Callahan's Crosstime Saloon

by Spider Robinson

  "I mean to say, isn't it ironic? All that prayer, and none of it did the slightest good. El Supremo was dead all the time, I never seemed to get that belief back, and Mary . . ." He broke off short and began to laugh softly, a laugh that got shriller and shriller until the glass burst in his hand. He then just sat and looked at his bleeding palm until Doc Webster came over and gently took it away from him.

  "Well, at least this damned thing is disinfected," the Doc grumbled. "Don't ever pull that with an empty glass." Someone fetched his battered black bag, and he began applying a dressing.

  Along about that point, everyone in the place got real interested in the floor or the ceiling. It somehow didn't seem as though there was a single intelligent thing that could be said, and it was slowly becoming necessary that somebody say something.

  Callahan was right there.

  "Reverend," he rumbled, hooking a thumb in his belt, "that's a right sad story. I've heard an awful lot of blues, and I can't say I ever heard worse. But what I would like to have explained to me is how, if you follow me, the hell does all this bring you into my joint with a heater in your fist?" There was steel in his voice, and the minister looked up sharply, guilt replacing the agony on his features. Bravo, Callahan, I thought.

  See, I knew what the preacher couldn't: that when there's anger in Callahan's voice, it's just got to be theatrics, because when Callahan is good and truly pissed off he don't bother to talk at all.

  The little minister was a while finding words. "You see," he said finally, as the Doc finished bandaging his hand, "it was ten years. Ten years. I... I don't know if you can understand what I mean. I know it's been two years since Mary died—-it's not just that. But you see, she was all I knew for such a long time, and now I don't know anything at all.

  "You must understand, in all that time we never saw a newspaper or a magazine or a TV broadcast, never heard so much as a radio. We had utterly no communication with the outside world; we were as isolated as two human beings can be."

  "Hell," said Tommy Janssen, "that sounds like what I could use to straighten out my head once and for all." I was thinking about a Theodore Sturgeon story called "And Now The News," and I kind of agreed with Tommy, which shows how well I'd read the story.

  "Straighten your head out!" Hauptman exploded.

  "Now, you know perfectly well what the boy means," Long-Drink interceded. "No one is saying those years weren't nightmares for you, but you know, they were nothing to write home to mother about for us. You missed a lot of turmoil, a lot of bad times and trouble, and maybe in that at least you were better off. I know most of us here have probably wished we could get away from everything for a long spell, and you did it. What's wrong with isolation?"

  "Nothing, per se," Hauptman said quietly. "The problem is this: the world won't wait for you. You drop out for more than a short time, and brother, the world goes on without you."

  "I think," said Callahan slowly, "I begin to see what you mean."

  "You don't even begin," Hauptman said flatly. "You can't. You're too close to it. The whole world turns upside down in ten years, but you turn upside down with it, and so to you it's right side up. It all happens over days and weeks and months, and most people can adapt that fast. But I don't recognize the first thing about this world—I didn't live through it.

  "Let me give all you good people a history lesson."

  He got up, walked to the bar and put out his hand. Callahan put a glass of gin in it. He turned, faced us all, took a long swallow, and cleared his throat pedantically.

  "Mary and I left for Pasala in February of 1963," he said. "I've since had occasion to supplement my own memories with references from The New York Times, and you may find some of them interesting.

  "On the day of our departure, for instance, there had been a total of thirty-three Americans killed in Vietnam since the start of U.S. involvement. Not that anyone was aware of it: it wasn't until a few days after we left that Senator Mansfield's study group issued a warning that the Vietnam straggle was becoming an 'American War, that cannot be justified by present U.S. security interests in the area.' Why, the godforsaken place was costing us a whole four hundred million dollars a year!

  "Of course, General O'Donnell replied the next day that all those combat pilots among the 'advisers' were there to train the Vietnamese, not to take part in the war themselves.

  "Lot happened since then, hasn't it?

  "How about another area, my friends? In November of 1962, Dean Munro of Harvard University warned undergraduates against use of 'the stimulant LSD that depresses the mind,' and censured Professors Alpert and Leary for promoting its use. Dr. Leary replied that hysteria could only hamper research, and pointed to the absence of any evidence that the drug was harmful.

  "In California, meanwhile, authorities were sounding a similar warning note concerning a newly-discovered drug which was beginning to appear on the streets. It was called Methedrine.

  "The New American Church was still fighting unsuccessfully for the right to continue using peyote in its religious ceremonies, a practice which predated white settlement of America. Harry Anslinger had just retired as head of the Federal Narcotics Agency, and there was some talk of controlling the sale of airplane glue to those under eighteen.

  "Incidentally, while Leary and Alpert (who I understand calls himself Ram Dass lately) found little difficulty in preserving their academic autonomy, others were not so lucky. Professor Koch was fired from Illinois University for daring to suggest in print that pre-marital sexual relations should in some cases be condoned. By the time Mary and I got on the boat, the efforts of the American University Professors' Association to have him reinstated had been entirely fruitless." A month after we left, the Illinois Supreme Court declined to intervene. Whatever Masters and Johnson were doing, they weren't talking about it. The sexual revolution was still being vigorously, and apparently successfully, ignored.

  "Hard to remember back ten years, isn't it? How about the space race? The latest news I've heard puts us quite a few moon landings and space probes ahead of the Russians, and most people I've spoken to seem to assume it was always that way. America has felt pretty cocky about the Big Deep for quite a while now. Did you know that by February of 1963, the Russian Vostok series had racked up 130 orbits, a total of 192 hours in space, while the U.S. had a total of 12 orbits and 20 hours? A couple of years earlier, President Kennedy—remember him?—had publicly committed us to putting a man on the moon in the next decade, and he was widely pronounced deranged. Eight years later, Armstrong took the first lunar walk, and the nation yawned. Oh, you people are so damned blase about it all!

  "I could go on for hours. When I dropped out, assassination had not yet become commonplace; J. F. K. had not yet been canonized, and R. F. K. was just arguing his first case in any court, as Attorney General of the United States. Cinerama was just getting started, hailed as the wave of the future, and the New York World's Fair had not yet opened. Two months after we left, Cleopatra premiered, and Twentieth Century Fox stock dropped two dollars a share—"

  Hauptman broke off, began to laugh hysterically. Callahan reached across the bar and gripped his shoulder with a hand like a steak, but the minister shook his head.

  "I'm all right," he managed, choking with laughter. "It's just that I haven't told you the funniest joke of all. Nearly killed me at the time, and I didn't dare break up.

  "You see, when I was finally released, they brought me directly to Washington, where some very cheerless men wanted to ask me a number of questions and help me memorize what had officially happened. But first they decided to compensate me for my troubles with the thrill of a lifetime. I was conveyed before the President of the United States for a hearty handclasp, and I thought I was going to faint from holding in the laughter.

  "I hadn't thought to ask who the President was, you see. It didn't seem especially important, after all I'd been through, and I didn't expect I'd recognize the name. But when Richard Nixon held out his hand
, I thought I'd die.

  "—You see, three months before I left, Nixon lost the race for governor of California, and assured the press with tears in his eyes that they wouldn't have Dick Nixon to kick around any more . .."

  This time the whole place broke up, and Doc Webster almost lost his tonsils trying to whoop and swallow at the same time. Fast Eddie tried to swing into "Don't Make Promises You Can't Keep," but he was laughing so hard he couldn't find the keys, and a barrage of glasses hit the fireplace from all around the room.

  Which was fine for catharsis. But as the laughter trailed off we realized that this catharsis was not enough for Tom Hauptman. As his impassioned words sank in it Began to dawn on all of us that we had adapted to an awful lot in ten years, and in some crazy way this confrontation with a man who was forced to try and swallow a whole new world in one gulp seemed to drive home to all of us just how imperfectly we had adapted, ourselves.

  "You know," Long-Drink drawled in the sudden silence, "the little man has a point. Been a lot goin' on lately."

  "It occurs to me," Tommy Janssen said softly, "that ten years ago I'd never heard the word heroin?" and he gulped at his beer.

  "Ten years ago," Doc Webster mused, "I thought that heart transplants were the province of science fiction writers."

  "Ten years ago," Slippery Joe breathed wistfully, "I was single."

  I was thinking that ten years ago, I wore a crewcut and listened to Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino. "Christ," I said, as the impossible burst over me. "Nobody'd ever heard of the Beatles in 1963!" The whole electric sound, the respectability of rock and its permeation of all other forms of pop music, had taken place while Hauptman was rotting in a cell, listening to his fingernails growing. What must the music of today sound like to him? Jim McGuinn of the Byrds had pointed out in the late Sixties that the Beatles had signaled a change in the very sound of music. He compared pre-Beatles music to the bass roar of a.propellor plane, and the ensuing post-Beatles rock to the metallic whine of a jet engine. From what I hear on the radio, it seems that we're already up to the transonic shrieking of a rocket exhaust, and Hauptman was getting it all at once. From Paul Anka to Alice Cooper in one jump! Why, the sartorial and tonsorial changes alone were enough to boggle the mind.

  We all stared at him, thinking we understood. But he looked around at us and shook his head, and took another drink.

  "No," he said. "You still don't understand. What you are all just beginning to see is what I would, if I were a science fiction writer, call the Time-Traveler's Dilemma: future shock, I believe they're calling it now. But my problem is the Time-Traveler's Second Dilemma: transplant shock.

  "You see, you're all time-travelers too, traveling through time at a rate of one second per second. In the past few minutes, you've all been made acutely aware of just how much time you've passed through in the last ten years, and it's made you think.

  "But I've traveled ten years all at once, and I don't have your advantages. Strange as this particular time is to you, you have roots woven into its fabric, you have a place in it however tenuous, and most important of all, you have a purpose.

  "Don't you understand? I was a minister.

  "I was charged with responsibility for the spiritual development of other human beings. I was trained to help them live moral lives, to make right choices in difficult decisions, and to comfort them when they needed comfort. And now I don't even begin to grasp their problems, let alone the new tools that people like me have been jury-rigging over the past ten years to help them. Why, I went to a fellow cleric for advice, and he offered me a marijuana cigarette! I called an old acquaintance of mine, a Catholic priest, and his wife answered the phone; I told her I had a wrong number and hung up. This whole Watergate affair is no revelation to anyone who was in Pasala in 1963; it's been a long time since I believed Uncle Sam was a virgin. But I used to be in the minority.

  "Gentlemen, how can I function as a minister when I don't even begin to comprehend one single one of the moral issues of the day? When I can't, because I haven't lived through the events that gave them birth?"

  He finished off his gin, left the glass on the table, and began tracing designs in the moisture it had left there.

  "I've looked for other work. I've looked for other work for nearly six months now. Are any of you here out of work?"

  Which was a shame, him saying that, because it caused me to pitch a perfectly good glass of Bushmill's into the fireplace.

  Hauptman nodded, and turned to the red-haired mountain behind the bar.

  "And that, Mr. Callahan," he said quietly, "is the long and short of why you find me in your establishment with a pistol I bought in an alleyway from a young man with more hair than Mary used to have. I simply didn't know what else to do."

  He looked around at all of us.

  "And now that didn't work either. So there's only one thing left I can do." He heaved a great sigh, and his shoulders twitched. "I wonder if I'll get to see Mary again?"

  Now, we're a reasonably bright bunch at Callahan's (with some notable exceptions), and nobody in the room figured that the one thing Hauptman had left to do was start up a chain letter. But at the same time, we're a humane bunch, with a fanatical concern for individual liberty, and so we couldn't do any of the conventional things, like try to talk him out of it, or call the police, or have him fitted for the jacket that's all sleeves. Truth to tell, maybe one or two of us agreed with him that he had no alternative. We were pretty shaken by his story, is all I can say in our defense.

  Because we just sat there, and stared at him, and felt helpless, and the silence became a tangible thing that throbbed in your temples and made your eyes sting.

  And then Callahan cleared his throat.

  "To be or not to be," he declaimed in a voice like a foghorn. "Is that the question?"

  Like I said, we're a bright bunch, but it took us a second. By the time I got it, Callahan had already lumbered out from behind the bar, swept a pitcher and three glasses to the floor, and wrapped the tablecloth around him like a toga. Doc Webster was grinning openly.

  "Listen, ya goddamn fathead," Callahan declaimed in the hokey, stentorian tones of a Shakespearean ham, " 'tis damn well nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, than to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, let 'em lick ya. Nay, fuck that. .." His eyes rolled, bis huge hands sawed the air as he postured and orated.

  Hauptman stared blankly, his mouth open.

  Doc Webster heaved himself up onto a chair, harrumphed noisily and struck a pose.

  "Do not go gentle into that good night," he began passionately.

  Suddenly Callahan's Place became a madhouse, something like a theater might be if actors "tuned-up" as cacophonously as do orchestras. Everyone suddenly became the Ghost of Barrymore, or thought he had, and the air filled with praises of life and courage delivered in the most impassioned histrionic manner. I unpacked my old guitar and joined Fast Eddie in a rousing chorus of "Pack Up Your Sorrows," and I guess among us all we made a hell of a racket.

  "All right, all right," Callahan bellowed after a few minutes of pandemonium. "I reckon that ought to do, gents. I think we took the Oscar."

  He turned to Hauptman, and tossed the tablecloth on the floor.

  "Well, Reverend," he growled. "Can you top that performance?"

  The little minister looked at him for a long spell, and then he began to laugh and laugh. It was a different kind of laugh than we'd heard from him before: it had no ragged edges and no despair in it. It was a full, deep belly-laugh, and instead of grating on our nerves like a knife on piano wire it made us feel warm and proud and relieved. Kind of a tribute to our act.

  "Gentlemen," he said finally, clapping his hands feebly, still chuckling, "I concede. I've been out-acted fair and square; I wouldn't try to compete with a performance like that."

  Then all at once he sobered, and looked at all of us. "I... I didn't know people, like you existed in this world. I... I think that I c
an make it now. I'll find some kind of work. It's just that... well... if somebody else knows how tough it is, then it's all right." The corners of his mouth, lifting in a happy smile, met a flood of tears on their way down. "Thank you, my friends. Thank you."

  "Any time," said Callahan, and meant it.

  And the door banged inevitably open, and we spun around to see a young black kid, chest heaving, framed in the doorway with a .38 Police Positive in his hand.

  "Now everybody be quiet, an' nobody gonna get hurt," he said shrilly, and stepped inside.

  Callahan seemed to swell around the shoulders, but he didn't move. Everybody was frozen, thinking for the second time that night that we should have been expecting it, and of all of us only Hauptman refused to be numbed by shock any more, only Hauptman kept his head, and only Hauptman remembered.

  It all happened very quickly then, as it had to happen. Callahan's shotgun was behind the bar, out of reach, and Fast Eddie had been caught with both hands in sight. The minister caught Doc Webster's eye, and they exchanged a meaningful glance across the room that I didn't understand.

  And then the Doc cleared his throat. "Excuse me, young man," he began, and the black kid turned to tell him to shut up, and behind him Hauptman sprang from his chair headlong across the room and headfirst toward the fireplace.

  He landed on his stomach, and his hands plowed straight into the welter of broken glass. As he wrenched over on his back, his right hand came around with that big .45 in it, and the kid was still turning to see what that noise behind him was.

  They froze that way for a long moment, Hauptman sprawled in the fireplace, the kid by the bar, and two gun-muzzles stared unblinking across the room at each other. Then Callahan spoke.

  "You'll hurt him with a .38, son, but he'll kill you with a .45."

  The kid froze, his eyes darting around the room, then flung his gun from him and bolted for the door with a noise like a cross between a sneeze and a sob. Nobody got in his way.