Parrot Blues

by Judith Van GIeson

  The Kid lifted the top strand of barbed wire. I stepped through, turned around and held the wire for him. We approached the vagabond ship. Light flickered from behind curtained windows and peeked out of the top of the cabin. A shirt thrown over the rigging danced a jittery dance under the spell of the moon and the wind. In Door gusty winds did exist. The shirt’s shadow partner followed, dancing backward on the deck in perfect sync. Everything had a partner tonight, and at this hour the shadows were longer than the originals. A ladder lead from the ground to the sailboat’s deck.

  “You want to go up?” the Kid asked me.

  Did I want to be pushing the envelope or licking the stamp? “You don’t want to stop now, do you?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, looking down at his watch.

  “Anybody there?” I yelled, pointing the .38 with one hand and feeling the top of the Punch with the other. The only answer was the sound of the rigging rubbing against the mast.

  “I go first,” the Kid said.

  “Why you?” I asked. “I’ve got the gun and the camera.”

  “I have more experience,” he said.

  “With what?”

  “Contrabandistas.” I couldn’t argue with that.

  “Take the gun,” I said.

  The Kid climbed the ladder. I adjusted my cowboy hat, turned on the camera and followed. Our footsteps resounded as we crossed the deck, giving the impression that there was deep water under us. Seats had been built, with storage cabinets underneath, around the sides of the deck. The top of one of them was open, but there was nothing inside. The wooden slats that were the door to the cabin were gone. We looked down into the light, which had the tentative, wavering quality of candle flame. There weren’t any power lines out here; I couldn’t hear the hum of a generator. We could see most of the cabin’s interior—but not all—from where we stood.

  “Anybody there?” I called again. There was no response. If anybody was inside, he or she was gagged, dead or not talking.

  The Kid stepped the three steps down into the cabin. I followed. A green parrot with red epaulets on its wings was perched in a corner. A black hood had been tied over its head, the falconers’ method of keeping a bird quiet. The birds think it’s nighttime, and they sleep at night. The parrot had the molted look of a stuffed bird that’s been sitting alone for years on somebody’s shelf. I knew it was alive, however, because it quivered when the Kid touched it.

  “It’s the bird the mineros ate,” he said. “I see them sometimes in Mexico.”

  He put the gun down, picked the parrot up and began crooning to it softly in Spanish as he lifted the hood. The instant the hood came off, the screeching began, a sound as grating as claws on a blackboard. The Kid continued talking in Spanish, but he could barely be heard above the din. The parrot flapped its wings and pumped up the volume with each beat. The noise made my inner ears vibrate and my head hurt. The parrot was about fifteen inches long, had a red forehead and a large, black beak that could crack open a piñon and was itching to take a chunk out of the Kid.

  “It’s a bronco,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “A bird that will never be domesticado.”

  The parrot noise affected me the way a child screaming in a supermarket does; I wanted to forget whatever I’d come for and flee.

  “Can you quiet it?” I asked the Kid.

  “Momenta,” he said.

  He put his hand over the bird’s head in a sheltering motion and held it near his heart. The bird calmed down, and I investigated Wes Brown’s quarters. The main cabin consisted of a tiny, messy kitchen, some bunks, the table and a chair where the Kid sat sideways, holding the parrot. A half-empty bottle of Jack Daniels and a couple of candles in clay candlesticks sat on the table. A ruana from Colombia was draped across a bunk. Papier-mâché demon masks from Mexico leaned against a counter, and the flickering light shadowed the eye and mouth holes and emphasized the meanness of the hooked nose. How much patience would it take to cover one of those masks with parrot and/or hawk feathers? I wondered.

  The wind that rocked the boat had come a long distance, gathering power on its journey the way water does. The cabin was drafty, the boards creaked and the candle flames stretched and ebbed in the wind. Within the belly of the boat it was easy to imagine we were at sea. In my mind I’d left Grant County and was sailing the edge of a rich and dark continent, circling around the ancient Colombian city of Santa Marta; the new version that resembled Miami Beach; past the province of Guajira, where the Indians who’ve gotten rich on oil drilling wear loincloths and drive Cadillacs; into the harbor of Cartagena, the walled city, where a chain was once hooked across the harbor in a futile attempt to keep the pirates out. This cruiser had been a smuggler’s boat, I had no doubt, and the coast of Colombia was where you’d go to pick up the most valuable loot. For some reason this smuggler had dropped out of that race. Had he lost his nerve? I wondered. Been broken? Busted?

  The Kid cooed to the parrot. I picked up the gun in one hand, a candle in the other and walked past the head, ducking my hat as I went into the forward cabin, a triangular space that’s usually used for a berth. The louvered door to the head swung behind me, causing the candle to flicker and flare and the shadows to advance and retreat. There was no berth in here, just a small desk built into the corner. The rest of the space was used for storage. I saw a bunch of duffle bags that might have contained sails. I also saw some scuffed and down-at-the-heels cowboy boots and a plastic bag full of red, green, yellow, brown and white feathers. Hawks and parrots. A backpack and a cowboy’s bad-weather duster had been thrown across the duffel bags. The pockets of the duster were empty, as was the backpack. I didn’t see a weapon, but I would have lifted it if I had. Wes Brown must have had a hunting rifle someplace, but not here.

  A ledger lay open on the desk. The entries were a detailed record of parrot transfers. The record keeping was precise, right down to the name of the pet store in Albuquerque (Birds of Paradise) that the birds were delivered to. The handwriting was tidy. Maybe Brown was neater in his work than he was in his life. Maybe he had a partner. I was wondering if the mini-cam could record the entries in the dim light, considering ripping out a page, when the bird started squawking again. The half-open door to the head was hiding me from the cabin and the cabin from me. Then the bird stopped squawking suddenly, and my finger reached for the trigger of my gun.

  “What are you doing in here?” I heard a man’s angry voice say. The parrot had concealed the sound of his descent into the cabin—from me anyway. There was no way of knowing what the Kid had heard or seen. I was hearing Wes Brown’s surly drawl.

  “The parrot needs help,” the Kid answered.

  “It’s not your parrot, cholo.”

  “Now it is.”

  “Give it to me.”

  “No,” the Kid said.

  “Give me my bird.”

  “You heard me.”

  “This is a .45 I’m holding here. You see it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to get shot over a bird?”

  “No tienes los cojones.” You don’t have the balls. You wouldn’t need much Spanish to get the Kid’s meaning. It was a nonnegotiable moment, and they take place in their own slow-motion time zone where every sensation is experienced with absolute and unforgettable clarity. The sailboat shifted on its mooring, and my heart skipped a beat. The cabin smelled of fear and people too close together. The candlelight flickered beyond the louvers. I felt the presence of a large, soft butterfly in the cabin. I felt it brush against me. My life with the Kid passed before me in an instant that seemed like a drop of water in an ocean of time. Give him the goddamn bird, I thought, give it to him. But my physical reaction was instinctive—no one was going to kill my man if my hands and feet could prevent it. I was reaching for the door when Brown’s weapon went off. I heard the floor splinter. I heard Brown swear—“Fuck.” I didn’t hear a sound from the Kid or the bird.

  “Drop it,
” I yelled, pushing the door aside and pointing the .38 at Brown, who was looking at the hole he’d made in the floor. I could see the back of the Kid’s head. His hair was electric. At the sound of my voice he turned around. His eyes had a wolf’s feral glow. He was alive and alert, but there was no time to revel in that now. He’d put the black hood back over the parrot’s head, and that’s what had been keeping it quiet. I don’t know what had kept him quiet. Cojones perhaps. That Wes Brown’s gun was still aiming at the floor gave me a big advantage. That and the fact that the Kid and I began working together. I’d never really considered us a team before, but in danger we were in perfect sync.

  The Kid didn’t miss a beat. “Give me the gun,” he said to Brown.

  The eyes that looked out from under Brown’s black hat wavered, the sign of a cowboy who couldn’t commit. Deep-water smuggling takes split-second timing and hair-trigger acuity. I could see why he’d given it up. Stopping to weigh his options was—for Wes Brown—a big mistake. I kept the .38 pointed at his vital organs. The Kid grabbed his hand and knocked the .45 out. It hit the floor with a thud instead of an explosion, and the Kid picked it up while my cowboy hat recorded every motion.

  “Why don’t you take care of this bird?” the Kid asked.

  “What the hell business is it of yours?” answered Wes Brown. “Who are you people, and what are you doing in my cabin?”

  “My name is Neil Hamel,” I said. “We’re looking for Deborah Dumaine.”

  “Deborah Dumaine?” Brown pushed his hat back on his head. “What would she be doing here?” He gave no sign that he knew who I was or that he’d been expecting me.

  “Why don’t you tell me?”

  “I haven’t a clue.” He did a lightweight’s feigning dance, shifting back and forth from one worn boot to the other. A plastic bag full of hawk feathers and dead parrots lay on the floor beside him. His eyes, seeking an escape route, circled the room and latched onto the only woman present—me. He had a pretty boy’s way of fluttering his lashes. The lashes were thick enough, and his eyes, a pale gray, were pretty enough. In his boot heels he was about my height. His thick blond hair fell to his shoulders. Good looks are the ruin of many men, and he was good-looking from across a candlelit room, but up close (and I had moved up close enough) his face had the ruddy, burned-out look of someone who’d spent too much time alone with the sun or the bottle. “I’m in trouble,” his pale eyes said. “Rescue me.” A lot of women would have tried. A lot of them had probably already failed.

  I had expected Wes Brown’s first step to be to demand the money, then to negotiate the terms of the hostages’ release. His know-nothing reaction forced me to reconsider, and I came up with some possibilities: One: He knew about the kidnapping and had invited us here, but something had happened to Deborah and Perigee and he was stalling until he could produce them—if he could ever produce them. Two: He knew nothing about the kidnapping, and someone else had sent us here, although Terrance’s cassette was a major obstacle to that theory. Three: He knew about the kidnapping, but he was pretending he didn’t, setting it up for someone we wouldn’t be able to identify to collect the money. That other person should have met us at Mile Marker 62 and might even be waiting there now. That the voice on the cassette had been Brown’s, I had no doubt; I recognized the surly drawl. The digitally altered voice on the R line could have been anyone’s, but someone had written the script, and that had taken a certain amount of imagination and humor. I didn’t see a lot of humor in Wes Brown, but I did see considerable fantasy. This was a person, after all, who lived in a ghost town in a wooden boat.

  He continued his story, and he might—or might not—have been ratcheting up the fantasy level. “I haven’t seen Deborah since she showed up here a couple of weeks ago.” He shifted his weight, blinked and attempted to meet my eyes. “She came on to me.” Maybe he was trying to appeal to some basic female instinct to outshine the competition. But if he thought Deborah’s interest would make him irresistible to me, he was mistaken. And if he thought I believed what he was saying, he was also mistaken. Terrance had said he thought Deborah was too smart for Wes Brown, but Terrance’s objectivity had been suspect, and smart women can be dumber than dirt when it comes to men. Still, I could see Brown coming a mile away, and I wanted to believe that Deborah would have too. As for Brown, I hadn’t decided yet how smart I thought he was. He was a criminal; there was plenty of evidence of that. Criminals aren’t known for their brain power, but the well-kept ledgers did show evidence of some kind of intelligence.

  “Deborah came on to you?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he shrugged. “I told her I wasn’t interested.” The message his eyes were sending was “But I could be interested in you.” It’s a sleazy guy who’ll send that message five minutes after he threatens to kill your lover, although he didn’t know the Kid was my lover. He did know he and I were Anglo and the Kid was not. I’ve gotten this look before from pale-eyes—you have more in common with me than him. I looked away, hoping my eyes remained noncommittal, because the message I was thinking was, Buzz off, parrot killer.

  “How much time did Deborah spend here?” I asked, trying to keep my voice noncommittal.

  “Couple of hours, I guess.”

  Long enough for … what? I wondered.

  “Who are you people anyway? What’s your game?” He looked from me to the Kid.

  “I’m Terrance Lewellen’s lawyer.”

  “That asshole’s trying to blame his problems with Deborah on me?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “And you, bird boy?” he said to the Kid. “Who are you?”

  “Cállate,” said the Kid. Shut up. His head was cocked; he’d been ignoring us and listening intently to something else. He could be as still as a predator when he wanted to.

  “What?” asked Wes Brown.

  “Oye. Listen.”

  There was a sound coming from above us on the deck, a low, ferocious growl, the universal back-off threat. It could have been the sound of a mountain lion, a dog, a coyote. It might even have been, by the remotest of possibilities, a wolf.

  “What the…” Wes Brown said.

  The Kid was itching to get up on the deck, but he aimed the .45 at Brown and made him go first. I followed. The moon had risen a little higher while we’d been below. The deck had gotten a little brighter. The gusty wind had died down, and the shirt was resting after its ecstatic dance. There was no sign of a cat or a dog, but a big blue macaw was hanging upside down by its beak and swinging from the boom.

  “Perigee!” I said.

  “What the hell is going on here?” asked Wes Brown.

  “Arwk,” said the macaw, who appeared to be in magnificent condition and have every feather in place. The tail feathers were long and silky. The plumage on his breast and neck was a smooth, deep blue, becoming lighter and greener around the head. The Kid had a few nuts in his pocket and he offered them to the macaw, who climbed off the boom onto his shoulder and gobbled them up.

  With the bandanna tied around his forehead, the parrot on his shoulder, the gun in his hand and the mast behind him, the Kid could have been a pirate. Too bad we didn’t have a gangplank to walk Wes Brown on. The prospect of deep water might have convinced him to fess up.

  “Que guapo,” the Kid clucked to the bird.

  “Pretty boy,” Perigee cackled. “Pretty boy, pretty boy, pretty boy.” The rigging groaned as it rubbed against the mast.

  “He couldn’t have flown here, could he?” I asked the Kid.

  “No. Mira. His wings are cut.”

  Perigee might well have been dangling up here the entire time we were talking to Brown. He cocked his head and looked at me as if he were trying to understand. The yellow circles around his bright eyes accented their intelligence and curiosity. “Pretty boy,” he croaked, then, “Arwk.”

  “Did you bring him here with you?” I asked Brown.

  “Me? You gotta be kidding. That’s Lewellen’s bird. I haven’t a clue what i
t’s doing here.”

  I looked over the deck and saw the faint prints of my running shoes and the Kid’s leading from the butte. The only other footprints were the half-moon-shaped heels of a cowboy boot, put there by someone who came down hard on the heel. They were all exactly the same size, they all led to and from Wes Brown’s truck to the cage or the path through the brush to Cottora Canyon. Perigee might have gotten here by magic if not on Wes Brown’s shoulder.

  The Kid was looking at the box of parrots Brown had put on the ground next to the cage. “I want to see something,” he said. “Watch him.” He nodded toward Brown and carried the macaw back to the boom.

  Perigee gripped the boom with his beak and did a somersault, watching us with his bright eyes and flapping his large blue wings. He was a high-wire act, as playful and irresistible as a child, but I couldn’t let myself get charmed; I had the devious and uncharming Wes Brown to think about. I wondered if he’d be any more forthcoming now that the Kid was on the ground and he was alone with me, an Anglo and a woman. Maybe if I played the eye game I’d get some answers. It had been a long time since I’d flirted to get what I wanted. I didn’t know if I was still capable of it—if I’d ever been capable of it.

  “The feds are hiring wets now?” Brown asked, looking at the Kid. A smuggler would suspect everyone of being a fed, but so would a kidnapper.

  “He’s not a wetback,” I said.

  “Is he a fed?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you two doing here?”

  Meeting his eyes by moonlight was comparable to meeting them underwater; they lacked clarity. Still, I had to do it now if I was ever going to. The minicam couldn’t do that for me. I swam into the fathoms, and I saw that Wes Brown was drowning. Water is a conductor, and the message it sent was that this man was full of confusion and pain. Misery leads to criminal activity, but was he miserable enough to commit a kidnapping? Smuggling is common, and bird smugglers are more likely to get a fine than a sentence. But kidnapping is the deep water of crime and it was possible that he’d gotten in over his head. It could be that something had gone way wrong, that Deborah Dumaine was dead and he couldn’t see the way out. If Deborah was dead, there wasn’t any way out, but the truth would cut him a better deal.