Long After Midnight

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.”