Long After Midnight

Shelley Capon came to stand small beside me, looking in at the cage, a fresh drink in his little fingers.

“What a shame you didn’t arrive at seven tonight,” he said.

“Why seven?”

“Why, then, Raimundo, we would have just finished our curried fowl stuffed with wild rice. I wonder, is there much white meat, or any at all, under a parrot’s feathers?”

“You wouldn’t!?” I cried.

I stared at him.

“You would,” I answered myself.

I stood for a moment longer at the door. Then, slowly, I walked across the small room and stopped by the cage with the shawl over it. I saw a single word embroidered across the top of the shawl: MOTHER.

I glanced at Shelley. He shrugged and looked shyly at his boot tips. I took hold of the shawl. Shelley said, “No. Before you lift it … ask something.”

“Like what?”

“DiMaggio. Ask DiMaggio.”

A small ten-watt bulb clicked on in my head. I nodded. I leaned near the hidden cage and whispered: “DiMaggio. 1939.”

There was a sort of animal-computer pause. Beneath the word MOTHER some feathers stirred, a beak tapped the cage bars. Then a tiny voice said:

“Home runs, thirty. Batting average, .381.”

“I was stunned. But then I whispered: “Babe Ruth. 1927.”

Again the pause, the feathers, the beak, and: “Home runs, sixty. Batting average, .356. Awk.”

“My God,” I said.

“My God,” echoed Shelley Capon.

“That’s the parrot who met Papa, all right.”

“That’s who it is.”

And I lifted the shawl.

I don’t know what I expected to find underneath the embroidery. Perhaps a miniature hunter in boots, bush jacket, and wide-brimmed hat. Perhaps a small, trim fisherman with a beard and turtleneck sweater perched there on a wooden slat. Something tiny, something literary, something human, something fantastic, but not really a parrot.

But that’s all there was.

And not a very handsome parrot, either. It looked as if it had been up all night for years; one of those disreputable birds that never preens its feathers or shines its beak. It was a kind of rusty green and black with a dull-amber snout and rings under its eyes as if it were a secret drinker. You might see it half flying, half hopping out of café-bars at three in the morning. It was the bum of the parrot world.

Shelley Capon read my mind. “The effect is better,” he said, “with the shawl over the cage.”

I put the shawl back over the bars.

I was thinking very fast. Then I thought very slowly. I bent and whispered by the cage:

“Norman Mailer.”

“Couldn’t remember the alphabet,” said the voice beneath the shawl.

“Gertrude Stein,” I said.

“Suffered from undescended testicles,” said the voice.

“My God,” I gasped.

I stepped back. I stared at the covered cage. I blinked at Shelley Capon.

“Do you really know what you have here, Capon?”

“A gold mine, dear Raimundo!” he crowed.

“A mint!” I corrected.

“Endless opportunities for blackmail!”

“Causes for murder!” I added.

“Think!” Shelley snorted into his drink. “Think what Mailer’s publishers alone would pay to shut this bird up!”

I spoke to the cage:

“F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

Silence.

“Try ‘Scottie,’ ” said Shelley.

“Ah,” said the voice inside the cage. “Good left jab but couldn’t follow through. Nice contender, but—”

“Faulkner,” I said.

“Batting average fair, strictly a singles hitter.”

“Steinbeck!”

“Finished last at end of season.”

“Ezra Pound!”

“Traded off to the minor leagues in 1932. ”

“I think … I need … one of those drinks.” Someone put a drink in my hand. I gulped it and nodded. I shut my eyes and felt the world give one turn, then opened my eyes to look at Shelley Capon, the classic son of a bitch of all time.

“There is something even more fantastic,” he said. “You’ve heard only the first half.”

“’You’re lying,” I said. “What could there be?”

He dimpled at me—in all the world, only Shelley Capon can dimple at you in a completely evil way. “It was like this,” he said. “You remember that Papa had trouble actually getting his stuff down on paper in those last years while he lived here? Well, he’d planned another novel after Islands in the Stream, but somehow it just never seemed to get written.

“Oh, he had it in his mind, all right—the story was there and lots of people heard him mention it—but he just couldn’t seem to write it. So he would go to the Cuba Libre and drink many drinks and have long conversations with the parrot. Raimundo, what Papa was telling El Córdoba all through those long drinking nights was the story of his last book. And, in the course of time, the bird has memorized it.”

“His very last book!” I said. “The final Hemingway novel of all time! Never written but recorded in the brain of a parrot! Holy Jesus!”

Shelley was nodding at me with the smile of a depraved cherub.

“How much you want for this bird?”

“Dear, dear Raimundo.” Shelley Capon stirred his drink with his pinkie. “What makes you think the creature is for sale?”

“You sold your mother once, then stole her back and sold her again under another name. Come off it, Shelley. You’re onto something big.” I brooded over the shawled cage. “How many telegrams have you sent out in the last four or five hours?”

“Really! You horrify me!”

“How many long-distance phone calls, reverse charges, have you made since breakfast?”

Shelley Capon mourned a great sigh and pulled a crumpled telegram duplicate from his velveteen pocket. I took it and read:

FRIENDS OF PAPA MEETING HAVANA TO REMINISCE OVER BIRD AND BOTTLE. WIRE BID OR BRING CHECKBOOKS AND OPEN MINDS. FIRST COME FIRST SERVED. ALL WHITE MEAT BUT CAVIAR PRICES. INTERNATIONAL PUBLICATION, BOOK, MAGAZINE, TV, FILM RIGHTS AVAILABLE. LOVE. SHELLEY YOU-KNOW-WHO.

My God again, I thought, and let the telegram fall to the floor as Shelley handed me a list of names the telegram had been sent to:

Time. Life. Newsweek. Scribner’s. Simon & Schuster. The New York Times. The Christian Science Monitor. The Times of London. Le Monde. Paris-Match. One of the Rockefellers. Some of the Kennedys. CBS. NBC. MGM. Warner Bros. 20th Century-Fox. And on and on and on. The list was as long as my deepening melancholy.

Shelley Capon tossed an armful of answering telegrams onto the table near the cage. I leafed through them quickly.

Everyone, but everyone, was in the air, right now. Jets were streaming in from all over the world. In another two hours, four, six at the most, Cuba would be swarming with agents, publishers, fools, and plain damn fools, plus counterespionage kidnapers and blonde starlets who hoped to be in front-page photographs with the bird on their shoulders.

I figured I had maybe a good half-hour left in which to do something, I didn’t know what.

Shelley nudged my arm. “Who sent you, dear boy? You are the very first, you know. Make a fine bid and you’re in free, maybe. I must consider other offers, of course. But it might get thick and nasty here. I begin to panic at what I’ve done. I may wish to sell cheap and flee. Because, well, think, there’s the problem of getting this bird out of the country, yes? And, simultaneously, Castro might declare the parrot a national monument or work of art, or, oh, hell, Raimundo, who did send you?”

“Someone, but now no one,” I said, brooding. “I came on behalf of someone else. I’ll go away on my own. From now on, anyway, it’s just me and the bird. I’ve read Papa all my life. Now I know I came just because I had to.”

“My God, an altruist!”

“Sony to offend you, Shelley.”

The phone rang. Shelley got it. He chatted happily for a moment, told someone to wait downstairs, hung up, and cocked an eyebrow at me: “NBC is in the lobby. They want an hour’s taped interview with El Córdoba there. They’re talking six figures.”

My shoulders slumped. The phone rang. This time I picked it up, to my own surprise. Shelley cried out. But I said, “Hello. Yes?”

“Señor,” said a man’s voice. “There is a Señor’ Hobwell here from Time, he says, magazine.” I could see the parrot’s face on next week’s cover, with six follow-up pages of text.

“Tell him to wait.” I hung up.

“Newsweek?” guessed Shelley.

“The other one,” I said.

“The snow was fine up in the shadow of the hills,” said the voice inside the cage under the shawl.

“Shut up,” I said quietly, wearily. “Oh, shut up, damn you.”

Shadows appeared in the doorway behind us. Shelley Capon’s friends were beginning to assemble and wander into the room. They gathered and I began to tremble and sweat.

For some reason, I began to rise to my feet. My body was going to do something, I didn’t know what. I watched my hands. Suddenly, the right hand reached out. It knocked the cage over, snapped the wire-frame door wide, and darted in to seize the parrot.

“No!”

There was a great gasping roar, as if a single thunderous wave had come in on a shore. Everyone in the room seemed knocked in the stomach by my action. Everyone exhaled, took a step, began to yell, but by then I had the parrot out. I had it by the throat.

“No! No!” Shelley jumped at me. I kicked him in the shins. He sat down, screaming.

“Don’t anyone move!” I said and almost laughed, hearing myself use the old cliché. “You ever see a chicken killed? This parrot has a thin neck. One twist, the head comes off. Nobody move a hair.” Nobody moved.

“You son of a bitch,” said Shelley Capon, on the floor.

For a moment, I thought they were all going to rush me. I saw myself beaten and chased along the beach, yelling, the cannibals ringing me in and eating me, Tennessee Williams style, shoes and all. I felt sorry for my skeleton, which would be found in the main Havana plaza at dawn tomorrow.

But they did not hit, pummel, or kill. As long as I had my fingers around the neck of the parrot who met Papa, I knew I could stand there forever.

I wanted with all my heart, soul, and guts to wring the bird’s neck and throw its disconnected carcass into those pale and gritty faces. I wanted to stop up the past and destroy Papa’s preserved memory forever, if it was going to be played with by feebleminded children like these.

But I could not, for two reasons. One dead parrot would mean one dead duck: me. And I was weeping inside for Papa. I simply could not shut off his voice transcribed here, held in my hands, still alive, like an old Edison record. I could not kill.

If these ancient children had known that, they would have swarmed over me like locusts. But they didn’t know. And, I guess, it didn’t show in my face.

“Stand back!” I cried.

It was that beautiful last scene from The Phantom of the Opera where Lon Chaney, pursued through midnight Paris, turns upon the mob, lifts his clenched fist as if it contained an explosive, and holds the mob at bay for one terrific instant. He laughs, opens his hand to show it empty, and then is driven to his death in the river…. Only I had no intention of letting them see an empty hand. I kept it close around El Córdoba’s scrawny neck.

“Clear a path to the door!” They cleared a path.

“Not a move, not a breath. If anyone so much as swoons, this bird is dead forever and no rights, no movies, no photos. Shelley, bring me the cage and the shawl.”

Shelley Capon edged over and brought me the cage and its cover. “Stand off!” I yelled.

Everyone jumped back another foot.

“Now, hear this,” I said. “After I’ve got away and have hidden out, one by one each of you will be called to have his chance to meet Papa’s friend here again and cash in on the headlines.”

I was lying. I could hear the lie. I hoped they couldn’t. I spoke more quickly now, to cover the lie: “I’m going to start walking now. Look. See? I have the parrot by the neck. He’ll stay alive as long as you play ‘Simon says’ my way. Here we go, now. One, two. One, two. Halfway to the door.” I walked among them and they did not breathe. “One, two,” I said, my heart beating in my mouth. “At the door. Steady. No sudden moves. Cage in one hand. Bird in the other—”

“The lions ran along the beach on the yellow sand,” said the parrot, his throat moving under my fingers.

“Oh, my God,” said Shelley, crouched there by the table. Tears began to pour down his face. Maybe it wasn’t all money. Maybe some of it was Papa for him, too. He put his hands out in a beckoning, come-back gesture to me, the parrot, the cage. “Oh, God, oh, God.” He wept.

“There was only the carcass of the great fish lying by the pier, its bones picked clean in the morning light,” said the parrot.

“Oh,” said everyone softly.

I didn’t wait to see if any more of them were weeping. I stepped out. I shut the door. I ran for the elevator. By a miracle, it was there, the operator half-asleep inside. No one tried to follow. I guess they knew it was no use.

On the way down, I put the parrot inside the cage and put the shawl marked MOTHER over the cage. And the elevator moved slowly down through the years. I thought of those years ahead and where I might hide the parrot and keep him warm against any weather and feed him properly and once a day go in and talk through the shawl, and nobody ever to see him, no papers, no magazines, no cameramen, no Shelley Capon, not even Antonio from the Cuba Libre. Days might go by or weeks and sudden fears might come over me that the parrot had gone dumb. Then, in the middle of the night, I might wake and shuffle in and stand by his cage and say:

“Italy, 1918 … ?”

And beneath the word MOTHER, an old voice would say: “The snow drifted off the edges of the mountain in a fine white dust that winter….”

“Africa, 1932.”

“We got the rifles out and oiled the rifles and they were blue and fine and lay in our hands and we waited in the tall grass and smiled—”

“Cuba. The Gulf Stream.”

“That fish came out of the water and jumped as high as the sun. Everything I had ever thought about a fish was in that fish. Everything I had ever thought about a single leap was in that leap. All of my life was there. It was a day of sun and water and being alive. I wanted to hold it all still in my hands. I didn’t want it to go away, ever. Yet there, as the fish fell and the waters moved over it white and then green, there it went….”

By that time, we were at the lobby level and the elevator doors opened and I stepped out with the cage labeled MOTHER and walked quickly across the lobby and out to a taxicab.

The trickiest business—and my greatest danger—remained. I knew that by the time I got to the airport, the guards and the Castro militia would have been alerted. I wouldn’t put it past Shelley Capon to tell them that a national treasure was getting away. He might even cut Castro in on some of the Book-of-the-Month Club revenue and the movie rights. I had to improvise a plan to get through customs.

I am a literary man, however, and the answer came to me quickly. I had the taxi stop long enough for me to buy some shoe polish. I began to apply the disguise to El Córdoba. I painted him black all over.

“Listen,” I said, bending down to whisper into the cage as we drove across Havana. “Nevermore.”

I repeated it several times to give him the idea. The sound would be new to him, because, I guessed, Papa would never have quoted a middleweight contender he had knocked out years ago. There was silence under the shawl while the word was recorded.

Then, at last, it came back to me. “Nevermore,” in Papa’s old, familiar, tenor voice, “nevermore,” it said.

The Burning Man

The rickety Ford came along a road that plowed up dust in yellow plumes which took an hour to lie back down and move no more in that special slumber that stuns the world in mid-July. Far away, the lake waited, a cool-blue gem in a hot-green lake of grass, but it was indeed still far away, and Neva and Doug were bucketing along in their barrelful of red-hot bolts with lemonade slopping around in a thermos on the back seat and deviled-ham sandwiches fermenting on Doug’s lap. Both boy and aunt sucked in hot air and talked out even hotter.

“Fire-eater,” said Douglas. “I’m eating fire. Heck, I can hardly wait for that lake!”

Suddenly, up ahead, there was a man by the side of the road.

Shirt open to reveal his bronzed body to the waist, his hair ripened to wheat color by July, the man’s eyes burned fiery blue in a nest of sun wrinkles. He waved, dying in the heat.

Neva tromped on the brake. Fierce dust clouds rose to make the man vanish. When the golden dust sifted away his hot yellow eyes glared balefully, like a cat’s, defying the weather and the burning wind.

He stared at Douglas.

Douglas glanced away, nervously.

For you could see where the man had come across a field high with yellow grass baked and burnt by eight weeks of no rain. There was a path where the man had broken the grass and cleaved a passage to the road. The path went as far as one could see down to a dry swamp and an empty creek bed with nothing but baked hot stones in it and fried rock and melting sand.

“I’ll be damned, you stopped!” cried the man, angrily.

“I’ll be damned, I did,” Neva yelled back. “Where you going?”

“I’ll think of someplace.” The man hopped up like a cat and swung into the rumble seat. “Get going. It’s after us! The sun, I mean, of course!” He pointed straight up. “Git! Or we’ll all go mad!”

Neva stomped on the gas. The car left gravel and glided on pure white-hot dust, coming down only now and then to careen off a boulder or kiss a stone. They cut the land in half with racket. Above it, the man shouted:

“Put ’er up to seventy, eighty, hell, why not ninety!”

Neva gave a quick, critical look at the lion, the intruder in the back seat, to see if she could shut his jaws with a glance. They shut.

And that, of course, is how Doug felt about the beast. Not a stranger, no, not hitchhiker, but intruder. In just two minutes of leaping into the red-hot car, with his jungle hair and jungle smell, he had managed to disingratiate himself with the climate, the automobile, Doug, and the honorable and perspiring aunt. Now she hunched over the wheel and nursed the car through further storms of heat and backlashes of gravel.

Meanwhile, the creature in the back, with his great lion ruff of hair and mint-fresh yellow eyes, licked his lips and looked straight on at Doug in the rearview mirror. He gave a wink. Douglas tried to wink back, but somehow the lid never came down.

“You ever try to figure—” yelled the man.

“What?” cried Neva.

“You ever try to figure,” shouted the man, leaning forward between them “—whether or not the weather is driving you crazy, or you’re crazy already?”

It was a surprise of a question, which suddenly cooled them on this blast-furnace day.

“I don’t quite understand—” said Neva.

“Nor does anyone!” The man smelled like a lion house. His thin arms hung over and down between them, nervously tying and untying an invisible string. He moved as if there were nests of burning hair under each armpit. “Day like today, all hell breaks loose inside your head. Lucifer was born on a day like this, in a wilderness like this,” said the man. “With just fire and flame and smoke everywhere,” said the man. “And everything so hot you can’t touch it, and people not wanting to be touched,” said the man.

He gave a nudge to her elbow, a nudge to the boy.

They jumped a mile.

“You see?” The man smiled. “Day like today, you get to thinking lots of things.” He smiled. “Ain’t this the summer when the seventeen-year locusts are supposed to come back like pure holocaust? Simple but multitudinous plagues?”

“Don’t know!” Neva drove fast, staring ahead.

“This is the summer. Holocaust just around the bend. I’m thinking so swift it hurts my eyeballs, cracks my head. I’m liable to explode in a fireball with just plain disconnected thought. Why—why—why—”

Neva swallowed hard. Doug held his breath.

Quite suddenly they were terrified. For the man simply idled on with his talk, looking at the shimmering green fire trees that burned by on both sides, sniffing the rich hot dust that flailed up around the tin car, his voice neither high nor low, but steady and calm now in describing his life:

“Yes, sir, there’s more to the world than people appreciate. If there can be seventeen-year locusts, why not seventeen-year people? Ever thought of that?”

“Never did,” said someone.

Probably me, thought Doug, for his mouth had moved like a mouse.

“Or how about twenty-four-year people, or fifty-seven-year people? I mean, we’re all so used to people growing up, marrying, having kids, we never stop to think maybe there’s other ways for people coming into the world, maybe like locusts, once in a while, who can tell, one hot day, middle of summer!”

“Who can tell?” There was the mouse again. Doug’s lips trembled.

“And who’s to say there ain’t genetic evil in the world?” asked the man of the sun, glaring right up at it without blinking.

“What kind of evil?” asked Neva.

“Genetic, ma’am. In the blood, that is to say. People born evil, growed evil, died evil, no changes all the way down the line.”

“Whew!” said Douglas. “You mean people who start out mean and stay at it?”

“You got the sum, boy. Why not? If there are people everyone thinks are angel-fine from their first sweet breath to their last pure declaration, why not sheer orneriness from January first to December, three hundred sixty-five days later?”

“I never thought of that,” said the mouse.

“Think,” said the man. “Think.”

They thought for above five seconds.

“Now,” said the man, squinting one eye at the cool lake five miles ahead, his other eye shut into darkness and ruminating on coal-bins of fact there, “listen. What if the intense heat, I mean the really hot hot heat of a month like this, week like this, day like today, just baked the Ornery Man right out of the river mud. Been there buried in the mud for forty-seven years, like a damn larva, waiting to be born. And he shook himself awake and looked around, full grown, and climbed out of the hot mud into the world and said, ‘I think I’ll eat me some summer.’ ”

“How’s that again?”

“Eat me some summer, boy, summer, ma’am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain’t they a whole dinner? Look at that field of wheat, ain’t that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there’s breakfast. Tarpaper on top that house, there’s lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that’s dinner wine, drink it all!”

“I’m thirsty, all right,” said Doug.

“Thirsty, hell, boy, thirst don’t begin to describe the state of a man, come to think about him, come to talk, who’s been waiting in the hot mud thirty years and is born but to die in one day! Thirst! Ye Gods! Your ignorance is complete.”

“Well,” said Doug.

“Well,” said the man. “Not only thirst but hunger. Hunger. Look around. Not only eat the trees and then the flowers blazing by the roads but then the white-hot panting dogs. There’s one. There’s another! And all the cats in the country. There’s two, just passed three! And then just glutton-happy begin to why, why not, begin to get around to, let me tell you, how’s this strike you, eat people? I mean—people! Fried, cooked, boiled, and parboiled people. Sunburnt beauties of people. Old men, young. Old ladies’ hats and then old ladies under their hats and then young ladies’ scarves and young ladies, and then young boys’ swim-trunks, by God, and young boys, elbows, ankles, ears, toes, and eyebrows! Eyebrows, by God, men, women, boys, ladies, dogs, fill up the menu, sharpen your teeth, lick your lips, dinner’s on!”