Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  “Boxes. You’re in charge of boxes. Hundreds of boxes, all shapes and sizes, but get as many as possible in the size they ship hardcover books to bookstores in: they have the most useful dimensions.”

  “No sweat. One of the places I guard is a bookbinder.”

  “Good. Get them flat rather than assembled if you can; more in one trip that way and they take two seconds to put together. Get some of those tape-guns they use.”

  “Check.”

  “What about me?” I asked.

  “You put everything you and Zoey own in the boxes.”

  “Oh my God.” I was sorry I’d asked. My worst nightmare. Decision-making. Millions of little decisions. What to keep. What to dump. How to package it. Hundreds of 3-D jigsaw puzzles, made of precious breakables. Trying to figure out how to intelligently label hundreds of jigsaw puzzles…

  Tanya heard the tremor in my voice. Her rapid-fire delivery didn’t slow any, but her voice softened. “Keep it simple, Jake. Don’t try to do any sorting: you’ll only confuse the shit out of yourself. You already know where everything is might now…so when Long-Drink brings you the first assembled boxes, you start right there in the bar. Start with the north wall, to the left of the door as you come in. The first thing you see you want to take, you put in the box. You keep doing that until the box is full. You label it ‘Bar N-1.’ The next box is ‘Bar N-2.’ And so on for east, south, and west walls. When the walls are bare, do the middle of the room; this time you label the boxes ‘Bar-1,’ ‘Bar-2,’ with no letters. When the bar’s empty, you go on into the back, and start a stack of boxes with ‘Bed N-1,’ ‘Kitchen N-1,’ and ‘Bath N-1.’ A robot could do it. Then when you get to Key West and you’re surrounded by boxes and you want to know where the hell something is, you just have to remember where it used to be.”

  That sounded sensible. Even better, it sounded doable. But—“Tanya, we’re going to need a lot of muscle. More than just your old man, I mean.”

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “Jim Omar’s back.”

  For the first time in a while I began to really relax. I’d rather have Jim Omar than a forklift and a chain hoist. The weird thing is, he looks like a normal person: built solid, but not at all “cut” or swollen like a bodybuilder. The muscles don’t show…until he uses them. Once, years ago, he’d been helping me on another move; and there came a point where four of us were having trouble getting my refrigerator off the back of a pickup. There wasn’t enough room in the truckbed and we kept getting in each other’s way. Finally Omar got impatient. He told the rest of us to climb out…and then I swear he wrapped his arms around that fridge, heaved it up to chest height and held it there, walked to the back of the truck, and jumped off with the damn fridge in his arms. He did not drop or damage it on landing. Then he carried it into the house and set it down where it belonged—and his arms and thighs reverted from Popeye-cartoon monstrosities to normal human size again. Later that day, after the move was done, I saw him eat a pound of chopped meat, raw—then he sat down to the meal I’d laid out for everybody, and ate two shares. He’d been out of the country for about fifteen of the last twenty years, but if he was stateside again, a lot of my worries were over. “How come he’s back?” I asked Tanya.

  “He got funding.”

  “For that wacky project of his; ‘Immortality for the Immortals’?”

  “Yep.”

  “Holy shit. The world has gotten even weirder than I thought.”

  I heard her chuckle. “Child, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. You remember Heinlein’s Future History?”

  “Sure.” In 1939 Robert Heinlein drew up a chart of several hundred years of imaginary future, within which matrix he eventually set a great many of his science fiction stories.

  “What were the 1990s labeled?”

  I visualized the chart. “Oh me. ‘The Crazy Years.’”

  “Fasten your seat belt. It’s gonna get nutty out by and by. Few more years and the President of the United States won’t be safe, I’m telling you.”

  Now there was a scary thought. I brushed it aside and tried to focus. “Okay, between your Isham and Omar I’d say we have serious muscle well covered. Long-Drink handles the wheels and boxes. Zoey and Erin do personpower recruitment. You got strategy and logistics. Eddie’s the banker and general facilitator. The Lucky Duck does…what he does.” I counted noses. “Hey—what about me?”

  “I told you,” she said. “You put everything you own into the boxes.”

  I began to hyperventilate.

  “I hear you breathin’,” she said. “Knock that off. Look, there’s two ways to do this. One, you can examine every item, right down to the last piece of forgotten paper, and make the decision do I take this or pitch it or do some third thing? about a million times—and worry each time that you made the wrong decision, and sometimes make the wrong decision.” I was sweating. “Or…you can just shovel things into boxes, without looking at them any closer than you have to to make ’em fit. If you do that, the load will be maybe twenty percent bigger and heavier, each person will end up lifting and carrying maybe two extra boxes—but you’ll have it ready in half the time, and you won’t be an emotional wreck.”

  I felt obliged to make at least a token protest. “Heavier load means more gas.” It came out kind of feeble.

  “So I play an extra hand,” Fast Eddie said.

  “He’s right, Jake,” Long-Drink said. “Efficiency is much overrated.”

  I looked at Zoey. She shrugged. “We can sort the stuff as we unpack it, if we want.”

  I blinked and looked around me. “So then…the only thing we really have to do now is survive endless long days of unceasing brutal yet tedious backbreaking donkey labor?”

  “Looks like,” she said, and Tanya on the speakerphone chimed in, “Now you got it.”

  I like to sleep late in the morning. I don’t like to wear no shoes. I despise all forms of exercise except sex, guitar-playing, elbow-bending, and talking. And thinking about sex. But there were clearly powerful karmic forces of some kind at work here that didn’t give a damn what I liked or didn’t like…and maybe I was even more wary of them than I was of manual labor. Or maybe I just wanted my wife and child to admire me a little. Bravery, I sometimes think, consists largely of faking bravery when necessary. “Well shit,” I said, willing my voice not to quaver, “I thought I had a problem. This is merely a catastrophe.”

  Zoey appeared to relax slightly.

  “You got it,” Tanya said, chuckling. “Nothing you gotta do about it except survive it.”

  “So when should I get the truck for?” Long-Drink asked.

  I had my breathing back under control now. “How long you figure it’ll take, Tanya? To pack up this whole place and load it?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “Oh. Right.”

  Of course. Tanya had been in Mary’s Place dozens of times. She’d even been in back a few times. But she’d never seen any of it…

  Wrong. She went on: “I’ll give you an estimate as soon as Zoey tells me how many warm bodies she and Erin have lined up to help.” I suddenly realized Tanya could probably have produced a more accurate inventory of Mary’s Place from memory than I could looking around at it.

  I was getting tired of talking on the phone. “Okay,” I said. “That covers everything I can think of. Anybody else got anything to contribute?”

  There was a brief silence.

  “Sounds like a plan,” the Lucky Duck said. There was a general murmur of agreement.

  “Right, then,” I said. “Tanya, we’ll get back to you tomorrow when we get a sense of how this is shaping up. Meanwhile, thank you from the bottom of my thorax.”

  “No sweat, cousin. Night.” She hung up, and so did I, and somebody killed the speakerphone.

  There was a brief silence, broken by Long-Drink McGonnigle. “I know the two things you should pack last.”

  I looked over at him. He was pointing to the two guns Erin had left
lying on the bartop. “Aw, you heard the Doc: they don’t use them much in Key West.”

  Long-Drink looked grim. “That may be…but just about the only thing I know about Key West is, you gotta go through South Florida to get there. You want those handy for show, to get respect.”

  As I was deciding that he had a point, I noticed something. “Hey—Erin!”

  “What is it, Jake?” Zoey asked, hearing my tone.

  “She left the safeties off on those things. There are nonbulletproof guests present. Okay, the Duck is safe enough, but what if Nikky took a round?” I went over and fixed matters, then looked around the room. “Erin?”

  “I put her down just a second ago.”

  “Where the hell could she have—”

  “Erin, where are you?” Zoey said in her command voice.

  No response. Everyone else was looking around, too, but…wait a minute, not everyone. “For that matter, where’s Nikky?” I said.

  “ERIN?” Zoey called. “NIKKY?”

  Erin rarely goes beyond earshot. Unlike most babies, she knows exactly how fragile and vulnerable she is. Just as I started to seriously worry, they came out of the back together, Erin in the crook of Tesla’s right arm and a flat box in his left. “Forgive me, Zoey,” he said. “Erin asked me to fetch this, and came along to show me where it was.”

  “I got bored with all the grown-up talk,” Erin said. “I want to play some Scrabble.” Sure enough, that was what the box was. Tesla set her and it down on the bar, opened the box, and began setting up the board. “Who’ll play with me?” she asked, selecting her letters.

  There was a silence. Everyone present loved Erin—but recent events had given us all a charge of adrenalin, and nobody seemed eager to sit down and lose at Scrabble…which was the usual outcome of playing with her.

  “I’ll play with you, kid,” the Lucky Duck said, surprising me. He strode over, selected seven tiles at random, but he didn’t bother to line them up on his rack. He just set them down on the center of the board without looking.

  “Uncle Duck!” Erin cried. “You’re no fun!”

  He had spelled out QUACKER. All seven of his letters. Ninety-four points, with the bonus.

  “I’ll play,” Fast Eddie said, and the Duck made way for him, looking bored.

  “Jake,” Zoey said, “where are you going?”

  I hadn’t realized I was going anywhere. Sure enough, though, I was halfway to the door to the back. I interrogated my automatic pilot to find out why. Oh. Right. “Who else besides Zoey and me missed dinner?”

  Zoey gasped. “My God, we have been busy.”

  “Come on,” I said to the others. “I’m planning a this-and-that omelet—who’s in? Speak up.”

  Eddie and Tesla and the Duck all admitted they could eat, and there was no point asking Long-Drink if he was hungry: he was awake. So I went back into the kitchen and made an omelet for six, and if you think that’s easy, try it sometime. In fact, now that I think of it, if it’s big enough for six people, it’s not an omelet anymore: it’s a full-fledged omel, I used our shallowest wok for a frying pan, and after I poured the egg mix into it I was as busy as a one-legged man at an ass-kicking contest for a while, and when it was finally time, Zoey bad to help me fold the sucker with a second spatula.

  Nonetheless, it turned out so well, I enjoyed eating it almost more than being complimented on it afterward.

  Zoey and I were not permitted either to clean up afterward or do the dishes. We couldn’t protest: they weren’t guests, they were family, one and all.

  As they worked, Zoey leaned over and murmured in my ear, “Thank you.”

  “For what?” I asked.

  She just looked at me.

  “It was my night to cook.”

  “Not for the meal, you asshole. For coming back from the dead.”

  “Oh.” I blinked. “That.”

  I went up into my mental editing room and ran some flashback sequences of the last year or so. By God, she was right. Until that moment I had not fully realized what a waste of space I’d become lately. Zoey had been carrying me.

  “I was scared,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said, “you must have been.” I thought about saying I was sorry, and studied her face, and realized somehow that it would be a mistake. “I love you,” I said instead.

  She pulled her chair next to mine and hugged me very hard.

  “Thanks for sticking around,” I murmured in her ear.

  “You’re welcome,” she said. Her voice was muffled.

  We sat there together for a time, hugging, while a feeling slowly suffused me that had been so long absent it took me a while to recognize it: peace. It made me think of Chairman Mao’s marvelous pronouncement, “All is chaos under heaven, and the situation is excellent.” Soon everything around me would be coming apart…but right at that moment I had a double-armful of beautiful woman. For the millionth time I wondered why so many men find skinny women attractive. Why would you be drawn to a body that says, I have either no physical appetites or inhuman restraint? Masochism, obviously—but why?

  Suddenly I had a flash, and grinned so broadly Zoey was able to detect it with the side of her neck. “What?” she asked.

  “My brain has started working again. God, it’s been a while.”

  “What?” she asked again, pulling away just far enough to see my face. “My, that’s an evil grin.”

  It got even broader “You know the Maloneys?”

  “Sure. I introduced them to you. What about them?”

  “Didn’t you say they’d just lost their lease again?”

  “Sure, and the sun came up this morning, so wha…oh. Oh.”

  “We’ve got Tesla and Fast Eddie bankrolling us,” I said, “but even so we’re gonna have to unload this dump eventually, or they’ll keep coming after us for taxes. I’ll bet the Maloneys are sick of renting. What do you say we offer it to them for…oh, say seventy-five percent of what I paid for it, a thousand dollars down?”

  If my grin was evil, Zoey’s was satanic. “Oh, I think they would make lovely neighbors for Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi. Make it fifty percent…and a hundred buck down payment.”

  We smiled at each other.

  “Rebirth, renewal, and revenge,” Zoey said. “Could there be a more perfect day?”

  Now my grin was satanic. “Wait until everybody leaves for the night,” I said, “and I’ll show you.”

  Her nipples stood up.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Railroading Time

  “A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  BY LATE MORNING OF

  the next day, things were shaping up nicely. By late afternoon, they were completely out of hand.

  The trouble wasn’t that nobody wanted to help. The trouble wasn’t even that everybody wanted to help—although there are few things that can screw up a move worse than having too many bodies to coordinate.

  The problem was that everybody wanted to come.

  I suppose it should not have surprised me as much as it did. But it did. Slowly, phone call by phone call by E-mail, I began to get it through my head that none of my friends and former customers were particularly happy where they were. If you’ve been telepathic with a large group of rather nice folks a couple of times, and now you’re not, the Long Island/New York area becomes even more unbearable than usual, I guess. Whatever the reasons, it turned out that in the fourteen months since we had been scattered, almost none of them had put down a root anywhere so deep that they weren’t prepared to pull it up and leave on a moment’s notice. And they all agreed that Key West sounded like a nice place to try.

  Noah Gonzalez was sick of slipping on ice—he only has the one leg, you see. Tommy Janssen was a major Jimmy Buffett fan. Slippery Joe Maser was in the Merchant Marine, and the chances of his getting a ship before his ticket rolled over were considerably higher in Florida than in San Diego just now; also, one of h
is wives (Susan) was from there, and the other (Suzanne) had always wanted to go. Shorty Steinitz, having finally lost his driver’s license for good—which even he admitted was only fair; Shorty once totaled a bumper car at a carnival—was suddenly in the market for a place where a bicycle was adequate transportation. Joe Quigley had finally lost his license, too—his private investigator’s license, that is—and while that one wasn’t fair, he and Arethusa were sick of the PI’s life anyway and ready to chuck it. Ralph von Wau Wau had heard a rumor that another talking dog lived in Key West—a female!—and wanted to check it out. Bill Gerrity already had several friends in Key West, had been receiving invitations and job offers from the transvestite community down there for years. Josie Bauer had family down there. And so on, down the list of the former patrons of Mary’s Place. For one reason and another, the answer always came down to, “Help you move? Sure, if you’ll help me move.”

  Maybe it was just “railroading time.”

  What began in the morning as a series of pleasant surprises became apparent as a logistical problem of staggering proportions by late in the day. We were no longer talking about a move; we were talking about an invasion force.

  And they all insisted they wanted to go together, as a convoy. It would be fun. A classic American road trip. A chance to all vacation together on the way to a new life in the sun. A memory to cherish for decades to come.

  “Twenty-three people, Zoey! Just so far. And their families and pets, and everything they own. Where in downtown Hell are we going to find twenty-three five-ton trucks? Not to mention gas and a hundred other—”

  “It’ll work out somehow,” she said.

  Everyone else I’d spoken to all day had said that, in just those words. “Look, I’m trying to get some worrying done here, and you’re not helping.”

  “You’re doing fine on your own,” she said soothingly, and set two fresh cups of Kenya AA before us.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Wait, now. I seem to recall I was just as worried as this about something…uh…yesterday, it was. Yes, yesterday, I remember now. And then I thought of something and did that, and everything got all better. Now, what was it?” I smelled the coffee. “Oh. Right. Where’s the phone?”