Ernest Hemingway - The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

The young man, who was named Enrique, took off his shoes and, putting them down carefully, moved softly along the tiling of the porch until he could look down at the back door. There was no one there. He slipped back to the front of the house and, keeping out of sight, looked down the street.

A Negro in a narrow-brimmed flat-topped straw hat and a gray alpaca coat and black trousers was walking along the sidewalk under the laurel trees. Enrique watched, but there was no one else. He stood there for some time watching and listening, then he took his sweater off the bird cage and put it on.

He had been sweating heavily while he had been listening and now he was cold in the shade and the cool northeast wind. The sweater covered a leather shoulder holster, the leather ringed and salt-whitened with perspiration, that he wore with a forty-five-caliber Colt pistol which, by its constant pressure, had given him a boil a little below his armpit. He lay down on a canvas cot now close to the wall of the house. He was still listening.

The bird chirped and hopped about the cage and the young man looked up at it. Then he got up and unhooked the door of the cage and opened it. The bird cocked his head at the open door and drew it back, then jerked his head forward again, his bill pointing at an angle.

“Go on,” the young man said softly. “It’s not a trick.”

He put his hand into the cage and the bird flew against the back, fluttering against the withes.

“You’re silly,” the young man said. He took his hand out of the cage. “I’ll leave it open.”

He lay face down on the cot, his chin on his folded arms, and he was still listening. He heard the bird fly out of the cage and then he heard him sing in one of the laurel trees.

“It was foolish to keep the bird if the house is supposed to be empty,” he thought. “It is just such foolishness that makes all the trouble. How can I blame others when I am that stupid?”

In the vacant lot the boys were still playing baseball and it was quite cool now. The young man unbuckled the leather shoulder holster and laid the big pistol by his leg. Then he went to sleep.

When he woke it was dark and the street light on the comer shone through the leaves of the laurels. He stood up and walked to the front of the house and, keeping in the shadow and the shelter of the wall, looked up and down the street. A man in a narrow-brimmed, flat-topped straw hat stood under a tree on the comer. Enrique could not see the color of his coat or trousers, but he was a Negro.

Enrique went quickly to the back of the porch but there was no light there except that which shone on the weedy field from the back windows of the next two houses. There could be any number of people in the back. He knew that, since he could no longer really hear as he had in the afternoon, because a radio was going in the second house away.

Suddenly there came the mechanical crescendo of a siren and the young man felt a prickling wave go over his scalp. It came as suddenly as a person blushes, it felt like prickly heat, and it was gone as quickly as it came. The siren was on the radio; it was part of an advertisement, and the announcer’s voice followed, “Gavis tooth paste. Unaltering, insuperable, the best.”

Enrique smiled in the dark. It was time someone should be coming now.

After the siren on the recorded announcements came a crying baby which the announcer said would be satisfied with Malta-Malta, and then there was a motor horn and a customer who demanded green gas. “Don’t tell me any stories. I asked for green gas. More economical, more mileage. The best.”

Enrique knew all the advertisements by heart. They had not changed in the fifteen months that he had been away at war; they must still be using the same discs in the broadcasting station, and still the siren had deceived him and given him that thin, quick prickle across the scalp that was as definite a reaction to danger as a bird dog stiffening to the warm scent of quail.

He had not had that prickle when he started. Danger and the fear of it had once made him feel empty in his stomach. They had made him feel weak as you are weak with a fever, and he had known the inability to move; when you must force movement forward by legs that feel as dead as though they were asleep. That was all gone now, and he did without difficulty whatever he should do. The prickling was all that remained of the vast capacity for fear some brave men start with. It was his only remaining reaction to danger except for the perspiring which, he knew, he would always have, and now it served as a warning and nothing more.

As he stood, looking out at the tree where the man with the straw hat sat now, on the curb, a stone fell on the tiled floor of the porch. Enrique looked for it against the wall but did not find it. He passed his hands under the cot but it was not there. As he knelt, another pebble fell on the tiled floor, bounced and rolled into the corner toward the side of the house and into the street. Enrique picked it up. It was a smooth-feeling ordinary pebble and he put it in his pocket and went inside the house and down the stairs to the back door.

He stood to one side of the door and took the Colt out of the holster and held it, heavy in his right hand.

“The victory,” he said very quietly in Spanish, his mouth disdaining the word, and shifted softly on his bare feet to the other side of the door.

“To those who earn it,” someone said outside the door. It was a woman’s voice, giving the second half of the password, and it spoke quickly and unsteadily.

Enrique drew back the double bolt on the door and opened it with his left hand, the Colt still in his right.

There was a girl there in the dark, holding a basket. She wore a handkerchief over her head.

“Hello,” he said and shut the door and bolted it. He could hear her breathing in the dark. He took the basket from her and patted her shoulder.

“Enrique,” she said, and he could not see the way her eyes were shining nor the look on her face.

“Come upstairs,” he said. “There is someone watching the front of the house. Did he see you?”

“No,” she said. “I came across the vacant lot.”

“I will show him to you. Come up to the porch.”

They went up the stairs, Enrique carrying the basket. He put it down by the bed and walked to the edge of the porch and looked. The Negro who wore the narrow-brimmed flat-topped straw hat was gone.

“So,” Enrique said quietly.

“So what?” asked the girl, holding his arm now and looking out.

“So he is gone. What is there to eat?”

“I am sorry you were here alone all day” she said. “It was so stupid that I had to wait until it was dark to come. I have wanted to come all day.”

“It was stupid to be here at all. They brought me here from the boat before daylight and left me, with a password and nothing to eat, in a house that is watched. You cannot eat a password. I should not be put in a house that is being watched for other reasons. It is very Cuban. But at least, in the old days we ate. How are you, Maria?”

In the dark she kissed him, hard, on the mouth. He felt the tight-pressed fullness of her lips and the way her body shivered against his and then came the stab of white pain in the small of his back.

“Ayee! Be careful.”

“What is it?”

“The back.”

“What of the back? Is it a wound?”

“You should see it,” he said.

“Can I see it now?”

“Afterwards. We must eat and get out of here. What have they stored here?”

“Too many things. Things left over from the failure of April. Things kept for the future.”

“The long-distant future,” he said. “Did they know it was watched?”

“I am sure not.”

“What is there?”