by Ben Fountain
“Go fuck yourself,” said the kid, jamming his gun into the notch behind Blair’s left ear. “I’ll kill you if I want.”
“It’ll be thrilling for a minute, just after you pull the trigger.” Blair was winging it, making it up as he went along; the main thing, he sensed, was to keep talking. “Then it’ll be like having a hangover the rest of your life.”
“Shut up you cocksucker, just shut the fuck up. Shut up so I can kill you.”
“But it’s true. I know what I’m talking about.”
“You? You never killed anybody in your life.”
“Are you kidding? The United States is an extremely violent country. You must have seen the movies, right? Rambo? Die Hard? Where I come from makes this place look like a nursery school.”
“You’re a liar,” the kid said, though less certainly.
“Why do you think I’m here? I have so much innocent blood on my hands, I was ready to kill myself I was so miserable. Then it came to me in a dream, the Virgin came to me in a dream,” he amended, remembering how the rebels fell to their knees and groveled whenever the Spanish priest came to say mass, and the punketos were always the worst, weeping and slobbering on the padre’s ring. “‘Follow the birds and you’ll have peace,’ that’s what she told me in the dream. ‘Follow the birds and your soul will know peace.’”
“Bullshit,” the kid hissed, clanking his gun into the back of Blair’s head.
“I’m here, aren’t I? You think anyone other than a desperate man would come to this place? I came for the birds,” Blair continued in a lulling voice, “the most incredible birds in the world live here, and they do the most amazing things. For instance, did you know that the bellbird’s call can be heard several kilometers away? In contrast to the puffbird’s soft, heavenly whistle, which he sings just once a day, right before dawn. Then there’s your famous oilbird who flies only at night, navigating with his headful of radar equipment…” And Blair talked on in the most hypnotic, droning voice imaginable, cataloging the wonders of Colombian avifauna until the punketo finally staggered off into the night, either entranced or stupefied, it was hard to say which. But when dawn broke and Blair was still alive a weird peacefulness came over him, along with the imperatives of an irresistible conviction. As soon as the cuffs were off he strode across the yard to Complaints and Claims, brushed past the guard, and walked into Alberto’s office without so much as a knock. Alberto and Tono were spreading maps across the jefe’s big desk; when the door flew open they went for their holsters, a reflex that nearly got Blair’s head blown off.
“Go on,” he dared them, stepping up to the desk. “Either let me do my work, or shoot me.”
There was a heat, a grim fury about Blair that most people would associate with madmen and martyrs. The comandantes eyed the gringo at a wary slant, and it occurred to Blair that, for the moment at least, they were actually taking him seriously.
“Well,” said Alberto in a cautious voice, “what do you think, Tono?”
Tono blinked. “I think he’s a good man, Comandante. And ecology is important to the Revolution.”
“Yes,” Alberto agreed, “ecology is important to the Revolution.” He tried to smile, to inject some irony into the situation, but his mouth looked more like a fluttery open wound.
“Okay, Joan Blair, it will be as you wish. I give you permission to study your birds.”
Blair was twelve when it first happened, on a trip to the zoo—he came on the aviary’s teeming mosh pit of cockatoos and macaws and Purple-naped Lories, and it was as if an electric arc had shot through him. And he’d felt it every time since, this jolt, the precision stab in the heart whenever he saw psittacidae—he kept expecting it to stop but it never did, the impossibly vivid colors like some primal force that stoked the warm liquid center of his soul.
He’d known a miracle was in these mountains, he’d felt it in his bones. For five rainy days he tramped ever-widening circles out from the base, traversing ridges and saddles and moiling through valleys while the armed guard followed him every step of the way. Hernan, Blair guessed, was another of the comandantes’ jokes, a slight mestizo youth with catlike looks and a manner as blank and flaky as cooled ashes. By now Blair knew a killer when he saw one; Hernan would as soon shoot a man as pinch off a hangnail, but as they trudged through the gelatinous drizzle together Blair began to get the subtext of the comandantes’ choice.
“So how long have you been with the MURC?” he asked.
“Always,” Hernan replied in a dreamy voice.
“Always?”
“That other boy,” Hernan said in a gaseous hum, “that other little boy they called Hernan, he died. I have been a revolucionario my whole life.”
Blair studied the youth, then went back to scanning the canopy. Alberto had returned the binoculars but not the camera.
“So I guess you’ve been in a lot of battles?”
“Yes,” Hernan said in his humming voice, and he seemed to reflect. “Yes, many,” he added.
“What’s it like?” Blair asked rudely, but the kid’s catatonia was driving him nuts.
“Oh, it’s not so bad. Once the shooting starts everything’s okay.”
Which Blair took for a genuine answer; five days through some of the most beautiful, rugged country in the world, and the youth showed all the emotion of a turtle. It might not matter what you hit him with—a firefight, a bowl of stew, a trip to Disneyland, Hernan would confront each one with the same erased stare, but when Blair passed him the binoculars on the fifth day, pointing down a valley at a grove of wax palms and the birds wheeling around like loose sprockets, Hernan focused and gazed in silence for a time, then burst out laughing.
“They’re so silly!” he cried.
And they were, Blair agreed, they were delightful, this remnant colony of Crimson-capped Parrots whose flock notes gave the impression of a successful cocktail party. The Crimson-capped Parrot, Purpureicephalus feltisi, aka Felty’s Crimson: there’d been no sightings since 1973, when Tetzlaff et al. spotted a single breeding pair in Pichincha, Ecuador. CITES listed the species as critically endangered, though the more pessimistic literature assumed extinction. That first day Blair counted sixty-one birds, a gregarious, vocal group with flaming crowns and chunky emerald green bodies, their coverts flecked with blues and reds like glossy M&Ms. Sixty-one birds meant that God was good: not only was there a decent chance of saving the species, but if he lived and made it home with his data intact Blair was going to knock the ornithological world on its ass. Over the next few days he and Hernan built a blind of bunch grass and palm fronds, and Blair settled into the grind-it-out fieldwork mode. He charted the foraging grounds, the potential nest holes, the roosts and flyways across the valley; he identified the mated pairs within the flock and noted the species’ strong affinity for wax palms—Ceroxylon andiculum, itself endangered—and surmised a trophic relationship. They talked constantly, with complex repertoires of sounds, chattering in an offhand, sociable way as they clambered about the canopy or sputtered from tree to tree, their short shallow wing beats batting the air with the noisy ruction of windup toys.
Within weeks Blair had a basic ethological profile. In exchange for the privilege of fieldwork he had to do camp chores every afternoon, but three years of graduate school had inured him to slave labor and subsistence living. In some ways this was better than school: he got room and board, worked with minimal interruptions, and was furnished a local guide-bodyguard free of charge. Hernan proved adept at tracking the birds on their feeding rounds, leading Blair through the forest as they listened for debris tumbling through the leaves, then the fuddles and coos that meant Crimsons were overhead. At the blind he usually lay back on the grass and dozed, rousing from time to time to say amazing things about himself.
“I used to have a girlfriend,” he once confessed to Blair in a sleepy voice. “She wouldn’t let me kiss her, but she’d bite me on the ear.”
In the same vacant drone he told all manner of terr
ible stories: battles he’d fought, prisoners he’d executed, patrols where his column had come across peasants burned to death or babies nailed to planks. The stories were so patently nightmarish that Blair wondered if Hernan was talking in his sleep, channeling dreams that rose like swamp gas out of his wounded subconscious. Hernan’s whole family had been killed when he was twelve, their village wiped out by autodefensas for electing a former insurgent as mayor.
“Sometimes I see them,” Hernan murmured in a half-doze, one arm thrown over his eyes, feet crossed at the ankles. “Sometimes I’m lying on my cot at night, and I look up and all my family’s standing there. And it’s like I’m lying in a coffin, you know? My family’s alive and I’m the one who’s dead, and they’ve come to my funeral to tell me good-bye.”
Blair was so horrified that he had to write it all down, the ba roque, spiraling cycles of murder and revenge mixed with his notes on allopreening among the mated Crimsons and the courtship dances of the unattached males, the way they minced around like fops doing a French quadrille. Sickness, he wrote in the margin of his notes, there’s a sickness in the world, along with parrots the most intelligent and beautiful of birds, also the most threatened—a clue to the nature of things(?) He wrote it all because it all seemed bound together in some screamingly obvious way that he couldn’t quite get. Tramping through the woods he and Hernan kept coming across giant cocaine labs, the thuggish workers warning them off with drawn machetes. The coca fields around the camp kept expanding; radio reports of the fledgling peace talks took on a spectral air, with the MURC insisting on prenegotiation of themes that might be substantively negotiated at a later time. Every few weeks Hernan would go off on a mission, and after three or four days he’d drag in with the other survivors, skinnier, with corpselike shadows under his eyes but otherwise the same, and the next dawn he and Blair would be at the blind, watching the birds greet the day with gurgling chatter. In March the males began to hold territory, and when the females developed brood patches Hernan offered to climb the trees for a look at the nests, a job they both knew was beyond Blair. After a year in the mountains he was a rashy stick-figure of his former self, prone to fevers and random dizzy spells that made his head feel like a vigorously shaken snow globe. Sometimes he coughed so hard that his nose bled; his bowels were papier-mâché, his gums ached, and the sturdiest thing about him seemed to be his beard, which looked positively rabbinical.
“Go for it,” Blair answered, and in a flash Hernan was seventy feet up the tree, relaying information while Blair wrote. Clutch, two; eggs, white; nest, about the size of a Guambiano water jar. Hernan had left his rifle propped against a nearby tree; Blair eyed it while allowing an escape fantasy to float through his head, a mini-vacation from the knowledge that if he ran they’d catch him before the day was out. Still, the rifle raised a nagging question: how could he leave, now, in the middle of his research, even if he got the chance? But not to leave might be a slow form of suicide. Sooner or later something would get him, either sickness, a swacked-out punketo, or an autodefensa raid, or maybe the Secretariat would decide to make a point at his expense. The hard line had lately crept back into the MURC’s rhetoric, which Blair guessed was part posturing for the peace talks, part exasperation at the trend of the times. The Soviet Union had imploded, the Berlin Wall was gravel, and the Cuban adventure was on life support, and yet the MURC insisted it would soldier on.
“Some say the end of history has come,” Alberto intoned to the journalists. “We can all have different interpretations about what’s happened in the world during these very complex years, but the fact of the matter is that most things haven’t changed. Hunger, injustice, poverty, all of the issues which led the guerrilla of the MURC to take up arms, they are all still with us.”
True, thought Blair. He wanted to believe in the Revolution, in its alleged devotion to reason and justice, but the Revolution wouldn’t return his camera for even one day. All of his research would be deemed hypothetical unless supported by a photo or specimen. No photo, no dissertation, and he’d sooner burn every page of his notes than take a specimen.
“I could steal the camera back for you,” Hernan offered. “I think I know where they’re keeping your stuff.”
“What would happen if they caught us?”
Hernan reflected. “To me, nothing—I can just disappear. To you?” He shrugged. “They’d probably cut off your fingers and send them to your family.”
Blair considered for a second, then shook his head. Not yet. He wasn’t that desperate yet.
When the chicks hatched Hernan went up again, checking out the nests while the parents and auxiliaries seethed around his head like belligerent box kites. One egg would hatch, then the second a few days later; Blair knew the second hatchlings were insurance, doomed to die unless their older siblings died first, and he sketched out a program for taking the second chicks and raising them in captivity.
The Crimsons had saved him, in a way; maybe he’d save them in turn, but he had to know everything about them first. “There’s something wrong with us,” he told Hernan one day. He was watching the nest holes for the soon-to-fledge chicks and thinking about the news, the latest massacres and estimates of coca acreage. The U.S. had pledged Colombia $1.6 billion in aid—advisers, weapons, helicopters, the whole bit—which made Blair wonder if his countrymen had lost their minds. There was a fire raging in Colombia, and the U.S. planned to hose it down with gasoline.
“Who?” Hernan answered, cracking open one eye. “Something wrong with who?”
“With us. People. The human race.”
Hernan lunked up on one elbow and looked around, then subsided to the grass and closed his eyes. “People are devils,” he said sleepily. “The only persona decente who ever lived was Jesus Christ. And the Virgin. And my mother,” he added.
“Tell me this, Hernan—would you shoot me if they told you to?”
“Anh.” Hernan didn’t bother to open his eyes. “They’d never ask me.”
“They wouldn’t?” Blair felt an unfamiliar surge of hope.
“Of course not. They always put the new guys on the firing squads, to toughen them up. Guys like me they never bug for stuff like that.”
Over the next few days seven chicks came wobbling out of the nests, and Blair set himself the task of tracking the flock as it educated the youngsters. Back in the shed he had notebooks and loose papers crammed with data, along with feathers, eggshell fragments, and stool samples, also a large collection of seeds with beak-shaped chunks scooped out of them. Occasionally Alberto would trek up the mountain to the blind, checking on Blair and the latest developments with “the children,” as he’d taken to calling the parrots. He seemed relaxed and jolly during these visits, though his essential caginess remained; he would smile and murmur noncommittally when Blair lobbied to start his captive-breeding program.
“Get with it, Alberto,” Blair pressed one day. “It would be a huge public relations coup for you guys if the MURC rescued an endangered species. I could help you across the board with that, like as an environmental consultant. You know we’re really on the same side.”
Alberto started to speak, then broke off laughing as he studied the wild gringo in front of him. Blair was dressed in scruffy jungle fatigues—his civilian clothes had worn out long ago—and with his gaunt, weathered face and feral beard he looked as hardened as any of the guerrillas. New recruits to the camp generally assumed that he was a zealot from the mythical suicide squad.
“Joan Blair, you remind me of a man I once knew. A man of convictions, a real hero for the cause. Of course he died in Bolivia many years ago.”
“Doing what?”
“Fighting for the Revolution, of course!”
Blair winced, then shook off a spasm of dread. “So what about my captive-breeding program?”
Alberto chuckled and patted Blair’s shoulder. “Patience, Joan Blair, you must learn patience. The Revolution is a lot more complicated than you think.”
“They’re negotiating you,” Hernan said a few weeks later. “Some big shot’s supposed to be coming soon.”
“Bullshit,” Blair said. The camp was a simmering cesspool of rumors, but nothing ever happened.
“It’s true, Joan Blair, I think you’re going home.”
“Maybe I’ll stay,” Blair said, testing the idea on himself. “There isn’t an ornithologist in the world who’s doing the work I’m doing here.”
“No, Joan, I think you should go. You can come back after we’ve won the war.”
“What, when I’m eighty?” Blair chewed a blade of grass and reflected for a moment. “I still don’t have my photo. I’m not going anywhere until I get that.”
The rumors persisted, gradually branched into elaborate subrumors. Just to be safe Blair got all his data in order, but it was still a shock to see the helicopters come squalling out of the sky one day, cutting across the slopes at a sassy angle and heading for camp. Blair and Hernan were walking back for afternoon chores, and if there was ever any doubt about Blair’s intentions his legs resolved it for him, carrying him down the trail at a dead sprint. At camp the helicopters were parked on the soccer field, two U.S.-surplus Hueys with the sky blue Peace Commission seal on their hulls. Campesinos and guerrillas were streaming into the compound; Blair had to scrum his way through the crowd to get a view of Complaints and Claims, where some kind of official moment was taking place on the steps. Several distinct factions were grouped around a microphone: Alberto and the subcomandantes were on one side, along with some senior comandantes whom Blair didn’t recognize, while to their right stood a sleek delegation of civilians, Colombians with careful haircuts and tasteful gold chains. Blair spotted the American delegation at once—their smooth, milky skin was the giveaway, along with their khaki soft-adventure wear and identical expressions of informed concern. Everyone was raked toward the microphone, where a Colombian was saying something about the stalled peace talks.
