Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey

willow. The bird was much more wily than the boy, for while I was heading straight for Watkins' secret hole, she pretended a broken wing and hobbled and fluttered toward the river, intending to lead me away from her nest.
    I had reached the stinging nettles, just before the door, when the designated wicket keeper caught me.
    Mr. Benjamin dropped on me like a spider, wrapping his huge hands around my chest, binding me to him, so close I could smell the inside of his nose.
    "Got you," he cried.
    The Parrot slid right through his nasty knot, surrendering the remainder of his shirt. I feinted toward the house, cut back toward the river, crashed through the pussy willow where Mr. Poole was waiting for me.
    "Got you."
    He had fair hair and blue eyes and a red blush to his cheeks like a toy soldier. He was slight but as hard and stitched together as the leather casing of a ball, and though I kicked and spat and scratched at him, there was no escape from the bony shackle around my wrist.
    "I'll break your frigging arm," he said.
    "Where is he?" That was Lord Devon, hollering from the steps.
    "Here sir," called Poole, dragging me brutally, skidding me on my knees, a half-skun hare.
    "Not him, you fool!" Lord Devon had a captive of his own--Mrs. Piggott--tripping and stumbling after him. "Not him, not him!"
    "Who sir?"
    "Try to remember," cried Lord Devon. "Lord Jesus save me, whom did we come to get?"
    "Piggott sir? Where is he?"
    "I do not know," his lordship cried, advancing with his still-burning stick. Poole jerked me backward and away. The red-waistcoated dervish continued closing and was only halted by an awful bang. Deus ex machina, as they say. And what a machina --a hot wash of light bathed his lordship's upturned face and there, for all to see, his cold gleaming rage was caught and held by a writhing rope of fire running along the ridgeline of the house.
    "Shit," cried the member of the House of Lords, and I had time to be astonished he would speak like that.
    The printers came running down their stairs, tumbling into the evening, walking backward, faces illuminated, necks craned, their gazes on the smoking humpback ridge. The first line of flame had died, but what was left behind were three conflagrations, flames bursting from three beds of tiles.
    Mr. Benjamin clipped me across the ears. The show continued--exploding squibs now bloomed like wildflowers in the gloom. These also whacked my eardrum, five times, as hard as anvils. Then came bursts of fire, broken tiles erupting from hips and valleys and places not in my view.
    The sky was now a cloudless shade of green and as Benjamin dragged me from the hail of heavy tiles, I feared for Mr. Watkins' life. Poor Watkins--he had dreaded fire above all things, and now there were at least eight separate fires all erupting from his roof. Then--from where I do not know--a great flock of bats burst forth, and in among the bats, at first almost indistinguishable from them, a thousand sheets of paper tipped with Pentecostal tongues. It was as if Piggott's brain had exploded through its bony casing and all its greed and argumentative confusion, its secrets and whispers and smugglers' boats, had burst in smithereens and scattered through the darkening air, landing like stinging wasps upon our arms and faces, and through all of this my captor was transfixed, as if he had seen the assumption of the Virgin Mary in the Devon sky.
    All nature was disturbed. The nightjars, who would have normally stayed quiet till dark, came diving and flapping around their territories, swooping down above Lord Devon's smoking wig. In flight they made a soft coohwick and a dreadful hand-clapping with their panicked wings. The printers were equally disturbed, shouting, running to the stream with buckets.
    I politely asked to be let go.
    Poole knew not what to do. He watched Lord Devon who, like someone drunk or dreaming, stared at the men carrying water into the house.
    Then came a great soft thump like a chaff