Callahan's Place 01 - Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (v5.0)

by Spider Robinson

  "No, it was not a cuckold's knuckles (say that three times fast with ice cubes in your mouth and you can have this drink) that finally put an end to Cousin Hobart's career, though it might have been. It was by his own hand that, if I may put it this way, The Nose was blown. One night he retired early with only a slight head cold for company, a yard-long handkerchief knotted to the bedstead (Hobart went through a lot of laundresses before he found one with a strong stomach). Thrashing in his sleep; he rolled over and contrived to wedge the end of his nose in his right ear. Sensing some obstruction, the mighty proboscis sneezed—and damned-near blew his brains out.

  "When his head had stopped ringing, a wide-awake Hobart settled down to some cold hard thinking. The incident could happen again at any time—the miracle was that so likely a phenomenon had taken so long to first occur—and next time the airseal might be better. Only by chance had Hobart survived at all. He reached his decision reluctantly, but he was a brave man: he followed through. He had his nose entirely amputated the next day, repudiating all nose-hood and installing a suction cup in the middle of his glasses. Within a week he had landed a job with some moonshiners, and he works their still there still."

  The Doc took a long gulp of Peter Dawson's and looked around expectantly, blinking.

  There was a silence, not much thicker than an elephant's behind.

  "A moonshiner with no nose?" snorted Long-Drink, who keeps a still in his garage for Sundays when Callahan's is closed. "That's ridiculous. How did he smell?"

  "Terrible," the Doc replied placidly.

  A general groan began, but Callahan held up a hand. "What's the moral, Doc?"

  The Doc blinked again. "No nose is good nose."

  The sky rained peanuts, and very few missed the Doc, his more-than-ample upholstery making him an excellent target. Callahan, maddened beyond endurance, seized up a seltzer bottle and was restrained with some difficulty. Me, I was worried. This would be hard to beat. I decided against another Bushmill's.

  As I recall, the next one up was Shorty Steinitz, with the story of his uncle Mort D. Arthur the magician, who walked down the street one day and turned into a drugstore. But three of us shouted the punchline before he got to it and he pitched his glass into the fire in disgust, toasting "To weisenheimers" first and putting his shoulder behind it. Then Tommy Janssen did a creditable job, W. C. Fields-style and better done than Fields usually is, about a Cousin Alex Ameche who used to hang from a hook on his kitchen wall and claim to be a telephone.

  "Obviously a masochist," Tommy intoned nasally. "The amount of abuse that man absorbed was simply incredible. Folks'd try to humor him, put a dime in his left ear, pick up his right hand from where it hung in his other ear, dial his nose in a circle and listen to his hand. But when nothing transpired, they would inevitably beat him about the head and shoulders until the dime came out of his mouth, dislocate his arm at the shoulder and leave the premises in a great rage, cursing prodigiously." This was pretty good stuff, but Tommy's moral, "A chameleon would do well to imitate objects of a species with which Man is not at war," had no pun in it, and it seemed the Doc still (the Doc's still) had the edge. Noah Gonzalez's effort, a one-joke story about an overaggressive uncle who customarily turned on the TV with such ferocity that one day the TV turned on him| was an obvious loser. For some crazy reason as each tale-teller realized he'd blown it and would thus be paying his night's tab, he invariably pitched his glass into the fireplace—which costs you your fifty cents change. Callahan had raked in a fortune in dollar bills by the time I was ready to make my move, and I decided for the hundredth time that Callahan is no fool, even if he does have to sweep out that fireplace every morning.

  "All right," I said at last, "it's time to tell you good people about my Grandfather Stonebender." I decided my country drawl would serve best.

  "You stole that from Heinlein," shouted Noah, the only other SF freak in the room. "One of the characters in 'Lost Legacy' had a Grandfather Stonebender who could do anything better than anyone. No fair lifting stories."

  "Heinlein must of heard about the real Grandfather Stonebender from my grandmother," I said with dignity, "and at that he toned him down for a cynical public. I'm talking about the real Stonebender—the man who built the pyramids, freed the slaves, invented the prophylactic, cured yaws—that Stonebender."

  "What's yaws?" Callahan asked injudiciously.

  "Why thanks, Mike. I'll have a beer."

  A cheer went up, and Callahan made a ferocious face at me as he drew a draft Bud. "Not that Grandfather Stonebender's legendary success was surprisin'," I continued smoothly, "as he was born with three heads. His mother was frightened by a pawn shop while she was carrying him. Doctor was so startled he swore off the sauce, and the child raised up such a fuss cryin' three ways at once that they sent him home early, where he caused his mother some unforeseen and unprecedented difficulties with nursing.

  "Fortunately, he matured quickly and found early employ as the 'before,' 'during,' and 'after' for hair-tonic commercials. Which anyway kept him in hair-tonic. 'Fore too long, though, his combined IQ had brought him the prominence he deserved in several unrelated fields, and he passed his weekends doing a trio at the local ginmill for relaxation. His sex life was something incredible, his prenatal trauma also having left him with three... but that's neither here nor anywheres I should be talkin' about. Point is, he wasn't no loser like Doc's cousin Hobart, reduced to geekin' in sideshows for a livin'. Grandfather Stonebender lived entirely off his wits—had to, to keep himself in neckties.

  "But the same strange fate that provided him with three times the brains and earning power of a normal man carried with it the seeds of his destruction. He fell prey to the Committee Syndrome.

  "One day he was debating Free Silver with himself. It was a burnin' issue at the time, and sad to say, he lost. This made him so mad he punched hisself right in the mouth, and broke several teeth and a knuckle. Bein' a gentleman, he had no alternative: he challenged hisself to a duel. Next mornin', acting as second for both sides so as to keep it in the family, he shot hisself in the right eye from point-blank range and died. Papers were full of it at the time. 'Course, if you read the only daily around you know the papers are still full of it, but anyhow that's how my Grandfather Stonebender passed on, from the past on."

  Doc Webster's mouth hung open in astonishment, but Callahan again called for the moral before the general outrage could begin.

  "Just goes to show," I explained, "that three heads are bitter, then none." I closed my eyes and waited for the holocaust, smugly sure that I wouldn't have to rely on cheap gags to get free beer any more tonight.

  But the silence was broken not by groans, but by a single groan, and the pain in that groan was not put-on at all. It came from the open doorway across the room, and as we all spun around we beheld a sandy-haired young man, shockingly disheveled, leaning against the door-frame and sobbing. As we watched, frozen, he slid from its support and fell full-length into Callahan's, landing on his face with a crash.

  Somehow I knew intuitively that I was not a winner tonight after all.

  For all his bulk, Doc Webster was the first to reach the newcomer. He rolled him over and began doing doctor-things almost before the rest of us had started to move, and swung his great black bag in a lethal circle when we crowded too close. Nobody ignores pain in Callahan's Place, but I guess sometimes we're a hair too eager to help.

  The kid wasn't much older than Tommy Janssen, maybe twenty-five or so, but you had to look past the haunted lines of his face to see it. At first glance he might have been thirty or better, and the expression he'd worn before he passed out would have looked more at home on a man eighty years old and tired of living. His eyes were set in close against a hooking nose, and his cheeks were broad enough to make his mouth seem a shade too small. His lips were the kind of full that isn't especially sensual, and his frame had just a bit more meat than it needed. His clothes seemed to have been pulled on in the dark in a hell of
a hurry, fly unzipped, shirt only partially tucked in, and buttons mismatched with holes. Furthermore he was dressed for June—and it was a particularly rainy March out. He was soaked clear through, hair that looked usually brushed back lying limply across half his face.

  It looked like he'd gotten to Callahan's just about in time.

  His upper cheeks and temples were livid with purple bruises, and his knuckles were swollen. Doc Webster searched his hair and found more contusions beneath. "Looks like somebody gave this poor bastard an awful beating," the Doc announced.

  The kid's eyes opened. "That was me," he said feebly, swallowing something foul.

  Someone fed the Doc a glass of straight rye, and he tipped a little of it into the kid's mouth. It seemed to help. Color came back to his pasty face, and he tried to get up. The Doc told him to lie quiet, but the kid shook him off and made it as far as the first table, where he fell into a chair and looked around groggily. He didn't seem to notice us, but whatever he was expecting to see scared him silly.

  It wasn't there; he relaxed some. Callahan was al- ready piling corned beef sandwiches in front of him, and the table happened to have a pitcher of somebody's beer already on it. Throwing us all a grateful glance, seeing us this time, he fell on the food like the wolves upon the centerfold, and got outside of three sandwiches in short order, washing them down with great draughts of beer.

  When he was done he looked Callahan squarely in the eye. "I don't have any money to pay you," he said.

  "I didn't figure you did," Callahan agreed. "Go on, eat up. They were getting stale—these bums here don't eat, far as I can tell. You can owe me." He produced more food.

  "Thanks. I'm OK now. I think. For a while."

  The Doc wanted to get something straight. "You put

  them bruises on your own head, young feller?"

  "Jim MacDonald, Doctor. Yes, I put most of those there."

  "I'll bet it felt good when you stopped," Long-Drink

  said, and immediately regretted it. I wouldn't want Doc Webster's mass balanced on my toe either.

  "If it did, I might stop more often," MacDonald said with a ghost of a grin, wincing at the sudden pain in his temples. "Lately it's the most fun I have."

  "Want to talk about it?" Callahan suggested delicately.

  "Sure, why not? You'll never believe me anyhow. No one would." MacDonald's grin was gone now.

  Callahan drew himself up and registered wounded dignity. "Son, this here is Tall Tales Night at my place, and I am prepared to believe anything you can say with a straight face. Hell, I sometimes believe the Doc over there, and his face ain't never been straight. Come on, spit it out. Maybe you won't owe me for them sandwiches and beer after all." The big Irishman put a fresh light on his ever-present El Ropo and gave the kid a fresh beer to lube his mouth with.

  I looked around; the boys were reverting to their favorite listening postures as naturally and gracefully as Paladin used to go into that gunfighter's crouch of his. The hell with the budget, I decided, and slapped another single on the bar, helping myself to a shot of Irish uisgebagh from the bottle labeled, "Give Every Man His Dew."

  "It started with my brother Paul," MacDonald began, and I groaned inside. The perfect shaggy-relative story, shot to hell. "He was ten years older than me, and he was really only my half-brother. Dad divorced and remarried when Paul was only three, and that's why I had some hope for a while.

  "You see, Paul was a mutant.

  "Not in any gross physical sense—his body was not malformed in any detectable way. But he was an Instantaneous Echo.

  "You've probably heard of them, maybe seen one on TV or read about 'em in places like Charles Fort. From the age of twelve Paul could mimic anything you said—at the instant that you said it. The voice and inflection were different, but he never stumbled, even when he didn't comprehend the words he was parroting. No noticeable time-lag—he simply said what you were saying, as you said it. Sometimes he actually seemed to jump the gun by a hair, and that was really strange.

  "Around the time that I was five, a couple of fellows from Duke came around with a truckful of equipment and put Paul through a series of tests. At first they were quite excited, but as the testing continued their excitement wore off, and eventually they told my father that Paul was just like all the other Instant Echoes they'd studied, simply a man who'd learned how to hook his mouth in parallel with his ears. According to their newest findings, he could not, in fact, 'jump the gun' as he sometimes seemed to, and while the actual lag was small, they claimed to be able to measure it. They were unhappy. They'd hoped to prove that Paul was a telepath.

  "Me, I think he got cagey.

  "Paul had always been an introspective kid and about that time he became moodier than ever. He seldom left the house, and when he did he was quite likely to return in tears, claiming a migraine as the cause. My father got our doctor to prescribe some strong stuff for the migraines, but it didn't seem to help for too long. Paul, having finished high school at fifteen with excellent grades, showed no interest whatever in college, a job, or girls. He seemed to be the typical loner, with a bit of hypochondria thrown in.

  "It was about then that the trouble started between my father and mother (Paul's stepmother, you understand). She felt that Paul had to earn a living regardless of his headaches, and insisted that he should do so at sideshows and on nightclub stages, doing his instant echo routine. Dad was having none of it; he'd made a good deal of money with a good deal of hard work, running a used-car chain, but he was perfectly willing to indulge a temperamentally infirm son, rather than set him on a stage to be gawked at by yokels. Mother was... not a very nice person, I'm afraid, and I suspect she thought of the child she had inherited as an untapped gold mine scant years from his majority. I think she wanted Paul to make a bundle while she could still get at it; she'd always had some of the Backstage Mother Complex. How I managed to remain neutral I don't know. But then, nobody asked my opinion.

  "When Paul was twenty and I was nine and a half, I got my first big scare.

  "It was all an accident, for by this time Paul had become uncannily adept at avoiding people, leaving the house only after dark and never straying far. The only spot he showed any affection for was the abandoned gravel pit a few miles from home, a place so gloomy at night that even the area's love-struck teenagers avoided it. I went there with him two or three times—Paul seemed to accept my company more often than anyone else's, particularly when I was younger. I didn't especially care for the place myself—it seemed to me the loneliest place I'd ever imagined—but I suppose a kid will follow his big brother just about anywhere he's invited.

  "I think that must be where he met the girl.

  "Mom and Dad were out that night at a PTA meeting or some such. I was watching TV, and if you want to know the truth, I was eating some stolen jelly beans from the horde Mother used to hide away for herself. So when Paul came crashing through the front door, I jumped a foot in the air before I even saw him. When I got downstairs, my first crazy thought was that the migraines had finally split poor Paulie's head open. He looked... well, I guess I've given you a pretty fair imitation tonight, crashing in here the way I did. His scalp was laid open around the sides of his head, his forehead was dripping blood in lines that streamed crazily over his face, his fingers were raw and bleeding, and his eyes held so much agony that even at nine years old I was more terrified by them than by anything else.

  "He was babbling incoherently, swinging his arms wildly as if to ward off some closing demon, and sobbing as though his heart would break. I'd never seen anyone his age cry like that, you know? I rushed to his side and got him to sit down, and without thinking about it I went to the bar and mixed him a martini, just as Mother had taught me to do for her. Little enough of it went down his throat, but it calmed him some, and the rest at least got some of the blood off his chin.

  "Of course, when he'd calmed down a little I asked him what had happened. 'She looked so nice, Jimmy,' he raved, 'so
nice. I thought it would be all right. I mean, I knew it would be bad, but I thought I could take it. She looked so goddamned nice,' he shrieked, trembling like a leaf. Finally I got the story out of him in bits and pieces.

  "It seems my brother was a telepath, after all.

  "A latent telepath, at any rate. From age five to fifteen, his only telepathic manifestation was his instant echo bit, and that was done unconsciously. Subvocalized thoughts must be closest to the surface. During that time he never received thoughts except those about to be verbalized, never sensed emotions, and never had any conscious volitional control of his wild talent.

  "But about midway through puberty the picture began to change. His power was still beyond his control, but it grew. With no warning, he would suddenly find himself inside someone else's head, with increasing frequency and for increasing lengths of time. The first time he plugged in was for a split-second only, just enough to scare him silly, and it didn't reoccur for a couple of months. By now, he told me, telepathy came to him every week or so, for as much as five or ten minutes at a time.

  "You must understand, this was nothing like the traditional 'telepathy' of science fiction stories. It was not the ability to send messages without speech; Paul had never succeeded in sending anything. Nor was it the ability to receive such messages. It was, rather, a process of entering the skull of another, receiving its entire contents and perceiving them as a gestalt.