Sam Weller - Shadow Show

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.

“She’s coming to see me,” he said. “I’m so very much scared. What if she doesn’t like me? What if I don’t like her? So many years have passed since we were young and in love.”

I tapped my finger on the front of the cage, and I couldn’t help but think of Vonnie, then, and the way she was when we were first falling for each other. The way we were when we were setting out together. Hearts wide open with wonder.

“Touchdown,” I said, remembering Popcorn’s call, and how back in the autumn it delighted everyone on the court to hear it. “Touchdown, touchdown,” I kept repeating, but the bird in the cage didn’t say a word.

Finally, Mr. Mendes stopped me, his voice low and kind. “Mr. Lex,” he said, “it’s not yet the football season.”

I couldn’t bring myself to say what I’d come to tell him—that unbeknownst to him I’d come into his house on the day that Popcorn disappeared. I’d seen Mr. Mendes leave for work. I knew he wouldn’t come home until his lunch hour. For weeks, ever since I’d pressed the button on the remote for the ceiling fan and seen his garage door lift, I’d tried to talk myself out of a crazy thought. Didn’t a garage door opener work by the same principle of a code set between transmitter and receiver? What would happen if I fooled around with combinations on my own opener until I found the one that would work on Mr. Mendes’s door?

The door would go up. That’s what would happen, as I discovered that day in late March. I walked across the street, wondering whether anyone was watching. I walked into Mr. Mendes’s garage and used the control on the wall to lower the door. I opened the door from the garage to the house, and I stepped inside.

All I wanted was a place to be that wasn’t my house. That’s what I couldn’t explain to Mr. Mendes. I couldn’t tell him how I enjoyed the open deck door and the warm breeze. I sat in the quiet of his home, content to be away from my own house, eager to believe, if only for an hour or so, that such peace and quiet belonged to me—that I deserved such rest.

Popcorn was in his cage, but the door was open so he could have free rein of the house. He chirped and trilled. Then he said, “Touchdown, touchdown.”

At one point, he came out of his cage and made a few low swoops around the breakfast area and family room.

I wasn’t thinking. I’d explain that to Mr. Mendes if I could. I’d tell him how I went to the deck door, and I felt so much at ease that I wanted to sit on his deck for a few moments, letting the sun warm me. I slid open the screen.

It was then that I felt a whisk of wings at my ear. With horror, I watched Popcorn lift beyond the beech tree in the backyard, then disappear around the corner of Chick Hartwell’s house.

What could I do but go home? If I’d been a better man, I would’ve come clean, but how in the world would I have explained being in that house in the first place? How would I have been able to tell Mr. Mendes how much those peaceful moments meant to me? How would I have said I knew my life was coming apart, and I didn’t know how to stop it?

I couldn’t say it then, and I can’t say it now that Vonnie has come for Henry and taken him away. It’s just me and that couch now. That sorry-assed couch. I sit here now in the dog days of summer, drinking. I remember that day when Mr. Mendes was so pleased to have this cockatiel he’d insist was Popcorn. The day he told me about his lost love, Eva, who lives in his home now and is a perfectly pleasant sort. I watch them come and go, often hand in hand, and as much as I want to, I can’t quite begrudge them. I just can’t manage it.

That day in his house, he said to me, “Are you happy for me, Mr. Lex?”

He stood there, wild-eyed—caught, so I imagined, between what was done and what was still ahead. Uncertain, I guess you’d say, and maybe sometimes that’s the best we can hope. I’d tell Vonnie this if I thought it might mean anything to her. A stir of air, a sliver of sky, an open door.

“I am,” I told Mr. Mendes. What else could I say? I didn’t want him to know that I was scared to death. Scared of all the days ahead of me. “Yes.” I patted him on the back. He was my neighbor, and for his sake I could pretend that I was a good man. “I’m happy. I’m very happy.” I even slipped an arm around his shoulders and pressed him to me. Just for an instant. “Very, very happy,” I said.

Then I did the only thing I could. I let him go.

My story “Cat on a Bad Couch” takes as its inspiration the Ray Bradbury short “I See You Never.” In a little more than a thousand words, Bradbury tells the story of Mrs. O’Brian, whose tenant, Mr. Ramirez, has come in the presence of police officers to tell her he must give up his room as he’s being returned to Mexico; his temporary visa has long ago expired and the police have now discovered that fact. He’ll have to give up his job at the airplane factory, where he makes a good wage. He’ll have to give up his clean room with the blue linoleum and the flowered wallpaper. Most of all, he’ll have to give up Mrs. O’Brian, his “strict but kindly landlady,” who doesn’t begrudge him the right to get a little drunk at the end of the week.

I’ve used this story for years in my fiction workshops. Notice, I tell my students, how skillfully Bradbury evokes the aching loss at the heart of the story by paying such careful attention to the details of Mrs. O’Brian’s home—the huge kitchen, the long dining table covered with a white cloth and laden with water glasses and pitcher and bright cutlery and platters and bowls, the freshly waxed floor—and the facts of Mr. Ramirez’s pleasant life in Los Angeles—the radio and wristwatch he bought, the jewels he purchased for his few lady friends, the picture shows he attended, the streetcar rides he took, the grand restaurants where he dined, the opera and the theater. Those details contrast with what Mrs. O’Brian recalls from a visit she once made to a few Mexican border towns—dirt roads, scorched fields, small adobe houses, an eroded landscape. Such is the world to which Mr. Ramirez must return, and the details of the story do the work of portraying his heartache. No need for the author to offer comment.

I ask my students to notice how Bradbury stays out of the way, allowing Mr. Ramirez’s agony to emerge organically from the details of the story. Mr. Ramirez says, “Mrs. O’Brian, I see you never, I see you never!” In the final move of the story, Mrs. O’Brian, sitting down to dinner with her children, realizes that this is indeed true, and again the details evoke her melancholy. With graceful understatement, Bradbury describes how she quietly shuts the door and returns to her dining table, how she takes a bit of food and chews it a long time, staring at the closed door. Then she puts down her knife and fork, and when her son asks her what’s wrong, she says she’s just realized—here she puts her hand to her face—that she’ll never again see Mr. Ramirez. The full brunt of her loss comes to her when it’s too late for her to express her sadness to him the way he has to her. Notice the irony in that last move, I tell my students, how it comes to us covertly because a skillful writer lets it emerge from the details of the story’s world.