Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0) (7 page)

“Well,” Marty Pignatelli spoke up, “I was planning to make an Italian rabbit stew for everybody, but you managed to find a way to screw that up, Jake.”

“Oh, Fifty-Fifty,” I said, shaking my head theatrically.
 
We had all started calling Marty Pignatelli Fifty-Fifty that year to break his chops, the logic being that he was a retired policeman —”Five-Oh” in street parlance—and had just turned fifty.
 
I smelled a pun coming, now, chiefly because Marty was
not
one of the seven competent cooks, and I decided to help him out by supplying the shortest distance between two puns: a straight line.
 
“What could I possibly have done to spoil your cooking plans?”

He didn’t let me down.
 
“Not buy the hare of my guinea din-din.”

It was decided, by instant consensus, that Marty really ought to be chatting with Lex rather than with us, and he was delivered there airmail by an ad hoc committee.
 
He made an impressive splash, exciting general merriment.

Most important to me, my daughter’s dark mood of self-recrimination vanished in a silver cascade of giggles.

That sort of set the tone.
 
The crisis was over now, the emergency past for the moment, problems remained to be solved but for the moment there was no pressing reason for us to stay sober. First Willard and Maureen and Eddie and I finished our parodic desecration of “Swingin’ on a Star” together—

Or would you like to swing with your wife?

Eat your beans and peas with a knife?

And be smarter dead than in life?

Or would you rather be a dork?

But if you’ve got some manners and class

And you ain’t a pain in the ass

And you’ve an itch to pitch you a glass

In an amazing state of grace

You could be swinging at The Place!

—and after that, Eddie and I did one of our usual sets of whatever piano/guitar tunes entered our heads, and by the time we were ready for a break, Willard had finished barbequeing, and about then the evening crowd started to arrive, and what with one thing and another, the Place managed—in spite of the brief shocking infestation of the Bureaucrat From Hell—to return to what we like to consider normal, at least for the rest of that night.

*
 
*
 
*

Zoey came plodding home in the small hours.
 
She looked like an unusually lovely zombie and moved like Lawrence three-quarters of the way to Aqabba.
 
Bass players work
hard
.
 
Especially on Duval Street.

Some of the plodding, of course, was due to the fact that she was towing her ax behind her.
 
Minga is a big brute of a standup bass, which produces a sound so powerful Zoey’s never bothered to electrify her, but even in the wheeled case I built for her she just barely qualifies as portable.
 
Erin keeps offering to just teleport the thing home for her mother after gigs, and I suspect one of these days Zoey’s going to take her up on it.
 
Art ain’t easy.

By then everyone but me had gone home, and the compound residents—Eddie, Doc and Mei-Ling, Tom Hauptmann, Long-Drink and Tommy Janssen, Pixel, Alf, Lex and even, thank God, Harry—had all gone to bed in their various cottages.
 
I still had a few closing-up chores to do behind the bar, but nothing that wouldn’t keep until tomorrow.
 
I stopped whatever I was doing, came around the bar, and joined my beloved in the last fifty yards of her March To The Sack.

“Hi,” I said.

Pause, several slow strides long.
 
“Mmrm,” she agreed finally.
 

“Glad it went well, Spice.”
 
Her face was slack with fatigue, but I could tell it had been a very good gig: the corners of her mouth turned up perceptibly.
 

She nodded once.
 
Long pause.
 
“Gate.”

“Yeah, Omar’s fixing it.
 
It got split down the middle.
 
I told him to leave a scar.”

Pause.
 
Then one eyebrow twitched.
 
“Big Beef.”

“Right.”

She grunted approval.
 
We were already in our cottage by then.
 
She let go of Minga’s case-handle in the middle of the livingroom and, freed of her weight, seemed to almost float into the bedroom.
 
Where she waited, patient as a horse being unsaddled, while I undressed her.
 
It is, I find, a vastly interesting experience to undress the most beautiful and desirable woman in the world, and to know with equal certainty both that she feels exactly the same about you, and that if you attempt the slightest sexual liberty
now
she will kill you with a single blow.
 
There ought to be a word for frustration that doesn’t make it sound like a bad thing.
 
I stopped chatting to devote my full attention to the task.
 

As soon as I was done, Zoey toppled over into bed like a felled tree—a fascinating thing to watch, from start to a couple of moments after the finish, when the ripples died down.
 
I heard her eyelids slam shut, and she made a small purring sound deep in her throat.
 
But my wife is a polite person; before surrendering to unconsciousness, she turned her face toward me and murmured, “’thing ’kay, spice?”

Tough choice to make.
 
I knew she was physically and mentally exhausted, knew she had earned her rest, knew there was nothing useful she could possibly do about anything until she woke up anyway.
 

I also knew, to a fair degree of certainty, what she would say tomorrow if I let her go to sleep without telling her.
 
The question was, was I hero enough to accept that penance, in order to give my beloved a good night’s rest.

Well, maybe I would have been…but I I hesitated too long making my choice.
 
One of her eyelids flicked, as if it were thinking about opening, and she repeated, “’thing ’kay?”

I suppressed a sigh.
 
As casually as I knew how, I said, “A little hassle came up, but nothing you need worry about now.
 
Erin and I have it covered.”

She made a half-inch sketch of a nod.
 
There was a long pause, and just as I’d decided she was under and I was home free, her eyelid twitched again, and she mumbled, “Wha’ troub’?”

This time my sigh emerged.
 
“Well…”
 
Further amphigory would only be counterproductive.
 
I wish they made a tasty bullet.
 
“…this afternoon a state education inspector showed up.
 
She says she’s going to put Erin in foster-care because we’re unfit parents.
 
No big deal.
 
Go to sleep.”

For about ten seconds I thought I had pulled it off.
 
Then one of her eyes opened wide.
 
“Name.”

“Ludnyola Czrjghnczl.
 
Accent on the ‘rjgh’.”

The eye powered up, swiveled to track me.
 
“Oh my God.
 
A relative of—”

I hastily nodded, to spare her throat.
 
She’d been breathing barroom air all night.
 
“You guessed it.”

Both eyes were open now, though the second wasn’t tracking yet.
 
“Was she carrying a briefcase?”

“Afraid so.”

She was sitting bolt upright in bed.
 
I hadn’t seen her move.
 
“Job title.”

“Senior Field Inspector, Florida Department of Ed.”

Her second eye caught up with the first and locked on to me.
 
“The home-schooling scam came apart?”

I nodded, and she groaned.
 
“Oh,
shit
.”

A man has to know when he’s in over his head.
 
What kind of coward would wake his teenager in the middle of the night to help him deal with an emergency?
 
This kind.
 
I fiddled with my watch, and Erin materialized next to us, and after that a whole
lot
of words got said,
 
but I can’t think of a rason to burden you with any of them.

It wasn’t
that
bad.
 
It could have gone much worse.
 
It was no more than half an hour after dawn when I managed to get the last of us—me—to sleep.
 
But the upshot was, all three of us started the next day feeling unusually tired…and of course it turned out to be a worse day than the one before.

Not that it started out that way.

I was able to sleep in a little, for one thing.
 
I run the kind of bar where it’s not strictly necessary for me to be there when it opens.
 
Everybody knows where everything is, and just about any of them is competent to step in and serve a newcomer if need be.
 
(It must be hell to serve alcohol to people you don’t trust with your life.)

When I finally emerged, showered and nearly human, from my home into the morning light, Long-Drink McGonnigle was behind the bar, and the dozen or so people in front of it all seemed content with his stewardship.
 
A glance at the sun told me it was early afternoon on a nice day, if that last clause isn’t redundant in Key West.
 
Two steps later I stopped in my tracks, paralyzed by a dilemma that might have killed a lesser man.

Two paths lay before me.
 
The right-hand path led to the pool—where Zoey sprawled in a chaise longue, sunbathing.
 
(Not tanning.
 
Thanks to the Callahans, none of us is capable of it.
 
Our bodies don’t believe in ionizing radiation, any more than they believe in bullets.
 
Perhaps this is regrettable—but since it kept us from being toasted by an exploding atom bomb once, I’ve never quite managed to regret it.)
 
My Zoey has the most beautiful body I’ve ever seen—have I mentioned this?—as generously lush as my own is parsimoniously scrawny, the kind of body Rubens or Titian would have leapt to paint, the kind they call BBW on Usenet, and when it glistens with perspiration…well, it glistens, that’s all.

But the
left
-hand path led to coffee.

I might be standing there now, my nose still pulling me in two different directions, if I hadn’t noticed the small bucket of coffee my darling had placed on the flagstone beside her recliner.

“Can I have some of your coffee, spice?”

She raised her sunglasses.
 
“If it’s worth your life to you.”

“Thanks.”
 
Cuban Peaberry, it was, somewhere between a medium and a dark roast.
 
To forestall my assassination, I took a seat down at the end of the recliner and began rubbing her feet.
 
Young men, forget Dr. Ruth and heed the advice of a middle-aged fart: rub her tootsies.
 
This is the only Jungle Love Technique you will ever need; done properly it will melt a Valkyrie.

“Have some more coffee,” Zoey murmured shortly.
 
And a little later, “Alright, you win, I will tell you of our troop movements.”
 
Then nothing but purring for awhile.

After I judged enough time had gone by, I said, “Has Erin filled you in?”

“Yes.
 
It
ought
to be manageable.
 
She’s working on it now.”

As if we’d invoked her, Erin came out of the house just then.
 
From a distance, in shorts and halter and bare feet, she looked pretty enough to make a bishop dance the dirty boogie.
 
Closer up, though, the frown spoiled the effect a little.
 
Nobody can frown like a new teenager.

When she reached us she dropped like a sack of laundry into the chaise longue next to Zoey’s and said, “I think we’re screwed.”

“I’m just rubbing her feet,” I said.

“Good morning to you, too,” her mother said, ignoring me.

“Good morning,” Erin conceded.

“That’s better.
 
How screwed?”

“The
law
says just what I thought it did: we can get me evaluated by quote any Florida-certified teacher unquote.”

“But…?”

“Well, to put it in technical terms, Ludnyola has the whammy on us.
 
She didn’t just pull some strings, she winched some cables.
 
The deck is not just cold, she’s dipped it in liquid nitrogen.
 
I won’t tell you the details of how she rigged it because I’d get too mad.
 
But the ultimate carriage-return is, there’s now one and only one person in the state of Florida authorized to evaluate me.”

Zoey and I groaned together.
 
How odd, that our groans of genuine dismay sounded precisely like the moans of pleasure Zoey had been making as I rubbed her feet.

“You guessed it,” Erin confirmed.
 
“Accent on the ‘rjkh’—as in, ‘What a dorjkh!’”

Zoey and I exchanged a glance.
 
“Screwed,” I said, and she nodded.

“Well…” Erin said, and trailed off.

After a while, her mother said, “You won’t be well for long, if you don’t finish the sentence.”

“Well, we may have one thing going for us.
 
I’m afraid to trust it, though.”

Why does evolution require humans approaching puberty to become exasperating?
 
My theory is, so their parents will go away and let them get some experimenting done.
 
The only defense is to refuse to be exasperated.
 
(Or, of course, to go away.)
 
After another while, Zoey said gently, “I might better advise you if I had some sense of what it is.”