Callahan's Place 09 - Callahan's Con (v5.0)
CALLAHAN'S
CON
Spider Robinson
www.spectrumliteraryagency.com/robinson.htm
Copyright © 2003 by Spider Robinson
Cover design by Passageway Pictures, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction; any resemblance between people, places or things in it and real people, places or things is coincidental and unintended.
Books by Spider Robinson
Callahan’s Place
books:
Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon
Time Travelers Strictly Cash
Callahan’s Secret
Off The Wall at Callahan’s
Lady Sally’s House
books:
Callahan’s Lady
Lady Slings the Booze
Mary’s Place
books:
The Callahan Touch
Callahan’s Legacy
Callahan’s Key
Callahan’s Con
Stardance
books:
Stardance (with Jeanne Robinson)
Starseed (with Jeanne Robinson)
Starmind (with Jeanne Robinson)
Deathkiller
books:
Time Pressure, Mindkiller (published together as Deathkiller)
Lifehouse
Very
books:
Very Bad Deaths
Very Hard Choices
Other books:
Variable Star (Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson)
God Is An Iron and Other Stories (collection)
The Free Lunch
By Any Other Name (collection)
User Friendly (collection)
Night of Power
Melancholy Elephants (collection)
The Best of All Possible Worlds (anthology)
Antinomy (collection)
Telempath
Dedication:
This book is dedicated to Larry Janifer,
known to some as
Oudis:
senior colleague, Knave extraordinaire,
and extraordinary friend
Acknowledgments
For assistance and advice in matters of science and technology, this time around, I am deeply indebted to Douglas Beder, Jaymie Matthews, Ray Maxwell, Jef Raskin, and Guy Immega; as always any mistakes or inaccuracies are my fault for trusting them.
Assistance of other kinds, just as valuable and appreciated, was provided by Rod Rempel, Lawrence Justrabo and Colin MacDonald (the wizards behind my website), and by Bob Atkinson, Steve Fahnestalk, Daniel Finger, Stephen Gaskin, Paul Krassner, Alex and Mina Morton, Val Ross, Riley Sparks, the late Laurence M. Janifer, every one of the posters to the Usenet newsgroup
alt.callahans
, and others too numerous or fugitive to mention.
Particular thanks go to one of my favorite writers, Laurence Shames, for his gracious permission to borrow, for the second time, his splendid creations Bert the Shirt and Don Giovanni.
If you find them as delightful as I, look for Mr. Shames’ novels FLORIDA STRAITS, SUNBURN, and MANGO SQUEEZE.
None of my 31 books—or anything else I’ve done—would have been possible without the advice, ideas, research assistance, not-always-credited collaboration and ongoing love and support of my wife Jeanne.
This time out, however, she deserves even more than the usual thanks: this is the first book I’ve written since I quit smoking tobacco, and I estimate I was about 15-20% harder to live with than usual during its creation.
(Neither of us is complaining; we both figure it’s a good trade.
But still—thank you, Spice!)
For the same reason and others, special thanks go to my longtime friend and agent Eleanor Wood, and evenlongertime friend and editor Pat LoBrutto, for believing in me and being patient.
—Howe Sound, British Columbia
8 September, 2002
CALLAHAN'S CON was originally titled CALLAHAN'S CONCH, but was changed by the publisher at the time. The following Author's Note is in regards to the original title…
Author’s Note:
A conch—pronounced “conk”—is the hard spiral shell of a marine gastropod mollusc common to south Florida, and especially the Florida Keys.
(Or at least they used to be common; please don’t take one home from your vacation.)
For this reason, people born in the Keys have traditionally always been called Conchs.
In this, as in all things, however, Key West is a special case.
Back in April 1982, the US government in its wisdom placed a border crossing at the top of the Keys, just as though there were a border there, and required anyone entering or leaving that 100-mile strip of America to prove his or her citizenship—and, if he or she looked weird, to submit to search.
The Keys nearly went up in flames, as normal commerce in both directions ground to a near-halt—but the reaction in Key West was both typical and admirable.
They decided that since they weren’t being treated like US citizens, they wouldn’t be.
They seceded, and formally declared the Conch Republic: issued passports, designed a flag, opened an embassy and everything.
That the Conch Republic concept is still alive today, and celebrated with a large and popular annual festival in which local boats pepper a “Coast Guard” vessel with rotten fruit until it surrenders, tells you something about Key West.
Therefore a Key West resident need not necessarily have been born in the Keys in order to call himself or herself a Conch. It’s a state of mind—or, more accurately, a state of the heart.
Teach us delight in simple things,
And mirth that has no bitter springs.
—Rudyard Kipling
The man who listens to reason is lost: reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
—George Bernard Shaw
Give up owning things and being somebody.
Quit existing.
—Jelaluddin Rumi
When you can laugh at yourself, there is enlightenment.
—Shunryu Suzuki Roshi
CALLAHAN'S
CON
Spider Robinson
1
Another Day in Paradise
The basic condition of human life is happiness
.
—the Dalai Lama
A little more than ten years after we had all arrived in Key West, saved the universe from annihilation, and settled back to have us some serious fun, bad ugliness and death came into my bar.
No place is perfect.
I noticed her as soon as she came through the gate.
I always notice newcomers to The Place, but it was more than that.
Before she said a word, even before she was near enough to get a sense of her face, something—body language maybe—told me she was trouble.
My subconscious alarm system is fairly sensitive, even for a bartender.
Unfortunately I’m often too stupid to heed it.
I did register her arrival, as I said…and then I went back to dispensing booze and good cheer to the happy throng.
Trouble has walked into my bar more than once, over the years, and I’m still here.
Admittedly, I did require special help the night the nuclear weapon went off in my hand.
And I’m the first to admit that I could never have succeeded in saving the universe that other time without the assistance of my baby daughter.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say that she might not have succeeded without my supervision.
All I’m trying to say is that in that first glance, even though I recognized the newcomer as Trouble looking for the spot marked X, not a great deal of adrenalin flowed.
How was I to know she was my worst nightmare made flesh?
If the Lucky Duck had been around—anywhere in Key West—there probably wouldn’t have been any trouble atall, atall.
Or else ten times as much.
But he was away trying to help keep Ireland intact that winter, in a town with the unlikely name of An Uaimh.
My friend Nikola Tesla might have come up with some way to salvage things, but he was off somewhere doing something or other with his death ray; nobody’d heard from him in years.
Even my wife Zoey could probably have straightened everything right out with a few well-chosen words.
She had a gig up on Duval Street that evening, though, sitting in with a fado group, and had brought her bass and amp over to the lead singer’s place for a rehearsal she assured me was
not
optional.
So I just had to improvise.
That only works for me on guitar, as a rule.
It was late afternoon on a particularly perfect day, even by the standards of Key West.
The humidity was uncommonly low for the Keys, and thanks in part to the protection of the thick flame-red canopy of poinciana that arched over the compound we were just hot enough that the gentle steady breezes were welcome as much for their coolness as for the cycling symphony of pleasing scents they carried: sea salt, frangipani, fried conch fritters, Erin’s rose garden, iodine, coral dust, lime, sunblock, five different kinds of coffee, the indescribable but distinctive bouquet of a Cuban sandwich being pressed somewhere upwind, excellent marijuana in a wooden pipe, and just a soupçon of distant Moped exhaust.
The wind was generally from the south, so even though The Place is only a few blocks from the Duval Street tourist crawl, I couldn’t detect the usual trace amounts of vomit or testosterone in the mix.
It was the kind of day on which God unmistakably intended that human beings should kick back with their friends and loved ones in some shady place, chill out, get tilted, and say silly things to one another.
I’ve gone to some lengths, over the years, to make The Place a spot conducive to just such activity, so I had rather more customers than usual for a weekday.
And they were all certainly doing their part to fulfill God’s wishes: I was selling a fair amount of booze, and the general conversation tended to be silly even if it wasn’t.
On my left, for instance, Walter was trying to tell Bradley a perfectly ordinary little anecdote—but since they each suffer from unusual neurological disorders, even the mundane became a bit surreal.
“I was down walking Whitehead Street when there was suddenly big this boom, and I’m on my lying back,” Walter was saying.
Thanks to severe head trauma a year or two ago, his whack order is often out of word: he can say eloquently things, but not right in the way.
After you’ve been listening to him for about five minutes, you get used to it.
Bradley’s peculiarity, on the other hand, is congenital, some sort of subtle anomaly in Broca’s Area.
I’ve always thought of it as Typesetter’s Twitch: Brad tends to vocally anagrammatize, scrambling letters within a word rather than scrambling the order of the words themselves like Walter.
Sometimes that can be even more challenging to follow.
Right now, for instance, he responded to Walter’s startling news with, “No this!”
Walter nodded.
“I to swear God.”