Callahan's Legacy

by Spider Robinson

  “Well,” Willard said, and stopped there.

  “Tink o’ de woist sting you ever hoid of dat de cops found out about. Did dey give de player de chair? And did dey bust de mark, too?”

  Zoey said softly, “Eddie, the cases aren’t parallel—”

  He flung his still-full glass into the fire, and the flames leaped. “Didn’t youse lissen’a me?” he said angrily. “Uncle Dave got raped dead. Dey screwed him till he bled out, you get it? De law don’t do dat ta guys dat kill babies or blow up airplanes! I got handed over ta da nearest pedophile an’ his friends fa five years. If I told ’em what I did, and de judge decided dat’s what I desoived, maybe I coulda understood. But nobody ever ast me. All dese people dat was sposta care about me, an’ nobody ever ast me!”

  “Eddie,” Zoey said, “are you saying kids should be allowed to have sex with adults?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “Absolutely not. Never in dis woild. What happened ta me proves it. Once everybody decides sometin is horrible, dey’re right. Fa some reason, foist-time sex has just gotta be as confusin’ an’ scary an’ clumsy as possible. Youse give somebody an awgasm, dat means youse exploited ’em. Sex is a war, an’ everybody’s gotta fight fair, or we’ll kill ’em. Even if de kid was smarter dan me, an’ kept his mout’ shut—or her mout’ shut—just havin’ a secret from everybody else inna universe’d be a bad ting. It just shouldn’t happen, okay? Like I said: never in dis woild.”

  “So what are you saying?” she asked.

  “I’m sayin’ dis woild sucks,” he told her. “An’ I can’t tink o’ no way to fix it except start over on a different planet.”

  There was silence in Mary’s Place.

  I groped for a segué. How did we get from here to the jokes again? What could I say to make Eddie feel better?

  When in doubt, do what you know.

  Lady Macbeth was lying forgotten on the bartop, where I’d set her when Eddie began his story. I picked her up, discovered the slight slippage of the D-string I had expected and corrected it, and strummed a loud G chord. I think it was at that point that I realized I had a problem. The song I intended to sing did not have a tune, yet. Hell, I’d only finished the lyrics…Jesus Christ, that very morning!

  Oh, well. Jump in, Jake.

  I did, establishing an R&B rhythm, and the tune simply occurred, as if I were taking dictation from the universe.

  God has a sense of humor, but it’s often rather crude

  What He thinks is a howler, you or I would say is rude

  But cursing Him is not a real productive attitude

  Just laugh—you might as well, my friend,

  ’cause either way you’re screwed

  I know: it sounds so simple, and it’s so hard to do

  To laugh when the joke’s on you

  I glanced at Eddie; he was already seating himself at his piano stool and flexing his fingers. He jumped in at the top of the second verse, and landed running.

  God loved Mort Sahl, Belushi, Lenny Bruce—He likes it sick

  Fields, Chaplin, Keaton…anyone in pain will do the trick

  ’Cause God’s idea of slapstick is to slap you with a stick:

  You might as well resign yourself to stepping on your dick

  It always sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do

  To laugh when the joke’s on you

  Again I looked at Eddie. He was grinning like a pirate. “Take a chorus,” I hollered, and he did it Dr. John style, scattering notes like buckshot, going out on fantastic limbs but always finding his way back by some impossible route that was in retrospect inevitable. “Again,” Zoey called out, and gave him a push with her bass. Twice in that chorus he did things that made me laugh out loud. “Bridge,” I called as he brought it back to the root, and to my surprise Zoey sang a harmony to it.

  You can laugh at a total stranger

  When it isn’t your ass in danger

  And your lover can be a riot

  —if you learn how to giggle quiet

  But if you want the right to giggle, that is what you gotta do

  when the person steppin on that old banana peel is you

  That exhausted her memory of the lyrics; she left the verses to me, coming in only on the last two lines.

  A chump and a banana peel: the core of every joke

  But when it’s you that steps on one, your laughter tends to choke

  Try not to take it personal, just have another toke

  as long as you ain’t broken, what’s the difference if you’re broke?

  I know: it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do

  To laugh when the joke’s on you

  Fast Eddie caught my nod and took another chorus, and this time I laughed all the way through; he kept deliberately playing clams, teetering on the verge of a train wreck, like a matador letting the bull put a couple of stripes on his ass. I was still chuckling as I took the final verse:

  It can be hard to force a smile, as you get along in years

  It isn’t easy laughin at your deepest secret fears

  But try to find your funny bone, and have a couple beers:

  If it don’t come out in laughter, man, it’s comin out in tears

  I said it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do

  To laugh when the joke’s on you

  Fast Eddie had found the third harmony for those last two lines by now. It sounded so sweet, we did it again. And then we did it a third time, with little bluesy variations that dovetailed perfectly. And the fourth and final time we repeated it, everyone in the joint who could carry a tune climbed on with us and we rode it into the wall together.

  Boy, it felt good.

  Of course there was applause and laughter, and some slightly manic chatter, when we were done. We all felt relieved to be back on track, eager to get back to being merry again. A competition developed to buy me and Eddie a beer. I put Lady Mac back down on the bartop and went to relieve Zoey of her bass.

  “Yo, Boss,” Eddie called over the noise.

  “Yeah, Eddie?”

  He began playing a slow intro riff in a minor key. Another of my songs; I recognized it at once. And frowned. “Evelyn’s Song,” I call it. It’s not a merry song. In fact, it’s so short and so sad I seldom perform it.

  “Laughin’s good,” Eddie said. “But just laughin’ don’t cut it sometimes, y’know?”

  I mentally shrugged, found a safe perch for Zoey’s fiddle, and reclaimed Lady Macbeth. There was a kerfluffle when I tried to join him; he was not in the key I was expecting, the one in which I had written the song. By the point at which I was supposed to sing the first line, I had just located the key he was using, so I gave him an indescribably eyebrow signal that meant, Go around again, I’ll get it on the next pass.

  Instead, he started singing. He had transposed the song to bring it into his own range. Just as the Beatles sang with American accents, Eddie sings without a trace of his Brooklyn accent. He has one of those Tom Waits voices, like Charlie Parker doing his best with a broken sax.

  Snow is beginning to melt

  Like an emotion I once felt

  The cards have already been dealt

  The hand has been played

  The arrangements have been made

  Icicles hide in the shade,

  Awaiting their turn

  For a bad case of sunburn

  Ain’t it something to learn

  even good people die?

  At that point the song quotes eight bars of an old Irish funeral chant, one of those “Aye-diddly-eye-die, diddly-eye-die, diddly-eye-die-die” deals. (If you have the Small Faces’ OGDEN’S NUT GONE FLAKE album, they quote it in the song “Mad John.”) A minor, A minor, C major, D, repeated over and over. I was ready to take the harmony, but Eddie did it instrumentally, and after the eighth bar he launched into a solo. I concentrated on staying out of his way.

  It was a helluva solo. Somewhere in there I heard magazine pages turning, and a boy saying, “Well, I ain�
��t doin’ it ever again!” and a man crying, “Don’t worry, Eddie, it isn’t your fault!” and an El train coming in the window. At one point it became so childishly simple I knew without asking he was quoting the first melody Uncle Dave ever taught him on the piano—then he repeated it with sophisticated embellishments, as if showing off his progress since then. And then he segued back to the simple melancholy chords, and sang the second and final verse:

  I hope you knew

  All I never could tell you

  Any time that I grew

  It was under your eye

  But I let the chance go by

  Never got to say goodbye

  Guess it’s time to make a try

  Hear me sing and hear me cry:

  Bye-bye…

  My words sounded so much better coming from Fast Eddie’s cracked pipes that I marveled I had never thought of having him sing that song before. I guess I had thought my pain for Evelyn to be too personal. Perhaps nothing else could have brought it home to me so clearly that my pain was Eddie’s, and Eddie’s pain was mine.

  He caught my eye and signaled me to sing the aye-diddly-eye-dies. As I did, he came in behind me with the third harmony—the one most people can’t find unless someone else is already singing the more natural second line—and it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  I didn’t need any more eye-signals; I just knew he wanted to repeat it eight times, so I did. The melody line was designed to be so simple even an untutored peasant can sing it, so people jumped in as the spirit moved them, and for a while there it got to be like an Irish funeral. I mean, fifty or sixty strangers singing something as essentially meaningless as the coda to “Hey, Jude,” can bring tears to your eyes: imagine a whole barful of micks—native, collateral and honorary—howling back at the banshee.

  When we were done, there were dry eyes in the house, four of them—but only because Tanya Latimer and Acayib Pinsky suffer from lacrimation deficit.

  And Fast Eddie was right. Tears, in their place, are just as important as laughter. You can’t tell a story like that and then shuffle away with a few giggles. Having invoked Uncle Dave, it was necessary to say goodbye to him.

  “Eddie,” I said, when the applause had died down, “what was Uncle Dave’s last name? I want to remember him as long as you do.”

  The question seemed to confound him. “Whaddya mean? His name was Costigan. Whaddya tink?”

  I nodded. “Ah. I should have guessed.”

  “What was your biological parents’ name, Eddie?” Merry Moore asked.

  “I don’t rememba,” he said flatly.

  Merry opened her mouth, closed it again, and finally settled on, “Oh.”

  Long-Drink McGonnigle was smiling as he brought Eddie a beer. “Eddie, what was that thing Roland Kirk said about dying?”

  Eddie’s forehead furrowed…then relaxed as the quote came back. “He said, ‘Nobody dies…dey just leave here.’ Dat de one?”

  Long-Drink nodded. “See what I’m gettin’ at? As long as you’re walkin’ around with that name on your bank card, David Costigan ain’t dead. He just ain’t here.”

  Eddie blew the foam off his beer, and smiled his beautifully hideous smile. “Well, I wish ta God he was here…but youse’re right, Drink.” He lifted his glass in salute. “Tanks.”

  And a cheer went up.

  As I was on my way to restore Lady Macbeth to her case in the back, I heard Solace call my name.

  “What’ll it be, Mac?” I punned, incautiously.

  Her icon became the Sad Mac that warns of a boot failure. “Job’s curse on you for what you’re Raskin,” she riposted. “Quadra have to go and Performa pun like that for? That Woz awful.”

  Punning with a savvy computer is like showing a few little steps you’ve invented to Baryshnikov. I’ve seen Doc Webster keep up with Solace for as long as ten minutes, but even he can’t sustain it. She can pun in every language there is, including COBOL. It had been sheer bravado to even attempt it. Nonetheless, I felt obliged to go down swinging.

  “Nothing I hate more than a moaner Lisa—don’t be such a crab Apple.” See? Pee-yew. “Tell me, is it true that Microcomputer is Patrocomputer’s brother?”

  “Yeah, and I’m their sister Minicomputer.”

  Doc Webster, gravitating naturally toward horror, arrived and gave me covering fire. “Data way, Solace.” He reached out and caressed her monitor screen. “What’s a nice pearl like you doing in a glaze like this?” Somewhere nearby, Tesla groaned. “Say, you know those little fish that swim across your face whenever the screen-saver’s on—are those Finder’s kippers?”

  “Yes,” she said, “and the little bouncing snowman is my graphic winterface. And one of the things that makes a man different from a woman is, every time he takes a WYSIWYGgles it. Because it’s floppy. You know, if I’d only had a diet cola, I might have joined you all on that last song. I could have been the mourning Tab and Apple choir.”

  Tesla was helpless with laughter, now. I decided the only hope of retreat was a diversion. Hearkening back to my last sortie, I said, “So the boss tells Pat and Mike to measure the telephone poles before they install them. Pat says, ‘Mike, I’ll stand the poles up on end, and you climb up there with a tape measure.’ ‘But Pat,’ says Mike, ‘why don’t we measure them here on the ground?’ ‘Why, ya eejit,’ says Pat, ‘the boss told us to find out the height, not the length.’”

  At once Solace accepted the tacit surrender. “Several weeks later, the boss says, ‘Pat, how come you and your brother can only install two poles a day, and the rest of me crew are installing twenty-four a day each?’ ‘Ah,’ says Pat, ‘but you should see how much they leave stickin’ out the ground…’”

  When the laughter had died away, I said, “Excuse me, Solace. You called me over, and before I knew it we were off and punning. What was it you wanted?”

  “I have a revised time estimate for the arrival of the Lizard,” she said. “Better data have just come in.”

  That sobered us. “How long have we got?” Tesla asked her.

  “Call it an hour and a half. And it seems to know just where we are. At least, it appears to be heading directly for this precise spot on the earth’s surface.”

  “Jesus!” the Doc exploded. “And you took time to make puns?”

  “Pardon me,” she said drily. “Was there some better use to which those thirty seconds could have been put?”

  The Doc opened his mouth and closed it again. “My apologies,” he said finally. “I guess not. Sorry, Solace—it’s been a long night, you know?”

  “I know,” she said.

  “Nothing important has changed,” I said. “Having a good time is still the most intelligent thing I can think of to do. Who knows? Maybe we’ll get telepathic yet. The one thing I’m sure of is that now is not a good—”

  “Nikky?” Zoey asked.

  “Just a sec, darling,” I said. “I was just telling the Doc now is not a good time to—”

  “Nikky?” she repeated.

  “Yes, Zoey?” Tesla replied.

  “You can repair stuff other people can’t, right?”

  He nodded gravely. “Often, yes. Why do you ask?”

  Her voice was funny. “Do you think you could fix my water? I’m afraid I broke it…”

  “Doc, I’m sorry,” I said. “I was wrong. On reflection, this seems like an excellent time to panic—”

  10

  ER…“OM” MORE!

  “—or it would be if I could spare the goddam time, which I can’t, sit down, spice, don’t worry about a thing, everything’s fine, everything is just totally copacetic, you’re in good hands, the best hands in the world, Doc, what do you need, boiling water, right?”

  “Sit down, hell,” she said. “I’ll be damned if I’m going to birth my first baby on a barroom floor. Take me in the back, Jake.”

  I will lighten the tension with a little joke. “Zoey, if you’d only thought of that nine and a half months ago, you
wouldn’t in this mess—”

  “Take me in the back, God damn it!”

  What tension? “Yes, dear.” I took her arm and started steering her toward our quarters in the back. “Doc? Boiling water?”

  “Only if you feel the need for a soothing cup of tea,” he said. “Lacking friend Acayib’s metabolic improvements, I rarely wash my hands in boiling water. Plain old hot water and soap will do fine. But put clean sheets on that bed before you let her lie down.”

  “I got her, Jake,” Callahan said in my ear. “Go ahead.”

  “Thanks, Mike,” I blurted, and ran.

  I set a new international indoor record in sheet-changing. Tossing the old sheets on the floor seemed inadequate, so I flung open the window and tossed them outside into the night—then slammed it down again, suddenly terrified of a draft. As I did so, Mike got Zoey in the door, looking rather like a man trying to waltz with a zeppelin. Halfway to the bed she let out a bellow and started to go down. Callahan is a strong man, but it took both of us to keep her from falling and get her safely horizontal. Doc Webster was at his heels, and—astonishingly enough—nobody else followed him to gawk.

  “Okay, honey,” I said, “cleansing breath, now—”

  “Fuck you,” she explained, so I shut up.

  So much for Lamaze. How many babies did he ever have?

  The Doc headed for the biffy. Once Zoey’s contraction was over and she was breathing easy again, I followed him in. He was stripped to his shirtsleeves, the sleeves rolled as high as they would go, and he was washing his hands in that peculiar, insect-like way doctors have. I joined him and began doing the same thing.

  “What do you think, Sam?” I asked him. “Get her down to Smithtown General, right?”

  I had never, even when Long-Drink McGonnigle was punning, seen him look so pained. “Jake, I am conflicted. I can’t recall a time in forty years of practicing medicine when I’ve been more conflicted.”