The Callahan Touch Read online

  “Are you alive?” I asked the stranger.

  “No, I’m on tape,” he said disgustedly, and gulped more beer.

  “Honest to God, Mister,” Shorty said, trying to push past me, “I never saw you. Be honest, I wasn’t looking—it just never occurred to me anybody could be on my tail at that speed—”

  “I was in your slipstream, Andretti, saving gas; are you familiar with the concept or shall I do a lecture on elementary aerodynamics? Even a rocket scientist like you will concede that there’s not much point in doing that unless the guy is going at a hell of a clip, now is there?”

  “Well, I never seen ya,” Shorty said uncertainly.

  “That’s because you weren’t looking,” the stranger explained.

  “One of you want to tell me what happened?” I asked. To my pleased surprise I heard my voice come out the way Mike Callahan would have said it in my place. A quiet, polite request for information, with the explicitly mortal threat all in the undertones.

  The stranger looked up at the ceiling again. No, at the sky. Apparently God signaled him to get it over with. He sighed. “I was following that maniac at a—”

  “‘Idiot,’” Long-Drink interrupted. “If they’re in front of you, they’re idiots.”

  The stranger glared at him, and decided to ignore him. “—hundred and twenty when he made an unsignaled left into your parking lot without slowing. On a Suzuki at that speed, you don’t want to bust out of the slipstream at an angle, so I swallowed my heart and cornered with him—better, of course—and there we both were, bearing down on a brick building at a hundred and twenty together, and I would like to state for the record that I would not, repeat not have hit him if his God damned brake lights had been working!”

  “Are they out again?” Shorty asked mournfully.

  The stranger looked at him. “Or if his brakes hadn’t been so God damned good.”

  “I hafta get new shoes every couple of months,” Shorty said.

  “No shit, Sherlock. How did I magically divine this information before you told me? I don’t know, I must be psychic.”

  “You ploughed into the back of Shorty’s car on a motorcycle?” I asked.

  “That,” he agreed, “was the very last moment I was on a motorcycle this evening. A microsecond later I was airborne.”

  “Jesus,” Doc Webster said, and pushed Shorty aside to take a turn at trying to get past me. But even he couldn’t manage it.

  The stranger finished his beer and signaled Tom Hauptman for another. Tom didn’t move, kept staring at him. “So I hit the trunk like a flat rock, up the rear window, and into the wild blue,” he pointed upward, “yonder. Somewhere along the way my trousers left me. The next thing I know I’m sitting here with a draft in my jockeys and a glass of Rickard’s in front of me. Snappy service.”

  Tom shook off his stasis. “I’d just drawn myself a beer when he came crashing in. I was so startled I just—” He made a sort of pushing motion away from himself with both hands. “And it went—I mean, right smack dab—as if I’d—” He pantomimed sliding a schooner down the bar like you see in old movies. “Bang into his hand.”

  Dead silence.

  “Are you all right, son?” the Doc asked finally.

  “Dad,” he replied sarcastically, “I was only all right up to about age six. After that I was more or less consistently fantastic up until about twenty-five, and since that time I have been world-class. How are you?”

  “‘On my best day,’” the Doc quoted, “‘I’m borderline.’ You know what I’m asking, and I’ll thank you to answer. No cuts? No sprains, bruises, contusions?”

  The stranger only shrugged.

  The Doc sighed. “Mister, I’ve seen a few things. I can manage to make myself believe, just barely, that you survived that experience—but without so much as a scratch? How could you?”

  The stranger shrugged with his mouth. “Just lucky, I guess.”

  There was another short silence, and then the Doc tapped me on the shoulder. (I could tell by the girth of the finger.) I turned and looked at him.

  “Jake,” he said softly, “weren’t you saying something just a few minutes ago about a ‘sustained run of incredibly good luck’?”

  I took a deep breath. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, “I believe we are ready to open. Please come in.”

  △ △ △

  Amazing stranger or no, I watched my friends’ faces closely as they filed in. Upstaged or not, this was my premiere…

  Noah was the first one who glanced around as the gang galloped inside, and he couldn’t help it: Noah can’t enter a strange room without looking around to try and guess where the bomb is. The rest either stared at the pantsless stranger or talked to each other or called out greetings to Tom. But as the stampede crested at the bar, folks remembered where they were: everybody picked a spot and began spinning in slow circles on it with expectant faces.

  I held my breath. That’s how I know that the silence couldn’t have lasted as long as it seemed to: I was still alive when it ended.

  It was Fast Eddie who broke it.

  “Jeez, Jake, dis place is okay.”

  In the time it took me to exhale, Doc and Long-Drink had nodded agreement, the Drink judiciously and the Doc vigorously. Maybe others did too, but they were the two I was watching closest, the experts whose opinion I most feared. About half of a great weight left my shoulders when I saw those two nods. A buzzing sound in my ears, of which I had not previously been aware, diminished in volume.

  “‘Okay’?” Susan Maser said. “Eddie, I bet if you ever saw the Grand Canyon up close, you’d say, ‘Nice ditch.’ Jake, this place is great! You really did a job on it.”

  That was nice to hear too. Susan was the only one present besides Tom who’d ever seen the place before, back when I’d first bought it. She’s an interior decorator, so I’d sought her advice before signing the papers—then thanked her and thrown her out, doing all the work myself. If she liked it, I knew the others all would.

  And they did. “This is just the way I hoped it would look,” Merry Moore said, and Les, her husband and fellow Cheerful Charlie, said, “Me too!”

  “Nice size,” Long-Drink said judiciously. “Huge, but it feels comfy. Good lighting. Nice tables, too—and I really like those couches—”

  “Nice fireplace,” Doc Webster said.

  There was a chorus of agreement that warmed my heart. I’d worked hard on that fireplace. Do you have any idea how hard it is to chisel a bull’s-eye into firebrick?

  “It ain’t exactly like the old hearth,” Noah said, “but it looks to me like it’ll work just as well. That won’t throw glass.”

  “It’s pretty,” Maureen said, as though Noah had missed the point.

  The stranger looked at Noah. “The fireplace won’t throw glass?”

  “We like to deep-six our glasses in the fireplace sometimes,” Noah explained.

  “A lot,” Long-Drink said, and a general murmur ratified the amendment.

  “Really.” For the first time the stranger looked mildly impressed. “But you’re just opening tonight?”

  “Re-opening,” I said.

  “De old place got nuked,” Eddie explained.

  “Nuked?” The stranger looked at us, decided we weren’t kidding, lowered the raised eyebrow and nodded. “Nuked. You people obviously don’t believe in omens. Wait a minute…I think I heard about that. Pony nuke, back in ’86? Some Irish joint on 25A? Terrorists?”

  Now I was impressed. “Not a lot of people know about it. Know that it was nuclear, I mean. There was a kind of major news blackout on that part.”

  The stranger nodded. “I’ll bet. Come to sunny Long Island, where terrorists take out recreational facilities with nuclear weapons. That would have looked swell in Newsday.”

  “Well, the Place was pretty isolated,” I said, “and it wasn’t much of a nuke, as nukes go, and the fallout pattern was out onto the Sound and east to no place in particular, so they decided wh
at with one thing and another they’d pass on starting God’s own stampede off the Island. I kind of think they made the right decision.”

  “‘—and the truth shall make you flee,’” the stranger said. “I’d like to have seen it. Millions of terrified suburbanites, everything they treasure strapped to the roofs of their station wagons, pour into New York City—and find themselves in the Traffic Jam From Hell, surrounded by street kids and derelicts with great big smiles. Talk about a massive transfer of resources. Like cattle stampeding into the slaughterhouse.” He chuckled wickedly.

  “How’d you happen to hear about it being nuclear?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I have sources.”

  “I said,” Doc Webster said with a long-suffering air, “‘Nice fireplace.’”

  I nodded. “Thanks, Doc. The way I—”

  “What I mean,” he interrupted, “is when are we going to give it a field test?”

  “Oh!” My friends had been in my bar for several minutes, and still had empty hands. I blushed deeply and ran around behind the bar, nearly trampling Tom Hauptman.

  “I’m buying,” the Doc said, and a cheer went up.

  I shook my head. “Sorry, Doc. You can buy the first round bought—but this one’s on the house. My privilege.”

  He nodded acknowledgment, smiling at me like a proud uncle, and another cheer went up.

  Rickard’s turned out to be okay with everybody; Tom and I became briefly busy drawing and passing out glasses. No one drank until everyone had been served. I noticed that Shorty was missing; he’d stepped out to see if his car was movable. I hoped he could, for once, find reverse on the first try. Finally every hand was full. “Your privilege, Jake,” the Doc said, gesturing toward the hearth.

  I nodded, stepped out from behind the bar and walked up to the chalk line on the floor, facing the fireplace. I lifted my glass. Something was wrong with my vision, and my cheeks felt cool.

  “To Mary Callahan-Finn, brothers and sisters,” I said solemnly.

  There was a nice warm power to the chorus. “To Mary Callahan-Finn!”

  I drained my glass, and hit that bull’s-eye dead center. As it had every time in rehearsal, the shape of the fireplace contained all the shards beautifully.

  A staggered barrage of empty glasses rained into the hearth, like fireworks filmed in reverse, flashing colors as they tumbled, sparkling as they struck and burst. When the last of them had landed—Ralph’s: he had to move in kind of close and flick it with his muzzle—I noted happily there still were no fragments on the floor of the bar proper.

  Then I took a closer look, and blinked.

  All the smithereened remains of those eighteen glasses were still in the fireplace, all right. And they had arranged themselves on the hearth floor in the shape of the word “MARY.” In glittering italic script. It was nearly perfect, except that each letter had a small gap in it.

  I turned to stone. “Hully Jeeze,” Fast Eddie said. There were grunts and exclamations all around as others saw the phenomenon. That reassured me somewhat; if others saw it too, at least I wasn’t crazy. Maybe that was good…

  “Sorry,” the stranger said.

  △ △ △

  I turned very slowly to face him. So did everyone else.

  His expression was of mildest apology, as though he’d just committed some very small and unintentional faux pas.

  “You did that?” I asked, pointing behind me at the fireplace.

  “Not consciously, no.” He got up—tugging at the seat of his jockey shorts and tossing his motorcycle scarf jauntily over his shoulder—and came over to me at the chalk line. He had one of those small man’s jaunty strides, just a touch of rooster in it. But it wasn’t like he was overcompensating for his size; it was simply that he had a total self-confidence. You can tell the genuine article from even the best fake, every time. He turned his back to the fireplace, finished the last sip of his beer, and tossed the empty glass backwards over his shoulder. It hit the bull’s-eye as squarely as my throw had.

  And when its little musical smash had ended, all four letters in Mary’s name were filled in.

  After a moment of silence, Long-Drink McGonnigle spoke up. “Mister, I’d like to buy you a drink.”

  The stranger looked him up and down carefully. “Let me think about it.”

  The Doc was looking thoughtful. “Stuff like that happen around you a lot? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  The stranger stuck out his hairy jaw, sublimely comfortable at the center of attention in his jockey shorts. “To the best of my knowledge, only while I’m awake. The rest of the time I lead a normal existence.”

  The door swung open and Shorty came back in, looking thunderstruck. “What’s the matter, Shorty?” Doc Webster asked. “Damage bad?”

  Shorty blinked at us all. “I went to look. See how bad it was, you know?” He gestured with his hands, looking a little like a man playing an invisible banjo.

  “That bad?” I asked sympathetically.

  He shook his head. “When I left the house tonight, I had this ding in the rear bumper from a hit-and-run two days ago. I’d been meaning to report it to my insurance company. That motorsickel fixed it.”

  “Huh?”

  “Fixed it nice as you please. The ding is gone. Popped back out. Near as I can figure, chrome from the bike fender plated itself everywhere there was chrome scraped off. You can’t tell there ever was a ding. And my trunk light works now.” He shook his head. “Never did before. Not even when she was new.”

  Rooba rooba rooba.

  The only one in the room who did not seem to need the services of a wig-tapper was the hairy stranger. He looked quite unsurprised and unimpressed by Shorty’s news.

  “Friend,” I said to him, cutting through the buzz of conversation, “I am Jake Stonebender, and this is Mary’s Place. These here are—” I introduced all my friends, one after another. “Welcome to our joint.”

  For the first time he smiled. Well, it had aspects of a smile to it, and for a second there teeth actually flashed in the undergrowth. “Usually I get more reaction. You people are all right.” He looked at us all a little closer. “You’ve seen some shit, haven’t you? All of you.”

  “That we have,” Long-Drink said solemnly.

  He nodded. “That’s gonna save a lot of time. My name’s Ernie Shea—but people generally call me the Duck.”

  An unusual name for a small man to choose. But there was just a touch of duck in his walk, and a trace of nasal honk to his voice, and he certainly could have given either Daffy or Donald points for attitude. Then I got it. “The Lucky Duck!”

  “The proverbial,” he agreed, and quacked twice, nasally, without quacking a smile. “But I sometimes think of myself as The Improbable Man. It’s less misleading. ‘Lucky’ implies that the luck is always good.”

  “You mean—,” Long-Drink began.

  “How was the bike?” the Duck asked Shorty, interrupting.

  “Well, that’s the other funny thing,” Shorty said. “I never in my life seen a piece of machinery so fucked up. I mean, every single piece of gear I could see on it was wrecked or ripped loose or mashed up some way or other. Even things you wouldn’t think would—Mister, I’m sorry. I don’t think you can salvage as much as a bolt out of her.”

  The Duck nodded. “There you go. Don’t worry about it. The best bargain you can get today, the Russians’ll charge you $187,000 to loft you into orbit. Your rates are more reasonable.”

  “I should have been more careful,” Shorty said. “Look, I’m insured—”

  “I’m not. And I hate cashing checks. Forget it.”

  “Huh?”

  “It happens all the time. When I need transportation, something will come along. Don’t worry about it. You, I’ll let buy me a drink. After the Doctor there buys his round for the house. That’ll square us, okay?”

  “Sure thing,” Shorty agreed dazedly.

  “Wait a minute, Duck,” Long-Drink said, doggedly pursuin
g his point. “Are you trying to tell me—”

  The Duck’s eyes flashed. “Okay, I’ll show, not tell,” he said. “That’s how to handle the third-grade mentality. Watch, Sir Stephen Hawking: I’ll try again.” He glanced around, and saw the dart board. “You got darts for that thing?” he asked me.

  I went back to the bar and got the compact little tube for him. Plastic darts, good ones, with snug little plastic tail-sockets so you can nest six of them in a tube that small, or carry them around out of the tube in comparative safety. He took them out and separated them, set down all but one of them on a nearby table, looked up and snatched Long-Drink’s night watchman’s cap from his head. Drink blinked, and then glared, and for an instant I thought, That duck’ll have to be lucky to survive now, but the hairy man returned his glare with a look of such total confidence that Long-Drink decided to let it go.

  “Thanks,” the Duck said insolently. He held the cap up over his face, completely obscuring his vision, and let go with one of the darts.

  It was a rotten shot. It just barely hit the target, wedging its way in precisely between the target proper and the surrounding rim.

  I guess we’d all been expecting a bull’s-eye. We giggled. Well, some of us guffawed. Relief of tension and all that.

  Without looking at the results of his shot, he glared around at us from behind the hat until silence descended again. He took another dart, and let fly.

  It socketed neatly into the first dart, with a suck-pop sound like kids make by plucking a finger out of their cheek.

  No laughter this time.

  He shifted hands. His view of the target still blocked by the hat, he threw a third dart lefthanded, quite clumsily.

  It homed in on the second dart like a Sidewinder up a MiG tailpipe. Thop!

  Dead silence.

  He turned around and threw the fourth dart over his shoulder, the way he had his glass. It spun like a Catherine wheel as it flew.

  Fap! Bull’s…uh, nether receptacle. Four darts stuck out from the target as one, drooping slightly.

  He turned back to face the board, put Long-Drink’s hat on his head backwards, picked up the fifth dart, balanced it on the point on his index finger, and let it fall. It fell tumbling, and when he drop-kicked it, it chanced not to be point-down. It rose in an arc across the room, and slammed into dart number four with an upward angle, correcting the droop.