“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 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