Callahan's Place 07 - Callahan's Legacy (v5.0) Read Free Page B

you’re broke?
 
I know: it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do
To laugh when the joke’s on you
 
It can be hard to force a smile, as you get along in years
It isn’t easy laughin at your deepest secret fears
But try to find your funny-bone, and have a couple beers:
If it don’t come out in laughter, man, it’s comin out in tears
 
I said it sounds so simple, but it’s so hard to do
To laugh when the joke’s on you
 
 
    The barking vision did not return.   Within ten minutes, Zoey and I had crawled back into bed, where we would enjoy a sound and undisturbed sleep, and nothing else awful or astonishing was to happen after that until well after sundown.  
    But—had we but known it—the ending of Mary’s Place had already begun.

 
    2
     
    TOO FAR EDNA:
    WE WANDER AFOOT
     
     
    That evening started out to be a fairly typical night.   At least, by the standards of the patrons of Mary’s Place—and its proprietor and chief bartender: myself.  
    Not that the evening had been uneventful.   By ten o’clock, roughly thirty of us had put away about thirteen gallons of booze…though admittedly something over eleven gallons of that had gone directly from their various bottles and kegs to the throat of Naggeneen, our resident Irish cluricaune, without ever occupying the intervening space.   (Like their cousins the leprechauns, and indeed like all the Daoine Sidh, cluricaunes have paranormal psi powers—in their case, the ability to teleport and absorb alcohol—and Naggeneen feels that pouring, lifting and sipping are shameful wastes of good drinking time.)   On the bright side, he paid for every drop he drank, cash on the bar, in gold coin so pure it would take a toothmark.   And of course, he tended to be a very agreeable drunk, neither pugnacious nor pathetic, neither morose nor manic, both merry and mannerly.   I guess a few hundred years of practice must count for something.
    Thanks to our other resident Irish myth, Ernie Shea, the Lucky Duck—a half-breed pooka, around whom the iron laws of probability tend to turn into extremely silly putty—we had even had a brief spell of weather indoors: at about nine o’clock one of the very few tornados in Long Island’s history had suddenly sprung up of nowhere and lifted the roof clear off the place, neat as you please, and scaled it away into the night like a Frisbee.   The noise and suddenness of the roof’s departure startled us a bit, naturally (Doc Webster, though, rising to the occasion as he so often does, glanced up nonchalantly and said, raising his voice over the howling wind, “A Gable roof, I see—gone with the wind.”), and there can’t be many sights sillier than a roomful of people gaping up at rain falling on their faces…but fortunately it is not possible for any of us at Mary’s Place to get wet when it rains (thanks to an alien cyborg friend of ours—I’ll get to that later), and besides, by now we had all acquired a certain sense of just how the Duck’s luck tends to run; we simply covered our drinks with our hands to prevent their dilution and waited it out.   Sure enough, another roof came along in a few minutes.   It was a good enough fit, and apparently it arrived with all its nails bristling because it installed itself with a solidity that we could hear and feel was reliable.   Indeed, it turned out to be slightly better than the roof I’d traded for it, in one respect: like its predecessor, it had a built-in hatch for rooftop access—but this hatch was better positioned, further away from the bar, so that I would now be able to get a stairway up to it and allow my customers the option of doing their drinking under the stars.   (I’d have to put a fence around the roof, too, of course.)
    After that, well, let’s see…once the floor had dried sufficiently, Ralph Von Wau Wau the talking dog got out his latest short story and read it aloud to us, turning the pages expertly with his muzzle and paws, and