Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (17 page)

“Oh, the seesaw never stops, I learned that when Jacob was killed-but then again I was gladder to find this bar than any customer you’ve ever had.”

“Then what … I mean, why uh …?”

“Why am I hurting? Hear me, Mike: there is nothing like extended life to make you aware that you’re going to die someday. I am more aware of my own mortality than any of you could possibly be. Damn it, I’ve been dying for two hundred years!

“And how do you, how do normal people come to terms with that awareness of mortality? How do you beat death?”

“Oh lord,” the Doc gasped. “I remember now. That toast …”

“Yes.” Rachel nodded. “The one that gave me the weeps, for the first time in twenty years. ‘To Motherhood.’ I don’t want to see or hear or say anything about motherhood ever again! A man or woman who’s afraid of dying will either decide to believe in an afterlife … or have children, so that something of himself or herself will live on. I haven’t believed in God since my years with Benjamin-and all my babies died childless and I can’t have any more! I had nineteen chances at real immortality, and they all came up craps. I’m the last of my line.

“So what will I leave behind me? I haven’t the gift to leave great books or paintings or music; I can’t build anything; I have no eternal thoughts to leave the world. I’ve been alive longer than anyone on Earth-and when I’m gone I’ll leave nothing; nothing more durable than your memories of me.”

Her voice had begun to rise shrilly; her hands danced in her lap. “For awhile I had hope, for those of my children who shared my birthmark-an hourglass on its side, high on the left shoulderblade-seemed to have a genetic share in my longevity. But that damned birthmark is a curse, an unbeatable hex. Not one of the, marked children had any interest at all in siring or bearing children of their own, and accident or illness cut them down, every one. If even one of them had left a child, I could die happy. But the curse is unbroken,” she slammed her fist down on the bar. “When I go I’ll be gone, solid gone without a trace. Centuries of living, and no heritage more durable than a footprint in the snow!”

She was crying again, her voice strident and anguished, contorted with pain. I could see Eddie, his own face twisting with strong emotion, trying to break in; but now that he wanted to talk she wouldn’t let him.

“So what have you got to offer me, boys? What’s your solution? Have you got anything more useful than four fingers of bourbon?” She got up and flung her empty glass at the fireplace, began grabbing glasses off the bar and throwing them too, grunting with effort, still speaking: “What kind of … answers have you … got for an … old old lady who’s … trapped in a moving … box sliding … downhill to …” She had run out of glasses, and with the last words she gripped the longlegged armchair she’d been sitting on and heaved it high over her head to throw it too into the fire, and as she stood there with the heavy chair held high her face changed, a ook of enormous puzzlement smoothing over the hysterical rage.

” . death?” she finished softly, and crumpled like a rag doll, the chair bouncing and clattering into a corner.

The Doc was fast, and ten feet closer, but Fast Eddie beat him easily. He slid the last yard on his knees, lifted Rachel’s head with great tenderness onto his lap, and hollered, “Rachel, lissen to me!” The Doc tried to take her away from him, and Eddie backhanded him off his feet without looking up. “Lissen to me Rachel, LISSEN goddamn it!” he thundered.

Her eyes fluttered open. “Yes, Eddie.”

“Ya can’t die, Rachel, not yet. You go and die on me an’ I’ll break both your arms, I swear to God. Lissen here,_ if you want a daughter I can fix it.”

She smiled, a faint and bitter smile. “Thanks, Eddie, but adoption just isn’t the same.”

“I ain’t talkin’ about adoption,” he barked. “But I tell ya I can fix it. Ida-spoke up sooner, but you said you didn’t ever want to think about kids again. Now will ya lissen, or are you too busy dyin’?”

She was teetering on the edge, but I guess curiosity must be a powerful stimulant. “What … what do you mean?”

“I’m sterile too, damn it. My wife divorced me for it.” Our eyes widened a little more at this revelation, and I was suddenly ashamednof how little I knew about Eddie. “But I kept my ears open an’ I found out how to beat it, how to leave somethin’ behind, see? Did you ever hear of cloning?”

She looked startled. “You can’t clone people, Eddie.”

“Not today, you can’t. Maybe you an’ I won’t live to see it happen, either. But I can take ya inta Manhattan to a place where they’ll freeze a slice o’ yer skin, a lousy coupla million cells, an’ keep ‘em on ice ‘til they can clone people. Tom Flannery’s there now, frozen like a popsicle, waitin’ for ‘em to invent a cure for leukemia; he tol’ me about it.”

I gasped in astonishment; saw Callahan beginning a broad grin.

“So how ‘bout it, Rachel?” Eddie snapped. “You want cryonics? Or d’ya just wanna cry?”

She stared at Eddie for a long moment, focusing about five feet past him, and nobody dared exhale. And then two centuries of fighting spirit came through, and she smiled, a genuine smile of acceptance and peace.

“Thank you, Eddie,” she breathed. Her eyes became for one timeless instant the eyes of a young girl, the eyes that belonged on that youthful face; and then they closed, and she began to snore softly. Rachel, who mourned for her lost children, and was comforted.

Doc Webster got up off the floor, checked her pulse, and slapped Eddie on the back. “Always a pleasure, herr doktor, to assist you in the technique which bears your name,” he said jovially, spitting out a tooth. “Your medicine is stronger than mine.”

Eddie met his gaze a little awkwardly, started to pick up Rachel’s sleeping form, and then paused. “Gimme a hand, will ya, Doc?”

“Sure thing, buddy. We’ll take her over to Smithtown General for observation, but I think she’ll be OK.” Together they lifted her gently and headed for the door.

But Eddie stopped when they reached it and turned toward Callahan, staring at the floor. “Mike,” he began. “I … Uh … what I mean …” The apology just wouldn’t come.

Callahan laughed aloud for the sheer joy of it and pegged the stump of his cigar into the fireplace. “You guys,” he said, shaking his head. “Always cloning around.”

Unnatural Causes

There’s been a lot of noise in the papers lately about the series of seismic shocks that have been recorded over the last few weeks in the unlikeliest places. Quake-predicting is a young art, from what I hear, and an occasional freak disturbance now and again should be no real cause for alarm-but an unpredicted miniquake every day for two or three weeks, spotted all around the globe, culminating in a blockbuster where a quake had no right to be, is bound to cause talk.

The seismologists confess themselves baffled. Some note that none of the quakes took place in a densely populated area, and are somewhat reassured. Some note the uniquely powerful though strictly local intensity of the blasts, and are perturbed. Some note the utter inability of their science to explain the quakes even after the fact, and fear that the end of the world is at hand.

But me-well, from here at the site of the first quake in the series, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, U.S.A., I’ve got me a different idea.

If you’ve been paying attention so far, you probably know what a circus Callahan’s Place can be on an ordinary night. Well I’m here to tell you that on holidays like Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it becomes something to stagger the imagination. All the stops are pulled out, insanity reigns supreme, and the joint generally resembles a cross between a Shriner’s Convention and an asylum run by the Marx Brothers.

So perhaps it wasn’t surprising that the first quake in the series struck damn near Callahan’s Place on Halloween Eve. It certainly couldn’t have happened the way it did on any other night.

The place was more packed than even I had ever seen it before, and I’ve been hanging out at Callahan’s for quite a few years now. Added to the usual list of regulars and semi-regulars were a host of old-timers and ex-regulars, some of whom I knew only by reputation and some not at all. As I think I already told you, a lot of Callahan’s customers stop needing to drink after they’ve been around long enough, and not many people in this crazy age enjoy judicious doses of ethanol for its own sake. So they stop showing up, or become more involved with their families, or simply move elsewhere-but holidays somehow draw them all back like chickens to the roost come sundown.

So by nine o’clock Callahan had already had to sweep the shattered glasses out of the fireplace to make way for incoming shipments, leaving Tom Hauptman to cover the bar, and more people were coming in all the time.

Nearly everyone had come in costume, lending a surreal air to a bar that’s never been-what you’d call mundane. There were four guys in gorilla suts playing poker in the corner, five or six sheeted ghosts doing a shuffle-off-to-Buffalo through the press of the crowd, and seventeen assorted bug-eyed monsters and little green men scattered here and there. I was profoundly glad to see that Eddie had finished his mourning and put away his grief; he had showed up in black-face and the most disheveled suit I’d ever seen, announcing, “I’m Scott Joplin-lookit my rags.” Doc Webster had dressed up as Hippocrates and was instantly dubbed “Hippo-Crates” (having been forced to use a tarpaulin for a toga); LongDrink McGonnigle appeared in an ancient frock-coat with a quill pen in the breast pocket, introducing himself as “Balzac-Balz to you;” Noah Gonzalez and Tommy Janssen had teamed up as a horse with a head at both ends because neither of them wanted to be the … aw, you get the idea. Callahan himself was dressed up as a grizzly bear, which suited his huge Irish bulk well, but he kept wincing when jostled, explaining to anyone foolish enough to listen that he was “a b’ar tender.” Me, I was dressed as a pirate with a black eye-patch and the name of a certain oil company painted across my chest.

I was watching the tumult and enjoying myself hugely, trying to guess the identity of friends through their masks, when I spotted one very familiar face unmasked.

It was Mickey Finn.

I hadn’t seen Finn for quite a spell, since he moved up to the Gaspe Peninsula in Canada to do some farming, and I was delighted to see that he’d made the reunion.

“Finn!” I hollered over the merry roar. “This way.”

Another human might not have heard me, but Finn looked up right away, smiled across the room at me, and started working his way toward the bar.

There’s some machine in Finn, the way he tells it, but I think there’s a lot of human in him too. He could easily have put a hand through the wall, but he was extremely careful not to discommode anyone on his way to the bar. I looked him over as he approached, noted his work shirt, sturdy coveralls and worn boots, and decided he was making a fair adjustment to his life of exile as a Terran. Wrinkles on either side of his smile said that it was no longer such an alien expression to him as it had once been.

He reached me at last, shook my hand gravely and accepted a glass of rye from Tom Hauptman. He offered Tom the traditional one-dollar bill.

“No thanks, Mr. Finn,” Tom told him. “Mike says your money’s no good here.”

Finn smiled some more, kept the bill extended. “Thank you, sir,” he said in that funny accent of his, “but I truly prefer to pay my own way.”

I shook my head. “If you’re gonna be human, Finn, you’re gonna have to learn to accept gifts,” I told him.

He sobered up and put away his money, nodding to himself as much as to me. “Yes. This is a hard learning, my friend. I must not refuse a gift from Mr. Callahan, who gave me the greatest gift-my free will.”

“Hey, Finn, don’t take it so hard,” I said quickly. “Accepting a gift graciously is something a lot of humans never learn. Why should you be more human than Spiro Agnew?” I leaned back against the bar and took a sip of Bushmill’s. “Come on, loosen up. You’re among friends.”

Finn looked around, his shoulders relaxing. “Some of these are unfamiliar to me,” he said, gesturing toward the crowd.

“Lot’s of ‘em are strangers to me too,” I said. “Let’s amble around and get to know some of ‘em. But first, tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself. How’s life in Canada?”

“I am doing well,” Finn said, “and I am also doing good, I think.”

“How do you mean?”

“Jake my friend,” Finn said earnestly, “the Gaspe is one of the biggest paradoxes on this continent: some of the richest farmland, and some of the poorest farmers. In addition to making my own living, I have been trying to help them.”

“How do you do that?” I asked, interested.

“In small ways,” Finn replied. “I see further into the infrared than their eyes can see; I can evaluate soil at a glance and compute yield, evaluate their growing crops much better than they, suggest what to plan for. That taught them to listen to my opinions, and of late I have been speaking of the necessity for alternate means of distributing their goods. It goes slowly-but one day those frozen acres will feed many hungry people, I hope.”

“Why, that’s just fine, Finn,” I said, slapping him on the back. “I knew there was work for a man like you. Come on, let’s meet some of the old-timers.” Finn, being as tight with his words as some gents are with their money, nodded briefly and we plunged into the thick of the crowd.

I spotted four tables pushed together near the fireplace, at which were seated the Doc, Sam Thayer, and a whole bunch of apparent strangers in assorted odd costumes. Best of all, Callahan was standing nearby-it seemed like a great place to start. I steered Finn in that direction, collecting a couple of chairs on the way and signalling Callahan to join us. When he saw Finn his face lit with pleasure, and he nodded.

As we sat down, one of the unfamiliar gents, dressed as a shepherd, was just finishing a plaintive rendition of “I Know I’ll Never Find Another Ewe,” and was applauded by a chorus of groans and catcalls.

“Better take it on the lamb, Tony,” Doc Webster suggested.

“Where there’s a wool, Thayer’s away,” agreed Sam, rising as if to leave. One of the boys removed his chair with a thoughtful expression, and he sat back down rather farther than he had intended. Callahan lumbered up and appropriated the chair, the head of his bear-costume under his arm, and Sam promptly sat on Bill Gerrity’s lap. This is funnier than it sounds, because Bill is a transvestite and was done up as Marilyn Monroe that particular night (while Callahan’s is certainly not the only bar where Bill can indulge his peculiarity, it’s the only one where he doesn’t have to put up with the annoyance of being propositioned regularly-and Bill is not gay). As Sam was dressed as Mortimer Snerd, the effect was spectacular, and those around the room not otherwise occupied cheered and whistled. One of the gorillas in the corner looked up from his cards and scowled.