I Sing the Body Electric (35 page)

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 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:

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!”

“Sorry 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 alone 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.