The Enthusiast Read online

  “That’s good,” he said, and closed his eyes again. “I think we should cheer up, though. They have that available. I saw it.”

  17

  None of this goes,” Gerald said, pointing to the lizard enclosures and basking rocks. “Some people who care deeply about animals are coming by to get those later.”

  He and Chloe and I were carrying boxes from their Mill Valley Victorian to a moving van. There were movers, but Gerald had paid them a little extra to let us help.

  “Can you and Patti use this table?” Chloe said. “I can’t see it in New York.” She was a head shorter than Gerald, beautiful in a moving-day sweatshirt. I said yes to the table and we wedged it into my Echo.

  “Do you know what you’ll be doing there?” I said.

  Gerald shook his head. “Nothing with animals. The people at the Customs Service have gotten very worked up about how some of the animals are coming in. It’s a good time for us to relocate.”

  “There’s always something,” Chloe said.

  When the house was empty we sat on the front porch with beers while the movers closed up the truck. One of them, a guy the same age Gerald and I were when we met, brought his clipboard over for Gerald to sign.

  “Okay, sir. We’ll see you in New York,” the mover said.

  “You taking Eighty?” Gerald said.

  He nodded. “We should be there in four days.”

  “No need to drive recklessly,” Gerald said. “We’re visiting in Wisconsin on the way.”

  “Okay,” the guy said. “Thanks.”

  He turned to go. “I know a place in Nebraska,” I said, “for Indian tacos.”

  “Oh, okay,” the mover said. “Let me write it down.”

  I told him how to find the place near Country Ways. Then I gave him Danish pastries in Utah, a lady selling old shirts in Colorado, and a friendly bar with pool tables in Illinois.

  “I would take note of these recommendations,” Gerald said.

  “They’re not available to the general public.”

  The guy put a fresh piece of paper in his clipboard. I gave him hamburgers in Iowa, a lake in Ohio, funnel cake in Pennsylvania, comic books in New Jersey, and a Chinese musician playing the erhu by the fountain of an outlet mall in Nevada. I kept going, surprising myself, drawing freely from the list of places I’d thought I never wanted to see again. He filled four pages on both sides. When I finally stopped, he said, “Wow. Okay. Thanks. We’ll try and hit some of these.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Actually, it’s kind of a great drive.”

  18

  First geese,” Deirdre said, spotting them in the rushes just before they took off in a loud V over the lake in Lawrence. It was afternoon and the kids were in school. Barney was walking on his own, although he sometimes had to put a hand on someone’s shoulder.

  “Do you remember the place in Houston?” I said.

  “A little,” he said. “The food.” His real voice was almost back. “First rabbit.”

  It stared at us for a second and then ran into the high grass. Barney looked at his watch, stopped walking, and said, “I have to go to the lab now. We’re having a meeting.”

  He was right this time. Deirdre dropped us off on campus, and Ralph Dreher and I helped Barney climb the stairs. “We’re doing vascular endothelial for the HSCs,” Dreher said. Barney nodded. He had to put both feet on each step and rest a minute before going up the next one. “The incubation’s with mouse monoclonal nestin and then sheep anti-mouse.”

  It took us ten minutes to get to the second floor, where Dick Tagaki and four other people were waiting in a conference room. Barney took the latest edition of Dad’s datebook from his backpack, put it on the table, and sat down.

  “We brain-injured the rats on Tuesday,” a young woman said. “We’ll be injecting them tomorrow.”

  Barney read a printout and spoke slowly. “We should look at which ones express O4 and which ones express GFAP. That’s something…”

  He looked at the young guy sitting across from him. A minute went by in silence, and then Barney looked down, saw the datebook, and opened it to two pages of taped-in Polaroids of people with their names written underneath. “That’s something Lucas should look at,” he said. The guy nodded and made a note.

  After an hour Barney got a headache, but Dreher told me that two months ago it had been twenty minutes. They were learning to catch the headaches faster, before they led to blackouts or throwing up.

  We went downstairs, where Deirdre picked us up and took us to the house for dinner. Barney was back to cooking and Deirdre was weighing the portions again. After dinner, when I was about to go to the airport, Deirdre said, “Can you guys go get those presents?”

  The kids ran out of the room and came back with two big packages they’d wrapped themselves, taping pieces of black-and-yellow paper together. “Like Aunt Patti’s shirts,” Pearl said.

  The presents were two emergency backpacks, like theirs, with flashlights, meal bars, tick spray, and first aid kits. “These are wonderful,” I said. “Patti will love this.”

  I got full waist-up off Deirdre and a ten-second hug from Barney that came close to spraining my shoulder. At the airport I stuffed Patti’s backpack into my suitcase and carried mine on, thinking about how people kept giving me backpacks, a conspiracy to get me walking. It was a great gift idea, and I was moved, but the airlines were going through cutbacks, and I ate my emergency meal an hour out of Kansas City.

  19

  Yesterday at breakfast Patti told me that her brother-in-law, Stewart, had decided to quit being a lawyer and become a smokejumper. “He’s looking for a fire department that tracks into it,” she said.

  “Stewart?” I said. “Has he ever done anything like that?”

  “No. It just came to him. He says he wants to make a difference. His parents are flying in. My mom’s losing her mind. Stephanie won’t stop crying.”

  “Stewart,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “Go, Stewart.”

  After breakfast I walked her to the corner. It’s been a year since I helped Gerald move, and eight months since Patti and I moved ourselves. Our house is on Duquesne, six blocks from downtown Clayton, ten blocks from Riddenhauer’s, and across town from the Tradewinds Apartments, which were torn down for condos six years ago.

  There was a stiff breeze at the cross street, a preview of autumn. I kissed Patti, walked home, and went up to the room where I put out Clayton.

  It’s not one of those one-city lifestyle magazines, although that would be fine, putting headlines like UNREAL ESTATE and IF YOU KNEW SUSHI into type all the time. But Clayton is for people who collect Claytons, or live in them. We salute the repurposed department store of the month, and give directions to walks in the margins. Our readers compare notes on how to fend off the big-box and the high-end, an area in which they’ve had some success.

  It’s not all small towns, though. Our New York correspondent keeps the reader informed about bakery guys and urban songbirds. The veteran Washington reporter James Rensselaer vents under a pen name in a column called “You and Your Government.” A caveman in Missouri writes about relationships. A Hudson River Valley composer of song cycles contributes a page called “Subliminal Hymnal.” Like every title I’ve worked at, Clayton covers an enthusiasm. In this case the enthusiasm has no name, but it’s there.

  We’re too small for Jillian to distribute yet, but she put us with her printer in St. Louis, and our order is a little bigger every month. So far the office staff is just me and the Silex, a one-pot unit I bought a month ago. I try not to let the last half inch of coffee get crisp, but sometimes there’s the press of business.

  I spent the morning on reader mail and ad sales, walked to Lofton Street for a sandwich, came home, and called Barney to plan my next visit. The headaches are easing and he’s up to three hours a day at the lab now. Pearl is helping out there this summer.

  When I hung up I went outside, picked up the hose, and hung beads
of water in the flower bed. The enthusiasm is for what happens every day, always the same and different.

  I worked all afternoon and then went back outside for a few minutes. There’s a time of day when every house on the street is split by the same diagonal into sun and shade, and I try not to miss that.

  I went back in, and then I heard my friends outside. Steve is still in Chicago, but everyone else is around. Scott and his wife, Melanie, came first, and then Jeff, who sank into the living room couch and said, “It’s my ankles, hon. I don’t know how I go on.”

  “You’re a martyr, hon,” Scott said. “I swear to God you are.”

  This is a thing called Tired Ladies on the Bus. No one remembers how it started. “At the end of the day, you can say you moved things along,” I said.

  “That’s all you can ask for, hon,” Melanie said.

  We walked to the Cuban place on Stovall, which used to be the Thai place, and for a while a Mongolian barbecue. Dina and her husband were holding the table. Jillian and Jack wanted to come but couldn’t get a sitter for Emmylou.

  It was strange at first, seeing everyone’s grownup faces, but I’m used to it now, and it’s the old photo collages at Jillian and Jack’s house that stop me. I didn’t expect to live here again. The enthusiasm is for switchbacks as a means of transportation.

  Patti and Megan got there last, and said they were paying because they’d gotten an order. They make a line of ladies’ activewear, with passivewear on the way. The clothes are sold in more than four stores nationwide. The T-shirts are blank.

  After dinner we all walked together as far as Lofton, where Patti and I split off to go home, stopping on Meader to buy the paper. These days I follow the news. There are days when the days seem numbered. The enthusiasm is for what we can do with what’s left. Meet me under the big clock.

  acknowledgments

  Thanks to my spectacular editors, Peggy Hageman and Marjorie Braman, along with Amy Baker, Erica Barmash, Kolt Beringer, Robin Bilardello, Jenna Dolan, Jennifer Hart, Carrie Kania, Cal Morgan, and everyone at HarperCollins.

  And to my cool, crusading agent, Chris Calhoun, plus Dong-Won Song and everyone at Sterling Lord.

  Sam Douglas made great editorial contributions, for which I’m forever indebted. Bob Roe was unstinting with both literary insight and moral example. Nancy Hass, Jon Carroll, Tracy Johnston, Tom Moran, Denny Abrams, Joshua Baer, and B. K. Moran gave and gave.

  And: Jim Barringer and Noël Lawrence, Lisa Brenneis and Jim Churchill, Sam Brown and Alison Teal, Greg Calegari, Kent Carroll, the Honorable Dean H. Chamberlain, Stuart Cornfeld, Joe Dante, De Lauer’s Super Newsstand, Christine Doudna and Rick Grand-Jean, Sean Elder, John Field, Mike Finnell, Mel Fiske, Danny and Hilary Goldstine, all of life’s Haases and Joneses, William Hood, James D. Houston, Tim Hunter, Issues, Jonathan Kaplan, Bob and Maggie Klein, Wendy Lesser and Richard Rizzo, Peter Lynn and everyone at Spring Break Buggy Blast, Anwyl McDonald and Meredith Tromble, Marlene and Rick Millikan, Marcia Millman, the Nits, David and Janet Peoples, Luigi Pinotti, Colin Portnuff, A. Roger Pothus, Frank Ratliff, Frank and Mary Robertson, Andy Romanoff and Darcy Vebber, Jane Sindell, Martin Spencer, Michael Tashker, Richie White, Carter Wilson, Renee Witt, and Alison Yerxa.

  My brother, Ken Haas, inspired me all his life and still does.

  About the Author

  CHARLIE HAAS’s writing has appeared in Esquire, New West, The Threepenny Review, and Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing, among many other journals. His screenwriting credits include Over the Edge, Gremlins 2, and Matinee. He lives in Oakland with his wife, the writer and editor B. K. Moran.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Credits

  Cover design by Robin Bilardllo

  Cover photograph by Allison Michael Orenstein/ Getty Images

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  THE ENTHUSIAST. Copyright © 2009 by Charlie Haas. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition May 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-187970-8

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