it.”

  “I don’t see why. I didn’t have anything to say that you haven’t heard a dozen times. The wet handkerchief over the face? The school gym in New Jersey? I couldn’t reach my girlfriend for two days? You’ve heard all that.”

  “Was she okay?”

  “Chloe?” He nodded and showed
me his ring. “We’re wed. You still need to meet her.” He pointed to my hand. “There’s a Mrs. Henry as well.”

  “Patti.”

  “With an i?” I nodded. He closed his eyes, smiled, and opened them. “You know what they say all the time in strategic metals? They sit at their trading screens and say”—he put his hand by his mouth and sprang his fingers apart, as if teaching me a phrase of Italian—“‘I’m getting fucking killed here.’ And now people were getting fucking killed there. It came true. And yet it was a miracle, how fast they got our screens back up. I think we were all kind of awed by that. If they’d gotten me back up as fast as my screen, it would have been spectacular.”

  He poured two sugars into his last inch of coffee. “But there was still that smell. The smell wasn’t going anywhere. You could go five hundred miles from home, buy all new clothes there, pour salt water through your nose, it didn’t make any difference. All the perfumes of Arabia, Henry. Well. City people. Complain, complain.

  “So that time I saw you, I was already on my way out of metals. I was wondering what I could do that might mean a little more to people. I don’t mean I had no self-interest. I’m a commercial traveler. I come to the Quality Inn with my sample case and fall asleep with my shoes on. I take some steam with a man who has six stores and whose order I hope to write.”

  “I think you’re doing better than that,” I said, nodding toward his double booth.

  He waved it off. “People kept saying that people would feel better if they could go back to familiar things. The comfort food. The Spaldeens. I had my doubts. I wasn’t sure the familiar was really there to go back to.

  “Chloe and I went to Yellowstone. She revitalized the main street of Kalispell and then we drove down. Have you been there?” I shook my head. “If you walk for a day you can still get off by yourself. We slept by a stream. I get up in the morning, I go to get wood, and I’m just going into the trees when this buffalo walks up to me.

  “We both stop, like five feet apart. The buffalo’s the size of a station wagon. It’s got the beard, the big shoulders, the serape feature on the side. But what I can’t take my eyes off are the eyes.” He showed me the buffalo’s clear stare. “And his breathing is slow. I’m scared, but my breathing slows down anyway, to match. My face gets the same as his. My shoulders. Five minutes. Eight minutes.