—Damn it, what the hell is that tall tower of testosterone doing back here a day earlier than he said? I’m not ready for him yet! I intended to spend the rest of today and tonight devising a Special Plan in consultation with all my friends, especially Willard and Maureen. Right now, I got nothing—
—This certainly is a tilted picnic—
—What am I gonna do?—
—Stall.
“So what can we do for you?” I asked him after the above extremely busy second.
He didn’t even need a second to choose his answer. “Money,” he said, and held out an upturned palm much like a snow shovel.
Shit. “Uh…like I said, I wasn’t expecting you back until tomorrow.”
In response he merely pursed his lips, as if to say, Yeah, life sucks sometimes.
“So I didn’t get to the bank today. But tomorrow—”
“Ya partner get back yet?”
For an instant the question baffled me. Zoey was standing there right beside me, big as life. Then I realized that in Little Nuts’s universe, partner and woman simply did not go together. I started to explain…and then thought, well, I don’t really have any particular reason to lie to him, but why do I need a reason? “Uh, no, actually. My partner’s been held up.”
As surreptitiously as possible, Zoey stepped on my foot. I find pressure situations an excellent time to make bad puns; my beloved holds a differing view.
“So it’s up to you then,” he said. He was still holding out that big snow shovel hand. I had not seen a snow shovel since I’d left Long Island to come down to the Keys.
“Well…I can write you a check, if you give me a name to make it out to.”
He just snorted.
To negotiate with an Italian you need both hands for gesturing. I used them to emphasize a shrug. “Then I can’t come up with anything like the amount you mentioned yesterday. Not until the bank opens again tomorrow.”
Little Nuts slowly lowered his hand until it was at his side again. “I unnastan. Any new business relationship, there’s gonna be little kinks startin’ up. I gotta make allowances. Like ya said, you got the day wrong, so it ain’t all your fault. And you ain’t gimme no attitude yet.” He sighed. “So here’s what we do. You empty the register, plus gimme everything you got on ya, plus your ATM card and PIN code, plus tell me you’re really sorry an’ promise not ta fuck up no more. Then I break a coupla unimportant fingers an go away, an we put the whole thing behind us. You can make up the shortage tomorra when ya partner gets back. Sound like a plan, chief?”
I caught Jim Omar’s eye, shook my head microscopically. Just in time; he’d been preparing to attack. With his bare hands, and whatever utensils he might find on his way to the enemy. Others were bristling, too; I could sense it. I began whistling loudly through my teeth, as if from nervousness. “Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me.” There are times when it’s good to have a clientele who are somewhat musically sophisticated. I felt a slight relaxation in the vibes, and knew everyone would stay calm and let me handle it. All I needed now was a clue how to handle it.
Once again my mind did that business of cloning itself in order to think multiple thoughts in the same split second.
Suppose Tony Donuts Junior decided to punch me in the face. There were basically two possible outcomes.
First, the invisible protective shield given me by Mickey Finn might assess the incoming punch as being of lethal force, and instantly activate to protect me: I’d feel nothing, and Tony would break his hand. This would probably clue him in that there was something unusual about me, which was something I was hoping very much to avoid. If he found out he couldn’t hurt me, he would not only become curious, but a little afraid of me, as well. All in all, you’d have to call that a bad outcome.
Alternatively, my magic cyborg defensive system might diagnose the punch as sublethal, and do nothing. That was really the more likely result: Tony in fact did not want to kill me (yet), and the Finn Shield is usually pretty accurate. Probably, then, the punch would land. On my personal face bone. This, too, met my criteria for a bad outcome.
Alternatives—
I could speak the name Pixel aloud, and Little Nuts would very suddenly acquire a large heavy orange fur hat, anchored firmly in place by ten of Hell’s hatpins, in such a way that its removal would necessarily involve the removal of Tony’s face as well. This might distract him, long enough for me to have a brainstorm. Or it might just really piss him off.
I could convert to Buddhism and set myself on fire. Keep that one in reserve.
I could ask Tom Hauptman behind the bar for “a double shot of the twelve-buck stuff,” and hold up my hand. We’d rehearsed this—we sell alcohol in South Florida—so I was fairly confident the double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun would arrive positioned so I could grab it out of the air and start firing at once. If I shot Little Nuts enough times at close range, perhaps I could wear down his resolve. But the noise would cause talk in the neighborhood, and the police would probably be curious.
I could page Mike Callahan. I had an emergency number that could theoretically raise him anytime. But I hadn’t used it back when we were threatened by the end of the universe, so I was reluctant to use it for one lone human, however formidable. I didn’t really know exactly what it was that Mike and his family were doing together, far off somewhere else in space and time—but I’d been given to understand that it was important.
There was always, of course, the option which had served me perfectly well for the past half a century. I could split: spin on my heel and run like a scalded son of a bitch. The open gate was only steps behind me; in under two seconds I could be out of the compound. Within which Tony would have my wife and daughter, some of my friends, my bar, and my home on which to vent his irritation. It was actually even a little worse than that, because the version of Erin present today was old enough to qualify as rapeable for someone like Tony. No, bugging out didn’t sound like fun.
Perhaps the scattergun was my best option after all. Shoot Tony as many times as it took to kill him, kick his body into the pool, cover it, and when the cops arrived, have everybody blink and say, What noise. I was just settling, most reluctantly, on that option when Erin spoke up.
“How would you like something better than money?”
“No such thing,” Tony Donuts Junior said automatically. Then he registered who had spoken and turned slowly to regard Erin. She met his gaze without flinching. She was standing with all her weight on her right leg and a hand on her left hip, which was slightly toward him. It was not an explicitly provocative pose…but even her father had to admit she looked damned good.
Tony made a horrid sound with both snort and snicker in it, and shook his head. “No such thing,” he repeated with assurance.
“Are you sure about that?” she asked.
She didn’t put any innuendo into it at all, but of course Tony heard some anyway. “Fuckin’-A. I want that,” he said, gesturing with his chin toward her body, “I take the first piece goin’ by I like. Money, I gotta wait for some asshole ta hand me.”
Erin started to reply—and then seemed to think better of whatever she’d been about to say. He gave her a second or two to come up with something else, then decided he’d won the point and turned back to me. “And waitin really pisses me off.”
He began walking toward me, looking remarkably like a Jack Kirby character. The Incredible Hulk after he’d finally found a competent tailor, perhaps, or Ben Grimm with body hair, or Doctor Doom in mufti. I could feel his footsteps through the soles of my feet.
Oh, I thought, if only Mike were here! Or Mickey Finn with his starkiller finger. Or Nikky Tesla and his death ray…or the Lucky Duck with his paranormal power to pervert probability…or even just Long-Drink with his hickory nightstick and Fast Eddie with his wicked little blackjack…
None of them being present, the crisis got solved by Tom Hauptman and his brain.
Tom likes to be around conversation, especially go
od conversation, but he doesn’t talk much himself. Which is sort of strange considering he was a minister for nearly a decade. He lost the habit of talking, along with his wife and then his faith, in a banana republic dungeon where he was held incommunicado for ten years. From the early Sixties to the early Seventies. He managed to completely miss the Beatles—and all that implies. The sexual revolution; civil rights; the murders of JFK, RFK, MLK; Vietnam; protest; pot, acid, mescaline, psilocybin, peyote; counterculture in general; Altamont, Woodstock, Apollo 11, Watergate—Tom missed all of it, busy watching his wife die, and then mourning her. By the time he got out, sprung by the CIA, Reverend Hauptman was so hopelessly out of touch, he would have been finished as a minister even if he’d still wanted to be one. Heaven knows what might have happened to Tom if he hadn’t gotten confused and lucky enough to try and stick up Callahan’s Place with an unloaded gun.
That was the night his tenure as our backup bartender began…and for most of the ensuing twenty-five years or so, Tom has been a quiet mainstay behind the bar, calm, competent, cheerful, and steady. Now, all at once, he became a bona fide official Hero of The Place—by cutting through the Gordian knot that baffled me with a single blow of his voice.
“Here.”
That voice was so soft, gentle, and unafraid it stopped the juggernaut in his tracks, where a bellowed “Freeze, motherfucker!” might have had no effect. Like a tank acquiring a target, Little Nuts swiveled to confront the upstart. What he saw made the corners of his mouth turn up with pleasure—and made me and most of the rest of us gasp.
Tom was holding out the drawer from the cash register in one hand, at enough of a tilt that you could see it was pretty full of cash. (I don’t go to the bank very often, because if I do, then I’m in the bank.) In his other hand he held out an unzipped empty orange backpack made of some sort of lightweight space-age polymer. When he was sure he had Tony’s attention, he emptied the drawer into the backpack. First the change, then the ones, fives, tens, and twenties.
Pay the man.
I’m not sure I can explain why not, but in a million years I would never have thought of that simple, brilliant ploy. It would buy us twenty-four hours of scheming time, and all it would cost us was money. You know that sports stadium maneuver, The Wave? Eyebrows did that all around, as people grasped the elegance of the solution.
Tom set the empty cash drawer down, reached up the bar a ways, snagged the open cigar box from which people take their change on their way out, and added its contents to the backpack. Then he dropped in his own wallet, pocket change and watch and passed the sack to the nearest patron, Shorty Steinitz. Looking glum but game, Shorty added his own wallet and change, and passed it on.
Okay, this was good. Things were looking up. We would fill the backpack with baubles, and the giant would go away, for now at least, and with him would go immediate danger, and we could finally get some furshlugginer thinking done. I was not yet beginning to relax, but I was beginning to envision a universe in which relaxation was sometimes permitted to such as me, when I saw a fist break the surface of the pool, holding a beer can, followed at once by Lex’s head.
The geometry was such that he was, barely, out of Tony’s field of vision. But I knew why he had surfaced, and my heart sank. (Wait, let me just look at that sentence for a minute. Okay, I’m good now.) This had come up once before, and so had Lex. (Sorry. I’ll try and get control.) From his point of view, tossing an empty beer can into the pool was like some clown lobbing trash through your living-room window. What he had done the last time it happened was to return the can, at high speed. By then it wasn’t empty anymore but three-quarters full of pool water, and its previous owner, a tourist from California, had his back turned, so the impact dropped him like a poleaxed steer, and his friends ended up having to drive him up to the emergency room on Stock Island.
I’d bought Lex a drink, then. But I did not want him to do it again. A beer barrel, full of cement, would probably not knock down Tony Donuts Junior. It would make him turn around…whereupon he would see, treading water there in the pool, something that looked very much as if the Creature from the Black Lagoon’s dermatologist was finally beginning to make some headway with his complexion, but only above the waist. This was the kind of sight that might make Little Nuts big-time nuts. But there was nothing I could do about it; where I was standing, Tony would see me if I tried to signal Lex to duck out of sight.
Beyond Tony I saw my grown-up daughter, striking in that dress—then all at once I was seeing only the dress, falling empty to the ground. In the pool, Lex’s head suddenly disappeared beneath the water, as if he’d been yanked downward from below. A human might have had time to yelp, but Lex had no air in his lungs yet.
Unfortunately, none of this was noticed by Marty, the last customer sitting at my end of the bar. Having put his own valuables into the backpack, he got up to walk it down to the other end of the bar. If he got where he was going, and Tony’s eyes followed him, the man-monster was going to notice that Erin wasn’t there anymore…and then that her dress was.
The whistle was earsplitting, the strident thumb-and-pinky kind of whistle you use to summon a cab in New York.
The shout that followed it was nearly as loud and just as piercing. “Hey, Goliath—screw you!”
Little Nuts became very still. He did not even look toward the upstart, yet. Only his face moved, slightly, and in a most unaccustomed way: his expression became thoughtful. “Screw me?” he mused.
“Yeah. Screw your mother, too.”
Tony snorted. From his expression you could see that he had run into this sort of thing before—suicides who picked him rather than the cops to assist them—and that he regarded the chore as part of the white ape’s burden, tedious but sometimes unavoidable. “Screw my mother too?” His voice was getting quieter.
The other got even louder. “Why not? Everybody else has.”
Tony pursed his lips. Time to swivel round and take a first and last look at this fool. “Everybody else ha-oly shit!”
“What are ya, a fuckin’ parrot?” Harry shrieked. “Damn right, everybody else has…except her husband, of course.”
Little Nuts was so startled he blinked and backed up a half step. “Jesus Christ. A fuckin’ parrot…”
“What are you, related to Robert De Niro? Are you? Are you related to De Niro? I don’t see anybody else here related to De Niro—”
A new, moving shadow appeared suddenly, on the poolside tile behind Tony, and begin sliding across the water toward me. I glanced up quickly. Through a gap in the poinciana canopy above I glimpsed Erin, a tiny figure perhaps half a mile above us, falling. Why was she sky-diving at a time like this? Oh, of course. Air-drying herself. She plummeted down to maybe a hundred feet overhead and winked out of existence. The next moment—no, actually, the same one—she was standing where she had been before, down at the far end of the bar, dressing hastily.
I was afraid Tony would turn and see her—how long could a bird hold his interest? But Harry picked that moment to do his signature piece. It captivated Erin when she first met Harry, at age two, and it did not fail to amuse Tony Donuts Junior now. Behind the bar, on top of The Machine, stands a miniature toilet. It’s a scale model of an old-fashioned water closet, the kind with an overhead tank of water you flush by pulling a chain, and it’s perfectly functional. Harry hopped up onto it now, put it to its intended use, and yanked the chain with his beak, causing it to flush noisily.
Tony cracked up. The sound was remarkably similar to the noise Lex makes when he surfaces and swaps the water in his lungs for air—if Lex were the size of a killer whale, that is, and lived in a fetid pool at the center of an immense dark dank echoey cave. By the time the ghastly sound was over, Erin was dressed again. I heaved a small sigh of relief. A very small one.
Jim Omar had just finished contributing to the backpack, and there were no other potential donors. Erin took the bag from his big hands before he could stop her and took it to Tony. He h
eard her sandals slapping the tiles, turned his head, and his grin got wider.
When Erin reached him, she solemnly handed him the backpack. He lifted it up next to his ear, shook it, and listened to the sound. Then he frowned in thought, a process which apparently involved moving his tongue in a slow circle against the inside of his left cheek. “Ya light,” he said over his shoulder to me. “Other hand, you an ya friends all showed respect. Okay, what the fuck. I don’t hurt nobody taday.”
He turned back to my grown daughter. “Like the French guys say, oh cunt rare,” he told her. He reached out one of his snow shovel hands and took a firm grasp on her right breast.
I moved forward to kill him with my teeth, but Zoey seemed to be in the way. No matter how I moved, somehow she kept being in the way. I stopped trying and watched to see what Erin did.
She acted as if Tony’s hand did not exist. She met his gaze squarely, her own expression as serene as that of a meditating monk or a professional poker player. Her voice when she spoke was pitched so low Zoey and I could barely make out her words, and we were the nearest people to her and Tony now. “How would you like something that’s better than either sex or money?” she asked him.
He blinked at her a few times, and then snorted. “No such t’ing.” He kneaded her breast, not gently. Zoey had a firm grip on my weapon arm by then, and her other hand over my mouth.
Erin continued ignoring Tony’s molestation, kept looking him square in the eye. “You’re wrong,” she told him quietly. “I’ll see you tomorrow. Not here, in town. If you don’t agree that what I show you then is better than sex or money, you can have both of them instead.”
Now I had a hand over Zoey’s mouth.
This proposal seemed to interest Tony. He stopped kneading while he thought it over. I couldn’t see his tongue tip circling on the inside of his cheek, from where I stood, but I could picture it. “Oh yeah?”
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