He nodded. “He’d just asked if he could warm himself at your fire, right? And you’d said sure.”
“Come to think of it, yeah.”
“That was your blood coming through, Jake me boy, saving your Irish ass. Instinct, something your grandmother told you when you were little, something you read and forgot, I don’t know. You said, ‘Na dean fochmoid fàinn,’ or ‘Do not mock us.’ It’s the only form of address that will guarantee a Fir Darrig won’t play any harmful pranks on your house.”
“I wondered why I took such an instant liking to you, stringbean,” the Duck told me.
He had? If that was true, I hoped I’d never see him suffer a fool.
“Okay,” he went on, “this is good, this is interesting, let’s keep this up. So I’m a halfbreed Fir Darrig. Practical jokes, riveting voice, sensitive nature, short and hairy, it all fits. Let me see if I can work this out: I can’t control my practical jokes because I’ve only got half the genes for it, right? So maybe…wait a minute! Do you suppose the color could have anything to do with it? You said Fir Darrigs always wear red—could it be that if I were to…no, that’s crazy. Ma never said a word about my screwball luck, never mentioned it, but I knew it drove her just as crazy as it did me. She’d never have prevented me from learning how to control it, and she’s the one who made me swear never to wear red as long as I lived. Okay, back to my first idea: if I—”
He paused for breath long enough to notice that Callahan had a hand up, and fell silent, breathing hard.
“I’m afraid, son,” Callahan said, “that you only have half the story.”
The Duck stood very still and closed his eyes. He forced his breathing to slow with visible effort. He unclenched his hands a finger at a time and put them down at his sides. “Straighten me,” he breathed, and opened his eyes. “’cause I’m ready.”
Mike gave it to him straight and quick. “Son, you’re a pooka on your mother’s side.”
△ △ △
The Duck did not react in any visible way. Neither did anyone else, for a long ten seconds of silence and stillness.
Then Doc Webster cleared his throat. “Excuse me. Mike?”
“Yeah, Doc?”
“Look, I decided awhile ago I was never gonna let anything blow my mind again. Hanging around you, it was kind of self-defense, you know? I’ve accepted everything from a talking dog to a cockroach from outer space to a cluricaune, and I haven’t complained, have I?”
“No, Sam, you haven’t,” Callahan agreed.
“I mean, I like to think I’m game. Irish fairies, flying saucers, JFK killed by Elvis, whatever: you put it down, I’ll pick it up. I just want to be absolutely sure I’ve got it straight, that’s all. So look me square in the eye, and tell me one more time, with a straight face: the Duck’s mom is a seven-foot-tall white rabbit named Harvey?”
Mike almost smiled. “That movie didn’t use anything about pookas but the name, Doc. It was as faithful to Irish mythology as a scifi movie is to science. Pookas can manifest as a lot of different animals—goat, horse, bear, wolf—but they’re always hairy, not furry.”
The Duck was nodding, just enough to see.
“They’re short, not seven-footers, damn near as short as a Fir Darrig or a cluricaune. And they don’t just sit around in a white vest, sipping a quiet drink with Jimmy Stewart, chatting amiably. They are especially not pixilated or civilized or loveable. What they mostly do is scare the shit out of people—”
“—by taking them for wild rides on their back,” the Duck said quietly. “Yes?”
“Yep. They mostly live in old ruins, or isolated mountains. They’re lonely and quirky and generally considered dangerous.”
“And once in a long while, one of them gets lonely and quirky enough to develop a hankering for miscegenation with something exotic. Like a Fir Darrig. And gives him a wild ride on her back…”
“If one ever did,” the cluricaune said, the compassion of the grandly drunk plain in his voice, “she’d be sure to be spendin’ the rest of her days in regret and remorse, with contempt for herself and a black reputation. T’is a union Saint Patrick himself couldn’t bless, and a recipe certain for very bad cess.”
The Duck spoke to Callahan. “You’re telling me that I’m the only person in North America who’s right when he says, ‘Everything screwed-up in my life is my parents’ fault!’?”
Mike took a deep breath. “In a word…yes.”
The Duck closed his eyes and visibly calmed himself. “Ma and I will have to have a little talk,” he said gently.
“Yes.”
He opened his eyes. “No wonder she didn’t have any pictures of her parents. No, wait—Jesus Christ! Ma’s always kept a pair of goats…” He closed his eyes and controlled himself again. “They acted like my grandparents, of course, but all goats do that,” he said in calm, reasonable tones. “I thought Ma spent a lot of time with them.”
Rooba rooba…
He was quiet for a time, then, and the rest of us fell silent as well. What could you say to a guy who’d just had a revelation of that kind and magnitude?
Well, what could you say? Something had to be said, that much was clear. Our new friend and newest family member was at cusp. But what? “I know how you feel…”? I racked my brains as the silence stretched out. Something sympathetic? Or was that the wrong tack with this thorny man? Something facetious to try to break the tension? Could a tension like that be broken, with any of the cheap gags I thought of? Something macho, stoic? Like what? I looked to Callahan. He shrugged helplessly back at me.
“I know how you feel,” Fast Eddie said.
The Duck opened his eyes and blinked at him mildly.
“As for me,” Eddie went on, “my fodda was a jackass, an’ my mudda was a sow. My grandparents…I don’t know what species dey was.”
In spite of himself, the Duck grinned.
“My parents were both vampires,” self-effacing little Pyotr said truthfully, sipping his Mary’s Bloody (Type A).
“I myself am the offspring of a turkey and a barracuda,” Long-Drink McGonnigle said, and Doc Webster, who knows the Drink’s parents well, went into quiet hysterics, his big belly shaking.
“I am ze son uff a bitch unt a sonofabitch,” Ralph von Wau Wau offered. As the big mutant German shepherd ages, his phoney accent has been getting thicker.
“I didn’t know that about your Dad, Ralph,” Slippery Joe said.
“Oh, jah. He vas so mean to my muzzer, I vas forced to bite him ven I vas old enough.”
“You mean—”
“Jah. I put my maw on my pa, and zen gafe my paw to my ma. Alzo, my anzestors were allegedly involfed vith sheep a great deal. Ve may haff relatifs in common, Duck.”
The Duck began to chuckle softly.
“A swine and a bat, here,” Margie Shorter put in, bringing more laughter from the crowd. “Only I think Mom cheated on him with a tiger.”
“Captain Ahab and the Great White Whale,” Doc Webster said, cracking up Long-Drink.
“I have it on good authority that both my parents were bear when they conceived me,” Shorty Steinitz said to a chorus of groans, and became the focus of a shower of peanuts and crumpled napkins.
“I’m a Thorne on my mother’s side,” Tommy Janssen said. “That’s what she always says, anyway—”
The Duck was giggling outright now.
“As you can see from my physique,” I said, drawing myself up proudly, “my father was a rock and my mother was a hard place. They call me Stonebender, and they ain’t shittin’.”
“I don’t know how to tell all of you this,” Isham said, “but my grandfather on my father’s side was a white man.”
“No!” “Jesus, Ish, that’s awful!” “It’s not your fault, bro,” and “Be strong, homey!” were among the comments heard amid the laughter.
“That’s nothing,” Marty Matthias called out. “My mother is a white man.” Whoops. “Hey, listen,” Marty’s bride Dave said, “you sh
ould taste his spaghetti sauce.” Louder whoops. “And he gave me some terrific tips on accessorizing,” Bill Gerrity said.
The Duck stopped laughing quite suddenly. He frowned ferociously, took in a very deep breath, and when he spoke I thought we had blown it, thought he was saying, “Bah!” The laughter faltered for a second…and then redoubled as we realized he was pulling our chain, that what he was braying was not, “Bah,” but a goat’s “Ba-a-a-a-a-a-a-a—”
He finished it with “—humbug!” just the same…and then threw an arm around Callahan and gave him a squeeze. Amid the applause, Margie Shorter slipped under his other arm. “So tell me, Ernie,” she purred, “aside from having enough hair to get a decent grip on…exactly what other characteristics do you share with a goat?”
There was a burst of merriment at the question, and then everyone hushed to hear the Duck’s reply.
He blinked at her—Marge is a short woman; they were almost at eye-level—and pursed his lips judiciously, and said, “All I can tell you is…improbable things happen.”
And she shivered deliciously and melted against him as the ovation began.
I think only I heard what she murmured to him. “Here’s looking at you…kid.”
He butted her with his head.
△ △ △
A little later, when the attention of the group had fragmented again and the party was in progress once more, the Duck got a chance to finish his conversation with Callahan.
“So if I understand this right, my…abilities are out of control because I didn’t get raised properly. Dad wasn’t there to teach me how to be a Fir Darrig, and Ma hated the sound of the word. So what do I do now? Is it like learning to talk, there’s a window and then it closes, and now it’s too late? Or do I make a pilgrimage to Ireland and try to find a Fir Darrig who wants an adopted son so badly he doesn’t care if the kid’s retarded?”
Callahan put a fresh light to his cigar, then waved his thumbtip out. “I can’t really say I have any answers for you, son. I know what I’d do in your shoes.”
“What’s that?”
“Stay right here and have a drink.”
The Duck snorted and followed the advice.
“I’m serious,” Callahan said. “Hang out with these folks. From what I understand, they have set themselves the goal of becoming mutually telepathic—and furthermore are sensible enough not to be attached to succeeding. That’s smart behavior for anybody of any species or race. Furthermost, it calls for an unusual amount of luck—a job with your name on it. And I have a feeling that the doors in your head you’ll have to open to join with them are some of the very doors you need opened to get a handle on your talent. The very first thing necessary to anyone who’s weird is a place where they don’t give you a hard time just because you’re weird.”
The Duck looked around him. He slid forward on his chair, held out his half-full glass, and dropkicked it. It caromed off his foot without tumbling or spilling, and disappeared into the crowd. There was a small, traveling commotion, a startled gulp, a small crash and assorted ancillary noises, and the wave of commotion came back through the crowd again. The glass appeared in the air, upright, incoming, and the Duck caught it without seeming to make any effort at all. It was now half full of peanuts. “Thanks, Duck,” Ben called politely, and folks went back to their conversations again. The cluricaune was juggling empties over by the fire. At least thirty of them.
“I have been looking for a place like this for a godawful long time,” the Duck admitted in a very soft voice, and ate a peanut.
Suddenly Long-Drink McGonnigle was upon us, bellowing and whooping in acute glee. “Jake! Mike! The penny just dropped!”
“That was my glass,” the Duck said, but Long-Drink overrode him in his excitement.
“No, no, I mean something just occurred to me—no, I mean, something just failed to occur to me—hasn’t occurred to me for hours, now, in fact, and anybody here will tell you, that’s just not normal, certainly not for me; I mean, not getting rained on is fine, I’m not knocking that, but this is fantastic!”
“I’m certainly glad you’ve cleared that up, Drink,” the Duck said.
“Don’t you get it? Don’t all of you get it?” He turned around and addressed the room, at the top of his lungs: “WE ARE THE MOST FORTUNATE HUMANS ON EARTH!”
From his piano, Fast Eddie said quietly, “Hell, we know dat, Drink.”
Long-Drink was practically tearing his hair. “Jesus, I never saw such a bunch of dummies! Don’t any of you turkeys see it? We’ve found the End Of The Rainbow—only there isn’t any gold in the pot, that’s the glorious part!” He spun on me. “Jake, you genius, Duck, you genius, together you’re solid gold: thanks to you two, no serious drinker who walks in here will ever leave again!” He spun back to the crowd, apoplectic with joy. “You fools, can’t you see it? It’s right under your belt-buckles!”
People were staring, clearly beginning to doubt his sanity despite long acquaintance.
Long-Drink turned to Callahan. “Mike: in your best professional estimation—and excluding our esteemed friend, Naggeneen—how much sauce would you say we’ve put away since you arrived?”
Callahan looked thoughtful. “I would say…” He looked around, gauged faces. “…about three quarters of a shitload.”
Long-Drink nodded and turned back to face the crowd. “Right. Now tell me, you rummies: in all that time…has that door over there swung open once?”
We all followed his pointing finger…
…to the bathroom door. (A single door, marked “Folks.”)
Stunned silence.
“Does anybody need to go now?” Long-Drink cried.
“Jesus Christ,” Eddie breathed, and hit a discord and stopped playing.
“Well,” I said, “that would be one side effect of having a cluricaune around the joint.”
Naggeneen whooped drunkenly. “The pleasure’s all mine, I’m sure!”
“That settles it,” the Duck said. “I’m staying.”
9
Lost Week, and—
What with one thing and another, it got kind of drunk out.
I mean, if you start with the best bar in the Western world (he said modestly), and the best friends a man ever had, all together again for the first time in a long while…and if then you add a cluricaune—a hundred glorious Irish barflies rolled into one dwarf body—and work out a truce with him that allows others to get a goddam drink in his vicinity…and if you also add a half-breed Fir Darrig/pooka, in whose presence the laws of probability explode of their own volition…and if then, for good measure, you throw in Mike Callahan, whom none of us had ever really expected to see again, and for whom the passage of time is a variable…well, is it any wonder that Saturday night went on a little longer than usual?
Naturally we were flat out of booze by dawn of Sunday, what with a cluricaune in the house. But it is not all that unusual for a ginmill to need an emergency shipment of juice on a Sunday morning; my distributors’ phone turned out to be manned at that hour, and they were happy to service my needs. Even the quantity—thrice what I had told them my usual weekly order was going to be, and a full half of that in Irish whiskey—didn’t faze them. They wanted a big markup, of course, with a hefty surcharge for immediate delivery—but when I mentioned that I’d be paying in solid gold coins, they changed their minds about both, and became very polite besides. In fact, the delivery truck was there in twenty minutes. The driver was a little startled. He’d never received a standing ovation for making a delivery on a Sunday morning before. Not so startled as to forget to test my gold coins before accepting them—but he did apologize.
I climbed up on the bartop, declared the bender to be officially begun, and got an ovation of my own. As the applause and the sound of glasses smashing in the fireplace began to subside, Fast Eddie began the unmistakable opening vamp of the most appropriate tune I can think of: Louis Jordan’s evergreen, “Let The Good Times Roll.” Hey everybody, let’s hav
e us some fun—
And one of the great drunks of our time got under way.
Not everybody stayed the course, of course. A few folks went off to church, shortly after the St. Bernard truck arrived, and not all of them made it back again afterward. A few sissies crawled out the door as Sunday wore on, victims of poor conditioning. (It had, after all, been a long time since Callahan’s Place, our original training camp, had been converted to a large radioactive hole in the ground.) A sizeable contingent went off to assorted jobs on Monday morning, and again only about eighty percent returned as soon as they were able. (All these dearly departed, by the way, departed dearly—that is, by cab. The coffee can behind the bar contained every set of car keys in the room. Like Callahan before me, I won’t let anybody too drunk to drive leave my place with car keys in their possession.) And from time to time there were other dropouts for one reason and another.
But most of us hung in there, and with very little difficulty we soon achieved that rare, remarkable state known as Beyond Drunk.
Do you know that condition? Have you been there? It comes only with truly heroic drinking, and comes but seldom even then. My limited research suggests that it occurs a maximum of two or three times in an average lifetime, and that it happens to alcoholics no more often than it does to healthy citizens. It’s not something you can set out to do. Maybe it helped that most of us were drinking Irish coffee; maybe that was irrelevant. It seems to have less to do with blood alcohol content or predisposition to intoxication than it does with your emotional state at the commencement of the binge, and the set and setting of the binge itself. You break through some kind of invisible psychic/biochemical membrane, and pass beyond drunkenness, to a state in which you do not feel drunk or act drunk or look drunk…but neither do you feel any of those nagging human sorrows (loneliness, fear, pain, regret, apprehension, etc.) that caused you to get drunk in the first place. You’re not sleepy or sore or dizzy or tired or uncomfortable in any way; your stomach feels so good that if you happen to think of it you’ll eat; your head doesn’t hurt; your tang has untungled; your wit is flowing and your perceptions are clear. You would pass a drunk test with flying colors. Indeed, only three things prove you haven’t accidentally sobered up somehow: the Olympian height, depth and breadth of your wisdom, insight and compassion; the profound (and profoundly unusual) conviction that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with anything, anywhere in the universe—just a series of silly, easily correctable misunderstandings; and the fact that no amount of further alcohol intake will have the slightest perceptible effect on you.
The Callahan Touch Page 14
