Callahan's Secret (2 page)

I said (prophetically enough) that I would be dipped in shit, but I relaxed. I was beginning to understand.

Mike Callahan lets his customers take their drinks up on the roof if the weather’s agreeable. There’s a dumbwaiter to ferry cash down and drinks up. But until now the only access for humans and most other customers had been a vertical ladder and hatch. Some of the regulars had trouble getting up the ladder due to age or infirmity. Certain others could get up just fine-but found that the added ballast of four or five drinks seriously disrupted their balance on the way down. Something about the center of gravity shifting, Dcc Webster said. Just a few days before, Shorty Steinitz had broken an ankle-and here was Callahan’s response.

“Hey, Mike,” I called out, and got no answer. The curtain behind the bar was closed. I had gall enough to enter Callahan’s bar uninvited, but not his living space. I called his name once more and wandered over to inspect the new staircase.

It was a cast iron joy to behold. I’m totally ignorant about such things,. but I could tell that it was old, and beautiful, and very well designed. You could not fall down that staircase,. You couldn’t even bark your shin. It was so well installed that it looked like it’d been there for years - except for the odd bits of welding spatter in the sawdust on the floor-and indeed it fit right in with the atmosphere of Callahan’s Place. Ornamented rather than starkly functional, subtly and ingeniously worked in ways I was not competent to appreciate even if the light had been adequate, it would not have looked out of place in a cellar jazz joint or a monastery, might have done time in both. It invited one to climb it.

So I did.

The footing was secure, the risers precisely the right height, the treads precisely the right depth. It had to be a modular assembly. A single giant staircase, even if it had happened to fit through the front door, would have required trucks, cranes, dollies, rollers, block and tackle and much time-whereas an assembly job this size could conceivably have been installed in a single day by two or three big skilled men. But it was so cunningly assembled that it was hard to be sure. This had to have cost Callahan a bundle.

I wound my way around and up until I stood in a sort of hut with a door opening onto the roof. I thought about rainwater spilling down into the bar below, but when I experimentally opened the door a crack, there was no flood. I pushed it open and the everpresent sound of rain went from bass rumble to treble hiss. It seemed to be easing up.

The rain did not spill indoors because the floor of the hut. was slightly higher than the roof. But you did not have to remember to step down; there was a short ramp. I know little more about carpentry than I do about iron work-but I know good design when I fail to trip over it. It figured that-Mike Callahan would hire the best man available to do surgery on his Place.

The door closed quickly; some unseen damping mechanism kept it from slamming; in the rain, it made no sound at all. I walked around the hut once, admiring it…then walked around it again, admiring the countryside.

I’m sure you know the strange, special magic of high places. Have you ever been on one at night? In the warm rain?

To be sure, Callahan’s roof is a wonderful place ‘from which to view the world in nearly any’ weather. The land falls sharply away to-the north and east, amid incredibly for Long Island (even for Suffolk County) it is largely undeveloped, raw trees as far as you can make out. To the south and west, beyond the parking lot, runs Route 25A, sparsely lined with garishly lit sucker traps. (Fairly heavy traffic, but Callahan doesn’t get a lot of transient trade. The parking lot is hid by tall hedges, the driveway is inconspicuous; the only sign is the one over the front door.) Beyond the highway you can -just make out one of the more expensive subdivisions, well zoned, landscaped and cared for; on Christmas Eve, with a couple of Irish coffees warming your belly and all the lights blazing in the distance, it locks… well, Christmasy.

Tonight the roof was a warm flat rock on which many large somethings were peeing, from a great height. The highway looked glorious-people who wear glasses are lucky, we have stars on rainy nights-but my clothes were getting-wet. Wetter. I considered ducking back inside… but as 1 said, I like warm rain. I particularly like to be naked in warm rain, and don’t get a lot of opportunities. Mike wouldn’t mind, and anyone else I would see drive up.

So I stripped and looked about for the driest place to stash my clothes.

The dumbwaiter seemed like the best bet; I could wedge its door open with something to keep it up here at roof level. I padded barefoot toward its tall housing-and discovered that it was already ~so wedged, with a chisel. Inside was a pile of clothing. Big man’s clothes, faded jeans, denim-shut, boots, sized to fit only one man I knew. That solved the mystery of Callahan’s whereabouts. He must be a secret naked-in-the-rain nut, too. He was going to jump a foot in the air when I came around the dumbwaiter. This would be good for laughs-and it might cost him a couple of drinks to keep the story to myself…

It was just possible that my fellow nudist was not Callahan-in which case I was properly dressed to meet him. Onward.

I should have lifted up the jeans. The underwear might have warned me. I piled my clothes on top of the others. walked around the dumbwaiter, and became one myself. Waiting, dumb, one foot in the air. She was very beautiful, and in the instant I saw her I wanted urgently to do this right, to not make any mistakes. It was not going to be easy.

I am sorry to say that you would probably not have thought she was beautiful-unless you, too, are a pervert. I mean, going naked in the rain is one, thing, but I’m talking major league perversion here. (From my point of view, I am the only sane man in a perverted culture. Perverts always feel that way.)

I will state the perversion: I like women who look like women. That is, my ideal of feminine beauty adheres closely to that which has been the generally accepted consensus from the dawn of time until quite recently and quite locally.

What you would probably have said if you’d seen her, naked or clothed, is, “Handsome woman; she could be beautiful if she lost the weight.” You would probably have gallantly tried to avoid looking at, let alone commenting on her body-you almost certainly would not have drunk the sight of it the way I did.

She did not, in other words, look the way North America thinks women should look. She did not look like a thirteenyear-old boy with plums in his shirt pockets. Those were her clothes in the dumbwaiter. Amid I do not even mean that she was a Jayne Mansfield/Loni Anderson type, with one of those big bodies that seem packed tight, compressed snugly by invisible plastic, firm as a weightlifter’s shOulder. She had big glorious saggy tits, and what are sometimes affectionately called “love handles,” (that is, the people who use the term sometimes mean it affectionately) and a round belly and thighs-that would jiggle when she walked.

She looked, in short, much like half the mature women in this sorry culture, and she would have opened the nose of most of the heterosexual males who ever lived. Praxiteles, Titian, Rubens, Rodin, any of the great ones would have reached for their tools, if not their work utensils, at the sight of her.

You know: a whale. A hippo. I’m telling ya, Morty, this broad was a hunnert’ eighty, hun’ninety pounds if she was a friggin’ ounce, no shit. One of America’s millions of rejects, forever barred from The Good Life, too sunk in sloth or genetic degeneracy to torture herself into the semblance of an undernourished adolescent male. A pig. No character, no willpower, no selfdiscipline, no self-respect, certainly no sex appeal. A lifelong figure of fun, doomed to be jolly, member of the only minority group that “comedians” like Joan Rivers can still get away with viciously assaulting.

I could tell I was beginning to get an erection.

So I used the second I bad left to study her face. A socially difficult moment was imminent, and I wanted it to go well, so I needed to know as much about her as possible, immediately.

Big lush women and small slight men in our society go through life wrapped around a softball-sized chunk of pain; it breaks some of them and makes others magnificent. She was magnificent. Clearly visible on her face, written plain for any fool to see, were the character, will power, selfdiscipline, self-respeCt and warm sexiness which common wisdom said she could not possibly have without automatically becoming skinny. She had lots of laugher’s wrinkles and a ‘couple of thinker’s wrinkles and no other kinds. She wore her hair in a big bush of curls that made no futile attempt to downplay her size; rain-sparkle made it a halo. The split-second glance I got of her eyes, glistening in the light from the allnight deli across the road, focused on the far distance, made them seem serene, self-confident.

I went on computer time. And a very good computer it must have been, too, because I was able to run several very complex subprograms in the second or so allotted to me, One routine sorted through the several hundred thousand Opening Lines in storage for something suitable to Unexpected Encounter With Nude Stranger, but since it expected to come up empty, a more ambitious program attempted to create something new, something witty and engaging and reassuring, out of the materials of the situation. In hopes that one or the other would succeed, a simple and well-used program began selecting the tone and pitch of voice and the manner of delivery-soft enough not to startle, but not so soft as to seem wimpy; humorous but not clownish; urbane but not smug; admiring but not lecherous-prepared, in short, to begin lying through its/my teeth. Meanwhile, an almost unconscious algorithm had me keep my hands firmly at my sides and stand up a little straighter. And all of this together took up, at most, 20 pereent of the available bytes-the rest was fully occupied in an urgent priority task.

Memorizing her…

Plenty of time! Computational capacity to spare! I knew that she was beginning to become aware of me several hundred nanoseconds before she did, integrated all the subprograms, picked a neutral Opening Line and pinned my hopes on delivery, ran a hundred full dress rehearsals to derive best-and worst-case results, made the go decision, and bad time to admire her lower left-eyelash and myself before I heard my very own voice say, with all the warmth and tone and clarity I could reasonably have hoped for, “It certainly is a very nice tits.”

My central processing unit melted down into slag.

It took her ten years to turn and look at me, and no thought of any kind took place inside my skull; horror fused every circuit. She looked me square in the eye, absolutely expressionlessly, for endless decades, while I marinated in failure and shame. Then her gaze left my eyes, panned slowly downward. It rested on my mouth for many years, moved on down again, did not pause until it reached my feet, then came back up again and paused where it was bound to eventually-but I was centuries dead by then, only a cinder of consciousness remained in my brain to be snuffed by the realization that my erection was now up to at least half mast, and so by the time her gaze got back up to my eyes, I don’t see how she could possibly have seen glowing therefrom the slightest light of intelligence.

The animal who sleeps Under my computer woke up and tried its best. It tried for a smile, doubtless produced a horrible grimace. It essayed a merry laugh, managed to generate a hideous gargling sound. It gestured vaguely, attempting a Gallic shrug and failing to bring it off. To all of this she displayed no visible reaction whatever. The old animal gave up.

The first plan I formed was to jump off the roof, but the problem with that was that it could only be done once and might not hurt enough long enough, so I stepped closer to the dumbwaiter housing and began battering my head against it to soften my skull up for the grand finale, and I liked the way it felt and began to get a rhythm going, and then and only then did she burst out into a magnificent bellow of laughter, a great trombone hoot of shocked merriment, and big as she was she was up out of tailor’s seat and holding me away from the dumbwaiter before I could deliver it another blow, and then there was a great complicated rocking struggling hugging stumbling confusion of laughter and tears and rain that somehow left us sitting on our asses on that wet roof with our feet touching, both of us shuddering with mirth. We nearly got our breath back a few minutes later, but when she tried to speak all she got out was “smooth” before dissolving into hysterics again, and a little after that I managed to get out, “My Freudian slip is-” before I lost it, and when the earthquake had well and truly passed I was lying flat on my back with rain running up my nostrils and the soles of my feet pre~sed firmly against human warmth. My hands hurt a little from beating them on the roof.

I sat up.

So did she. ‘I must have looked forlorn. My erection was gone. “It’s okay,” she said, pressing her toes gently against mine. “I’ve heard worse.”

“You don’t understand,” I moaned.

“Admittedly-but I think I got the message.”

“But-“

“It was, unquestionably, the most memorable meeting of my life, and nothing will ever top it.” Oh, if only she’d been right.

I was beginning slowly to realize that this situation was salvageable-that the disáster was of such epic proportion as to be a kind of triumph. I had certainly made an impression on her. Was this not Callahan’s Place-albeit empty~- beneath my butt? Callahan’s Place, focus of strange and wonderful events, magical tavern in which nothing was impossible and few things even unlikely? Could there be any better, more fitting place for a miracle to happen than here on Callahan’s roof?

But exactly where to go from here was hidden from me. “I’m Jake.”

“I’m glad. I thought you might have really hurt yourself there.”

“I meant that my name is Jake.”

“Glad to hear it. What is your name?”

Better and better. I like them quick. “Damned if I know. What’s yours? And please don’t say, ‘Thanks, I’ll have a beer.”

“I’m Mary, Jake.”

With what feeble wits I had left, I attempted a cunning investigation. “You must know the guys who put in that splendid staircase, right?”