Callahan's Legacy

by Spider Robinson

  But I digress.

  As I was saying, Solace successfully displayed that silly sentence (in thirty-six-point Benguiat font on her fourteen-inch monitor, if you’re a computer weenie. And by the way, did you know that nanotechnology fans are known as “teeny weenies?”) as fast as Doc Webster could say it, and was applauded by something like a dozen onlookers. “Way to go, Solace,” Long-Drink McGonnigle called out.

  “Thank you, Phil,” Solace said. Ever since we had decided that Solace was more of a she than a he, she had spoken aloud to us—through the speakers I’d hooked up to the Mac II—in a warm contralto, not unlike Zoey’s.

  “Hell,” the Drink went on, “these days there’s probably Ph.D.s in English who couldn’t spell that sentence correctly. Even I might have had to hesitate a second or two, here and there.”

  “These days there are Ph.D.s in English who can’t spell ‘Ph.D,’” Tanya Latimer said gloomily, and her husband Isham nodded agreement.

  Marty Matthias spoke up. “My grade twelve students at St. Dominic’s all did rotten on the last exam I gave them. So to try and cheer them up a little, I told them the inspirational story of how Albert Einstein himself failed math when he was in school, right? A hand goes up in the back of the room. ‘Mr. Matthias,’ he says, not kidding, honestly puzzled, ‘I don’t get it. If he was so lousy in school and everything . . . how come they called him “Einstein”?’”

  There were cries of horror, outrage and protest. But no disbelief.

  “I didn’t know what to say. I stood there with my mouth open until the bell rang.”

  Doc Webster sighed. “It’s the ‘Tood and Janey’ effect,” he announced.

  “The which?” Long-Drink asked.

  “Creeping—no, galloping—illiteracy. The township repaired the sidewalks in my neighborhood recently, poured fresh concrete, you know? Naturally kids with popsicle sticks condensed out of the ether, to immortalize themselves with…uh…concrete poetry.” Groans. “Well sir, right in front of my house, where I have to look at it every time I go out, there is now inscribed a large heart, within which lie the dread words, ‘TOOD AND JANEY.’”

  “Huh?” chorused half a dozen people at once.

  “I know the world has gotten weird lately,” the Doc went on, “but I still don’t believe we’ve reached the point where any set of parents would name their son ‘Tood.’ I’m forced to conclude that young Todd can’t spell his own fucking name.” This brought shocked laughter. “Old enough to be horny for Janey, mind you, and the boy can’t spell his name. Miracle he got hers right; her Mom must have sewn nametags onto her underwear.” That got even more laughter.

  Long-Drink shook his head. “How much you want to bet her name is Jeannie?” he asked, and the laughter redoubled.

  “Wait, I got a topper,” Tommy Janssen said. The Lucky Duck had just finished skunking him at darts—tossing all five shots with his teeth and then punting them into the bull’s-eye, with his own eyes closed—and Tommy had naturally gravitated to the nearest source of laughter to soothe his wounds. “I was in the men’s room down at the library, and I was reading the graffiti on the wall of the stall, to pass the time, right? And at first I was bummed out, because all the ones I saw were racist. But then a pattern began to emerge, and I cheered up a little. The first one I saw said, ‘Pakis’ suck’…but the author had spelled ‘Pakis’ P-A-K-I-S-apostrophe. The next one read, ‘KKK—the clan is back,’ only ‘clan’ was spelled with a c instead of a k! But the third one was the best: he was trying to say, ‘Death to anyone wearing a turban’…but the last word was spelled T-U-R-B-I-N-E!” By now people were whooping. “Which as far as I know lets out everybody but Mickey Finn, and maybe the Terminator. So the bad news is, racism is on the rise…but the good news is, they’re even stupider than ever!” The laughter became applause, and a number of empty glasses sailed across the room and met in the fireplace with a musical sound.

  I think it was about then that I first noticed the newcomer enter my bar.

  I remember wondering if a barrage of flying glasses was going to put him off. Newcomers to Mary’s Place—and we don’t get many, for I don’t advertise, and there’s no sign outside—sometimes take a while to dope out that all the silicon shells are ending up in the fireplace. But this guy seemed to take a rain of glasses in stride. It even seemed to tickle him. I liked him for that.

  He was about fifty or so, close on to six foot, clean-shaven with short gray hair (which was dry; the rain must have stopped outside), dressed casual and cheap—save for an exceptionally fine pair of boots that looked like some kind of exotic endangered lizard’s skin. When I saw their heels I revised my estimate of his height downward by several inches. Since he carried an acoustic-guitar case, I took him for a fellow musician, who had heard about Mary’s Place through the folkies’ grapevine.

  He must have observed a couple of toasts being made, as he covered the distance from the door to the bar. I believe Doc Webster started it, toasting, “To the American educational system, God bless it,” and flinging his empty glass into the fire. And then Tommy stepped up and replaced him at the chalk line, said, “Literates: next on Oprah,” drained his own beer, and unloaded his own empty into the flames. Anyway, by the time the new guy bellied up to the bar, he seemed from his expression to have intuitively grasped the essential nature of our most central custom—and I could see he approved of it. More points for alertness and class. “What’ll it be, friend?” I said, going through that silly little ritual of pretending to polish the bartop in front of him.

  “A cold day in Hell before I find another bar as interesting as this one,” he said agreeably. (I agreed with him, anyway.) “Not many innkeepers let you smash your glass in their hearth anymore these days.” He held up his guitar case. “Okay if I set this thing on the bar a minute?”

  It was a big case, but there was ample room. “Sure. Let me mop up some of the spills and circles for you—”

  “No need,” he said, and set the case down on the bar. “I won’t be needing the case much longer.”

  I was finding him as interesting as he found my bar. “Why not?” I asked him.

  He was fumbling with the latches. “I intend to empty it—for good.” He got the last one open and lifted the lid. It blocked my view of whatever was in the case, and I wrestled with the question of whether it would be polite—or prudent—to shift my position a little and sneak a glance over the opened lid. What kind of guitar was this man proposing to destroy? Or was that a machine gun in there?

  Standing behind him, Noah Gonzalez suddenly did a double-take—then made it a triple, gaping at the open case. That decided me. But before I could move forward, the stranger plucked something from the case, took it at either end with his fingertips, and snapped it taut.

  It was, or appeared to be, a one-hundred-dollar bill.

  Noah nudged his nearest neighbor, Suzy Maser, directed her attention to the stranger and his guitar case, and Suzy did what may have been the first quadruple-take I’ve ever seen.

  A crisp new hundred-dollar bill, it looked to be: he folded it lengthwise and it took a crease between his fingernails. He folded one corner over to meet the central crease, then did the same with the resulting new corner. Then he repeated the procedure with the opposite corner. By now Noah and Suzy were no longer the only ones staring.

  I glanced over the lid. That entire jumbo guitar case was packed with what seemed to be genuine U.S. currency, all of it—or at least all the ones visible on top of each banded stack—crisp starchy hundred-dollar bills. I knew less than an innkeeper probably really ought to know about spotting counterfeit money, but these looked pretty good to me. My intuition told me they were genuine. I couldn’t estimate the total, but something told me it would have the word “million” in it somewhere, quite possibly in the plural.

  I looked back up at the stranger. He had folded one raked outer edge back to meet the central crease, and was doing the same with the other. Maybe half my customers were discr
eetly watching now; the buzz of conversation faltered.

  By the time I had allowed myself to believe that I was watching a man make a paper airplane out of a hundred-dollar bill, he had it airworthy. He grinned briefly at me, turned around to face the fireplace, and let fly.

  The bill soared gracefully across the room. By the time it arrived at the hearth, most of the eyes in the Place were tracking it. It was damned well aimed. The sudden updraft over the flames made it try to climb up the chimney, but too abruptly: it stalled, rolled out and augured into a chunk of birch, falling over and bursting into flame.

  All eyes traveled back to the stranger. I guess he’d been confident of his aim: he was already halfway through the next C-note/airplane…

  The general reaction was unanimous. Once people were satisfied that he had torched the bill intentionally, and meant to continue doing so for a while, they politely looked away and went back about their own business. The noise level in the room went back up to normal.

  Oh, no doubt many of them discussed the stranger—but did so in politely hushed tones, without any unseemly gawking or pointing. I stared at the guy closely, but I had professional obligations. I figure if a man comes into my bar and starts setting cash on fire, I have a moral duty to assure myself that he isn’t drunk before I decide whether to sell him liquor. I’m much better at detecting drunkenness than I am at detecting counterfeit money, and it was clear to me that while he was not cold sober, neither was he near bombed enough to call for intervention. “Want any help with that, cousin?” I asked.

  Our combined reaction—or rather, lack of it—delighted him as much as our glass-smashing custom had. “Why, thanks,” he said, and gestured for me to help myself.

  I signaled Tom Hauptman, my backup bartender, to take over the job of keeping everybody else’s glasses refilled. He nodded and went to work with the industry you’d expect of a former minister. So I busted the paper tape off another stack of hundreds and fashioned the top bill into a paper airplane. When I had it done, I set it close to the newcomer’s hand and built another. Soon we had sorted it into a system: I made the planes and he launched them. The only attention anyone else paid was to make sure they didn’t wander into his line of fire. His aim was impressive. Before too long he had to pause and wait for the pile of crashed C-planes to burn down a bit, so that new arrivals wouldn’t spill out onto the floor.

  “This is really nice of you,” he said. “This was going to be my last attempt before I gave up the whole idea. The last three places I tried this, people got very upset.”

  I nodded. “I can see how that could be. Riots have started over less.”

  “The third time I picked a really upscale bar, a Hamptons joint where a Coke cost five bucks and a rum-and-Coke cost ten, on the theory that people who actually had money to burn would be the least upset to see it done. Hah! I thought they were going to merrill-lynch me. I had blasphemed their religion. How many rum-and-Cokes will this buy me here?” He offered me one of his pale green aircraft.

  “None at all,” I told him. “I’m afraid I deal in nothing but one-dollar bills.”

  “Singles? Seriously? How come?”

  I shrugged. “House custom. Call it…homage to the memory of a departed friend. Long story.”

  He grinned. “Do you actually mean to tell me that with a guitar case full of hundred-dollar bills, I can’t get a drink in here? Oh, that’s marvelous!”

  “Well,” I said, “I judge you to be a special case. How about if on a one-time basis, I change one of those into singles for you?”

  He looked thoughtful. “How many drinks would a hundred singles buy me? Hypothetically.”

  “That depends.”

  “Say they were all rum-and-Cokes.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not what it depends on. Every drink in the house, from Coke to Irish coffee to champagne, costs three dollars. But if you turn in your empty glass or mug or whatever, you get to take a dollar back from the cigar box over there.” I pointed it out, down at the end of the bar closest to the door. “So, hypothetically speaking…well, let’s see: ninety-nine singles would buy you thirty-three drinks—but if you didn’t toss any of your empties into the fireplace, you’d be entitled to raid the cigar box for another thirty-three singles, treat yourself to eleven more drinks, then go get eleven singles from the box, add ’em to the dollar you still had left over from your original hundred and have four more snorts for a nightcap, then take four singles, have one more for the road, and walk out with a buck in your pants. Plus whatever leftover hundred-dollar bills you don’t have time to burn by closing, if any. This is just theoretical, of course: I wouldn’t sell a man forty-nine glasses of orange juice. And I’d cut you off once you were down to cab fare: I don’t let anyone leave here drunk with their car keys. But it comes down to, three bucks a drink, a dollar back if you return your empty.”

  He was staring at the cigar box, sitting there unattended at the end of the bar, singles spilling over its sides. “What keeps anyone from filching a fistful of those on their way out?” he asked.

  I shrugged again. “Honesty? Integrity? Self-respect? Enlightened self-interest?”

  He grinned delightedly. His grin was almost manic, his gaze intense. “I’m beginning to like this place. You don’t find many bars with a flat rate—much less a Free Lunch of dollar bills. But look here: if I let you break that yard…well, let’s say I’ll have three or four drinks, tops: that leaves me with eighty-eight—and possibly ninety-two—singles to dispose of.” He gestured to his open guitar case. “As you can imagine, I expect to be somewhat arm-weary by the time I’ve emptied this thing. Another ninety-four missiles might just be the straw that broke the camel’s wrist.”

  “I see your problem,” I agreed. “After you’ve burned a guitar case full of hundreds, how much fun can there be in burning singles?”

  He smiled. I wish I saw guys in their fifties smile that big more often. “How about this? Why don’t I just give you a hundred, and we’ll call it an advance payment on my tab?” He looked around the room. Don and Ev were holding a crowd with pornographic smoke rings, the Lucky Duck was trouncing Slippery Joe Maser at darts by flipping them over his shoulder, and the cluricaune was dancing a jig upside down on the (new) rafters while Fast Eddie played the C-Note…pardon me, the C-Jam Blues on his beat-up old upright. “I think I’m going to be doing a lot of drinking in here: you people are crazy as a basketball bat.”

  “Yeah, we’re weird as a snake’s suspenders, all right,” I agreed. “Welcome to Mary’s Place. I’m Jake Stonebender.”

  “Rogers is my name,” he said.

  I hesitated. “Ordinarily I don’t ask a man’s first name if he doesn’t offer it to me…but in your case I think I’m going to make an exception. No offense, but I just don’t think I can call you ‘Mister Rogers’ with a straight face for any length of time.”

  He sighed. “I quite understand your problem. But it isn’t going to get any better when I give you my first name.”

  “Try me.” I made up my mind not to laugh, whatever he said next.

  “My parents, for reasons which have always seemed to me inadequate, elected to name me for my Uncle Buckingham.”

  I managed to keep my face deadpan, with great effort, but a nasal sound like a snore played backwards soon escaped from me despite my best attempts to suppress it.

  “No, go ahead,” he said understandingly. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

  I gave up and released a large bolus of laughter. He waited it out; I tried my best to keep it short, but it just kept coming and coming.

  I mean, it was beyond perfect. It would have been a funny name anywhere—but here it had added impact. Buck Rogers had walked into Mary’s Place. Hell, we should have been expecting him! And the first thing he’d done was to start rogering bucks.

  I finally got it under control and stuck out my hand. “Buck, I apologize. See, you don’t know it yet, but you were born to find this place. That’s why I couldn’t he
lp laughing. It’s not your name, so much as the appropriateness of it. I’ve actually heard much worse names.”

  “Name two,” he challenged me.

  “Well, I know of a guy in Yaphank named Bang who actually named his daughter Betty. Swear to God. And a friend of mine, a sci-fi movie buff named Ted Leahy, got himself married to a fellow fan, an Asian-American feminist named Susan Hu, and of course they both really idolized George Lucas, so—”

  His face was pale. “Oh God, no. Tell me they didn’t—”

  “Afraid so,” I said sadly. “Mr. and Mrs. Leahy-Hu named their firstborn son ‘Yoda.’ Lad’s about three years old now, and he’s already learned to fight. Dirty.”

  Buck shuddered. “You win,” he said. “Betty and Yoda have me beat by a mile. Suddenly I need a drink. So what do you say? Will you let me open up a line of credit with one of these bills?”

  I shook my head. “Your money’s no good here. As you seem to feel yourself. I’m having too much fun to charge you for it. Name your poison.”

  “You did speak of Irish coffee?”

  “We call it ‘God’s Blessing’ here. Sugar in yours?”

  “Please. One standard glop.”

  I turned, adjusted the settings on The Machine, took a mug from the rack and set it down upright on the conveyor belt. The mug slid away into The Machine, small sounds began, pleasant smells occurred, and in less than a minute the mug emerged at the far end wearing a cap of whipped cream. I placed it before him.

  He had watched the entire procedure carefully. “That’s some machine,” he said respectfully.

  “The only one in the world,” I agreed, “more’s the pity. Drink up—it ain’t much good cold. Well, not as much good.”

  He lifted it and took a careful sip. The instant he did his face changed. He had been under some well-controlled strain; now he began for the first time to truly relax, and seemed pleasantly surprised that nothing bad happened when he did. “The coffee is Celebes Kalossi…” he said slowly.