We do two dozen more houses and Charles signs up two more people, leaves leaflets at the rest, smiling the whole time. Bill stays behind with the ones that were cooperative and gets them to sign a release form, then races to catch us up again.
“You think you can do a door on your own now, or do you want me to stand there with you?” Charles asks.
“I can do it,” I tell him.
“Great. We’ll try down this street, might be a little trickier. I’ll do this side, you the other, meet at the end, ok?”
I nod. It’s a side street, Toyotas and Hondas, rather than BMWs and Volvos, but it still looks ok. Mock Tudor houses, some with gardens, picket fences.
My first house, I ring the doorbell.
No one home, I write “N/H” on the clipboard.
I walk down the path of the second house, knock the door.
“Coming,” someone says.
The door opens, and it’s an elderly man in his seventies. Pale, white, wearing a dressing gown, smoking a cigarette.
“Hi, I’m from the Campaign for the American Wilderness and we’re in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save the ancient forests…. Er, is this an issue that concerns you at, er, all?”
“The what?” the man says.
“The CAW, we’re an environmental org—”
“Nope,” the man says, and closes the door in my face. I hear him muttering as he walks back down the hall.
I write a zero beside his door number.
Next house. One-floor bungalow, painted a kind of frostbite blue. Creepy-looking dolls in the window. In this house there’s a screen door and a porch. I open the screen door, it shuts behind me, trapping me between the two doors in the tiny porch. It’s filled with potted plants and an enamel plaque of a fat man drinking beer that says on it “Bavaria the Beautiful.”
A black woman comes to the door. Early fifties.
“Hi, I’m in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to preserve the ancient forests of—”
“Wait a minute,” she says, “I’ll get my husband.”
She goes off and calls into the back room. She returns to the front room and closes the door. Meanwhile, the kitchen door opens and a man wearing dungarees comes down the hall. There is oil all over his hands, and he’s sweating. His eyes are opaque gray and dead tired.
“Whadda ya want?” he asks suspiciously.
“Hi, I’m from the, uh, Campaign for the, uh, Wilderness, we’re in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save the forests.”
“Yeah?” he says, and I show him the literature on the clipboard. The pictures of the trees before and after deforestation. The quotes from logging company executives and politicians. The list of endangered species in the Amazon.
“What are you selling?” he asks gruffly.
“Nothing. I, er, I’m campaigning to save the trees, the old growth forests. There’s only—”
“Do I have to pay anything?”
“No, not really. It’s a—”
“Ok, where do I sign?”
I give him the clipboard and he takes a pen out of his lapel pocket and signs the sheet next to his door number. He gets oil all over the acetate cover.
“Ok?” he says.
“Yes, and if, er, you’d like to, um, make a donation?” I say to him, with a great deal of embarrassment.
“No, don’t think so.”
“Ok, well, thanks again.”
“My pleasure, glad to help.”
I turn and walk down the path. He closes the screen door behind me.
Shit, I say to myself, and mark zero on my sheet. I walk to the next house. I ring the bell and no one answers and I write down “N/H.”
No answer in the next four houses and in the fifth house an Asian girl comes to the door, wearing a Girl Scout uniform.
“Are your parents in?”
“Not allowed to talk to strangers,” she says bravely, and shuts the door.
I turn and walk back down the path. Smart kid, I say to myself.
Next house, no one home. Next house, no dice. Next house, old white guy in a crumpled suit, standing behind a patched screen door.
“Rain, finally, cool us down,” he says.
“Yeah, listen, I’m in your neighborhood tonight campaigning to save—”
“Blue steel.44,” he says. “Used to have that.”
“What?”
“You know what gun I got now?”
“No.”
“A Walther PPK,” he says, his eyes narrowing.
“Really?” I say.
“Uh-huh. Never be too careful opening the door to strangers,” he says.
I look down and I notice, sure enough, that he’s holding a firearm in his left hand, bouncing it there on his hip.
“You know who has that gun?” he asks.
“Uh, no. No, I don’t.”
“James Bond. That’s James Bond’s gun,” he says, and gives me an off-putting smile.
“Well, that’s terrific, thank you very much, I’ll have to go,” I say.
“What do you want, boy?”
“I just wanted to leave you a leaflet, here you are.”
“Are you Scottish?”
“Irish, Irish. Well, look, thanks very much.”
“Irish, Scottish, isn’t it all the same thing?” he says.
“No, no, quite different. Well, thanks anyway, have a good night,” I say hastily, and back down the path.
When I meet up with Charles at the end of the street, I have signed up no one. I don’t tell him about the man with the gun in case he thinks I’m hysterical. But I take twenty bucks of my own money and pretend that I got two donations of ten bucks each.
“That’s pretty good, Alex, that was a more difficult street, tough test. Look, we’ll do a few more houses together and meet up with the others, ok?”
“Where’s the film crew?” I ask him.
“Oh, they ran out of light, but I think they got enough for tonight,” Charles says.
He doesn’t elaborate about who they were or what they were doing, so I let the matter drop.
Charles takes us back down to a more affluent street and I wonder if this was all a deliberate ploy to blood me on a lot of rejections to see if I got downhearted.
Sure enough, back in the richer street we get three more memberships and even a life membership.
The rain has eased and when we pick up the others, everyone is excited and happy. They’ve had a good night and a third of the money they raised will be going to them. We drive back to the city, everyone talking, laughing. We stop for pizza in a grungy-looking place on a slip road close to the highway.
We scrunch together several tables. The lights flicker. The pizza bakes.
Charles is in high spirits. He talks and, eventually, the attention turns to me, as the new boy.
“Alexander, what would you be doing right now in Ireland?” Charles asks.
“Well, it’s five a.m. there, so I’d probably be sleeping,” I say.
“No, no, no, that’s not what I mean, what do you do over there, at night, for fun, are there pizza places like here?”
“Uh, not that many and they’re expensive, pizza is more of a restaurant thing,” I say, a bit disconcerted to be the center of attention.
“So what would you do?” Charles asks.
“Go to the pub, I suppose,” I say.
“Are the pubs really full of musicians and music and stuff?” Amber asks.
“Some of them, but most aren’t, they—”
“I was in this pub in Dublin and it took forever for my pint of Guinness to come, I thought they’d forgotten about me,” Charles says. “They were so slow.”
“It’s supposed to be slow, Guinness has to be poured very slowly,” I explain.
“Well, it was slow, and the smoke in those places, terrible, I felt sorry for the bar staff, really awful,” Charles says.