“The only trouble with a reputation for crudeness is that sooner or later you run short of unsuspecting victims. So you look for new faces. One day I’m at a party off campus, and I notice a young lady I’ve never seen before, a pretty little thing in an off-the-shoulder blouse. Oboy, I sez to myself, fresh blood! What’ll I do? I’ve got the mouse in one pocket, the rectal-thermometer swizzle stick in the other, but she looks so virginal and innocent I decide the hell with subtlety, I’ll try a direct approach. So I walk over to where she’s sittin’ talkin’ to Petey LeFave on a little couch. I come up behind her, like, upzip me trousers, out with me instrument, and lay it across her shoulder.”
There were some howls of outrage, from the men as much as from the women, and some giggles, from the women as much as from the men. “Well, I said I was a jackass,” the Drink said, and we all applauded.
“No reaction whatsoever do I get from her,” he went on, dropping into his fake brogue. “People grinnin’ or growlin’ all round the room just like here, Petey’s eyes poppin’, but this lady gives no sign that she’s aware of me presence atall, atall. I kinda wiggle it a bit, and not a glance does she give me. Finally I can’t stand it. ‘Hey,’ I sez, tappin’ her other shoulder and pointing, ‘what do you think this is?’ And she takes a leisurely look. Then she looks me in the eye and says, ‘It’s something like a man’s penis, only smaller.’”
An explosion of laughter and applause filled the room.
“…wherefore,” continued Long-Drink, “I propose a toast: to me youth, and may God save me from a relapse.” And the cheers overcame the laughter as he gulped his drink and flung the glass into the fireplace. I nearly grinned myself.
“My turn,” Tommy Janssen called out, and the Drink made way for him at the chalk line. Tommy’s probably the youngest of the regulars; I’d put him at just about twenty-one. His hair is even longer than mine, but he keeps his face mowed.
“This happened to me just last week. I went into the city for a party, and I left it too late, and it was the wrong neighborhood of New York for a civilian to be in at that time of night, right? A dreadful error! Never been so scared in my life. I’m walking on tippy-toe, looking in every doorway I pass and trying to look insolvent, and the burning question in my mind is, ‘Are the crosstown buses still running?’ Because if they are, I can catch one a block away that’ll take me to bright lights and safety—but I’ve forgotten how late the crosstown bus keeps running in this part of town. It’s my only hope. I keep on walking, scared as hell. And when I get to the bus stop, there, leaning up against a mailbox, is the biggest, meanest-looking, ugliest, blackest man I have ever seen in my life. Head shaved, three days’ worth of beard, big scar on his face, hands in his pockets.”
Not a sound in the joint.
“So the essential thing is not to let them know you’re scared. I put a big grin on my face, and I walk right up to him, and I stammer, ‘Uh…crosstown bus run all night long?’ And the fella goes…” Tommy mimed a ferocious-looking giant with his hands in his pockets. Then suddenly he yanked them out, clapped them rhythmically, and sang, “Doo-dah, doo-dah!”
The whole bar dissolved in laughter.
“…fella whipped out a joint, and we both got high while we waited for the bus,” he went on, and the laughter redoubled. Tommy finished his beer and cocked the empty. “So my toast is to prejudice,” he finished, and pegged the glass square into the hearth, and the laughter became a standing ovation. Isham Latimer, who is the exact color of recording tape, came over and gave Tommy a beer, a grin, and some skin.
Suddenly I thought I understood something, and it filled me with shame.
Perhaps in my self-involvement I was wrong. I had not seen the Doc communicate in any way with Long-Drink or Tommy, nor had the toasters seemed to notice me at all. But all at once it seemed suspicious that both men, both proud men, had picked tonight to stand up and uncharacteristically tell egg-on-my-face anecdotes. Damn Doc Webster! I had been trying so hard to keep my pain off my face, so determined to get my toast made and get home without bringing my friends down.
Or was I, with the egotism of the wounded, reading too much into a couple of good anecdotes well told? I wanted to hear the next toast. I turned around to set my beer down so I could prop my face up on both fists, and was stunned out of my self-involvement, and was further ashamed.
It was inconceivable that I could have sat next to her for five minutes without noticing her—anywhere in the world, let alone at Callahan’s Place.
I worked the night shift in a hospital once, pushing a broom. The only new faces you see are the ones they wheel into Emergency. There are two basic ways people react facially to mortal agony. The first kind smiles a lot, slightly apologetically, thanks everyone elaborately for small favors, extravagantly praises the hospital and its every employee. The face is animated, trying to ensure that the last impression it leaves before going under the knife is of a helluva nice person whom it would be a shame to lose. The second kind is absolutely blank-faced, so utterly wrapped up in wondering whether he’s dying that he has no attention left for working the switches and levers of the face—or so certain of death that the perpetual dialogue people conduct with their faces has ceased to interest him. It’s not the total deanimation of a corpse’s face, but it’s not far from it.
Her face was of the second type. I suppose it could have been cancer or some such, but somehow I knew her pain was not physical. I was just as sure that it might be fatal. I was so shocked I violated the prime rule of Callahan’s Place without even thinking about it. “Good God, lady,” I blurted, “What’s the matter?”
Her head turned toward me with such elaborate care that I knew her car keys must be in the coffee can behind the bar. Her eyes took awhile focusing on me, but when they did, there was no one looking out of them. She enunciated her words.
“Is it to me to whom you are referring?”
She was not especially pretty, not particularly well dressed, her hair cut wrong for her face and in need of brushing. She was a normal person, in other words, save that her face was uninhabited, and somehow I could not take my eyes off her. It was not the pain—I wanted to take my eyes from that—it was something else.
It was necessary to get her attention. “Nothing, nothing, just wanted to tell you your hair’s on fire.”
She nodded. “Think nothing of it.” She turned back to her screwdriver and started to take a sip and sprayed it all over the counter. She shrieked on the inhale, dropped the glass, and flung her hands at her hair.
Conversation stopped all over the house.
She whirled on me, ready to achieve total fury at the slightest sign of a smile, and I debated giving her that release but decided she could not afford the energy it would cost her. “I’m truly, truly sorry,” I said at once, “but a minute ago you weren’t here and now you are, and that’s the way I wanted it.”
Callahan was there, his big knuckly hand resting light as lint on my shoulder. His expression was mournful. “Prying, Jake? You?”
“That’s up to her, Mike,” I said, holding her eyes.
“What you talkin’ about?” she asked.
“Lady,” I said, “there’s so much pain on your face I just have to ask you, How come? If you don’t want to tell me, then I’m prying.”
She blinked. “And if you are?”
“The little guy with a face like a foot who has by now tiptoed up behind me will brush his blackjack across my occiput, and I’ll wake up tomorrow with the same kind of head you’re gonna have. Right, Eddie?”
“Dat’s right, Jake,” the piano man’s voice came from just behind me.
She shook her head dizzily, then looked around at friendly, attentive faces. “What the hell kind of place is this?”
Usually we prefer to let newcomers figure that out for themselves, but I couldn’t wait that long. “This is Callahan’s. Most joints the barkeep listens to your troubles, but we happen to love this one so much that we all share his load.
This is the place you found because you needed to.” I gave it everything I had.
She looked around again, searching faces. I saw her look for the prurience of the accident spectator and not find it; then I saw her look again for compassion and find it. She turned back to me and looked me over carefully. I tried to look gentle, trust-worthy, understanding, wise, and strong. I wanted to be more than I was for her. “He’s not prying, Eddie,” she said at last. “Sure, I’ll tell you people. You’re not going to believe it anyway. Innkeeper, gimme coffee, light and sweet.”
She picked somebody’s empty from the bar, got down unsteadily from her chair, and walked with great care to the chalk line. “You people like toasts? I’ll give you a toast. To fivesight,” she said, and whipped her glass so hard she nearly fell. It smashed in the geometrical center of the fireplace, and residual alcohol made the flames ripple through the spectrum.
I made a small sound.
By the time she had regained her balance, young Tommy was straightening up from the chair he had placed behind her, brushing his hair back over his shoulders. She sat gratefully. We formed a ragged half-circle in front of her, and Shorty Steinitz brought her the coffee. I sat at her feet and studied her as she sipped it. Her face was still not pretty, but now that the lights were back on in it, you could see that she was beautiful, and I’ll take that any day. Go chase a pretty one and see what it gets you. The coffee seemed to help steady her.
“It starts out prosaic,” she began. “Three years ago my first husband, Freddie, took off with a sculptress named, God help us, Kitten, leaving me with empty savings and checking, a mortgage I couldn’t cut, and a seven-year-old son. Freddie was the life of the party. Lily of the valley. So I got myself a job on a specialist newspaper. Little businessmen’s daily, average subscriber’s median income fifty kay. The front-page story always happened to be about the firm that had bought the most ad space that week. Got the picture? I did a weekly Leisure Supplement, ten pages every Thursday, with a…you don’t care about this crap. I don’t care about this crap.
“So one day I’m sitting at my little steel desk. This place is a reconverted warehouse, one immense office, and the editorial department is six desks pushed together in the back, near the paste-up tables and the library and the wire. Everybody else is gone to lunch, and I’m just gonna leave myself when this guy from accounting comes over. I couldn’t remember his name; he was one of those grim, stolid, fatalistic guys that accounting departments run to. He hands me two envelopes. ‘This is for you,’ he says, ‘and this one’s for Tom.’ Tom was the hippie who put out the weekly Real Estate Supplement. So I start to open mine—it feels like there’s candy in it—and he gives me this look and says, ‘Oh no, not now.’ I look at him like huh? and he says, ‘Not until it’s time. You’ll know when,’ and he leaves. Okay, I say to myself, and I put both envelopes in a drawer, and I go to lunch and forget it.
“About three o’clock I wrap up my work, and I get to thinking about how strange his face looked when he gave me those envelopes. So I take out mine and open it. Inside it are two very big downs—you know, powerful tranquilizers. I sit up straight. I open Tom’s envelope, and if I hadn’t worked in a drugstore once, I never would have recognized it. Demerol. Synthetic morphine, one of the most addictive drugs in the world.
“Now Tom is a hippie-looking guy, like I say, long hair and mustache, not long like yours, but long for a newspaper. So I figure this accounting guy is maybe his pusher and somehow he’s got the idea I’m a potential customer. I was kind of fidgety and tense in those days. So I get mad as hell, and I’m just thinking about taking Tom into the darkroom and chewing him out good, and I look up, and the guy from accounting is staring at me from all the way across the room. No expression at all, he just looks. It gives me the heebie-jeebies.
“Now, overhead is this gigantic air-conditioning unit, from the old warehouse days, that’s supposed to cool the whole building and never does. What it does is drip water on editorial and make so much goddamn noise you can’t talk on the phone while it’s on. And what it does, right at that moment, is rip loose and drop straight down, maybe eight hundred pounds. It crushes all the desks in editorial, and it kills Mabel and Art and Dolores and Phil and takes two toes off of Tom’s right foot and misses me completely. A flying piece of wire snips off one of my ponytails.
“So I sit there with my mouth open, and in the silence I hear the publisher say, ‘God damn it,’ from the middle of the room, and I climb over the wreckage and get the Demerol into Tom, and then I make a tourniquet on his arch out of rubber bands and blue pencils, and then everybody’s taking me away and saying stupid things. I took those two tranquilizers and went home.”
She took a sip of her coffee and sat up a little straighter. Her eyes were the color of sun-cured Hawaiian buds. “They shut the paper down for a week. The next day, when I woke up, I got out my employee directory and looked this guy up. While Bobby was in school, I went over to his house. It took me hours to break him down, but I wouldn’t take no answer for an answer. Finally he gave up.
“‘I’ve got fivesight,’ he told me. ‘Something just a little bit better than foresight.’ It was the only joke I ever heard him make, then or since.”
I made the gasping sound again. “Precognition,” Doc Webster breathed. Awkwardly, from my tailor’s seat, I worked my keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Callahan. He caught them in the coffee can he had ready and started a shot of Bushmill’s on its way to me without a word.
“You know the expression ‘Bad news travels fast’?” she asked. “For him it travels so fast it gets there before the event. About three hours before, more or less. But only bad news. Disasters, accidents, traumas large and small are all he ever sees.”
“That sounds ideal,” Doc Webster said thoughtfully. “He doesn’t have to lose the fun of pleasant surprises, but he doesn’t have to worry about unpleasant ones. That sounds like the best way to…” He shifted his immense bulk in his chair. “Damn it, what is the verb for precognition? Precognite?”
“Ain’t they the guys that sang that ‘Jeremiah was a bullfrog’ song?” Long-Drink murmured to Tommy, who kicked him hard in the shins.
“That shows how much you know about it,” she told the Doc. “He has three hours to worry about each unpleasant surprise—and there’s a strictly limited amount he can do about it.”
The Doc opened his mouth and then shut it tight and let her tell it. A good doctor hates forming opinions in ignorance.
“The first thing I asked him when he told me was why hadn’t he warned Phil and Mabel and the others. And then I caught myself and said, ‘What a dumb question! How’re you going to keep six people away from their desks without telling them why? Forget I asked that.’
“‘It’s worse than that,’ he told me. ‘It’s not that I’m trying to preserve some kind of secret identity—it’s that it wouldn’t do the slightest bit of good anyway, I can ameliorate—to some extent. But I cannot prevent. No matter what. I’m not…not permitted.’
“‘Permitted by who?’ I asked.
“‘By whoever or whatever sends me these damned premonitions in the first place,’ he said. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea who.’
“‘What exactly are the limitations?’
“‘If a pot of water is going to boil over and scald me, I can’t just not make tea that night. Sooner or later I will make tea and scald myself. The longer I put off the inevitable, the worse I get burned. But if I accept it and let it happen in its natural time, I’m allowed to, say, have a pot of ice water handy to stick my hand in. When I saw that my neighbor’s steering box was going to fail, I couldn’t keep him from driving that day, but I could remind him to wear his seatbelt, and so his injuries were minimized. But if I’d seen him dying in that wreck, I couldn’t have done anything—except arrange to be near the wife when she got the news. It’s…it’s especially bad to try to prevent a death. The results are…’ I saw him start to say ‘horrible’ arid reject i
t as not strong enough. He couldn’t find anything strong enough.
“‘Okay, Cass,’ I said real quick. ‘So at least you can help some. That’s more than some doctors can do. I think that was really terrific of you, to bring me that stuff like that, take a chance that I’d think you were—hey, how did you get hold of narcotics on three hours’ notice?’
“‘I had three hours’ warning for the last big blackout,’ he told me. ‘I took two suitcases of stuff out of Smithtown General while they were trying to get their emergency generator going. I…have uses for the stuff.’”
She looked down into her empty cup, then handed it to Eddie, who had it refilled. While he was gone, she stared at her lap, breathing with her whole torso, lungs cycling slowly from absolutely full to empty.
“I was grateful to him. I felt sorry for him. I figured he needed somebody to help him. I figured after a manic-oppressive like Freddie, a quiet, phlegmatic kind of guy might suit me better. His favorite expression was, ‘What’s done is done.’ I started dating him. One day Bobby fell…fell out of a tree and broke his leg, and Uncle Cass just happened to be walking by with a hypo and splints.” She looked up and around at us, and her eyes fastened on me. “Maybe I wanted my kid to be safe.” She looked away again. “Make a long story short, I married him.”
I spilled a little Bushmill’s down my beard. No one seemed to notice.
Time Travelers Strictly Cash Page 2