Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (11 page)

“That’s my problem, burglar.”

MacDonald’s eyes seemed to see a far place, and I hope to God I never see it myself. I suppose he was examining his guts. The suspense hung in the air like the electric calm before a cyclone, and nobody made a sound.

After a long, timeless moment he nodded faintly. “All right. I’ll try, Mr. Callahan.”

We relaxed a trifle in our chairs, and then tensed right back up again. Callahan put out his cigar and laid a hand on the shotgun, unobtrusively waving Chuck and Noah out of the line of fire.

MacDonald sat bolt upright, put his hands over his ears. He opened his eyes real wide, looked around one last time, and closed them tight. His brow knotted up.

Now, I don’t know quite how to explain just what happened next, because it doesn’t seem to jibe with what Jim MacDonald had told us. But I figure that if he was a telepath, some of us at Callahan’s are pretty fair empaths. Maybe he was tapping us himself; maybe not. All I know for sure is that all at once the lights were gone and I wasn’t in the bar any more, and Callahan and the Doc and Fast Eddie and Tommy and LongDrink and Noah and Shorty and Chuck and I were all crowded together somehow, touching, like we were rubbing shoulders in back of a truck we had to push-start. We didn’t waste time wondering, we put our backs into it.

That’s crazy, there was no truck, not even a hallucinatory one, but I guess it describes the sort of thing we did as well as words can. We … pushed, and just like with a truck there came a time when the thing we were pushing gave a hell of a shudder and took off, leaving us gasping far behind.

The thing we were pushing was Jim MacDonald.

The lights came back and the familiar sights of Callahan’s Place came back and I was alone in my skin again, looking around at Callahan and the rest of the boys and realizing with surprise that I hadn’t been the least bit scared. They were looking around too, and it was a few seconds before we saw MacDonald.

He was sitting rigid in his chair, trembling like a man with a killing fever. Doc Webster started for him like an overweight white corpuscle but pulled up short and looked helpless. The air around MacDonald’s head seemed to shimmer like the air over a campfire, and we heard his teeth gnashing.

Then, not suddenly but gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, he began to relax. Muscles unknotted, joints unlocked, his face began to soften. He … I don’t know how to say this either. He wore his face differently. The MacDonald he loosened into was changed, somehow older.

He had won.

“Our deepest thanks, gentlemen,” he said in a more resonant voice than he had used before. “I think we’ll be all right from here on.”

“What will you do now?” Callahan rapped, and I wondered at the cold steel in his voice.

MacDonald considered for a moment. “We’re not really sure,” he decided finally, “but whatever we do, we hope we can find a way to help other people the way you’ve helped us. There must be lots of things we can do. Maybe we’ll finish school and become a psychiatrist like I planned once. Imagine-a telepathic headshrinker.”

Callahan’s hand came away from the trigger of the scattergun for the first time; Jim/Paul didn’t catch it, but I did. I was rather glad to know that the intentions of the world’s only two telepaths were benign, myself.

Callahan looked puzzled for a second, then his face split into a huge grin. “Say, can I offer you fellas a drink?”

And MacDonald’s new voice echoed him perfectly.

“Don’t mind if we do,” he added, laughing, and got up to take a chair at the bar.

“Hey,” Fast Eddie called out, ever one to remember the important details, “wait a minute. De cops’ll be lookin’ for youse fer leavin’ dat accident. Whaddya gonna tell ‘em? Fer dat matter, how d’ya get yer udder body outa King’s Park?”

“Oh, I dunno,” Callahan mused, putting a careful double-shot of Chivas Regal in front of MacDonald. “It seems to me a telepath could dodge him a lot of cops. Or a lot of witchdoctors. Wouldn’t you say, gents?”

“We guess so,” MacDonald allowed, and drank up.

And they were right. All three of them.

I haven’t heard much from either of the MacDonald brothers yet, but then it hasn’t been that long, and I’m sure they’ve both got a lot of thinking and catching up to do. I wonder if either of them is thinking of having kids. One way or another, I expect to be hearing good things of them, really good things, any day now.

It figures. I mean, two heads are better than one.

The Law of Conservation of Pain

There’s a curious kind of inevitability to the way things happen at Callahan’s. Not that we wouldn’t have managed to help The Meddler out some way or other even if it had been, say, Thursday night that he came to us. But since it was Monday night, I finally got to learn what it is that “heavy-metal” rock music is good for.

After ten years as a musician, it was about time I found out.

Monday night is Fill-More Night at Callahan’s Place, the night Fast Eddie and I do our weekly set on piano and guitar. But don’t let the name mislead you into thinking we play the kind of ear-splitting music the Fillmore East was famous for. Although I do play an electric axe (a Country Gent Six) and have an amplifier factoryguaranteed to shatter glass, these are the only remnants of a very brief flirtation with heavy-metal that occurred in much hungrier times than these. I don’t like loud noises.

No, the name derives from the curious custom we have at Callahan’s of burying our dead soldiers in the fireplace. You can usually tell how good a night it’s been by how many glasses lay smashed on the hearth, and after one particularly tasty session Doc Webster nicknamed Eddie and me the Fireside Fill-More. To our intense disgust, it stuck.

This particular Monday night, things was loose indeed. Eddie and I had held off our first set for half an hour to accommodate a couple of the boys who were playing a sort of pool on the floor with apples and broomsticks, and by the time Callahan had set up the two immense speakers on either side of the front door, the joint was pretty merry.

“What’re you gonna play, Jake?” the Doc called out from his ringside seat. I adjusted the mikestand, turned up my axe just enough to put it on an equal footing with Fast Eddie’s upright, and tossed the ball right back to the Doc .

“What would you like to hear, Doc?”

“How about, `There Are Tears In My Ears From Lying On My Back And Crying In The Evening Over You?’ “

“Naw,” drawled LongDrink from the bar, “I want to hear `He Didn’t Like Her Apartment So He Knocked Her Flat,’ ” and a few groans were heard.

Doc Webster rose to the occasion. “Why not play the Butcher Song, Jake?”

I resigned myself to the inevitable. “The Butcher Song?”

“Sure,” boomed the Doc, and conducting an invisible band, he sang, “Butcher arms around me honey/hold me tight …” Peanuts began to rain on his head.

Callahan shifted the right speaker a bit, and turned around with his hands on his hips. “Play the Camera Song, Jake.”

“Hit me, Mike.”

With a voice like a foghorn undergoing root-canal work, Callahan began, “Lens get together ‘bout half past eight/I’ll ring your Bell & Howell …” and a considerable number of glasses hit the fireplace at once. One or two had not been emptied first; the crackling fire flared high.

In the brief pause that ensued, Fast Eddie spoke up plaintively.

“Hey Jake. I got an idea.”

“Be gentle with it,” the Doc grinned. “It’s in a strange place.”

“What’s your idea, Eddie?” I asked.

“How about if we do de one we been rehoisin’ all afternoon?”

I nodded judiciously, and turned to face the house. “Regulars and gentlemen,” I announced, “for our first number we would like to do a song we wrote yesterday in an attempt to define that elusive essence, that shared quality which brings us all together here at Callahan’s Place. In its way it is a song about all of us.

“It’s called the Drunkard’s Song.”

And as Eddie’s nimble piano intro cut through the ensuing catcalls, I stoked up my guitar and sang:

A swell and wealthy relative of mine had up and died

And I got a hundred thousand from the will

So a friend and I decided to convert it into liquid form

The better our esophagi to fill

So we started in the city, had a drink in every shitty

Little ginmill, which is really quite a few

And a cabbie up in Harlem took us clean across the river

Into Brooklyn, where he joined us in a brew

We was weavin’ just a trifle as we pulled into Astoria

At eighty miles an hour in reverse

But it was nothin’ to the weavin’ that we did as we was leavin’

And from time to time it got a little worse

Well there’s nothin’ like drinkin’ up a windfall

We was drunker than a monkey with a skinfull

We wuz so goddam drunk it was sinful

And I think I ain’t sober yet

As we finished the chorus, Fast Eddie tossed up a cloud of gospel chords that floated me easily into my solo, a bit of intricate pickin’ which I managed to stumble through with feeling if not precision. When it was Eddie’s turn I snuck a look around and saw that everyone was well into his second drink, and relaxed. There were smiles all around as I slid into the second verse:

We was feeling mighty fine as we crossed the city line

Suckin’ whiskey and a-whistlin’ at the girls

But the next saloon we try someone wants to black my eye

‘Cause he doesn’t like my brown and shaggy curls

So then a fist come out of orbit, knocked me clean across the floor

But I was pretty drunk and didn’t even care

And I was pretty disappointed when the coppers hit the joint

As I was makin’ my rebuttal with a chair

But the coppers came a cropper ‘cause I made it to the crapper

And departed by a ventilator shaft

Met my buddies in the alley as they slipped out through the galley

And we ran and ran and laughed and laughed and laughed

Yeah there’s nothin’ like drinkin’ up a windfall

We was drunker than a monkey with a skinful

We wuz so goddam drunk it was sinful

And I think I ain’t sober yet

This time Fast Eddie jumped into the gap with a flurry of triplets. I could tell that he knew where he was going, so I gave him his head. As he unfolded a tasty statement, I looked around again and saw all-to-wall grins again.

No, not quite. Tommy Janssen, sitting over by the mixer, was definitely not smiling. A pot-bellied gent in an overcoat, who I didn’t recognize, was leaning over Tommy’s shoulder, whispering something into his ear, and the kid didn’t seem to like it at all. Even as Eddie’s solo yanked my attention away again I saw Tommy turn around and say something to the overcoated man, and when I looked back the guy was standing at the bar with his nose in a double-something.

I put it out of my mind; verse three was a-comin’.

Halfway out of Levittown we got our second wind

In a joint so down it made you laugh

So I had another mug, and my buddy had a jug

And the cabbie had a pitcher and a half

When we got to Suffolk County we was goin’ into overdrive

The word had spread and crowds began to form

We drank our way from Jericho on down I10 to Merrick Road

A-boozin’ and a-singin’ up a storm

I lost my buddy and the cabbie in the middle of the Hamptons

We was drunker than it’s possible to be

But there finally came a time when I just didn’t have a dime

I sat on Montauk Point and wept into the sea

And everybody in the joint joined in on the final chorus. All except the guy in the overcoat … who was already on his second double-something.

Yeah there’s nothin’ like drinkin’ up a windfall

We was drunker than a monkey with a skinfull

We wuz so goddam drunk it was sinful

And I think I ain’t sober yet!

A storm of glasses hit the fireplace, and Fast Eddie and I went into our aw-shucks routine at about the same time. When the cheers and laughter had died down somewhat, I stepped back up to the mike and a-hemmed.

“Thank you for your sympathy, genties and ladlemen,” I said. “We’ll be passing the eleven-gallon hat directly.” I tapped the huge Stetson on my head significantly and grinned.

“Well now …” I paused. “We only know two songs, and that was one of them, so we’re real glad you liked it.” I stopped again. “What do you think we ought to play now, Eddie?”

He sat awhile in thought.

“How ‘bout de udder one?” he asked at last.

“Right arm,” I agreed at once, and hit a G.

Doc Webster beheaded a new bottle of Peter Dawson’s and took a hearty swallow.

“Okay, folks,” I continued. “Here’s a medley of our hit: a sprightly number called, `She Was Only A Telegrapher’s Daughter, But She Didit-Ah-Didit.’ ” I started to pick the intro, but the sound of glass smashing in the fireplace distracted me, and I bungled it.

And in the few seconds before I could take another stab at it, the fellow in the overcoat burst noisily and explosively into tears.

Fast Eddie and I were among the first to join the circle that formed immediately around the crying, pot-bellied man. I didn’t even stop to unplug my guitar, and if anyone had trouble stepping over the stretched-out telephone cord they kept it to themselves.

Paradoxically, after we had rushed to encircle him, nobody said a word. We let him have his cry, and did our best to silently share it with him. We offered him only our presence, and our concern.

In about five minutes, his sobs gave way to grimaces and jerky breathing, and Callahan handed him a triplesomething. He got outside of half of it at once, and set the remaining something-and-a-half down on the bar. His face as he looked around us was not ashamed, as we might have expected; more relieved than anything else. Although there was still tension in the set of his lantern jaw and in the squint of his hazel eyes, the know in his gut seemed to have eased considerably.