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.
“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