Hemingway's Notebook Read Online Free PDF Page B

said in a rough, gravelly voice.
    “Yes, Harry,” Cohn agreed. His voice had grown rough along with Harry’s from the days and night of vodka and rum. He saw the knife in Harry’s hand and he didn’t care. He was so tired.
    “I told you I told Flaubert I’m not going to live like a goddamn nigger with chickens walking and crapping where I eat, didn’t I tell him that?”
    “Yes, Harry.”
    “So he leaves the door open anyway and he goes in the back because he knows a goddamn chicken is going to walk in finally. He does it to aggravate me. I know these people, I know people like Flaubert. I’ve lived in the islands thirty years. But you know that, don’t you, Cohn.”
    “If you say so.”
    “And what does it say in my files?”
    “I don’t know, Harry.”
    “Martinique to Cuba, Windward and Leeward, Bahamas and Jamaica and St. Maarten, I’ve been on them all, worked on them all, I know them and all their fucking little secrets. I know you’d like to know everything I know. Everything I wrote down in the book. You’d like to know about the book.”
    “Jesus Christ, Harry.”
    “The trouble with these people is they never talk to you directly unless they want to say please or thank you but they don’t mean it. I know what they really think—they have ways of letting you know what they really think. Flaubert wants to piss me off, Cohn, that’s why he leaves the door open. Well, it’s time to piss Monsieur Flaubert off.”
    Cohn said nothing.
    “We’re going to have chicken for dinner.” Harry Francis crossed the floor. He held the knife in his left hand like a fighter. At the last minute, he rushed for the chicken but it fluttered with a squawk out of his grasp. Harry cursed.
    Harry lunged again, moving more quickly than his big-bellied bulk might have indicated. The chicken squawked and flapped onto the tabletop. Its claws slipped on the dirty Formica and in that moment, Harry lunged again and reached under it and grabbed one yellow leg. The chicken made another sound and then was silent, waiting for death upside down, its wings spread. The weight of its feathered wings was too great to move.
    “Not in here,” said Cohn, feeling sick. His face was pale. “That’s as bad as the other thing.”
    Flaubert opened the curtain that covered the doorway to the back of the café. He was a small, thin black man and his skin seemed oily in the heat. His black eyes glittered red at the edges of the whites. He wiped his hands on a soiled white dish towel.
    “What it is, my friend?” he began in a singsong French that was part island patois.
    “A fucking chicken. In here. I told you.”
    “I forgot. It was so hot in here.”
    “I know you forgot.”
    “You’re going to kill it, Monsieur Harry?”
    “Yes.”
    Flaubert shrugged and turned his back.
    Harry Francis slit the head from the body with one stroke of his ivory-handled knife. It was so sudden there was no drama to it. The head fell to the floor with scarcely a sound. Blood spurted from the severed neck artery onto the floor. When the bleeding slowed, Harry Francis dumped the carcass on the floor.
    A final burst of the creature’s nervous system sent the headless body scurrying in a sudden dance across the floorboards.
    Cohn felt frightened then; it was not pleasant to see a dead thing still moving as though it were alive.
    And then it was over and the carcass collapsed and there was blood all over the floor of the Café de la Paix.
    “Flaubert, get your chicken,” Harry Francis shouted. His face was red and his eyes were shining. He wiped the bloody knife on his shorts and tucked the blade in its sheath.
    Flaubert turned again, came to the carcass, and picked it up. He picked up the head as well and threw it out the window. “Philippe!” he called sharply and the boy with almond skin and light blue eyes came to the door from the beach. He stared at the bloody floor.
    “Monsieur Harry has killed a chicken. Get the mop and wash the