The Enthusiast

by Charlie Haas

  I called his cell back and got voice mail. “Barney?” I said. “It’s Henry. Don’t do that climb. Call me back, okay?”

  I heard someone yell, “I said put it down!” realized it was Dane Fredericks, hurried back to the table, and pushed my way through a knot of spectators. Kris was holding Craig’s Jeep, waving it around as he examined it. “Why?” he said. “I’m appreciating the different insignias on it.”

  Dane, bright red, pointed his finger an inch from Kris’s face. “Put it down, asshole. You don’t even deserve to be touching something as good as that.” Kris smirked and put Craig’s Jeep on the table.

  “We have to go,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Dane said. “Thanks a whole lot, Henry.”

  I said, “Not now, Dane.”

  “Oh, sorry.” He turned to Craig. “Anybody got working steam engines?”

  Craig hesitated and then said, “Yeah, Harry’s showing one.” Dane went behind the table and opened his model case.

  I headed for the exit with Kris and Strother following me, and called Deirdre as I walked. “Is Barney there?” I said.

  “No. He’s at a conference in Idaho.”

  “Do you know where he’s staying there? I just had a question.”

  “It’s the Westin something.”

  I got the number from her, tried it, and left him another message. Strother called shotgun. As I drove onto the freeway I called Information and got connected to Ice Climbing. No one I knew still worked there. I asked the woman who answered the phone where Haystack Peak was.

  “Idaho,” she said. “Caribou National Forest.”

  I called 411 again and got through to park headquarters. “I want to report someone trying to climb Haystack Peak,” I said.

  “I’m concerned about his safety.”

  “Okay, sir,” the ranger said. “Is he in distress? Has he contacted you that he’s in distress?”

  “No. I just don’t think he knows what he’s doing.”

  “Does he have appropriate gear?”

  “Yes. I think so.”

  “We can’t tell him not to go up. That’s not in our purview.”

  “Can you go by and see if he’s okay?”

  “I can mention it to the next ranger going out in that area, yes.” I thanked him and rang off.

  Kris said, “Patti’s husband is like a guardian angel of some kind.” I glared at him in the rearview mirror, heard Strother yell, “Look out!” and saw a Presto Rooter van cut in front of me. I hit the brakes, fishtailed for an epic second, barely missed the van, careened onto the shoulder, and stopped. Strother, ashen, said, “Should I drive?”

  “No,” I said. “I just need you guys to shut up.”

  “Patti’s husband, come on,” Kris said. “Didn’t you like it when that guy was friends with his friends again? I loved that part.”

  “I’m going to drop you down there and someone named Cici is taking you home,” I said.

  “I’m gonna skate some great shit today,” Kris said. “I can feel it.”

  In the lot next to the skateboard store in Pacifica were a few hundred waiting kids, a two-story ramp, and a Swag Van from the heavy metal radio station with the grow-light sponsors. I decided to call Patti from a pay phone so my cell wouldn’t be busy if Barney called, and found one in a restaurant over the beach. When she answered I said, “Barney called me. He said he was going ice climbing in Idaho. He—”

  “Who called you?”

  “Barney.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know.”

  “Did he sound upset, or…?”

  “No, he sounded happy. He’s supposed to call me back.”

  “That’s so weird. How did it go with Kris and Strother and the guy?”

  “That was fine,” I said.

  Walking down to the beach, I heard cheers a block away, looked over, and saw Kris Santangelo shoot over the lip of the ramp. He was an arc of pure energy against the sky and so forth. I paced on the sand, trying not to worry about Barney, till it was time to go.

  Dinner was at a modern Italian restaurant at the top of our price range, with Kristin, who designed shirts for Hindenburg; her husband, Jon, a graphic artist who did a lot of regional perishable foods packaging but was trying to get some more challenging things going; their friend Ed, who sold bulk telephony minutes; and his wife, Belinda, who customized RV interiors. I got there last. Patti said, “Did he call?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Patti was just telling us,” Belinda said. “Your brother is mountain climbing?”

  “Ice climbing,” I said. “I think it’s okay.”

  “But he’s never been up before?” Kristin said. “That’s pretty technical if you haven’t done it. It’s like these huge icicles hanging off—”

  “Let’s get you a drink,” Ed said.

  “Ice climbing,” Jon said.

  “Is he an older brother or younger?” Belinda said.

  “I think it’s okay,” I said again. My phone rang. I walked to the bathroom hallway as I answered. “Henry?” The wind noise was still there, but softer.

  “Barney? Where are you?”

  “I just got down. It was amazing.”

  “Where are you now?”

  “I’m going back to the hotel.” A car door closed and the wind cut out.

  “How long are you staying there?”

  “Two more days. Hey, you want to come out here?”

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure.”

  “That’d be great. There’s some other stuff I want to try here. You could do some with me.”

  “But Barney? Why are you doing this?”

  “I know. I know,” he said. “What makes us do this? If you’ve done it, I don’t have to say a word. If you haven’t done it, nothing I can say will explain it to you.”

  On my way back to the table I realized I’d read those sentences somewhere—Motocross X-treme or maybe Bodyboard Shreddin’, someplace where I’d helped compile the codex of the risk monkeys. The world had tilted. I asked Patti to order for me and went back to the hallway to book my plane.

  12

  I landed in Idaho in blowing snow and rented a Forester, the cheapest thing that would stay on the roads. The rental clerk’s directions got me stuck for twenty minutes in a gridlocked business district where you could buy a hundred paintings of snug chalets but no milk. The milk would be in a parallel downtown, where the rental clerks lived and traffic was light.

  Barney’s Westin was six wooden trapezoids wedged into a hillside between ski runs. The conference schedule in the lobby said a panel on blastomere cleavage was just starting. There was security, as Barney had said, a big guy in a suit and earpiece at the door to the Conestoga Room. He let me look inside, but Barney wasn’t there.

  I called his cell. “Great, you’re here,” he said. “I’m at Snow Angel. Come over, okay? I’ve got to suit up.”

  I detoured around the downtown to Snow Angel, a funkier resort whose guests looked like Patti’s snowboarders. I didn’t see Barney on the slopes, and was about to call him again when I saw the luge run.

  It was modeled after the Olympic ones, a wooden trough lined with smooth ice, running down the mountain in a series of sharp banked turns. In the start house at the top a guy in a red neoprene suit and pointed booties lay down on his sled, face up and feet first. He put his gloved hands on the ice, rocked the sled back and forth a few times, and shoved off, pawing the ice twice more for speed and then putting his hands in the sled as gravity took over.

  He hit the first turn hard but shifted his weight, banked through it, and came out level. A crowd of fifty cheered him on, while I braced myself every time he bumped the side of the trough. He straightened out just in time for the steep final straightaway and the braking uphill stretch that ended the run. When he stood up, yelling and shaking off snow, I saw his face. He wasn’t Barney. Barney was carrying his sled into the start house.

  I ran up the hill through the snow, bu
t he was already taking off. We reached the first turn at the same time, so I was only a few feet from him when his troubles began.

  He slammed his sled into the corner of the turn and came out of it on the wall of the run, trying to get the sled’s runners back down. The next turn was worse, putting him so far up the wall that only one runner was on the ice. The crowd was yelling, “Aah, no, God,” and I heard myself shout “Barney!” It looked like he’d either crash in the snow or flip over and be facedown on the ice at sixty miles an hour, but finally he dropped back into the trough, crashed through the rest of the turns, and wobbled into the finish.

  People ran to see if he was okay. The snow on his face was red from his scrapes but he stood up from the sled, high-fived the kid who handed him a towel, and yelled, “Yes!” as if he’d just broken the course record. The crowd laughed and applauded. He took off his gloves, wiped his face, saw me, yelled, “Henry!” came over, and hugged me.

  “Are you okay?” I said.

  “I’m great.” He saw blood on the towel, scooped up some snow, and rubbed it on his face as he started walking toward the parking lot. “That third turn, boy. You should never anticipate. What’d you rent?”

  “A Forester. Barney—”

  “Perfect. Let’s get something to eat.”

  He led me to a bicycle rack by the parking lot and unlocked a mountain bike whose tires were studded with steel bolts for riding on ice. “They rent these in town,” he said. “We can get you one later.”

  There were clothes bungeed to the bike’s rear rack. He opened the car door and stood behind it to change, replacing the luge suit with ski pants, a down parka, lobster gloves, and hiking boots. Then he threw the bike in the back of the Forester and smiled at me. “Sometimes,” he said, “you really need to get away.”

  He had me drive to a restaurant in the milk district, a big room smelling of wet clothes and coffee. We got a booth and Barney ordered the Posthole Digger, which was four eggs, four pancakes, sausage, hash browns, cream gravy, and biscuits. I ordered the Slimmer, which was the same thing with cottage cheese instead of gravy.

  “So,” Barney said, “how’s Patti?”

  “She’s fine.”

  “I bet. Her teams are winning everything.” In place of his usual scrutiny he looked at me affably, like he wasn’t trying to solve anything. It made me nervous.

  “Barney? Could you tell me what’s going on here?”

  “Yeah. Where to start?” he said, and drained his coffee in two sips. “Well. When you moved to Illinois, I was pretty annoyed at you. I don’t know if you remember that.”

  “Of course I remember. I thought you were still annoyed.”

  “No, but I was then.”

  “I wanted to stay at college and help that lawyer—”

  “No,” he said, still cheerful. “By definition, what we do is what we want. We might not like the reasons we want to, we might not do what we wish we wanted to, but if we didn’t want to we wouldn’t do it.

  “Anyway, you remember that time you showed me a copy of Ice Climbing, and I said it seemed like people need a lot of stimulus? I kept thinking about that. I didn’t understand those people and I didn’t understand what you were doing there. I mean, you were obviously attracted to it. The places you were living—we were always so impatient to get out of Rancho Cahuenga, but you were calling me from places that made Rancho Cahuenga look like Renaissance Florence. Silica, Missouri? It’s two speed traps and a Superfund site. I checked.”

  The food came. Barney put his hash browns on top of his pancakes, put a fried egg on top of that, sliced the egg into runny checks, poured maple syrup and gravy over the whole thing, cut a layer-cake wedge of it and started to eat.

  “I wanted to know why you liked it so much,” he said, “because when you were growing up, and you didn’t know what you wanted to do? I was always watching you and thinking, ‘I want something really good to come get him.’” Just like that, I had two hot tears behind my eyelids.

  “So I went to this bookstore in Lawrence where they have hundreds of magazines,” Barney said. “A wall of them. It made me dizzy at first. Quilting. Souping up cars. All these areas where people are keeping up with the literature every month.” He was putting the Posthole Digger away fast, though he was as thin as he’d been in Kansas.

  “After a while I was spending a lot of time in that bookstore. I would lie to Deirdre about where I was, because I didn’t think it would make sense to her. That was scary, initially, the lying. I felt like one of these guys who sleep with their students. But I would make up an errand, and it was shocking how easy it was. The steering’s pulling to the left, Tagaki wants to show me some gene expressions, pretty much anything and you’re out the door. I think those guys might enjoy that as much as the sex. Or not, you know. Put that aside.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were reading them?” I said.

  “I am telling you. Was there a deadline?” He shrugged, still smiling. “I was reading an issue of Ultra Running. I kept following it after you worked there. They had these pictures of people doing hundred-mile foot races in the desert, with those close-ups of the heat rash and the scorpion bites, and I said, ‘What’s going on with these people? No one’s making them do this.’” He mopped up gravy with a pancake. “They’re conditioning themselves as harshly as anything since foot-binding, and they’re putting themselves in situations that the conditioning might get them out of but it might not. It’s uncertain. And the uncertainty seems to be part of what they’re doing it for.”

  He finished his food and looked at mine. I pushed it over to him. “I had this conference coming up in Santa Fe, on new nuclear-transfer technologies, and I’d seen something in Ultra Running about an all-night event in New Mexico where the racers were weeping and seeing Indian spirits and so on. I’d been going to the field house, but that was stuff like Pilates for Busy People, which is designed to let you go back to work without taking a shower. Whereas sweat is a factor in this, right? Just like pain is a factor. Elevated pulse. Endorphins. All factors.

  “So I stepped it up. I got out there on the farm roads. Again, I didn’t tell Deirdre. But after a while I was gliding. You remember when we rode our bikes on Transformer Way right after they paved it? That’s what it was like, but without the bicycle.

  “So the first night of the conference, I snuck off to the desert and ran all night. By the time the sun came up I was an Indian hunter, you know, ‘I’m a shadow flying over the rocks. Something just thought it saw me, but then it looked again and I was gone.’ I went back to the hotel and ran into some guys from the conference. I told them I’d been jogging around in the parking lot for half an hour. They said, ‘Good for you, I should really do that.’

  “The next conference, ovasomagenesis in Delaware, I rented roller skis. I’d never been skiing before. They told me to go to some park where I could fool around without getting hurt, but I drove six miles up a mountain road instead. I start skiing down this narrow, winding road; the descents are like ten degrees, and there’s a sheer drop with no guardrail.

  “It was so fast, Henry. And so cold. I was using ninety-eight percent of my brain to steer, and all that was left was the lizard brain, so I was thinking ‘Cold too cold why cold cold?’ you know? There certainly wasn’t room to think about the things I was dealing with at home. Which there were a lot of.”

  “I had a sense,” I said.

  “So now I knew what the attraction was. But then a car comes around a curve. I’m an inch from their mirror and an inch from the side of the road, and then I’m off the road, I can feel the pebbles under my wheels, and just past the pebbles is the drop, it’s like fifty feet. I’m correcting my course about five times a second.

  “When I made it down I thought, ‘Okay, that was stupid. Never again.’ Then I started walking back up to my car, and within ten minutes I knew I was going to do it again. I was going to do it all day.”

  “Barney—”

  “So you and the
groups you’ve worked with over the years, you’ve really done something for people,” he said. “For me, definitely.”

  “It sounds great,” I said. I was suddenly starring in the life of the guy who’d always starred in mine. I had no idea how that might play out. “I’m just concerned about the safety part.”

  His face clouded for the first time. “You’re not going to tell Deirdre, are you? She thinks I’m weighing my food here.”

  “No. I’m just concerned.”

  He nodded. “The uncertainty. But you know what, Henry? The uncertainty’s always there anyway. It’s been there all along. I just wasn’t using it before. It’s like having this wonderful saxophone that you never play.”

  When we got back to the Westin, the panel discussion had ended and scientists were milling in the lobby. On our way to the elevator, people came up to Barney to ask him questions or compliment him on papers he’d written. Upstairs he changed into his bike clothes, an old-school woollen jersey with block letters saying IL GRANDE CICLISMO, tights with a chamois crotch liner, cleated shoes, and fingerless gloves. I stuck with my jeans and sweater.

  The bike store was in the chalet-painting district, and it took us fifteen minutes to park. I rented a bike with studded tires like Barney’s and signed a waiver that absolved the store of ever having gone into business.

  As we rode out of town Barney sought out the ugliest patches of black ice to ride over, showing me how the bolts on the tires kept us upright. It was fun, although the seam of my jeans was already shredding my perineum.

  After half an hour we turned onto a dirt fire road that climbed for two miles to a tree-lined ridge. I was in no shape to ride uphill, and Barney pulled away from the start. The studded tires broke the thin ice that covered the mud, which sucked my wheels to a crawl. I stood up on the pedals, rocking the bike sloppily and gasping for air that was too cold to breathe. Barney kept turning and smiling at me from farther and farther away.