Ray Bradbury: Long After Midnight

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 cafe"-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 murderl" 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, al 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 C6rdoba 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?"