THE AMERICAN STORYBAG Page 6

  And—guess what?

  Both ends of that dog could catch a rabbit just as good.

  So, right about now, if you don't say it, I will --

  -- Time to call the dog!

  A Tree Frog Named Houdini

  "Houdini" appeared in Gulfshore Life magazine and it has hopped off my tongue at schools all over the U.S. This is what one of my storytelling friends, Bert McCarry calls an "Ahh story". See if you say that, or at least think it, at the end.

  One summer we had four hurricanes, one right after another. There was Charley, Francis, Ivan and Jeanne.

  Worst of the bunch, Charley, was a surprise visitor, and he clobbered us with category five wind force. Charley was a mighty hard puncher but he didn't box us very long, about a half hour altogether. After he left every telephone pole from one end of the island to the other was snapped off like a twig. Everything in our yard was either dead flat or somewhere it shouldn’t be. There was an electric hair trimmer stuck in a tree and my basketball backboard was way off at the far end of our lake, and I even saw a carpenter's level driven through a tree trunk and when I told my cousin, he said dryly, "Was it level?"

  Well, we'd pretty much seen everything with Charley. We'd seen mullet dancing across the sky and great big, bloated chunks of water congealed like some kind of hair gel skipping away in the wind.

  I let the backboard stay where it was. If the bass in our pond wanted to play ball, let them.

  The strangest thing though was a little white Cuban tree frog that we found pressed flat against one of our storm shutters. I unbolted the shutter after the storm and Tree Frog was there. Stuck to the aluminum. I thought he was dead. I peeled him off the shutter like a piece of nutty putty. He was alive, and smiling.

  Tree Frog’s skin color was white as whipped cream. I brought him inside the house and set him on the counter and he hopped into the air and disappeared. We looked all over the kitchen for him. He was nowhere to be seen.

  A couple days went by. One morning I moved the coffee maker an inch or two and saw Tree Frog stuck like flypaper to the back of the machine.

  From then on, we called him Houdini.

  And Houdini lived with us for several months. He was a good little guest and he grew fat eating all the mosquitoes, flies, no-see-ums, lizards, and worms that chanced to slide into the house. There wasn’t any power on the island and the whole house was open. At night we lay awake in pools of sweat. Houdini had disappeared by then, and we couldn’t find him. We figured maybe he couldn’t find himself.

  Then one autumn day about two months after the hurricane, I got an invitation to speak at a school in Texas. Lorry and I packed to leave. When we were stowing our bags into the trunk of the Honda Accord, I saw a white flash.

  Houdini! How did he get in the trunk of the Honda?

  I picked him up and gently affixed him to a Shefflera tree. “Stay there,” I said, “there’s plenty to eat.” Houdini’s big eyes blinked in the glare of the day and poof he vanished before my eyes. I looked all over for him, but he had jumped into the next dimension. We finished stowing our stuff and hit the road.

  Unloading at the airport parking lot, I saw the white flash again.

  “Oh, no,” I cried. “Not here!”

  Houdini was in the trunk glued to Lorry’s leather purse. “Where do I put the little guy?” I asked her.

  “We can’t leave him in the car,” she said. “What about over there on that shady oak tree?”

  I caught Houdini and put him on an upper branch and as soon as he settled he was gone.

  So were we – we were already close to boarding time.

  All during that week in Mission, Texas I thought about Houdini. He invaded my dreams with his large liquid eyes and his vampire pale skin and his great gluey toes. I missed him the same way you miss a dog pal. It was impossible not to wonder if he could survive the heat of the tarmac and the scream of the planes.

  We got home to Fort Myers in the dark. Tired and hot, we put our bags down by the side of the Honda. Unlatching the trunk, I peered in. My heart sank. Houdini wasn’t there. I searched the bottom of the car and the interior and then I shined my flash all over the oak tree. An airport cop caught me as I climbed onto the first limb. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  Lorry explained, and the cop turned his beam on her. Illumined, she told the tale of the disappearing tree frog named Houdini.

  This was one soft-hearted policeman, let me tell you, because he got up in the tree with me and we both climbed around and I even heard him call out, “Houdini” a few times. But there was no Houdini in that oak tree. We parted friends. Sadly. I said, “He made it through Hurricane Charley, but I guess he couldn’t take Southwest Florida International Airport.”

  “Hey,” the policeman said, “he’s a tree frog. He knows better than we do how to live through a bad situation. Go home and get some sleep.”

  We drove directly home to Pine Island, not stopping at Starbuck’s as we usually do. At home, our two dogs, Great Dane Zora and Dachshund, Mousie, greeted us with wet noses and kisses, and after we put our bags on the bench by the door, we went right to bed.

  I dreamed all night of unimaginable things. Hot, sweaty dreams of being lost on planets of no mercy where water looked like mercury and long tapered, upright beings spoke to me through their eyes, which were the eyes of tree frogs. “I’m alive and well,” one of these creatures said with his bulbous and burny eyes.

  “Where?” I asked with my own eyes.

  “Look for me,” the eyes said. “Look for me.”

  In the morning, I went out to the Honda.

  “This is nuts,” I said to Lorry.

  “What harm?” she asked.

  “None, I guess.”

  I lifted the trunk. It was already hot in there and it smelled like scorched plastic.

  I saw the white flash. So did Lorry.

  Then a soundless sound as a weightless weight traversed space and time.

  Alighting -- poit! -- on my right forearm.

  “Good little tree frog,” Lorry said.

  “Good little Houdini,” I said.

  One Bright Night

  There is an Anglo-Saxon form of riddling that plays with the polarities of words like bright and dark, cold and warm, throwing them against one another and crafting lines of rich, humorous nonsense like this poem that has been around for so many hundreds of years that you just have to sit back and, with nothing else in mind, laugh out loud.

  One bright night in the middle of the day

  I saw a bald baby with hair all gray

  He said he was a papa but I thought he was my mum

  He ground his teeth but he hadn’t got one

  He sat all pretty and he talked up a song

  It wasn’t very short and it wasn’t very long --

  One fine day in the middle of the night

  Two dead boys had a fight

  Back-to-back they faced each other

  Drew their swords and shot each other.

  I recited this once at a school visit and a girl raised her hand and I called on her and she said –

  “My father says that one to me before I go to sleep, and there’s more to it and it goes like this --

  One fine day in the middle of the night

  Two dead boys got up to fight

  Back-to-back they faced each other

  Pulled their swords and shot each other.

  The deaf policeman heard the noise

  Came and shot the two dead boys

  If you don’t believe this lie is true

  ask the blind man, he saw it too.

  Who knows how far this tale goes back; I’ve read that the earliest manuscript verse is from 1305. It’s tangled up, this history, but the words are always fun to kick around on the tongue. There’s more, by the way. A bit of research turned up this --

  A paralyzed donkey was passing by

  And kicked the blindman in the eye

  Knocked him through a
nine inch wall

  Into a dry ditch and drowned them all.

  Usually, when I am visiting a school and riddling the kids with tangletalk, they ask for more. Sometimes I give them the story-in-the-round that my grandfather used to say to me when I was five.

  “It was a dark and stormy night

  Robbers were gathered round the fire

  The oldest of them said, “Tell me a story.

  The youngest said, “It was a dark and stormy night,

  Robbers were gathered

  Round the fire, the oldest of them said…”

  Another of these old poems comes from Iceland and I used it recently in a “riddling contest” at a school in Highland, Texas. “Tell me,” I said, “who are the two and what is the Thing. If you can give me the answer by the end of the day, I’ll give you a free book.” Well, of course these twenty-first century kids needed a tenth century Icelandic clue. I gave it to them and by day’s end, one boy gave me correct answers for both the two and the thing. Here is the riddle poem –

  Who are the two who ride to the Thing?

  Three eyes they have together

  Ten feet and one tail

  And thus they travel through the lands.

  A little bit of Norse information is useful here and my contest winner went to a book of Norse legends and learned that “the Thing” was a great meeting of early democracy, a sharing of policy and mind that covered everything from title disputes to taxes. The god Odin rode to the Thing on an eight-legged horse named Sleipnir (meaning Slipper). Odin had two eyes, Sleipnir had one.

  So, a ten-year-old Hispanic boy ferreted out the answer to the riddle. Plus a fantasy writer from Mission, Texas, who answered the same riddle in a cab on the way to the airport. “That wasn’t hard,” she said. “Not if you have words tripping off your tongue,” I said.

  The Parrot’s Scribe

  George the parrot is not normal. I don't know what normal is for a parrot any more than I know what it is for a human. But any parrot that can watch a murder mystery on TV, and then, when the bad guy finally gets what's coming to him, asks -- "Hey, what happened to the man?" I say, "He's dead, George." And George looks me in the eye, and says, "Yeah, sure," real sarcastic-like, yeah, well, any parrot that can do this and always put it in the right context is either not-normal, or just plain super-normal. And I'm not going to add, "for a bird" because that's where we humans get into trouble. George gets into trouble by merely talking. And I readily admit to being the parrot's scribe but not the parrot's press agent. He doesn't need me for that.

  A little while ago I watched a flock of conures fly over our house. They're noisy, jittery birds, and I loved them at first sight. Sometimes they hang out in our Shefflera tree. They consume the little black fruits, or seeds, making a glorious big mess the way parrots do. They throw stuff all over the place, then, in a rush of abandonment, they’re off in a green whirl to another property where their calls and squalls are heard for a mile or more. I have seen parrot flocks in downtown Fort Lauderdale and I have read about the monk parakeets making unruly nests in Florida and all over the Northeast. Parakeets in Connecticut doesn’t sound right somehow, though I've heard they're in Chicago, too.

  However, the parrots of Pine Island seem in synchrony with this green heaven of ours—well, probably not if you own a grove or tropical fruit farm, for then it’s as my Jamaican friend Roy says, “Parrots are destroyful.”

  I should know this myself, as I have lived with a contentious Blue-fronted Amazonian parrot for the past twenty-seven years. My daughters are fearful that I will put him in my final will and testament. Neither one wants George. They’ve made that perfectly clear.

  They’re not the only ones.

  Quite a number of Pine Islanders feel the same way. Even those who don’t know George personally have been forced to know him auditorially, so to say.

  From time to time, I’ve dipped into the literature of the parrot seeking answers to various questions about their oddball behavior. We all know jokes about ill-tempered parrots -- but why are they that way?

  Is it because the best defense is offense?

  Medieval monks, the ones who wrote the first books of natural and unnatural history, which they called bestiaries, had a special point of view when it came to parrots. The monks depicted parrots as indestructible animals. The hardest part of a parrot’s body, they said, was its head.

  So far, so true. However, the bestiarists went further than that; they wrote that a parrot could dive out of the sky, drop down, and crash on the point of its beak without doing any harm to itself. Maybe the monks meant this metaphysically. In any case, I’ve seen parrots dive. But I’ve never seen one stuck in the ground, headfirst. Not that I wouldn’t like to…in the case of George.

  It’s arguably true that a parrot’s hard part is his head. George, for instance, is as hardheaded and as loud-mouthed as they come. And, if it’s true that he who talks loudest lives longest, well, we should all raise our voices like George, for this very well could be the ultimate source of longevity.

  Joking aside, Amazonian parrots, of which George is one, can live 75 years or more. Macaws live longer than that.

  Actually, I’ve stopped thinking of George as a parrot. He is a child. When I roll his cage into the hallway, he cries like a baby, until our guests beg me to wheel him back into range of our dinner. Whereupon he begs for chicken bones—he loves to crack them and suck out the marrow. He loves scrambled eggs, too. Thus making him a cannibal, I suppose. But the words that come out of his beak when he’s not screeching for goodies defy the latest avian research.

  The other day when my artist friend John Bredin came over to the house, he stopped in the kitchen to say hello to George. “How are you doing, George?” John said. George looked at John and replied —“Too busy to talk to you now!” He was pacing on his perch when he said it, too, like a man who has no time to waste on idle talk. John gave me a critical glance and commented, “Wonder where he got that.”

  A day or so after, I was out on our porch waiting for the mail. As William Saroyan once observed, “We are all men of letters waiting for the mail.” I was expecting a check, and there I was (probably pacing like George, who was right behind me in his cage) waiting and looking, when the mail lady drove up in her little right-sided Jeep. Cheerfully, I said, as much to myself as to George, “Well, there she is at last.” And George replied demurely, “What are you talking about, I can’t even see her from here.”

  The reason I believe George is a thinking being, not just an imitative one is because his remarks are often not repeated. He says what he will, when he will, as he will. And there’s no coaxing another epithet or comment like the one he said earlier. He really talks the way we do; he observes things and makes remarks that have substance.

  He does, however, repeat “nighty-night” when it’s time to go to sleep. But he only says it once when we turn out the lights.

  When our incontinent and aged dachshund had an accident on the kitchen floor, I heard George make an audible sigh from his perch, and he said, “The poor little thing.” For the rest of that day, my wife and I counseled ourselves on learning to be as compassionate as our parrot.

  In addition to his uncanny ability to speak proper English at the proper time, George exhibits other traits that show an uncanny degree of appropriate intelligence. The other day when our carpet was being cleaned by an efficiency expert with a loud voice and a militant manner, George growled at her. This meant, “Pipe down, pal, I don’t like your style.” When the officious carpet cleaner continued shouting, George slipped out of his cage and flew at her face. She screamed as George alighted in her abundance of auburn, deep pile hair. The poor lady stood perfectly still as I untangled George’s claws from her hair. After he was safely ensconced in his cage and the door was locked, the carpet lady said, “People say my voice is grating, and I guess it is. Your parrot thinks so, that’s for sure.” She was quiet for the rest of that day. George preened his feathers and lo
oked well satisfied with himself.

  The worst George attack on record was when he went after a photographer from the News-Press. This affable fellow wanted a picture of the whole family, our animal family, with us in the middle. I warned him, “George doesn’t like to have his picture taken.” The photographer smiled with indulgence. “I just finished a shoot with some Bengal tigers—you think I’m afraid of a little bird?”

  I shrugged, and said, “Have it your way.”

  George was balanced on my index finger when the photographer snapped his first shot. I tried to hold George back, I really did. But he exploded. He turned into a green meteor. George flew at the man, who used his telephoto lens to ward George’s flared claws. I guess the poor fellow got a scratch or two in the encounter, but he was sanguine about it. I put George back in his cage.

  “Well,” the photographer said, “I didn’t believe a parrot was faster than a tiger, but now I know different.”

  Some neighbors think we should have George’s wings and claws clipped. We don’t want to do that. What if he needed to fly to escape the hawks that come within range of his cage? I’ve seen them dive at him. One day I put George outside so he could enjoy a little sunshine. He has a perch on top of his four-wheeler cage. One second he was there talking to me. The next second he was gone. I spent the rest of that day searching for him, with no luck. Our house is surrounded by pine flats and palmettos. Out there the hawks scream and the eagles chortle and the parrots, if there are any out there, lie low to the ground.

  My wife and I walked the shell roads repeatedly calling out, “Georgie, Georgie.”