Parrot Blues

by Judith Van GIeson

  “What is a blowhard?”

  “Someone who likes himself too much and who talks too much. His wife and a very rare parrot have disappeared. They appear to have been kidnapped.”

  “What kind of a parrot is it?”

  “An indigo macaw.”

  “I never heard of it. Where is it from?”

  “Brazil.”

  “How does he treat the bird?” the Kid asked.

  “Good. He feeds her treats. He lets her nibble on his ear.”

  “Does she like him?”

  “She’s crazy about him.”

  “The Indians say a man who is good to animals has a good heart.”

  “Anglos say that about a man who is good to his mother.”

  “Claro,” said the Kid. When he quoted the Indians, I figured he was really talking about himself. In this part of the world, Indian myths are so pervasive and powerful it’s hard to tell where you leave off and they begin. It’s easy to believe that there was once a better and more harmonious life in New Mexico, but you never know how much of the myth is true, how much of it you believe because you want to believe. Often there is nothing to go on but relics, artifacts and skeletons like the fourteen macaws found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon. Did the macaws reproduce because they’d found a harmonious home? Were the Indians breeding them for their feathers? Or their meat? Did the anthropologists and archaeologists put their own spin on the parrots’ bones? Who knows? The facts are usually vague enough that you can leave your own imprint.

  “If you could have been an Indian in the old days before the conquest, what kind of Indian would you have been?” I asked the Kid.

  “In Mexico, an Aztec. Here, an Apache,” he said, mentioning two warrior tribes. He’d have made a good Apache. His long legs and strong thighs could have covered the Chiricahua Mountains as well as a soccer field. He could look wild and romantic with a scarf tied around his head, and he wouldn’t look bad in a blue coat and white pants either, the Apache scout uniform after the pale eyes arrived.

  “Me too,” I said, although I was grinding out a cigarette in my plate, and my legs hadn’t been running anywhere lately.

  “And I know who I’d be,” the Kid said.

  “Who?” Not Geronimo, I hoped; he’d already been over-emulated.

  “Mangas Coloradas. He was a leader. He was six feet six inches tall and lived to be seventy years old. That was a long life for an Apache. When he was fifty he was shot by the soldiers and his men put him on a … how you say it? … a litera.”

  “A litter.”

  “And they ran him all the way to the doctor in Mexico.”

  “I’d like to have been Dextrous Horse Thief Woman,” I said. “She could ride, shoot and steal horses as well as any man.” Mythmaking for sure. The truth was, I hate riding, and I don’t like horses. But I do like doing things as well as a man. “Did the Apaches have parrots?” I asked the Kid. “The Indians at Chaco Canyon did. Chaco isn’t that far from Apache country.”

  “I don’t know. There were parrots in that part of New Mexico then, but they only live in old Mexico now. I saw them sometimes coming across the border. The lorobandistas color their heads yellow so they will look like Amazonas. When the feathers grow, the roots show. Amazonas are more valuable because they can talk.”

  “I met a parrot named Max at UNM who imitated my voice perfectly. What do you hear in my voice?” I asked him.

  “I hear…” the Kid imitated a certain sound, not perfectly, but close enough. I wouldn’t want a parrot to get hold of that and repeat it to death.

  “Is that all?” I asked him.

  “I hear a lawyer sometimes. Sometimes somebody else.”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. Dextrous Horse Thief Woman.” He laughed.

  “Um,” I said.

  There are voice analyzers that can tell whether or not a person is lying. Terrance Lewellen would know where to get one and how much it cost. But there isn’t any equipment, as far as I know, for analyzing where you’ve been. I heard New York State and New Mexico in my voice, but the Kid hadn’t mentioned that. Maybe the differences in states were too subtle for a non-native English speaker to notice. The differences in countries are more obvious, and in his Spanish I hear Argentina and Mexico and even the U.S.A. In his English I hear the outlaws, the solitaries, the artists, all the people who come here alone to get away from someplace else. New Mexico is a place that values roots, tradition, family, history. People come here because they are attracted to those things, but they have to sever their own ties to do it. There is the code of the communal and the code of the individual in New Mexico. Sometimes they coexist in harmony, sometimes not.

  Telling the Kid about Max the parrot jump-started one of his stories, which are never very long but are always fairly complicated. I lit a cigarette, adding another layer of gravel to my voice, moving another step away from being Dextrous Horse Thief Woman. “When I was a boy in Argentina,” he began, “we hear parrots on my street. They knew the children’s names, and they call the names when we go by the house on the way to school and when we go home again. Que cacofonia.”

  “What did they call you?” I asked.

  “El Pibe.” That means kid in Argentine Spanish. “Every time I go by the house I hear El Pibe, El Pibe,” he squawked in a good imitation of a parrot. “That is what my brother, Sebastian, called me. Now everybody calls me that. We always hear the parrots, pero the curtains are always closed and we never see them.”

  Pero means “but,” and it’s the last word a native Spanish speaker gives up.

  “My brother and I wanted to know what the parrots looked like, and what color they were. We knew about parrots because my uncle had them, and we gave them their food when he was away. My brother said the parrots were Africanas. I said they were blue-fronted Amazonas, a bird that lives in Argentina. Their voices are different from Africanas. One day we tricked them. My brother walked in front of the house and I went along the side very quiet. ‘Sebastian,’ the parrot said to my brother when he walked by. ‘Hola, Sebastian.’ There was a space,” he separated his hands a few inches, “and I looked in the window.”

  “What did you see?”

  “An old lady,” he said. He hunched up in his chair like a woman who hadn’t been taking her calcium. “There were no parrots in the house, only an old lady who lived alone and sat in the window and talked to the children. She knew all our names. She was all alone and she had nothing to do.”

  “Why was she pretending to be a parrot?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe she thought a parrot would be more interesting to children.”

  “Did she ever find out that you knew?”

  “Never,” he said.

  ******

  Even though I got up early the next morning, the Kid had already left for work. It’s a good idea to greet the wind goddess in the morning and bow down to her before going to bed. From my window at La Vista all you can see over the rooftops and telephone poles is the tip of the mountain, not how widely or firmly it is rooted. Still, I paid my respects.

  When I got to the office, Anna stood in front of the mirror spritzing her hair with a spray bottle and scrunching it up. Anna has enough hair for three people without adding frizz, but the increase in volume did emphasize the compactness of her body. Her hair was a twenty; her body a six. She was wearing high-heeled shoes with ankle straps over black ankle socks. It was one of those fashions that can only be worn by the very desperate or very young, a style that had its time and place. The place was East Central. The time was after midnight. But what did it matter what she wore as long as she did her work?

  “Could you cover the phones for a minute?” she asked me. “I have to go to the bank.”

  “You’re spritzing your hair to go to the bank?”

  “Hey. Any place you go now you’re on camera.”

  “You’re not planning to stick up the bank, are you?” And look her best on the most-wanted poster?

  �
��No. I’m gonna use the ATM, but there’s a camera there too. I don’t want some guys sitting around watching the surveillance tapes and saying I’m a mess.”

  “Could you wait a minute?” I asked. “There’s a phone call I have to make.” Actually, it was a phone call I wanted to make, the reason, in fact, I’d come in early.

  “You got it,” Anna said.

  I went to my office, dialed the Relationships hot line and sat through the operator’s instructions, as impatient as a SWF hot on the trail of a SWM. Terrance was right again; the message had been changed. The plaintive ambisexuous voice now said, “Max a million. I am verrry valuable,” rolling the r in the “very.” The words were perfectly clear, but what the hell did they mean?

  The phone rang. “For you,” Anna called.

  It was Terrance. “You hear the message yet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think it means?” he asked in his gruff, hard-driving, corporate raiding voice.

  “I don’t know,” I had to admit.

  “Well, I know,” he said. “Brown thinks he’s gonna get a million dollars out of me. No bird’s that valuable. You be around this afternoon?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll be by,” he said.

  “I’ll be here,” I replied and hung up.

  “Now I’m going to the ATM. Okay?” Anna asked me.

  “Okay,” I said. I listened to her walk down the sidewalk toward her car, which she’d parked in the lot tucked behind the Hamel and Harrison building, and I couldn’t help comparing the sound of her footsteps to the sound of Deborah’s. Deborah had been crisp and commanding in her high-heeled shoes, at least before the abduction. Anna was tentative and teetering in hers, which she never was in life. Maybe she had a loose ankle strap. Her walk had the fluttering uncertainty of prey; I’d have to warn her to be careful where she stepped in those hooker’s shoes.

  ******

  Terrance had said, “I’ll be by,” but he didn’t show up at my office, they did. That’s the kind of guy who calls to tell you about the vacation he just took, never mentioning that he took a woman with him. When that kind does show up with a woman, he doesn’t tell you who she is. Some men like to make introductions about as much as they like to ask directions.

  “This is Sara,” Terrance said, sitting down in a client chair and plunking his briefcase on the floor. Sara sat next to him and dropped her beaded and fringed suede purse into her lap. He’d made an introduction of sorts, but it didn’t tell me anything I wanted to know, like Sara who? So I began my own discovery, a combination of interrogation and observation.

  “I’m Neil Hamel, Terrance’s lawyer,” I said.

  “I know,” Sara replied. “Terry told me about you.” She smiled at Terrance, who didn’t seem like a Terry to me. He didn’t correct her, he didn’t smile back. Sara was definitely a bottle blond, possibly a trophy blond. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head with wispy tendrils hanging down around her face. Her eyes were the color of a Texas bluebonnet. I’d say she was a good twenty years younger than Terrance, which didn’t make her young. It made her close to forty, in fact, an age I know well, the age at which a lot of women come to New Mexico to find themselves. If they end up in Santa Fe (and I was already convinced that Sara was a Santa Fe woman), the first step is to throw out all the old clothes and buy into Santa Fe style. Sara had done that with a vengeance. The next step is usually to find a guru or a mission. No problem; there are plenty of those around. Then comes finding an affordable place to live, a job and a man, and that’s where the trouble starts. There aren’t many of any of the above, and there’s a ton of competition (some of it rich and beautiful) for the few there are, and this at an age when a woman doesn’t need competition. Santa Fe breeds female insecurity like Yuma, Arizona, breeds killer bees. Sometimes women find the life they’re seeking in the city different, sometimes not. The chic life isn’t always an easy life.

  The upper part of Sara’s outfit was a short white jacket that copied the navy blue ones the U.S. cavalry wore. The Apaches called them blue coats, but the Apaches who put them on to track down their own were considered turncoats. Indian women took the jackets from the bodies of dead soldiers, hung fringe from the epaulets and sewed bone hairpipes slanted like ribs across the chest. The decoration of the uniforms had a significance for the Indian women, but what it meant to Sara I couldn’t say. I’m one of those who believes it’s unwise to purchase or wear what you don’t understand. In my experience Indians don’t reveal themselves readily to non-Indians, and why should they? Dressing like one isn’t going to make you one. When it comes to clothes, I follow the Albuquerque KISS principle: keep it simple, stupid.

  With the jacket Sara wore a choker made of beads and feathers, a white broomstick-pleated skirt and tan cowboy boots. She was tall and willowy enough to carry the costume off, but her eyes were bluebonnets in the wind. They danced away from contact, and the fine lines beside her mouth were as jittery as an aspen.

  “How long have you been in Santa Fe?” I asked to prove to myself that I’d been right.

  “Three years,” she replied. Three years is the turning point there. Either you decide it’s not working and get out of town, or you stay forever. “I came out here to visit Terry and Deborah, and I stayed.” She reached over to pat Terrance’s bear claw hand. “Deborah’s my sister,” she said.

  “Your sister?” And I’d been assuming she’d come here as an appendage to Terrance. I’d been on target about the place, but way wide of the connection.

  “Her half-sister,” Terrance corrected, sliding his hand out from under Sara’s and reaching for his briefcase and a cigar.

  “We have the same father. Deborah got his brains.”

  Was she implying that she got his looks? The trouble with looks is that they eventually go out the window. Brains are more dependable. I would have said that Deborah got some looks too, but she hadn’t made a career out of them. Deborah had to be ten years older than Sara, which could have made her the child of the father’s first marriage, and Sara the child of the second, or the third or…

  “I’m so worried about Deborah.” Sara picked at her fringe. “She’s been getting so much attention since that Time article came out. Any crazy could have seen that and abducted her.”

  “It wasn’t any crazy. It was Wes Brown crazy,” Terrance said.

  I thought I’d detected a flicker of jealousy under the pyre of sisterly admiration, and I couldn’t resist fanning the flame. My motto has always been, never envy a woman until you’ve walked a mile in her shoes or slept a night in her bed, but I don’t have a sister. “What do you do in Santa Fe?” I asked Sara. There weren’t any university labs to run there, I knew, but there were a lot of tables to wait on.

  “I’m an art consultant.” She took a card from her purse and handed it to me. Sara Dumaine, it said, Zia Gallery, Art Consultant. That could mean she sold art on commission. Whether it was good art or crap art or wearable art or T-shirt art, I couldn’t say. Maybe she was making a living at it, maybe not. “I think Deborah’s success was hard for her to deal with; there were so many demands,” Sara continued. “She was having a problem with success management?” She ended that sentence with the raised inflection of up talk, the tentative way some women have of expressing (or hiding) themselves.

  Terrance pulled out his lighter and lit the cigar. “Success management, my ass,” he butted in, punctuating his remark with the smoldering cigar, his version of down talk. Up talk leaves room to continue. Down talk does not. “Deborah didn’t have any problem with success management. She was a bitch long before she got into Time magazine, and she was a bitch after. Deborah, in fact, was a habitual bitch.” A man who disses the woman who precedes you will sooner or later end up dissing you. It’s a useful guide for a woman to follow through the minefield of male/female relationships, but for some other woman, not me. I wasn’t looking, and if I was I’d know better than to look twice at Terrance Lewellen even if he was richer
than God, especially if he was richer than God. Rich enough, anyhow, to be asked to pay a million-dollar ransom and to afford a substantial legal fee.

  “Can we put some effort into getting your wife and your bird back?” I asked, doing something to earn my fee.

  “I’m not paying any million dollars, I’ll tell you that. I’d have to sell most of what I own to raise that kind of money.”

  “The gallery could sell the Lochovers for you.” Sara turned toward Terrance, and her serpentine tendrils curved like dollar signs around her face.

  “Anybody could sell the Lochovers,” Terrance said. “After he died, the demand for him went ballistic. Offer Brown three hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Will he accept that?”

  “Let him make a counteroffer if he doesn’t like it.”

  “Your wife and your bird are at risk, and the negotiations are taking up precious time,” I said.

  “What time?” Terrance demanded. “You call the machine, he calls the machine, we call the machine.” He stood up to go, stubbing out his cigar in my ashtray. “Place my offer. I’ll check in with you later.”

  Sara’s fringe bobbed as she stood up and slung her purse over her shoulder. “Nice meeting you,” she said with a tentative but orthodontically correct smile.

  “Mucho gusto,” I replied.

  She was a willowy aspen, Terrance a barrel cactus, but in volume he had her beat. Maybe there was a heart under all his barbs, maybe hot air. As they went through the door, Sara made a motion to pat his shoulder, but she stopped herself as if she’d seen the prickers there.

  The minute they were gone and the Jag was rolling down Lead, I called the Relationships hot line and listened again to “Max a million. I am verrry valuable.”

  “This is Neil Hamel, Terrance Lewellen’s lawyer,” I replied. “Our offer is three hundred thousand dollars.”

  Then I wandered into the outer office where Anna and Brink were killing the day. Brink was telling Anna about his first date with the semi-full-figured DWF now known as Nancy. “She’s a great cook,” he said.