Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  Three weeks later, each of those antique buses had been brought fully up to Shorty’s and Dorothy’s standards with regard to roadworthiness, gas mileage, and emissions cleanliness. And each had been fundamentally reconfigured within, so that its interior was now roughly sixty-six percent cargo space and thirty-four percent passenger space/living quarters—with variations to fit individual family units or other groups. Each had, at minimum, heat, running potable water, a stove of some sort, and some sort of sanitary provisions. No two were alike; we scrounged parts from everywhere. My personal bus, for instance, had a surplus Greyhound toilet (with a smaller holding tank) and a microwave oven wired into the electrical system, whereas Shorty managed to fit a standard Winnebago plumbing system and stove into his, and Jim Omar, with characteristic quirkiness, built a wood-burning cookstove and a genuine antique water closet complete with pull chain into his own vehicle. (His ignition was literally a switch: a big old knife-switch like the one Frankenstein’s monster throws to blow up the laboratory, sticking up out of the dashboard. He said he hated carrying keys. At one point on the trip, at a rest stop in Virginia, he and I would watch a young wannabe bus thief spend five solid minutes looking for the place where the key went, before we chased him off.)

  One thing that kept me awake nights for a while was the problem of what the hell to do with all the seats. In converting those big yellow kid-haulers to big yellow cargo-haulers, we naturally had to rip out one whack of a lot of seats…and it turns out that the damned things don’t stack neatly, and after a while there was an almighty huge heap of them. I was perfectly prepared to leave them for Grtozkzhnyi, let him figure out what to do with them once we were gone—but it got to the point where they were taking up so much space in the parking lot, there was scarcely room for people to park.

  Then one morning Zoey let out a whoop while reading Newsday over her breakfast coffee. She had found an article about how the county was considering whether or not it could afford to replace several hundred park benches in county parks. She started working the phone, and by dusk of the following day we were as seatless as Cher. You remember those plastic schoolbus seats, don’t you? Leave one out in the weather for a hundred years, it won’t need replacing.

  How did we keep track of who put in how much money, who contributed how much labor, who deserved how much cubic footage for his goods?

  We didn’t. It seemed too much like work. Of which we had no shortage.

  Instead, we used basically the same scheme we’ve always used for bar-change. We just trusted each other.

  See, back in the original Callahan’s Place, Mike Callahan had a flat rate: every drink in the house cost a dollar—and if for some reason you decided not to smash your emptied glass in the fireplace, you were entitled to take two quarters’ change out of the cigarbox on the end of the bar on your way out. The prices will give you an idea of how long ago this was. When I opened up Mary’s Place after Callahan’s closed (well, actually it didn’t exactly close—what it did was more open a little too emphatically…owing to the detonation of a small nuclear weapon within its walls), the cigarbox was one of Mike’s many traditions that I carried on—although naturally I had to raise the prices, to three bucks a drink, a dollar back if you returned your empty glass. Both Callahan and I made it a point never to pay the slightest attention to who took how much out of the cigarbox. We noticed its existence only when someone pointed out to us that it needed refilling…which didn’t happen often. Mike said if he couldn’t trust his customers, he didn’t much want to tend bar, and I’ve always felt the same way.

  If you’re already accustomed to trusting your friends with small change, it’s not much of a leap to serious bucks. A cigarbox wouldn’t have served, in this instance, so Long-Drink solved the problem by bringing in a packing crate that had been used to ship boxes of cigars. He set it just inside the door and hung a sign on it that read “THE KITTY” and I tossed in a few hundred bucks to salt the mine, and after that we basically forgot it. If folks needed cash for materials or supplies, they took what they figured they’d need and came back with any change; if folks had cash to contribute to the caravan, they tossed it into the crate. Records of who put in how much do not exist—at least not with me, though I imagine most folks reported to the IRS eventually. But if I wanted to for some reason, I think I could probably guess pretty close. I already know which of my friends are how affluent and how generous; I don’t need figures to tell me.

  Neither did anyone else. Astonishing as it may seem for an enterprise involving human beings, there were no squabbles about money. To each according to his/her needs; from each according to his/her abilities, was our guiding principle. We had more important things to think about.

  Hundreds of them. No, hundreds of thousands. Everybody had Special Circumstances. Kids (or grandkids or in some cases great-grandkids), or pets, or disabilities, or unique cargo requirements of some sort. Bill Gerrity, for example, owns a macaw. That affects interior vehicle layout more than you might imagine: your average macaw could easily chew his way out of a mahogany box, and for some reason they find steering wheels irresistibly attractive perching-places—not ideal when you’re pushing several tons down the highway. Then there were the Masers. You would expect a household consisting of one husband and two wives to have unusual travel requirements—but what none of us had fully grasped after more than thirty years of drinking with Joe and Susie and Suzie was that between them they had fourteen cats. Tommy Janssen had gotten so heavily into computers lately that his bus needed special wiring and power supply. And so forth.

  This was not something as simple as, say, planning the Normandy Invasion…unless you can picture a Normandy Invasion carried out by the inmates of a particularly easygoing asylum. Rugged we were not, necessarily, but we sure were individual.

  Fortunately, we had Tanya Latimer.

  How can I convey to you just how organized Tanya is?

  Ah, got it. I stayed with her and Isham once, while my own place was being painted. Every Sunday she sat down and decided what she was going to cook for the following week, and made an exhaustive list—in Braille!—of all the necessary ingredients she lacked. Then she rewrote the entire list. In the order in which the required items appeared on the shelves of her local supermarket, so that she could start at one end of the store and shop straight through to the other without ever needing to double back.

  You will appreciate that this required memorizing the entire inventory of the supermarket—something the manager probably could not have done. The week I was there, she ended up with two lists, because the store she usually gave most of her business carried a poor line of Mexican food, and she knew I liked that stuff. You guessed it: she had the other store’s layout memorized too. There were people who knew her only as a fellow shopper at the market who had no idea she was blind.

  If the Chinese had Tanya, they wouldn’t need fire drills. With her help, the jillion impossible things we had to accomplish all got done somehow.

  What I’m not sure I can explain to you is why they were fun.

  Work sucks, right? Everybody knows that. Hard work really sucks. Endless backbreaking labor interspersed with countless impossible decisions must therefore logically suck The Big Hairy Pockmarked One. QED.

  Well, maybe there’s something wrong with the premise. All I can tell you is that hard, even backbreaking shared labor, labor toward a common goal earnestly desired, does not suck. At least, it didn’t for us.

  It was, in fact, some of the most fun I ever had out of bed.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Drunkard’s Drive

  “If we don’t succeed, we run the risk of failure.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle

  FORTUNATELY WE FINISHED

  before it killed us.

  In spite of everything, there came a crisp morning in early March when Mary’s Place itself was a hollow shell, the box a bar used to come in, and the parking lot outside was full to the brim with grumbling farting schoolbus
es, all of them, in Theodore Sturgeon’s memorable phrase, “packed to the consistency of a rubber brick” with everything we owned. Even at idle, that many engines made an impressive rumble. Amongst them, like pilot fish at a convention of yellow sharks, were occasional smaller vehicles: the cars and trucks and motorcycles of those of us so hopelessly addicted to internal combustion that they wanted to own a car even in Key West. Most of those lesser vehicles were shut off at the moment, since they’d already warmed up on the way over here.

  Except for a few folks wandering hither and yon on last-minute errands, most of us had gathered by the doorway together. There was no conversation. We admired our caravan together in silence, thinking of what lay behind us, and what lay ahead.

  Finally I turned to my Dortmunder.

  “All right, Tanya,” I said. “Let me have it.”

  She obligingly punched me in the stomach.

  “No, no, dammit! The route!”

  I pronounced it unfortunately, and she began to aim a second punch a bit lower.

  “The route!” I repeated hastily, this time pronouncing it like the rout this conversation was becoming.

  “Oh. Sorry, Jake. What route?”

  I stared at her. “The route we’ll be taking to Key West. Knowing you, I presume you have it all planned out day to day, with mileage estimates and fallback plans and projected gas consumption.”

  She smiled. “I planned a route suitable to this particular group of people, Jake. There is no route.”

  Several people laughed.

  I blanched slightly. “You mean, we’re faking it?”

  “Jake, we’d be faking it even if I spent a month nailing down the itinerary. Be realistic.”

  “Is that absolutely necessary?”

  “Look at this group of loonies.” She gestured around for emphasis. “I can organize them all fine, individually, give them each a plan and more or less get them to stick to it. But get all of them to stick to the same plan? For days at a time?” She laughed. “I guarantee you, every state we pass through, somebody’s gonna want to stop and gawk at some tourist attraction they always wanted to see, or visit some relative they haven’t seen in years and are a little vague on how to locate precisely.” There were rumbles of agreement. “There’ll be flat tires, engine trouble, mechanical trouble, medical trouble, more than likely some cop trouble, and for sure there’ll be just plain road fatigue—no way to predict any of it. Might as well face it, Jake: this is going to be a Drunkard’s Walk—only on wheels.”

  I had to admit she was right. The only way to keep a convoy this size together—and I knew we all wanted to make the trip together—was to stay loose and be constantly prepared to improvise. But as Road Chief, I was a little dismayed. “Can you give me a hint, at least? For instance…do we want highway, do you think, or back roads where we can get ’em? Efficient trip, or scenic route?”

  She shrugged. “Play it by ear. Literally. Everybody’s got a CB aboard; I suggest you do whatever the hell you feel like, and if enough people don’t like it, you’ll hear about it.”

  She was sure right about that.

  I sighed and bit the bullet. “Okay,” I said. “We fake it.”

  I looked around for somebody to give the signal to board, and slowly realized that everybody else was looking at me.

  “You want to say a few words, Jake?” Long-Drink asked.

  “Uh—”

  How could I possibly have failed to anticipate this moment? I’ll say too busy, and you go with too dumb if you prefer. This was a Big Moment, a pivotal point in the lives of all of us. Something obviously had to be said. I obviously was elected. I hastily ransacked my brain for the right words…and realized that I could probably have spent the previous three weeks doing nothing else, and still not have found them. There was too much to say, and some of the words hadn’t been coined yet. I looked around at all my friends and their families, and felt my eyes begin to sting. Then I saw others starting to cry outright. It made me smile, and the moment I did, my own tears spilled over.

  Fast Eddie, of all people, spoke up. “Dis was a great place,” he said. “Ya done good, Jake.”

  There was a strong rumble of agreement. I found that I had Zoey’s hand in mine, and squeezed hard. She squeezed back.

  “I love all of you, too,” I said, and paused until I could speak again. They waited.

  “Look,” I said then, “we didn’t get all weepy and sentimental when Callahan’s Place blew up. We picked ourselves up and kept going. Now we’re doing it again. Only difference is, this place didn’t end with a bang. Well, I’m tired of whimpering. Let’s go find ourselves an even better place. We got a universe to save.”

  A cheer went up.

  “Let’s have fun doing it, too,” I added, and the cheering got even louder.

  Long-Drink McGonnigle gestured for attention. “I got something I want to say before we go,” he said. “Would those of you with impressionable children please cover their ears?”

  He waited until this was done. Then he paused a moment for effect, took a deep breath, tilted back his head, and bellowed to the skies, “Fuck Long Island!”

  “FUCK LONG ISLAND!” we chorused automatically, loud enough to make the world echo, and dissolved into laughter and cheers.

  I raised one arm high. “All right, people,” I cried, “mount up!”

  And suddenly we were all in motion at once. Omar picked up a big sawhorse under one arm and trotted it out to 25A to block traffic for our departure. Zoey stuck the key in the front door, left it there, and headed for our bus, carrying Erin. I thought about taking one last look around, decided that what I was already looking at was more rewarding, and followed them both.

  Ralph von Wau Wau had elected to ride with us, at least for today. I let him go first up the stairs into the bus; dogs are lousy at climbing stairs. I followed him, and opened the window beside his seat for him so he could ride the way he likes to: the way most German shepherds like to ride. “Sank you, Jake,” he said, and stuck his head out the window, his tail already beginning to wag.

  Zoey kissed me soundly before she’d let me sit down in the driver’s seat. Then she strapped Erin into the special seat we had rigged up for her right beside me, where she could see everything. I reached past her and pulled the lever that shut the door.

  The bus seemed eager to be going. Once Zoey had strapped herself into her own seat just behind Erin, I picked up the CB mike. We had all agreed on two channels, one for casual chatter and one for important traffic; I selected the latter. “Anybody got a problem?”

  Silence.

  “Okay then. Wagons, ho!” I put her in gear and gave it the gun, threaded my way through the maze and out to the highway, turned right on 25A, keeping it slow.

  Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi, my Nemesis, was standing by the roadside in front of her place as we rolled slowly past. Bundled up in an overcoat and babushka, she looked like some sort of squat evil prehistoric toad-god out of H. P. Lovecraft. She had clearly come out to gloat at our departure. It was the first time I had ever seen her smile. She was the only person I’ve ever seen whom a smile made uglier—and you have to understand, until I saw it I’d have said the trick was impossible. The sight disturbed me—and not just aesthetically: it was an ill omen for our journey. Not that I believe in omens. No sir. Nonetheless I stepped on the accelerator, wanting to be past her as quickly as possible.

  But that bus was loaded; it took a while to answer the helm. There was plenty of time for little Erin to notice her, wave to attract her attention…and then carefully and deliberately give her the finger.

  Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi fainted dead away: threw her arms in the air and fell over backward and made an angel in the snow.

  We were almost to the Expressway by the time Zoey and Ralph and I managed to stop laughing, and chuckles continued to come out of the CB for some time to come.

  The trip started off kind of dull. Familiar roads, not much to look at outside that we hadn’t all seen befor
e. Two dozen schoolbuses traveling in a pack through New York City during school hours attracted absolutely no attention whatsoever. No reason to pay any attention to us; none of us were spraying gunfire.

  Without discussion, my family and I slipped into the pattern we would tend to follow all the way down the coast: me driving, Zoey navigating, and Erin dividing her time between gawking out the window, physical exercise of one kind or another, and trolling around the Internet with the souped-up laptop she had built with Tesla’s help. (If you boggle at the phoneless net-surfing capabilities and high download speed of Erin’s laptop in 1989, all I can tell you is, Tesla assured me there was no miscegemation involved, that not one piece of gear in that rig was a technological anachronism…though they might have been hooked up together in ways nobody else had quite thought of doing yet in 1989.)

  All too soon we were in New Jersey, remembering the dullness of New York with nostalgic fondness. Erin had been chattering when we crossed the state line, but the sight of the Jersey Turnpike reduced her to silence. After a few miles of it, she said, “This is New Jersey?”

  “That’s right, hon,” Zoey said.

  Erin shook her head. “God, I hate to think what Old Jersey must look like.”

  A few miles farther down the ’Pike, the CB speaker crackled and Jim Omar’s voice said, “Smoky on the back door, Jake, gumball lit.”

  “Copy,” I said, and swallowed something I happened to have in my mouth, and opened my window a little farther to air the bus out. So did Zoey. “Prepare for boarders, everybody.” I didn’t have to check, I knew I was doing precisely the speed we’d all agreed on in advance: a safe, rational five miles an hour over the posted limit. I eased on back until I was doing exactly the limit, glanced in my sideview, and soon saw the spinning flashers of a state police cruiser coming up fast on my left. A few seconds later the sound of the siren reached me.