Searching for Caleb by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online

four days a week and then three; and next came the bourbon, the solitaire, the silence in which to reflect upon the bars of his cage.
       Next another venture. He was his own perpetual motion machine.
       Sometimes he worried about Justine. He didn't want to be the way he was, uprooting her yearly or even more often, switching Meg to still another school. He knew how the neighbors shook their heads over him. Yet it seemed he suffered from some sort of chronic dissatisfaction which came and went like malaria, and the only way to hold it back was to learn more and more new facts, as if continually surprising his mind. Now peculiar scraps of knowledge were stuck to him like lint from all his jobs. He knew a Toggenburg goat from a Saanen, he could measure a dachshund, by sight alone, for a plaid mackintosh with matching Sherlock Holmes-style hat. He was an authority on the making of yogurt and the application of poisons to broad-leafed weeds during dandelion season. He had also discovered that every shop, even the most unlikely, has a circle of daily customers who become its experts-the elderly gentlemen capping each other's list of imported cheeses, the ladies debating on the use of slippery elm bark, the teenagers intoning the life history of every member of every rock band. At the tobacconist's, college boys could spend hours recalling the time a legendary freshman had found a fully aged and yellowed, hand-carved meerschaum pipe sitting on the top of someone's garbage can. Perched on his stool behind the counter, gloating over the drawings for his pedal-driven flying machine, Duncan absorbed this stray knowledge like sunlight. Never mind that it was useless. And now he was about to find something else to learn, here among these ancient navigating devices and cracked foggy lanterns and ropes of amber beads like half-sucked butter rum balls.
       "This is potassium lactate," said Silas, tapping a brown bottle on the telephone table. "We use it to replace the acids in the covers of old leather books."
       And he looked surprised at the sudden light that flashed across Duncan's face.
       "Now this pad I always keep handy, and the pencil chained. People will call with items to sell, you want to get their addresses. Here, by the way, is a message for you."
       He ripped it off the pad. Habit-Forming Entertainments called, come to lunch first Sun. in Feb.
       "What?" said Duncan.
       "He said you would know him. He phoned four times in the last two days.
       He said if you couldn't make it call back, he's still listed as Exotico."
       "Ah," said Duncan, and pocketed the slip. Silas waited but Duncan didn't explain.
       "Well, then," Silas said finally, "if you can't think of any questions-but I'll be by, I'll drop by often, of course."
       "Of course," said Duncan, and he sighed, but Silas was groaning back down the steps by now and didn't hear him.
       Habit-Forming Entertainments, which had been Exotico, Inc., last year and Alonzo's Amazing Amusements the year before that, was located in a cow pasture on the outskirts of Parvis, Maryland. It was a carnival company, of sorts-the kind that is called a forty-miler, although in this case the circuit was considerably wider. It traveled from one tiny town to another, supplying the entertainment for firehouse fairs, church and school bazaars, homecoming celebrations, and the gala openings of new shopping malls. In between trips the entire company lived in trailers in the cow pasture, with a pumpkin-colored tent flying pennants in the middle. They worked year round. Even in the dead of winter, Habit-Forming Entertainments would come trundling across the frostbitten Maryland countryside to whoever asked for them. They brought mechanical rides, two ponies, a concession stand, a few simple games of chance whenever local law allowed, and five girls to run the games in satin bathing suits with dirty seams. There was also a merry-go-round. It was hard to