Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  “You can’t get any farther south than this without getting your feet wet,” he agreed. “Just give me a minute to shift gears, okay? Christ, I feel like I was braced to lift a half-ton truck and it turned out to be a hologram. Just a second.”

  We heard him put his hand over the mouthpiece of his phone, and even with that filter, his bellowed “WAA-A-A-A-HOO!” nearly broke my speakerphone.

  “There,” he said a moment later, “I think I’m back up to speed now. Boy, I’d forgotten how much fun those bootlegger turns are. Okay, when do you get here and what do you need?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Let me get back to you on both. I haven’t really got my mind wrapped around this, yet.”

  “You haven’t? I feel like Scrooge on Christmas morning.”

  “We’ll work all that stuff out. I’ll let you know when to expect how many of us as soon as I know myself. How’s the housing market down there?”

  “Pricey.”

  “Figures.”

  “Worth every damn penny. But bring a lot of pennies.”

  I glanced at my venture capitalist. Nikola Tesla frowned. He died owing a fair amount of money to a number of people, back in 1943—but I happen to know he subsequently went to considerable pains to repay all of it. (Without being caught at it, a good trick) He had committed himself to underwriting this particular Quest, and I was confident that he would come across. Eventually. But I could see from his expression that it might not be Real Soon.

  Fast Eddie spoke up. “Dey play poker in Key West?”

  There was a pause, and then the Doc’s laughter began, and built to the point where it strained the speaker. “Eddie, God damn it,” he boomed, “I have missed you.”

  “Yeah,” Eddie agreed.

  “Well, get your ass down here. You’re right: money won’t be a real problem. Plenty of optimists you can bleed, down here. I got a piano for you you’re gonna like, too—and nothing you won’t.”

  “Good dere, huh?”

  “Worst thing happened to me since I got here is sunburn,” the Doc assured him.

  “Well, you got what you basked for,” I said.

  He riposted at once. “Yes, that’s the fry in the ointment.”

  God, it was good to volley with him again. It had been too long. “But I’m sure the women there like to get off on a tan gent.”

  “Enough to cosine a loan, some of ’em.”

  Erin applied Daughter Block. “Daddy…if you and Uncle Doc are going to do that, I want my nap now.”

  (One of the very few quirks of my daughter’s personality that I do not find totally enchanting is her strong dislike of punning. She got some of that from her mother—but Zoey’s distaste for puns is probably not much stronger than that of any normal healthy human being. I attribute Erin’s abomination of them to the influence of her earliest mentor: Solace, the world’s first self-aware silicon intelligence. Nobody hates double-meanings more than a computer, trust me.)

  “We don’t do it on purpose, honey,” I said.

  “Same with me and my diaper. I learned to stop. You can do that if you have to—I just don’t want to smell it.”

  “Come on, darling, I’ll take you in back,” Zoey told her, and held out her arms. “You boys wipe yourselves afterward, and wash your hands.” Erin crawled to the end of the bar and leaped into her mother’s arms.

  “Don’t go, Erin.” Doc said quickly. “You either, Zoey. We’ll try to control ourselves. I…I guess I just want you all in the room listening while I say this. Since I moved down here I’ve been a happy old fart. But this…” He paused a moment. “…this is the happiest day I’ve had since…” Another pause while he thought about it. “…well, I guess since that last time we saved the world.”

  “Same here,” I said, and for a second I thought I was somehow hearing my own voice fed back through the speakerphone—then realized everyone else in the room had said the same thing at once. We looked around at each other and grinned. “It’s gonna be good to see you again, Doc,” I said.

  “There’s a little less of me to see, actually,” he said, sounding smug.

  “Really?” The Doc had been trying to lose weight for as long as I’d known him, without notable success.

  “Yeah, I seem to have misplaced thirty or forty pounds. I’m on the Half-Chinese Diet.”

  “What’s that?” Zoey asked.

  “You can eat anything you want—but you have to use only one chopstick.”

  I grinned. Erin rolled her eyes. But it wasn’t strictly speaking a pun, so she let it pass.

  “That’s great, Sam,” Zoey said. “But seriously, how did you do it?” My beloved is one of the most sensible people I know, with fewer illusions and delusions than most—but she is human, and a product of her culture. Like every other female in America, she suffers from the irrational conviction that she weighs too much.

  “Zoey,” the Doc said, “I could tell you that a big man burns more energy just walking around in this climate, and that’s true. But that’s not it. I don’t think so, anyway. The best I can say it is, in Key West the air is a meal. It tastes so good you just don’t get hungry as often. Being here satisfies the appetite.”

  “That good, huh?” the Lucky Duck threw in.

  “You get peckish, head for your local restaurant…and along the way you suck in a few lungfuls of frangipani and jasmine and sea salt…you soak up a few eyefuls of bougainvillea and palm fronds and sunset and skimpily dressed college students on bicycles…and when you get to the restaurant, you find that one Cuban sandwich does the work of two, and somehow it feels like a piece of Key lime pie would just be gilding the lily. You end up having the walk back home for dessert.”

  “Sounds rough,” I said.

  “Well, it’s an easy job, but nobody’s gotta do it.”

  “What’s the downside?” the Duck asked the Doc.

  “The what?”

  “Come on.”

  “Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating a hair. The downside is high prices, mosquitoes like birds with teeth, cockroaches the size of New York rats, and tourists—but they’ve got that last one almost under control. Like New Orleans did: herd ’em all into a long narrow pen where they can be milked conveniently, and it’s easy to hose away all the vomit in the mornings and so forth. It’s called Duval Street. Real humans don’t have to go there—but the funny thing is, we do, sometimes. Like going to the zoo. Of course, the animals escape from time to time…but when they do they’re almost always on bicycles or mopeds, so they’re easy to shoot.”

  “How’s de heat?”

  Doc knows Eddie, and understood that he wasn’t asking about the climate. “Let me put it this way, Ed. The cops here ride around on bicycles in short pants, and most of them won’t slug a drunk unless they have to.”

  “Huh.”

  “There hasn’t been a shot fired since I came here, let alone a GSW. There’s only one way on or off the island, so there’s no high-speed chases. It’d be a nice peaceful place to practice.” There was a slight wistful note in his voice. The Doc had always intended to keep practicing medicine until they planted him…and had retired only when, within the same month, he developed a tremor in his right hand and his eyes went bad on him.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, “this is costing a fortune and we’re already sold. We’ve got a million things to do and a million decisions to make. Go have a Cuban sandwich and we’ll get started. I’ll get back to you on what we’ll need and when as soon as I figure it out. I’m really glad you called.”

  “Jake, take me off speakerphone for a second,” the Doc said. “Good night, everybody. You’ve all made me very happy.”

  They all bade him farewell, and I switched off the speaker and picked up the handset. “I’m here, Sam.”

  “You’re healed, Jake.”

  I thought about it. “Well…healing. I don’t know about healed.”

  “It’s finally scabbed over, at least. I could hear it in you
r voice the minute you picked up the phone. You’ve got your juice back. You’re ready to take on your Aspect and raise up your Attribute again.”

  I probed my soul. “You know, I believe you’re right.”

  “I’m so glad,” he said. “I was worried for you, Jacob. Very worried.” There was the faintest suggestion of a quaver in his voice.

  I was moved by it. Also a little scared retroactively, if that makes any sense. I’d known the Doc a long time, and he had seen me through some major traumas without letting his worry show. Had I really been that close to the edge?

  Yeah, I guessed I had. “So was I, Sam,” I said. “I just couldn’t seem to do anything about it. But I guess I had a kind of epiphany.”

  “Isn’t that a brand of guitar?” he said quickly, but a trace of the quaver was still there.

  “You’re lucky Erin didn’t hear that.” Back when Mary’s Place had been operational, we’d had a guy in one night, a heroically drunken Classics professor from Stony Brook. A guitarist friend of mine was performing that night, and the prof squinted blearily at the “Epiphone” label on the head of his guitar, and read it aloud—pronouncing it “epiphany.” The resulting laugh had been memorable. The Doc had explained to him that Epiphone was the little-known Goddess of Long-Necked High-Strung Women with Large Navels.

  “The success of a pun,” he quoted philosophically now, “is in the oy of the beholder”

  “Yeah, well, Erin may be more success than even you can handle,” I said. “Look, I gotta go. As the ratio of a circumference to a diameter once said to the bottom of a boat—”

  He beat me to the punchline. “‘Keel, I’m pi.’ Jake, it’s going to be good to see you. Give your ladies a kiss apiece for me.”

  “I’ll try to fit yours into the schedule,” I promised, and hung up the phone.

  Fast Eddie, practical as always, was behind the bar, playing The Machine like a piano, producing coffee for everybody, except Erin who claimed caffeine “corrupted her clock-chip.” He did not need to ask our individual prescriptions; as I watched he dialed for a double shot of Irish whiskey in mine, and a single shot for Zoey. Suddenly my vision refocused past him, on The Machine itself. Conceived and built by an eccentric—okay, a monomaniac, who had earned the name The Slave of Coffee—it was a miracle of inspired design, combining state-of-the-art technology, clever engineering, and patient honest craftsmanship. It was superbly functional, visually impressive, sturdy. It weighed something over two hundred pounds, empty…

  I scroaned. That’s a cross between a scream and a groan, similar to greaming. “Oh my God, what have I done?”

  My wife was at my side, her hand on my shoulder “What is it, Jake?”

  “It just hit me.” I turned toward her, making groping motions with my hands. “Zoey…dear God in Heaven…I’ve committed us to Moving!”

  “It’ll be okay,” she said soothingly at once. “We have drugs.”

  “But, Zoey—you know what Twain said!”

  She nodded. “I know. Two moves equals one fire.” She looked around the room and shrugged. “This place could use half a fire, right about now.”

  Fighting for control, I glanced around myself. At first I didn’t get what she meant, saw only large heavy awkward objects that would soon have to be moved a thousand miles…and then it began to sink in. Dust everywhere that Erin couldn’t reach. General small untidinesses. I noticed a chair cobwebbed to its table. A dead light I hadn’t gotten around to rewiring. A general air of listlessness and defeat. And much too much space, way too empty.

  “Well,” I said slowly, “this was a real good place to be, once.”

  “Got dat right,” Eddie said.

  “But you’re right, love. Not anymore. This is no place to be raised by a kid. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  She grinned. “Attaboy.”

  “Only, how?” I greamed. “Jesus, it’d take everybody here just to get The Machine there on a truck—if we had a truck—let alone all the rest of the—” Suddenly I remembered. “Oh, Christ, I don’t even own a car anymore—”

  “Jake, calm down,” she said, putting her arms around me. “Breathe slowly. Answer this: What are friends for?”

  I got a grip. “Oh. Right. To help you move. I forgot.” I hugged her back. “Thanks.” A thought suddenly struck me, and I pulled away. “But hey—most of our friends are all scattered to the four winds.” Thanks to their favorite innkeeper spending the last year or so in a funk…

  She took me by the ears and kissed me firmly. “Calm down, I said.” She turned to the Lucky Duck. “Ernie?”

  He just grinned.

  The door opened and Long-Drink McGonnigle walked in, stamping snow off his boots and talking as he came.

  “Jake, God damn it, I got something to say and I want you to shut the hell up until I finish saying it, okay? This place has turned sour for you, you’re no good here anymore, spilled milk is bad for the stomach—Christ, you don’t even keep your driveway shoveled anymore, I had to park out on the damn road and hike in—and I’m telling you it’s time you got your thumb out of your ass and moved on, before you turn into an impacted wisdom tooth of a man—move anywhere, I don’t care where, out of state—hell, Florida even—I mean it, I’m serious as a heart attack: serious enough to get on the horn and organize a Moving Party to run you and your family out of town on a rail right away, and if you don’t…what the hell are you all laughing about?”

  The only one who wasn’t laughing was the Lucky Duck, who smirked at me and said, “You can always leave these little things to me.”

  Eventually we got Long-Drink straightened out. I studied his reaction with some interest. The Drink is one of the least sentimental people I know, at least publicly. Not as sour as the Lucky Duck, mind you—Long-Drink definitely knows how to have fun—but he works pretty hard on being unflappable. Yet I knew this news would affect him emotionally at least as deeply as it had Doc Webster; like him Long-Drink is sort of a founding father, one of the oldest living patrons of the original Callahan’s Place, and one of the steadiest customers of Mary’s Place until they shut us down. As he began to grasp what we were telling him, and understand that we were really and truly planning to reunite the company, in a Place Without Snow, I watched his face to see whether he would let any of his emotion show.

  He closed his eyes briefly, then reopened them. The corners of his mouth turned up. “Well, now,” he said. “That doesn’t suck much at all, does it?” His eyes were bright. Then he blinked six times fast and they were normal again. And that was it. “Now comes the hard part,” he went on.

  “You got that right,” I said.

  He went to his usual spot at the bar, slid into his chair, and rested his elbow on the bar. It was oddly beautiful to watch: as easy, graceful, and inevitable as Paladin dropping slowly into that gunfighter’s crouch of his on Have Gun Will Travel. McGonnigle is several inches taller than me, or just about anybody, and damn near as skinny—but I’m pretty sure people would have called him Long-Drink if he’d been five feet tall. Eddie took a mug from The Machine and slid it down the bar to him, and he fielded it without looking. “You need a Dortmunder”

  A planner, he meant. Like John Dortmunder in Donald Westlake’s books: the guy that plans the caper “Right.”

  He shrugged and knocked back half his coffee. “Then you want Tanya Latimer.”

  He was right. Tanya is an ex-cop, smart, tough, and decisive; she could get a riot marching in step. The reason she’s an ex-cop as young as forty is she was blinded in the line of duty, and late-life blindness improved her already impressive organizational skills a great deal. Also her husband Isham, though only twice the size of a normal human being, carries enough muscle for three of them—and I was already dimly sensing that muscle was going to be required here. Finally, for reasons known only to her and to God, Tanya played the tuba; she and Ish had to move at least once a year themselves. “Brilliant, Long-Drink,” I told him.

  “Redundant,” he
said.

  So I gave Tanya a call, and explained the situation. There was nothing reserved about her reaction; her “Y-Y-Y-Y-YES!” could have been clearly heard out in the parking lot…and I did not have her on speakerphone at the time. Soon I did, though, at her command; Tanya’s not a person to waste time. “All right, you beautiful loonies, let’s get this damn show on the road! Zoey, you still have the old phone files: give them to the Duck and Fast Eddie and have them start tracking, find every regular you can and tell ’em it’s railroadin’ time—”

  “Why those two?” Zoey asked, already heading for the Rolodex. “I can handle it.”

  “Don’t argue. Because they talk less than you. Or anybody. I want you and Erin to fire up the Mac and do the same thing by E-mail and newsgroup. She knows the system better, but she can’t type or mouse as fast as you.”

  “Yet,” Erin qualified.

  “That’s right, honey. Don’t worry about overlapping with the Duck and Eddie: the point is to get as many bodies as possible, fast—besides, anybody who gets the first message won’t be home long enough to get the second. McGonnigle, you’re a night watchman, you gotta know somebody with a five-ton truck we can rent for a week who won’t skin us—”

  “Rent, schment,” Long-Drink said. “I know where I can get one for free.”

  “Yeah?” she said suspiciously. “How much will that cost?”

  He shrugged at the phone. “Hell, as long as we promise not to bring it back, and not to tell anybody it didn’t really have a full load of expensive items aboard when we stole it, and to dump it somewhere in the Keys where it won’t be noticed for a week or so, we might even make a few bucks.”

  “Rent one,” she said firmly. “Defrauding an insurance company is lousy karma to begin a move with.”

  Long-Drink sighed. “When you’re right, you’re right. Okay, one five-ton, coming up. I can get us a driver, too.” He threw me a dark look. “Assuming somebody ever shovels out the goddam driveway around here. What else?”