Hunting Midnight

by Richard Zimler

  “No!”

  Daniel grabbed my arm. “Now!”

  We landed hard. I lurched to my left and tumbled over, skinning my knee badly and banging my shoulder. I regained my wits just in time to see the bald birdseller’s wagon trundling down the street.

  I heard a shout. A horse with a white patch over its nose was huffing at me, plainly just drawn to a halt. A driver in a red and blue uniform, gripping his reins with fists, was screaming. “You there, beanhead, what d’ya think you’re doing? You could’ve been killed.”

  “I’m sorry,” I squeaked, rushing to the side of the road.

  Spinning around in search of Daniel, I found him sitting by a stone fountain on the other side of the road. Though he had twisted his ankle badly, he was grinning like a fool.

  “That was insane,” I said, brushing dirt and blood from my skinned knee.

  Daniel spat in his hand and rubbed my wound. Wincing along with me in my pain, he said, “Does it hurt much?”

  “No, not so badly.”

  “You’re more hardy than you let on.” He smiled, then he did something strange: He held my shoulders and kissed me on the cheek as though he had just received me as a present, almost as if I were his wee brother.

  I could not speak after that.

  *

  Daniel and I limped on to the stalls of the bird market. The birdseller, in a plumed green cap and festive waistcoat of rose-colored velvet, was standing by his wagon, outraged, surrounded by a growing crowd. His wife stood by in tears as he lifted one cage after another, offering proof of our robbery.

  “What else can I believe?” asked his wife in a trembling voice to one of the women in the crowd. “All our beauties have been turned to wood.”

  “Woman, you’re pissing mad,” snapped her husband, banging a cage down. “They’re carved and painted. Anyone with bloody eyes can see that!”

  “This very jay,” she replied, holding up the carving she gripped in her gnarled hand, “this jay turned to wood as I reached in for him. You explain that if you can!”

  Daniel gave me a gleeful look; proof of supernatural intervention was far better than we could have hoped for.

  “It is a miracle given to us by St. John himself,” called out a slender lass in the crowd. “A miracle!”

  Daniel stared at her in astonishment and took a step toward her, as though tugged by an invisible lead. But she crossed her arms over her chest defensively and raised her eyebrows, as though daring him to disagree with her, and he immediately retreated.

  A tall man with a mangled ear then lifted up a cage with a wooden goldfinch perched inside, held it high over his head, and addressed the crowd. “The lass speaks the truth! St. John has changed feather to wood.”

  It was shameful to let this talk continue, but I didn’t have the courage to confess our hoax.

  The birdseller spit. “It’s your head that’s been changed to wood, my friend. Someone has hoodwinked me” – he raised both his hands like angry claws – “but I shall find out who and then I will strangle him. Those beauties were my silver and gold. I’ve lost everything!”

  His wife licked her lips and spoke in a vengeful whisper. “You choose your words more carefully, you silly man! It’s witchcraft.” She turned in a slow circle, as though to catch sight of the perpetrator. “We must have a very powerful enemy somewhere, and you” – she turned back to her husband – “ought not to provoke her with your threats.”

  “Be still, woman! It is you who is doing the provoking.” He raised his great callused hand as though to clout her. “Someone will pay for this, and if you wish it to be you, continue to defy me!”

  Daniel ran forward. In my innocence, I believed he was about to confess after all. Instead, he shouted in his most proper voice, “Please, sir, show us the miracle – show us all the birds!”

  “You … you only wish to see how I have been made the fool,” said the birdseller, his dark eyes glinting with fury. “All of you are against me!”

  “Show us what St. John has accomplished,” Daniel begged. “Please, sir, don’t let your pride deny us a look at a miracle.”

  Others in the crowd seconded this noble request until the birdseller, indignant, found himself trumped by Daniel’s acting. Making the best of the situation, the poor man unloaded the rest of the cages containing our carvings from his wagon, slamming down each one of them onto the cobbles. A dwarf woman draped in a black shawl shouted to him, “You have been chosen by St. John himself.”

  The birdseller could contain his rage no longer and kicked one of the wire-mesh cages at her. It hit the ankle of a stout merchant in a high-collared blue dress coat, who threatened to clock the careless wretch with his cane for such an affront.

  By now, a hundred onlookers were pointing, gawking, and even praying on their knees, moved by this union of heaven and earth, the possibility of witchcraft abandoned in favor of saintly intervention.

  “John, come with me,” Daniel said, tugging me away.

  We crouched down behind a gig thirty paces from the chattering crowd. “Wait underneath,” Daniel said.

  “What for?”

  “So you’re hidden.”

  “But why do I want to be hidden?”

  “There’s no time, John,” he snorted. “Just do as I say.”

  God forgive me, I squatted down under the gig. He raced away, only to return, moments later, out of breath.

  “Do a melro thrush.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, keep hidden and imitate a thrush. The birdseller’s wife just picked one up. Do it loud, but only once.”

  Half-wit that I was, I cleared my throat, curled my lips, and warbled.

  “Louder!” Daniel urged.

  Under his watchful eye, I succeeded better the second time.

  I now spied the same skinny lass who’d first called our hoax a miracle. She squatted nearby and was staring at me intently.

  “Again,” Daniel said. “But do it louder this time.”

  The lass had such large and pretty eyes that they seemed to stop time. Looking at her, I recalled one of the wee wrens we’d freed. So terrified it had been of me that it flapped wildly around its cage. After I’d cloistered it in my hand, however, it calmed, seeming to understand my motives. For a long moment, we’d been alone in the world.

  The girl grinned now, but she was not judging me badly. I smiled my thanks to her and executed my imitation once again.

  “Now come out,” Daniel said.

  He reached down for me and we raced back to the crowd, where we found the birdseller’s wife sprawled on the ground, a hand over her brow, having fainted. But her husband was having none of it. He stood over her, shaking his head with exasperation, while two women dressed in widow’s black attended to her.

  “What happened?” Daniel asked a soldier.

  “The wooden bird sang,” he replied reverently.

  The lad laughed from his belly while I prayed for a second and very personal miracle: to be swallowed by the earth and tugged all the way to Spain.

  Daniel led me away. When I hesitated to get under the gig again, he pushed me down and told me to pretend to be a lark; the tall man with the mangled ear was holding one in his hand.

  The lass was still watching, and her jade-colored eyes seemed to be looking deep into my doubts. “We’re being watched,” I whispered to Daniel, pointing at her.

  He waved her over. She came to us without hesitation, her hands behind her back.

  “What’s your name?” he said, glowering.

  “Violeta.” She breathed deeply and pulled her waist-length auburn hair around to cover her front. Licking her lips, she added, “I might ask your name, young man, but your rudeness makes you unworthy of my question.”

  “Violeta, go away!” he shouted, plainly of the belief that he could banish her with an order.

  The lass gave him a challenging look. “I saw what you were doing.” She crossed her hands over her chest and stood her ground.

/>   Sensing that only I could make peace between them, I stepped forward. “What we did was wrong. I shall do no more imitations.”

  At that very moment, I found myself rising skyward, impelled by a force tightening around my neck.

  “Got you!”

  A rush of cold terror gripped me; I believed I was in the clutches of the necromancer. I fought and kicked for freedom, dangling a foot and a half above the ground.

  “Let him go!” Daniel shouted.

  The birdseller had both his meaty hands coiled around my neck. He was not squeezing hard enough to choke the life from me, but it was evident that he could twist my head off at any moment.

  Disregarding Daniel, he shook me violently and said, “You’re the little bastard who wanted the dead woodpecker! You two are the ones who’ve done all this.”

  “Let the lad go!” Violeta ordered.

  I was struggling with all my might to pry the villain’s hands loose from me. Daniel kicked him in his shin, but that accomplished nothing. The lass then did something clever: She spit into the villain’s face. And she kept on spitting.

  Dropping me to the ground, the birdseller kept a firm hold on my collar while he wiped his face with his sleeve.

  Struggling for breath and coughing, I felt sick to my stomach.

  “Help! Please help us!” Violeta wailed.

  The stout merchant whose ankle was hit by the cage slashed his cane over the birdseller’s shoulders.

  “I’ve had quite enough of you,” said the merchant. “Unhand the lad.”

  But the birdseller was not about to release me without more of a struggle. Hence, the merchant brought his cane down against his back again with a cruel thwap that promised broken bones.

  The birdseller fell forward and avoided a kiss to the cobbles by thrusting out both his hands. I was free. And the first thing I did was stumble forward, bend over, and vomit.

  “Return to your wagon and leave the lad be,” the merchant advised the birdseller.

  “But this little bastard was the one who imitated a thrush so we would think there’d been a miracle,” he pleaded in reply. “I saw him myself. Very likely he’s the one who stole all my beauties.”

  “Is this true?” the merchant asked me.

  As the birdseller got to his feet, Violeta rushed to testify on my behalf. “Sir, I have been with him for an hour or more, and he uttered not a single call.”

  With those words, she earned my eternal allegiance.

  “She is lying to protect me,” I confessed, wiping my mouth with my sleeve. “I am guilty as charged.” I took a mighty breath into my lungs and imitated a thrush.

  “Extraordinary,” the merchant said. “Sing it again, lad.”

  And so I did.

  “More!” a woman exclaimed.

  Over the next few minutes I created warbling and whirring renditions of goldfinches, jays, canaries, sparrow hawks, and gulls, culminating in an animated rendition of two kingfishers in friendly conversation.

  “Astounding!” The merchant smiled.

  At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, he did, in fact, seem to speak for everyone in the crowd. It occurs to me now that given more encouragement in this direction, I might have ended up as a performer at circuses or touring monster shows, the kind that feature bearded women and two-headed goats.

  After I was finished, the birdseller said, “That is all very clever, son, but you have hoodwinked me out of my stock.”

  “Hold out your hand,” the merchant commanded the birdseller.

  But he feared a caning and would do no such thing.

  “Please, I shall not hit you again, my good man. And I believe that these” – he reached into his waistcoat pocket to take out two large silver coins of one hundred reis apiece – “will compensate you for your loss. I ask only that you give me the wooden birds as a fair trade.”

  He tossed the shining disks of silver to the birdseller, who, with his newfound wealth firmly clenched in his fist, walked off to complete the transaction. The merchant then inhaled a pinch of snuff and suggested, between sneezes, that I imitate a nightingale. A greater crowd gathered as I displayed my talents – more than two hundred souls, according to the counting done by Violeta, who was to become our greatest friend. Today, when I picture her as she was that day, standing right up front, alternately biting her lip out of concern that I might fail and giggling in wonderment, I cannot help but laugh along with her. Daniel was standing next to her, of course, his raised fist punctuating the cadences of my calls, watching me with such wild and generous enjoyment that I felt in some way that my imitations were truly only for him and Violeta. As for the wooden birds, all but one were given to the merchant; the jay that the birdseller’s wife claimed to have been transformed to wood in her hands she insisted on keeping, as proof of St. John’s intervention in our earthly affairs.

  It is to her more than anyone else that we owe the continuing belief that a miracle took place that particular morning, June Twenty-Third, 1800. Indeed, the entire affair was later recorded in the chronicles of Joaquim Rodrigues, a city alderman, under the title “The Transfiguration of the Birds of Porto.” In this account, I am erroneously referred to as João Stewart Zarco, my two family names reversed. Daniel’s name is not given, but he is nicely described as a lithe older accomplice to young Zarco. It is also noted that a pious and pretty lass by the name of Violeta was the first to broach the subject of saintly dominion over the birds.

  Belief in the miracle persists in Porto to this day, and I have learned to keep my lips sealed when it occasionally comes up in conversation. That the destinies of Daniel, Violeta, and me were forever linked in the space of a single morn seems to me the true and far greater miracle.

  *

  If something of symbolic and lasting value was accomplished that day, as I like occasionally to think, then my debt is to Daniel, of course. Even today, decades later, when I dream of him, he is often holding one of our painted birds in his hand, and I can tell from his gleeful eyes that he is plotting some new exploit that is sure to lead us toward both trouble and grace. Sometimes, too, I find the two of us sitting on the stoop of my home in Porto, side by side, and there is a warmth all around me, radiating from the street, the houses, the day itself….

  *

  One person who makes no appearance in Joaquim Rodrigues’s retelling of the incident is Grandmother Rosa. Yet she, too, played her part, since I continued my avian theatrics until I spotted her waddling forward through the crowd, an expression of abject horror on her face. When she stood in front of me, glaring like an incensed queen, it was only too clear that all was lost.

  I took her hand and stepped like a miniature Moses through a parting sea of congratulations and pats on the head. A number of coins were offered to me, all of which my grandmother sternly obliged me to refuse.

  On returning to my house, I discovered Mother beside herself with worry. “John!” she exclaimed, pulling me into her arms. “Thank God, you’re safe.”

  Grandmother ordered me to go to my room, telling Mama, “Wait till I tell you what mischief he’s been making while you’ve been sleeping.”

  Mama gripped my shoulders hard. “Nothing bad happened to you?” I shook my head. “Thank God for that. Don’t ever do that to me again, John.” She wiped her eyes. “I shall be up shortly to see you. Go and change those filthy clothes.”

  I climbed up the stairs while Grandmother Rosa recited a list of my indiscretions over the past months, ending with what she referred to as a “circus show for all the early-morning riffraff.” I undressed and sat on my bed, then fell into a sound sleep.

  I awakened to find Mama seated at the foot of my bed. She greeted me with a wistful smile. She’d been crying again. “John, I’ve been thinking of what I ought to say to you.”

  I sat up and started to make excuses, but she hushed me with a hand laid gently to my chest. “Just hear me out. I want you to know that you had me frantic with worry. John, you are a bit like fireworks – vo
latile and bright and scattered. I cannot control you. Not even Papa can. I know that. So we must strike a bargain. Otherwise, I shall die of agitation. You must never leave the house before either your father or I have given you permission – not until you are much older. The streets are not as friendly as you think. You are never to leave the house without me knowing where you are – never!”

  “But I was going to – ”

  “No but’s, John. We must strike this bargain or I shall have to tie you down at night, just as Grandmother would like. Have we a deal?”

  I nodded.

  “John, this is serious. You promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  Mama took a deep breath and walked over to my window.

  “Did you quarrel with Grandmother?” I asked.

  “Indeed.”

  Mama then told me of her mother’s diatribe and how she’d ended by saying, “I’ve no idea how my grandson came to be giving such a shameful concert in the street – indeed, I do not wish to know. I only expect that it will never be repeated.”

  To which Mama had offered a surprising reply: “On the contrary, my John will make use of all of his gifts and explore them to their limits.”

  Her voice was taut with determination when she repeated this to me. Apparently, she and her mother had then fought as only a parent and child can. But the outcome was favorable – Grandmother Rosa had fled. In fact, she was punishing us by refusing to join us for supper!

  After our special St. John’s supper of grilled sardines, boiled potatoes, and roasted peppers, Mama listened patiently to all my excuses for having perpetrated what could only be rightly described as a theft. “Involving yourself in such a ludicrous escapade was foolish. And stealing another man’s property …” she remarked.

  “But birds are living things. They were in cages. They were suffering.”

  “I am aware of that, which is why I shall not punish you. What I don’t understand, John, is why you and Daniel painted the birds with such care, all the while knowing that you would give them away.”

  “Daniel has odd ideas sometimes. I suppose he hoped that the birdsellers might see in our wooden substitutes the evil in their trade.”