Callahan's Secret (19 page)
Ralph Von Wau Wau neither smelled nor-behaved domesticated, and he sounded like Arnold Schwarzenegger in pitch, tone, accent, and confidence; he could move among his savage cousins in relative safety. He had only been forced to fight twice in the five years he had been wintering on Long Island, and had won both fights handily. The fend dogs were cunning, ‘but Ralph was intelligent, and it made all the difference.
Though he was a mutant, Ralph had all the normal urges of any red-blooded son of a bitch, and house pets just didn’t do it for him. Too tame, too boring. His true preference was for women, and he was currently on intimate terms with half a dozen-but three were vacationing to the south with their husbands, two were preparing fmal exams for their students, and one was preparing to run for reelection. Ralph had not gotten laid in several weeks, and his opinion was that the next best thing to an adventurous and sophisticated lady was a wild outlaw bitch. They were less inventive, but more instinctively satisfying-and cross-fertile besides.
He had certain moral rules of his own devising, which might seem exotic to a human. He always fed a bitch, before
and after. If necessary, he protected her to the best of ability. If she got pregnant, he behaved as honorably as a other dog would-and scrutinized the offspring for in cations that his mutation might have bred true-which far it had not. If a hyperintelligent pup had resulted, would have bent every effort to get it the same laryn modification surgery he himself had once had, then tau~ it to talk. But by now he had almost given up hope.
He’d tried moving a few mates in with him, but it nev worked out: they never really had enough in common relate to one another, and it always upset them when typed for hours at a time.
This particular bitch excited him a great deal, for reaso too subtle and subconscious for him to analyze. (Regr~ tably, the Freud of canine psychology has not yet emerged Something about the fur at the back of her neck, somethir about her walk, something about her smell… there wast defining it. She was new to him, puzzled by the contradi tion between what her eyes and nose told her, and what h ears told her, and he found her innocence charming. SI was cooperative, but not slavishly obedient. Her eyes flashe Her scent was… piquant.
So they gave the rest of the pack the slip, and he to her to a warm and sheltered place he knew. There he opem a can of deviled ham-a rather extravagant wooing-gil but one of the annoyingly few meats available in pop-u can format-and waited politely while she wolfed it dow Then they romped a bit, and nuzzled a bit, and present he taught her some things about “foreplay that astonishi her. (The Masters & Johnson of canine physiology have y to emerge as well-but when they do, Ralph Von Wau W will be massively represented in their footnotes.) Short after that, she taught him some things about hindplay.
mentioned, Ralph was a love ‘em andieave ‘em sort fellow, but the summons from Jim and Paul MacDoria came at an extremely unfortunate, uh, juncture, and he w compelled to bring her halfway to Callahan’s with him.
Joe and Susan Maser had sent their wife Susie on ahead to Callahan’s because they wanted to put the finishing touches on the chili they intended to bring fot the New Year’s celebration; the summons came as Joe was stirring up the coals
in the firebox of his woodstove. He dropped the poker and sprinted with Susan for the car, leaving the flie-door open
on the stove. Pulling out of the driveway, he realized what would probably happen, but he didn’t have time to do anything about it. Behind him, the draft whipped the fire to its hottest and sucked all the heat ‘up the chimney… which had not been cleaned recently enough. Since Joe and Susan had also left the front door of the house open, much the same thing eventually happened to the building; by dawn all the Masers would own was the clothes on their backs and the contents of their pockets.
Similarly, Shorty Steinitz left his lovingly restored ‘57 Thunderbird jacked up with one wheel off by. the side of Route 25A and ran the last quarter-mile; he never saw it again. Lady Salty McGee was entertaining a very old and dear friend when the call came; he had never been intended to remain in that position for more than fifteen minutes, but the silken cords were strong, and he could not reach the slipknots. Pyolr left his bottle of breakfast sitting on his kitchen table, and few foods go bad faster or uglier than blood. And Bill Gerrity was caught in ‘the middle of getting dressed: this would have been embarrassing for anyone, but for Bill “half-dressed” for a party meant dark nylons, purple garter belt, black panties and an hour’s worth of makeup (high heels, too, but he ditched them within the first half block); in the three and a half miles he had to jog ~o Callahan’s, he was forced to hospitalize four young toughs who mistook him for a homosexual, two policemen who correctly identified him as an attractive nuisance, and a persistent politician who simply would not get out of the way.
It was not, in short, without cost that the men and women of Callahan’s Place answered the Call, even though nearly all of them were getting ready to go there at the time. But it is a matter of proud record that every single one of them
paid the cost, unhesitatingly. Within an hour, the Place was packed to capacity with all the regulars past and present, with all the people to whom this tavern had ever been home for a time, and nobody had any complaints to make. The MacDonald Brothers had followed up their initial Call with a synopsis of the situation;, everyone arrived with a fair grasp of what was going on.
Josie Bauer was the first to arrive, of course, since it took her literally no time at all; she materialized before the bar, took the shot glass of Irish whiskey that Callahan was holding out for her and set it down on the bartop, plucked the cigar from his lips and kissed him firmly. “You sneaky bastard,” she murmured. “I never guessed. I should have guessed. You must be from much further up the line than my outfit.”
“Not as much as you might think, hon’,” he told her.
She turned to Mary and kissed her, too. “Hang in there, sugar. He’ll be okay.”
The next arrival was Shorty, and he did just what Josie had done. I’d be willing to bet Shorty had never kissed another male in ‘his life before, but he did so with no hesitation or sign of embarrassment. That set the pattern. Every new arrival, and those already present, collected a shot and a kiss from Callahan and his daughter. No one drank; we waited for Mike to propose the toast. All of us were smiling, and all of us were crying, and all of us were touching, and none of us said a word, save for occasional briefly murmured greetings to old friends too seldom seen. No, one had anything pertinent to say, and no one felt the need to mouth off without saying anything; it was enough to be together, to share whatever would come., I saw friends I hadn’t seen in years-Ben, Stan, Don, Mary and Stephen, both Jims, Big Tom, Susan, Betsy, Mark, Chris, Robert and Ginny, Herb and Ricia, Diana, Joe and Gay, Jack, Viny, Railroad George, Ted, Gordy, Dee for Chrissakes, Tony and Susan, Wendy, Bob, Kirby, Eleanor, Charlie and Evelyn, and of course David-and it came to me as the crowd grew and the Place filled up that I could not have asked for a better time or place to die. There was noplace on Earth or off it that I loved as much, nor any people I had ever loved better-no, not even the wife and daughter I’d killed a decade ago by doing my own brake-job with a self-help book-and New Year’s Eve seemed an appropriately backassward date for Judgment Day.
After a, little more than a half hour of murmured greetings, multiple embraces and general warm happiness, Paul MacDonald spoke to Callahan. “Okay, Mike. Everybody who’s going to arrive in time is here now.”
The room became totally quiet, filled with a mood of exuberant desperation. The locker room before the big game.
Backstage waiting for the house lights to go down. The hold of the Huey as the LZ appears in the distance.
We were as ready as we were going to be.
Callahan nodded slowly. “It’s about time,” he rumbled. He trod his cigar underfoot and lit a new one. “It’s all about time.” He poured a shot of Bushniill’s for himself, walked slowly around the bar. “Isn’t it?” The sawdust squealed under his boots. Fast Eddie left the piano and tossed a couple of sticks of dry birch onto the fire; there was a crackle as the bark began to catch, and that fine sharp-sweet smell of burning birch joined the symphony of pleasant smells in the room. Callahan toed the chalk line, faced the rattling hearth. I didn’t mind the tears; they fell too quickly to obscure my vision. He raised his glass, and we all raised ours. The bright lights shattered on all that glass and the room sparkled like a vast crystal.
“To the human race,” Mike Callahan said clearly in that gravelly baritone. “God help us, every one.” He drank off the Bushmill’s in one long, slow draught, smacked his lips and whipped the glass underhand into the fireplace.
“To the human race,” we chorused, and the largest barrage of glasses in the history of Callahan’s Place began.
And when the great shout and cheer had subsided and the last shard of glass skittered to its final resting place, we began to build something.
I perceived it in musical terms, of course: to me what we built was something like a vast symphony orchestra, save that in addition to the usual ordnance of a full orchestra it incorporated saxophones, electric guitani, tin flutes, tablas, trap drums, Yamaha synthesizers, steel drums, vocoders, kazoos, baby rattles, Zal Yanovsky’s Electric’ Gorgle and the Big Jukebox in Close Encounters, included every means the race has ever devised for making music and some that haven’t been invented yet, the whole thing integrated into a vast tapestry of sonic and tonal textures that was indescribable and probably unimaginable-certainly I had never imagined anything like it before that night-and primevally satisfying to what a Buddhist might call my “third ear.”
Imagine that you assembled such a superorchestra in a room. First there is cacophony, as each musician sounds his or her instrument and limbers it up, no individual or group predominating for more than a few seconds. Then one loud true voice takes up and holds a 440 cps A, and gradually everyone tunes to it; for several seconds everyone is playing the same note and it’s like a giant “OM” chant. Then it diverges again, as each player goes into scales or warmup exercises. Imagine then that, seemingly by pure random chance, the vast assemblage of instruments happens to stumble onto a single, stupendous chord, an accidental aural architecture of terrifying beauty, a chord so complex that the most knowledgable musician there cannot name it, yet so elemental that each feels he has always known it in his heart. It holds, swells, falters momentarily as percussive notes fade and lungs empty of breath and bows reach the limit of their traverse, then returns and steadies and fills the room to bursting, each musician thinking, keep playing-yes, try to notice and remember what note you’re playing, but for God’s sake keep playing, ~f we lose this thing we may never find it again and if that happens I believe I may need to die-The thing we built was like that. There was no sound to it, any more than there was substance to it, but it hung
invisibly in the air around us, annihilating the space between us, and to me that’s music. The 440 A that we all tuned to was the voice, the essence,- the nature of Mike Callahan, echoed and amplified by the MacDonalds. But neither he nor they led us to’ that “chord”-we found that ourselves.
Shortly it changed from something as static as the word “chord” implies to something dynamic, as though individual musici~ns, confident now that the chord would not be lost, began to jam around it, to dress it with trills and arpeggios and scraps of melody and rhythmic accents; it changed from a pretty sound to true music, although no human ear could have resolved music like that. It was timeless, like raga, and frantic, like bebop; it swung like Carl Perkins, and it purred like Betty Carter; it was simple like Bach and complex like Ray Charles; it was hot and cool and hip and square and lush and spare-I know no music can be all those things together, but this was. In the back of my mind I could hear Lord Buckley, rest his ticker, talkin’ ‘bout, “My lords and my la4ies, I’m gon’ hip you: you may have heard a lot of jam sessions blowin’ off, you may o’ heard o’ New Orleans flips, you may have heard it Chicago style, you may have heard all kinds o’ jazz jumpin’ the wildest an’ the most insane, you may have heard o’ many musical insane flips, but you studs an’ stallions an’ cats an’ kitties never dug any session-like these cats BLEW!. .
To others present it did not suggest music at all. Shorty Steinitz was a sculptor, to him it was as though all of us struck together simultaneously at a magnificent block of Carrera marble, reducing it in an instant to a perfect and complete statue, which began in that moment of its creation to walk and talk. Susie Maser was a Modern dance choreographer; she felt that we were inventing zero-gravity dance together. Indeed, Long-Drink McGonnigle, who had cherished a perverse interest in entomology ever since Febmary 7, 1964, felt that whatever it was resembled pictures he’d seen of webs woven by spiders in free fall, in Skylab. Doc Webster saw us all as neurons learning to work together, to form “… well, not a brain, not even a small one-but a ganglion, by God!” Toni Hauptmann, the former minister, perceived what we built as a perfect prayer, pleasing to God, who is a tough critic of prayers.
I do not know all this from having compared notes afterward. I knew it then, and everyone there knew and understood the analogy-mode that worked for me just as well as I knew theirs. Just because I perceived it as music didn’t make it music for Fast Eddie: the little piano. man felt that we were setting up and executing a hundred-cushion billiard shot in ultraslow motion and cascading instant-replay. Of course, he appreciated my appreciation of it as music-but no more than did Tom Hauptmann, who is totally tone deaf (or rather, had been until then). Perhaps the most insightful analogy we conceived was that of Joe and Susan and Susie Maser, who saw us all as building a group marriage akin to their own triad.
Or perhaps it came from Noah Gonzalez, who pictured us constructing, entirely by intuition, a cobalt bomb.
