Callahan's Secret (7 page)

“This is not fair,” he roared, and flung his bottle of rye into the fireplace.

SMASH! Cracks appeared in some of the bricks.

There was a general murmur rising in the room now, but Mary’s soft laughter cut right through it, deflating it. I turned, to look at her with new eyes. I resented her for being privy to this intimate matter, for having provoked this hassle, for being cruel to my friend the rotten son of a bitch. Pushy, and nasty, and castrating, and fat…

I transferred to her all my conflict; as I had on the roof, I poured my need into her.

And this time she didn’t accept it. I opened my mouth to say something or other that would end our affair, and

she ignored me, spoke directly and only to Finn.

“Now you’re gotting it,” she said, smiling. “It isn’t fair. Enjoying it, Mick? Have I given you enough, now? Have you got a way to store it digitally and play it back later? Can you put it on a loop and run it continuously or something?”

He blinked at her.

“You marinate in guilt soup for enough years, you suck all the juice right out of it, have to go get some new vegetables to throw into the pot, that’s understandable. But eventually you’ll use up this bag. What’ll we do next-spread the news around, put you on the Phil Donahue Show? Sooner or later, somebody’d figure out a way to kill you, and you know it, too, you big dumb jerk. Can’t you make this last you for a while?”

These were hammer blows she was landing, from a distance of about a foot and a half. I opened my mouth to say something, and suddenly she whirled around to face us. Finn’s got a more efficient speaker than any human, but she certainly had an impressive bellow onto her-we jumped further than we had when he let go.

“Will you clowns stop indulging him now?”

The dust settled, Callahan picked his cigar butt up off the floor and blew sawdust off it, and she cut back to about Force Eight and went on:

“What is the matter with you morons? A mutt comes in here, a guy you claim is your friend, with a sign on his forehead says, ‘Masochist’, and you people get out the whips and chains, is that it? Txffu’s committed the cardinal sin, eh? He doesn’t love humanity: hang him. And Handsome over there, too, and half the people in this bar, probably

what the hell is so special about humanity that not loving it is a sin? Finn said his people loved sentient life: I respect that a lot more, and I’m not at all sure that humanity qualifies, on average-“

(By “Handsome,” she referred to Long-Drink, whose name she didn’t know, and I found time to wonder if Mary was a pervert, too, queer for scrawny men. Long-Drink is even taller and skinnier than me-put him and me and Finn side by side and we look like a pine mountainside…)

“-How about an analogy: will that strain your brains too much? Say you work for a South American real estate developer; he has you go out into the bush and extenninate tribes of monkeys where he wants to build new condominiums. You don’t like the work, you’d rather quit and jungle up, bi~t the boss has thoughtfully planted a booby-trapped transceiver on you. To make matters worse, you’re a diabetic, and he only gives you a limited supply of insulin for each trip. -

“One day you run across a tribe of monkeys clever enough to disable the transceiver. It may even be possible to train them to manufacture insulin. Is it necessary that you love them before you can accept their aid? I could maybe, given time, learn to get attached to three or four individual monkeys, maybe as many as a dozen or so-be amused by them, grow fond of them, even respect them in certain ways. I could see being concerned if I learned that their tribe was locked into some kind of suicidal behavior pattern-really concerned, not just on my own account. But love them? Or their kind in general?

“And should I be ashamed for wanting insulin so that I can live another forty or fifty years-when the monks can only hope for ten or twenty? Oh, you jackasses, I can understand HIM being that dumb, he’s smarter than any of us-but how could you morons be so stupid?”

Many feet were shuffled. She had opened up our friend’s hidden wound… and we had all picked at it. I was belatedly beginning to realize her technique. Sometimes a mocking voice whispers vile things in a man’s ear, things he can’t shut out because he half-believes they’re true. But if you can personify that voice, and get him to fight it, to reject

it.

“He comes from a race so fatheaded noble and’ ethical that-they couldn’t bring themselves to destroy their assassins-perhaps, he says, they made the wrong choice. Naturally he’d feel guilty about exploiting us by trying to keep

us alive, about his inability to love monkeys. All the years he’s been on this planet, none of you noticed any pattern in the kind of professions he’s followed?”

I found that I was speaking. “I figured he picked basic, earthy trades as a way of rootijig himself to this planet. Our primal cultural basics: farming, fishing, watching the forest, contemplating the sea-“

“Solitary, lonely jobs, every one, the way he went about them. Hermit jobs.” She turned to Finn. “You probably find most of us actually repellent, don’t you, Txffu?”

His face was expressionless again. “Candidly, yes.”

“Physically disgusting?”

“Well… deformed, on the average. Your males are all so short… and your females are all so undernourished..

Her ears grew points. “Really?”

“Yes. Among my people, you yourself would be considered-well, not emaciated, but almost unfashionably slender. As it happens I have an unconventional taste for slender women… but most human females your size hate themselves so much it is unpleasant to be near them-“

“Txffu?” she interrupted.

“Yes, Mary?”

“Will you marry me?”

I screwed my eyes so tight I saw neon paisley. Somewhere behind their lids was the switch that would turn my breathing back on, and I had to find it pretty quickly.

Finn was utterly still for five long seconds. “You are not serious.”

“No, thank God, and that’s going to be a break for you in the years to come-but my proposal is dead serious. What’s your answer?”

“But-you-“

“Finn, you’ve been unable to love because you haven’t loved yourself because you haven’t loved us-it’s time somebody got you off the loop. You ninny, of course you didn’t save us out of love! You did it out of compassion. That’s something that’s, underrated, but I think it’s just as good as love-who knows, maybe better. You can love

only your equals-with your superiors or inferiors, compassion is the best you can do, and it’s pretty damned good, at least as high up on the ethical scale. With time, it can lead to love. I speculate that-it could even be the basis of a pretty fair marriage. Do you think?”

“You saw what is in my chest-“

“Yeah, I’m fascinated. Is there an owner’s manual for it?”

“You cannot be s&ious. You do not even know if we are sexually compatible-“

“The hell I don’t. I can see fingers and a tongue from here;- anything else is gravy. And I’ve got something or other that appeals to you; I knew that back up on the roof when I met you.”

That breathing switch had to be around here someplace; just a question of finding it… -

“-we are not cross-fertile-,” Finn tried.

“What of it? Maybe we’ll adopt. Hell, we’ll adopt this whole goddam bar-they need someone to bring ‘em up. Quit stalling: yes or no?”

I think maybe I’d known it all along, sensed it up there on the roof when Finn first flew out of the rainy night. I suppose there are worse ways to say goodbye…

“Yes,” Finn said fmally. “Yes, Mary, I would be honored to marry you. On one condition.” He turned to the rest of us. “All of you, male and female, must agree to be my Best Man.”

A roomful of people looked guiltily to Mary.

She nodded serenely. “Deal.”

A cheer went up that rung the rafters. I even got my lungs going in time to join it. Sure it hurt.

But it felt good, too.

Finn’s face remained blank for another few seconds-and then he remembered to share his joy with us, and hung that expression on himself; I was pleased and proud that he took the trouble.

“Would you two,” Callahan boomed, “do me the honor of gettin’ married here in my joint? Say, over there on the staircase?”

“Where else?” Mick and Mary said together, and another cheer went up, even louder.

It came to me that I might find some use for a bucket of alcohol, so when Callahan began the bucket brigade of free

drinks for the house I hogged three or four. It’s amazing how fast you can throw down booze if you work at it, and so before long I found myself bellying up to the bar.

“Innkeeper,” I said when he reached me, “give me drink.”

He understood my situation-had probably understood from the moment. Mary popped the question. Not much gets past Mike Callahan, and nothing that pertains to the human heart. “Healthy reaction,” he said, nodding judiciously. “I

think you’ll live, Jake.”

“Have you ever hated your best friend’s guts, Mike?”

“Careful, pal: don’t get into the same guilt-loop Finn did. Melodrama is for T.V. Finn’s not your best friend, just a

garden variety pal. And if you feel like hating him for a while, go to it: it’ll pass.”

“You haven’t said much tonight, Mike. How do you feel about all this?”

“Well, the way I look at it, I’m not so much losing a daughter as I am gaining an alien.”

I stared at him, and by the time all the tumblers had fmished clicking into place, he was handing me an oversized mug of Irish coffee.

“Mary is your-“

“Lady Sally and I have always been real proud of her,” he said contentedly, puffing on that miserable stogie.

“Why the hell didn’t she ever come around here before?” I asked. “All these years-“

“Well, she couldn’t, Jake. She lived too far away, and she used to work nights. Until Sal retired. .

You burn your tongue when you drink Irish coffee too fast, so I burned my tongue. So I had another to keep my

tongue numb, and then another, and I started having so much fun that the idea sort of caught on generally, and that’s more or less how Mike and I and about a dozen of our friends eventually ended up naked in the rain on Callahan’s roof, me for the second time that night.

Do you know, from that day to this, rain won’t land on me-or any of us that were there-unless we ask it to?

Pyotr’s Story

TWO TOTAL DRUNKS in a single week is much higher than average for anyone who goes to Callahan’s Place-no pun intended.

Surely there is nothing odd about a man going to a bar in search of oblivion. Understatement of the decade. But Callahan’s Place is what cured me of being a lush, and it’s done the samelor others. Hell, it’s helped keep Tommy Janssen off of heroin for years now. I’ve gotten high there, and once or twice I’ve gotten tight, but it’s been a good many years since I’ve been flat-out, helpless drunk-or yeari~ed to be. A true drunk is a rare sight at Callahan’s. Mike Callahan doesn’t just pour his liquor, he serves it; to get pissed in his Place you must convince him you have a need to, persuade him to take responsibility for you. Most bars, people go to in order to get blind. Mike’s customers go there to see better.

But that night I had a need to completely dismantle my higher faculties, -and he knew that as I crossed the threshold.

Because I was carrying in my arms the ruined body of Lady Macbeth. Her head dangled crazily, her proud neck broken clean through, and a hush fell upon Callahan’s Place as the door closed behind me.

Mike recovered quickly; he always does. He nodded, a nod which meant both hello and something else, and glanced up~and down the bar until he found an untenanted stretch. He pointed to it, I nodded back, and by the time I reached it he had the free lunch and the beer nuts moved out of the way. Not a word was said in the bar-everyone there understood my feelings as well as Callahan did. Do you begin to see how one could stop being an alcoholic there? Someone, I think it was Fast Eddie, made a subvocal sound of empathy as I laid the Lady on the bar-top.

I don’t know just how old she is. I could find out by writing the Gibson people and asking when serial number 427248 was sent out into the world, but somehow I don’t want to. Somewhere in the twenty-to-thirty range, I’d guess, and she can’t be less than fifteen, for I met her in 1966. But she was a treasure even then, and the man I bought her from cheated himself horribly. He was getting married much too quickly and needed folding money in a hurry. All I can say is, I hope he got one hell of a wife-because I sure got one hell of a guitar.

She’s a J-45, red sunburst with a custom neck, and she clearly predates the Great Guitar Boom of the Sixties. She is handmade, not machine-stamped, and she is some forgotten artisan’s masterpiece. The very best, top-of-the-line Gibson made today could not touch her; there are very few guitars you can buy that would. She has been my other voice and the basic tool of my trade for a decade and a half. Now her neck, and my heart, were broken clean through.

Long-Drink McGonnigle was at my side, looking mournfully down past me at the pitiful thing on the bar. He touched one of the sprawled strings. It rattled. Death rattle. “Aw,” he murmured.

Callahan put a triple Bushmill’s in my hand, closed my fingers around it. I made it a double, and then I turned and walked to the chalk line on the floor, faced the merrily crackling fireplace from a distance of twenty feet. People waited respectfully. I drank again while I considered my toast. Then I raised my glass, and everybody followed suit.

“To the Lady,” I said, and drained my glass and threw it at the back of the fireplace, and then I said, “Sorry, folks,” because it’s very difficult to make Mike’s fireplace emit shards of glass-it’s designed like a parabolic reflector with a shallow focus-but I had thrown hard enough to spatter four tables just the same. I know better than to throw that hard.

Nobody paid the least mind; as one they chorused, “To the Lady” and drank, and when the barrage was finished, eight tables were littered with shards.

Then there was a pause, while everybody waited to see if I could talk about it yet. The certain knowledge that they were prepared to swallow their curiosity, go back to their drinking and ignore me if that were what I needed, made it possible to speak.