Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (11 page)

A
s the days went on, Vonnie kept calling to see if Henry had come home. “Haven’t seen him,” I told her. “Are you doing okay?”

“Yes. You?”

“Sure,” I said.

But the truth is I was pretty low, and I think it started to get to Henry—the way I moped around. Even though I’d known a long time that things were over between Vonnie and me, I hadn’t counted on this tremendous pit of loneliness that invited me to sink into it. To make matters worse, the neighbors were spending all their sympathy on Mr. Mendes and poor, poor Popcorn. Granted, Vonnie and I had never really been close with the Hartwells or the Shipleys or the Biminrammers, but still, I thought that once word was out about our breakup, someone would express concern.

I’d see Missy Biminrammer walking her sheltie, or Chick Hartwell mowing his lawn, or Peg Shipley working in her flower beds, and I’d give a wave and wait for them to say something about not seeing Vonnie around for a while, but they just waved back and didn’t say much of anything at all except to tell me to keep an eye out for Popcorn.

One evening I saw Herb Shipley washing his car in his driveway. I walked down the sidewalk, past the Biminrammers’, who lived next door to me, and the Hartwells’ on the other side of them, until I was standing in the Shipleys’ drive, out of the way of the spray coming from Herb’s hose. Henry was stretched out on the sidewalk in the sun. He rolled over onto his back and closed his eyes.

Herb was washing the vintage 1963 Thunderbird—red with a black ragtop—that he’d restored. He was an industrial-arts teacher at Davidson High School, a wiry man with a nice head of silvery hair. He didn’t have much of a chin, which made it seem that his lips were stretched tight in a constant state of alarm, as they were now when he turned and saw me standing there.

I just blurted it out. It makes me feel like an idiot to think of it now. I said, “My wife left me.” Maybe it was that look on his face. Maybe it was the fact that I thought of him as an angry man and assumed he’d be angry for my sake. “Vonnie,” I said. “She’s gone.”

He was holding the hose with the nozzle pointed in my direction, and to anyone who might have been watching, it probably looked liked I’d said something he didn’t like and he was about to squirt me in the face.

But all he said was, “Did you hear? Mendes just got a call. A woman in Plain City. She thinks she’s found Popcorn.” He was there now, Herb explained. “We’re all hoping for a happy ending.”

Just then, Henry jumped up onto the trunk of the T-Bird. He stood up on his hind legs so he could reach the ragtop, and then he went to town, picking at it with his claws.

“Henry,” I said. “No.”

But it was too late. Herb turned around and saw what was happening—that ragtop getting shredded—and he did the only thing he could. He turned that hose on full blast. The force knocked Henry off the T-Bird. He landed on his feet and shook himself. His fur was slicked down with water, and he didn’t wait around to see what might be coming next. He took out up the sidewalk as fast as he could run. I watched him until he disappeared around the side of my garage.

“I’ll pay for whatever it costs to fix that,” I said to Herb.

“Damn straight you will.” He looked past me, and I heard a car turning down our court. I wondered if it might be Vonnie coming back to give us one more try. Then, before I could turn to look, Herb said, “It’s Mendes.”

It didn’t take long for the word to spread. Peg came out the front door as if she’d been watching, and who knows, maybe she had been.

“It’s him,” Herb said, and the two of them brushed right past me and started up the street.

Chick and Connie Hartwell came out of their house to join them. Even Benny and Missy Biminrammer tagged along to see whether Mr. Mendes had indeed recovered Popcorn.

I stood there watching as Mr. Mendes got out of his Volvo, and the neighbors gathered around him. He said something and then bowed his head. Connie Hartwell put a hand on his shoulder, and I heard Herb say, “Damn it all to hell,” and I knew that the woman in Plain City had turned out to have the wrong bird.

Everyone stood in Mr. Mendes’s driveway talking, and I went back to my house, where Henry, wet and trembling, waited for me to let him inside.

“Damn it, Henry,” I said. Then I opened the front door. He stayed on the step, hesitating, as if he knew I was going to be out some cash for what he’d done to Herb’s ragtop. “Come on,” I said. “You know that couch just won’t look right without you on it.”

I swear he was pissed off the rest of that night and the days that followed. He prowled around the house, letting out these guttural yowls. I opened the door to see if he wanted to go outside, but all he did was come to the threshold, sniff at the air, yowl some more, and then head for the couch.

One day, he got up on the window seat, where I sat watching the whoop-dee-do across the street. Herb Shipley had volunteered to weld Popcorn’s cage to an iron rod and then anchor it to Mr. Mendes’s roof. I watched Herb bolt it to each side of the roof ridge. Mr. Mendes watched from the ground, his head tipped back, his hand shading his eyes from the sun. When Herb was done, he left the cage door open, so Popcorn could fly right in if he happened to be in the vicinity and took a notion. Herb climbed down the ladder, and Mr. Mendes solemnly shook his hand.

A news van—WNBS 10TV—pulled to the curb, and two men got out. One of them had a video camera on his shoulder. The other one, a young man with perfectly combed blond hair, had a microphone. He was wearing khaki slacks and penny loafers. A navy-blue poplin jacket with a white shirt. The knot of a robin’s-egg-blue tie poked out above the jacket’s zipper.

I watched a little while as the blond man talked to Mr. Mendes, sticking the microphone up to his face from time to time. Then Henry pawed at the window and hissed.

“My sentiments exactly,” I said.

I picked him up in my arms and headed toward the kitchen, where I kept the Evan Williams bourbon. It was five o’clock, a perfectly reasonable time for a cocktail.

What was it about Mendes and his story that Henry and I found so objectionable? How could our hearts turn so hard toward a man who’d lost something dear to him? I suppose we were jealous. Here we were in the midst of our own story of loss, but no one had time for that. Mr. Mendes and Popcorn—that was the story that had captured everyone’s heart.

So Henry and I sat on our couch, and the longer I sat there, drinking, the more I began to enjoy the way he looked, propped up on his rear end, wedged into the corner, his belly exposed. I swear sometimes it looked like he was almost human, the way he sat there. I started telling him the story of how I came to buy the couch, and before I knew it, I was relating the details of how Vonnie and I had once loved each other. “Believe it or not, Henry. We were young and in love, and we thought we’d have kids and grandkids and a long and happy life. Now look what’s happened.”

He nodded off from time to time, and I poked him. He grumbled, curling his mouth into that sneer he so often had, but I didn’t care how put out he felt. I wanted to talk, and he was the only one around to listen.

“Oh, Henry,” I said. “The first time you fall in love, you think it’ll be forever, but you know what? There ain’t no forever. Ain’t no forever, ever. That’s what I’ve learned, my fabulous feline friend. Mendes is going to learn it, too. You and I both know that bird’s not coming home.”

How did I know that? Let’s just say I had a good idea. Maybe I was jaded because of how everything had gone wrong for Vonnie and me, or maybe I hoped that in our shared sadness Mendes and I would rekindle our friendship. Maybe I, and not Herb Shipley or Chick Hartwell—jeezy Pete, I’d even seen Mr. Mendes asking favors of Benny Biminrammer—would be the one Mendes would count on.

“I can be that kind of person,” I told Henry, but I knew I was lying. I hadn’t been that sort in a good while. I sure as shooting hadn’t been that person for Vonnie in quite some time. “I’m a drunk,” I said. “I’m a man of a certain age, a retired man who no longer matters to the world at large. Now, I’m alone.” I took in the way Henry was slouched against the corner of the couch, that pissed-off look on his face. “
We’re
alone,” I said to him, “but the only thing anyone cares about is that bird.”

Henry gave a little snort, as if to say,
Damn bird,
or else,
Where’s the woman who loves me, the one who feeds me tuna and lets me sleep in bed with her and calls me Prince Henry Boo-Boo Ca-Choo. How’d I end up on this ugly-assed couch with a drunk man who’s always feeling sorry for himself?

“You just did,” I said.

Then, because I felt my heart go out to him, I made up a little song—or, to be more exact, the bourbon wrote a few lyrics. I could imagine Henry as one of those angry rappers I sometimes saw on TV, someone like that 50 Cent or that Eminem. Put a baseball cap turned sideways on Henry and a load of silver chains and medallions, and he’d be ready to go. I just started rapping whatever came into my muzzy head:

Cat on a bad couch,

pimping a pissed-off slouch.

Woman done done him wrong,

that’s why he’s singing this song.

I could tell he was unimpressed. “We’ve all got a story,” I told him, “and, like it or not, that’s yours.”

T
he next evening, I turned on the news and there was Mendes talking about how much Popcorn meant to him, how he’d had him a number of years, and when you lived alone, as Mendes did, you came to count on the affections of a pet.

“I’m hopeful,” Mr. Mendes said. The camera was close on his face, and I could see that his eyes were wet. “I don’t know how he got out,” he said, and then he blotted his eyes with the heel of his palm. “I left the deck door open just a little when I went to work that morning, so he could enjoy the warm air from outside, but I made sure the sliding screen was secure. He liked to fly around the house. I always gave him free range. I swear that screen was closed.”

The news story ended with a shot of Popcorn’s cage atop the house. The reporter’s voice was somber. “If anyone has any information that might lead to Popcorn’s return, please call the number at the bottom of your screen, or visit www.findpopcorn.com.” The camera zoomed in closer to the cage, and the reporter added, “In the meantime, the cage door is open, and a worried pet owner watches and waits.”

All night I tried to get that image out of my head, but I couldn’t. I drifted in and out of a restless sleep, finally falling more “in” than “out.” By the time I got out of bed, it was after eleven o’clock. It was another pretty spring day. I slid open the deck door and stood at the screen, smelling the scents of the earth coming back to life after a long winter. The daffodils were in bloom along the side of the deck. The sunlight slanting through the screen was warm on my face, and yet I felt miserable.

I heard Henry jump down from his couch—I’d come to think of it as
his
—and soon he was weaving in and out between my legs, meowing and looking up at me with contentment.

“Henry,” I said, “it’s time Mr. Mendes and I had a little talk.”

When I rang the bell at his house, I heard his footsteps coming quick and hard over the floor.

He opened the door, and it swung free with a complaining groan, as if it had been closed throughout the winter and was just now letting loose from its seal.

I said, “Mr. Mendes, please.” I didn’t know quite how to begin. “If I may,” I said, trying to find the words for why I’d come.

He took my arm. He pulled me into his house. “Mr. Lex. Oh, Mr. Lex.” His face was beaming. “Come, please.”

I let him usher me down the hallway to the open space that, like in my own home, contained kitchen, breakfast area, and family room. There, on the counter, was a cage, and inside that cage was a cockatiel that looked very much like Popcorn.

“Popcorn,” Mr. Mendes said with a flourish of his arm as if he were a spokes model on a TV game show. “Last night a woman called from New Albany, and now”—he waved his arm once more, his hand sweeping in front of the cage—“
gracias a Dios
, a miracle has come to me.”

New Albany was nearly thirty miles away, a fact I pointed out to Mr. Mendes. “That’s quite a flight for the little guy,” I said.

For just an instant, his face became very somber. Just a moment when the two of us looked into each other’s eyes, and we both knew the bird in the cage wasn’t Popcorn but rather some other cockatiel who’d strayed from home. There’d been a number of other false alarms since Popcorn had been gone, and, for whatever reason—maybe there just comes a time when you make a choice and life goes on—Mr. Mendes had decided to accept this one as fact.

His face brightened. He said, “It’s not for us to question miracles. They come to us for a reason. We don’t have to know what that reason is. Yes?”

I bent over with my hands on my knees and peered into the cage. The bird sat on his perch. He had the same markings as Popcorn—same yellow head, same orange spots on his face. He was even doing a little bob and sway the way Popcorn had done the first time I’d seen him. It was easy enough to believe. All it took was faith.

Mr. Mendes was telling me another story. The girl he’d left in Cuba, Eva, had written him a letter. I thought of the letter with the Miami postmark I’d left inside the front door close to Christmas. They’d exchanged e-mails throughout the winter.