by Charlie Haas
“Finally the buffalo walks away. It shuffles off to Buffalo. People are shuffling off this mortal buffalo all over the place, but for once I’m not thinking about that. I go to get the wood but my steps feel different. It’s like I’m pressing down on the ground with five hundred pounds per leg.
“I go back to where we slept, and I’m thinking it really doesn’t matter how much of the familiar I put in place, because the strange is coming over to kill me later anyway. The strange believes in things I couldn’t even dream about. There’s drunk with God and then there’s mean drunk with God. But I said, ‘What if I could be friends with the strange? Just with a piece of it, just for a while? Would that help?’”
He saw he was leaning over the table, and sat back. “So I started learning about animals. I’d already eaten vegetables and sold minerals, so why not?”
“I always wondered what you meant when I saw you that time,” I said. “When you said the metals were a funny business.”
He thought for a minute, considering how much to tell me. “Actually?” he said. “There were certain difficulties even before the eleventh. I came up against some regulatory issues. And of course the difficulties I ran into weren’t just mine, they were my investors’. People said some strongly worded things about me. I said a few about myself.” He stood up. “I like the buffalo story better, though. It’s true too, as far as it goes.”
When we got back to his booth the young couple was waiting to say yes. Gerald suggested skipping some of the usual paperwork. They hesitated, then looked at Leonard and agreed. In college I’d thought Gerald would go around shaming the modern day into behaving itself, but that was college. He closed the deal, throwing in some frozen food balls and a few anecdotes.
See, I said to myself, it’s not that hard to change what you do. You run into a buffalo or walk into a Franklin Covey store, crochet crooked or just lie down on a luge sled, paw the ice, and go. Everyone’s doing it. When I was leaving, Gerald said we’d have to get together for dinner soon, “and bring the wives.” I waited for him to ask me if I hated it when people said that, but he never did.
14
I’m going to Colorado to see Dad on tour,” Barney said on the phone. “You want to go?”
“On tour?”
“Yeah, it’s twelve cities. Mom isn’t doing all of it but she’s going to this one. It’s called The Big Meeting. They have six or seven speakers. The Colorado one is near Pikes Peak. We could do some bouldering. Let me give you the phone number.”
I asked Patti if she wanted to go to Colorado and she said yes. We were having a good day, and she liked seeing Mom.
I mail-ordered the tickets, which came tucked into a glossy program with soaring eagles on the cover. The speakers included an ex–vice president of the United States, a two-time carpeting saleswoman of the year, Dad, and a football player whose career had been ended by knee injuries three weeks into his first pro season and who’d written an inspirational bestseller called I Can Still Pray on Them.
Dad got off the plane in Colorado bulging with energy. Everyone else, including Mom, looked suitably wrecked from the flight and the long delay before it, but Dad bounced out of the Jetway like a bullet list of travel tips, hydrated and aisle-stretched, inhaling the noxious mix of contrail and Cinnabon like it was an ocean breeze. Even with his hair getting gray he looked younger, fit and tan in a straw-colored suit and cocoa Mephistos. Mom wore her work outfit, with an upgrade from flip-flops to Huaraches. They both hugged us, customary for Mom but new for Dad, who got two-count chest and cheek off Patti.
I asked if we were meeting Barney. “No, he’s getting in tomorrow,” Dad said. “We have to stop at baggage claim up here. They made me check my chair.”
The cardboard box Dad took off the carousel was four feet square and six inches thick. We lashed it to the roof of his rented Land Cruiser with bungee cords from his carryon.
The fifteen-minute drive to the hotel took us through sunshine, a blinding thunderstorm, and then rainbows. The office parks and shopping centers here were like everywhere else, but the landscape and weather kept staging over-the-top parables, with cloudbanks straining the sun into searchlights and snowcapped Pikes Peak glaring down at gray walls of sky forked with lightning. It was known as a religious area, and I felt that if I lived there I’d be devout about something inside of two weeks.
The hotel lobby was huge, with mounted caribou heads looking down on triumphal coffee urns, but our room was tiny. Patti got some vodka and a bag of shellacked Japanese crackers from the minibar, lay down with both pillows behind her, flipped through the movies on TV, and found a domestic drama where people had loud arguments and drank milk from the carton.
Mom and Dad had a dinner date with a guy who was publishing a day planner featuring the take-away points from Dad’s books, and Patti said the minibar food had been dinner for her. I went to the bar off the lobby for wings and ranch. When I got back she was asleep in her HINDENBURG T-shirt, the blanket at her waist. Looking at her, I forgot our problems momentarily and felt a surge of love, the old chest panic. If I’d tried to wear that shirt I’d have been a vampire sucking on youth, but on Patti it was as if all the kid brio from Burning Man to Phuket had settled on her breasts, which were being flattened an optimum half inch by the stretched black fabric.
I got into bed with her but couldn’t sleep. Previews of the bouldering expedition with Barney played in my mind, using two miserable weekends from my job at Rappel for source material. I saw the new Barney on top of a rock formation, watching the sun rise with one perfect tear of joy on his cheek, like Gerald’s monk. All these years he’d had three times the brains I did, and now he was going to beat me at having none.
When I finished worrying about Barney I started worrying that Patti would tell Mom about our problems while I was off trying to boulder. There were no sides to take, but Mom would take Patti’s. She’d know I’d built the rut we were in, that I was a natural rut-builder like Dad, except that Dad had walked out of the family rut business in his two-hundred-dollar walking shoes, leaving me in charge.
In the morning I rented bouldering shoes and a harness at a climbing store, got dressed for Dad’s speech, and met Barney in the hotel lobby. His tweed sport coat had a pale rectangle over the pocket from a hundred conferences’ worth of HELLO stickers. “Dad went on ahead with the vice president guy,” he said. “They have a warm-up routine they do together.”
Patti and Mom came off the elevator in twice-a-year dresses, stockings, and makeup. Barney hadn’t seen Patti since he’d said goodbye to us in Lawrence with no eye or body contact, but he gave her extended temple-press now.
We went in the Land Cruiser, Mom driving. “You must be getting a kick out of Dad doing this,” Barney said to her.
“Uh-huh,” Mom said.
The event was in a covered arena, a big silver disc with twelve pairs of glass doors. Long tables in the lobby were piled with salesmanship books and motivational CDs. The salespeople at the tables over-enunciated their pitches and focused on the browsers’ eyes, and the browsers focused and enunciated right back at them, a closed loop of technique learned from the previous year’s CDs.
Half the four thousand seats had sold. There were lots of people in suits, but also youth groups, Air Force Academy cadets, Sedona types, and knit-hat chemo klatches. Behind the podium a giant video screen showed a repeating montage of wheat, flags, fireworks, the Grand Canyon, and kids playing in hydrant spray on a ghetto street. The music repeated too, a stirring-esque synthesizer melody that hurled itself up the scale every twenty seconds.
The first speaker was the quota-smashing carpet saleswoman, who said, “You see, women have an advantage, because women have been going to the supermarket all these years, and a lot of what happens in business is just like going to the supermarket. You put your foot down and doors open up for you.”
“We should be writing this down,” Patti deadpanned to Mom.
When the saleswoman finished, the emc
ee introduced Dad, who came onstage carrying the web chair he’d sat in for the summer he got laid off. Barney smiled and nudged me.
Dad unfolded the chair, put it down beside the podium, went to the mic, and said, “Back in the 1980s, I lost my job.” His speaking voice was different, full of breath and portent. “The company I thought I was going to work for till I was sixty-five went out of business and took my pension with it. Sad story, but it’s not unusual. It gets a little less unusual every time you turn on the news.”
He took the wireless mic off the podium and walked around. “So I did what the people at programs like this one are always telling you to do. I created my own job. I created a job sitting in that chair and looking out at the street. That’s the hardest job I ever had, because you don’t get a lot of feedback from your boss when your boss is an eight-dollar chair from the drugstore.
“After a while I got a job at a salad bar. I went from managing forty people to slicing forty pounds of cucumbers. But it turns out there’s a satisfaction you get from doing something real like that, seeing people eat those cucumbers. I started feeling better.”
I looked at Barney. He was smiling proudly, a kid watching his father in a local theatrical, loving the glue-on beard and the laboring accent. Barney, I thought, are you really buying this? Can we speak the true samba here? Dad is the office expert who hasn’t been in an office for fifteen years, and he hated the salad bar.
Dad held up a business card. “My card,” he said. “It’s a flimsy little item. It’s nothing. But it’s everything, because it says what I do. It says I have something to do. You take this away from people, they dry up and blow away.” Barney, did you know you can have the business card and flutter down the street like a gum wrapper anyway? Can we talk behind Dad’s back again, just once for old time’s sake? I know I haven’t said anything either, but why don’t you start?
After Dad they brought on the ex–vice president, who looked like the sandy-haired dad in a family movie, his blowtorch smile betrayed by nervous eyes as if he were bracing for his kids’ next prank. During his one term in office he’d called India a key part of Europe and said that Sesame Street “subjects America’s children to a threateningly run-down urban environment, where living in a garbage can is held up as being a badge of honor.” The president had dumped him from the ticket the next time but lost anyway.
“I had the honor of serving with a great president and meeting with heads of state from all over the world,” he told the crowd, “but it’s every bit as great of an honor to be talking to your organization today. Or to this gathering, rather. To this group. I mean that.”
He was followed by Brent Targill, the football player who’d been retired by knee injuries. He hobbled out of the wings, stiff and grimacing, then stopped halfway to the podium, pointed at the audience like “Gotcha!” and grinned, walking almost normally the rest of the way. He was in his late thirties, with the sly smile of a coach kidding his players on awards night.
He recounted “hearing that crunch” at the bottom of a midfield pileup and knowing it was over. After two years of moping, he said, he’d realized he could serve a higher purpose with youth counseling and a prison ministry, because “it turned out I still had a coach. I had a coach that was willing to die, just to give me a victory. He—boy, you folks are quick. I say that in New York, they think I’m talking about Jimmy Johnson. True story. But that’s not who I mean.”
I looked at Barney again. His stare of concentration was suddenly back, fiercer than ever, as if Targill’s homily of the fractures held the mysteries of nature. The more religious Targill got in the five minutes that followed, the harder Barney focused.
“Hey, you folks have been awesome,” Targill finally said into the hush he’d made. He reached into the back of the podium, pulled out a football, yelled “Deep!” and threw it into the audience as he walked off. Everyone, including Barney, cheered for a lady in a pantsuit who caught it.
In the dressing room the speakers were eating grapes and wiping off makeup. We all told Dad he’d been great, except Mom, who hugged him but didn’t say anything. Dad introduced us to Targill and said, “Why don’t we all get something to eat?”
“Absolutely,” Targill said. “Hey, Veepster?”
“You’re on,” the ex-VP said, but Patti and Mom said they were tired from traveling. “Okay, just the guys, then,” the ex-VP said. “It could get wild. I’m kidding.”
We went in the ex-VP’s rented Impala to an Australian-themed restaurant built to look like a desolate sheepherding outpost, but fun. “We can go around back,” Targill said.
“I’m way ahead of you,” the ex-VP said, and parked by the rear entrance. As we walked to the door he put a hand on my shoulder and quietly said, “Brent thinks he’s the one that gets recognized.”
Dad went first, a non-celebrity scout, and got us a table near the kitchen. By the time the food came the ex-vice was on his third bourbon and asking Barney what he did for a living.
“Biology,” Barney said. “Stem cells.”
“That’s an exciting area, okay? We just think that’s something where the most vibrant solution is for private industry to step up.” He turned to me. “What kind of work do you do…”
“Henry,” I said. “I’m in magazine publishing.”
“That’s good too, okay,” he said, “but I’d like to know why they think they can write these things where they distort people. No one will give me an answer on this.”
Dad said, “Henry doesn’t—”
“I don’t mean him. But when they twist how someone gets portrayed so they look foolish and so on. I don’t mean Henry here at all.”
“He’s at the company that does Maximum Snorkel,” Barney said. “Clean Page.”
The ex-VP’s face changed. “Oh. Clean—that’s Tom Patrick. I didn’t realize. No, he’s terrific. He’s one of the people that stood up for me when there weren’t that many, I’ll tell you. That’s a great company. You know what he told me? That people were making money with magazines about tattoos and the thing where they pierce themselves, but he wasn’t going to touch it because kids are hanging on by a fingernail already. Would you tell him hi for me?”
I said I would. Dad put a hand on my shoulder and smiled at Barney. “Both my guys are doing great,” he said.
The ex-VP had two more bourbons and a brandy before we went out to the car. He wanted to drive, but Targill, who’d had only half a beer, asked him for the keys.
“It’s my rental,” the ex-VP said. “My name is on it.”
“Veepster, you’re drunk, okay?” Targill said.
“Don’t call me that. I never should have gone on this thing.”
“I won’t call you that,” Targill said. “Sorry. I’d just like to go back and get some sleep.”
“Why? What do you have, a prayer breakfast tomorrow?”
“Yes, actually.”
“That’s great. With the local movers and shakers. Jesus.”
“I’ll walk back if I have to,” Targill said. “Knees and everything.”
“Fuck your knees,” the ex-vice said, taking a wobbling step toward Targill as a family with a ten-year-old boy and a seven-year-old girl came out of the restaurant. The kids looked over at us as the parents tried to keep them moving toward their car. Dad waved at them. Everything after the salad bar was heaven.
“See, this could get in the media,” Targill said.
“Oh, they’d love that,” the ex-vice said. “That would be their big story of all time.” He gave Targill the keys.
Back at the hotel Dad and I walked the former vice through the parking lot, keeping him upright and away from Targill, who walked ahead of us with Barney.
“Prayer breakfast,” the ex-VP said. “I went to fucking Davos.”
“Steady as she goes,” Dad said.
“You just hand it all off to Him,” Targill was saying to Barney. “Everything you’ve been carrying on your back all this time.”
“He
was hitting on the carpet lady,” the ex-VP said. “It’s always the holy ones.”
Targill put his hand on Barney’s shoulder. “You might want to fall by this breakfast thing in the morning,” he said. “Just to give you a feel for it.”
“I’d like to,” Barney said, “but I promised my brother we’d go rock-climbing.”
In the room Patti was watching a DMX movie. She said, “Hi, are you drunk?”
I said, “No, but the Sesame Street guy is.”
“He’s my favorite.”
“Yeah. How was it with my mom?”
“Okay,” she said. “A little sad, though. She said she was thinking of leaving your dad for a while.”
“When? When he got laid off?”
“No, when he started doing this stuff. Because it’s so weird. But then she decided it was like he was getting paid back by the guys that wrecked his old company. She decided it’s all the same guys.”
“Wow.” I paused. “How did that come up?”
“What do you mean?”
“No, I just, were you just on the general subject of marriage, or…?”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Yeah, I told her all our problems. She’s going to yell at you.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Give me the benefit.”
“I do.”
“Then please press or say what your fucking problem is.” It sounded like Kris Santangelo. She was the Switchblade Priest. I said I didn’t have a problem. She said, “That’s good,” and turned off the TV and the lights.
At five in the morning I met Barney downstairs, saying hello in a hushed voice as if there were someone in the two-acre lobby I could wake up. He was studying a climbing map he’d cut out of Rappel, which Tom Patrick was about to buy after cutting off its oxygen by giving away ads in Ascend. Barney was in climbing shoes, his emergency backpack stuffed with ropes.
