Not one of my best days, so far.
Zoey wasn’t going to think so, anyway.
The sudden departure left a silence.
It seemed a shame to break it.
But Long-Drink McGonnigle managed to find the right words.
“I’m not going in that pool again until it’s been drained and scrubbed.”
He brought the house down.
“Oughta get Nikky to oil it with his breath day,” Doc Webster said.
“Huh?”
“I say, we ought to get Nikola Tesla to boil it with his death ray.”
I blinked at him, wondering if he was pulling my leg or my ears were starting to go—then got distracted by the sudden recollection of what Erin had said to me just as the Field Inspector had emerged from the water.
“You said ‘aha!’,” I said to her.
“Yes, Papa.”
I like to think I’d have thought of it myself, in time.
Erin has often told Zoey and me that she isn’t really any smarter than we are, just quicker at it.
I’ve never been sure if the distinction means anything.
“Aha what, honey?”
“Well, I can’t be sure, of course,” she said.
“But how much do you want to bet that she’s a relative of either Nyjmnckra or Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi?”
Thunderbolt.
2
Little Nuts
Some recap may be useful here.
I met most of my friends while we were all patrons of a tavern on Long Island, New York, named Callahan’s Place, owned and operated by a man who called himself Mike Callahan.
It was an unusual tavern in many ways—customers were permitted to make their own change, for instance, and were welcome to smash their glasses in the fireplace…
if
they were willing to propose a toast, first.
Enough interesting things happened there that I’d need three books this size just to hit some of the highlights—and then, one fateful night, it fell to us to defend the planet from destruction by hostile extraterrestrials.
In the course of that evening, Mike found it necessary to reveal to us all that he was a time traveler named Justin from the far distant future…and we all found it necessary to enter telepathic rapport together…and I found it necessary to set off an atom bomb I was holding in my hand at the time.
Busy night.
When the dust settled, Mike Callahan was gone back home to his own ficton, Callahan’s Place was a radioactive hole in the ground, and I had started another bar for us all to hang out in just down the road: Mary’s Place, named after Mike’s daughter.
There we all spent an almost indecently happy year together, during which I met and successfully wooed my Zoey.
Then the night our daughter was being born, there was another of those annoying alien-destruction-of-Earth attempts—don’t you hate when that happens?—and we managed another of those group telepathic hookups to stave it off…only this time our group included Solace, a silicon person.
Solace was, in fact, the Internet itself, become alive and self-aware…and that night, just before she sacrificed her own life to save the human race that had unknowingly birthed her, she took the opportunity to interface directly with my baby Erin’s brain, as Zoey was in the act of birthing her.
Erin emerged from Zoey’s womb with an IQ and vocabulary better than those of a university graduate.
Hell, a university
professor
, these days.
Unfortunately, under the stress of saving the world and birthing a supergenius, my friends and I—well, mostly I—managed to mortally offend our next-door neighbor, Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi, an infected pimple of a human being and a finalist in the Ugliest Person That Ever Lived sweepstakes.
The problem with offending her was her nephew Jorjhk.
By evil chance he was a Town Inspector…for our town…and there turned out to be some deficiencies in my liquor license, business license, operating permit, and fifty-’leven other required forms; namely, their nonexistence.
In establishing Mary’s Place I had seen no reason to waste anybody’s time, particularly my own, on paperwork.
This turned out to be a fatal mistake.
Bureaucracy, I ended up proving, is way more dangerous than nuclear weapons.
In 1989, after a year of sulking, I was seized by either inspiration or madness—you pick—and moved my family and myself out of Long Island, all the way down the coast to Key West.
To my astonishment and joy, just about every one of my former customers opted to follow me, in a caravan of school buses, and I ended up opening yet another tavern, a little south of Duval Street, which I called simply The Place.
My mistake was in assuming that the entire Eastern Seaboard was enough distance to place between my bar and the vindictiveness of a pissed-off petty official.
There was, it appeared, an unofficial Old Pricks’ Network—as slow as a glacier, maybe, but just as deadly.
The long arm of Clan Grtozkzhnyi had finally reached all the way down to the ass end of the Florida Keys.
And fallen into my pool.
*
*
*
“Oh shit—
of course
.”
“Ukrainians have long memories,” my daughter said.
From the pool came a splash, and then a series of sounds familiar to me but probably not familiar to you.
In order for Lex to speak, in air, it’s necessary for him to empty his windpipe of whatever water is in it at the time, and then dry out his larynx by flexing his gills and breathing in and out—as quickly as possible since breathing air hurts his lungs.
The net effect is that conversations with him generally begin with the sound of a man vomiting, and then hawking and swallowing extremely juicy boogers for ten or twenty seconds.
The resulting tone poem has driven tougher people than the Field Inspector to depart the premises at high speed, even
before
they saw Lex’s legs.
In a weird way, it’s been a boon for Lex: not one of his friends is a silly, shallow person, distracted by trivia.
Perhaps in consequence, he speaks with a distinct Bahama Village accent—a strange lilting creole that borrows quirks from Jamaica, Bermuda, Cuba, and other places I don’t know.
“I beg your humble pahdon, Jake—but who was dat gray-yut styoupid harse?
She look like a jumbee, bahd ting to see wakin’ from a nap.”
“Sorry about that, Lex.
I wish she
was
a jumbee; a simple charm’d get me off the hook then.
She’s a bureaucrat.”
Sploot
.
He was gone.
You wouldn’t think someone like Lex would know enough about bureaucrats to be properly afraid of them.
But he knows the movie
Splash
real well—I believe that’s why he chose the name Lexington, actually—and there are several bureaucrats in that.
“Well,” I said to Erin, “I guess the first thing to do is try and get hold of your mother.”
“The first thing to do,” Erin said, double-knotting a shoelace, “is make a few phone calls and find out what the hell’s actually going on, how much trouble we’re actually in.
Mom’s better with clearly defined problems.”
I refrained from comment.
She straightened up from tying her shoes.
“Okay, the first—damn.”
She had just noted the position of the sun in the sky.
“It’s after three PM: every state employee in Florida has gone home by now.
Ah well, that’s why they invented the Net.
Excuse me, Papa.”
She left, and went in the house.
On foot: Zoey and I have impressed on her that teleporting is not something to be done casually, especially not in public.
(Sure, only family were present in The Place at the moment–but at any time a really tall tourist standing up on the seat of a bicycle could glance over our hedge.)
Our house is less than fifty yards from my bar, and the windows are pretty much always open in the daytime, so I could hear the chiming chord of the Mac booting up in the study.
“Hey, Jake,” Jim Omar called from the other direction, “I can fix this.”
He referred to the gate.
He was holding it up against its ruined hinges experimentally, the way a girl holds a dress up in front of herself to judge how it will look if she puts it on.
He was using a thumb and two fingers to do so.
Omar looks like a normal, if large-size, person, but I’ve seen him lift up the front of a schoolbus and set it down on his jack.
The gate itself was badly cracked, but Omar was right, it was repairable.
Seeing it made me think of a man decades dead, with the unlikely name of Big Beef McCaffrey.
“Okay,” I called back to him.
“But do a mediocre job, will you?”
He pantomimed puzzlement.
“Tradition,” I told him.
He continued to look uncomprehending for a moment—and then he smiled.
“Big Beef.”
I nodded.
There were smiles all around.
Nearly everyone either remembered Big Beef McCaffrey, or had heard the story.
Our original home, Callahan’s Place, had featured a big poorly-repaired crack right down the center of its front door, too.
It had been put there in the late 1940s by the head of the McCaffrey, the night he tried to stiff Mike with a bogus ten-spot.
Now I had a crack to match it in my own tavern door.
For some reason I found that absurdly pleasing, and a quick glance around told me I wasn’t the only one.
“You got it,” Omar called.
He inspected the door again.
“Still rather use my own tools, though.
I’ll have it back tomorrow.”
He left with it, carrying it in one hand as if it were an empty pizza box.
I put my elbows on the bar, my face in my hands, closed my eyes, and briefly left the world.
(That’s the kind of clientele I got: I can do that when I need to, and my bar will still be intact when I get back.)
Okay, Jake: let’s compact our feces, here.
The hammer of doom hangs over you, the forces of darkness are mad enough to shit thumbtacks, and it’s time to establish priorities.
You won’t be able to get hold of Zoey for hours yet.
It’ s too late to phone your lawyer, or anyone in the government who could offer info or advice.
So your optimum move right now is…what, again?
Well, I have a default answer for that question.
I turned to The Machine, and found that Long-Drink McGonnigle was way ahead of me.
While I had been staring into space, he had come around behind the bar and taken over for me.
A whipped-cream-capped mug was already emerging from the right side of The Machine, the air above it shimmering slightly; he picked it up and handed it to me.
The first sip told me that he’d gotten my prescription right: Tanzanian Peaberry coffee, the Black Bush, two sugars and 18% cream.
“Thank you, Drink.”
“My pleasure,” he said, dialing a different prescription.
His own empty mug was just disappearing into the left side of The Machine.
The barely audible sound of the conveyor belt stopped, and was replaced by the gurgle-bubble sound of magic taking place inside.
When it emerged, I knew, it would contain New Guinea Peaberry, Tullamore Dew, three sugars and whipped Jersey cream.
“As your physician, I prescribe intoxication,” he told me.
“Why don’t you let me take the stick awhile, so you can focus?”
“
I’m
Jake’s physician,” Doc Webster said from his seat behind us.
“As your attorney,” Long-Drink told him, “I advise you not to contradict me.
Do you dispute my diagnosis?’
“No, no,” the Doc said.
“You’re quite right: she heeds to get nitfaced.”
Long-Drink and I looked at each other and rolled our eyes.
Spoonerisms—in a company that included Walter and Bradley.
The Doc was slipping.
Nonetheless he constituted a qualified second opinion, so I allowed Long-Drink to take over as bartender, found an empty chaise longue near the pool, and consented to the course of treatment he had prescribed.
It was delicious.
*
*
*
An hour or so later, Erin came back outside, again walking rather than teleporting since there was no need for haste.
I was sitting beside Fast Eddie’s piano, holding my guitar on my lap, helping Willard and Maureen Hooker put the finishing touches on their fond desecration of Johnny Burke’s lyrics and Jimmy Van Heusen’s tune:
A duck is animal that flies around town
Try him if you’re looking to get down
Named after champagne in a paper cup
When he flies upside down he sure quacks up
And if you don’t mind how badly things will suck
You might grow up to be a duck
Our listeners liked that one.
Three puns in one verse made it their kind of lyric.
When the applause had faded, Erin put a hand on my arm to get my attention.
“I think I’ve found the problem, Pop,” she said.