The Callahan Touch

by Spider Robinson

  “I gotta give you points,” Tanya said calmly, not even breathing hard. “You’re the first guy I ever cuffed that didn’t call me a nigger, not once. The very first. That’s nice—isn’t that nice, Isham?”

  “The Irish, my dear,” the old boy said icily, “are the blacks of the world—and we don’t emulate the oppressor. I limit meself to observin’ what anyone has to admit: you’re unlovely, unkind, and as heavy as lead!”

  His anger had the massive dignity and rolling majesty that only the magnificently drunk can achieve. His voice was a little like the Duck’s: you couldn’t call it pretty, exactly, but it held your attention somehow. It should have sounded ugly, but it didn’t, if that makes any sense. Somehow he kept that longstem pipe clenched in his teeth as he talked, without losing any enunciation at all. From behind the bar, I could smell his breath. It smelled like every drop of alcohol I had thought I owned, earlier in the evening. The wonder was his pipe didn’t set it alight.

  “Damn, little fella,” Isham said, too bemused to be angry at the slurs on his beloved, “who’d you come here with?”

  “Nobody, yet,” the munchkin menace snapped, “and bedad, by the looks of your wife here, it’s sure to be some little while if it’s left up to me! Bondage, is it, with the handcuffs and all? Small wonder you carry these plague-take-it things on your person, ya batface—that must be what got you a husband atall! Sure, for you to be callin’ me ugly is just like the pot tellin’ kettles they’re Afro-American. Cease and unhand me, ya chocolate moose, or I’ll raise up a spell that’ll give yez the root canal every Thanksgivin’ from now till you give up an’ cut yer own throat!”

  Then all at once, with the mercurial changeability of the magnificently smashed, he forgot he was angry at her. “You know,” he said conversationally, “it’s a long time indeed I been wonderin’ why your own folk ever gave up so gorgeous a name as The Colored—I don’t understand it, be dipped if I do. Now what in the name of old Cu Chullain’s cummerbund ever possessed yez to call yerselves Black—when yer not, and the word stands for everythin’ scary and evil there is? I traveled the world in me youth, and I noticed yez mocha, mahogany, chestnut and cocoa…ochre and umber and amber and gold…” His eyes were literally twinkling, as if someone had focused a baby spot on them. “…coffee with cream, coffee with milk, coffee with nothin’ but Tullamore Dew…amber and anatase, russet and chocolate…both the siennas, the burnt and the raw, hazel and sepia, several more…an’ never a black man or woman I saw. Most perishin’ colorful people on earth, and ‘black’ is the word for the absence of color! Go cobble a new pair o’ shoes from the hide of the darkest of darkies in Africa: see if they’ll let yez be wearin’ them shoes to a wake—by old Balor’s bumbershoot, what made yez claim yez a name ya can’t wear, even on the outside? The Black Irish, now: there’s a people that’s black, have yez got any insights to share on the matter?” Whereupon he belched with shattering force, crossed his twinkling eyes, winked the one that was now facing Tanya…then slowly winked the other as well, and passed out.

  The silence was refreshing.

  He remained in mid-air, on his back, breathing noisily. His elongated white pipe—which, thank God, had gone out—had slipped at last from his teeth. It hovered below him, about a foot from the floor. As he breathed, it stirred gently in the air, as though it were attached to the underside of an invisible waterbed.

  “Tanya, Ish, Doc,” I barked, “hang on for dear life—all three of you, every second! He could be faking.” The sense of relief was overwhelming; I needed a moment to get my breath. All three of the little man’s captors set their grips and fixed their resolves.

  “Voice on him like a model airplane,” Doc Webster said finally, shaking his big head. “And yet somehow it’d be kinda pleasant to listen to—if there wasn’t so much of it. So that’s a leprechaun, huh, Jake? I forget what the deal is now: we’re supposed to not take our eyes off him, or something?”

  “Don’t be silly, Doc,” Noah Gonzalez said. “How could you trap him with your eyes when he has the power to turn invisible? It’s the cuffs that’ll hold him, if anything will.”

  “Is it true he knows where to find some Acupulco Gold?” Tommy Janssen asked excitedly. “The famous pot at the end of the rainbow?”

  “Aw, rot at the end of the painbow—that’s an old wives’ tale,” Shorty Steinitz said.

  “What’s wrong with old wives?” Maureen Hooker asked dangerously.

  “Sorry, troops,” I said hoarsely. I tried to clear my throat, but I didn’t seem to have my E-meter. Get thee behind me, Thetan! “I’m sorry to say he’s not a leprechaun. It’s much worse than that. He’s a cluricaune. Leprechauns make shoes.”

  Brief silence.

  “What do cluricaunes do?” Doc Webster asked.

  “Drink.”

  He paled. “Oh, shit.”

  “Hip-deep,” I agreed.

  “A cluricaune,” Long-Drink said darkly, “is a walking thirst.”

  “A walkin’ toist?” Fast Eddie exclaimed. “Cripes, Jake—”

  “Take a good look, folks: that’s the finish of Mary’s Place, right there in handcuffs,” I told them all. Tanya, Isham and the Doc all redoubled their grip. “Unlike many of the Little Folk, a cluricaune will attach himself to a specific place, rather than to a family or clan. And what he does to that place is to drink it dry as an Iranian cabinet meeting—no matter what God or man may do or try to do to stop him. Even a Russian would call him a black hole. A cluricaune can suck booze through a stone jug. He can smell sauce in a cesspool. He’ll eat fuming Drano if you pour in a few drops of vinegar. I can guarantee you not one purse in this room has any nail polish remover left in it right now.”

  The cluricaune began to snore—loudly, and fairly disgustingly. He was not a pretty drunk.

  An extrapolation suddenly occurred to me. “In fact, I am the only bartender in the world prepared to bet cash that not one of his customers needs to pee.”

  Rooba rooba rooba—

  “I thought I knew every con there was,” Willard Hooker said, “but a cluricaune is a new one on me.”

  “What the hell is he doing in America?” Mary Kay asked. “I thought the…uh, the Little People…all stayed in Ireland. Something about the Old Sod—”

  “Why would they all want to be sodomized?” Gentleman John Kilian wondered. “They’re not British.”

  “It’s a good question,” I conceded. “I’ve heard of a few of the old Daoine Sidh leaving Ireland—but mostly pookas, and once in a long while a Fir Darrig. It makes least sense for a cluricaune. Say you loved coffee more than life itself: what would it take to make you move away from the foot of the Blue Mountains of Jamaica? To say the least, it’s highly improb—” I broke off and looked at the Duck.

  “What’s a Deeny Shee?” Eddie asked.

  The Duck seemed to me horrorstruck by my obvious suspicion. Too late, I regretted having let it become obvious. I shrugged with my lips, who cares?, and questioned him with an eyebrow, you okay?, but he shook his head never mind and gestured go ahead with his chin. But he still looked troubled. “The Daoine Sidh are the fairy folk, Eddie,” I said, “descendants of the Tuatha De Danaan, the Tribe of the Goddess Diana. Originally from Greece, by way of Scandinavia, took over Ireland from the Firbolgs back about the time clothes were being invented. Make a long story short, they got their own butts kicked by the Miledhians about twenty-five hundred years ago. The survivors talked it over and decided they couldn’t live as a conquered people. So they went underground, at a place called Brugh na Boinne in County Meath, and over time became the Daoine Sidh: the fairies and pookas and Fir Darrigs and leprechauns—yes, and the cluricaunes too.”

  The cluricaune’s snore backfired twice, sharply, and then settled into the rhythm again—at a higher volume. His pipe, below him, now trembled slightly on each exhale. Who could blame it?

  Doc Webster cleared his throat in counterpoint. “Look, Jake…I don’t know quite how to put this. In thi
s company, I have had personal experience of many strange things. But I understood that the Daoine Sidh were mythical. Like ghosts, and channeled entities, and all that crap. Not real.”

  “You mean ‘real,’ like time machines and faster-than-light travel and people that rain won’t fall on, Doc?”

  “Unt talkink dogs?” Ralph von Wau Wau added.

  The Doc didn’t answer.

  “Will it make you feel any better about it to call what he does ‘PSI,’ Doc? Like the way Fogerty could make the dart board want darts? Like what the Duck does? The cluricaune is here. Our booze is not. Ergo, a subrace of dwarves with paranormal powers must exist. Once you define ‘magic’ as ‘knowledge I don’t have yet,’ you can stop being afraid of it.”

  “Well,” the Doc said reluctantly, “when I’m holding it in my own hand, I can’t very well deny it exists. But I must say this is aggravating. I was looking forward to getting less open-minded as I aged.” He frowned. “All right: the Daoine Sidh are real. Just don’t you say a goddam word to me about Loch Ness!”

  “My grandfather used to tell me stories about them,” Long-Drink said. “Is that how you know about that stuff, Jake?”

  “No, Drink—my people came over a century and a half ago. But awhile back I reached the age where a man starts to wonder about his roots. Turned out my mother’s line, the Meads and the Porters, came from Navan, in County Meath—not far from New Grange, where the Brugh na Boinne is, so I got into the whole story.”

  “Cripes, Jake,” Eddie said. “Two o’ yer ancestors had beers named after ’em?” He looked impressed.

  Well, so was I. “Swear to God. Explains a lot about my destiny, doesn’t it?”

  “How’d ya know da guy’s name wuz Noggin Ian?”

  The cluricaune opened one eye. “Me name is unknown to you yet, gallinaceous repugnant orangutang,” he muttered in his sleep. “Aye, ‘Naggeneen’ is what folks call a cluricaune, just a generical term for the breed: freely translated, it means ‘a short beer.’ Have yez got any here?”

  “Not since you showed up, bocksucker,” Eddie said bitterly.

  The cluricaune went back to sleep. Noisily. His stupendous white beard floated an inch or two above his torso, curling up slightly at the end.

  “He’ll never tell anyone his real name, Eddie,” I said. “In magical terms, it’d be kind of like giving somebody your credit cards—with no way to cancel them.”

  “Jesus, Jake,” Doc Webster said, “skip the family history and nomenclature, will you? This is serious—what do we do about this joker? How do you decluricaune a bar? Try and run this place without lubrication and the engine’ll seize up pretty quick.”

  The bad news first. “The only thing you can usually do to get rid of a cluricaune is go on the wagon, and stay there so long that he gives up and goes looking for a better ’ole.”

  “How long does dat take?” Eddie asked.

  “I’ve heard of up to fifty years,” I said.

  “Fifty years?” Margie Shorter scroaned. “What’s the low end?”

  “I’ve heard of as little as a year,” I said.

  Rooba rooba—

  “I don’t tink I can wait dat long,” the little piano man said, frowning deeply. “I gotta toist myself.”

  “You said ‘the only thing you can usually do…’, Jake,” the Doc said. “What is it you can only do sometimes?”

  Now the good news. I smiled for the first time in what seemed like a long while. “Well, they say that once in a hundred years or so…and mind you, only if you happen to have a pure heart, an eye that sees no evil, a fleet foot, the grip of a lobsterman, and—” I glanced at the Duck. “—the luck of the Devil himself…you might just be lucky enough to capture the cluricaune, in iron. Then you’re in Fat City. It now appears that between us, we made the nut.”

  Rooba rooba rooba—on a tentatively cheerful note.

  Talk about a close call!

  △ △ △

  “So where’s the trigger?” Noah asked. “Now that we have him located, secured and accessed, how do we disarm him?”

  Noah used to be a bomb-disposal expert for the county heat, until there was a spot of unpleasantness over his taking a terrorist nuclear weapon he was working on home for personal use, and not bringing it back. Since no citizens or legal aliens had perished as a result (just a single alien, without papers…and a very nice tavern), no charges had been preferred—but he’d been transferred out of the Bomb Squad for good. He missed it fiercely, and still tended to think in those sort of terms. It was exactly the kind of attitude I was looking for.

  “Hear that, gang?” I said, loud enough to cut through the roobae. “Noah has exactly the right mindset. Think of it like we’re looking at a live, ticking—no, snoring bomb. Everything is going to be perfectly all right—as long as we don’t make any mistakes.” I grinned. “The good news is, the snoring bomb is made of solid gold. Old Naggeneen here is powerful magic. If we handle this right, we can literally have just about Anything In The World We Want. I don’t want to jinx it, but if we don’t blow this, I think we truly may just have come to the End Of The Painbow—”

  “I just wish—” Fast Eddie began.

  “SSSHHHH!” Long-Drink and I said at once.

  He looked offended. “I was just gonna say I w—”

  “Shut up, Eddie!” we both bellowed, fear making us sound enraged, and Doc Webster chimed in with us. Fast Eddie blinked at our combined volume, opened his mouth to speak a third time…saw us all draw breath to shriek at him, and subsided. “Jeezis Christ,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Nice manners, you mugs.”

  I was shaking with relief at the close call. “That’s exactly what I was just getting to,” I said quickly. “Once you capture a cluricaune, you get three wishes.”

  ROOBA ROOBA ROOBA!

  “…the first three wishes spoken aloud…”

  “Aw Jeez,” Eddie said. He thought for a minute. “Sorry, Jake. I almost put my foot in my mout’.”

  I sighed. “That’s okay, Eddie. My fault, for trying to save the good news for last. I should have known, life doesn’t work like that. Would everybody here please be real careful not to use the W-word at all for the next little while—just to be on the safe side?”

  Nods all around. One or two people actually put their hand over their mouth.

  “I think it’s time we gave this some careful thought,” I said…and my voice trailed off. Even for me, the implications were just beginning to sink in.

  Sink in: like a loaded plane, over the Bermuda Triangle…

  Within seconds, the gang’s expressions mirrored my own rapidly evolving succession of emotions. The cluricaune snored contentedly in Tanya’s grip as we tried to sort things out.

  It’s funny: if somebody came up to you and said, “You can have any wish you want,” that’d be a miracle—and I could see all of them start to look as excited as I’d been feeling. But where one wish is more than enough—more than some people get in a lifetime, God help ’em—three wishes can seem, the more you think about it, like an insufficiency. It spoiled their pleasure a little, and realizing that spoiled it a little more for each of them, as it had for me. Then one by one they—as I had—quit wasting time on that crap and came back to a bubbling, Three wishes! What should we wish for?

  But any time now they would catch up with me, and begin to see how horrible the question was.

  I had not thought this thing through…

  △ △ △

  MY PERSONAL FIRST-BALLOT SHORTLIST:

  (in no particular order, as they occurred to me,

  beginning with number two)

  World peace?

  An end to hunger?

  A solution for pollution?

  The end of tyranny?

  A cup of coffee that tastes as good as it smells?

  Universal freedom?

  A resurgence of urban folk music?

  A truce between the sexes?

  Universal respect for prostitutes? Tha
t is, an end to chronic epidemic male and female self-contempt?

  (I could not wish for Love, much as I wanted one in my life: what good is a love gained through magic trickery? But the passing thought suggested:)

  An off-switch for the pain system?

  A good high without addiction or backlash?

  A cure for AIDS?

  A cure for suffering, period?

  A cure for death?

  Oh, dear God: a retroactive cure for death?

  △ △ △

  Barb! Jess!

  Mom!

  △ △ △

  Was there any chance at all of distilling all of that down to three wishes? Was there anything on that list you could forgive yourself for leaving out? Might you not also be tempted to give at least a little thought to wealth and fame—and a hundred other things? I felt like a mule surrounded by three hundred and sixty separate piles of hay—each one concealing a bundle of sweating dynamite.

  And there was still the very first wish I’d thought of. The one I had rejected so instantly I was almost able to convince myself I’d never wished to wish it. A simple, painless, gift-wrapped solution to the personal dilemma I’d been worrying about back at the beginning of the night, the one which had been haunting my dreams and churning my guts into brown butter for the past several months now. It was a small thing, next to world peace—but what isn’t? I wanted to solve it myself, without assistance—but I wasn’t sure I could, and I needed it solved so badly I was tempted beyond words to accept this free pass.

  Looking around me, I could see that just about everybody had some similar personal demon of their own, someone it hurt unbearably to have lost, something they needed to live. And we all knew the arithmetic: several dozen into three doesn’t go.

  Honest to God, I think the dilemma would have destroyed a lesser group than us.

  Had I loved those people an ounce less, I think I’d have said screw ’em and wished my dead ladies back to life before I could have a chance to think about it too much. Had any one of my customers loved me and each other an ounce less, they’d have tried to beat me to it, and there could have been blood over that.