Long After Midnight

Poison, all of them, poison! The thought ran in my head like ants at a picnic. I caught my lip in my teeth.

“Unh?” said Dad, blinking at me. You said?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Except I’m not hungry.”

I couldn’t say I was ill and that food made me ill. I couldn’t say that cookies, cakes, cereals and soups and vegetables had done this to me, could I? No, I had to sit, swallowing nothing, my heart beginning to pound.

“Well, drink your milk at least, and go on,” said Mother. “Dad, give him money for a good lunch at school. Orange juice, meat, and milk. No candy.”

She didn’t have to warn me on candy. It was worst of all the poisons. I wouldn’t touch it again, ever!

I strapped my books and went to the door.

“Douglas, you didn’t kiss me,” said Mom.

“Oh,” I said, and shuffled to kiss her.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “’Bye. So long, Dad.”

Everybody said good-bye. I walked to school, thinking deep inside, like shouting down a long, cold well.

I ran down through the ravine and swung on a vine, way out; the ground dropped away, I smelled the cool morning air, sweet and high, and I screamed with laughter, and the wind threw away my thoughts. I tossed myself in a flip against the embankment and rolled down as birds whistled at me and a squirrel hopped like brown fuzz blown by the wind up around a tree trunk. Down the path the other kids fell like a small avalanche, yelling. “Ahh—eee—yah!” Pounding their chests, skipping rocks on the water, jumping their hands down to catch at crayfish. The crayfish jetted away in dusty spurts. We all laughed and joked.

A girl passed by on the green wooden bridge above us. Her name was Clarisse Mellin. We all hee-hawed at her, told her to go on, go on, we didn’t want her with us, go on, go on! But my voice caught and trailed off, and I watched her going, slowly. I didn’t look away.

From way off in the morning we heard the school bell ring.

We scrambled up trails we’d made during many summers over the years. The grass was worn; we knew each snake hole and bump, each tree, every vine, every weed of it. After school we’d made tree huts here, high up over the shining creek, jumped in the water naked, gone on long hikes down the ravine to where it emptied lonely and abandoned into the big blue of Lake Michigan, near the tannery and the asbestos works and the docks.

Now, as we panted up to school, I stopped, afraid again. “You go on ahead,” I said.

The last bell tolled. The kids ran. I looked at the school with vines growing on it. I heard the voices inside, making a high, all-the-time noise. I heard little desk bells tinkle and sharp teacher voices reaching out.

Poison, I thought. The teachers, too! They want me sick! They teach you how to be sicker and sicker! And—and how to enjoy being sick!

“Good morning, Douglas.”

I heard high-heeled shoes on the cement walk. Miss Adams, the principal, with her pince-nez and wide, pale face and close-cropped dark hair, stood behind me.

“Come along in,” she said, holding my shoulder firmly. “You’re late. Come along.”

She guided me, one two, one two, one two, upstairs, up the stairs to my fate….

Mr. Jordan was a plump man with thinning hair and serious green eyes and a way of rocking on his heels before his charts. Today he had a large illustration of a body with all its skin off. Exposed were green, blue, pink, and yellow veins, capillaries, muscles, tendons, organs, lungs, bones, and fatty tissues.

Mr. Jordan nodded before the chart. “There’s a great similarity between cancer and normal cell reproduction. Cancer is simply a normal function gone wild. Overproduction of cellular material—”

I raised my hand. “How does food—I mean—what makes the body grow?”

“A good question, Douglas.” He tapped the chart. “Food, taken into the body, is broken down, assimilated, and—”

I listened and I knew what Mr. Jordan was trying to do to me. My childhood was in my mind like a fossil imprint on soft shale rock. Mr. Jordan was trying to polish and smooth it away. Eventually it would all be gone, all my beliefs and imaginings. My mother changed my body with food, Mr. Jordan worked on my mind with words.

So I began to draw pictures on paper, not listening. I hummed little songs, made up a language all my own. The rest of the day I heard nothing. I resisted the attack, I counteracted the poison.

But then after school I passed Mrs. Singer’s store and I bought candy. I couldn’t help it. And after I ate it I wrote on the back of the wrapper: “This is the last candy I’m going to eat. Even at the Saturday matinee, when Tom Mix comes on the screen with Tony, I won’t eat candy again.”

I looked at the candy bars stacked like a harvest on the shelves. Orange wrappers with sky-blue words saying “Chocolate.” Yellow and violet wrappers with little blue words on them. I felt the candy in my body, making my cells grow. Mrs. Singer sold hundreds of candy bars each day. Was she in conspiracy? Did she know what she was doing to children with them? Was she jealous of them being so young? Did she want them to grow old? I wanted to kill her!

“What you doing?”

Bill Arno had come up behind me while I was writing on the candy wrapper. Clarisse Mellin was with him. She looked at me with her blue eyes and said nothing.

I hid the paper. “Nothing,” I said.

We all walked along. We saw kids playing hopscotch and kick the can and playing mibs on the hard ground, and I turned to Bill and I said, “We won’t be allowed to do that next year, or maybe the year after.”

Bill only laughed and said, “Sure, we will. Who’ll stop us?”

“They will,” I said.

“Who’s they?” asked Bill.

“Never mind,” I said. “Just wait and see.”

“Aw,” said Bill. “You’re crazy.”

“You don’t understand!” I cried. “You play and run around and eat, and all the time they’re tricking you and making you think different and act different and walk different. And all of a sudden one day you’ll stop playing and have to worry!” My face was hot and my hands were clenched. I was blind with rage. Bill turned, laughing, and walked away. “Over Annie Over!” someone sang, tossing a ball over a housetop.

You might go all day without breakfast or lunch, but what about supper? My stomach shouted as I slid into my chair at the supper table. I held on to my knees, looking down at them. I won’t eat, I told myself. I’ll show them. I’ll fight them.

Dad pretended to be considerate. “Let him go without supper,” he said to my mother, when he saw me neglect my food. He winked at her. “He’ll eat later.”

All evening long I played on the warm brick streets of town, rattling the tin cans and climbing the trees in the growing dark.

Coming into the kitchen at ten o’clock, I realized it was no use. There was a note on top of the icebox which said, “Help yourself. Dad.”

I opened the refrigerator, and a little cool breath breathed out against me, cold, with the smell of rimed foods on it. Inside was the wondrous half-ruin of a chicken. Members of celery were piled like cords of wood. Strawberries grew in a thicket of parsley.

My hands blurred. They made motions that caused an illusion of a dozen hands. Like those pictures of Eastern goddesses they worship in temples. One hand with a tomato in it. One hand grasping a banana. A third hand seizing strawberries! A fourth, fifth, sixth hand caught in midmotion, each with a bit of cheese, olive, or radish!

Half an hour later I knelt by the toilet bowl and swiftly raised the seat. Then, rapidly, I opened my mouth, and shoved a spoon back, back along my tongue, down, down along my gagging throat….

Lying in bed, I shuddered and tasted the acrid memory in my mouth, glad to be rid of the food I had so eagerly swallowed. I hated myself for my weakness. I lay trembling, empty, hungry again, but too sick, now, to eat….

I was very weak in the morning, and noticeably pale, for my mother made a comment on it. “If you’re not better by Monday,” she said, “to the doctor’s with you!”

It was Saturday. The day of shouting, and no tiny little silver bells for teachers to silence it; the day when the colorless giants moved on the pale screen at the Elite movie house in the long theater dark, and children were only children, and not things growing.

I saw no one. In the morning when I should have been hiking out along the North Shore Rail Line, where the hot sun simmered up from the long parallels of metal, I lolled about in terrific indecision. And by the time I got to the ravine it was already midafternoon and it was deserted; all of the kids had run downtown to see the matinee and suck lemon drops.

The ravine was very alone, it looked so undisturbed and old and green, I was a little afraid of it. I had never seen it so quiet. The vines hung quietly upon the trees and the water went over the rocks and the birds sang high up.

I went down the secret trail, hiding behind bushes, pausing, going on.

Clarisse Mellin was crossing the bridge as I reached it. She was coming home from town with some little packages under her arm. We said hello, self-consciously.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Oh, walking around,” I said.

“All alone?”

“Yeah. All the other guys are downtown.”

She hesitated, then said, “Can I walk with you?”

“I guess so,” I said. “Come on.”

We walked down through the ravine. It was humming like a big dynamo. Nothing seemed to want to move, everything was very quiet. Pink darning needles flew and bumped on air pockets, and hovered over the sparkling creek water.

Clarisse’s hand bumped mine as we walked along the trail. I smelled the moist dank smell of the ravine and the soft new smell of Clarisse beside me.

We came to a place where there was a cross trail.

“We built a tree hut up there last year,” I said, pointing.

“Where?” Clarisse stepped close to me to see where my finger was pointing. “I don’t see.”

“There,” I said, my voice breaking, and pointed again.

Very quietly, she put her arm around me. I was so surprised and bewildered I almost cried out. Then, trembling, her lips kissed me, and my own hands were moving to hold her and I was shaking and shouting inside myself.

The silence was like a green explosion. The water bubbled on in the creek bed. I couldn’t breathe.

I knew it was all over. I was lost. From this moment on, it would be a touching, an eating of foods, a learning of language and algebra and logic, a movement and an emotion, a kissing and a holding, a whirl of feeling that caught and sucked me drowning under. I knew I was lost forever now, and I didn’t care. But I did care, and I was laughing and crying all in one, and there was nothing to do about it, but hold her and love her with all my decided and rioting body and mind.

I could have gone on fighting my war against Mother and Dad and school and food and things in books, but I couldn’t fight this sweetness on my lips and this warmness in my hands, and the new odor in my nostrils.

“Clarisse, Clarisse,” I cried, holding her, looking over her shoulder blindly, whispering to her. “Clarisse!”

The Parrot Who Met Papa

The kidnaping was reported all around the world, of course.

It took a few days for the full significance of the news to spread from Cuba to the United States, to the Left Bank in Paris and then finally to some small good café in Pamplona where the drinks were fine and the weather, somehow, was always just right.

But once the meaning of the news really hit, people were on the phone, Madrid was calling New York, New York was shouting south at Havana to verify, please verify this crazy thing.

And then some woman in Venice, Italy, with a blurred voice called through, saying she was at Harry’s Bar that very instant and was destroyed, this thing that had happened was terrible, a cultural heritage was placed in immense and irrevocable danger.…

Not an hour later, I got a call from a baseball pitcher-cum-novelist who had been a great friend of Papa’s and who now lived in Madrid half the year and Nairobi the rest. He was in tears, or sounded close to it.

“Tell me,” he said, from halfway around the world, “what happened? What are the facts?”

Well, the facts were these: Down in Havana, Cuba, about fourteen kilometers from Papa’s Finca Vigía home, there is a bar in which he used to drink. It is the one where they named a special drink for him, not the fancy one where he used to meet flashy literary lights such as K-K-Kenneth Tynan and, er, Tennessee W-Williams (as Mr. Tynan would say it). No, it is not the Floridita; it is a shirt-sleeves place with plain wooden tables, sawdust on the floor, and a big mirror like a dirty cloud behind the bar. Papa went there when there were too many tourists around the Floridita who wanted to meet Mr. Hemingway. And the thing that happened there was destined to be big news, bigger than the report of what he said to Fitzgerald about the rich, even bigger than the story of his swing at Max Eastman on that long-ago day in Charlie Scribner’s office. This news had to do with an ancient parrot.

That senior bird lived in a cage right atop the bar in the Cuba Libre. He had “kept his cage” in that place for roughly twenty-nine years, which means that the old parrot had been there almost as long as Papa had lived in Cuba.

And that adds up to this monumental fact: All during the time Papa had lived in Finca Vigía, he had known the parrot and had talked to him and the parrot had talked back. As the years passed, people said that Hemingway began to talk like the parrot and others said no, the parrot learned to talk like him! Papa used to line the drinks up on the counter and sit near the cage and involve that bird in the best kind of conversation you ever heard, four nights running. By the end of the second year, that parrot knew more about Hem and Thomas Wolfe and Sherwood Anderson than Gertrude Stein did. In fact, the parrot even knew who Gertrude Stein was. All you had to say was “Gertrude” and the parrot said:

“Pigeons on the grass alas.”

At other times, pressed, the parrot would say, “There was this old man and this boy and this boat and this sea and this big fish in the sea….” And then it would take time out to eat a cracker.

Well, this fabled creature, this parrot, this odd bird, vanished, cage and all, from the Cuba Libre late one Sunday afternoon.

And that’s why my phone was ringing itself off the hook. And that’s why one of the big magazines got a special State Department clearance and flew me down to Cuba to see if I could find so much as the cage, anything remaining of the bird or anyone resembling a kidnaper. They wanted a light and amiable article, with overtones, as they said. And, very honestly, I was curious. I had heard rumors of the bird. In a strange kind of way, I was concerned.

I got off the jet from Mexico City and taxied straight across Havana to that strange little café-bar.

I almost failed to get in the place. As I stepped through the door, a dark little man jumped up from a chair and cried, “No, no! Go away! We are closed!”

He ran out to jiggle the lock on the door, showing that he really meant to shut the place down. All the tables were empty and there was no one around. He had probably just been airing out the bar when I arrived.

“I’ve come about the parrot,” I said.

“No, no,” he cried, his eyes looking wet. “I won’t talk. It’s too much. If I were not Catholic, I would kill myself. Poor Papa. Poor El Córdoba!”

“El Córdoba?” I murmured.

“That,” he said fiercely, “was the parrot’s name!”

“Yes,” I said, recovering quickly. “El Córdoba. I’ve come to rescue him.”

That made him stop and blink. Shadows and then sunlight went over his face and then shadows again. “Impossible! Could you? No, no. How could anyone! Who are you?”

“A friend to Papa and the bird,” I said quickly. “And the more time we talk, the farther away goes the criminal. You want El Córdoba back tonight? Pour us several of Papa’s good drinks and talk.”

My bluntness worked. Not two minutes later, we were drinking Papa’s special, seated in the bar near the empty place where the cage used to sit. The little man, whose name was Antonio, kept wiping that empty place and then wiping his eyes with the bar rag. As I finished the first drink and started on the second, I said:

“This is no ordinary kidnaping.”

“You’re telling me!” cried Antonio. “People came from all over the world to see that parrot, to talk to El Córdoba, to hear him, ah, God, speak with the voice of Papa. May his abductors sink and burn in hell, yes, hell.”

“They will,” I said. “Whom do you suspect?”

“Everyone. No one.”

“The kidnaper,” I said, eyes shut for a moment, savoring the drink, “had to be educated, a book reader, I mean, that’s obvious, isn’t it? Anyone like that around the last few days?”

“Educated. No education. Señor, there have always been strangers the last ten, the last twenty years, always asking for Papa. When Papa was here, they met him. With Papa gone, they met El Córdoba, the great one. So it was always strangers and strangers.”

“But think, Antonio,” I said, touching his trembling elbow. “Not only educated, a reader, but someone in the last few days who was—how shall I put it?—odd. Strange. Someone so peculiar, muy eccèntrico, that you remember him above all others. Someone who—”

“¡Madre de Dios!” cried Antonio, leaping up. His eyes stared off into memory. He seized his head as if it had just exploded. “Thank you, señor. ¡Si, si! What a creature! In the name of Christ, there was such a one yesterday! He was very small. And he spoke like this: very high—eeeee. Like a muchacha in a school play, eh? Like a canary swallowed by a witch! And he wore a blue-velvet suit with a big yellow tie.”

“Yes, yes!” I had leaped up now and was almost yelling. “Go on!”

“And he had a small very round face, señor, and his hair was yellow and cut across the brow like this—zitt! And his mouth small, very pink, like candy, yes? He—he was like, yes, uno muñeco, of the kind one wins at carnivals.”

“Kewpie dolls!”

“¡Sí! At Coney Island, yes, when I was a child, Kewpie dolls! And he was so high, you see? To my elbow. Not a midget, no— but—and how old? Blood of Christ, who can say? No lines in his face, but—thirty, forty, fifty. And on his feet he was wearing—”

“Green booties!” I cried.

“¿Qué?”

“Shoes, boots!”

“Sí.” He blinked, stunned. “But how did you know?”

I exploded, “Shelley Capon!”

“That is the name! And his friends with him, señor, all laughing—no, giggling. Like the nuns who play basketball in the late afternoons near the church. Oh, señor, do you think that they, that he—”

“I don’t think, Antonio, I know. Shelley Capon, of all the writers in the world, hated Papa. Of course he would snatch El Córdoba. Why, wasn’t there a rumor once that the bird had memorized Papa’s last, greatest, and as-yet-not-put-down-on-paper novel?”

“There was such a rumor, señor. But I do not write books, I tend bar. I bring crackers to the bird. I—”

“You bring me the phone, Antonio, please.”

“You know where the bird is, señor?”

“I have the hunch beyond intuition, the big one. Gracias.” I dialed the Havana Libre, the biggest hotel in town.

“Shelley Capon, please.”

The phone buzzed and clicked.

Half a million miles away, a midget boy Martian lifted the receiver and played the flute and then the bell chimes with his voice: “Capon here.”

“Damned if you aren’t!” I said. And got up and ran out of the Cuba Libre bar.

Racing back to Havana by taxi, I thought of Shelley as I’d seen him before. Surrounded by a storm of friends, living out of suitcases, ladling soup from other people’s plates, borrowing money from billfolds seized from your pockets right in front of you, counting the lettuce leaves with relish, leaving rabbit pellets on your rug, gone. Dear Shelley Capon.

Ten minutes later, my taxi with no brakes dropped me running and spun on to some ultimate disaster beyond town.

Still running, I made the lobby, paused for information, hurried upstairs, and stopped short before Shelley’s door. It pulsed in spasms like a bad heart. I put my ear to the door. The wild calls and cries from inside might have come from a flock of birds, feather-stripped in a hurricane. I felt the door. Now it seemed to tremble like a vast laundromat that had swallowed and was churning an acid-rock group and a lot of very dirty linen. Listening, my underwear began to crawl on my legs.

I knocked. No answer. I touched the door. It drifted open. I stepped in upon a scene much too dreadful for Bosch to have painted.

Around the pigpen living room were strewn various life-size dolls, eyes half-cracked open, cigarettes smoking in burned, limp fingers, empty Scotch glasses in hands, and all the while the radio belted them with concussions of music broadcast from some Stateside asylum. The place was sheer carnage. Not ten seconds ago, I felt, a large dirty locomotive must have plunged through here. Its victims had been hurled in all directions and now lay upside down in various parts of the room, moaning for first aid.

In the midst of this hell, seated erect and proper, well dressed in velveteen jerkin, persimmon bow tie, and bottle-green booties, was, of course, Shelley Capon. Who with no surprise at all waved a drink at me and cried:

“I knew that was you on the phone. I am absolutely telepathic! Welcome, Raimundo!”

He always called me Raimundo. Ray was plain bread and butter. Raimundo made me a don with a breeding farm full of bulls. I let it be Raimundo.

“Raimundo, sit down! No … fling yourself into an interesting position.”

“Sorry,” I said in my best Dashiell Hammett manner, sharpening my chin and steeling my eyes. “No time.”

I began to walk around the room among his friends Fester and Soft and Ripply and Mild Innocuous and some actor I remembered who, when asked how he would do a part in a film, had said, “I’ll play it like a doe.”

I shut off the radio. That made a lot of people in the room stir: I yanked the radio’s roots out of the wall. Some people sat up. I raised a window. I threw the radio out. They all screamed as if I had thrown their mothers down an elevator shaft.

The radio made a satisfying sound on the cement sidewalk below. I turned, with a beatific smile on my face. A number of people were on their feet, swaying toward me with faint menace. I pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my pocket, handed it to someone without looking at him, and said, “Go buy a new one.” He ran out the door slowly. The door slammed. I heard him fall down the stairs as if he were after his morning shot in the arm.

“All right, Shelley,” I said, “where is it?”

“Where is what, dear boy?” he said, eyes wide with innocence.

“You know what I mean.” I stared at the drink in his tiny hand.

Which was a Papa drink, the Cuba Libre’s very own special blend of papaya, lime, lemon, and rum. As if to destroy evidence, he drank it down quickly.

I walked over to three doors in a wall and touched one.

“That’s a closet, dear boy.” I put my hand on the second door.

“Don’t go in. You’ll be sorry what you see.” I didn’t go in.

I put my hand on the third door. “Oh, dear, well, go ahead,” said Shelley petulantly. I opened the door.

Beyond it was a small anteroom with a mere cot and a table near the window.

On the table sat a bird cage with a shawl over it. Under the shawl I could hear the rustle of feathers and the scrape of a beak on the wires.

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