Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  I snorted. “To be sure. To be thoroughly sure. Leave this collection of goofballs, weirdos, and nincompoops on their own, to take care of themselves? Half of ’em would never reach Florida, and the rest would trickle into Key West over a period of a month, after wasting weeks just trying to find each other.”

  “They’ll probably do that even if you do stick with them,” Erin said.

  “The hell of it is, you’re right! They’re as organized as spaghetti, for Christ’s sake. I must have been fucking crazy to take this on. Honest to God, it’s like trying to herd cats—the toilet’s about to fall out of my goddam bus and I can’t even get anybody to help me fix it—” I was working my way back up to full-bore tantrum again.

  “Mother?” Erin said. “Time for drastic measures?”

  Zoey finished layering the avocado slices onto her sandwich and closed it up. “I think you’re right, dear. Shall I take it?”

  Erin shook her head. “No, you got it last time. My turn.” She turned her face up to me, and gave me the full-bore impact of those eyes of hers, from which no man can turn away unless she wills it. “Daddy?”

  I braced myself. “Yes, Princess?”

  “You’re not supposed to be Uncle Mike.”

  “Huh?”

  “Nobody expects you to be.”

  I gave my head a little involuntary shake, like a dog throwing off water. “I don’t get you.”

  She climbed off my lap, stood on the seat beside me so that our eyes were on the same level. “I’m going too fast, I guess. Let me back up. Look, when you get upset about something, you like to get mad about something else. That’s okay, as long as people know how to read you, I guess. But Mom and I are getting tired of it right now. You’re getting mad at everybody so you won’t get mad at yourself. So why don’t you just get mad at yourself and then forgive yourself, and then it’ll be all over with, and we can have fun again.”

  “You go, girl,” Zoey murmured.

  I blinked at my daughter in silence for a time. It is always humbling to meet someone smarter than yourself…and when it’s someone under two years old, it sort of transcends humbling and skips right on into humiliating. I still didn’t know what the hell she was talking about—but I could already tell that she was right.

  “You said it yourself once, Daddy. You told me. You said, ‘Anger is always fear in disguise.’ Always, you said.”

  Again, her words felt true. “But what the hell am I afraid of, then? Do you know?”

  She turned to look at her mother. “You want to jump in? You know I’m not good at being tactful yet.”

  Zoey nodded serenely. “That’s why you should take it, hon. I don’t think it can be said tactfully—and he’ll forgive you quicker.”

  Erin nodded and turned back to me. “You’re afraid you’re a shitty Road Chief. You’re afraid you’re a cheap imitation Mike Callahan, and everybody knows it. You failed, big time, and you’re afraid that means you’re a failure. You’re afraid you’re gonna fail again, only bigger. You’re afraid you’re gonna screw up this bar too, and then Mommy and I will decide you’re a loser and go away. So if you get mad enough about something else to storm off and leave the caravan instead, then nobody but you will ever find out what a loser you were. At least, not as quick.” I closed my eyes. “Believe me, Daddy, I know: you and I are at about the same emotional age right now. It’s just about the way I’d feel if I were you.”

  I sat there in silence with my eyes shut and my mind revving in neutral. Each of her sentences was like being punched in the heart by a pro; in combination they were devastating. I felt a blackness opening beneath me. My right arm was resting on the back of the seat; I felt something touch my hand and realized Zoey had put a jigger into it. Automatically I drank the Irish whiskey that was in it, in a gulp. Zoey’s unseen hand took the empty jigger away again.

  Maybe she and Erin shared a glance. “One more part I forgot,” Erin said. “You’re superstitious. You know it’s silly, but you have this idea that every time you take a wife and daughter out on the road, something bad is gonna happen.”

  The bulk of my adult life has been colored by the knowledge that I killed my first wife and daughter, Barbara and Jessica, by being cocky enough to do my own brake job and incompetent enough to screw it up. Pinned in the wreckage, unable to move, I’d watched them both die. By fire. It was to escape the shattering impact of that grief and guilt and shame that I had originally found my way to Callahan’s Place almost twenty years ago. There I had met most of the friends I was traveling with now…and had slowly, over time, been healed by their kindness and caring and good fellowship, and by the wisdom of big Mike Callahan.

  About five years ago, sort of as icing on the cake, I had had it proved to me by Mike’s daughter Mary that while my grief was earned, my guilt and shame were not: that the brakes that had failed, and killed Barb and Jess, were not the two I had replaced after all.

  But I realized now that Erin was right. Oh, the good news had probably percolated down to my subconscious long since…but it didn’t matter: even though I knew better, part of me would always think of myself as The Guy Who Killed His Family, and I would never feel fully at ease while driving with my loved ones.

  Even if Omar and Shorty had checked the brakes, this time.

  “But don’t pay any attention to that part,” Erin said. “That one, you already know better than. Let’s do the other stuff. Okay?”

  I seemed to hear my own voice from far away. “Okay.”

  She leaned closer, took me by the hair, put her face a few inches from mine, and those incredible eyes of hers locked on. “Let’s do the important part first.”

  “Okay.”

  She spoke slowly and distinctly. “Even if you are a failure, Mommy and I aren’t going anywhere. We love who you are. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but neither do John Tesh fans: it’s just the way we are, that’s all. You’re stuck with us. Okay?”

  “Okay.” I felt something shift inside me. “That’s good to hear.”

  “Next, you’re not a failure. You’re just not Uncle Mike. And Daddy, really—who is?”

  I sighed. “Honey, granted he had certain advantages I lack…but Mike ran Callahan’s Place for thirty-eight years. I didn’t last a single year. Any way you look at it, that’s poor performance.”

  “Compared to what?” she asked.

  I said nothing. At least with my mouth, but she must have read something in my eyes. Without losing her lock on them, she spoke to Zoey. “Mom, put on that song he wrote.”

  I thought she meant the one about laughing when the joke is on you. But Zoey knew better, somehow, and found the cassette Erin wanted and slipped it into the deck. A song I had written years ago, long before I ever met Zoey, called “Perspective.” My younger self sang it to me now:

  A cop with any decency at all looks like a hero

  A millionaire knows billionaires who think that he’s a zero

  The shoes a lord rejected are a godsend to the churl

  And an immie in the sewer looketh mighty like a pearl

  A million people kill themselves attempting to be stars

  While stars go nuts with loneliness and smoke the highest tars

  Businessmen competing, and the ones who do the best

  Win the hatred of their neighbors and a cardiac arrest

  So remember on those days when in your bed you shoulda stood

  That somewhere there is someone who makes even you look good

  It’s only your perspective that has got you in a muddle

  You ain’t too small a frog—you just been in too big a puddle!

  Erin let go of my hair and gestured; Zoey stopped the tape. “Most bars opened by human beings close within a year, you know,” Erin told me. “I looked it up. And Uncle Mike isn’t a human being.”

  “Don’t tell me Mike isn’t human,” I said sharply. “He’s probably the humanest guy I ever—”

  “Oh, Daddy,” she said, with the massive sco
rn only a small child can easily lift, “he is not—he just plays one on TV. You know that! If he’s a human being, you and me are Homo habilis. He comes from so far in the future, they don’t even have sad people, Daddy! He told me he was over a hundred years old the first time he ever set foot in this galaxy. I asked him to show me where his planet Harmony is in the sky, once, and he told me the light from the birth of its star hasn’t got here yet. How are you supposed to measure up to that? How could anybody?”

  “He left the gang in my hands,” I said, hearing my voice quiver but unable to control it. “He spent my whole lifetime building it, and then he handed them all off to me and went home. I scattered them to the four winds in a matter of months.” I swallowed. “And then spent the next year wearing my ass for a hat, feeling sorry for myself.” I tried, and failed, to pull my gaze away from Erin’s eyes. “I used to ask myself…when things got tough, I’d ask myself, What would Mike do? I don’t feel like I have the right to ask that anymore. You’re right: I’m not him. And him is what I wanted to be.”

  She tugged gently on my hair, forcing my face to describe a small circle in the air. “Where are we going right now?”

  “Florida. Key West.”

  “Who?”

  “Huh?”

  She bobbed my head again. “Who’s going?”

  I blinked. “You. Me. Mom. The whole gang. Eventually.”

  “Why?”

  I opened my mouth.

  “No, don’t tell me a bunch of reasons why going to Florida is a good idea. Any of those people could have decided to move to Florida a year ago, just like Uncle Doc did. None of them felt like it then. How come they all happen to be on the road, more or less together, right now?”

  I didn’t know what to say, what kind of answer she wanted from me.

  Zoey spoke an inch from my left ear. I hadn’t heard her approaching. “Hint: because you are, schmuck! Just like me and the kid.”

  I heard white noise. Erin’s eyes began to kaleidoscope.

  “Because they know you can do what Uncle Mike did, Daddy,” my daughter said. “You can help them get telepathic again. You did it, once. It took Uncle Mike thirty-eight years. It took you one. You think they care how good a businessman you are?”

  Zoey was at my right ear now, speaking softly but overriding the white noise. “Doc told me about it. That night you were all standing around the radioactive crater that used to be Callahan’s, and everybody said you should open up Mary’s Place, and you said why me? And it was Long-Drink who answered you. He said, because you were always the merriest son of a bitch in the whole crew.”

  That was true. The Drink had said that. And there had been a rumbled chorus of agreement from everyone present at the time.

  “That’s important, Daddy,” the girl with kaleidoscope eyes said. “That’s really important. That’s why you have to stop all this bull-grunty. Nobody wants you to make this trip organized and efficient. They want you to make it fun. So do me and Mommy.”

  “Lighten up, Stringbean,” Zoey murmured.

  Then she straightened up and backed off a few paces, and said in her normal voice, “I think that’s enough for now, Erin. It’s like making yogurt. Now we leave him alone for a while, for the yeast to work.”

  “Okay,” Erin said, and powered down her eyes, and disconnected her gaze, and climbed over me. I presume Zoey picked her up and carried her off the bus; I was distracted. Anyway, when I emerged from the fog, they were both gone.

  My God—they were right! The one trying to force unwanted adult responsibility on me was not them, or the group, or cussed Fate, or Tesla, or even Mike Callahan. It was me!

  My only demonstrable talents were for fucking off and having fun—it was time I started playing to my strengths.

  I didn’t need to follow their tracks in the snow. My ears led me to Ted’s house, where the crew—those who had showed up so far—had gathered to party. Even with half of us missing, the joint was rockin’. Ted obviously had a piano somewhere in his home, and Fast Eddie, deprived for so long, had seized the opportunity to take on his Aspect and raise up his Attribute: as I came in the door I could hear him playing an instrumental chorus of the rousing old John Koerner classic “Good-Time Charlie,” with Zoey on bass and somebody I didn’t know on banjo. I had Lady Macbeth in my hands, but discovered that Ted’s piano was not tuned up to concert pitch…so I set her down on a couch, and walked into the room where Eddie was with my kazoo in my teeth, blasting out a raucous solo as I came.

  Eddie made room for me, and we volleyed back and forth for a couple of verses, both of us standing on a flying carpet Zoey built for us with her big standup bass, while people cheered and clapped and danced. The banjo player, as I expected, turned out to be our host—and he was good, not one of those banjo players who tricks everything up. Erin and Ralph von Wau Wau were dancing together in the middle of the room, a sight that would make a cat laugh. She caught my eye and threw me a grin, and I sent it back with a blown kiss. Another verse came around, and I sang it to her:

  Don’t you try to dance like Snaker Ray—

  The last woman tried it got thirty days!

  Good-Time Charlie’s back in town again…

  She giggled and did a little parody of a bump and grind, and Zoey did a comic underline with her bass. I looked over at her, and cut to the last verse, the one you sing at the top of your lungs in your highest register:

  Well, I lost my money and I lost my honey—

  If I can’t get happy, then I better get funny:

  Good-Time Charlie’s back in town again

  —Eddie knew it was the last verse and was ready for my

  Oh, yeah,

  and so were Zoey and Ted—

  Good-Time Charlie’s back in town again!

  And Eddie took us home and nailed it shut, and the room exploded in laughter and applause.

  “Good news,” Zoey called to me over the noise, and Erin ran over and hugged hell out of my leg, and I smiled so big I hurt my face.

  Two extremely merry days later, we were assembled and ready to roll again.

  I don’t remember where we were, on the map. Somewhere well south of Falls Church, perhaps in one of the Carolinas. It was evening, I remember that much—after sundown, but before we got to wherever it was we were stopping that night. Everything else about it I remember very well.

  The weather was good, road conditions nominal, traffic moving. Zoey was snoring gently, just loud enough to hear, in the curtained-off area at the rear of the living area that we were pleased to call “the bedroom,” and Erin and I were sharing the drive together up front, with her strapped in beside me in her special seat.

  We chatted in soft voices to kill the monotony of broken white lines coming at us out of the dark, covering a variety of subjects I can no longer recall. Then there came one of those natural pauses where you’ve used up the present topic, and somebody has to introduce a new one, and I let Erin take it because I had proposed the last one—but she took so long that I got hypnotized by the highway and forgot I was waiting for her to speak. When she did, it startled me a little. So did what she said.

  “Is it weird, Daddy?”

  “Yes, honey, it usually is,” I said automatically. Then, “Uh…is what weird?”

  “Having a freak for a kid.”

  I snapped my head around to look at her. She was looking back at me, her face expressionless. Bland little Buddha. It came to me for the first time that if she and I were about the same emotional age, then she could hurt about as profoundly as I could. Maybe all babies can, regardless of emotional age. In any case, I knew my answer was important to her. So I thought about it, real hard and real fast.

  My first impulse was to say, “I wouldn’t know”—to deny the question, in other words. But I was not in the habit of lying to my daughter—had not been since, when she was about a week old, I got it through my head that it was not only a bad policy but a waste of time. And there was no honest way to deny it: Erin was a
freak. A freak’s freak, in fact. I had considered myself a freak all my adult life, and was traveling in a company any one of whom could claim that title—if nothing else, by virtue of being bulletproof—but the Lucky Duck and Ralph von Wau Wau the talking dog were perhaps the only ones of us who could claim to be as much of a freak as Erin was.

  Oncoming headlights tried to make shadows move across her face in time with the traffic, but her features were too young and smooth to give them anything to work with. Yet even the poor light could not hide the unmistakable adult intelligence in her big baby eyes.

  Okay, Jake: it’s a bona fide question. What’s your answer?

  “Yeah, it is,” I said, with what I hoped was no perceptible hesitation. “A little.”

  She nodded. “I thought it must be.”

  “Be weird if it wasn’t weird,” I said, and put my own eyes back on the road to make sure we were still on it.

  “What’s it like?” she asked.

  I was about to say that I’d never thought about it…when I discovered that I had. Sometimes the brain does some thinking—even a whole lot of thinking—without recording it in the Master File Directory the consciousness uses. Suddenly I realized that somewhere in the basement of my mind, a little thought loop had been running, like a set of Lionel trains with no way to escape its track, for quite some time now. I scanned it.

  “Pretty strange,” I heard myself say. “About ninety-nine percent of the time I’m scared for you. The rest of the time I’m scared of you.”

  The second sentence shocked me a little—but it made Erin break up. “You’re scared of me?”

  “A little,” I admitted. “There’ve been a handful of science fiction stories about kids as smart as you—and in just about every one of them, the kid was ruling the world by the time she was old enough for junior high school. Usually with an iron fist.”

  She giggled. “Then they weren’t as smart as me,” she said. “Tyrants are stupid.”

  “Yes, they are, honey.”