Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (8 page)

None of the Doc’s remaining shots came close to the target, and he left the firing line like a disconsolate blimp, shaking his head and looking at his hand. Fogerty took his place and, without removing that absurd hat, selected a dart.

Watching his throw I thought for a second the match might turn out a draw. His wind-up was pitiful, his stance ungainly, and he held the dart too near the feathers, his other arm stiff at his side. He threw like a girl, and his follow-through was nonexistent.

The dart landed right between the eyes with a meaty

thunk.

“Winner and new champeen, Dink Fogerty,” Fast Eddie hollered over the roar of the crowd, and Fogerty took a long, triumphant drink from the glass he’d set down on a nearby table. Fast Eddie informed him that he’d just won thirty-five bottles of Scotch, and the new champ smiled, turned to face us.

“Any takers?” he rasped. The ‘54 Chevy had gotten a valve job. .

“Sure,” said Noah Gonzalez, next on the list. “Be damned if you’ll take us for three dozen bottles with one throw.” Fogerty nodded agreeably, retrieved his dart from the target and toed the mark again. And with the same awkward, off-balance throw as before, he proceeded to place all six darts in the fifty-circle.

By the last one the silence in the room was complete, and Noah’s strangled “I concede,” was plainly audible. Fogerty just looked smug and took another big gulp of his drink, set it down on the same table.

“Ten dollars says you can’t do that again,” the Doc exploded, and Fogerty smiled. Fast Eddie went to fetch him the darts, but as he reached the target . .

.

“Hold it!” Callahan bellowed, and the room froze. Fogerty turned slowly and stared at the big redheaded barkeep, an innocent look on his pudding face. Callahan glared at him, brows like thunderclouds.

“Whassamatter, chief?” Fogerty asked.

“Damned if I know,” Callahan rumbled, “but I’ve seen you take at least a dozen long swallows from that drink you got, and it’s still full.”

Every eye in the place went to Fogerty’s glass, and sure enough. Not only was it full, all the glasses near it were emptier than their owners remembered leaving them, and an angry buzzing began.

“Wait a minute,” Fogerty protested. “My hands’ve been in plain sight every minute-all of you saw me. You can’t pin nothin’ on me.”

“I guess you didn’t use your hands, then,” Callahan said darkly, and a great light seemed to dawn on Doc Webster’s face.

“By God,” he roared, “a telekinetic! Why you lowdown, no-good …”

Fogerty made a break for the door, but Fast Eddie demonstrated the veracity of his name with a snappy flying tackle that cut Fogerty down before he covered five yards. He landed with a crash before LongDrink McGonnigle, who promptly sat on him. “Tele-what?” inquired LongDrink conversationally.

“Telekinesis,” the Doc explained. “Mind over matter. I knew a telekinetic in the Army who could roll sevens as long as you cared to watch. It’s a rare talent, but it exists. And this bird’s got it. Haven’t you, Fogerty?”

Fogerty blustered for awhile, but finally he broke down and admitted it. A lot of jaws dropped, some bouncing off the floor, and LongDrink let the guy with the hat back up, backing away from him. The hat still clung gaudily to his skull like a homosexual barnacle.

“You mean you directed dem darts wit’ yer mind?” Fast Eddie expostulated.

“Nah. Not ezzackly. I … I make the dart-board want darts. “

“Huh?”

“I can’t make the darts move. What I do, I project a … a state of wanting darts onto the center of the target, like some kinda magnet, an’ the target attracts ‘em for me. I only learned how to do it about a year ago. The hard part is to hang on to all but one dart.”

“Thought so,” growled Callahan from behind the bar. “You make your glass want gin, too-don’t ya?”

Fogerty nodded. “I make a pretty good buck as a fisherman-my nets want fish.”

It seemed to me that, given his talent, Fogerty was making pretty unimaginative use of it. Imagine a cancer wanting X-rays. Then again, imagine a pocket that wants diamonds. I decided it was just as well that his ambitions were modest.

“Wait a minute,” said the Doc, puzzled. “This `state of wanting darts’ you project. What’s it like?”

And Fogerty, an unimaginative man, pondered that question for the first time in his life, and the inevitable happened.

There’s an old story about the centipede who was asked how he could coordinate so many legs at once, and, considering the mechanics of something that had always been automatic, became so confused that he never managed to walk again. In just this manner, Fogerty focused his attention on the gift that had always been second nature to him, created that zone of yearning for the first time in his head where he could observe it, and …

The whole half-dozen darts ripped free of the target, crossed the room like so many Sidewinder missiles, and smashed into Fogerty’s forehead.

If he hadn’t been wearing that dumb hat, they might have pulped his skull. Instead they drove him backward, depositing him on his ample fundament, where he blinked up at us blinking down at him. There was a stunned silence (literally so on his part) and then a great wave of laughter that grew and swelled and rang, blowing the cobwebs from the rafters. We laughed till we cried, till our lungs ached and our stomachs hurt, and Fogerty sat under the avalanche of mirth and turned red and finally began to giggle himself.

And like the centipede, like the rajah whose flying carpet would only function if he did not think of the word “elephant,” Fogerty from that day forth never managed to bring himself to use his bizarre talent again.

Imagine getting a netfull of mackerel in the eye!

Two Heads Are Better Than One

As usual, it was a pretty merry night at Callahan’s when the trouble started.

I don’t want to give the impression that every time us Callahan’s regulars (Callahanians?) get to feeling good, there’s drama around the corner. The reason it seems that way is probably that, barring disaster, merriment is the general rule at Callahan’s Place. Most of us have little better to do than get happy in another’s company, and we’re not an unimaginative bunch, so we keep ourselves pretty well amused.

Being a Wednesday, it was Tall Tales Night (as opposed to Monday, the Fireside Fill-More singalong night, or Tuesday, which we call Punday). Along about eightthirty, when most of the boys had arrived, and the level of’ broken glass in the fireplace was still rather low, Callahan dried his big meaty hands on his apron and cleared his throat with a sound like a bulldozer in pain.

All right gents,” he boomed, and conversations were tabled for the night. “We need a subject. Any suggestions?”

Nobody spoke up. See, the teller of the tallest tale on a Wednesday night gets his drinking money refunded, and most folks like to lie low until they’ve had a chance to examine the competition and come up with a topper. Not that the first tale told never wins, but it has to be pretty memorable.

“All right,” Callahan said when no one took the lead. “People, places or things?”

“We did t’ings last week,” Fast Eddie pointed out from his seat at the upright. True enough. I’d had everybody beat with a yarn about a beer-nut tree that used to grow in my backyard until I watered it, when Doc Webster wiped me out with the saga of a ‘38 Buick of his that understood spoken English, which would have been just fine except that it took on a rude highway cop one day and chased him across six lanes of traffic. Doc claimed to have buried it in his backyard after it expired from remorse.

“Ain’t nothing says we have to be consistent,” Callahan replied. “We can do things again.”

“Naw,” Doc Webster called out. “Let’s do people.”

“All right, Doc. What kind? You sound like you got something in mind.”

“Wal …” drawled the Doc, and people checked to see that their drinks were fresh. Those who needed a refill put a dollar bill on the bar and were refueled by Callahan, who did not need to ask what they wanted.

“… I was just thinking,” the Doc continued, his own drink as magically full as always, “of my Cousin Hobart, the celebrated Man With The Foot-Long Nose.” (“Oh, relatives tonight,” someone muttered.) “Hobart’s mother died in childbirth, naturally, and his father succumbed to acute embarrassment shortly thereafter. As a child Hobart was a born showman, keeping the orphanage in stitches with incredibly accurate woodpecker imitations, and upon attaining the age of seven he ran away, to form the nucleus of a traveling road company which played Pinocchio in every theater in the country, and some in the city too. This kept him in Kleenex until he outgrew the role, and Cyrano de Bergerac was not popular at the time, so he struck off on his own and in short order became something of an old stand-by on the vaudeville circuits, where his ability to identify the perfume of ladies in the last row and his prowess on the nose-flutes (as many as five at one time) were a never-failing draw. He might have lived on in this way for a good many years, for he was a fanatically hygienic man, and although there were dark rumors about his sex life he was invariably discreet. The young ladies he visited were for some reason equally reticent, even with their best girl friends-let alone their husbands.

“No, it was not a cuckold’s knuckles (say three times fast with ice-cubes in your mouth and you can have this drink) that finally put an end to Cousin Hobart’s career, though it might have been. It was by his own hand that, if I may put it this way, The Nose was blown. One night he retired early with only a slight head-cold for company, a yard-long handkerchief knotted to the bedstead (Hobart went through a lot of laundresses before he found one with a strong stomach). Thrashing in his sleep, he rolled over and contrived to wedge the end of his nose in his right ear. Sensing some obstruction, the mighty proboscis sneezed-and damned near blew his brains out.

“When his head had stopped ringing, a wide-awake Hobart settled down to some cold hard thinking. The incident could happen again at any time-the miracle was that so likely a phenomenon had taken so long to first occur-and next time the airseal might be better. Only by chance had Hobart survived at all. He reached his decision reluctantly, but he was a brave man: he followed through. He had his nose entirely amputated the next day, repudiating all nose-hood and installing a suction cup in the middle of his glasses. Within a week he had landed a job with some moonshiners, and he works their still there still.”

The Doc took a long gulp of Peter Dawson’s and looked around expectantly, blinking.

There was a silence, not much thicker than an elephant’s behind.

“A moonshiner with no nose?” snorted LongDrink, who keeps a still in his garage for Sundays when C allahan’s is closed. That’s ridiculous. How did he smell?

“Terrible,” the Doc replied placidly. “Those moonshiners are filthy.”

A general groan began, but Callahan held up a hand. “What’s the moral, Doc?”

The Doc blinked again. “No nose is a good nose.”

The sky rained peanuts, and very few missed the Doc, his more-than-ample upholstery making him an excellent target. Callahan, maddened beyond endurance, seized up a seltzer bottle and was restrained with some difficulty. Me. I was worried. This would be hard to beat. I decided against another Bushmill’s.

As I recall, the next one up was Shorty Steinitz, with the story of his uncle Mort D. Arthur the magician, who walked down the street one day and turned into a drugstore. But three of us shouted the punchline before he got to it and he pitched his glass into the fire in disgust, toasting “To weisenheimers” first and putting his shoulder behind it. Then Tommy Janssen did a creditable job, W. C. Fields-style and better done than Fields usually is, about a Cousin Alex Ameche who used to hang from a hook on his kitchen wall and claim to be a telephone.

“Obviously a masochist,” Tommy intoned nasally. “The amount of abuse that man absorbed was simply incredible. Folks’d try to humor him, put a dime in his left ear, pick up his right hand from where it hung in his other ear, dial his nose in a circle and listen to his hand. But when nothing transpired, they would inevitably beat him about the head and shoulders until the dime came out of his mouth, dislocate his arm at the shoulder and leave the premises in a great rage, cursing prodigiously.” This was pretty good stuff, but Tommy’s moral, “A chameleon would do well to imitate objects of a species with which Man is not at war,” had no pun in it, and it seemed the Doc still (the Doc’s still) had the edge. Noah Gonzalez’s effort, a one-joke story about an overaggressive uncle who customarily turned on the T.V. with such ferocity that one day the T.V. turned on him, was an obvious loser. For some crazy reason as each tale-teller realized he’d blown it and would thus be paying his night’s tab, he invariably pitched his glass into the fireplace-which costs you your fifty cents change. Callahan had raked in a fortune in dollar bills by the time I was ready to make my move, and I decided for the hundredth time that Callahan is no fool, even if he does have to sweep out that fireplace every morning.

“All right,” I said at last, “it’s time to tell you good people about my Grandfather Stonebender.” I decided my country drawl would serve best.

“You stole that from Heinlein,” shouted Noah, the only other SF freak in the room. “One of the characters in `Lost Legacy” had a Grandfather Stonebender who could do anything better than anyone. No fair lifting stories.”

“Heinlein must of heard about the real Grandfather Stonebender from my grandmother,” I said with dignity, “and at that he toned him down for a cynical public. I’m talking about the real Stonebender-the man who built the pyramids, freed the slaves, invented the prophylactic, cured yaws-that Stonebender.”

“What’s yaws?” Callahan asked injudiciously.

“Why thanks, Mike. I’ll have a beer.”

A cheer went up, and Callahan made a ferocious face at me as he drew a draft Bud. “Not that Grandfather Stonebender’s legendary success was surprisin’,” I continued smoothly, “as he was born with three heads. His mother was frightened by a pawn shop while she was carrying him. Doctor was so startled he swore off the sauce, and the child raised up such a fuss cryin’ three ways at once that they sent him home early, where he caused his mother some unforseen and unprecedented difficulties with nursing.