Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) (2 page)

Zoey had awarded that offer an emphatic “Fuck you very much, Doctor,” and I was behind her a hundred percent.
 
At the time.
 
We had both devoured most of the available literature on birthing as a subversive activity, and were determined to Do This Naturally—not with drugs and episiotomies, like postmodern drones, but the way our primitive ancestors did it in the caves: with a trained Lamaze partner, a camcorder, and a physician standing by just in case.
 
As far as we were concerned, Nameless could emerge in his or her own good time.
 

The hospital had seen all too many zealots like us; they sighed and agreed to let us wait as long as we could stand it, against advice…provided we were willing to furnish daily proof that Nameless was not in fact dying in there.
 
In the form of a maternal urine sample.
 
Which they would need first thing in the morning.
 
Every morning.
 
Wherefore:

BZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ!!!!!

***

As far as I can see, the biggest disadvantage to having a pregnant lady around the home is that it’s always your turn to get up.
 
I said a few words, and Zoey stuck an elbow in my ribs, saying, “Not in front of the baby!”
 
So I said some more words, but in my head, and got up out of bed.
 
As I went around the bed, I confirmed by eye that her chamber pot was placed where she would be able to conveniently straddle it, and went to the bathroom to get another specimen container from the package under the sink.
 
(If you think ten yards is too short a walk to the bathroom for a chamber pot to be necessary, you’ve never been nine and a half months pregnant.)
 
And then…well, it got complicated.

I bent over, see, and took the package by a scrap of torn flap at the top, and straightened up, intending to rummage inside the thing for a specimen container once I got it up to around waist level.
 
But Zoey had been pregnant for nine months and thirteen days, and those damn packages hold a dozen…so it was empty…and since it was empty, it didn’t weigh anything…and since I was expecting it to weigh at least
something
, and was more than a little groggy…well, I overbalanced and landed ass-first in the bathtub, whanging my head against the tile wall.

It could have happened to you, okay?
 
Sure, it didn’t, and never will…but it
could
have.
 
And if it had, I wouldn’t have laughed at
you
.

Oh all right, I’m lying.
 
Go ahead.

Zoey had apparently decided to rest her eyes until I got back, and
then
get up into a sitting position, when there was someone there to help.
 
But her love was true: I believe the combination of my piteous wail and the loud reverberating
boom
were probably enough to cause at least one of her eyes to open, perhaps as much as halfway.
 
“You alive, hon?” she murmured.

I was dazed, and not honestly sure of the answer, but I could not ignore the concern in her voice.
 
“Depends on what you call living,” I temporized, trying with little success to get out of the tub.

Her reply was a snore.

My struggles triggered another of those invisible Murphy Switches: the shower-head’s built-in bombsight detected the presence of an unsuspecting human in its target area, and cut loose with the half-cup or so of ice-water it keeps handy for such occasions, scoring a direct hit on my groin.
 
That got me up out of the bathtub, at least, though I can’t explain exactly how; all I know is, an instant later I was standing up and drawing in breath to swear.
 
Loudly.
 
With a great effort I managed to squelch it.
 
The useless empty paper sack that should have held specimen jars was still in my hand; I flung it angrily toward the wastebasket beyond the toilet bowl.
 
But of course it had poor aerodynamic characteristics for a projectile: it fluttered and flapped and curled over and fell short, square into the toilet bowl.
 
Two points.
 
This time I was not entirely successful in suppressing my bark of rage; it emerged as a kind of moan.
 
I turned angrily on my heel, and walked straight into the edge of the open bathroom door.
 
The sun went nova, and when it had cooled, I found that I was sitting again, on the cold tile floor this time.
 
The front of my head now hurt as much as the back, and my buttocks hurt twice as much.

Outside in the bedroom, Zoey snored again.

For the third time, my lungs sucked in air…and then let it out again, very slowly.
 
If I woke Zoey with screamed curses, I’d have to explain why—and then refrain from strangling her while she giggled.
 
Or chortled.
 
I got up, rubbed the places that hurt, and turned my attention to the problem of improvising an alternate urine container.
 
If it had been for myself or another male, no problem—but females need a wider aperture.
 
I shuffled past the sleeping Zoey and left the bedroom, searching for inspiration.

By the time I found it, I had left our living quarters completely and wandered out into Mary’s Place proper.
 

Living in back of a tavern has been a lifelong dream of mine, and the reality has turned out to be even better than I imagined.
 
There, for instance, ranked in rows behind the bar, were a plethora of acceptable receptacles.
 
(Say that three times fast with marbles in your mouth and you’ll never need a dentist again.)
 
Before selecting one, I punched a combination into The Machine and set a mug upright on its conveyor belt, which hummed into life and whisked the mug away into the interior.
 
Less than a minute later it emerged from the far side of The Machine, filled now with fresh hot Tanzanian Peaberry coffee adulterated to my taste.
 
I took it and the specimen container I had chosen back into the bedroom.

There are few things a very pregnant woman will wake up for, but peeing is definitely one of them.
 
Getting Zoey to a sitting position on the side of the bed (without tipping over the chamber pot) was probably less difficult than portaging a piano.
 
The smell of coffee must have helped.
 
She took a long sip of it, then came fully awake when she recognized the receptacle I was offering her.

“Jake, I am
not
peeing into a stein.”

“Oh hell, Zoey, what’s its religion got to do with anything?
 
It’s wide enough, it’s been sterilized, it’s got a lid I can tape shut after, we’re out of specimen jars, just go ahead and get it over with, okay?
 
Whoever it is today will be here any minute.”

My best friends in the world—AKA: my regular clientele—had organized what they insisted on calling a Pee Pool: each morning one of them took a turn at coming by Mary’s Place to pick up the day’s specimen and ferry it to the hospital for analysis.
 
I had no idea whose turn it was today, and was too groggy to figure it out, but the way things were going I suspected it would be one of the rare prompt ones.

Zoey thought it over, and relaxed to the inevitable.
 
She set the coffee down where I couldn’t reach it without stepping over her, deployed the stein above the thundermug, and cut loose.
 

Sure enough, just as she finished, there was a thunderous knocking.
 
A
distant
thunderous knocking—at the bar’s front door.

That irritated me.
 
Whoever it was could have just as easily come around to
this
side of the building and knocked on the much-closer
back
door.
 
As a gesture of my irritation, I tossed aside the underpants I had just managed to locate, snatched the filled stein out of Zoey’s hand, and set off to answer the knock stark naked.
 
“Jake—” Zoey called after me, and I snarled, “Whoever it is has it coming,” over my shoulder.
 
For the second time that day I padded out of the living area and into the bar, went through the swinging doors into the foyer, and flung open the outside door with a flourish.

And was vouchsafed a vision.

***

It had to be a vision.
 
Reality, even the rather plastic kind I’ve learned to live with over the years, simply could not—I felt—produce a sight like that.
 
Nor was it a mere hallucination: I had not had a drink in many hours, or a toke in several days.
 
The thing was so weird that it took me a full second or two to learn to see it: at first my brain rejected what it was given and searched for plausible alternatives.

This object is a fireplug—no, a fireplug’s older brother—over which someone has draped a very used painter’s dropcloth, and onto the top of which someone has placed the severed head of a pitbull.
 
No, wait, pitbulls don’t have mustaches.
 
Perhaps this is the secret midget son of Buddy Hackett, wearing a paint-spattered toga as part of his fraternity initiation.
 
No, I have it now: this is R2-D2 dressed for Halloween.
 
Or maybe—

We gaped at each other for a good five seconds of silence, the vision and I, before I tentatively—and correctly—identified it as the ugliest woman I had ever seen.
 
The moment I did so, I screamed and jumped back a foot—and at the exact same instant, she did the exact same thing.

***

The difference was, I was holding a nearly full stein.
 

The lid flew open when I started, and a glog of the contents sailed out into the air: an elongated fluid projectile, like a golden version of the second, liquid-metal-model Terminator.
 
It caught her amidships and splattered, the splat-sound overpowered by the
clop!
of the stein lid slamming shut again.

There was a short pause, and then she barked.

I mean barked, like a dog.
 
In fact,
yapped
is closer to the sound she made—but doesn’t begin to convey the impact.
 
Even “barked” isn’t strong enough.
 
Maybe “bayed.”
 
Imagine a two-hundred-pound Pekingese with a bullhorn, and you’ve only started to imagine that sound.
 
It was something like all the fingernails in the world being drawn across all the blackboards in Hell and then amplified through the Madison Square Garden sound system at maximum gain.
 

I shivered rather like a dog myself, blinked rapidly without effect, and felt my testicles retreating into my trunk.
 

The vision barked again, louder—a sound which you can duplicate for yourself if you wish by simply inserting a power drill into each ear simultaneously.
 
As its echo faded, I heard the distant sounds of Zoey approaching to investigate.
 
She pushed the swinging doors open and joined me in the foyer—stopped short and gaped.

The…I was finally beginning to believe it was a human woman, or something like one…gaped back at the two of us, staring from the naked hairy man to the extremely pregnant woman in the ratty bathrobe.
 
She opened her mouth to bark again, paused, blinked, looked down at the damp stain on her chest, sniffed sharply—the sight of her hirsute nostrils flaring will go with my to my grave—glared up at me, then at the stein in my hand, then back at me, then down at the stain on her chest again, then one more time at Zoey, and finally she threw back her head and
howled
.
 

A couple of glasses burst behind the bar.
 

I heard them just before my hearing cut out completely, as though God had accidentally overloaded the automatic level control on my tape deck.
 
I know I tried to scream myself, but don’t know whether I succeeded.
 
I also tried to jam my fingers into my ears, to stop the pain that continued long after actual hearing had fled.
 
Not only didn’t it help a bit, the stein I had abandoned to do so landed squarely on my bare right foot, with a crunch that I
did
hear, by bone conduction, and sprayed the last of its contents onto the creature’s behaired shins, pilled socks and orthopedic shoes.

A pity, for it caused her to sustain her howl longer than she might have otherwise, and to shake at me a fist like a small wrinkled ham.

Horrible as that shriek was—and it was, even without being audible—the end of it was worse, for now she had to draw in breath for the
next
one, and so I saw her teeth.
 
I can see them now.
 
My eyes sent my brain an urgent message asking how come
they
had to stay on duty when my ears had already bugged out.

With that, my Guardian Idiot snapped out of his stupor, and reminded me that I did not have to endure this trial any longer than I chose to.
 
I closed the door quietly but firmly in her face.
 

Then I stood on one leg and cradled my mashed foot in both hands and hopped in pain.
 
Then I lost my balance and fell down, for the third time that morning, on my bare ass, banging my head again too.
 
(For those of you who are connoisseurs of anguish, a hardwood floor is perceptibly harder than either tub or tile.)
 

Zoey, bless her, did the only thing she could: she burst out laughing.