Ask the Parrot

by Richard Stark

  “This is your granddaughter, sir?”

  “Suzanne. Suzanne Gilbert.”

  So then he had to tell the trooper everything about Suzanne, her looks and her age and her weight and her employment and a whole lot of stuff that didn’t seem to Jack as though it mattered, but he figured, it’s the trooper’s job, let him do it. And after that, there was a lot about Suzanne’s car. And after that, he wanted to know everything about Suzanne’s personal life; was she married, did she have a boyfriend, was anybody living with her, had she ever gone off on her own before? And through it all, Jack couldn’t figure out, from the even, flat way the trooper asked his questions, whether he was being taken seriously or patronized. Because, if there was one hint that he was being patronized, boy, would he start to holler. Never mind the gun; we’re talking about Suzanne here!

  But then at last the trooper said, “We’ll dispatch a car, sir. They should be there in less than half an hour.”

  By God, Jack thought, I hope Suzanne’s back by then, and yet, on the other hand, I hope she isn’t. Nothing bad happen to her, just not already here when the troopers show up.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’ll leave the porch light on.”

  7

  It wasn’t football Fred saw on the blank television screen, it was the cell. The all-purpose cell, sometimes the one he knew he was headed for, sometimes the one George was in right now—what has happened to our family?—but other times the cell/grave in which lay the man he killed, twitching still in death.

  He had never seen George’s cell, of course, so this cell, constantly shifting, existed only in his imagination, fed mostly by old black-and-white movies watched on nights he couldn’t sleep. A small stone room it was, longer than wide, high-ceilinged, with hard iron bars making up one of the short walls and one small high-up window in the opposite wall, showing nothing but gray. The cell smelled of damp and decay. He lay curled on the floor there, or George did, or sometimes that poor man up at Wolf Peak, the last thick dark red blood pulsing out of his back.

  It was getting dark outside the living room windows. Imagination had never much bothered Fred before this, but now he was all imagination, screaming nerve ends of imagination, imagining the cell, imagining the shame, and now, as darkness was coming on, imagining the teeth. Destroying the evidence. It gets darker and darker, and all those rustling creatures gather around the body on the forest floor, gnawing at it, snarling at one another, gnawing and gnawing.

  His body. The way he sometimes became George, in that Gothic prison cell, now sometimes, too, he became the dead man on Wolf Peak, among all those jaws, all those teeth.

  I can’t stand this, he thought, I have to get out of this, and what he meant was, he could no longer stand his mind, he had to get away from his mind, and, of course, he understood what he meant by that.

  But what stopped him? Not thoughts of his family, his wife, his son, his daughter, they’d get over him after a while, everybody gets over everybody sooner or later. Not cowardice; he had no fear of eating the rifle, he knew the terror would be short and the pain almost nonexistent.

  What stopped him was the thought of that man Smith. Ed Smith, or whoever he was. To send that message home with Jane, to play his little psychological games again, the way he’d done up in the woods, the way he’d done on the drive home. Manipulating him. Sending Jane home with a coded message—don’t kill yourself—because the real code under the first code was to put the idea of killing himself into his head.

  That’s what Smith had in mind, that was so obvious. Pretend sympathy—as though that man knew the meaning of the word “sympathy”—as a way to put that little worm into his brain: Wouldn’t it be easier if you were dead?

  God, yes, it would. God, he didn’t need Ed Smith to tell him that. But with Smith everywhere around him, it was just impossible. No matter how much pain he was in, no matter how hopeless everything was, he couldn’t kill himself, he just couldn’t, for the one and only reason that he wouldn’t give a bastard like Ed Smith the satisfaction.

  Time went on, and his thinking circled around the same points, but gradually the angles shifted, gradually he came around to another point of view. If only Ed Smith were gone. It would be possible to become unstuck, to move forward with life, if only Ed Smith were . . .

  No. If only Ed Smith didn’t exist.

  Everything would be different then. The weight of the dead man up on Wolf Peak would bear less heavily on him, the fear of exposure would end. Fred knew that Tom Lindahl would never talk about what had happened up there; Tom wasn’t the problem. But how could they trust Ed Smith, how could they be sure what he would or would not do next?

  The problem wasn’t Fred’s imagination, that was just inflamed for now by what had happened. The problem wasn’t George, who, of course, would be coming home in a year, less than a year, and, of course, Fred would be here to greet him. The problem wasn’t Fred or George or Tom or that poor wino up on Wolf Peak.

  The only problem was Ed Smith.

  After all that thinking, when Fred finally did get to his feet and walk to the bedroom, he did it with almost no conscious thought at all. There was nothing to think about when you were sure, and Fred was sure.

  He carried the rifle loosely in his right hand, grasping the warm wood of the stock, pleased as always with the feel of the thing. His memories with that rifle, out hunting, had been very good for a long time, and soon they’d be good again.

  He knew that Jane, at the very rear of the house, absorbed in her book, wouldn’t hear him drive away, but he coasted backward down the driveway, anyway, and didn’t start the engine until he’d backed around onto the empty street. The houses all around him were warmly lit with families together for Sunday evening. Very soon he’d be back among them. The rifle on the seat beside him, he drove toward Tom Lindahl’s house.

  8

  The parrot saw things in black and white. He knew about this place of his, that it was very strong, and that he was very strong within it, and that whenever he thought he might be hungry, there was food in his tray. He was clean and preferred to stand on his swinging bar rather than down at the bottom of the world, even at those rare moments when the bottom of the world was made new, almost shining white and black, crisp, noisy if touched, until he began to drop upon it again.

  For movement, rather than down there, he preferred to move among the swinging wooden bar and the rigid vertical black metal bars of the cage. Up and over, sometimes, for no reason at all, his strong talons gripping the bars even directly above his head, giving him, when he arched his neck back and stared with one round black and white eye at the world, this world, a whole new perspective.

  There wasn’t much in this world, but not much was needed. With his strong talons and his strong beak, gripping to the metal bars, a taste like inside your brain on his tongue from the bars, he could move around and control everything he needed.

  Outside the cage, enveloping it, was another cage, indifferent to him. Below him, on the one side, dim light glowed upward to suffuse that larger cage with soft auras, constantly shifting. Sometimes grating noises came up from there, too, sometimes not. Beyond, over there, a paler, larger, taller rectangular brightness sometimes briefly appeared, when Creatures entered or departed their world, the one beyond his. At other times they made that rectangle and moved through, but there was no extra light.

  He had some curiosity about these Creatures, but not much. He studied them when they were present, usually observing one eye at a time, waiting for them to do something to explain themselves. So far, they had not.

  Sometimes the parrot slept. He slept on the swinging bar, talons gripping tight, large button eyes closed, coarse green feathers slightly ruffled upward and forward. When he woke, he always knew he had been asleep, and that nothing had happened, and that, now he was awake, it was time to eat and shit, drink and piss, so he did.

  Now it was now. Creatures went out, with not much brightness in their rectangle, and leaving no
Creatures behind. The shifting lights from below continued, without the noise. Time went by and the parrot slept, suddenly awakened by a racket.

  Another Creature had come in, with banging noises and shouting noises. It crossed in front of the bright square, it went into other darknesses and came back, it yelled and yelled, and then it leaned down to stare at the parrot, to stare at that left eye observing it, and yell and yell the same phrase over and over.

  The parrot had never spoken. The parrot had never been in a social situation where it seemed the right thing to do was to speak. The main Creature who lived with him, in his cage outside the cage, almost never spoke. It had never occurred to the parrot to speak.

  But now this Creature, some unknown foreign Creature, was yelling the same sounds over and over again, and it came to the parrot that he could make those sounds himself. It might be satisfying to make those sounds. He and the Creature could make those sounds together.

  So he opened his beak, for the first time ever not to grip a bar, and the first thing he said was a rusty squawk, which was only natural. But then he got it: “Air izzi? Air izzi? Air izzi?”

  The Creature reared back. It shrieked. It yelled many different things, too fast and too many and too jumbled for the parrot to assimilate. Then it jabbed the end of a metal rod into the cage, wanting to poke it against the parrot’s chest, but the parrot sidestepped it easily on his swinging bar, then clamped his left talon around the long metal rod.

  The Creature had not finished yelling. The parrot joined it: “Air izzi? Air izzi?”

  The parrot leaned his head down and swiveled it to the right. His left eye looked down the long round tunnel inside the metal rod. “Air izzi? Air izzi?”

  The searing white flame came out so fast.

  9

  Trooper James Duckbundy was a health nut, which was why he liked to drive with the cruiser’s window open. Trooper Roger Ellis would have been just as happy with General Motors air, but Duckbundy was at the wheel this time out, so it was his call.

  They were driving to Pooley from Barracks K because some old coot had reported mislaying his weapon, a handgun. Both troopers understood the citizens’ right to bear arms and all that, but both sincerely believed the world would be a safer place if idiots didn’t own guns. They could understand how a person at almost any age could mislay their car keys or watch, but to lose your piece? That was just the sort of individual, in their opinion, who shouldn’t be armed in the first place.

  Of the sleepy little towns in the world, Pooley had to be one of the sleepiest. They drove in to few lights and no traffic, and Duckbundy parked in front of the address, a small house lit up like a Christmas tree, the only house in town that seemed to have every last light switched on, interior and exterior. Losing his handgun seemed to have made the householder nervous.

  Because Duckbundy was a health nut, which meant his window was open, before he even switched off the engine they both heard the flat serious crack of a shot. Up ahead it came from, and on the other side of the road.

  They looked at each other. “That was no handgun,” Ellis said.

  “It wasn’t applause, either,” Duckbundy said, and put the cruiser back in gear.

  There were no further shots as they eased slowly down the road, but there didn’t need to be. It is a crime to discharge a firearm within five hundred feet of a dwelling, and one time will do.

  They both peered at the houses on the left, inching along, until Ellis said, “Movement back there.”

  There was a boarded-up empty house at that point, with a driveway next to it and what looked like a garage in back. Duckbundy braked, swiveled the spotlight, and clicked it on. In the sudden glare, a man down there by the garage, with a rifle in his right hand, was just getting into a black Taurus. Something wet glistened on the barrel of the rifle as the man spun around, glaring into the light, clutching the rifle now with both hands.

  Ellis had the microphone in his palm and carried it with him as he stepped out to the roadway. “Police,” roared the speaker on the cruiser’s roof. “Stop where you are. Lay the weapon down.”

  He didn’t. He screamed something, gibberish, something, and then he did bring the rifle up.

  Between them, the troopers fired eleven shots. Any three would have done the job.

  10

  What do you call a parrot? Does it have to start with “P”? Polly Parrot; Peaches Parrot. Penitentiary Parrot; not good. Greeny Parrot.

  There was less traffic tonight, and fewer roadblocks. It seemed to Tom the authorities no longer believed they had the fugitives trapped; they were just going through the motions.

  How was Ed going to get there, without a car and without an ally? Or had he somehow phoned someone, while Tom was away from the house, and arranged to meet with another professional like himself, another hard man, who would come with him to Gro-More to help in the robbery? And get what out of it?

  Tom’s share, of course.

  He could still pull over, at any open gas station, and call the state troopers to tell them where they could find one of the men they were looking for. Unless Ed had left the house almost immediately after Tom.

  But it didn’t matter; he wasn’t going to stop. It was too late to change anything now, too late to decide to do something other than this.

  Different cars appeared in his rearview mirror, and some passed him because, with all this fretful thinking inside his head, he couldn’t keep up to his normal speed, but poked along at probably ten miles an hour below his regular average. There was a gray Volkswagen Jetta in his mirror for miles, somebody else as poky as he was, but then he came to another of the rare roadblocks, and after that pause, the Jetta was gone, and for some miles his mirror was dark.

  He next became aware of other traffic when a different car’s lights appeared well behind him, coming on fast. This one was pretty much a speed demon, who tailgated Tom a mile or so and then, at the next passing zone, roared on by him like a freight train. In Tom’s headlights, as it raced away, he could see it was a black Infiniti, a faster, more powerful car than his, soon out of sight up ahead.

  Perry Parrot? Ed Parrot? Madonna Parrot? William G. Dodd Parrot?

  What if he doesn’t show up? What if, after all this, I get there and I never see Ed Smith again? What if he’s gone from my life just as abruptly as he came into it?

  There would be a relief in that, but Tom knew it wasn’t the right question. The question was, if Ed Smith disappeared, could Tom do it himself, come back with both duffel bags full, take the whole gate from the track on his own, double the secret inside the boarded-up house?

  Tom didn’t believe it. If he got there, and waited half an hour and Ed never appeared, he knew damn well what he’d do. He’d turn tail. He was still the same gutless wonder he’d always been. He needed Ed Smith to give him a backbone. He hated that he needed the man, but he knew it was true. Even after all this, he wouldn’t be able to take the track’s money on his own.

  Do I want him to show up? Do I want this thing to happen, or do I want an excuse just to go back to my crappy little house and vegetate in there forever? Which do I want, which do I really want?

  Like the parrot’s name, he just didn’t know.

  11

  Suzanne woke to the patter of pebbles on her window. Annoyed, not wanting to be awake, she thought, Who would be pestering me at this hour? What time is it, anyway?

  No, it’s not pebbles, it’s shooting! Guns, shooting.

  Suzanne opened her eyes to utter madness. Instead of the silent dark of her own hushed peaceable room, she was seated upright in some harshly angular place of bands of hard glare that sliced down across full crowded banks of blackness. Light above, dark below, black on all sides—a window?

  “Oh! My God, what’s—”

  “Shut up!”

  Another shock. The voice was male, low, intense, guttural, and not at all friendly. It silenced Suzanne like a hand clapped against her mouth, long enough for the sharp bite of the boo
t lace around her wrists to bring memory crashing back, with all its terror and all its humiliation.

  How could she not have realized that it was the bank robber they’d run into? She had been just so full of her normal assumption, for so many years, that as she moved through the world she was simply going to be mistreated, or ignored, or dealt with unfairly, that when a man suddenly appeared in front of her to wave a gun around and tie people up like political prisoners, then march off without a single word of explanation, it had somehow been normal, somehow what she’d expected from the world all along, even though on most days nothing remotely like this had ever happened.

  And now that it had happened? She’d been so locked up in her own feelings of mistreatment, expectations fulfilled, that it hadn’t even occurred to her to wonder who that man might be or why he would act in such a way.

  Bank robbers were being hunted all around the countryside, but when this had happened to Suzanne, did she think, bank robbers? No, she thought, now, see what they’re doing to me, and it took Brian Hopwood of all people to tell her, not gently, that this time the story wasn’t about her, it was about him, about that man, the one who’d tied them up and gone away.

  Then, of course, once Brian had explained to her what was actually happening here, she’d felt such belated terror, mixed with such humiliation, that the tension had kept her absolutely silent for hours, afraid to make somehow an even bigger fool of herself. Brian, who never said anything to anybody, anyway, was also silent through all this, until, who knows how much later, the phone had rung, and rung, and rung, and Brian had finally said, “By God, I hope that’s Edna, and I hope she’s starting to smell a rat.”