Nevertheless it was the most memorable day of the entire affair for me—all because of what started out that night seeming to be the sort of absolutely generic, standard issue, garden-variety philosophical conversation for which bars are notorious.
It was late, getting on toward closing time. Few remained, Eddie had packed it in for the night, and people were keeping their voices down in consideration of those who might be asleep in the five cottages. I had left my post behind the bar, and gone around back of it—behind behind the bar, if you follow me—to empty the used-grounds hopper of The Machine into a trash can. The area back there behind the big wall of booze bottles is relatively secluded, and not heavily used due to the nature of trash cans in Florida sunshine; if the breeze fails, the smell can be something you could raise houseplants in. But we aren’t becalmed much at The Place, and some folks like privacy, so I keep a few tables back there. I came upon Doc Webster sitting alone at one now. That was odd; the Doc may not be the most gregarious man I know, but he’s definitely in the top three. We’ve had a firm no-prying policy in force for decades, but it’s pretty much always been blatant hypocrisy.
Rather than simply stepping over there and asking him why he was by himself, however, I began singing a new song parody I was working up, softly, as if to myself. The tune was Sir Paul’s title song for the James Bond film Live and Let Die.
When we were young, with our heads in an open book
We used to read Niven/Pournelle
(you know you did, you know you did, you know you did)
And in this ever-changing world, Pournelle and Niven
hope the fans will still buy…
I paused, and waited hopefully. And was pleased when, as I’d hoped, the Doc was unable to prevent himself from singing, “The Mote in God’s Eye—” He was willing to accept company.
“Let me guess,” I said, strolling over to his table. “You’re sitting by yourself because some Cuban-Irish guy persuaded you to try a taco scone.”
He was off his game. It took him a whole second to identify the straightline, see the punchline I planned, and improve on it. “The famous ‘scone with the wind,’ yes, it was Tara-ble.”
I took a seat downwind of him and fired up a doobie. Slimmer than a soda straw, but it was Texada Timewarp from British Columbia; two or three hits would be plenty. And again the Doc surprised me. I’d sat downwind out of courtesy, because I knew he wasn’t a head, but he reached out and took the joint out of my fingers, and shortened it an inch with a single toke. Which he held so long, the exhalation was barely visible, long enough for me to have two more tokes of my own. Our eyes met, and we beamed at each other like twin Buddhas, one chubby and one skinny, while the night began to sparkle in our peripheral vision.
I offered him a second hit but he waved it away, so I set the joint down in an ashtray. After a few minutes of shared silent stone, he suddenly asked, “Do you think we’ll ever see Mike again, Jake?” That toke had hoarsened his voice a little.
The question took me by surprise. “Why, sure. I guess. One of these days.”
“It’s been ten years, now.”
He was right. The question had been bothering me too. I didn’t often let it rise up to conscious level. “I guess he figured we were ready to solo. You know?”
“Well, I wish he’d asked first.”
“Doc, are you pissed off about something? At Mike Callahan?”
“At myself. At all of us idiots. For years we had him around all the time. We didn’t really know for sure that he was literally superhuman until right near the end, there, but it was pretty much always clear that he knew stuff nobody else knew. Am I right?”
I hear that question a lot. The answer is always, “Yeah, you’re right.” This time it happened to be accurate.
“Every fucking night of the week we had him. And then he buggered off to the ass end of space or the far end of time or some damn thing—but he came back to visit at fairly frequent intervals, partied with us for days at a time, helped us save the world once, am I right?” After the first one, a nod suffices. “And then when we all moved down here, he showed up for Opening Day, spent one whole night with us, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of the wonderful son of a bitch since, not him nor his whole fam damily, am I right?”
Nod. “What’s your point, Doc?”
“We blew it. That’s my point. All of us. How could we be so goddam stupid?”
“Blew what?”
“How could we have had unfettered access, for so long, to a man who clearly knew some of the final answers—and never once have asked him any of the questions?”
I knew what he meant, and didn’t want to admit it. “What questions?”
“Don’t play dumb, Jake. The important questions.”
I was too stoned not to admit it. “Oh. Those.”
“How did all this—” he gestured at the universe around us “—get here? How did I come to be stuck here in it? Will I end, when I cool? If not, then what?” He relit the joint, took a second great hit.
So I continued for him. “Does it matter what I do in the meantime? If so, why? Is it all going somewhere? Is there some kind of point? Or is virtue its own only reward? Is there a God?”
Doc exhaled and took up the litany. “And if so, is anyone mounting an assault on Heaven? That’s the thing I never grokked about religious belief, you know? All that time I spent watching people die for a living…watching their loved ones buckle with grief and loss…seeing that all human lives begin with agony, and most of them end with it…that no more than five or ten percent of real-life stories, if that, get anything you could possibly call a happy ending—” Deep breath. “—that a good half of even those of us lucky enough to die in a hospital bed die in unbearable pain, which God apparently forbids us to shorten…that when we beg Him on our knees for ten thousand years straight to explain why this torture must happen, to as many souls as procreatively possible, all we get back is ‘Trust me.’” Deep breath. He reached across the table, took my hand, squeezed. “I can understand people who believe in God, Jacob. I just can’t understand why they aren’t trying their best to kill the motherfucker.”
“Jesus Christ, Sam!”
He let go of my hand, picked up what was left of the joint and squinted at it. It had gone out again. “This is ditty pood grope,” he said, and then he sighed and his shoulders slumped. “Shit.”
“Sam, what’s wrong?”
He dropped the roach on the table. “I was about to say it seemed to help suppress the spoonerisms. I brant seem to latch a cake. Oh, bin of a such!” Without warning he slapped the ashtray into a nearby ficus.
Shocked, I took his hand back and held it in both of mine. “What’s the matter? Something with Mei-Ling?” It was a natural conclusion to leap to. Doc’s wife, at age forty-mumble, was the only one of the five Lady Sally’s alumnae who was still working—and that profession is a lot more dangerous these days than it used to be.
He leaned closer, added his free hand to the pile, and lowered his voice. “Jake…I have a humor in my ted.”
Suddenly I was too stupid to untangle a spoonerism. “What?”
“I have a tomb brainer. Dammit, a train boomer. Shit.” He lowered his head, took a deep breath, and said slowly and carefully, “There is an evil spider growing in my skull. It will sill…will kill me soon.”
I could feel my eyeballs trying to bulge out of my head. “Oh my God. Oh, Sam!”
In my head I was thinking, No, there’s been a mistake, the script editor has fucked up, this is wrong, wrong! Doc Webster isn’t one of the ones who die, for Chrissakes. He’s not a spear-carrier, he’s one of the heroes. Like me.
“Spoonerism is one of the symptoms,” he explained. “It’ll get progressively worse. After a while I won’t even know for sure if I’m newing…if I’m doing it or not.”
“How long?” I heard myself ask. He would say a year, and I would tell him about my cousin in Canada who’d been told he had a brain tumor
that would kill him in a year, and was still alive and well three years later—
He shrugged. “Maybe a week. Maybe a month. Not two.”
I felt a wave of dizziness. “Who else knows?”
“Aside from professionals, only Mei-Ling, until just now. I was hoping to keep it that way, for as pong as lossable. But she can’t wake the late atone.”
So that was why the Doc had been sitting alone.
“She’s home crying?”
He nodded. “I certainly hope so. I left to give her the chance.”
I’ve read that in the Old West, if you really pissed off the Comanche, they used to cut open your chest and pour in hot coals while you were still alive. I felt like that now, only with ice cubes. I couldn’t seem to get enough air, felt my stomach clench like a fist, and wondered briefly if I were having a heart attack. This news was more than I could encompass, way more than I was prepared to accept. “I can’t carry this alone, either, Sam,” I said. “I gotta tell everybody. I’m sorry.”
“I know.” He nodded. “I know, Jake. I’ve known that since you sat down. Shared pain is lessened.” He shuddered slightly. “But you tell them for me, okay? I’ve been dying all trey, and I just can’t deem to suet.”
I said nothing. I was trying to decide whether I had it in me to tell all my friends that my oldest friend—just about everybody’s oldest friend—was on his way out. Doc Webster had been responsible for bringing many of us to Callahan’s in the first place. (Pun intended.)
And just then a strange and wonderfully dopey thing happened. More to relieve the tension in our necks than anything else, he and I both happened to lift our gazes skyward—just as a meteorite flared overhead. Automatically we sucked a little air through our teeth. And then the doc said, with quiet wonder, “Wow—a starting shoe.”
For some reason, I broke up. It started as a giggle, and before I knew it, I was laughing so hard I literally fell off my ass, ended up curled up on the ground, pounding it and whooping.
Well, you know. Maybe Ebola is as contagious as laughter…but I doubt it. Doc lost it seconds after I did, and remained seated only because his center of gravity is lower; that’s my story, anyway. When we might have stopped laughing, he said, “Trust me to find a ridiculous death,” and we were off again.
After a while I helped him to his feet and walked him home. It didn’t take long: Doc and Mei-Ling live right next door to me and Zoey, no more than a hundred yards from the bar. He barely had time to tell me the one about the lion who enters a clearing and sees two men, one reading a book and the other typing away on a laptop, and knows at once which man to eat first (readers digest, and writers cramp), and then we were there. We stood at his door looking at each other for a long moment, as awkward and self-conscious as teenage first-daters trying to decide whether to go for a good-night kiss or just agree what a terrific time we’d had. Two unusually articulate men, completely at a loss for words. Finally he sighed and said, “Well, thanks, Timmy—I really had a terrific time,” so I pulled him into my arms and hugged him as hard as I could and kissed the side of his neck and he stroked my hair and hugged back, and it was quite some time before we remembered to be embarrassed again and let go.
He flashed me the crooked smile I knew so well and went inside, and I stood there a moment. I hadn’t quite finished all my closing rituals yet, and distant murmurs told me there were still a few customers in the house. But none of the undone chores was mission-critical, and I don’t have any regulars I don’t trust to close The Place. To hell with it. I left the compound by the parking lot entrance, where I’d be less likely to be seen leaving, and walked west to Mallory Square.
Packed and bustling though it always is at sunset, the square is almost always completely deserted late at night: the area is too open and exposed and just a bit too well lit to constitute a good place to neck. As always, there was no slightest trace of evidence that dozens of vendors and street performers had been doing lucrative business here only hours earlier, not even an empty film container to mark the passage of thousands of stunned, stoned, or stained tourists and their children. As usual, the only one present was John the Fisherman, fishing alone off the south end of the pier just as he has every night of his life, as far as anyone can remember; we exchanged nods as I passed. I sat on concrete right at the edge of the dock, at the spot where Will Soto always sets up his tightrope for the sunset celebration, lit the stub of my Texada Timewarp, and stared across a few hundred yards of dark slow water at what the Chamber of Commerce would like you to call Sunset Key, and every Conch calls Tank Island. It was an absolutely textbook Key West night: air the temperature and the approximate humidity of a spit-take, coming from the west in a gentle, steady breeze against my face. It kept away the fried-food-and-beer smells of Duval a few blocks behind me; I smelled only brine, iodine, my roach, and a faint hint of petroleum product spills from that day’s cruise ships. In the far distance a huge dark cloud loomed over the Gulf of Mexico, heading this way, but it would be hours before it arrived. It seemed a perfect metaphor. Darkness coming for my oldest friend, still a ways off but unstoppable.
I sat there for maybe an hour. I tried to wrap my mind around the news, and failed. I tried to imagine a world without Doc Webster in it, finding the funny parts for us, and failed. I tried to cry for him, and failed.
Finally I made up my mind, found a pay phone, dialed from memory a number I’d once solemnly promised myself I would never use again, and failed at that too. I couldn’t raise so much as voice mail. I counted twenty-five rings, then gave up. Did you know that with the proper wrist action, you can get the handset of a payphone to skip seven times? (Try it yourself.) When I got back to The Place I found that as expected someone had done an imperfect but adequate job of closing up for me. I just set out food for Pixel and Harry, dropped a pair of hard-boiled eggs into the pool for Lex’s breakfast, and went straight to bed. Okay, went stoned to bed.
Zoey got in about half an hour later, dragging her bass and her ass. She’d had a jazz gig that night, and the way it works for her is, the better the music she plays, the more exhausted she is when she comes home. I thought I was doing a fair job of feigning sleep until she said, “Jesus, Jake, what’s the matter? Is Erin okay?”
I rolled over. “What do you, read shoulder blades? Erin’s fine, sound asleep. Come to bed.”
“Are you okay?”
“Hey, my wife says I’m a lot better than okay.”
“To you, maybe. What’s wrong?”
“Can we talk about it in the morning?”
“Of course we can. We can talk about it whenever we like. Right now, for instance.”
She wasn’t going to let it go, so I decided to just get it over with, tell her the news as calmly and dispassionately as I could and then try and comfort her. “You know how I’m always saying Doc’s puns are brain damaged?” I began, and then I lost it, started crying as hard as I ever have in my life, in great racking sobs that threatened to tear my diaphragm, might have if not for the strength in my Zoey’s arms. After a while I was able to squeeze out words between shuddering intakes of breath, “Tumor,” and, “Inoperable,” and, “Mindkiller,” and, “Week. Month, tops.” Somewhere in there, Erin joined the hug, and even in my pain I was impressed because I’ve personally seen her sleep through both a hurricane and a riot.
A long time later I came to the awareness that I was cried out, hollow. It was like vomiting: you don’t exactly feel good afterward, just a tiny bit less rotten—but that tiny bit makes the difference between intolerable and endurable. I realized there seemed to be only one pair of arms around me now, opened my eyes and learned they were my daughter’s. I started to ask where her mother was, and then I knew. Zoey was next door, with Mei-Ling. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again it was morning, and the arms holding me were once again my wife’s, and we were both crying.
I usually keep bartender’s hours. That day, I was awake at the crack of dawn.
Even so, leavi
ng my bed took everything I had; leaving my house seemed out of the question. I knew there was a perfect sunny day outside, because there nearly always was, and I wanted no part of it. An insoluble dilemma lay out there. The moment I stepped out onto my porch I would start seeing and being seen by my friends, some of them anyway. I knew I could not look even one of my friends in the eye even momentarily without telling them that Doc was dying, and yet for the life of me I could not imagine myself doing so, could not think of the right words to use. So I dithered around in the house as long as possible, and then some more. I made what even for me was a special omelette, so large and complicated that it really should have been considered a full-scale omel, and wolfed the whole thing down. Zoey and Pixel stared at me. I frequently cook omelettes—for supper; it may have been the first time either of them had ever seen me eat a bite less than five hours after awakening. I did all the dirty dishes, by hand, and dried them all with a towel. Zoey and Pixel stared even harder. I made the bed—well, I always do that, being almost always the last one out of it, but this day I decided it was not only time to change the sheets, but also to rotate and flip the mattress. Then I collected the trash that would not be put out for another three days, and began coaxing the old newspapers into a more orderly stack. Erin and Pixel were staring at each other, now.
When I started alphabetizing the spice rack Zoey came over and put a firm hand on my shoulder. “The bad times, too,” she said enigmatically, and slipped her arm through mine. “Come on, Slim. Let’s go open the store.”
I closed my eyes and sighed. Three times in a row, each longer and deeper than the last. And finally nodded.
By the time we got as far as the porch, my nose and ears had already given me a pretty accurate head count and roster. Roughly three dozen folks, nearly all hard-core long-timers. Unusually large crowd for so early in the day. Had the news about Doc leaked already? No, I realized; the faithful had begun to gather in anticipation and support of the imminent scamming of Tony Donuts Junior. I’d forgotten I also had that to look forward to. I’d have balked there in the doorway if it were possible to balk while arm in arm with a moving Zoey.
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