Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (21 page)

But Callahan raised a hand. “No,” he said quietly.

We stared at him, stunned. Callahan withholding absolution?

“You can’t drink in my bar, brother,” he said, staring Raksha in the eye, “and you can’t have our forgiveness. There’s a price for absolution on this planet, and it’s called penance. Tony here gets arrested for joining demonstrations; Jerry has chucked away a pot-full of money he was making in real estate and started lobbying for green-belts and cluster housing; Finn here exiled himself among a lot of obnoxious, smelly humans for the sake of the ones worth saving. Buddhist monks who couldn’t influence their governments any other way set themselves on fire, by Christ, and for their souls I pray on Sunday. What do you figure to do for atonement?”

Raksha closed his eyes-they were doublenictitating-and knotted his brow. He was silent for a long time.

“There is nothing I can do,” he said at last, his voice hollow and bleak.

“Then there is no absolution for you,” Callahan said flatly, “here or anywhere. Get out o’ my joint and don’t come back.”

Raksha’s face fell, and for a timeless moment I thought he was going to cry, or whatever Krundai do that’s like crying. But he got a hold of himself, nodded once, rose and left the bar, shouldering party-people aside as he went.

There was another silence when he had gone, and we all looked at Callahan. His jaw was set, and his eyes flashed, challenging us to criticize his judgment.

“Were … weren’t you a little harsh on the guy, Mike?” Doc Webster asked after a while.

“Hell, Doc,” Callahan exploded, “that clown was Adolph Hitler! You want me to pat him on the head and say it’s all right, you were only following orders? Christ on a minibike, if it wasn’t for him and his kind, I might not have to run this goddamned bar. And my bunions give me the dickens.”

“I grieve for him,” Finn said tonelessly. “I too was once in a similar position.”

“Save your grief, Finn,” Callahan spat. “You had the same choice, but you followed through. And you weren’t gutless-you were counterprogrammed. If you could figure out a way around the sheer physical limitations of your machinery, why the hell couldn’t he overcome his conditioning? Conditioning isn’t an excuse, for Krundai any more than for humans-it’s an explanation. Thanks to you and the work-you’re doing, the Gaspe Peninsula may be prosperous farmland some day. You’re still paying your dues. But that guy didn’t want to atone, just apologize. He and his kind made this sorry old world what it is today, and maybe I could forgive that. But I don’t give absolution free. It costs, costs you right in the old will power, and he wasn’t willing to ante up. Fuck him, and the horse he rode in on.”

“I still think we should have jollied him along and tried to pump him, Mike,” Tony said insistently. “How are we going to find them to stop them now?”

Callahan looked tired. “As Finn started to say before I tromped on his toes, that ain’t necessary. Now Finn knows they’re here, he can find ‘em for us as easy as you could spot a wolf in a chicken coop. That wasn’t the prob…”

There came a shattering roar from outside. The building rocked; glass sprayed inward from the windows and bottles danced behind the bar. Everyone began to shout at once, and most of the boys made a bee-line for the door.

Only Callahan of all of us failed to jump. “Like I said, no guts,”- he said softly.

He rose quietly, walked through the suddenlyuncrowded bar the chalk line before the fireplace, picking up someone’s drink as he went. He looked surreally absurd in that damned bear-suit he still had on, balding red head sticking out the top like a partially digested meal. He stood gazing into the flames for a moment, gulped the raw liquor and spoke in a clear, resonant baritone.

“To cowardice,” he said, and flung the empty glass against the back wall of the fireplace with a savageness I had never seen in him before.

Fast Eddie stuck his head in the door. “Jeezis Christ, boss, de whole unprintable parkin’ lot blew up.”

“I know, Eddie,” Callahan said gently. “Thanks. Anybody hurt?”

Eddie scratched his head. “I don’t t’ink so,” he allowed, “but dere’s a lotta dead cars.”

“Least of my worries,” Callahan assured him. “Call the cops, will you? Tell ‘em whatever you like.” Eddie got busy on the phone.

Callahan came back to our table, stood over Finn. “Well, buddy, what do you say? Can you take ‘em?”

Finn looked up at him for a while, figuring some things.

“That blast was powerful, Michael. They must have strong defenses.”

“That’s why I stepped on your toes and let that joker go, Mickey. If you two tangled in here, we’d have lost a lot more’n a few cars we can’t gas anyway. But you heard what he said about violence.”

“They abhor it,” Finn agreed. “Even if they will employ it in self-defense, they are unused to it. Michael, I can take them. I will.”

He rose and left the bar.

“Thanks, Mickey,” Callahan called after him. I reckon your dues are paid in full.”

There’s been a lot of noise in the papers lately about the series of seismic shocks that have been recorded over the past few weeks in the unlikeliest places. An unpredicted miniquake every day or two for three weeks, culminating in a blockbuster where no quake had a right to be, is bound to cause talk.

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

But me and some of the boys at Callahan’s Place suspect it’s more like the beginning.

The Wonderful Conspiracy

I used to think that almost anything could happen at C allahan’s Place. It wasn’t long before I realized the truth: that anything can happen at Callahan’s Place … and not long after that it was made clear to me that anything can happen at Callahan’s.

But I confess I was still surprised the night I learned that A*N*Y*T*H*I*N*G can happen at Callahan’s Place -and that, sooner or later, it probably will.

It was New Year’s Eve, a natural time for introspection I guess. The Place was virtually empty, for the first time in a long while. Now that might strike you as downright implausible, but it’s just another one of the inexplicable eccentricities of Callahan’s that stop startling you after you’ve been hanging out there awhile. You see, the kind of guys that come in there regularly, if they’ve got families, tend to spend holidays with ‘em at home.

It’s that kind of crowd.

There are, of course, a handful who don’t have families, and aren’t willing to settle for the surrogate of a date, so Callahan stays open on holidays-but I’m sure he runs a net loss. This particular New Year’s Eve, the entire congregation consisted of him, me, Fast Eddie, the Doc and LongDrink McGonnigle.

Funny. You take men who already consider themselves deep and true friends: they’ve been drinking together regularly for many years, have experienced some memorable moments in each other’s company, have given each other an awful lot. And yet somehow, on a night when there’s just a few of them, there because they have no better place to be, such men can find an even deeper level of sharing; can, perhaps, truly become brothers. At such times they relax the shoulders of their souls, and turn their collective attention to those profound questions that can overawe a man alone. They bring out their utterly true selves. We shared a rich plane of awareness that night, Callahan behind the bar and the rest of us sitting together in front of it, lost in the glow of that special kind of intimacy that drink and good company bring, looking back over the year gone by and talking of nothing in general and everything in particular. What we were doing, we were telling dumb puns.

It started when Callahan taped over the cashbox a hand-lettered sign that read, “the buck stops here. “

“Oh boy,” rumbled the Doc, “I can see there’ll be no quarter given tonight.”- which is a pun because he chucked his glass into the fireplace as he said it, which meant the cigarbox at the end of the bar held at least two quarters that he wouldn’t be given tonight.

LongDrink got up and walked to the chalk line, and I assumed he wanted to give Doc’s stinker the honor of a formal throw. I should have known he was setting us up. He toed the mark, announced, “To the poor corpuscle,” drained his glass, and waited.

The Doc had reflexively drained the fresh glass Callahan had already supplied unasked-Doc will drink to anything, sight unseen-but he paused with his arm in midthrow. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Why the hell should I .drink to `the poor corpuscle’?”

“He labors in vein,” LongDrink said simply.

“Ah yes,” I said without missing a beat, “but he vessles vhile he vorks.”

“Plasma soul,” exclaimed Callahan.

The Doc’s eyes got round and his jaw hung down. “By god,” he said at last, “I’ve never been outpunned by you rummies yet, and I’m not about to go down on medical puns. As a doctor I happen to know for certain there’s only one other blood pun-I got it straight from the Auricle of Delphi.”

There was an extended pause, and I was saying to myself, yep, as usual, no one can top the Doc-when all of a sudden Fast Eddie spoke up. Now you have to understand that while he’s a genius at the piano, lightning wit has never been Eddie’s strong suit; I don’t think I’d ever heard him attempt a pun in the presence of so many masters.

But he by God opened his mouth and said with the nearest thing to a straight face he owns, “Well I dunno about youse guys, but anemia drink.”

And even then he was not done, because while the Doc spluttered and the rest of us roared, Callahan quietly went into the gag that-unknown to us-Eddie had worked out with him before the rest of us arrived. Instead of Eddie’s usual shot, the barkeep mixed him a drink, and served it with a wooden chopstick jutting out of the glass.

“What the hell kind of a drink is that?” Doc Webster demanded grumpily. And Eddie delivered it magnificently.

“A hickory dacquiri, Doc.”

And the laughter of a mere three of us nearly blew out the windows.

The Doc was a good sport about it. In fact, he laughed so hard at himself that he lost three shirt buttons. But you could tell he was severely shaken: he paid for the next round. I felt as though I’d just seen a bulldozer to a tapdance myself. The world is full of surprises, I told myself.

Callahan put it even more succinctly. “It’s a miracle,” he whooped, setting up fresh glasses. “A genuine damn miracle.”

LongDrink snorted. “Miracles are a dime a dozen in this joint.”

“You know, Drink,” I said suddenly, “you said a mouthful:”

“Hah?”

“Miracles. That’s Mike’s stock-in-trade. This is the place where nothing is impossible.”

“Horse feathers,” Callahan said.

“No, I’m serious, Mike. I can think of half a dozen things that’ve happened in here in the past year that I wouldn’t have believed for a minute if they’d happened anywhere else.”

“That’s sure true enough,” the Doc said thoughtfully. “Little green men … two time travelers … Adolph Hitler …”

“That’s not exactly what I mean, Doc,” I interrupted. “Those things’re highly improbable, but if they could happen here, they could happen anywhere. What I mean is that, barring Raksha, every one of those jokers that walked in cryin’ walked out smilin’-and even he could have, if he’d been willing to pay the freight. By me, that’s a miracle.”

“I don’t getcha,” said Eddie, wrinkling up his face. Even more, I mean.

“Take that business of Jim and Paul MacDonald. Near as I can see, they represent the basic miracle of Callahan’s Place, the greatest lesson this joint has taught us.”

“What’s dat?”

“That there’s nothing in the human heart or mind, no place no matter how twisted or secret, that can’t be endured-if you have someone to share it with. That’s what this place is all about: helping people to open up whatever cabinets in their heads hold their most dangerous secrets, and let ‘em out. If you’ve got a hurt and I’ve got a hurt and we share ‘em, some-crazy-how or other we each end up with less than half a hurt apiece.” I took a sip of Bushmill’s. “That’s what Callahan’s Place has to offer-and as far as I know, there’s no place like it in all the world.”

“I know one place kinda like it,” LongDrink said suddenly.

“What? Where?”

“Oh, I don’t know that you’d spot the resemblance right off-I sure didn’t. But did any o’ you guys ever hear of The Farm?”

“I was raised on one,” the Doc said.

“We know-in the barn,” LongDrink said drily. “I ain’t talking’ about a farm. I mean The Farm-place down in Tennessee. Better’n eight hundred people livin’ on a couple o’ thousand acres. One of ‘em’s my daughter Anne, an’ I went down to visit her last month.”

“One of them communes?” the Doc asked skeptically.

“Not like I ever heard of,” LongDrink told him. “They ain’t got no house brand o’ religion, for one thing-Anne still goes to Mass on Sundays. For another thing, them folks work. They feed themselves, an’ they build their own houses, an’ they take care of business. The heaviest drug I saw down there was pot, and they wasn’t using that for recreation-said it was a sacrament.”

“Tennessee,” I said, and whistled. “They must get a hard time from the locals.”

“Not on your tintype. The locals love ‘em. I spoke with the Lewis County sheriff, and he said if everybody was as decent and truthful and hard-working as the Farm folk, he’d be out of a job. I tell you, I went down there loaded for bear, ready to argue Annie into givin’ up her foolishness and comin’ on home. Instead I almost forgot to leave.”

“So what’s all that got to do with this joint?” Callahan asked.

“Well, it’s, like Jake was sayin’ about sharing, Mike. Them folks share everything they got, an’ the only rule I noticed was that a body that was hurtin’ some way was everybody’s number one priority. They … ‘ He paused, looked thoughtful. “They care about each other. Eight hundred people, and they care about each other -and the whole damn world, too. That kind of thing’s been out of style since Flower Power wilted.”