One more gulp of coffee. Should have asked Tom for a whole shot. Spit it out, Jake. No, not the coffee, the apology-and don't call me Shirley. "Here's the thing," I said. "Every time I see you, I get p.i.s.sed off, but it isn't you I'm getting p.i.s.sed off at. I mean, I hardly even know you, you know? And as I get to know you, I kind of like you. Even before you saved my world, I mean. What I keep getting p-" I saw her expression. "What I keep getting angry at is not you. It's me."

"I don't understand."

"Every time I see you, even now, you remind me of a hole in my bucket. A burr under my saddle. A piece of unfinished karma-"

"Ah. Now I understand."

Yeah, that was dry wit all right. I did kind of like her. "Every time I see you, you remind me of your-your-Oh h.e.l.l, I have no idea what the word is. What do they call the aunt of one's third cousin twice removed, do you know?"

She frowned-and then her eyes opened wide. "Oh you mean Tante Nyjmnckra! Cousin Jorjhk's aunt."

"Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi, yeah."

She tilted her head. "Your p.r.o.nunciation is very good." "Thank you. Accent on the zkzh, right?"

"And remembering her makes you angry because she drove you from your home in Long Island."

"No, G.o.d ... bless it. It makes me angry because the whole feud was my fault, from start to finish. I deserved everything she dumped on me. My friends and family didn't but I did."

She sat back and drank more coffee. "Now I really don't-understand."

I tried to drink more of my own, but the mug seemed to be empty. I didn't want to signal Tom for more and interrupt this now. I licked the rim, and it helped, but not enough, so I set it down. "Look," I said, "it was a very busy morning. Zoey was way overdue to give birth to Erin, and we had to run daily urine samples to the hospital. It was the crack of dawn, I was half asleep, I'd banged my head a couple of times already. We were out of sample containers, and all I could find to use was a Bavarian beer stein with a lid. Then the buddy who was supposed to come pick up the urine sample rang the wrong doorbell, way over at the other end of the building, and I stormed all the way over there, cursing under my breath and flung the door open, and your tante Nyjmnckra and I screamed at each other." I licked the rim of the mug one more time.

"Why?"

"Huh? Oh. Well, I a.s.sume she screamed because I was naked."

"Ah."

"And in part I suppose because I was screaming at her." "Ah. Because you were naked."

"No. Well, yes, I suppose, a little. But I've been startled naked before; usually I just make a little squeak sound. Why I screamed ... Ludnyola, have you ever actually met your tante?"

"No."

"Seen a photograph, perhaps?"

She shook her head.

"Ah. Then I must ask you to trust me on this, until such time as you can verify it for yourself. Your tante Nyjmnckra is, almost beyond doubt, the ugliest woman presently alive on this planet, and I mean no s.h.i.t."

Her eyebrows raised. "Really?"

"Was over ten years ago, and I don't see her for a late bloomer. Honestly, my first impression was a pit bull with a fireplug up its a.s.s."

"Ah. So-"

"So what with everything, anxiety for Zoey and the kid, a couple of fresh lumps on my head, bad temper, surprise, embarra.s.sment, truly eye-watering ugliness-"

"You screamed."

"And dropped the urine sample."

"Ah."

"On my bare foot."

She winced. "Ow."

"And most of the contents ended up-"

She closed her eyes. "On-"

"Tante Nyjmnckra," we said together.

She opened her eyes again, looked at me ... slammed her palm on the table and whooped with laughter. Whooped and hooted and cackled and shrieked, and when somebody laughs like that, what are you gonna do but laugh, too?

"And somehow a feud developed from this?" she managed to choke out a while later, and while that made us both laugh harder, it also helped me to taper off again soon.

"Do you see?" I said finally. "There were a few other subsequent incidents I won't go into, even less plausible, that poured gasoline on the flames-but yes, basically the whole feud began right there. A feud violent enough that within a year more than a hundred people had to pick up their entire lives, pack them into converted buses, and move them more than a thousand miles down the coast to Key West. Ten years later, the general consensus seems to be that we all gained more than we lost by it. But my point is, it was necessary. Why? Because Nyjmnckra and I loathed each other on sight. Why? Well, she hated me because I was rude, stupid, clumsy, and naked. And I hated her because she had been p.i.s.sed on by G.o.d, and because she objected to being p.i.s.sed on by me. Who had the high ground there?"

She sat up straighter.

I took my gla.s.ses off, held them up to the light, saw that they were filthy, began polishing them with a napkin. "Do you see-huff! Huff! -what I mean? She and I have invested a decade of prime hatred in each other. I taught my d.a.m.n wife and child to hate her, and all my friends. She taught her nephew to hate us right out of town, and ultimately it all trickled down, like the upstairs neighbor's leaking toilet, onto you. And now whenever I see you, I remember that half of what she hated me for was my fault, and nothing I hated her for was hers."

My wife's splendidly familiar voice came from just behind me. "You keep this sort of s.h.i.t up for another fifty years or so, Slim, and you're in serious danger of maturing." Her wonderfully familiar hand settled on my shoulder and squeezed gently.

I tilted my head all the way back, until I could see her magnificently familiar face upside down, and grin at it. "I ain't worried. Eavesdropping, eh?"

"Hear my old man laughing that hard with another woman, bet your a.s.s I'm eavesdropping," she said. She was wearing her favorite kimono, the purple silk job with the dragon on the back. Her other, equally gloriously familiar hand settled on my other shoulder. "I'm glad I did. You nailed it, Spice. Tante Nyjmnckra has been a hole in everybody's bucket. And now we can finally start mending it."

Even upside down, it was a rapturously familiar, totally satisfying kiss.

She dropped into a chair beside me and took both of my hands in hers. "I have a couple of holes in my own bucket to deal with," she said.

I thought of six funny replies, and shut up.

"First of all, I know you would never say it at gunpoint, so I will. You told me so."

I said nothing.

"I don't know what the h.e.l.l possessed me to do something so stupid. Forget risking the universe-screw the universe-I risked my life, and Erin's life, and I don't have the right to do either without consulting you, because they both involve you-"

I squeezed her hands. "Whoa. I can see you're mad at yourself-"

She smiled wryly. "Let me put it this way. Every time I put myself in hard vacuum, it really makes my blood boil."

Ludnyola barked with involuntary laughter, then swallowed it hard.

"Well, okay," I said. "But I'm not mad. You did what you had to do. What with one thing and another, raising Erin has never really given you much chance to use your maternal protective instinct. Right from birth, she just hardly ever gave either of us any reason to be frightened. Not only did you suddenly acquire a perfectly good excuse to be scared s.h.i.tless for her, but you also probably knew somewhere deep inside that it's never likely to happen again that this was your very last chance to freak out. Having just done a little freaking out of my own, I can empathize, you know?"

She looked at me for a long moment and then said, "Will you marry me?"

"Repeatedly," I said.

"How long have you two been married?" Ludnyola asked.

"Not long enough," we said together, and squeezed each other's hands.

Suddenly something struck me about her grip. I looked, and sure enough. "You still have your ring! I thought it'd be halfway to Neptune by now."

She glanced down at it. "Oh. No, Erin did have to take it off my finger to teleport me home, but she sent it home first, under separate cover, as it were. She was in a bit of a hurry, so she just dropped it in the pool; Lex found it and gave it back to me a few minutes ago. There are a zillion teeny tiny little pits on the surface now; I think it's cool."

"Stick with me, baby," I said, "and I'll get you a ring of s.p.a.ce-burned gold ..."

Another in a soul-satisfyingly familiar series of kisses.

"I still have one more hole in my bucket," she said then. "I'm going to leave that line alone," I said.

"Yes, you are." She released my hands and turned in her chair to face Ludnyola. "I thought some hard thoughts about you, these last few days. I've been doing a little more thinking since I found out I'd be dead if it hadn't been for you."

"I only-"

Zoey overrode her. "I have no more business hating you than my husband had hating your ttnte. Your job, what you have to see, what you have to do ... what you must burn to do and can't ... the bulls.h.i.t you must have to listen to, the empty-eyed children, the crushing caseload and the pathetic budget ... it almost has to make you cold, formal, efficient, suspicious, profoundly cynical, aggressive, stubborn, and rigid, if you were a decent human being to start with. Almost anyone doing any kind of social work is like an inner-city cop armed with a slingshot and armored with cellophane-never mind the ones who have to cope with children. You become a bureaucrat or you get your heart torn out, those are the choices. Add in the family pressure your cousin and his aunt put on you ..." She held out a hand, and Ludnyola hesitantly took it. "I ask you to forgive me for judging you, before you accept my thanks for saving my life."

The Field Inspector blinked and blinked and blinked at her. Finally she said, "Don't mention it, you're welcome, if only I met a few more people like you two-and Mei-Ling and all your friends-in the course of my work, I think I'd be a much nicer person to be around."

"We've got a guest bed," Zoey told her. "If you phone ahead, it'll even have clean sheets on it."

The matter of the state of Florida versus Zoey and me dried up and blew away the next day. Field Inspector L. Czrjghnczl filed an Annual Evaluation report in Tallaha.s.see stating that in her opinion, the homeschooling of the minor child Erin Stonebender-Berkowitz adequately and appropriately demonstrated educational progress at a level commensurate with her intellectual age and ability, as required by statute, and that while it had been mutually agreed that the inspector herself would serve as the regular Annual Evaluator in the future (every year at Fantasy Fest time), no further formal written reports would be deemed necessary.

That same afternoon, I mailed brief but sincere letters of apology, translated into Ukrainian and then handwritten, to both Nyjmnckra Grtozkzhnyi and Smithtown Town Inspector Jorjhk Grtozkzhnyi. I had thought to send a few pounds of exotic chocolates along with hers and a case of good vodka with his, but at the suggestion of Ludnyola (who'd also kindly done the translating for me), I reversed them, and by golly, each of them eventually sent me back a letter accepting my apology. Tante Nyjmnckra actually came down for a visit, a year later-during Fantasy Fest-but that's another, and far more ridiculous, story.

Two days after that, Bert the Shirt came by, resplendent in a cobalt-blue silk shirt with fire opal cuff links that were older than he was, and sat at the best table in the house with Don Giovanni wheezing dryly on his lap and a crowd gathered around him, anxious to hear the word. And the word was that nearly all the ten million dollars had been recovered, and while Tony Donuts Junior was apparently still alive, his net worth and his life expectancy were both very close to zero.

"Tony's no Einstein," he told us, "but the third time in a row he breaks a hundred, an five minutes later guys shoot at him, even he figures out this ten million is no good fah spendin. So basically he abandons it to slow the hunters down, an keeps rennin-in effect, he gives it back to Chollie, see? Chollie smiles so much lately, sharks are gettin jealous."

"Where do you figure Tony is now, Uncle Bert?" Erin asked.

Bert was dipping his aged fingers in a gla.s.s of ice water and sprinkling Don Giovanni. The dog sighed every time droplets. .h.i.t a good spot. "Well, n.o.body's brought Chollie his head, so he might be on earth. But if he is, it's someplace where they don't have booze, dope, hookers, gambling, unsecured loans, hotel linen, garbage collection, airports, thieves, cops, lawyers, TVs, or telephones. There was one reported sighting up at Baffin Bay, but the thinking now is it was probably a polar bear. I think ya can fuhgeddaboutim."

So we did.

Lex's skin rash and scale infection both finally cleared up; and we trucked him back home to the Florida Strait on the last night of Fantasy Fest. He sat up in the back, waving like the Queen of England and rippling his gills. Everyone who saw him as we drove by a.s.sumed they were hallucinating him.

Doc Webster seemed stable for a couple more months. Bouts of Spoonerisms came and went; he seemed to get tired a little more than usual, but not less merry; it became possible to tell a joke around him without being topped, but it was never a sure thing. He and Mei-Ling did seem to work extra hard at savoring every golden moment, but then they always had.

Then with the coming of spring, he went into decline. He started losing weight rapidly, first. Then the Spoonerisms started to cl.u.s.ter and get a bit compulsive. I heard him intro-duce three strangers he'd just met with, "Jim Thompson-excuse me, Tom Jimson-I'd like you to meet Tim Preacher, a prim teacher and a trim peacher; Treacher, this is either Will Johnson, John Wilson, Jill Wansen or Juan Jillson; Ginseng, say h.e.l.lo to Tim Johnson ..." They didn't stay long.

A few days later it went beyond Spoonerisms; his unit of meaning began to shrink. He went from funny jokes to funny sentences to funny words, and finally he began to get hung up on individual syllables. I don't mean he got dumb. One night I was behind the bar, trying unsuccessfully to fix a jam in the conveyor belt of The Machine with orders backed up to Mars, when he came up and slammed his fist on the bar top until he had my and everyone else's attention. Then he held the fist in the air, and used it to count syllables, as he said, "Bet bat bit bot but bite bait boat boot bought beat. Eleven. Ah?"

I nodded cautiously. "Mm-hm."

He zeroed his fist and started over. "Met mat mitt molt mutt might mate moat moot mought meet-eleven? Eleven." "Uh-huh," I said.

"Ah-but"-this time he counted slower-"cat kit cut cot kite Kate coat coot caught ... nine. No keet or ket, you see?" Before I could respond, he went on, "Set sat sit sot site sate suit sought seat ... nine! No sut or sote. But check this out: get gat git got gate gut goat ... seven, only seven, no gyte, geet, Boot, or gawt, isn't that amazing?"

I felt my smile congealing, and tried to think of another noncommittal grunt besides uh-huh and mm-hm ... and then all of a sudden light dawned. "Oh, I get you, Doc. You're saying there are a whole fistful of basic one-syllable words, just as simple and memorable as they can be-"

"-that aren't being used at the moment, right," he agreed. "There's gotta be money in that somewhere."

You see what I mean? His brain didn't so much break down, exactly, as come adrift, or at least begin steering by a map n.o.body else could read. And still it managed to find interesting places.

Here, for the record, is the last coherent joke I ever heard him tell. "Researchers say they are baffled by a newly discovered discrepancy: While only forty-three percent of husbands say good-bye to their wives when they leave the house, over ninety-nine percent of men say good-bye to the house when they leave their wives."

And here, from a little later in the same impromptu mock newscast, is the last pun I ever heard him make: "Asked how a student dressed entirely in black, wearing a mask, and bran-dishing a sword could have gained access to the building, school officials cited their new Zorro-tolerance policy." Several people got up and left his vicinity, crying out in disgust; he looked over at me, winked, closed his eyes, and smiled.

One day Fast Eddie and I were trying to set up a live recording of some new music he'd composed, which I wanted to send as a present to some relatives back up on Long Island. As we were making the final sound checks, Eddie nudged me, pointed over to where the Doc was sitting at poolside with his back to us watching his wife swim, and murmured, "His elevens is up." It's an old British colonial expression, from the days of the Raj. What they meant was, when the tendons at the back of your neck stand out like a number eleven, you're a goner. With a stab of sorrow I saw that Eddie was right; Doc's elevens were up.

Just then he suddenly stood, turned around, and came shuffling up to me and Eddie, his eyes glowing with excitement. "What's up, Doc?" I said, partly because I just love saying that.

"Vamp," he said to Fast ,Eddie, pointing at the piano, "Blues ballad," and he hummed a few bars of "Try to remember/that kind of September ..." to indicate meter and tempo. "Fill," he said to me, and pointed to my guitar. Eddie and I exchanged a glance, shrugged, and went for our instruments, and thank G.o.d left the tape running as Doc Webster, off the top of his head, in a single take with no fluffs, tunelessly declaimed the following, his last twisted masterpiece: PRUZY, THE NEWSIE WITH A CHARTREUSE UZI.

Hugh's an intrusion who sues cows for moos: He will cruise avenues to woo slews of new stews, So the cooze of the floozy he screws is a doozy; The brews and the booze he abuses till woozy Excuse what he chooses, confused, to refuse: The queues in the pews, all the falses and trues ...

So, amused by confusion, we use rendezvouses To enthuse over news of shrews snoozing in flues Who confuse their infusions with views of illusions Whose Muse eschews dues through the tissues of clues And the ruse that glues mews imbues yews with tattoos While gnus in igloos contuse crews of yahoos ...

Ghu's baby Suze coos: she has Terrible Twos She spews slews of grues, and strews shmoos that she shoos; Youse ooze goos and muse, right through Lou's don't's and do's, To the boos of two zoos, because two twos till Tues day are clues to defusing the losers who bruise: If you shmooze about boo-boos and fuse cootchycoos With the issues of thews for the Jews and the Druze Syracuse would refuse, with fondues in your shoes, Dr. Seuss can peruse any cashews he chews, so you lose: Louis, you is got the blues

And then as people were applauding and whistling, his nose started to bleed, his eyes rolled up in his head, and he went down.

At his insistent request, we broke him out of the Stock Island Hospital the next day and brought him home. He never left The Place again. We set up a round-the-clock home care rotation system, and within a week it was clear it was a deathwatch. With an almost eerie appropriateness, considering it's Sam Webster we're talking about, it turned out to be one of the very few silly deathwatches of all time. I've asked around: at no time did any of us ever see him frightened, or depressed, or angry, or even particularly sad. If anything, he laughed more than usual, at less excuse, with each pa.s.sing day. Everything amused him. His own deteriorating physical condition struck him as a riot, and I honestly believe his deteriorating mental condition escaped him. I, for one, found it much easier to deal with in consequence, and I'm sure Mei-Ling did, too, but I don't think he was bravely faking it for that purpose. Basically, he just got a little goofier every day, until one day he got so goofy, he neglected to take the next breath.

There was no deathbed scene. He went in his sleep in the middle of the night. I thought that a special mercy. Then a few days later I was going through some of the oldest letters he'd sent me, so old the stamps had single digits, and I ran across one where, in discussing the recent pa.s.sage of a friend, he'd written, "Me, I'd hate to go in my sleep. Miss the whole thing!"

Well, there you go, Sam. One last joke on the funniest andkindest man I ever knew. It's been over a year now, and I miss you every day.