He had won.
"Our deepest thanks, gentlemen," he said in a more resonant voice than he had used before. "I think we'll be all right from here on."
"What will you do now?" Callahan rapped, and I wondered at the cold steel in his voice.
MacDonald considered for a moment. "We're not really sure," he decided finally, "but whatever we do, we hope we can find a way to help other people the way you've helped us. There must be lots of things we can do. Maybe we'll finish school and become a psychiatrist like I planned once. Imagine—a telepathic head shrinker."
Callahan's hand came away from the trigger of the scattergun for the first time; Jim/Paul didn't catch it, but I did. I was rather glad to know that the intentions of the world's only two telepaths were benign, myself.
Callahan looked puzzled for a second, then his face split into a huge grin. "Say, can I offer you fellas a drink?"
And MacDonald's hew voice echoed him perfectly.
"Don't mind if we do," he added, laughing, and got up to take a chair at the bar.
"Hey," Fast Eddie called out, ever one to remember the important details, "wait a minute. De cops'll be lookin' for youse fer leavin' dat accident. Whaddya gonna tell 'em? Fer dat matter, how d'ya get yer udder body outa King's Park?"
"Oh, I dunno," Callahan mused, putting a careful double-shot of Chivas Regal in front of MacDonald. "It seems to me a telepath could dodge him a lot of cops. Or a lot of witchdoctors. Wouldn't you say, gents?"
"We guess so," MacDonald allowed, and drank up.
And they were right. All three of them.
I haven't heard much from either of the MacDonald brothers yet, but then it hasn't been that long, and I'm sure they've both got a lot of thinking and catching up to do. I wonder if either of them is thinking of having kids. One way or another, I expect to be hearing good things of them, really good things, any day now.
It figures. I mean, two heads are better than one.
The Law Of Conservation Of Pain
There's a curious kind of inevitability to the way things happen at Callahan's. Not that we wouldn't have managed to help The Meddler out some way or other even if it had been, say, Thursday night that he came to us. But since it was Monday night, I finally got to learn what it is that "heavy metal" music is good for. After ten years as a musician, it was about time I found out.
Monday night is Fill-More Night at Callahan's Place, the night Fast Eddie and I do our weekly set on piano and guitar. But don't let the name mislead you into thinking we play the kind of ear-splitting music the Fill-more East was famous for. Although I do play an electric axe (a Country Gent Six) and have an amplifier factory-guaranteed to shatter glass, these are the only remnants of a very brief flirtation with rock that occurred in much hungrier times than these. I don't like loud noises.
No, the name derives from the curious custom we have at Callahan's of burying our dead soldiers in the fireplace. You can usually tell how good a night it's been by how many glasses lay smashed on the hearth, and after one particularly tasty session Doc Webster nicknamed Eddie and me the Fireside Fill-More. To our intense disgust, it stuck.
This particular Monday night, things was loose indeed. Eddie and I had held off our first set for half an hour to accommodate a couple of the boys who were playing a sort of pool on the floor with apples and broomsticks, and by the time Callahan had set up the two immense speakers on either side of the front door, the joint was pretty merry.
"What're you gonna play, Jake?" the Doc called out from his ringside seat. I adjusted the mikestand, turned up my axe just enough to put it on an equal footing with Fast Eddie's upright, and tossed the ball right back to the Doc.
"What would you like to hear, Doc?"
"How about, 'There Are Tears In My Ears From Lying On My Back And Crying In The Evening Over You'?"
"Naw," drawled Long-Drink from the bar, "I want to hear 'He Didn't Like Her Apartment So He Knocked Her Flat,' " and a few groans were heard.
Doc Webster rose to the occasion. "Why not play the Butcher Song, Jake?"
I resigned myself to the inevitable. "The Butcher Song?"
"Sure," boomed the Doc, and conducting an invisible band, he sang, "Butcher arms around me honey/hold me tight..." Peanuts began to rain on his head.
Callahan shifted the right speaker a bit, and turned around with his hands on his hips. "Play the Camera
Song, Jake."
"Hit me, Mike."
With a voice like a foghorn undergoing root-canal
work, Callahan began, "Lens get together 'bout half past eight/I'll ring your Bell & Howell..." and a considerable number of glasses hit the fireplace at once. One or two had not been emptied first; the crackling fire flared high.
In the brief pause that ensued, Fast Eddie spoke up plaintively.
"Hey, Jake. I got an idea."
"Be gentle with it," the Doc grinned. "It's in a strange place."
"What's your idea, Eddie?" I asked.
"How about if we do de one we been rehoisin' all afternoon?"
I nodded judiciously, and turned to face the house. "Regulars and gentlemen," I announced, "for our first number we would like to do a song we wrote yesterday in an attempt to define that elusive essence, that shared quality which brings us all together here at Callahan's Place. In its way it is a song about all of us.
"It's called the Drunkard's Song."
And as Eddie's nimble piano intro cut through the ensuing catcalls, I stoked up my guitar and sang:
A swell and wealthy relative of mine had up and died
And I got a hundred thousand from the will
So a friend and I decided to convert it into liquid
form
The better our esophagi to fill
So we started in the city, had a drink in every
shitty
Little ginmill, which is really quite a few
And a cabbie up in Harlem took us clean across
the river
Into Brooklyn, where he joined us in a brew
We was weavin' just a trifle as we pulled into Astoria
At eighty miles an hour in reverse
But it was nothin' to the weavin' that we did as
we was leavin'
And from time to time it got a little worse
Well there's nothin' like drinkin' up a windfall
We was drunker than a monkey with a skinfull
We wuz so goddamn drunk it was sinful
And I think I ain 't sober yet
As we finished the chorus, Fast Eddie tossed up a cloud of gospel chords that floated me easily into my solo, a bit of intricate pickin' which I managed to stumble through with feeling if not precision. When it was Eddie's turn I snuck a look around and saw that everyone was well into his second drink, and relaxed. There were smiles all around as I slid into the second verse:
We was feeling mighty fine as we crossed the city line
Suckin' whiskey and a-whistlin' at the girls
But the next saloon we try someone wants to
black my eye
'Cause he doesn 't like my long and shaggy curls
So then a fist come out of orbit, knocked me clean across the floor
But I was pretty drunk and didn 't even care
And I was pretty disappointed when the coppers
hit the joint
As I was makin' my rebuttal with a chair
But the coppers came a cropper 'cause I made it
to the crapper
And departed by a ventilator shaft
Met my buddies in the alley as they slipped out
through the galley
And we ran and ran and laughed and laughed
and laughed
Yeah there's nothin' like drinkin' up a
windfall
We was drunker than a monkey with a
skinful
We wuz so goddamn drunk it was sinful
And I think I ain't sober yet
This time Fast Eddie jumped into
the gap with a flurry of triplets. I could tell that he knew where he was going, so I gave him his head. As he unfolded a tasty statement, I looked around again and saw wall-to-wall grins again.
No, not quite. Tommy Janssen, sitting over by the mixer, was definitely not smiling. A pot-bellied gent in an overcoat, who I didn't recognize, was leaning over Tommy's shoulder, whispering something into his ear, and the kid didn't seem to like it at all. Even as Eddie's solo yanked my attention away again I saw Tommy turn around and say something to the overcoated man, and when I looked back the guy was standing at the bar with his nose in a double-something.
I put it out of my mind; verse three was a-comin'.
Halfway out of Levittown we got our second wind
In a joint so down it made you laugh
So I had another mug, and my buddy had a jug
And the cabbie had a pitcher and a half
When we got to Suffolk County we was goin' into
overdrive
The word had spread and crowds began to form
We drank our way from Jericho on down 110 to
Merrick Road
A-boozin' and a-singin' up a storm
I lost my buddy and the cabbie in the middle of
the Hamptons
We was drunker than it's possible to be
But there finally came a time when I just didn't
have a dime
I sat on Montauk Point and wept into the sea
And everybody in the joint joined in on the final chorus. All except the guy in the overcoat... who was already on his second double-something.
Yeah there's nothin' like drinkin' up a windfall
We was drunker than a monkey with a skinfull
We wuz so goddamn drunk it was sinful
And I think I ain 't sober yet!
A storm of glasses hit the fireplace, and Fast Eddie and I went into our aw-shucks routine at about the same time. When the cheers and laughter had died down somewhat, I stepped up to the mike and a-hemmed.
"Thank you for your sympathy, genties and ladle-men," I said. "We'll be passing the eleven-gallon hat directly," I tapped the huge Stetson on my head significantly and grinned.
"Well now..." I paused. "We only know two songs, and that was one of them, so we're real glad you liked it." I stopped again. "What do you think we ought to play now, Eddie?"
He sat awhile in thought.
"How 'bout de udder one?" he asked at last.
"Right arm," I agreed at once, and hit a G.
Doc Webster beheaded a new bottle of Peter Dawson's and took a hearty swallow.
"Okay, folks," I continued. "Here's a medley of our hit: a sprightly number called, 'She Was Only A Telegrapher's Daughter, But She Didit-Ah-Didit.' " I started to pick the intro, but the sound of glass smashing in the fireplace distracted me, and I bungled it.
And in the few seconds before I could take another
stab at it, the fellow in the overcoat burst noisily and explosively into tears.
Fast Eddie and I were among the first to join the circle that formed immediately around the crying, pot-bellied man. I didn't even stop to unplug my guitar, and if anyone had trouble stepping over the stretched-out telephone cord they kept it to themselves.
Paradoxically, after we had rushed to encircle him, nobody said a word. We let him have his cry, and did our best to silently share it with him. We offered him only our presence, and our concern.
In about five minutes, his sobs gave way to grimaces and jerky breathing, and Callahan handed him a triple-something. He got outside of half of it at once, and set the remaining something-and-a-half down on the bar. His face as he looked around us was not ashamed, as we might have expected; more relieved than anything else. Although there was still tension in the set of his lantern jaw and in the squint of his hazel eyes, the knot in his gut seemed to have eased considerably.
"Thanks," he said quietly. "I... I..." He stopped, wanting to talk about it but unable to continue. Then he must have remembered the few toasts he'd seen earlier in the evening, because he picked up the rest of his drink, walked over to the chalk line in the middle of the room, drained the glass and announced, "To meddlers." Then he pegged the glass into the exact geometrical center of the fireplace.
"Like me," he added, turning to face us. "I'm a meddler on a grand scale, and I'm not sure I've got the guts. Or the right."
"Brother," Callahan said seriously, "you're sure in the right place. All of us here are veteran meddlers, after a fashion, and we worry considerable about both them things."
"Not like this," the Meddler said. "You see, I'm a time-traveler too." He waited for our reaction.
"Say," piped up Noah Gonzalez, "it's a shame Tom Hauptman's off tonight. You two'd have a lot to talk about."
"Eh?" said the stranger, confused.
"Sure," Callahan agreed. "Tom's a time-traveler too." "But… but," the guy sputtered, "but I've got the
only unit."
"Oh, Tom didn't use no fancy equipment," Noah explained.
"Yeah," agreed Callahan. "Tom did it the hard way. Never mind, friend, it's a long story. You from the past or the future?"
"The future," said the time-traveler, puzzled at our lack of reaction. I guess we're hard to startle. "That is, the future as it is at present... I mean..." He stopped and looked confused.
"I get it," said Noah, like me a veteran SF fan. "You're from the future, but you're going to change that future by changing the past, which is our present, right?"
The fellow nodded.
"How's that again?" blinked Doc Webster.
"I am from the year 1995," said the man in the overcoat with weary patience, "and I am going to change history in the year 1974. If I succeed, the world I go back to will be different from the one I left."
"Better or worse?" asked Callahan.
"That's the hell of it: I don't know. Oh kark, I might as well tell you the whole story. Maybe it'll help."
Callahan set 'em up, and we all got comfortable.
Her name (said the stranger) was Bobbi Joy, and you couldn't say there'd never been anyone like her before. Lots of people had been like her. April Lawton, for instance, was nearly as good a guitarist. Aretha had at times a similar intensity. Billie Holiday surely bore and was able to communicate much the same kind of pain. Joni Mitchell and Roberta Flack each in their own way possessed a comparable technical control and purity of tone. Dory Previn was as dramatic and poignant a lyricist, and Maria Muldaur projected the same guileless grace.
But you could have rolled them all together and you still wouldn't have Bobbi Joy, because there was her voice. And it was just plain impossible that such a voice could be. When a Bobbi Joy song ended, whether on tape or disc or holo or, rarest of good fortune, live, you found your head shaking in frank disbelief that a human throat could express such pain, that such pain could be, and that you could hear such pain and still live.
Her name was the purest of irony, given to her by an employer in a previous and more ancient profession, a name she was too cynically indifferent to change when her first recordings began to sell. I've often wondered what her past customers must feel when they hear her sing; I'm certain every nameless, faceless one of them remembers her.
They surely appreciate as well as anyone the paradox of her name—for while God seemed to have given her every possible physical advantage in obtaining joy, it never got any closer to her than her album jackets and the first line of her driver's license. Although many pairs of lips spoke her name, none ever brought its reality to her.
For the scar on her soul was as deep and as livid as the one that ran its puckered, twisted way from her left cheekbone to her right chin.
The Woman With The Scar, they called her, and many, seeing only a physical wound, might have wondered that she did not have it surgically corrected—so easy a procedure in my time. But she sang, and so we understood, and we cried with her because neither of her scars would or could ever be erased, and that, I suppose you'd say
, was her genius. She represented the scars across the face of an entire era; she reminded us that we had made the world in which such scars could be, and that we—all of us—were as scarred as she. She...
This is absurd. I'm trying to explain sex to a virgin, with a perfectly good bed handy. Lend an ear, friends, and listen. This holo will tell you more than I can. God help you.
The stranger produced a smooth blue sphere about the size of a tennis ball from one of his pockets, and held it out toward the fireplace. The shimmering of the air over the crackling fire intensified and became a swirling, then a dancing, and finally a coalescing; The silence in Callahan's was something you could have driven rivets into.
Then the fireplace was gone, and in its place was a young black woman seated oh a rock, a guitar on her lap and starry night sky all around and behind her. Her face was in shadow, but even as we held our breath the moon came out from behind a cloud and touched her features. It gave an obsidian sheen to her skin, a tender softness to a face that God had meant to be beautiful, and made a harsh shadow-line of the incredibly straight slash that began an inch below her left eye and yanked sideways and down to open up lips that had been wide already, like a jagged black underline below the word "pain." She was black and a woman and scarred, and as the thought formed in our minds we realized that it was a redundancy. Her scar was visible externally, was all.
We were shocked speechless, and in the stillness she lifted her guitar slightly and began to play, a fast, nagging, worrisome beat, like despairing Richie Havens, an unresolved and maybe unresolvable chord that was almost all open string. An E minor sixth, with the C sharp in the bass, a haunting chord that demanded to become something else, major or minor, happy or sad, but something. A plain, almost Gregorian riff began from that C sharp but always returned unsatisfied, trying to break free of that chord but not succeeding.
And over that primevally disturbing sound, Bobbi Joy spoke, with the impersonal tones of the narrator behind all art:
Snow was falling heavily on U.S. 40 as the day drew to a close. This lonely stretch of highway had seen no other movement all day; the stillness was so complete that the scrub pines and rolling hills by the roadside may have felt that the promise given them so long ago had come to pass, that man had finally gone and left them in peace forever. No snakes had swayed forth from their retreats that day, no lizards crawled, no wolves padded silently in search of winter food. All wildlife waifed, puzzled, expectant, caught in the feeling of waiting... for what?
Callahan's Place 01 - Callahan's Crosstime Saloon (v5.0) Page 9