“I take off me lid to yez, woman an’ man,” he said. “Ye’ve taken me best and ye’ve given it back to me. This is a house I’ll be sorry to leave—but I guess ye’ll be wantin’ me off o’ yer premises. Hoo, an’ I can’t say I blame yez atall: I’ve a terrible case o’ the ol’ barrel fever, I know it; it’s part of me nature and cannot be helped. I’d drink every night nearly twice what I’ve guzzled tonight if I stayed. So let’s have it over with: wish your third wish, an’ I’ll be on my way, leavin’ thanks for the laughter you gave me today.”
I looked at Mike Callahan.
He looked back at me.
In his face I saw his daughter Mary’s face…only a wish away from Mary’s Place…
…and for a moment, it seemed to me I could hear her husband Mickey’s voice, speaking in anguish on the night he’d first come to Earth, saying, “I did not know that you had love!”
I turned to the cluricaune. And in that moment I became mature enough to accept the help of magic in solving my problem. It’s not accepting a free pass, I suddenly saw, if I pay for it at fair market value…
“Nobody here wants you gone, Naggeneen,” I said. “I just wish to God that you’d pay for your drinks like a gentleman—”
Mike waved at me frantically, mimed playing with a yo-yo.
Oh Christ, that was close! “—without, let me add, ever using your Sprè na Skillenagh; I mean honest money.”
I thought for a moment he was going to erupt in a towering rage. Instead, he began to laugh and laugh and laugh. If we could laugh at ourselves, his pride would not let him do less. “Done,” he choked amid his guffaws. “Ye’ve quaggled me proper—the first time it’s happened in two hundred years!”
The cash register went chung behind me, and its drawer opened up and began spilling gold coins on my floor.
Pandemonium broke out.
8
The End of the Painbow
“What de hell kind o’ spray was dat you said, Jake?” Eddie called, when the tumult began to die down.
“The Sprè na Skillenagh,” I repeated. “The ‘shilling fortune,’ is the English of it. A magic shilling, that always returns to a cluricaune’s purse the moment you take your eyes off it, like there was a rubber band on it. He keeps it for the suckers. But cluricaunes also always know the location of buried gold, real gold, in unlimited quantities.”
Rooba.
“Jake?” Doc Webster said. “Maybe I’m missing something…but what good is all the gold in the world to us if we can’t get a drink?”
“But we can, Doc,” I said. “You just heard Naggeneen here state a maximum capacity.”
He blinked. “Huh. That’s right, I did. But—”
“What none of you guys understand,” I said, “is that the thirsty little feller is going to be the saving of this place.”
Rooba rooba.
“What do you mean, Jake?”
“Do you remember the state I got myself into, getting this place ready to open, Doc?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Now, you know me, Doc. Look around this place. Is there anything you see here that could have caused me that much grief?”
He spun around slowly. “Well, no, not really, now that you mention it. I did wonder about that some…what you were sweating so hard.”
“I was sweating how to pay for this place,” I said. “Remember how I said last night I was tripling the price of a drink, and everybody carefully didn’t flinch? Fifty cents higher and some of you would have flinched…and rightly too, the amount of sauce we go through. I’ve been running around like a rat in my skull, working arithmetic over and over. I’ve sunk every cent of my savings in this, and so have you all, and there’s no way in hell it can pay for itself.” I turned to Mike. “I never appreciated just what a miracle-worker you are, Michael, until I costed it out for the eighty-fifth time.”
He smiled. “I had certain advantages not available to you, son.”
“I know that now. I think I knew it then: I just never thought about it. But even you might not believe what they’re getting for glasses nowadays.”
He nodded. “Yeah, there’s a big sand shortage. Still, bars do stay open, somehow.”
I shrugged. “Half of ’em are probably laundering cash for the syndicate. All I can tell you is, for month after month I have juggled the figures—and the only way I could see of keeping this place open past six months was to triple our clientele. Which would destroy the place as effectively as a sheriff’s padlock on the door.”
“Jesus, Jake,” Long-Drink said accusingly, “you never told us—”
“And what if I had?” I asked him. “What could any of you have done? You’ve already all given ’til it hurts, Drink. Was I supposed to never have opened? Or soured the six months it looked like we were gonna have, by telling everybody there was a doomsday clock ticking on the wall? How did I know?—maybe we could all manage to get telepathic in six months, and clean up on Wall Street or something.”
I flung my arms out expansively and grinned.
“Oh Jesus, it was tearing me up inside—but I’m free, by God, as of tonight! A great express-train has been lifted from my jock. You heard what the Naggeneen said: he can drink the place dry twice a night: he’s just tripled our clientele—without clumsying up the place with a bunch of uncouth strangers. Doc, we’re covered!”
△ △ △
A rafter-ringing cheer went up. Folks took the cluricaune gently in hand, and together they hoisted him up to their shoulders, and tossed him exuberantly up to those rafters; he laughed like a child and let gravity have him, fell back to be tossed up again, and again. Fast Eddie played “Jolly Good Fellow,” and Callahan grinned like a bandit and gave me his hand. I shook it contentedly, feeling the feeling you have when you know you have chosen correctly and weathered the cusp.
I had not taken any unfair profit from fairy magic. I had not plundered gold I had not earned, had not used a Sprè na Skillenagh to pay my distributors, or any other sort of cheat that would require a karma-balancing backlash. I’d simply taken on one jolly new client, with the thirst of a hundred men. A lonely great-grandson of Bacchus who would probably end up greying my hair…and classing my joint up considerably.
“Thanks for that footnote; that saved us,” I told Callahan.
“You’re welcome,” he said with a wink of his eye.
I reached under the bar and I took out a cylinder made of aluminum, twisted the end off, and dumped out what looked and what smelled like a coprolite. Callahan stared and then started to smile. “Surely it isn’t—”
“Be damned if it isn’t—and don’t call me Shirley—it’s one of your miserable rotten cigars. I stepped on it as I was leaving, that night in the woods, and held on to it. It was radioactive, the first year or so, but I handled it carefully. Sort of a souvenir of you, if that isn’t corny…to help me remember the kind of a stinker you were.”
He stuck the thing into a grin of pure pleasure, and set it alight with the tip of his thumb. As always, the thing smelled a little bit better on fire. When the first puff diffused throughout the room, all the cheering and laughter redoubled anew, as that hideous scent we remembered of old worked its magic on all of our subconscious minds. (Well, mine was, at least, at the moment.)
“Does it make an appreciable difference,” I asked, “the thing being seven years stale?”
“Oh, it does,” he assured me. “It’s just getting ripe.”
“Naggeneen,” I called out, “I no longer compel you…but maybe between us we might make a bargain…as equals and friends with a terrible thirst.”
He paused in mid-air at the top of a leap and regarded me keenly. “Speak on, for ye interest me strangely,” he said.
“Have you had enough spirit to take off the edge of your thirst for the evening, at least?”
“I might have,” he said.
“There’s a case of Black Bush sitting out in the truck, and a room full of sufferers long out of luck. It’s
a reasonable man I believe that you are—if I send for that case, will it get to my bar?” I pointed to the special Bushmill’s backup-shelf just beside The Fount, about as long as the cluricaune was tall. “You can have all the bottles that fit on that shelf…but leave two or three for my friends and myself.”
Again, maybe rhyming it helped. “It’s a bargain,” he shouted, and people applauded until they were hoarse.
△ △ △
About a hundred Irish coffees later, the supply ran out again, and I was finally able to take a breather. It seemed like it might be handy to have a cluricaune around the joint: whenever I got too overworked, I could slip him a wink and my problems would…uh…dry right up.
I took my own mug of God’s Blessing, feeling that I had earned it, and looked for someone to talk with. One large group was gathered around Mike, over by the fireplace, all talking and listening and laughing at once. Another large group huddled around the cluricaune, listening to him bullshit. A third group was dancing gaily to Eddie’s piano, smiling fiercely with tears running down their cheeks…
And down at the end of the bar, watching it all in the flickering firelight…the Duck.
I wandered over.
“I could pretend to be polishing the bartop,” I said softly.
He spun round in his chair so fast I was afraid he was going to hit me; it was hard not to flinch. But when he was facing me, his expression was not angry, but…
Well, I don’t know what it was, exactly. All that hair on his face didn’t leave a lot of room for expression to express itself. All I could say for sure was that the permanent sneer I’d thought the natural shape of his face was gone now—and whatever had replaced it, it looked unfamiliar with the territory.
“Mister Stonebender,” he said to me, in an oddly formal tone, “I liked what you did just now. You and your friends. If a walking thirst is welcome here…would it be all right if I hung around here and tried to get telepathic with you people?”
I was touched, and moved by how much effort it had cost him to ask. “All right?” I repeated. “I think it would be world-class, Mr. Shea.”
He gave me his hand, and I shook it solemnly.
A corner of his mouth twitched. “Kind of hard to square getting telepathic with that house custom of yours, coldcocking anybody that asks a snoopy question. Or is that just with newcomers?”
I shook my head. “That’s the right way to get telepathic: walking on eggshells, with the awareness that a mistake could put a knot on your own skull. It’s dark in there. So what ends up happening here half the time is, people with sensitive areas they don’t want to talk about get so tired of watching people back away from them on eggshells that they say the hell with it, and cut loose of whatever hangup it was. The other half of the time, at least nobody ends up feeling violated. Look, how about if I try to read just what’s right up on the top of your mind, right now? Just the headlines, I mean.”
He scratched his hairy head and thought about it. “The ones above the fold. Okay?”
“Sure. Hey, Mike! You got a minute?”
Callahan excused himself from the group he was talking with and came over. Brian Boru, the cluricaune had called him. Hell, for all I know, maybe Mike had been King of Ireland at the turning of the last Millennium—and Cu Chullain a millennium before that, too, for that matter. I saw him deal with Hitler as an equal, once. All I can tell you is, barefoot and barechested, wearing another man’s trousers and trailing clouds of toxic waste from a cheap cigar, he strode through my place like a king. He slid gracefully into a tall chair next to the Duck, and saluted him with a half-empty glass of the Black Bush.
The Duck nodded back at him and turned to me. “Not bad, pal,” he said judiciously. “You don’t miss a lot.”
“Go on, ask him,” I said.
He shrugged, and turned back to Callahan. “Mike, I’d—”
“You want to know,” Callahan said, “how I knew your name was Ernie.”
The Duck raised an eyebrow. “You guys volley pretty good around here.”
“I haven’t even started,” Mike said. “The Great Miasmo sees all, tells all. You can see there’s nothing up me sleeves—now tell me how close I come.”
“Fire,” the Duck said.
Callahan put his head back and recited softly. “You’re special. Things go haywire around you. It’s like you sweat practical jokes. The laws of probability don’t apply to you. I heard people call you the Duck: that must be short for The Lucky Duck, right?”
“Go on,” the Duck said tightly. “You’re doing great.”
“Let’s see, there isn’t a mountain from one end of Long Island to the other, so you must live in some kind of ruin.”
The Duck nodded, frowning. “An abandoned mansion. I usually pick places like that. I don’t bother anybody there—or get bothered—and if I need any food or water or electricity…well, I seem to get lucky. Go on.”
“Your mother—”
“Yah?” the Duck said sharply.
“I mean no disrespect,” Callahan said carefully, “in discussing your mother. If it helps any, my wife is a madam. But would I be correct in guessing that your mother is…of inexcessive stature, like yourself? And perhaps, also, what some might consider…more hirsute than average, again like yourself?”
The Duck waved his hand, to show he took no offense. “Short as a fireplug, hairy as a…” He hesitated. “She taught me how to shave, okay?”
“And she always took you for wild rides on her back, when you were a kid.”
“You must be reading my mail,” the Duck said. “Look, Mister—”
“The only part I can’t figure out,” Callahan said meditatively, stroking his bristly chin, “is why you aren’t wearing any red.”
The Duck’s eyes widened. “Ma has a fetish about that. She made me swear never to put on anything red as long as I lived…thinks it’s the color of the Devil…”
“Ah,” Callahan said, as one who has had a great mystery cleared up for him. “I think I see. Much is becoming clear to me now.”
The Duck slowly regained his characteristic expression—bored scorn—and put it on like a raincoat. “Look, Sherlock Holmes,” he said, “nobody likes being gaslighted more than me—I’ve been known to drive hundreds of miles to get jerked around by total strangers—but if you know what you know, then you know it’s the mystery of my goddam life you’re screwing with here. You want to make me the straight man in a mentalist act, fine. String it out as long as your sadistic little heart desires, by all means—I’m not a killjoy—but when you finally get to the blowoff of this pitch, when you’re ready to read my leaves or do my chart or toss my stalks or whatever it is you’re gonna do, would you wake me up?”
Mike was immediately and sincerely apologetic. “I am sorry, Ernie. Sometimes I get too cute for the room. I’ll tell you anything you want to know—and I’ll lead you if you can’t find the right questions, okay?”
“What’s a Fir Darrig?” the Duck asked.
The moment he said the term, I remembered how alarmed he had looked, the first time he’d heard me use it, in the course of explaining to the group about the Daoine Sidh. I had misunderstood the reason for his dismay, then. Because when he pronounced “Fir Darrig,” now, I realized at once that I had already heard the Duck say it once before.
When he had told me the name his mother had always called his absentee father. “Feared Eric,” I’d heard him say, at the time—but unbeknownst to both of us, he’d been saying, “Fir Darrig”…
“A Fir Darrig, often called the Red Man, is one of the Daoine Sidh,” Callahan said promptly. “Like a cluricaune, he tends to attach himself to a house or locality, rather than to a family. Stands about three feet high on average, always dresses in red cap and coat, and has a very flexible voice, alternately described as fuaim na dtonn, the sound of waves, and ceol na naingeal, the music of angels, and ceileabhar na nèan, the warbling of birds. They are the practical jokers of the Daoine Sidh. Mischievo
us jokes if they like you, mean-spirited ones if you offend them, really nasty ones if you threaten someone they love. They sort of exhale good and bad luck. A leprechaun is always a sourpuss, and a cluricaune is usually almost offensively cheerful—Fir Darrigs tend to oscillate between the two states. Which can mean hell to pay for those around them.”
The folks at Mary’s Place are better than average at eavesdropping unobtrusively. People had been doing so for the last few minutes, and even I’d had to look sharp to catch them at it—but now one or two of them smothered a rooba.
The Duck glared at them…and then sighed. “Listen up, people,” he said in a ceol na naingeal. Heads turned, with politely expectant expressions. “Callahan here has just told me that I’m the son of a Fir Darrig. One of those Deeny Shee jokers, like our friend Naggeneen. Apparently I’m one of the Gods of Practical Joking on my father’s side.”
There was a thoughtful pause.
“I buy dat,” Eddie said.
“Yeah, that does explain a lot,” Doc Webster said. “How do you like that? Good for you, Duck-o.”
“Why, that’s wonderful, Ernie,” Merry Moore said. “It must be nice to have that cleared up, huh?”
“I should have suspected,” the cluricaune whooped happily. “The first time I’ve ever been tricked into payin’ for liquor, I should have suspected a Fir Darrig’s hand in the unlikely business. It’s clever indeed that yer not wearin’ red: it misled me entire. Good jape, Brother Duck, and I drink ta yer health!” He flung an empty Bushmill’s bottle into the fireplace—several other receptacles followed it in—and led a round of applause.
“Congratulations, Duck,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said respectfully. “There was a time in my youth when I’d have worshipped you.”
“A lot of people have that reaction to me,” the Duck said, but I could tell he was relieved by the general response.
“Mike,” I said, “when I first met Ernie, I found myself speaking Gaelic to him. Something that sounded like ‘Nadine, fuck me.’ Any idea what that was?”
The Callahan Touch Page 13