Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  “You’re resting your head on it, Daddy,” Erin said.

  I lifted my head and looked, and she was right. “Very good,” I said. “I was just testing you.”

  She nodded. “I passed.”

  I blinked at the phone, wondering why I had wanted it. A long gulp of coffee. Oh yes, of course! The inspiration that was going to save my bacon, for the second time in two days. I picked up the phone and speed-dialed my mastermind, my Dortmunder, my Eisenhower: Tanya Latimer.

  “Tanya? Jake. Listen, things have—”

  “Jake? Hey, do you think McGonnigle could maybe come up with another truck someplace? Ish and I have been talking it over all day, and we figure after Nova Scotia, Florida sounds good…and besides, we’re basically still packed, so—”

  I held the phone away from me, stared at it, and passed it to Zoey.

  She saw my face, sighed, nodded, accepted the phone, and I concentrated on finishing my coffee while she took on the chore of explaining to Tanya that the Latimers were the twenty-fourth party to join the wagon train, and agreeing that that sure was amazing, huh, and finally asking if by any chance Tanya had any thoughts to offer on exactly how to manifest and organize said wagon train. I couldn’t hear the answer, but it was short. Zoey thanked her and promised to get back to her and hung up.

  “She hasn’t got a clue,” I said.

  Zoey shook her head. “She thinks it’s impossible. She says ‘Good luck.’”

  Think about it. Call it two dozen vehicles—though it could easily run to twice that many. How do you keep them together, without everybody having to memorize two dozen license plate numbers? How do you coordinate stopping for gas? Stopping to pee? Stopping to gawk? Stopping for breakdowns? What are the chances of getting everyone to agree, even once, on where and what to eat? And if you scatter for meals, how do you re-form the convoy afterward without creating a public nuisance somewhere?

  Try and calculate the theoretical maximum distance your caravan can cover in a day. Cut that in half, to get the probable real-world maximum. Now sit down with a map, and work out where you’ll probably be stopping each night—assuming nothing goes wrong. Now phone motels, campgrounds, or hostels in each of those places, until you find ones that will accept a reservation for two dozen rooms, with kiddy cots in half of them. Allow a good ten minutes per call, and be prepared to be persuasive. Assuming you do get lucky, they will want the number of a credit card with a whopping balance—and if by inevitable mischance you should be held up on the way, and arrive five minutes later than you said you would, you will find that half the rooms you’re paying for have been rerented already.

  Hell, where do you find two dozen big trucks?

  I got so desperate I asked Tesla to help me cheat, even though I knew better.

  “Nikky, Mike and Sally taught you how to do that Transiting thing, right? Like, teleportation? Couldn’t you just sort of…slide us all right down there, shazam, without covering the intervening distance?”

  He left off playing Scrabble with my daughter and frowned. “Jake—”

  “From what I hear, a hundred people appearing out of thin air in Key West is not going to cause that big a stir.”

  He shook his head, sadly but with finality. “I cannot permit humans of this time—other than yourself and your friends—to observe Transition, lest they suspect prematurely the existence of the forces which make it possible. It does not matter whether or not it would frighten them. It is a question of chronistic prophylaxis. To permit futuristic knowledge to enter the timestream at this historic locus would risk disastrous paradox, you know that.”

  I did know it, but was feeling stubborn. “Hell, the whole crew of us are walking paradoxes—you know that.”

  Erin picked that moment to lay down the word “QUANTIZE,” on a triple word score, in such a way that it interlocked with two other existing and lengthy words. She giggled and selected seven new tiles from the box.

  “See?”

  Tesla smiled sadly. “Yes, but you are indigenous paradoxes, native to this ficton.”

  “Okay, but can’t you bend the rules a little, just this once? Come on—to help save the universe?”

  He smiled again, even more sadly. “‘To save the universe,’” he asked, paraphrasing that infamous line from the Vietnam War, “‘it was necessary to destroy the universe…’?”

  I gave up. You quote that line to an old hippie, you’re kind of hitting below the belt.

  “I am sorry, Jake. This is not a rule, but a necessity. You must solve this problem using contemporary methods and materials.”

  “Like what?”

  He spread his hands. “I will give it thought.” He returned his attention to the Scrabble board.

  Erin finished studying her own new letters, and looked up at me. “I know who can help you, Daddy.”

  “Who’s that, Peanut?”

  “Jorjhk.”

  “Zoey,” I called, “get the barf-scarf. She’s coughing something up.”

  “One drool-spool coming up,” she said, coming in from the back with one.

  Erin grimaced ferociously. “Daddy—Jorjhk!”

  “Something stuck in her throat!” Zoey cried, and came at a gallop.

  Tesla tried to pick Erin up, I believe with the idea of performing some sort of Heimlich maneuver, and got an elbow in the solar plexus for his trouble; Erin squirmed clear.

  “That’s his name, you mungle-bungles,” she yelled. “The guy who can help you. Jorjhk. Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi. Nyjmnckra’s nephew.”

  Ten seconds of paralyzed silence all around, broken at last by the nearby sound of the Lucky Chuck, duckling. Excuse me: the Lucky Duck, chuckling.

  “Jesus, Jake,” Zoey said wonderingly. “She’s right.”

  Damned if she wasn’t.

  Even the first time I saw him—before I had any conception of how much I would come to hate him—I thought Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi was the ugliest man I’d ever seen in my life. (And very nearly the ugliest person I’d ever seen in my life. But then there was his aunt Nyjmnckra, you see, and femininity gives much greater scope for ugliness.) I believe a charging rhinoceros would stop in its tracks to gape at him. In fact, now that I think of it, in certain lights, his face would closely resemble the back end of a female rhino. In heat. (I watch PBS.)

  It went perfectly with the rest of his exterior, too. He was built along the lines of a sidewalk mailbox, always dressed in off-the-rack polyester (the stuff everyone else had left on the rack), bathed insufficiently often, and had a complexion that made you wonder if there could be such a thing as spoiled putty. His walk reminded me of a little windup duck I’d had when I was four or so, scaled up to mailbox size.

  But all these uglinesses were as nothing compared to his personality. I have known more than one person whose external ugliness masked an inner beauty. He was not one of them. He had earned that face.

  He was a career bureaucrat, and he was proud of it. What else can I say?

  I did not want him in my home, not even now that it wasn’t going to be my home much longer. There was an impressionable child present. Not to mention the odd few rats, spiders, and roaches about the place, whose sensitivities ought to be considered. Also, the houseplants in the bedroom in back might die. So when I phoned him, I gave him the address of the Maloneys and told him to meet me there. He was willing to meet immediately, once I told him I was planning to sell Mary’s Place and leave Long Island. But I made him wait until after supper. I knew from experience that dealing with him would destroy my appetite completely for at least twelve hours.

  Long-Drink let me borrow his wheels. I arrived at the appointed time to find Grtozkzhnyi waiting for me, his inevitable polyester suit covered by a Robert Hall topcoat, his bald head covered by a small dead fur-bearing animal of some sort, whose death by electrocution had apparently been botched. He was standing in the street by the driver’s side door of his car, staring over its roof at the Maloney residence, and the expression on his face made it, incred
ibly, even uglier.

  Which did not surprise me. Especially not when I opened my own door and the full impact of the sound hit me too. I had timed our meeting to coincide with feeding time. Olga Maloney boarded dogs. Many dogs. Her husband Frank had converted the basement of the house into a kennel for her. Twice a day, she let them all out into the enclosed backyard at once, for feeding and exercise. The evening feedings frequently coincided with Frank’s band rehearsals, and this was one of those nights. They’re a tribute band: they call themselves Redi-Wip, because they’re Cream imitators. As I got out of the car they were just launching into “Toad.” Since they all have day jobs, and don’t have to earn their living from music, they can afford very good sound equipment. The outlines of the house visibly blurred every time Frank stomped on his floor-tom pedals—which, given the song, was more or less constantly. It kind of forced the dogs to talk louder so they could hear each other. The resulting cacophony pretty much blanketed the audible spectrum, and on up into the hypersonic.

  We were a good fifty yards away; it was possible for us to converse without quite shouting. Nonetheless Grtozkzhnyi shouted. “Do you expect me to go in there?”

  I shook my head, and he relaxed slightly. He turned and looked at the house again. The front door opened, spilling light and lots more noise, then shut again.

  “An uncle of mine lives on the approach to JFK,” he said. “I wish I were there now.” He shook his head. “I never thought I would wish that.”

  A little girl was coming down the walk toward us, maybe ten years old, pushing a bicycle. Frank’s youngest daughter Bridget. She stopped just short of the sidewalk, stared at Grtozkzhnyi, and said, “God. You are…like, so ugly.”

  He frowned at her. “You are a very rude little girl.”

  Bridget nodded, studying his face. “Yeah, but I can be polite if I want. You always look like that.” She seemed to reach a decision. “I’d kill myself,” she said, and got on her bike.

  Grtozkzhnyi growled and started to come around his car, angling to cut her off, but she stood her ground. “My daddy is a state trooper,” she said. Grtozkzhnyi stopped in his tracks.

  She noticed me for the first time. “Hi, Jake. Erin with you?”

  “Hi, Bridget. No, not tonight.”

  My existence ceased to have meaning in her universe. She pedaled away down the block.

  Grtozkzhnyi stared after her.

  The background racket became, astonishingly, even more astonishing. It took me a few seconds to work out the nature of the change, because it seemed too weird to be true: the drum solo was becoming stereo. A second channel was fading up, behind me. Strangely, this one was in a different time signature. I looked around and suddenly it made sense. The approaching car, a 1970 Dodge Pioneer, did have a muffler—you could see it hanging beneath, like a desperate hobo clinging to the underside of a boxcar—but it did not appear to be connected to the exhaust system in any important way. The engine had bad valves, and at least two bad cylinders that caused it to misfire rhythmically—and, we soon learned, badly worn and misadjusted brakes. It came to a shuddering halt alongside us, and continued shuddering. With the engine idling, the car was noisier: now you could hear, or more accurately feel, the rap music from the car stereo. With all the windows rolled up, it was as loud as the ongoing drum solo from the house, and clashed badly with it. It sounded like “Fight the Power” or something with the same rhythmic structure and emotional tone, which narrowed it down to ninety percent of rap.

  The passenger door opened—the rap briefly overpowered the heavy metal from the house; a generational triumph—and emitted a cloud of pot smoke and a fifteen-year-old male; that is to say, a lout. He was in full lout uniform: logoless baseball cap worn backward over a faux bowl haircut, nose ring, ten studs in each ear, T-shirt large enough to conceal a pregnancy, “shorts” long enough to conceal his calves and baggy enough to share with two friends, and sneakers that appeared to have been fashioned out of Cadillac Eldorado upholstery, dipped in Day-Glo paint, and inflated with helium. As a concession to the bitter cold, he had left the baggy sleeves of his T-shirt unrolled. He leaned and bellowed something back into the car, then slammed the door and stood clear. The Dodge’s engine roared like Kong in his wrath, its tranny screamed like Fay Wray in despair, and it peeled away, backfiring as it went like Robert Armstrong hurling gas grenades, tires squealing like someone forced to sit through the De Laurentiis remake.

  The lout threw me a wave—his other hand busy putting Walkman earbeads in his ears—then caught sight of Grtozkzhnyi. “Whoa,” he said, frowning. “Bogus.” He turned away and headed for the house.

  Grtozkzhnyi turned to look at me. Now that the car was gone, the overall noise level was no lower; it was just monaural again, and the rhythmic discord was resolved. He opened his mouth to speak, then shook his head and gestured for me to join him in his Volvo.

  Once we were inside with the doors closed, it wasn’t any noisier than being in an overloaded 747 at takeoff. We both took a moment to savor it.

  “Why are we here?” he asked finally, taking off his gloves.

  “That,” I said, pointing over my shoulder at the house, “is the home of Francis Xavier Maloney and his wife Olga. Frank is a sergeant in the state police, who moonlights as a drummer. His wife Olga runs the kennel. They have six children. You’ve already met the nice ones—that was Brian just now, and the one driving the car was Frank Junior.”

  “Why are we here?” Grtozkzhnyi repeated stolidly.

  “Their landlady is evicting them.”

  He just looked at me. “No. Really?”

  “She’s been trying to evict them for more than a year. But Frank’s been a trooper a long time, and Olga’s family has owned a sizable chunk of the North Shore since the twenties. Between ’em they’re so well connected it took the landlady a long time to find a judge willing to be bought, and a lawyer willing to be the bagman.”

  “But what has all this—oh.”

  “As I told you on the phone, I’m planning to leave town, and I am looking for someone to sell Mary’s Place to.”

  His eyes went dull with horror.

  “And I thought maybe if you came along while I put the idea to Frank, you could fill him in, give him an unbiased assessment of the neighborhood, tell him what a swell place to live it is and so forth.”

  He began to curse in what I presume was Ukrainian.

  “I was thinking of asking a hundred bucks for a down payment; does that sound high to you?”

  He gestured with his hands, as if throttling an invisible throat. “You can’t…I won’t…you’ll never…I’ll…”

  “You’re a civil servant, Jorjhk,” I said. “You have demonstrated to me that you have connections far and wide throughout the bureaucracy. You know more than I ever will about how the power structure works, the interlocking hierarchy of clout. If a state trooper with eighteen years on the job and five commendations and his old-money wife square off with a town inspector, who wins?”

  He looked at me as if he were planning to paint me from memory at some later time.

  “You know better than I ever will how many different licenses, permits, variances, and easements Olga must have to be able to run that kennel. Think about the lawyer who got them all for her.”

  He closed his eyes, put his hands in his lap, took several deep breaths, and regained control of himself. “What do you want?” he said without opening his eyes.

  “Two dozen schoolbuses.”

  He opened and closed his mouth several times. I waited.

  “Not new ones,” he said finally.

  I shook my head. “But roadworthy, inspected, with good paperwork. I’ll want them at my place, gassed up, a week from today.”

  “Do I get them back?”

  I shook my head. He looked unhappy, so I added, “Or us, either. And the Maloneys find their own place to live. And I sell Mary’s Place, to you or your aunt or the town or whoever you like, for exactly what I paid for it a c
ouple of years ago. Deal?”

  “Hell,” he said.

  “A pleasure doing business with you,” I said. “Say good-bye to your aunt for me, would you? I’m going to be busy packing, and I’ll need my strength.”

  Did you know you can actually split the corners of your mouth from grinning too big? I arrived home with trickles of blood in my beard.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Bus Bar

  “I have made good judgments in the past. I have made good judgments in the future.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  TESLA DISAPPEARED ON

  business of his own, promising to catch up with us after we reached Florida. Three weeks later, we were ready to roll.

  Okay, I’m skipping over a lot of details. An infinity of details. And some of them were fascinating—at least to us, at least at the time. But I figure, how much do you really want to know about the practical details of converting a retired schoolbus into a moving van/Winnebago—on a budget, in snow season, mostly outdoors? Or the logistical processes of coordinating close to a hundred people who all tested out rather higher than usual in Rugged Individualism? Or the sheer brutal donkey labor of picking up a couple of dozen households in your hands and putting them on high platforms with the intention of taking them off and setting them down somewhere else later? Are these things you envision needing to know at some point in your life? Can’t we just stipulate that miracles occurred and prodigies were performed, and let it go at that?

  Perhaps some general outlines can be sketched. If a particular task required technical or mechanical expertise, Shorty Steinitz and Dorothy Wu, our two resident master mechanics, generally handled it. If a breakthrough in lateral thinking was called for, most often it was Erin who took it on and solved it. If it involved broad-scale planning or people-managing skills, Tanya Latimer gravitated to it and found the right people to parcel it out to. If luck was required, we gave it to the Lucky Duck and forgot about it. If the job called for muscle, either Tanya’s husband Isham or Jim Omar did it.