“Is there water in the canyon?”
“There was,” he said. “The canyon was made by the water.”
Talking about water made me thirsty, but the water was back in the car. “I need something to drink,” I said.
“Put a pebble in your mouth. When the Apaches did that, they could go all day without water.”
I found a pebble and took his advice.
“If you put a pebble in your shoe, you can make your walk look and sound different. Did you know that?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
We followed the rock wall into an arroyo with a sandy bottom that meandered in the direction of Cotorra Canyon. A butte had been formed by centuries of water seeking the lowest level. It wasn’t a very high butte, a newcomer in geological time. A couple of coyotes loped along the top of it. Coyotes are the tricksters of the animal world, and in coyote country things aren’t always what they seem. The Kid took my aunt Joan’s binoculars and looked over the butte, beyond the coyotes and into the sky.
He pointed up. “El buitre,” he said.
He handed me the binoculars, but I didn’t need them to see that to the east, above where Cotorra Canyon had to be, a black vulture was circling with a long prehistoric glide. It was barely bothering to beat its large wings, letting the thermals keep it up. You rarely see a vulture alone. If a vulture finds something to eat, it will be joined by more. Soon, a couple of them were circling like an airborne merry-go-round. But whatever was underneath wasn’t merry. A vulture in the air meant that something on the ground was dying or dead. There’s nothing like a vulture to remind you that we’re not always at the top of the food chain.
The Kid untied his bandanna and wiped the sweat from his forehead. It was a hundred degrees in there and getting hotter by the minute. My gun was in its holster, my pepper spray hooked onto my belt. There’s not a weapon made that can protect you from what is already dead, but a cigarette helps cushion the blow. I lit up.
“When I lived in Mexico, I knew a woman who went rafting on the Usumacinta River,” I told the Kid. “The raft hit a rock and broke up. She swam to shore, but her leg was broken and she couldn’t get any farther. She lay there for days while the vultures circled overhead, waiting for her to die.” There could be a woman in Cotorra Canyon with just enough life left in her to keep the vultures aloft.
“El buitre is the sign of death,” the Kid said, “but he is also the sign of purificacion. He eats the bad meat and cleans the bones. Nothing can hurt el buitre. He can eat everything. The Indians believed in his power.”
“How do you know that?” I asked.
“I listen.” He looked at the cigarette in my hand. “You want someone to see that smoke, Chiquita?”
“Probably not,” I said. I rubbed the cigarette out and buried the butt in the sand.
“El buitre will stay away if there is something dead and something alive,” the Kid said. “When the lorotrafìcantes bring the parrots here from Mexico, they give them tequila to keep them quiet, they tape their mouths shut; they kill many of them. Smuggling is very brutal. Sometimes in Colombia they smuggle cocaina in dead babies. A woman carries the babies and says they are sleeping.” He nodded toward Cotorra Canyon, where the vultures had taken a sudden dive, leaving the sky as bare as a picked-clean bone. “You sure you want to go in there? It could be muy feo.”
Really ugly. It could be more ugly if we didn’t go. The desert lizard crawled up my spine. Something lost its life in Cotorra Canyon while we stood in the arroyo.
We’d come across a tumble of rocks that had fallen from the butte. “I think we can get to the top here,” the Kid said. “It’s better not to walk into a canyon full of lorotraficantes. No?”
“Yes.”
“We can see them from up there, but if we stay close to the ground they won’t see us.”
“Right,” I said.
Before we climbed, he stopped to straighten the backpack, tighten his bandanna, and take a good look around. The sun was setting, and the sky behind us had turned the color at the center of a bud or a flame. A bird perched on a dead branch made a black silhouette against the rose-on-fire sky. The bird had the shape of a hawk, broad and hunched at the shoulders, narrow at the talons, an upside-down vase. It was the last chance for the diurnal hunters to get a meal before night fell.
“The sky is the color of la encia del leopardo,” the Kid said.
The color of a leopard’s gums, a line from his favorite Argentine writer. I’d heard it before, but this was the first time I knew what it meant.
“The moon will be coming up there.” He pointed east.
“How do you know that?”
“Tonight it is la luna llena…”
The full moon.
“…and la luna llena comes up across from where the sun goes down. When the moon enters Cotorra Canyon, it will be very light. Your camera will get good pictures from up there if it can see that far.”
I hoped it would. My desire to enter a canyon filled with vultures had become very dim. Dextrous Horse Woman might have done it, but she was an Apache and she rode a horse. “It’s not a very high butte,” I said.
“Verdad. Lista?”
“Ready,” I said.
“Vamos.”
The rocks that had fallen from the top of the butte were so evenly spaced that they might have been tossed there by a StairMaster. It was an easy climb, but rattlers like rocks at dusk, and we had to go slowly, watching and listening for the warning whirr. By the time we reached the top, the moon was rising exactly where the Kid had said it would. Puffs of clouds preceded it like the smoke from a signal fire. A lenticular hovered above the horizon, and the light reflected on its underbelly, turning it into a silver fish. The moon’s aura was followed by a sliver, and then the rest of it slid slowly across the horizon. It was the biggest moon I’d ever seen, a perigee moon, a perfect circle, a hole in the sky, so full of light that I had the feeling I could see through it. The moon was bright enough and low enough to cast a long shadow, but when the nights are as clear as they are here, even the Milky Way will cast a shadow. We scuttled across the butte. It was flat and smooth, a faster and safer way to see into Cotorra Canyon, and possibly even Door, than wandering around the sandy arroyo.
When we reached the eastern end of the butte, we put our bellies to the ground (concealing our shadows beneath us), crawled up and peered over. I hoped our heads would look like rocks from the canyon—if anybody was looking up from the canyon. The vultures had gone wherever it is that vultures go at night and left a pile of bones behind. I glassed them quickly with Joan’s binoculars and saw that they were the bones of a bird, not a woman. The vultures hadn’t picked the carrion entirely clean. A pile of feathers remained that were a light and dark mix. Hawks, I thought, and the only predator a full-grown hawk has is man. Something had frightened the vultures away, and I didn’t have to look far to find it. A man stood beside a prickly pear cactus wearing a black cowboy hat and smoking a cigarette. His name was Wes Brown. The moon’s spotlight created a shadowy black and white scene in Cotorra Canyon like a night shoot or the view seen through an ATM surveillance camera. A couple of bats swooped by our heads.
“Is that him?” the Kid asked me.
“That’s him,” I whispered, turning on the minicam and laying the cowboy hat beside me with the camera facing forward. “I think those are hawk feathers. Why would someone kill a bunch of hawks?”
“Hawks kill loros,” the Kid said. “He was protecting his contraband.”
It was illegal, I knew, to kill a migratory bird. Crime one for Wes Brown. It’s widely believed that more crimes are committed under a full moon, but no obvious crime was taking place at the moment. Wes Brown tossed his cigarette to the ground, picked up a shovel and dug a hole. He appeared to be looking for something rather than burying something. There was a wooden crate on the ground next to him, and I could see through the binoculars that it was empty. The prickly pear appeared to be a marker. Brown dug do
wn about a foot, found what he wanted—a plastic bag—and pulled it out. He opened the bag and took out several bills, but I couldn’t make out the denomination.
“The smelly money,” I said.
“What?” asked the Kid.
“The money he deposited in the bank had an earthy smell.”
Brown put the bills in his pocket and buried the stash again, smoothing the ground carefully over the spot. He turned around and walked in our direction. We slid back from the edge of the butte. Brown must have hidden the shovel in a crevice in the wall, because when we looked over again it was gone. He went back to his bleeding-heart marker and lit another cigarette. I wanted that cigarette. Badly.
It might have been serendipity that brought us to this spot, but to me it had the feel of a master plan. We’d been sent to Mile Marker 62 and been diverted by the petroglyphs. The petroglyphs led to Cotorra Canyon whether we followed the steps or the arroyo. Brown was standing near the spot where the water had flowed. But he already had a pocket and a hole full of money. Bringing money to him was like pouring Perrier into the Rio Grande.
“Do you think he’s waiting for us?” I asked the Kid.
“I don’t think so, Chiquita,” he said. “Mira.”
He pointed toward the southeast, where a dotted line of car lights was visible on a highway twenty or thirty miles away. It’s possible to see that far where the nights are so open and clear. One car had left the line and was crossing the desert. Cotorra Canyon wasn’t accessible by car from the arroyo, but it seemed to be from the southeast. We watched and waited while Wes Brown smoked his cigarette and the car’s headlights approached. It was possible that he was waiting for someone to deliver Deborah to him, and he was going to give that person the money. It was possible that person was late and Brown still intended to meet us at Mile Marker 62. The car pulled up in front of him and turned off the headlights. Who needed them under la luna llena ? All I could tell about the car was that it was a station wagon.
The Kid glassed it. “Ford,” he said. “Pinto.”
Two guys wearing the plastic cowboy hats of Mexican campesinos got out and walked over to Brown. Some conversation and hand gestures ensued. The conversation was a distant murmur from where we lay, but it was a murmur that had resonance like a mountain stream slapping on a hard rock bed. The guys walked around the side of the car. I hoped they’d open the door and Deborah Dumaine would climb out. I hoped she would be able to climb out.
“Mulas,” the Kid said.
People who get paid very little to carry something very valuable across the border. One of the men pushed a taillight aside, reached into a compartment hidden behind it and pulled something out. It was about a foot long, a few inches wide and tightly wrapped in a paper bag, a lot of dope or an average-sized bird. The man ripped off a piece of tape, opened the package and a parrot rolled out. Its wings didn’t flap, its beak didn’t open, its head flopped.
“Tu madre,” said the Kid.
It was muy feo, worse than that—muchisimo feo. The man swore and tossed the dead parrot to the ground. Wes Brown swore back, picked the parrot up and put it in a plastic bag, one meal the vultures wouldn’t be getting. If the parrot wasn’t dead already, the bag would have killed it.
“Why is he keeping it?” I asked the Kid.
“He can sell the feathers,” he said.
The runner reached behind the taillight, pulled out and unwrapped another package, also a parrot, way feeble but still alive. Wes Brown looked it over. Apparently that bird was too maimed for him to care about, or it was the wrong kind of parrot. He held the head in one hand and the body in the other and twisted the neck until that bird’s head flopped too. It was revolting to see something so big kill something so small, and for what? Money. It may have made Brown feel like a god, but it turned him into a despicable coward in my eyes. We couldn’t hear the snap of the bird’s neck, but I cringed and the Kid put his hand on my back.
Brown threw the dead bird away. The vultures would pick the bones clean tomorrow. Something else would get the meat and lick the brains out tonight. I looked away as the runner unrolled the next package, thinking of the vitality of Maxamilian and Colloquy, thinking of the flocks of thick-billeds that once filled the air, expecting another dead bird, but sound exited from this bag, a harsh sound that echoed around and around Cotorra Canyon, echo feeding on echo, until the squawk of one terrified bird became the cry of all endangered parrots. The men ignored the sound and continued their sickening business.
“Uno,” said the Kid.
The runner reached behind the taillight and pulled out more and more parrots, most of them dead. The Pinto resembled a car packed full of circus clowns—dead clowns. There could have been a pipeline under the taillight that ran all the way to the border and was jammed full of parrots: green parrots, yellow parrots, red parrots, blue parrots, their feathers mingling together in a parrot stew. When the runners were finished, they’d pulled out twenty tightly wrapped birds and sixteen of them were dead. The moonlight had robbed them of their color. The smugglers had robbed them of their freedom and their lives. Wes Brown taped the beaks of the live ones shut again and put them in the box. He put most of the dead ones in the plastic bag. He reached into his pocket and counted out some money. The amount provoked an argument, but eventually the runners took what Brown offered and drove away in the Pinto with the deadly hidden compartment.
“You know how they catch those parrots?” the Kid said.
“No.”
“They cut down the trees they live in, and they fall to the ground. Many of them die. Many more die on the road. The guys who catch them get a couple of dollars each.”
“And the runners? How much do they get?’
“Five hundred dollars maybe. Depends on how many live.”
I didn’t want to think about how much Brown would get for the live ones. A lot, but not as much as he could get for Perigee and Deborah Dumaine. He had come back for his shovel and started to bury the money he’d kept.
“Vamos, Chiquita,” the Kid said. “Door is on the other side of the mesa. If we go now, we can get there before him. Maybe we will find the woman there.”
“Maybe,” I said.
8
WE SLID BACK from the edge until the depths of Cotorra Canyon weren’t visible anymore. Assuming that if we couldn’t see Wes Brown, he couldn’t see us, we stood up and trotted across the butte. The Kid took the south side, I took the north, giving me the sandy arroyo, him the brush. Both of us were looking for any sign of Deborah and agreed to yip if we found anything. The Kid yipped first. He hadn’t seen Deborah, but he had come across Door about half a mile back from Cotorra Canyon.
It was a pile of tumbled stones and broken beams in the desert moonlight, a twentieth-century ruin. What used to take hundreds of years to accomplish took, in the mining boom and bust years, ten. A lode was discovered; in New Mexico that could mean coal, silver, gold, turquoise, copper, uranium, potassium salts or pumice for stonewashing jeans. They’ve all been fuel for our extractive industries. A town sprang up near the mine complete with bars, hookers and con men. The lode got mined out, the miners left. There has been a constant ebb and flow of civilizations in Door’s part of the world: warriors and misfits, soldiers and diggers. Had it been nearer a population center, artists and craftspeople would have moved in, set up shop and transformed it from a cheap rental to an expensive tourist trap.
Since it was a dot in the middle of Grant County, it was inhabited by rodents, reptiles and a parrot smuggler. When the miners moved out, the critters came back.
We stood at the edge of the butte and peered down into Door, which was also home to a sailboat in dry dock. The nearest places you’d want to sail a boat would be Elephant Butte or the Sea of Cortez. The sailboat sat in the spot where the plaza must have been. Its mast was erect, a beacon for something, but I couldn’t say what. The name El Vagabundo was scrawled across the stern.
“Que loco,” the Kid said, shaking his head.<
br />
It was a touch of magical realism in the already surreal desert, and enough to make you wonder just what Door was the doorway to. Vagabundo was a wooden boat, made in the days before fiberglass became ubiquitous on the water. Woodies require a lot of maintenance, and this boat hadn’t been getting any. It was scruffy and badly in need of paint, but it was shelter, which was more than you could say for the crumbling houses. The boat was about thirty feet long, the type of cruiser that can be picked up for several thousand dollars in the marinas along southern California and northern Mexico. I knew that because I did a tour of duty once along the Mexican coast. There’s a dream many Californians have: to chuck everything on the mainland, buy a boat and spend their days cruising warm water. They call it “catching the rabbit” in honor of the racing greyhounds that manage to catch the mechanical rabbit and drop out of the race. Cruising is a cheap way to live, and there’s always one way to make money if the savings run out. As to why anybody would put it in Door—possibly because the rules of civilization were as hard to enforce here as they were at sea.
A barbed-wire fence circled Door. The dirt road that lead to Route 270 was blocked by a chain-link gate and a couple of hand-lettered wooden signs that read NO TRESPASSING and KEEP OUT. A tired American-made pickup with an NRA bumper sticker was parked inside the perimeter of the fence, near a chicken-wire cage that was empty except for a couple of metal bowls and a branch for a perch.
The StairMaster hadn’t provided steps for us on this side of the butte. There were no evenly spaced rocks, only soft earth that showed the gouges of erosion. We tried to descend slowly and carefully, but it couldn’t be done. Our speed picked up, and we raced faster and faster as we descended. When we reached level ground, I ran several feet before I could stop. When I did, I looked behind us. If you didn’t get too close, our path of descent resembled an erosion channel. The flat ground was hard enough that our footprints were scattered and faint. Wes Brown would be approaching from the other side of Door. Chances were he wouldn’t notice the signs of our arrival. It never hurts to have surprise on your side, and he wouldn’t be expecting us to show up here. Or would he?
Parrot Blues Page 9
