Parrot Blues

by Judith Van GIeson

  Or a betrayer.

  While we waited for the deposit envelope, Terrance burned up the airwaves talking to his security men, who had nothing better to do than go back to Midnight Cowboy and spy on Wes Brown. “He’s picking up a waitress,” Terrance said.

  “What are your men going to do if he takes her home?” I asked.

  “Follow him. Maybe he’ll connect with the mask somewhere. I’m not letting Brown out of my sight until this is all over.”

  “It’ll be hard to follow anybody to Door without being made,” Charlie said. “No cover there.”

  The bank employee arrived eventually and handed Charlie the deposit envelope. “Thanks,” Charlie said. He slit the envelope with a letter opener, put tape over the tips of his fingers and slid the deposit slip and money out. Terrance and I leaned over his shoulder to see. The money added up to two hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills.

  “Phew.” Charlie wrinkled up his nose. “That money stinks.”

  It did have a moldy, earthy smell.

  “I never heard of a kidnapper giving money back before,” Terrance said.

  “Beats me,” said Charlie.

  He examined the deposit slip. Brown had penciled in the amount, two hundred dollars, on one side. The other side was as blank as the wall behind the Tramway ATM. Terrance shined the black light on it; hand-printed letters rose to the surface with a yellow glow. “Send your lawyer Rte. 270, Mile Marker 62 Sunday night with two hundred thousand in hundred-dollar bills. No police, no phones, no security guards. Your valuables will be returned.”

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Hundred-dollar bills will be harder to carry, but easier to come by,” Terrance said.

  “Two-seventy is the road that will get you to Door,” said Charlie.

  “You’ll do it, won’t you?” Terrance asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I responded. Acting as a ransom courier struck me as going above and beyond the call of duty.

  “I’ll double your fee,” said Terrance.

  “Um,” I replied.

  “Someone has to rescue Deborah,” Charlie said. “Her life is in danger.”

  And Perigee, I knew, was dying without his mate. “Oh, all right,” I said while asking myself why. For the money? For the love of adventure? For the sake of the woman and the bird? I’d already risked my life once for a bird, and I hadn’t regretted it. “But only on one condition. I’m not going alone.”

  “No police or security guards,” Terrance parroted the note.

  “Not them. I’m taking a weapon, and I’m taking a friend.” The person I intended to take was the Kid, the one friend I had whose taste for adventure was as keen as mine. The weapon was my LadySmith .38.

  “Is this person reliable?” Terrance asked.

  A lot more reliable than his security guards, I thought. “Yeah,” I said. “And he knows all about birds.”

  “All right,” Terrance said. “Do you have a cell phone?”

  “No.”

  “Take mine.”

  “The note said no phones.”

  “Leave it in the car. I want to outfit you with a minicam so we’ll have some evidence to use against Brown.”

  “What’s a minicam?”

  “A tiny video camera, about half the size of your thumb. Police departments hide them in their helmets. It’ll work inside a cowboy hat.”

  “You want me to wear a cowboy hat at night?” I asked.

  “It’ll keep you from getting moonstruck,” Charlie said.

  7

  THE ONE ADDICTION the Kid and I share is maps. We read them the way some people read legal thrillers. The places we haven’t been are the unsolved mysteries. The Kid always keeps the two Mexicos, old and new, folded up in his glove compartment, and one Argentina in case he ever gets back. He folds his road maps carefully, keeping to the original creases as if to make sure that the roads and towns won’t be mixed up when he opens them again. He brought his New Mexico map inside my apartment, spread it on the floor and located Door, a tiny circle at the far edge of Grant County with a dotted line (a dirt road, the kind of road that makes a car old before its time) leading to it from State Highway 270. Door was near the Gila National Forest, the first designated wilderness area in the U.S., land the Apaches once roamed. There are fewer people living in parts of the Gila now than there were when the Apaches and the cavalry were battling over it. The fact that a place merits a dot on the map means that somebody lived there once, not necessarily that anybody lives there now.

  “There was a mina in that town,” the Kid said.

  “I know.”

  “Did you know that the New Mexico loros lived around there?”

  “No.”

  “Not many people know that. They were illegals,” he smiled. “They ate piñones. Sometimes you see them in Mexico now, but there are not many left.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “They are this big.” He held his hands about fifteen inches apart. “They are green with red here…” he tapped his shoulders, “…and here…” he tapped his forehead.” They call them thick-billed parrots in this country.”

  “What happened to them?” It was a question I should have known better than to ask.

  “The mineros ate them.”

  “No.”

  “Si. They eat guacamayos in Mexico too. People there think they are good food. Loros are always together, they are muy ruidoso…”

  Very noisy.

  “They are easy to catch. The ones the mineros didn’t eat were food for the puercos.”

  The pigs. “That’s disgusting.”

  “The mineros are gone now, but so are the birds. They kill everything in a place and then they leave. Crazy, no?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is a man in Arizona now, trying to bring them back.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Where is it exactly that we are going?”

  “Mile marker sixty-two on Route Two-Seventy.”

  We found 270 on the map. I measured sixty-two miles in scale from the border. The Kid measured the distance in kilometers. We arrived at the same place, a few miles north of Door near an area marked Cotorra Canyon.

  “Cotorra means parrot,” he said.

  “I thought loro meant parrot.”

  “It does, and it is more common than cotorra. Cotorra also means a … how you say it? … a woman who talks too much.”

  “A chatterbox?”

  “I also hear it called Chatterbox Canyon.”

  “You know about that canyon?”

  “Yes, but I never went there. It’s a place the narcotraficantes go.”

  “Sixty-two miles from the border?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? The police are more careful near the border. Look,” he pointed to the map, “there is nobody around.”

  He was right. There wasn’t another town for thirty or forty miles, and that town was an equally tiny dot. Door would be a good place to hide a woman or a bird or a couple hundred thousand dollars. “Why is it called Cotorra Canyon?” I asked.

  “Maybe it is on the path the Indians used to trade parrots. The Indians here liked the red Mexican guacamayos.”

  “Maybe it’s a place they are traded now. According to Terrance Lewellen, Wes Brown is a parrot smuggler.”

  “Maybe there is an eco there,” the Kid said. “The voice of one woman is the voice of twenty.”

  “There’s only one way to find out,” I said.

  We had calculated that Door would take us four hours, so we left at one-thirty to allow time to get lost and time to get ready. We brought along my aunt Joan’s birding binoculars, which were worth more than my car. I was packing my Punch and my LadySmith .38. The Kid went unarmed. I knew he’d come, and I knew he’d come unarmed. His feeling is that if you can’t take care of yourself without a gun, you won’t be able to do it with one. We had a different attitude toward weapons, but the same love of adventure. Maybe the Kid and I weren’t a perfect match in society�
��s eyes, but there had to be some connection deep in the threads of our DNA. Also, this adventure would take place in former Apache country and, if all went as planned, we’d be coming back with a rare and beautiful bird.

  Terrance had outfitted me with the minicam, two thousand hundred-dollar bills stuffed into a Patagonia backpack, and an off-white Stetson with a silver concho hatband. The one nonnegotiable demand I’d made was that I wouldn’t wear a black hat. These days every would-be cowboy from Gallup to Nashville wears a black hat. The conchos made the Stetson the hat of a Santa Fe cowboy, but they provided good camouflage for the minicam. Terrance ran the wire from the cowboy hat through my hair (it blended right in), down my back to a fanny pack that carried the videotape. He showed me how to turn the camera on and off without being noticed. I had to keep the crown of the Stetson pulled down so that the mini-cam sat in the middle of my forehead like a third eye. Otherwise I’d be filming the stars in the sky. Any hat feels like a weight on my head, but the minicam was lighter than I’d expected. Terrance gave us a cage for Perigee, some of the parrot’s favorite toys and an avian first-aid kit in case the bird needed help. He also gave us a plastic bag of granola for a treat.

  “Take good care of my Perigee,” he told us.

  “Sure,” the Kid said.

  ******

  There’s a saying along the border—no pasa, no muera. Don’t cross and you won’t die. The Kid had made enough border crossings to know what to expect at night in the desert—robbery and/or death. He’d been robbed and beaten, and he got tired of the fighting and fighting back. Everybody has a nonnegotiable point, although not everybody is unlucky enough to discover that; nonnegotiable points are danger points. On the Kid’s last trip as an illegal, he reached his. Somewhere in the big lonely, he was held up at gunpoint. The guy demanded his gun. The Kid handed it over. He demanded his money. The Kid gave it to him. He demanded his watch, and the Kid said no. It wasn’t a prized possession, it wasn’t even valuable. It was just a watch, but the Kid had been pushed as far as he was willing to go on that particular night.

  “You have my gun. You have my money. You can’t have my watch,” he said.

  “Give it to me,” the coyote insisted.

  “No,” the Kid said.

  They stared each other down across the barrel of the coyote’s gun. Maybe the Kid’s fearlessness intimidated him. Maybe the coyote didn’t think a watch was worth another illegal’s life. He walked away and let the Kid keep the watch. He has worn it ever since; it is his invincible shield. It doesn’t keep good time, but better than no time at all, which is what I wear. My never wearing a watch is also a shield; my defense against being a bill-by-the-minute lawyer. Possibly my empty wrist is as much of an illusion as the Kid’s watch. You are what you are. What happens, happens.

  The Kid’s watch did get us out of Albuquerque at one-thirty and to Mile Marker 62 near eight. We went in his white pickup, which would provide better camouflage in Grant County than my yellow Nissan. We put the camper shell on and threw in some pillows and sleeping bags. The desert can be cold at night and dry any time. I hydrated well before I went to bed and was up all night peeing. We filled some plastic bottles with water and froze them. You stick the bottles between your legs to cool off, and when they defrost you drink the water. We brought along some chips and salsa and some Snapple Ice Tea. The only Cuervo Gold on this trip was the José Cuervo bandanna tied, Apache style, around the Kid’s head. I wore the cowboy hat with the minicam hidden beneath the conchos. A cowboy hat is good camouflage in Grant County too. A pickup in rural New Mexico without at least one Resistol in the cab raises suspicion. Sometimes you see as many as four or five. Men are more likely to wear hats than women, but seen in silhouette in the cab of a truck, who can tell whether the wearer is a man or a woman? Before I got in the Kid’s truck, I arranged my hat in his industrial-sized side-view mirror. The brim tilted like wings.

  “Looks good on you, Chiquita,” the Kid said.

  “Thanks,” I replied.

  The route we took was Route 60 through Magdalena, around the high bend where Robert James Waller had an out-of-body experience and immortalized it for millions of women, and up onto the vast Plains of San Agustin. We drove past the Very Large Array, the place where white satellite ears on tracks are moved around the high plain listening for a message—any message—from space. There’s a bumper sticker seen often in New Mexico that says MAGIC HAPPENS, and a road sign that says GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST. Does that mean the winds are allowed to exist, I always wonder, and if so who is it that’s granting permission? That sign also makes me think that aliens may exist. There are people who brake for them. If aliens do exist and want to communicate, the Plains of San Agustin would be the place to do it.

  The message I get from this space is that there’s a different vibe where there are no people. There’s a lot of nothing out here, more than any I’ve ever seen. Some people find emptiness terrifying. I find it exhilarating. On the Plains of San Agustin you can drive for sixty miles and see one truck and three or four ranches. It’s peaceful, but it’s not boring. Miles of nothing may be punctuated by a split second of lightning and fear. New Mexico can have more than twelve thousand dry lightning strikes in a day, and the area around Magdalena has the most active lightning field in the state. At any moment it can bolt from the clouds like the long, crooked finger of God or of fate. I’d driven this road before in summer; I knew the lightning is always there waiting and gathering its power. I knew the tricks the wide open plains play on your vision. We floated in a high blue universe. The blue sky and gray-blue mountains were real. The puddles on the road and the ponds in the fields were shimmering illusions.

  It was a change to see Route 60 from the Kid’s truck. I was higher. I didn’t have to keep my eyes on the road. I could watch the purple cloud shadows and the dance of the golden fields. I had time to think about the two thousand hundred-dollar bills in Terrance’s backpack. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t wonder what I would do with the money. There was a lot of space in two hundred thousand dollars, room to buy a house, a business, several trips around the world or two Mercedes Benz convertibles. It could support you for the rest of your life if you lived cheaply or in the third world. I’d given money its due and moved on to my hat, which also gave me a different perspective, a cowgirl’s perspective. The one pickup we passed had EAT BEEF and an American flag on its vanity plate. The driver gave us a neighborly wave; I waved back.

  I remembered that I had a third eye and wondered if it was seeing what I was seeing. I’m not used to looking through the eye of a camera. For the sake of practice, I turned the minicam on the Kid, who, as usual, was driving with maximum speed and total concentration. The Kid is never a chatterbox. He knows the value of words; he has to think them twice, in his first language and then in his second. He doesn’t talk much, and when he drives he doesn’t talk at all. He sensed that I was looking at him, and he squirmed in his seat.

  “Turn that thing off, Chiquita,” he said.

  “How’d you know I had it on?”

  “By your expression,” he said.

  ******

  We turned south on 270, reached Mile Marker 62 by eight, pulled off the road and parked. Somewhere down here the mile markers would become kilometer markers, but it hadn’t happened yet. The Kid concealed the pickup behind a boulder, hoisted the backpack, and locked up. The ground was hard and dry enough that you’d need to get close to see any tire tracks. Whoever had sent us here knew where to look, but the boulder would conceal the truck from a casual thief. The ground beyond the boulder was too sandy to drive any farther, and we didn’t know where to drive anyway. There had been no instructions as to what to do once we reached Mile Marker 62. I’d been hoping it would become obvious; it didn’t. No people or tracks were visible. The only sound was a couple of squabbling ravens. Maybe we were supposed to stand here and wait, but whoever had conceived that plan didn’t know me or the Kid. Waiting wasn’t our style. Still, we gave it a s
hot. Maybe the kidnapper had run into problems and was late, maybe the kidnapper was testing us, maybe the kidnapper was waiting for darkness. Hard as it was for us to wait in daylight, it would be borderline impossible after nightfall.

  This was the desert, but it wasn’t empty. Emptiness is another illusion of the road. The longer we stood here, the more we saw. Prickly pear cactus grew in a cluster of oval pods. Red fruit had sprouted from the pods and circled them like a string of two-inch hearts. The fruit is called tuna in Mexico, and it’s sold in the market there. You need a pair of gloves to pick a prickly pear. If you cut into one with bare hands, you (and the fruit) will bleed.

  Jimson weed bushes sprawled everywhere. The weed is also known as sacred datura, wild lily and trumpet lily. It’s a member of the deadly nightshade family, with the ability to accumulate narcotics from the soil; it is believed that it can even absorb atomic wastes. It is hallucinogenic, and it is poisonous. In daytime it’s a dumpster weed soaking up the earth’s garbage, but at night it flowers with an otherworldly beauty. The flowers are six inches long, the white inside shading to lavender as the trumpets open up.

  While I’d been thinking deadly nightshade thoughts the Kid had become an Apache tracker. He crisscrossed the shoulder of the road cutting for signs and found a triangular pile of stones that could have been put there yesterday or several hundred years ago. The sun was sinking, and the shadows of the cairn pointed toward a rock wall. The Kid followed the shadow, walked up to the wall and found a petroglyph that had been scratched into the rocks. A stick figure was holding a basket dripping water into a pair of wavy lines that had to symbolize a river or a stream. Petroglyphs are found everywhere there are rocks in New Mexico, and that’s just about everywhere. Artist is the oldest profession in this state.

  “He is giving directions to Cotorra Canyon,” the Kid said.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I know that the canyon is over there, and when you follow the rock pictures in the desert you find water.”