Parrot Blues

by Judith Van GIeson

  “You catch the rabbit?” I asked, trying to develop a rapport.

  “I thought I had.” He shrugged.

  “What happened? You get caught?”

  “Yeah.”

  “For drugs?”

  “Right.”

  “Did you do time?”

  “No. I plea-bargained and got a suspended sentence and a fine. They took everything I had but this.” He kicked the cabin of the boat.

  He’d been willing enough to tell me about the drug smuggling. Maybe because I was a woman and women existed only as insubstantial shadows to him. I attempted to move on to the next crime. “Tell me the truth about Deborah,” I said, “it’ll be a lot easier on you.”

  “Huh?” he said, branding himself indelibly as a So-Cal cowboy. A real cowboy would say ma’am.

  “It could keep a bad situation from getting a whole lot worse.”

  “Right,” he said with a short and bitter laugh.

  “Tell me where she is.”

  “I told you I haven’t a clue.”

  “Where’s your partner?”

  “What partner?”

  “You’ll be in big trouble if anything happens to Deborah.”

  “You got the wrong guy. I’m not responsible for Deborah Dumaine.” He blinked his eyes and shifted his weight.

  There were a number of options. The Kid and I could have beaten the truth out of him, but that was a felony. I could have bribed him, but the money belonged to Terrance Lewellen. I could have made a citizen’s arrest, but that would conflict with my responsibilities to my client and there was no guarantee that Deborah would be better off if Wes Brown was removed from Door—if she was in Door. He could be her only source of food and water. It was a quagmire. I was ready to turn it over to the feds, but I couldn’t do that either without consulting my client.

  “Chiquita,” the Kid called from the ground. “Come here. I want to show you something. Watchate,” he pointed the .45 at Brown, “stay where you are. Put your hands on the mastil.” Brown swore out loud. Under his breath he called the Kid a fucking wet, but he followed orders.

  I climbed down the ladder and circled the pickup, recording Brown’s license plate number with the minicam. I looked into the cab of the truck, checked the glove compartment and under the seat and found no weapons hidden there. I walked over to the Kid and the cage. He showed me the parrots in the wooden box and I taped them too, making the feds’ case for them. The parrots were a sad and sorry lot; they’d had a long, cruel journey.

  “Those are yellow-headed Amazonas from Mexico,” the Kid said. “But this one is a blue-fronted Amazona from Argentina. Beautiful, no?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “What do you want to do with him and the birds? You want to take them to Albuquerque?”

  “No,” I said. “That would be tampering with evidence. I want to call in the feds and let them do it, but I have to talk to my client first.”

  “Something could happen to these birds if we leave them here. That guy could hurt or kill them.” He nodded toward Brown, who glared at us from the mast.

  “He’s more likely to sell them,” I said. “I’ve got the name of his contact in Albuquerque. I’ll call Terrance as soon as we get back to the pickup. Why don’t we tie Brown up for a few hours anyway? If I can convince Terrance, we can call the feds and get them in here.”

  “Okay. Let’s go. You want to take Perigeo. Right?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “I want to take the thick-billed.”

  “Brown won’t like it.”

  The Kid shrugged. There were times when a weapon was more effective than a watch. We tied Brown to the mast with some knots the Kid had learned in his travels. A partner might well show up and untie him. Brown was a sailor; he’d know something about knots and might untie himself eventually. The rope was at best a temporary measure to get us over the butte and to the phone without Brown’s interference. One of us might have stayed here and guarded him, but neither of us wanted to do it. There were too many unknowns out there in the desert, and no telling when and if help would come. No telling what my client’s next direction would be, and I was obligated to follow my client’s directions.

  “Tell us where Deborah is and we might let you go,” was my parting shot to Brown.

  “I haven’t a clue,” was his parting answer.

  The Kid put the parrots in the cage, took the tape off their beaks and gave them some food and water before we left. We began a tedious sideways trudge up the butte, slipping and sliding. Brown started yelling and swearing when we were about halfway up after it was too much trouble to go back down and beat the crap out of him.

  “You wet bastard,” he yelled at the Kid, followed by “cunt” for me.

  “A la verga,” said the Kid.

  “Prick,” said I.

  That’s the kind of guy Brown was, a smuggler who’d turn on you whether you crossed him or whether you didn’t.

  9

  OUR SHADOWS STRETCHED west as we crossed the butte. My thoughts were on the treachery of some men and what I would say to my client when I reached him on his C phone. When the Apaches wanted to communicate, they lit a fire and fanned the flame. A warrior on another butte would see the puffs of smoke and pass the message on. The whole vast Apache territory could be alerted in a matter of minutes. It was almost as fast and a lot more interesting than a fax machine. Through their system of smoke signals, the Apaches were able to keep tabs on where the cavalry had been, how many there were and where they were going. For hundreds of years they stayed one step ahead. We’re the air people, our thoughts ride the airwaves; the Apaches were people of earth and fire.

  When we reached the north side of the butte, we climbed down the rock stairs very carefully and walked through the sandy white arroyo. Maybe we were a step ahead, maybe not. The C phone waited in the pickup for me to call my client.

  While I did, the Kid attended to the parrots. Perigee squawked happily when he saw his toys. If he was having any return-to-the-cage anxieties, he didn’t reveal them. He was not an anxious bird. The contrast between him and the thick-billed was pronounced. The thick-billed seemed scarred by something, the memory of the border crossing, maybe, or life with Wes Brown.

  I called my client and listened to his phone go through the answering machine dance, ringing two, three, four, five times. Come on, Terrance, I thought. Answer the goddamn phone. It was hard to believe he could be sleeping in Albuquerque while I was in the desert negotiating the release of his wife and his bird with his two hundred thousand dollars. “Lewellen here,” the machine came on. “You know what to do.”

  “Pick up the phone, Terrance,” I said when the machine beeped. “It’s Neil.”

  As I suspected, he was screening his calls, but who else was he expecting in the middle of the night? “You get the bird?” he asked me.

  “Yeah. We found him on the deck of Wes Brown’s boat.”

  “Yahoo. How’s he look?”

  “Wonderful. He’s happy and healthy. He’s in his cage now, playing with his toys. There’s no sign of Deborah.”

  “Did you give Brown the money?”

  “He didn’t ask. He says he knows nothing about Deborah and he doesn’t know how Perigee ended up on his deck.”

  “He’s a liar. He won’t take the money from you because you can identify him.”

  “We’re not far from the border. Two hundred thousand dollars could take him somewhere and he’d never have to come back. It won’t make any difference whether I can identify him or not once he gets to Mexico.” Would the feds care enough to go looking for him? That could depend on how much he owed them.

  “He’ll want to come back. He likes it in Door; he’s too screwed up to live anyplace else. His partner will show up with Deborah and take the money. Brown’ll think there’s no way of proving he was involved.”

  “There is a lot of circumstantial evidence.”

  “Did you get it on the minicam?”

 
; “Yeah.”

  “Good. The person who picks up the ransom will be someone you’ve never seen before. Mark my words.”

  “We came across Brown smuggling parrots. I think it’s way past time to call in the feds.”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know what kind of danger Deborah is in.”

  “She’ll be in worse danger if they get involved. Believe me. They’ll screw it up. And don’t you do it yourself, either. Everything I told you I told you in confidence.” Not if he told me over the cell phone. Anybody who tuned in could listen to the radio signals zinging between Door and Albuquerque. They couldn’t hear my swear words riding the waves in English and in Spanish, but they were there too, if only in spirit. “Stay down there till morning, and if nothing happens come on back. Deborah could be in Albuquerque for all we know. If they contact me directly, I’ll call you.” He hung up.

  He didn’t go so far as to remind me of the lawyer’s code of ethics; he didn’t have to. One of the original purposes of that code had to have been to prevent lawyers from ratting on impossible clients.

  “That’s the last time I ever work for a corporate raider,” I said to the Kid.

  “What did he say?”

  “He doesn’t want me to call in the feds.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s possible he came by the macaws illegally and is afraid he’ll lose them. It’s probable the kidnapping was taped illegally. If he committed a crime, I can’t reveal it.” If Terrance had committed a crime, the question was, how big a crime?

  “You have to do what he says?”

  “Yeah. He’s my client. He wants us to stay here till morning and see if Brown’s partner shows up.”

  “You think that will happen?”

  “Who knows? Who knows if Brown has a partner? Who knows if Brown is even involved?”

  “You believed that guy when he said he knew nothing?”

  “Did he look like an honest person to you?”

  “No. He’s a lorotrafìcante. He has the eyes of a liar.”

  “The evidence is not in his favor.”

  “If we wait, maybe the woman will come to us.”

  “Maybe.”

  I thought he’d be pissed about spending the remainder of the night at Mile Marker 62, but he wasn’t. He had too much of an adrenaline buzz to want to get in the truck and drive the six hours back to Albuquerque. He was having trouble just standing still. A near-death experience activates all the senses—for a while anyway. Then it wears off, and you either get the shakes or collapse. I had a bit of a buzz myself, but mine came from the feeling that I was being manipulated by a cosmic puppeteer. There was tension in the strings. There was also some unresolved business from the events in the boat.

  “Why you not give Brown the parrot?” I asked the Kid, lapsing into his English. Sometimes his English reflected me, sometimes mine reflected him.

  He shrugged. “I knew he wouldn’t shoot.”

  “If you’d been wrong, you’d be dead now.” My voice had a sharp edge, and what was that reflecting? That I was pissed at him for putting me through his death, if only for an instant?

  “He’s a cobarde.

  “A coward with a temper. He has killed a lot of parrots and hawks,” I said.

  “That’s what a cobarde does—kills birds and animals.”

  “That’s how people killers get their start.”

  “If I give him the parrot, maybe he shoot me anyway.”

  Maybe.

  “You had your gun.” He smiled. “I knew you would protect me.”

  “Brown fired before I could,” I reminded him.

  “Verdad, but it went into the floor. It’s over. Forget it, Chiquita. Mira.” He pointed to the sky where a star had left its constellation and taken a solitary dive, which happens often enough in the summer skies. “Death is always there,” he said. “It can come like that.” He snapped his fingers. “You can never be ready, or you can always be ready.”

  “No pasa, no muera,” I said.

  “I crossed the border a long time ago,” he replied.

  “I know.” His hair was electric, the wolf glow was in his eyes. We were in the Land of Enchantment; the night was alive with sweetness and danger. The prickly pear cactus were circled by a red heart string. The datura was releasing its scent and its pollen. If moonlight had a fragrance, it would be the scent of sacred datura. It’s a magical plant that can rearrange you or kill you. Its beauty was exquisite and abundant. We were surrounded by hundreds, maybe thousands, of moon-white flowers, a wedding party where every bud had become, for one night only, a bride. I knew he was looking at me with the thing I most dreaded—need—in his eyes, but I met them. It was a need I had too—to say we were here and alive when we could so easily have been vulture fodder.

  “In the spring there are yellow flowers here that smell exactly like chocolate,” the Kid said.

  “Verdad?”

  “Si.”

  “What does this smell like to you?” He picked a datura flower and handed it to me. I ran my hand down the silky trumpet to the place where the petal opened up. I stuck my nose into the pistil. It was, I thought, the most beautiful thing I had ever smelled. It was the odor of love in the face of death, its most pure and simple form. Love always exists in the face of death but we usually don’t admit it.

  “It smells like the moon,” I said.

  “Come with me,” the Kid whispered.

  “Okay,” I responded. Yes, I was thinking. Yes, yes, yes.

  We’d been brushed by the wings of death. I saw it as a very large butterfly, the size of a man or a woman. Its power was awesome, but its touch had been as light as a feather. It was terrifying; it was exhilarating. I wanted more than anything to lie down on the ground and make love.

  We grabbed our equipment and a sleeping bag, walked into the desert and surrendered to the spell of the moon and the weed. It was so quiet I could hear the earth hum. The stars were bright enough to navigate from here to Tierra del Fuego. They were the color of diamonds: blue, yellow, red.

  “Mira,” I said. “Diamantes.”

  “Magnifico,” he replied.

  The Kid took off the backpack. We spread out the sleeping bag and entwined like DNA strands that had found their perfect mate. When it was over, we separated and went to opposite sides of the sleeping bag. I thought I’d close my eyes for five minutes; we had a long drive ahead. The Kid sleeps like a stone. I don’t sleep at all. We’d been careful. We’d locked the pickup, brought the weapons and the phone.

  The sky was the gray that comes before dawn when I woke up. Minutes could have passed, or hours. The moon was setting. The birds were calling up the sun. I’d always wondered if the full moon looks as large going down as it does coming up. It doesn’t. I rubbed my eyes. A cowboy was standing in front of me, and several feet behind the cowboy a white horse waited with its reins hanging down. The cowboy wore a duster, a black hat and a mask made out of feathers. The feathers were muted by the gray dawn, but I knew that in full daylight they’d have the brilliance of a rain forest. That they had come from parrots and hawks, I had no doubt. I was looking at two hands wearing gauntlets thick enough to grab a prickly pear and squeeze it tight. The right hand held a .45 and the left hand rubbed the fingers against the thumb in a gesture of universal greed. I reached over to wake the Kid, and the hand holding the .45 closed in on my forehead. One twitch and my skull would have exploded across the ground like an overripe melon.

  “Who are…? What do…?” I started to ask, but the greed hand went to the mouth and made a shhhhh motion. I knew what the hands wanted, but I didn’t want to give it up. We’d gotten back the parrot, but we didn’t have the woman yet. The bargain hadn’t been entirely kept. The hat with the minicam was lying on the ground. I’d turned it off before making love. The camera wouldn’t be getting the holdup on tape, but what did it matter? The identical image had already been recorded by the Tramway ATM. “Where’s Deborah?” I mouthed. The head be
hind the feathered mask shook. The eyes were hidden inside the sockets.

  Stuck between a .45 and a hard place, I handed over two thousand hundred-dollar bills. The cowboy shouldered the backpack, picked up the C phone and the weapons that were lying on the ground, got on the white horse and rode west, leaving not one word of instruction for the return of Deborah Dumaine.

  I woke the Kid. “You’re not going to believe this,” I said, even though in this time and place almost anything was believable. By the time he was awake enough to comprehend what had happened, the pale horse and feathered rider had disappeared. Maybe it had been a dream, maybe a contact hallucination brought on by the proximity of too much jimson weed. The trumpet lilies had shot their pollen and were beginning a sated, sensual droop. We heard horse hooves clomping down the not-so-distant highway.

  “That’s the sound of two hundred thousand dollars galloping away,” I said. “The weapons and the phone are gone too.”

  “You hear anything about the woman?” he asked.

  “Not a word.”

  “Why you not wake me up?”

  Because I didn’t have the cojones? “I would have gotten me a bullet in the head. You too.”

  “I told you that guy’s a cobarde.”

  “I don’t know that it was that guy, Kid. I couldn’t see anybody’s hands or face or eyes. All I saw was a mask, a pair of boots and a coat.”

  “Only a cobarde would hide himself like that. How big was he?”

  “Brown’s size, more or less.”

  “What hand did he use for the gun?”

  “The right.”

  “What kind of gun?”

  “A .45.”

  “That’s him.”

  “We took his .45.”

  “He hid another one somewhere. Maybe he buried it with the money.”

  Maybe. “If that was him, then who wore the mask at the ATM?”