"Power of suggestion," the Drink roared. "Placebo effect. Contact high from these other rummies. Bill him, Doc."
Doc Webster, who had been sitting quietly hunched over his drink, chose this moment to throw back his head and shout, "Woe is me!"
"Hey, Doc, what"s wrong?" two or three of us asked at once.
"I"m ruined."
"How so?"
He turned his immense bulk to face us. "I"ve been moonlighting on the side, as a theatrical agent."
"No foolin"?"
"Yeah, and my most promising client, Dum Dum the Human Cannonball, just decided to retire."
Long-Drink looked puzzled. "Hey, what the h.e.l.l, unemployment and everything, you shouldn"t have any trouble lining up a replacement. h.e.l.l, if the money"s right, I"ll do it." The Doc shook his head. "Dum Dum is a midget. They cast the cannon special for him." He sipped bourbon and sighed. "I"m afraid we"ll never see an artist of his caliber again."
Callahan howled, and the rest of us accorded the Doc the penultimate compliment: we held our noses and wept.
He sat there in his special-built oversize chair and he looked grave, but you could see he was laughing, because he shook like jello. "Now I"ve got my own back for last night," he said. "Guess my riddles, will you?" He finished his bourbon.
"Well, I"m off. Filling in tonight over at Smithtown General." His gla.s.s. .h.i.t the exact center of the fireplace, and he strode out amid a thunderous silence.
We all crept back to our original seats and placed fresh orders. Callahan had barely finished medicating the wounded when the door banged open again. We turned, figuring that the Doc had thought of a topper, and were surprised.
Because young Tommy Janssen stood in the doorway, and tears were running down his face, and he was stinking drunk.
I got to him first. "Jesus, pal, what is it? Here, let me help you."
"Ricky"s been kicking the gong-" he sang, quoting that old James Taylor song, "Junkie"s Lament," and my blood ran cold. Could Tommy possibly have been stupid enough to ... but no, that was booze on his breath, all right, and his sleeves were rolled up. I got him to a chair, and Callahan drew him a beer. He inhaled half of it, and cried some more. "Ricky," he sobbed. "Oh, Ricky, you stupid s.h.i.t. He taught me how to smoke cigarettes, you know that?"
"Ricky who?"
"Ricky Maresca. We grew up together. We ... we were junkies together once." He giggled though tears. "I turned him on, can you dig it? He turned me on to tobacco, I gave him his first taste of smack." His face broke. "Oh, Christ!"
"What"s the matter with Ricky?" Callahan asked him.
"Nothing," he cried. "Nothing on Earth, baby. Ricky"s got no problems at all."
"Jesus," I breathed.
"Oh, man. I tried to get him to come down here, do you know how hard I tried? I figured you guys could do it for him the way you did for me. s.h.i.t, I did everything but drag him here. I shoulda dragged him!" He broke down, and Josie hugged him.
After a while Callahan said, "Overdose?"
Tommy reached for his beer and knocked it spinning. "s.h.i.t, no. He tried to take off a gas station last night, for the monkey, and the pump jock had a piece in the desk. Ricky"s down, man, he"s down. All gone. Callahan, gimme a f.u.c.king whiskey!"
"Tommy," Callahan said gently, "let"s talk awhile first, have a little java, then we"ll drink, OK?" Tommy lurched to his feet and grabbed the bar for support. "Don"t G.o.ddammit ever try to con a junkie! You think I"ve had enough, and you are seriously mistaken. Gimme a f.u.c.kin" whiskey or I"ll come over there an" get it."
"Take it easy, son." I tried to put my arm around Tommy. "Hey, pal-"
He shoved me away. "Don"t patronize me, Jake! You got wasted two nights running, why can"t I?"
"I"ll keep serving "em as long as you can order "em," Callahan said. "But son, you"re close to the line now. Why don"t you talk it out first? Whole idea of getting drunk is to talk it out before you pa.s.s out."
"Screw this," Tommy cried. "What the h.e.l.l did I come here for, anyway? I can drink at home." He lurched in the general direction of the door.
"Tommy," I called, "wait up-"
"No," he roared. "d.a.m.n it, leave me alone, all of you! You hear me? I wanna be by myself, I-I"m not ready to talk about it yet. Just leave me the h.e.l.l alone!" And he was gone, slamming the door behind him. "Mike?" I asked.
"Hmmm." Callahan seemed of two minds. "Well, I guess you can"t help a man who don"t want to be helped. Let him go; he"ll be in tomorrow." He mopped the bartop and looked troubled.
"You don"t think he"ll-"
"Go back to smack himself? I don"t think so. Tommy hates that s.h.i.t now. I"m just a little worried he might go look up Ricky"s connection and try to kill him."
"Sounds like a good plan to me," Long-Drink muttered. "But he"s too drunk to function. More likely he"ll go down. Or do a clumsy job and get busted for it."
"Be his second fall," I said.
"d.a.m.n it," the Drink burst out, "I"m goin" after him." But when he was halfway to the door we all heard the sound of a vehicle door slamming out in the parking lot, and he pulled up short. "It"s okay," he said. "That"s my pickup, I"d know that noise anywhere. Tommy knows I keep a couple bottles under the seat in case of snakebite. He"ll be okay-after a while I"ll go find him and put him in the truckbed and take him home."
"Good man, Drink," I said. "Pyotr"s out with the bug, we"ve got to cover for him."
Callahan nodded slowly. "Yeah, I guess that"ll do it."
The Place began to buzz again. I wanted a drink, and ordered more coffee instead, my seventh cup of the day so far. As it arrived, one of those accidental lulls in the conversation occurred, and we all plainly heard the sound of gla.s.s breaking out in the parking lots Callahan winced, but spilled no coffee.
"How do you figure a thing like heroin, Mike? It seems to weed out the very stupid and the very talented. Bird, Lady Day, Tim Hardin, Janis, a dozen others we both know- and a half a million anonymous losers, dead in alleys and pay toilets and gas stations and other people"s bedrooms. Once in every few thousand of "em comes a Ray Charlies or a James Taylor, able to put it down and keep on working."
"Tells you something about the world we"re making. The very stupid and the very sensitive can"t seem to live in it. Both kinds need dangerous doses of anesthetic just to get through a day. Be a lot less bother for all concerned if they could get it legal, I figure. If that Ricky wanted to die, okay-but he shouldn"t have had to make some poor gas jockey have to shoot him."
Another sound of shattering gla.s.s from outside, as loud as the first.
"Hey Drink," Callahan said suddenly, "how much juice you say you keep in that truck?"
Long-Drink broke off a conversation with Margie Shorter.
"Well, how I figure is, I got two hands-and besides, I might end up sharing the cab with somebody fastidious."
"Two full bottles?"
All of us got it at once, but the Drink was the first to move, and those long legs of his can really eat distance when they start swinging. He was out the door before the rest of us were in gear, and by the time we got outside he was just visible in the darkness, kneeling up on the tailgate of his pickup, shaking his head. Everybody started for the truck, but I waved them back and they heeded me. When I got to the truck there was just enough light to locate the two heaps of gla.s.s that had been full quarts of Jack Daniels once. The question was, how recently? I got down on my hands and knees, swept my fingers gingerly through the shards, accepting a few small cuts in exchange for the answer to the question, is the ground at all damp here abouts?
It was not.
"Jesus, Drink, he"s sucked down two quarts of high test! Get him inside!"
"Can a man die from that?"
"Get him inside." Tommy has one of those funny stomachs, that won"t puke even when it ought to; I was already running.
"Where are you-oh, right." I could hear him hauling Tommy off the truck. Callahan"s phone was out of service that week, so the Drink knew where I had to be headed. He was only half right. I left the parking lot in a spray of gravel, slipped in dogs.h.i.t just off the curb, nearly got creamed by a Friday-night cowboy in a Camaro, went up over the hood of a parked Caddy and burst in the door of the allnight deli across the street from Callahan"s. The counterman spun around, startled.
"Bernie," I roared, "call the Doc at Smithtown. Alcohol overdose across the street, stat," and then I was out the door again and sprinting up the dark street, heading for my second and most important destination.
Because I knew. Don"t ask me how, I just knew. They say a hunch is an integration of data you did not know you possessed. Maybe I"d subconsciously begun to suspect just before the Doc had distracted me with his rotten pun-I"d had a lot of coffee, and they say coffee increases the I.Q. some. Maybe not-maybe I"d never have figured it out if I hadn"t needed to just then, if figuring it all out hadn"t been the only thing that could save my silly-a.s.s friend Tommy.
I had no evidence that would stand up in any kind of court---only hints and guesswork. All I can tell you is that when I first cleared the doorway of Callahan"s Place, I knew where I would end up going-hipping Bernie was only for backup, and because it took so little time and was on the way.
Half a block is a short distance. Practically no distance at all. But to a man dreadfully hung over, afraid that his friend is dying, and above all absolutely, preternaturally certain of something that he cannot believe, a half block can take forever to run. By the time I got there, I believed.
And then for the second time that day I was looking at a small, dark cottage with carven-Swiss drolleries around the windows and doors. This time I didn"t care if I was welcome.
I didn"t waste time on the doorbell or the door. There was a big wooden lawn chair, maybe sixty or seventy pounds I learned later, but right then it felt like balsa as I heaved it up over my head and flung it through the big living room window. It took out the bulk of the window and the drapes behind; I followed it like Dum-Dum the Human Cannonball, at a slight angle, and G.o.d was kind: I landed on nothing but rug. I heard a distant shout in a language I did not know but was prepared to bet was Rumanian, and followed it through unfamiliar darkness, banging myself several times on hard objects, destroying an end table. Total dark, no moon or starlight, no time for matches, a door was before me and I kicked it open and there he was, just turning on a bedside lamp.
"I know," I said. "There"s no more time for lying."
Pyotr tried to look uncomprehending, and failed, and there just wasn"t any time for it.
"You don"t drink blood. You filter it." He went white with shock. "I can even see how it must have happened, your trip at Callahan"s, I mean. When you first got over here to the States, you must have landed in New York and got a job as a technician in a blood bank, right? Leach a little bit of nourishment out of a lot of whole blood you can feed without giving serious anemia to the transfusion patients. An ethical vampire-with a digestion that has trouble with beef broth. I"ll bet you"ve even got big canines like the movie vampires-not because size makes them any more efficient at letting blood, but because there"re some d.a.m.ned unusual glands in "em. You interface with foreign blood and filter out the nourishment it carries in solution.
Only you couldn"t have known how they got blood in New York City, who the typical donor is, and before you knew it it was too late, you were a stone alcoholic." I was talking a mile a minute, but I could see every single shot strike home. I had no time to spare for his anguish; I grabbed him and hauled him off the bed, threw clothes at him. "Well, I don"t give a s.h.i.t about that now! You know young Tommy Janssen, well he"s down the block with about three quarts of hooch in him, and the last two went down in a gulp apiece, so you move your skinny Transylvanian a.s.s or I"ll kick it off your spine, you got me? Jump, G.o.dd.a.m.nit!"
He caught on at once, and without a word he pulled his clothes on, fast enough to suit me. An instant later we were sprinting out the door together.
The half-block run gave me enough time to work out how I could do this without blowing Pyotr"s cover. It was the total blackness of the night that gave me the idea. When we reached Callahan"s I kept on running around to the back, yelling at him to follow. As we burst in the door to the back room I located the main breaker and killed it, yanking a few fuses for insurance. The lights went out and the icebox stopped sighing. Fortunately I don"t need light to find my way around Callahan"s Place, and good night-sight must have been a favorable adaptation for anyone with Pyotr"s basic mutation; we were out in the main room in seconds and in silence.
At least compared with the hubbub there; everybody was shouting at once. I cannoned into Callahan in the darkness- I saw the glowing cheroot-tip go past my cheek-and 1 hugged him close and said in his ear, "Mike, trust me. Do nor find the candles you"ve got behind the bar. And open the windows."
"Okay, Jake," he said calmly at once, and moved away in the blackness. With the windows open, matches blew out as fast as they could be lit. The shouting intensified. In the glow of one attempted match-lighting, I saw Jimmy laid out on the bar in the same place Lady Macbeth had lain the night before, and I saw Pyotr reach him. I sprang across the room to the fireplace-thank G.o.d- it was a warm night; no fire-and cupped my hands around my mouth.
"ALL RIGHT, PEOPLE," I roared as loud as I could, and silence fell.
d.a.m.ned if I can remember what I said. I guess I told them that the Doc was on the way, and made up some story about the power failure, and told a few lies about guys I"d known who drank twice as much booze and survived, and stuff like that. All I know is that I held them, by sheer force of vocal personality, kept their attention focused on me there in the dark for perhaps four or five minutes of impa.s.sioned monologue. While behind them, Pyotr worked at the bar. When I heard him clear his throat I began winding it down. I heard the distant sound of a door closing, the door that leads from the back room to the world outside. "So the important thing," I finished, locating one of those artificial logs in the dark and laying it on the hearth, "is not to panic and to wait for the ambulance," and I lit the giant crayon and stacked real maple and birch on top of it. The fire got going at once, and that sorted out most of the confusion. Callahan was bending over Tommy, rubbing at the base of his neck with a barrag, and he looked up and nodded. "I think he"s okay, Jake. His breathing is a lot better."
A ragged cheer went up.
By the time we had the lights back on, the wagon arrived, Doc Webster bursting in the door like a crazed hippo with three attendants following him. I stuck around-just long enough to hear him confirm that Tommy would pull through, promised Callahan I"d give him the yarn later, and slipped out the back.
Walking the half block was much more enjoyable than running it. I found Pyotr in his bedroom. Roaring drunk, of course, reeling around the room and swearing in Rumanian.
"Hi, Pyotr. Sorry I bust your window."
"Sodomize the window. Jake, is he-"
"Fine. You saved his life."
He frowned ferociously and sat down on the floor. "It is no good, Jake. I thank you for trying to keep my secret, but it will not work."
"No, it won"t."
"I cannot continue. My conscience forbids. I have helped young Janssen. But it must end. I am ripping you all up."
"Off, Pyotr. Ripping us off. But don"t kick yourself too hard. What choice did you have? And you saved a lot of the boys a lot of hangovers, laundering their blood the way you did. Just happens I"ve got a trick metabolism, so instead of skimming off my hangover, you gave me one. And doubled your own: the blood I gave you the last two nights must have been no prize."
"I stole it."
"Well, maybe. You didn"t rob me of the booze-we both got drunk on it. You did rob me of a little nourishment-but I gather you also "robbed" me of a considerable amount of poisonous byproducts of fatigue, poor diet, and prolonged despair. So maybe we come out even."
He winced and rolled his eyes. "These glands in my teeth-that was a very perceptive guess, Jake-are unfortunately not very selective. Alcoholism was not the only unpleasant thing I picked up working at the blood bank- another splendid guess-although it is the only one that has persisted. But it must end. Tomorrow night when I am capable I will go to Mr. Callahan"s Place and confess what I have been doing-and then I will move somewhere else to dry out, somewhere where they do not buy blood from winos. Perhaps back to the Old Country." He began to sob softly. "In many ways it will be a relief. It has been hard, has made me ashamed to see all of you thinking I was some kind of altruist, when all the time I was-" He wept.
"Pyotr, listen to me." I sat on the floor with him. "Do you know what the folks are going to do tomorrow night when you tell them?"
Headshake.
"Well, I do, sure as G.o.d made little green thingies to seal plastic bags with, and so do you if you think about it. I"m so certain, I"m prepared to bet you a hundred bucks in gold right now."
Puzzled stare; leaking tears.
"They"ll take up a collection for you, a.s.shole!"
Gape.
"You"ve been hanging out there for years, now, you know I"m right. Every eligible man and woman there is a blood donor already, the Doc sees to that-do you mean to tell me they"d begrudge another half liter or so for a man who"d leave a warm bed in the middle of the night to risk his cover and save a boy"s life?"
He began to giggle drunkenly. "You know-hee, hee- I believe you are right." The giggle showed his fangs. Suddenly it vanished. "Oh," he cried, "I do not deserve such friends. Do you know what first attracted me about Callahan"s Place? There is no mirror. No, no, not that silly superst.i.tion-mirrors reflect people like me as well as anyone. That"s just it. I was ashamed to look at my reflection in a mirror."
I made him look at me. "Pyotr, listen to me. You worked hard for your cakes and ale, these last few years. You kept a lot of silly b.a.s.t.a.r.ds from turning into highway statistics. Okay, you may have had another motive that we didn"t know-but underneath it all, you"re just like everybody else at Callahan"s Place."
"Eh?"
"A sucker for your friends."
And it broke him up, thank G.o.d, and everything worked out just fine.
And a couple of weeks later, Pyotr played us all a couple of fabulous Rumaman folk songs-on Lady Macbeth.
AUTHOR"S NOTE