Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (12 page)

“Thanks,” he said quietly. “I … I …” He stopped, wanting to talk about it but unable to continue. Then he must have remembered the few toasts he’d seen earlier in the evening, because he picked up the rest of his drink, walked over to the chalk line in the middle of the room, drained the glass and announced, “To meddlers.” Then he pegged the glass into the exact geometrical center of the fireplace.

“Like me,” he added, turning to face us. “I’m a meddler on a grand scale, and I’m not sure I’ve got the guts. Or the right.”

“Brother,” Callahan said seriously, “you’re sure in the right place. All of us here are veteran meddlers, after a fashion, and we worry considerable about both them things.”

“Not like this,” the Meddler said. “You see, I’m a time-traveler too.” He waited for our reaction.

“Say,” piped up Noah Gonzalez, “it’s a shame Tom Hauptman’s off tonight: You two’d have a lot to talk about.”

“Eh?” said the stranger, confused.

“Sure,” Callahan agreed. “Tom’s a time-traveler too.”

“But … but,” the guy sputtered, “but I’ve got the only unit.”

“Oh, Tom didn’t use no fancy equipment,” Noah explained.

“Yeah,” agreed Callahan. “Tom did it the hard way. Never mind, friend, it’s a long story. You from the past or the future?”

“The future,” said the time-traveler, puzzled at our

lack of reaction. I guess we’re hard to startle. “That is, the future as it is at present … I mean …” He stopped and looked confused.

“I get it,” said Noah, like me a veteran SF fan. “You’re from the future, but you’re going to change that future by changing the past, which is our present, right?”

The fellow nodded.

“How’s that again?” blinked Doc Webster.

“I am from the year 1995,” said the man in the overcoat with weary patience, “and I am going to change history in the year 1974. If I succeed, the world I go back to will be different from the one I left.”

“Better or worse?” asked Callahan.

“That’s the hell of it: I don’t know. Oh kark, I might as well tell you the whole story. Maybe it’ll help.”

Callahan set ‘em up, and we all got comfortable.

Her name (said the stranger) was Bobbi Joy, and you couldn’t say there’d never been anyone like her before. Lots of people had been like her. April Lawton, for instance, was nearly as good a guitarist. Aretha had at times a similar intensity. Billie Holiday surely bore and was able to communicate much the same kind of pain. Joni Mitchell and Roberta Flack each in their own way possessed a comparable technical control and purity of tone. Dory Previn was as dramatic and poignant a lyricist, and Maria Muldaur projected the same artless grace.

But you could have rolled them all together and you still wouldn’t have Bobbi Joy, because there was her voice. And it was just plain impossible that such a voice could be. When a Bobbi Joy song ended, whether on tape or disc or holo or, rarest of good fortune, live, you found your head shaking in frank disbelief that a human throat could express such pain, that such pain could be, and that you could hear such pain and still live.

Her name was the purest of irony, given to her by an employer in a previous and more ancient profession, a name she was too cynically indifferent to change when her first recordings began to sell. I’ve often wondered what her past customers must feel when they hear her sing; I’m certain every nameless, faceless one of them remembers her.

They surely appreciate as well as anyone the paradox of her name-for while God seemed to have given her every possible physical advantage in obtaining joy, it never got any closer to her than her album jackets and the first line of her driver’s license. Although many pairs of lips spoke her name, none ever brought its reality to her.

For the scar on her soul was as deep and as livid as the one that ran its puckered, twisted way from her left cheekbone to her right chin.

The Woman With The Scar, they called her, and many, seeing only a physical wound, might have wondered that she did not have it surgically corrected-so easy a procedure in my time. But she sang, and so we understood, and we cried with her because neither of her scars would or could ever be erased, and that, I suppose you’d say, was her genius. She represented the scars across the face of an entire era; she reminded us that we had made the world in which such scars could be, and that we-all of us-were as scarred as she. She …

This is absurd. I’m trying to explain sex to a virgin, with a perfectly good bed handy. Lend an ear, friends, and listen. This holo will tell you more than I can. God help you.

The stranger produced a smooth blue sphere about the size of a tennis ball from one of his pockets, and held it out toward the fireplace. The shimmering of the air over the crackling fire intensified and became a swirling, then a dancing, and finally a coalescing. The silence in Callahan’s was something you could have driven rivets into.

Then the fireplace was gone, and in its place was a young black woman seated on a rock, a guitar on her lap and starry night sky all around and behind her. Her face was in shadow, but even as we held our breath the moon came out from behind a cloud and touched her features. It gave an obsidian sheen to her skin, a tender softness to a face that God had meant to be beautiful, and made a harsh shadow-line of the incredibly straight slash that began an inch below her left eye and yanked sideways and down to open up lips that had been wide already, likc a jagged black underline below the word “pain.” She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all.

We were shocked speechless, and in the stillness she lifted her guitar slightly and began to play, a fast, nagging, worrisome beat, like despairing Richie Havens, an unresolved and maybe unresolvable chord that was almost all open string. An E minor sixth, with the C sharp in the bass, a haunting chord that demanded to become something else, major, or minor, happy or sad, butsomething. A plain, almost Gregorian riff began from that C sharp but always returned unsatisfied, trying to break free of that chord but not succeeding.

And over that primevally disturbing sound, Bobbi Joy spoke, with the impersonal tones of the narrator behind all art:

Snow was falling heavily on U.S. 40 as the day drew to a close. This lonely stretch of highway had seen no other movement all day; and stillness was so complete that the scrub pines and rolling hills by the roadside may have felt that the promise given them so long ago had come to pass, that man had finally gone and left them in peace forever. No snakes had swayed forth from their retreats that day, no lizards crawled, no wolves padded silently in search of winter food. All wildlife waited, puzzled, expectant, caught in the feeling of waiting … for what?

Gradually, without suddenness, each living thing became aware of a curious stuttering drone to the far east, which became audible too slowly to startle. It swelled, drew nearer, and small muscles and sinews tensed, then relaxed as the sound was identified as familiar, harmless.

A pale green 1960 Dodge, with no more than three cylinders firing, crept jerkily into view through the shrouds of snow. Wipers blinking clumsily, the great machine felt its way along the road, its highway song hoarse and stuttered. With a final roar of mortal agony, it fell silent: wipers ceased their wiping, pistons ceased driving, lights winked out, and the huge car coasted gracefully off the road and rolled to a stop with its nose resting on a snow-laden mesquite.

Stillness returned to U.S. 40 … and still, on either side of it, the animals waited.

Even as she finished speaking, the walking bass line with which she was underpinning her mournful chord returned to that dysharmonic C sharp. Then with breathtaking ease it slid down two tones to B, became the dominant of a simple E minor, and as bass, organ and drums came in from nowhere she began to sing:

Snow fallin’ gentle on the windshield

Sittin’ on the side of the road

Took a ride—my engine died and left me

Sittin’ on the side of the road

In a little while I’ll get out and start a-walkin’

Probably a town pretty near

But it just occurs to me that I ain’t got no

More reason to be there than to be here

But I’ll be leavin’

(sudden key shift)

Soon as I find me a reason to

Right now it’s nice just to watch the snow

Coverin’ the windshield and windows …

She finished on a plaintive A minor, toppled off it back into that ghostly mosquito-biting E minor sixth again, and the other instruments fell away, leaving her guitar alone. Again, she spoke:

Snow now completely covered the windshield and windoves, forming a white curtain which hid the interior of the car, and any activity within-if there was any to be seen. No sound issued from the car, no vibration disturbed the snow on its doors. The animals were puzzled, but delighted: perhaps a human understood at last.

The C sharp walked down to B again, but this time it belonged to a clean, simple G chord, supported by a steel guitar and the trapping of bluegrass, a comparatively happy sound that only lasted for the first four lines as that voice-that voice!-picked up the song again, etching us with its words:

Don’t worry now. I’m goin’

Any minute now, I’ll be goin’

Leave the car

—It isn’t far to walk now

Any minute now, I’ll be going

(slowing now, an electric guitar leading into an achingly repeated C-E minor-A progression that went nowhere

Soon as I can find a place I want to go

Soon as I can find a thing l want to do

Soon as I can find someone I want to know

Or think of something interesting and new

(a sudden optimistic jump into the key of F …)

I mean, I could make it easy to the next town

(twisting crazily into E flat …)

But what am I to do when I get there?

(inexorably back to C…)

That’s what I made this odyssey to find out:

Two thousand miles and still I just don’t care …

(a capalla:)

Is it worthwhile to go on looking?

We wanted to cry, wanted to shout, wanted to run forward with a hundred reasons for living, find some way to heal the hurt in that voice, and no one made a sound. Alone again with her guitar, Bobbi Joy wove that dysharmonic tapestry of hurting notes that was already becoming as familiar to us as the taste that a bad dream always has in the cold morning; and as she began to speak again, not a muscle flickered in her ebony face, as though her scar was all the expression she would ever need or be allowed.

The snow began to drift.

In a minute—or an hour—the car was half-buried in a heavy white winter coat of wet snow. The animals were already beginning to forget about the car. It had not shown movement in so long that they were coming to regard it as part of their environment—of less interest than the tattered 1892 edition of the Denver Record pinned under a rock, which at least still fluttered occasionally in the wind.

For the memory of the animals is short, and the years are long, and they have found that very little is worth puzzling over for very long.

And still, the snow fell …

This time she stayed with the C sharp, built an A chord around it, and was joined only by harpsichord and bass. There was no ambiguity to this part: a simple, mournful melody that had no change-ups, no surprises, just the quiet calm of resignation, if unheeded defeat.

Sort of friendly here inside the car

Even though it’s gettin’ kinda cold

Haven’t stirred, or said a word, in hours

I believe it’s gettin’ awful cold

In the glove compartment, there’s a small fask:

Little Irish whiskey for the soul

But reachin’ out to get it seems a great task

And anyway, it isn’t all that cold

It might keep me warm

But it just ain’t worth the trouble …

Her shoulders seemed to slump, and-the droning background of her guitar took on a terrible finality.

There was no longer a Dodge by the side of U.S. 40; just a drift like many others, peaceful and horribly cold. A faint illumination began to expose mysteries of snowsculpture hummocks and valleys of white. But for the swirling haze, you might have said it was dawn.

The car was completely hidden from sight-and so, in caves, holes and shelters, were the animals. But they no longer remembered the car … and at least in their dwellings were some signs of life.

And with shattering unexpectedness she slammed into E major, driving with horns and bass and moog and drums in a frenzied hallelujah chorus that dared you to begin hoping again. Surely that throbbing beat was a heart starting to beat, surely that energy was purposeful!

We sat up straighter, and crossed our fingers.

I’ve got it!

There’s something that I want to do

A thing that seems to have some kind of point

I’ve got some grass, enclosed in glass

Here inside my shirt

Think I’m gonna roll myself a joint

(the bottom fell out of voice and arrangement, scared away by solemnity and a trembling echo …)

A complicated operation-might disturb the peace

But it ought to warm me just as well as drink

So it’s something worth the trouble and it’s gonna help me find

A reason to get out of here

I think

(a capella)

Now where did I put all those Zig-Zags?

Again that C sharp rang out, shocking return to inevitability, and the droning guitar cut the rug out from under us. Helpless, not knowing whether the music or the words frustrated us more, we waited in fearful silence for what had to come next. And for the last time the expressionless voice spoke:

Two weeks later, when a road-crew dug out the car, they found inside it the frozen corpse of a young woman, incredibly tranquil and serene. Between the blue and rigid lips was the pencil-thin column of ash from a hand-rolled cigarette, which had burned undisturbed until it had seared the lips and gone out. The crew-boss silenced his men, radioed a call to the State Police with remarkable calm …