Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (38 page)

Yeah, that was dry wit alright.
 
I
did
kind of like her.
 
“Every time I see you , you remind me of your…your…oh hell, I have no idea what the word is.
 
What do they call the aunt of one’s third cousin twice removed, do you know?”

She frowned—and then her eyes opened wide.
 
“Oh—you mean Tanta Nyjmnckra!
 
Cousin Jorjhk’s aunt.”

“Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi, yeah.”

She tilted her head.
 
“Your pronunciation is very good.”

“Thank you.
 
Accent on the ‘zkzh,’ right?”

“And remembering her makes you angry because she drove you from your home in Long Island.”

“No, God…bless it.
 
It makes me angry because the whole feud was my fault, from start to finish.
 
I deserved everything she dumped on me.
 
My friends and family didn’t—but I did.”

She sat back and drank more coffee.
 
“Now I really don’t understand.”

I tried to drink more of my own, but the mug seemed to be empty.
 
I didn’t want to signal Tom for more and interrupt this now.
 
I licked the rim, and it helped, but not enough, so I set it down.
 
“Look,” I said, “it was a very busy morning.
 
Zoey was
way
overdue to give birth to Erin, and we had to run daily urine samples to the hospital.
 
It was the crack of dawn, I was half asleep, I’d banged my head a couple of times already.
 
We were out of sample containers, and all I could find to use was a Bavarian beer stein with a lid.
 
Then the buddy who was supposed to come pick up the urine sample rang the wrong doorbell, way over at the other end of the building, and I stormed all the way over there cursing under my breath and flung the door open, and your Tanta Nyjmnckra and I screamed at each other.”
 
I licked the rim of the mug one more time.

“Why?”

“Huh?
 
Oh.
 
Well, I assume she screamed because I was naked.”

“Ah.”
 

“And in part I suppose because I was screaming at her.”

“Ah.
 
Because you were naked.”

“No.
 
Well, yes, I suppose, a little.
 
But I’ve been startled naked before; usually I just make a little squeak sound.
 
Why I screamed…Ludnyola, have you ever actually met your Tanta?”

“No.”

“Seen a photograph, perhaps?”

She shook her head.

“Ah.
 
Then I must ask you to trust me on this, until such time as you can verify it for yourself.
 
Your Tanta Nyjmnckra is, almost beyond doubt, the ugliest woman presently alive on this planet, and I mean no shit.”

Her eyebrows raised.
 
“Really?”

“Was over ten years ago, and I don’t see her for a late bloomer. Honestly, my first impression was a pit bull with a fireplug up its ass.”

“Ah.
 
So…”

“So what with everything, anxiety for Zoey and the kid, a couple of fresh lumps on my head, bad temper, surprise, embarrassment, truly eye-watering ugliness—”

“You screamed.”

“And dropped the urine sample.”

“Ah.”
 

“On my bare foot.”

She winced.
 
“Ow.”

“And most of the contents ended up…”

She closed her eyes.
 
“On—”

“Tanta Nyjmnckra,” we said together.

She opened her eyes again, looked at me…slammed her palm on the table and whooped with laughter.
 
Whooped and hooted and cackled and shrieked, and when somebody laughs like that, what are you gonna do but laugh too?

“And somehow a feud developed from this?” she managed to choke out awhile later, and while that made us both laugh harder, it also helped me to taper off again soon.

“Do you see?” I said finally.
 
“There were a few other subsequent incidents I won’t go into, even
less
plausible, that poured gasoline on the flames—but yes, basically the whole feud began right there.
 
A feud violent enough that within a year more than a hundred people had to pick up their entire lives, pack them into converted buses, and move them more than a thousand miles down the coast to Key West.
 
Ten years later, the general consensus seems to be that we all gained more than we lost by it.
 
But my point is, it was necessary.
 
Why?
 
Because Nyjmnckra and I loathed each other on sight.
 
Why?
 
Well, she hated me because I was rude, stupid, clumsy, and naked.
 
And I hated her because she had been pissed on by God, and because she objected to being pissed on by me.
 
Who had the high ground there?”

She sat up straighter.

I took my glasses off, held them up to the light, saw that they were filthy, began polishing them with a napkin.
 
“Do you see—
huff! huff!
—what I mean?
 
She and I have invested a decade of prime hatred in each other.
 
I taught my damn wife and child to hate her, and all my friends.
 
She taught her nephew to hate us right out of town, and ultimately it all trickled down, like the upstairs neighbor’s leaking toilet, onto
you
.
 
And now whenever I see you, I remember that everything she hated me for was my fault, and nothing I hated her for was hers.”

My wife’s splendidly familiar voice came from just behind me.
 
“You keep this sort of shit up for
another
fifty years or so, Slim, and you’re in serious danger of maturing.”
 
Her wonderfully familiar hand settled on my shoulder and squeezed gently.

I tilted my head all the way back, until I could see her magnificently familiar face upside down, and grin at it.
 
“I ain’t worried.
 
Eavesdropping, eh?”

“Hear my old man laughing that hard with another woman, bet your ass I’m eavesdropping,” she said.
 
She was wearing her favorite kimono, the purple silk job with the dragon on the back.
 
Her other, equally gloriously familiar hand settled on my other shoulder.
 
“I’m glad I did.
 
You nailed it, spice.
 
Tanta Nyjmnckra has been a hole in everybody’s bucket.
 
And now we can finally start mending it.”

Even upside down, it was a rapturously familiar, totally satisfying kiss.

She dropped into a chair beside me and took both of my hands in hers.
 
“I have a couple of holes in my own bucket to deal with,” she said.

I thought of six funny replies, and shut up.

“First of all, I know you would never say it at gunpoint, so I will.
 
You told me so.
”

I said nothing.
 

“I don’t know what the hell possessed me to do something so stupid.
 
Forget risking the universe, screw the universe: I risked my life, and Erin’s life, and I don’t have the right to do either without consulting you, because they both involve you—”

I squeezed her hands.
 
“Whoa.
 
I can see you’re mad at yourself—”

She smiled wryly.
 
“Let me put it this way.
 
Every time I put myself in hard vacuum, it really makes my blood boil.”

Ludnyola barked with involuntary laughter, then swallowed it hard.

“Well, okay,” I said.
 
“But I’m
not
mad.
 
You did what you had to do.
 
What with one thing and another, raising Erin has never really given you much chance to use your maternal protective instinct.
 
Right from birth, she just hardly ever gave either of us any reason to be frightened.
 
Not only did you suddenly acquire a perfectly good excuse to be scared shitless for her, you probably knew somewhere deep inside that it’s never likely to happen again—that this was your very last chance to freak out.
 
Having just done a little freaking out of my own, I can empathize, you know?”

She looked at me for a long moment and then said, “Will you marry me?”

“Repeatedly,” I said.

“How long have you two been married?” Ludnyola asked.

“Not long enough,” we said together, and squeezed each other’s hands.

Suddenly something struck me about her grip.
 
I looked, and sure enough.
 
“You still have your ring!
 
I thought it’d be halfway to Neptune by now.”

She glanced down at it.
 
“Oh.
 
No, Erin did have to take it off my finger to teleport me home, but she sent it home first, under separate cover as it were.
 
She was in a bit of a hurry, so she just dropped it in the pool; Lex found it and gave it back to me a few minutes ago.
 
There are a zillion teeny tiny little pits on the surface now; I think it’s cool.”

“Stick with me, baby,” I said, “and I’ll get you a ring of space-burned gold…”

Another in a soul-satisfyingly familiar series of kisses.

“I still have one more hole in my bucket,” she said then.

“I’m going to leave that line alone,” I said.

“Yes, you are.”
 
She released my hands and turned in her chair to face Ludnyola.
 
“I thought some hard thoughts about you, these last few days.
 
I’ve been doing a little more thinking since I found out I’d be dead if it hadn’t been for you.”

“I only—”

Zoey overrode her.
 
“I have no more business hating you than my husband had hating your Tanta.
 
Your job, what you have to see, what you have to do…what you must burn to do and can’t…the bullshit you must have to listen to, the empty-eyed children, the crushing caseload and the pathetic budget…it almost
has
to make you cold, formal, efficient, suspicious, profoundly cynical, aggressive,
 
stubborn and rigid, if you were a decent human being to start with.
 
Almost anyone doing any kind of social work is like an inner-city cop armed with a slingshot and armored with cellophane—never mind the ones who have to cope with children.
 
You become a bureaucrat or you get your heart torn out, those are the choices.
 
Add in the family pressure your cousin and his aunt put on you…”
 
She held out a hand, and Ludnyola hesitantly took it.
 
“I ask you to forgive me for judging you, before you accept my thanks for saving my life.”

The Field Inspector blinked and blinked and blinked at her.
 
Finally she said, “Don’t mention it, you’re welcome, if I only met a few more people like you two—and Mei-Ling and all your friends—in the course of my work, I think I’d be a much nicer person to be around.”

“We’ve got a guest bed,” Zoey told her.
 
“If you phone ahead it’ll even have clean sheets on it.”

*
 
*
 
*

The matter of the state of Florida versus Zoey and me dried up and blew away the next day.
 
Field Inspector L. Czrjghnczl filed an Annual Evaluation report in Tallahassee stating that in her opinion, the home-schooling of the minor child Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz adequately and appropriately demonstrated educational progress at a level commensurate with her intellectual age and ability, as required by statute, and that while it had been mutually agreed that the Inspector herself would serve as the regular Annual Evaluator in future (every year at Fantasy Fest time), no further formal written reports would be deemed necessary.

That same afternoon, I mailed brief but sincere letters of apology, translated into Ukrainian and then handwritten, to both Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi and Smithtown Town Inspector Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi.
 
I had thought to send a few pounds of exotic chocolates along with hers and a case of good vodka with his…but at the suggestion of Ludnyola (who’d also kindly done the translating for me), I reversed them, and by golly, each of them eventually sent me back a letter accepting my apology.
 
Tanta Nyjmnckra actually came down for a visit, a year later—during Fantasy Fest—but that’s another, and far more ridiculous, story.

*
 
*
 
*

Two days after that, Bert the Shirt came by, resplendent in a cobalt-blue silk shirt with fire opal cufflinks that were older than he was, and sat at the best table in the house with Don Giovanni wheezing dryly on his lap and a crowd gathered around him, anxious to hear the word.
 
And the word was that nearly all the ten million dollars had been recovered, and while Tony Donuts Junior was apparently still alive, his net worth and his life expectancy were both very close to zero.

“Tony’s no Einstein,” he told us, “but the third time in a row he breaks a hundred, an five minutes later guys shoot at him, even he figures out this ten million is no good fah spendin.
 
So basically he abandons it ta slow the hunters down, an keeps runnin—in effect he gives it back ta Chollie, see?
 
Chollie smiles so much lately sharks are gettin jealous.”

“Where do you figure Tony is now, Uncle Bert?” Erin asked.

Bert was dipping his aged fingers in a glass of ice water, and sprinkling Don Giovanni.
 
The dog sighed every time droplets hit a good spot.
 
“Well, nobody’s brought Chollie his head, so he might be on earth.
 
But if he is, it’s someplace where they don’t have booze, dope, hookers, gambling,
 
unsecured loans, hotel linen, garbage collection, airports, thieves, cops, lawyers, TVs or telephones.
 
There was one reported sighting up at Baffin Bay, but the thinking now is it was probably a polar bear.
 
I think ya can fuhgeddaboutim.”