Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

I started to nod, and that reminded me that she was still clutching my hair. “Yes he is,” I said, and locked my hands around her fanny again so she could let go.

  “Want me to take her?” Zoey asked beside me.

  “I’m fine,” I assured her. And then I looked around—really looked around, and took it all in, setting and sunset and happy people and honest merchants—and added, “In fact, I left ‘fine’ in the dust a long ways back. I’m great. How about you?”

  Her arm went around me, and her hand settled on my butt. “I left ‘great’ behind a long ways back. Jake, what the hell took us so long?”

  Erin and I somehow worked it out wordlessly that she’d take hold of my hair again so as to free up one of my arms to go around Zoey. “Who knew?” I said.

  “True,” Zoey said.

  We watched the sun drop the last few increments. At the last moment, Zoey nudged me and gestured with her chin. I picked out the Doc and Mei-Ling nearby in the crowd. They were kissing, oblivious to crowd and sunset and everything but each other. Just then the bottom edge of the sun melted and spilled down into the water just below, an odd optical illusion that made it look a little like an incandescent flat tire, and a cheer went up, and flash units and horns went off, and a zillion cameras and camcorders began to chatter like a locust orgy. Zoey and I stood arm in arm and watched until the last gleam of sun disappeared…and then we turned to each other and we kissed too. When Erin finally made us break it up, I looked around to find that half the crowd was gone already.

  Including half of our crowd. But it didn’t matter. The trip home was a straight six-block walk, no chance of getting lost—and getting lost in Key West didn’t sound very scary anyway. So we stayed long enough to introduce ourselves to Will Soto, and found the conversation illuminating.

  “In the late Seventies, early Eighties,” he told us, “vendors and buskers were setting up here illegally, and the tourists loved us, and the merchants loved us too, but the city had eyes to put a cruise-ship dock here, so they started hassling us. Recognizing the levity of the situation, we got organized about five years ago. Karen and Richard Tocci and Featherman Louie and Marylyn the Cookie Lady and Love22 and Sister and me and a bunch of others formed the Key West Cultural Preservation Society in ’84, and managed to cool the clem. We got a great show of support from the nearby merchants, and that helped a lot. We finally cut a deal with the city, where the Society leases this dock for four hours every night, and then turns around and rents space to the various artisans and performers. We clean up after ourselves, we keep out the drunks and dealers and dips, everybody’s happy.”

  “There’s a living in it?” Zoey asked.

  “The Society breaks even, the members all make a living.”

  I shook my head. “Jesus. A town that makes a fair deal with its buskers, and then keeps it. I’m gonna like it here.”

  Will grinned like a pirate. “Don’t get too starry-eyed, Jake. They got idiots here like everywhere else. No place is perfect.” Then he blinked. “No, I take that back: this place is perfect.” He sighed faintly. “But no place can stay perfect.”

  “Then we should dig it while we can,” Erin said. “And try and keep it perfect for as long as we can.”

  Will did a small double-take. Erin was down at ground level by then, and for an instant he thought perhaps I was doing a ventriloquist routine. Then he located Erin’s eyes, looked closely at them…and directed his response to her. “You said a mouthful. Erin, right? I wouldn’t mind having those words carved on my headstone, Erin. So what are you guys gonna do down here, to help keep it perfect?”

  “We came to save the universe,” Erin said.

  He pursed his lips judiciously. “Really? Big job. This is the place to do it, though.” He looked up to me. “Is she serious, Jake?”

  What the hell. I nodded.

  It didn’t seem to faze him. “What’s your first move?”

  I searched his face carefully for hints that he was either being sarcastic or politely humoring us. I didn’t find any. “Well, first I’m going to open up a bar—”

  “Good luck,” he said. “This town’s already got more bars than it has drunks—and it has a lot of drunks.”

  “Well, see, I sort of brought my clientele with me,” I said. “It’s a long story, but there’s about a hundred of us.”

  He nodded. “That’ll help.”

  “Can a musician make money in this town?” Zoey asked.

  “If they’re good,” Will said carefully. “What’s your ax?”

  “Standup. Any kind of music.”

  He grinned broadly. “You don’t even need to be good, then. A bass player, versatile, and pretty as you—shit, you’ll have more gigs than you can handle.”

  Zoey beamed.

  “Okay, so your nut’s covered and you open your bar. What then?”

  I floundered, unable to come up with a way to explain it. Erin jumped in. “Daddy and his friends will work on getting telepathic, and then they’ll all talk it over with Uncle Nikky and make a plan, and then they’ll save the universe.”

  He blinked at her. “Uncle Nikky?”

  I sighed, knowing how this was going to sound. But what could I do? “Nikola Tesla,” I said.

  His eyes locked on mine and stayed there for several long seconds. “Look,” he said finally, “I have to break down and stow my gear now. But you and me have got to talk.”

  I told him where we were staying for the time being. “And I know where to find you.”

  “Everybody does,” he agreed. “Nice meeting you, Jake. You too, ladies.”

  “You were great,” Erin told him. He flashed her that pirate grin and was gone. I could see why they’d named a whole school of Zen Buddhism after him.

  As we went by Duval Street on our way back to the trailer court, it was just beginning to gear up for the evening ahead, and you could already sense the energy starting to build. It reminded me a little of the French Quarter in New Orleans, and a little of Commercial Street in Provincetown—sidewalks spilling over with tourists and hustlers and colorful drag queens, storefronts blaring music, pedicabs and tour buses and endless bicycles crawling down a narrow street together. But in many ways it was unlike either the Quarter or P-Town. For one thing, the smells were different, tropical and haunting. Everything was cleaner and less garish and in better repair than the Quarter; it didn’t have the cramped feeling or upscale pretensions of P-Town. I saw a minimum of neon. For a Main Stem, it was pretty okay.

  And the farther we got away from Duval, the nicer and quieter and prettier it got.

  Scents came and went in the night air. Jasmine. Limes. Swimming-pool chlorine. Flowers whose names I didn’t know yet, hibiscus and bougainvillea and frangipani and a dozen others, all intoxicatingly sensual. Cooking smells. Cat pee. Fish off to the left somewhere.

  The side streets on our right got more and more tempting-looking as we left Duval behind, too, but we were all too weary to explore, and stayed on Caroline all the way back home. A block away from the trailer court, Pixel met us, loudly demanding dinner. As we walked, Erin told him about the guy we’d seen at Mallory Square named Dominique, and his truly amazing three trained cats, Sara, Piggy, and Sharky. Pixel seemed properly impressed, and Erin told us he would be coming with us next time to check them out.

  The sight of our own familiar yellow submarines was cheering. The party was already under way, and we joined right in. The Doc and Double Bill were barbecuing ribs and burgers in massive quantities. Tom Hauptman had set up an impromptu bar on a folding table under a coconut palm, and was passing out cold beer, margaritas, piña coladas, and other liquids. Fast Eddie had somehow acquired an upright piano in reasonable tune (it turned out to belong to Double Bill) and was letting his fingers out for a walk after their long confinement. Long-Drink was juggling Key limes. Mei-Ling had organized the kids into a treasure hunt. The Lucky Duck was pitching dimes in the air, had a stack of about eight, on edge, in front of him, and looked about as happy�
��at least, as little unhappy—as I’ve ever seen him.

  We jumped right in. Fed our faces for half an hour, made music for a couple of hours—Double Bill turned out to have a fantastic singing voice, and a great repertoire—then put Erin to bed and talked for another hour or so, over Irish coffees—finally climbed aboard our own yellow home and went to bed. An hour after that we went to sleep, and I distinctly remember thinking as I drifted off that today had been, without question, the happiest day of my life.

  The next day was better.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Place

  “It isn’t pollution that is harming our environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  I WAS AWAKENED BY A

  familiar weight on my chest, and opened my eyes to find my daughter’s angelic face an inch above mine, an expression of solemn disapproval on it. “Daddy,” she whispered, “you’re missing the party!”

  The sun was already high. I was naked, and had kicked off the sheet, and I was neither too hot nor too cold. I realized I had been vaguely aware of divine scents and happy sounds somewhere nearby for some time. Now they came into focus. Subdued laughter. Happy but not manic conversation. Gentle bluesy piano chords, like Charles Brown in an introspective mood, unmistakably Fast Eddie. Giggling children. Soft clattering noises and crackling noises and bubbling noises.

  And let me give the smells a paragraph of their own. First, the underpinning: sea salt, a hint of iodine, just a dash of windblown coral dust, and the blossoms of some lewd tropical flower I didn’t know yet. Then, floating over this base: bacon. Sausages. Onions. Eggs, with which some sharp cheese had been mated in some intriguing way. The never-before-tasted or even -imagined, but somehow unmistakable, tang of fresh-picked avocados mashed with fresh-squeezed Key lime juice. And overriding all these, like Charlie Parker soloing over the orchestra, the smell of smells: coffee. Even better: a kind of coffee I’d never had before, which I could already tell I was going to like a lot, and take with a lot of sugar. I guessed, correctly, that it was Cuban. I could picture the beans: dark and oily and round, like the berries I’d seen the Key deer leave behind.

  Erin was right. Brunch was nearly served.

  I turned to Zoey and gently touched her hair. Her breathing changed. She opened one eye halfway. Then one nostril. (On the same side as the eye.) Then she opened both nostrils, wide, closed the eye again, and smiled. “If you bring me a cup of that,” she said, “I will marry you.”

  “You already did, Mommy.”

  “I’ll do it again.”

  “Now that,” I said with great sincerity, “is a nice thing to hear. It’s a deal.” I removed Erin from my chest and sat up and got dressed. Key West style: a pair of shorts and, just in case it was formal, a pair of sneakers and the NASA ballcap I had picked up at the Shuttle launch.

  Diplomatic relations had clearly been opened with the incumbent residents of the trailer park, and the vibes were good. Even the lesbians were smiling at everybody. Some of the cooking gear was ours, some was unfamiliar; and all of it was busy. Over at the far end of the common space, under a scaly tree that looked to me like it was from Alpha Centauri, Pixel the cat rode regally on the back of Ralph von Wau Wau, both of them surrounded by an awestruck mob of adoring Conch children. Ralph is real good with kids; back home on the Island, they were about the only people outside of Mary’s Place who’d talk to him. Here at my end of the clearing, most of our kids (who were used to Ralph and Pixel by now) were gathered around a splendid snow-white cockatoo that talked. It was talking to Bill Gerrity’s macaw, which did not. The macaw looked lovestruck. Doc and Mei-Ling were at the center of a crowd too, gathered in a rough circle of lawn chairs and chaise lounges, eating and talking and laughing easily.

  I set Erin down, and she scampered off to join the crowd around Ralph and Pixel. I located the coffee urns immediately…but even closer I could see something even more urgent: a bus with its door open. I’m not sure whose it was, but it was empty, and where mine had a gaping hole in the floorboard, it had a toilet. Bladdest, bladder, blad…aaaah.

  I met Double Bill at the coffee urn table. Also on it were huge pitchers of fresh-squeezed orange juice, iced tea, and ice water with Key lime slices floating in it. “Do you know,” I told him, “that this is the first time in ten years I’ve smiled before coffee?”

  He grinned. “Get used to it.”

  “Won’t be easy,” I said, filling a mug and adulterating it. Then I stopped with it halfway to my lips and looked around. “No, wait a minute. It will be easy.”

  “Well,” he said, “we’ll see what we can do to help you exercise the facial muscles involved today, get them in shape for it. After we eat, I’ll take you downtown and show you your new saloon.”

  “Uh—” I already liked Double Bill a lot—but I was from Long Island, and he was a realtor; my instincts fought with my intuition. I sipped coffee to cover, and thought fast. “Gee, Bill, I haven’t even had a chance to really sit down with you and talk about exactly what I’m looking for yet, maybe we ought to do that before—”

  He held up a work-worn hand. “Sam spent about, oh, I guess fifty hours outlining your requirements to me, this last month. How about I just show you the place I have in mind, and then all you’ll have to tell me is what details he got wrong?”

  I had to admit that made sense. “Is it far?”

  The question delighted him. “Son, no place on the Rock is far. It’s about the same distance as Mallory Square; we’ll bike over after brunch.”

  By now I had enough caffeine in me to be civilized. “Thanks a lot, Bill. That’ll be fine. I appreciate.”

  “Go bring some of that java to your lady,” he advised. “The food won’t hold out forever.”

  “You’re a kind man,” I told him.

  “Naw. I just like the way she looks in shorts.”

  Maybe he did know my tastes. “Astute, then.”

  I usually sleep much sounder than Zoey. It was a rare treat, a kind of privileged intimacy, to bring her coffee in bed, to be allowed to witness her transition from sleeping animal to sentient human. I developed the theory that Cuban coffee cures morning breath, and proved it empirically on the spot. The kiss progressed to the point of a promissory note, and then we allowed the food smells, and Zoey’s bladder to pry us apart. As she was dressing I said, “Double Bill likes the way you look in shorts.”

  She grinned over her shoulder at me and tugged them all the way up. “Doesn’t everybody?”

  The food tasted as good as it smelled. We found two folding aluminum lawn chairs nobody else was using, and dug in. As we ate, Jim Omar came up, with a guy I didn’t know: a tall white-haired eagle-beaked senior citizen in shorts and a magnificent pale green linen shirt. He carried something that looked like a deflated football at his right hip. “Somebody I want you to meet, folks,” Omar said. “He’s a friend of Doc’s, and I think he’s going to be a big help to us. Bert, this is Jake and Zoey.”

  “Hewwo, Mert.”

  Bert waved his free hand. “Finish eatin’, kid,” he told me. “Pleasure, Zoey.” Since he couldn’t shake her hand, he took it in his left, bent with an old man’s care, and kissed it. Zoey turned pink and her eyes softened.

  “Bert thinks he can help us get rid of our buses,” Omar told us.

  “Really, Bert?” Zoey asked. “All of them?”

  Bert shrugged. “I’ll call a guy.”

  This was one of the many nagging little worries I’d been sweating: one of my last responsibilities as Road Chief for Callahan’s Caravan. Assuming Double Bill really did have accommodations for our tribe, what the hell were we going to do with two dozen converted buses at the ass end of nowhere, once we were done unloading them? Waste days making cattle-drive runs up to Miami and try to peddle them there? “That sounds great, Bert,” I said, having cleared my mouth by then. “You do know there’s two dozen of the damn things?”

  He nod
ded, and shifted his grip on the object at his hip. “Jimmy tells me once they’re empty, ya got enougha the original seats left ta make like a dozen regular schoolbuses again, anna dozen hulks for pahts, am I right?”

  There was something odd about his voice, besides a slight hoarseness. “Yeah, that sounds about right, I guess.”

  He shrugged again. “I know a guy has, like, interests in transportation, plus he’s got a certain relationship with the school district. Ya got paper on alla buses?”

  “Yeah, they’re legit”

  “Fahget aboudit. Chollie’ll give you a price.”

  I finally got what was strange about his voice: there was nothing strange about it. He was the first stranger I had met in days that didn’t talk funny. He talked normal, like a person. “You’re from Brooklyn, Bert?”

  “President Street,” he agreed. “You was born inna Bronx—Bainbridge Avenue—but you been out onnee Island since. Zoey, you’re from the Island too, am I right?”

  “Huntington,” she told him. “You have a good ear, Bert.”

  Another shrug. “People talk ta me. Fuck else I got to do but listen? S’cuze my French.”

  She started to tell him not to worry about it, but just then the thing in his hand opened up two gummy eyes and revealed itself to be an ancient chihuahua so ugly it qualified for Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi’s class, canine division—if such a distinction is made. It was smaller than Nyjmnckra, but that was the only visible improvement. Bert was carrying it upside down like a football; it blinked up at me mournfully and blew a long dry fart. He glanced down at it and frowned. I believe there’s a Carl Hiaasen novel in which a psychotic spends several chapters wandering around with a dead pit bull attached to his wrist; that’s the kind of look Bert gave this dog, as if he’d been carrying it like a ball and chain all his life. “Jesus Christ,” he said to it softly. The dog blinked up at him, sighed, and farted again. “Look, I gotta go,” Bert said to us. “This millstone around my neck has gotta have his flaxseed. Ya get the buses empty, you’re ready, lemme know, I’ll give Chollie a call. Maybe we get together sometime afta ya get settled in. Nice meeting ya, Zoey; take it easy, Jake; later, Jimmy.” And he was gone, shuffling away through the sunlight with his dog at his hip.