Calahan's Con Part 2

I told her.

Erin frowned. "Accent on the rjgh?" she asked, and I nodded. "Aha," she said.

I heard her, but it didn't register right away; I was distracted.

G.o.d d.a.m.n it.

I really don't want anyone but friends in my pool.

No, I mean I really really don't want anyone but friends in my pool-and certainly not enemies.

"There's a corpse down there," she screamed as she broached. "A dead bod-" and by then she had fallen back below the surface of the water again.

See what I mean?

No friend would leap to a conclusion like that. Not even a fair-minded stranger. The only corpselike thing about Lex at all is his custom of taking naps at the bottom of the pool. And why shouldn't he? Perfectly normal thing for a merman to do, 'especially at that time of the day.

All right, he doesn't look much like someone raised on a diet of movies and cartoons would expect a merman to look.

Specifically, he has no tail. Unlike Daryl Hannah in Splash, even when he's immersed in water, Lex has two legs, just like thee and me-they're just a lot scalier, that's all. Well . . . and they bend in a few directions ours don't. And the toes are webbed. Other details of his lower anatomy I leave to you to imagine for yourself, except to say that while he may not have a tail himself, my understanding is that he gets plenty of it.

Also unlike Daryl Hannah, he is not amphibian. If you kept him out of the water long enough to dry off, he would not metamorphose into a smooth pink human being; he would die. And would probably soon smell like dead fish.

Lex has lived in the waters around Key West for most of his life. Most of the old-time Conchs know him, especially the fishermen, guides, charter boat skippers, divers, the Houseboat Row gang, and other water people. n.o.body actually discusses him at any length, you understand; the word just went around a long time ago that if you got into trouble out there on the briney, and you weren't an a.s.shole, help might just come to you if you were to lean over the side and slap the water in a certain manner. And that if that did happen, the next time you went out, it would be a good idea to toss a large sack of salt.w.a.ter taffy overboard at the same spot. Then there was the fis.h.i.+ng boat skipper who accidentally dropped a waterproof Walkman with a ca.s.sette of Rubber Soul in it over the side, and from that day forward could not go out without catching large, sought-after fish in great quant.i.ty. For years afterwards the word was that leaving a ca.s.sette tape on a buoy on your way to sea was good luck. Word of another kind also went around about Lex from time to time, but only in the scuba community, and only among the ladies.

I'd been hearing about him since I moved to the Rock, and wanted to meet him, but I'm not any kind of a boat guy, and my wife is crazy about me, and anyway hates to scuba, so there was no occasion for our paths to cross. Then a few weeks ago my friends William Williams and Doc Webster (you'd expect a doctor and a guy called Double Bill to get along, wouldn't you?) came to me and asked if it would be all right if Lex moved into The Place's pool for a while, while the Doc experimented with a couple of possible treatments. It seems that in recent years, the water around Key West has finally become so befouled by the c.r.a.p we dump into it that Lex had developed a really serious rash on his upper half, and some sort of scale infection on his lower half. If The Place is about anything, it's Welcoming the Weird, so I agreed at once to help. I had the pool filled with salt water and raised a volunteer crew to help transport him, and one dark Tuesday night we did it.

Double Bill lined the back of his pickup truck with plastic, filled it with seawater, and we transported Lex in that. At one point Bill stopped a little short at a traffic light on Truman Street, and I guess Lex bonked his head back there, because he let out a bubbly shout loud enough to be heard in the cab. A couple of tourist college boys standing nearby came over and looked in the back of the truck, and the last I saw of them they were still standing there, solemnly a.s.suring each other in hushed voices that the stuff definitely was worth three hundred an ounce.

Anyway, I'd had Lex as a houseguest (well, poolguest) for a few weeks now, and he'd been no trouble at all. He spent a lot of his time at the bottom of the deep end, listening to his Walkman, and unfortunately, while engaged in that harmless pursuit he bore a slight but persuasive resemblance to a waterlogged corpse.

Which is why Field Inspector Czrjghnczl left the pool very much like a Trident nuclear missile leaving an atomic sub: straight up, and with a great deal of foam, fuss, and noise.

Folks hauled her out of the pool-fun new game: Bobbing for Bureaucrats-and set her on her feet, and pa.s.sed her a few towels, earning not a particle of grat.i.tude from her. Her mouth opened and she gestured with her hands, but she was so terrified and enraged, words failed her.

"G.o.d, I love it when she's wet!" Harry the Parrot shrieked, flying in a circle around her head.

She swiveled her head to glare at him, raised a hand-Suddenly there was a cat on her head.

She removed Pixel's tail from her mouth, spit a fine spray of orange cat hair, and tried very hard to hit him, very hard. Slow learner. She very nearly knocked herself back into the pool when he vanished just before her fist arrived.

"What a knockout," Harry squawked.

When it comes to mollifying monumentally p.i.s.sed-off women, any man alive can use some advice. "What should I do?" I asked Erin.

She shrugged. "Survive."

It wasn't what I wanted to hear, but she was right. Nothing I could possibly have said or done would have been of the slightest possible use.

The soaked civil servant did say things, a number of them-and I'm pretty sure they were in English-but since her voice had gone hypersonic by that point, I'm not sure what they were. It doesn't matter, because she said them over her shoulder on her way to the gate, and she probably summarized them effectively with the violent slam that cracked the gate itself down the center and knocked it off its hinges.

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 gla.s.ses 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. h.e.l.l, 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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.suming that the entire Eastern seaboard was enough distance to place between my bar and the vindictiveness of a p.i.s.sed-off petty official. There was, it appeared, an unofficial Old p.r.i.c.ks' 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 a.s.s end of the Florida Keys.

And fallen into my pool.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t-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 pandon, Jake-but who was dat gray-yut styoupid ha.r.s.e? She look like a jumbee, band ting to see wakin' from a nap."

"Sorry about that, Lex. I wish she were 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 h.e.l.l'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-d.a.m.n." She had just noted the position of the sun in the sky. "It's after three P.M. 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 school bus 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 s.h.i.+t 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.h.i.+mmering 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 percent 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 const.i.tuted 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 finis.h.i.+ng 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.

"I'm not sure you should call him that," Willard said.

"While I've never been sure what to call the kind of music your father plays, it's definitely not Pop."

She gave him deadpan. So did his wife, Maureen, whose distaste for puns rivals Erin's. No accounting for distaste. Willard grinned at both of them. "Folkaoke, maybe?"

I was suddenly too agitated for repartee. "You've found the problem," I prompted Erin.

She nodded and offered me some printout. I glanced at it, but one glance was enough. "This is in Bulls.h.i.+t."

"You can say that again," she said, "bearing in mind that if you actually do, I'll bite you. And don't call me s.h.i.+rley. I'll translate the important bits into Human for you."

"Wait," I said, holding up a hand. "Hey, Drink-hit me again, harder." Behind the bar, Long-Drink waved acknowledgment and turned to The Machine. If I had to be exposed to Gummint Regulations, I wanted fortification. "Okay, honey, go ahead," I said bravely.

"The Home Education Program comes under Florida Statute 232.0201. It says that parents who choose to teach and direct the education of their own children at home must notify their district school superintendent, and, quote, 'meet the other requirements of this law.' It says, 'Parents bear the teaching responsibility in this option ... '-news flash-' ... and the child must show educational progress each year. She did not glance down at the papers she held, but her voice told me she was quoting.

Long-Drink arrived with my Irish coffee, and I took a big gulp, waving thanks to him with the mug. "What are these requirements we're supposed to meet?" I asked Erin.

"The law requires an annual educational evaluation, which the parent or guardian must file with his district school superintendent's office."

"When?"

"The state doesn't say, exactly."

"What does it say?"