“He tells me to take all the meat I want,” my dad says. “To take everything. They are emptying the place out. He and his wife will be gone the next day. That’s what he tells me when I go by.”
The story has changed. In the first version of this story, all of this happened at the record player. The butcher said he was leaving, and then he was gone. Dad never mentioned going to his shop before.
“His wife was undercover. He was undercover. They both were.” That’s how he said it. Separate. I remember his wife as Peruvian. And I don’t remember her being in his story before. I remember the butcher never in a sport coat but a starched apron with brown handprints smeared on the front. The wife could be Peruvian and still be undercover, I think. All the better cover. But the wife never appeared in the story before.
“He worked for the Treasury Department, back then they didn’t have a DEA, but the Treasury Department tracked all the drug dealers in Peru.” This is when I stop and really wonder why he is telling me this story. Why he adds on this detail. I know better than to ask him, to point out what he is revealing, because he will stop. Never before, never before the age of eighty would he talk about any of his secrets.
I have researched the DEA well before this conversation. My suspicions about my dad’s possible undercover work made me wonder about which agency he worked for. I thought maybe the DEA didn’t even exist, and that it was all just my crazy imagination coming up with these stories as explanations for the unexplainable. When I had asked him about his collusion with the CIA and he said no, so precisely, so certain, and yet he had hinted at his friends’ connections in another story, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was covering up his own contribution. But now, here, my dad, who does not know that I know that the DEA did not yet exist as the DEA until 1973, is telling me the same. The Treasury Department, by instruction from Richard Nixon, had started a new program to stop drug trafficking. The countries they had infiltrated first were Peru, Venezuela, and Colombia. When my father wasn’t in the jungle searching for oil, he had “meetings” in Caracas and Bogota. Often we went with him. I have little emerald earrings from Colombia. I can still recall looking out at the Caribbean from the shore in Caracas. I wondered how two bodies of water like the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean could still be considered separate when the water is all the same water. It goes back and forth between any drawn boundaries and still tastes like salt. This Treasury Department program my dad is referring to would eventually become what is known today as the Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA.
“They worked undercover. Both of them.” The wife has taken on a bigger role in this unabridged version of the story. “‘We will be leaving tomorrow,’ the meat cutter told me,” Dad continued. “‘We have to be out of here. I’ve turned in the name of the city official who is in cahoots with the drug lords. He will be publically denounced. So we have to get out of here.’”
A city official! Now details are showing up. I keep quiet, let him talk. I lie on my couch with my cats snuggled up against me, phone tight against my ear, waiting for what would come next.
“They left,” Dad said. “No one ever heard of the butcher and his wife again. I don’t know where they went.”
“They had exposed the city guy, so they had to flee,” I said. I’m part of the movie now. I’m helping to write the script. Is it a script? Or is it the truth?
“The State Department stopped that,” my dad tells me. “The embassy stopped the Treasury Department from letting the name go public. So no one ever knew who the city official was, or no one outside the U.S. government.” And was my dad on the inside? How did he know the State Department stopped it? Did the butcher reveal the name at his shop that day before he left? When he asked my dad to come by? To take everything. Did my dad take everything?
I know this about the State Department in overseas offices: the diplomats in the embassy keep the cool with the host country. When I worked in Bolivia, we had to get approval from the State Department for all our U.S. Government AID projects. The embassy approved when and where we could work, not DC.
Why does my father tell me this story with more detail now? Why does he add the part about going to the butcher’s house the next day? About how the butcher came up to him later at the party? Is it true? Is it added for decoration? To make a better story? Does it make him sound special, that he was chosen as the confidant of the butcher? But why would the butcher, if he was so undercover, so deep in this mystery, why would he confide in my father? Unless my father was somehow involved. But why would my father tell me?
Because I asked. I ask all the time for him to tell me these stories. I ask about questionable details. I ask if he was involved. Like bedtime stories, I love to hear them repeated. I love to hear about his job, the dangers, the antics, the adventures. If I ask too much, he stops. So I’ve learned when to just listen. To wait for him to tell me what he wants to reveal. A Burt Bacharach tune is always playing in the background of my head. On the record player. Side A. Then Side B. “What the World Needs Now.”
I have no idea what is true. But I have an inkling.
Part 3
Bolivia
I always tell the truth, even when I lie.
—Tony Montana played by Al Pacino in Scarface
Taking Flight
Constant togetherness is fine—but only for Siamese twins.
—Victoria Billings
Peru, under a nationalist government, had other plans for finding resources under the earth, and asked the American oil companies not to let the door hit them on the ass on the way out.
I packed up my stuffed animals, my dollhouse, and its contents, while Mom packed up our house, the furniture, and the collection from the Chancay grave. I put Pretty Bird in his little yellow cage and slid him under the airplane seat in front of me, as we’d been transferred to Cochabamba, Bolivia.
In Bolivia we stayed in another hotel until our shipment arrived via ground over the Andes. The Gran Hotel Cochabamba was much more modest than the Hotel Country Club in Lima. The Hotel Coch (pronounced coach) had been a convent in its original days. The nuns were no longer housed in the convent, but the Catholic church next door still thrived. The bell that tolled every hour on the hour, much to our sleeping dismay, turned out to be a recorded broadcast belched through speakers from the belfry. During Carnival, I and other expat kids climbed the bell tower’s long steps, wiping away spider webs. At the top we leaned out the arched openings to drop water balloons on the unsuspecting passersby below. All the while, the Virgin Mary statue on the plaza in front of us seemed to watch with discontent.
No rose garden pathway led to the foyer at the Hotel Cochabamba. The street noises echoed off the cracked honeycomb mosaic tile floor of the entrance. Our rooms sat just at the top of the stairs facing a courtyard. The horseshoe-shaped convent wrapped around a broken-down domed adobe gazebo surrounded by scraggly, swaying palm trees and an empty pool.
Exploration for oil and gas in Bolivia was new, so only a few expats lived in Cochabamba. Dad spent most of his time in the jungle again. But I was relieved to have another petroleum company employee’s family move into the hotel a few months after we did. The family had two boys, Marc and David. Marc was two years older, and David a year older than I was. But they rode the bus with me, and their hotel room sat just doors down at the end of the mosaic mezzanine.
After school one day Marc asked me to come over to their room to listen to tapes. The three of us stretched out on the two twin beds we’d shoved together. I brought my Panasonic cassette player over to listen to the tape they had brought from the States. It was a comedy tape by someone named Bill Cosby. He was popular in the U.S., but I’d never heard of him. Our giggles turned us inside out as Mr. Cosby told stories about serving chocolate cake to his kids for breakfast and going to the dentist. Even though the funny faces didn’t come through on the Panasonic cassette player, the nubby wool blanket bedspread scrunched up underneath us as we listened to the blubbery sound effects of B
ill’s novocained bottom lip hanging in his lap.
We didn’t have TV in Cochabamba. Any day now, they told us, the TV station would be built. Any day. In the meantime Cochabambinos, the wealthy ones, bought television sets and set them up in their living rooms. The eternal optimists. Without TV we had to visualize the Bill Cosby routine.
I left Marc and David’s room with my ribs hurting. I carried my cassette player back to my room two doors down. The tile floor cooled my socked feet as I walked along the entresol. A flower planter bordered the half-wall of the cloister’s mezzanine. Just outside my room, Pretty Bird’s yellow cage balanced on the planter. He’d been so used to the atrium in Lima with all the space and open air that I didn’t like to keep him in my stuffy room, which had no windows.
But now the jade puffball didn’t jump around inside the cage as I walked up. Only a second later did I realize the spindly cage door hung open. I checked the bottom of his cage, both hoping to find him and not to find him. With some relief I saw only the splotched Los Tiempos newspaper lining the bottom. I glanced up and down the planter, all around, and along the cracked ocher tile floor. Had I left the little wire cage door open? A simple vertical slide latch; could I have been so negligent?
Since he couldn’t fly, I searched the ground carefully around all the wrought iron tables and chairs in front of the rooms on the veranda. My fingers came away stained by the moist, brown dirt as I riffled through the geraniums in the planter along the half-wall, lifting stiff leaves and soft red flower petals. Marc and David came out and were looking in hidey spots between tiles big enough for a softball to fit in. “Look in even smaller holes,” I said. “He can curl up to smaller than my fist when he wants.”
I spotted my mother two stories below in the courtyard. She took in the sun, head tilted back to absorb the rays, sitting in one of the curlicue wrought iron chairs circling the gazebo.
“Mom!” I shouted. She raised her head slowly, too slowly. She did not like being disturbed when she napped.
“What is it, Amy?”
“Pretty Bird’s gone!” The shadows from the palm trees grew long along the grass garden, crisscrossing the gunmetal gray flagstone paths from the hotel’s first-floor rooms to the gazebo.
“What do you mean gone?” She sat up, holding one hand in a salute across her forehead to block the sun. I knew what she meant—he couldn’t fly, how could he have left? “He’s around here somewhere.”
“I can’t find him. I need you to help me.”
With his clipped wings, Pretty Bird’s mode of transportation was either a side-to-side waddle or a hop. From high places I’d seen him hop off the edge, then glide through the air with his maimed, green wings spread open. He couldn’t get lift, but he could coast down. Maybe he had jumped off the ledge where his cage sat.
Down below, my mom was poking in the bushes. Even the hotel waiters in their white jackets who brought us Coca-Cola and Inca Kola in the courtyard were bent over in search position. Max, the bartender of the Whiskeria, who knew us kids from cocktail hour when the folks ordered pisco sours and we had Cokes at the bar, had just come on duty. He laid his maroon tuxedo jacket in its dry cleaner bag on a wrought iron garden chair while he too joined the pursuit. I ran downstairs after finding nothing upstairs, not even one of the chalky blue feathers from under his wings. Pretty Bird had to be somewhere; he had to be nearby.
“He could pull that little latch up by himself,” my mother reminded me. It was true: he’d seen us do it, and he would reach one claw out through the thin metal bars of the cage, and with one talon push the latch up and out from its cylinder. Had I not paid enough attention to him? I’d been so busy with Marc and David and Bill Cosby when I came home from school. I didn’t sit and play with him as I did in Lima. Now I had friends, and he’d run away.
My mother enlisted any person who walked past the gazebo in the hunt for Pretty Bird. All the maids, the waiters, the bartender, the manager, even a few other hotel guests scrambled around the hotel grounds.
I did everything I could to keep from crying. I held my breath. I thought of Bill Cosby and his blubbery bottom lip at the dentist’s office. “Loob ab my fabebe,” he said to the dentist. “I don’t understand,” the dentist said. “Loob! Ab! My! Fabe!” Mr. Cosby pleaded again. I even pulled up my favorite routine where he said he and his brother thought their names growing up were “Jesus Christ” and “Damn it,” because that’s what his father yelled out the front door. But my throat held onto something the size of a parrot egg, and my eyes turned into rushing water pipes. So I looked up to the clean blue sky with the whitest threads of cirrus clouds to reverse the drainage and tried once more to be distracted. I couldn’t stand the thought of losing my downy pet. His little head butts against my chin, his masticating my fingertip and chirping his name PRETTY BIRD, PRETTY BIRD.
I felt something more than just losing my best friend. Whomever I loved left. It didn’t matter who or how. Even Mom had said malaria comes back. I couldn’t predict when or why anybody left. I wanted some say in the matter. I wanted it to stop.
Then I heard the purl, and my ears perked up. The all-too-familiar chirp, chirp, squawk that said Pretty Bird needed me to talk to him, came from above.
In the sky, as high as the red tile rooftop of the hotel, I spied a flash of green flap-flapping hard and slow across the courtyard.
“Pretty Bird!” I screamed. “He’s flying!” I could tell he heard me because he floated back down a couple of feet.
“Where?” my mom said, her sandals clacking on the stone as she ran across the courtyard. I pointed up, and she looked.
“He can fly,” she said.
All the searchers turned their heads heavenward and watched Pretty Bird flutter his wings.
“He’s gone,” Mom said.
“No!” I said. No, no, no. I would not let this be. No.
“He’s free, Amy.” She shook her head as we watched him fly, his flapping uncoordinated as far as I was concerned. He couldn’t leave me. Freedom? What good was that? Freedom was for the birds, so to speak. And Pretty Bird wasn’t a bird, but my parrot.
“It’s better for him,” my mother said. Her hands were grimy from digging around in the bushes. She wiped them on her hips. “Birds are supposed to fly.”
Of course, I understood this, as on some level I knew letting him go was the right thing, the just thing, the proper and fair way to be. But I quickly stuffed those thoughts away and went back to wanting him to come back, to be mine. Pretty Bird would stay with me. This was one relationship where I had the say. When it was convenient for me, we would play; if he was set free I wanted to be the one who determined this. With Pretty Bird in my life, I was never alone. I would not let him go. I couldn’t. No.
I let the waterworks go full force. Snot and tears streamed down my face, my cheeks blotchy and my nostrils flared. I wanted Pretty Bird. I thought he had wanted to be with me.
“Oh, Amy,” Mom said. “He’ll be okay. He’ll join the other parrots.” Green flocks of squawking parrots circled the hotel every day.
“No, he won’t,” I explained. I knew how it worked. He’d be the strange parrot trying to fit in with the Bolivian parrots, a darker, greener breed. His softer jade would stand out. The parrot flocks would shun him. He might think they would be his friends, but he’d find out they really weren’t. No, Pretty Bird needed me to protect him, and I began to chase him, to follow his serpentine flight pattern, arms outstretched overhead. “Pretty Bird, Pretty Bird,” I hollered to the sky. He squawked back, and to me, he sounded scared. Maybe he wanted to be rescued from this thing called Freedom. Freedom, I knew, was not all it was cracked up to be. I ran and ran and waved my arms, never letting them down in case he wanted to sit on my finger. He thought I was playing. So he would scoop close, then swoop back out of reach. This was no time for play. “Get down here,” I scolded.
A hotel guest in a brown suit, wearing a bowler hat, started to walk across the courtyard to his room when he saw
the commotion and asked my mother what was going on. “Her parrot got loose,” she said. “I’m afraid he’s gone for good.” I hated her for saying that. She gave up too easily. She couldn’t understand.
The man stepped out near the domed gazebo, stood in the shadow of a pillar, and when Pretty Bird flew by the gazebo, he reached up with his bowler then pulled it to the ground so swiftly I couldn’t tell what had happened. He slowly lifted the hat’s brim off the ground, then stuck his hand underneath.
Wrapped in his thick, cigarlike fingers, Pretty Bird’s head poked out, looking dazed. He opened his curved beak as he did when he wanted to step onto my finger.
My heart slowed to a sprint. With my two smaller hands, I took Pretty Bird from the man in the bowler, then held him to my cheek and rubbed his downy head on my skin. Not wanting him to fly off again, I kept my hands tight, the tiny bones and quills poking at my palm. I held him up to my face, and he headbutted my jawbone. Once, then twice. “Pretty . . . ” he warbled, mellow and trite.
This is how it should be, I thought, holding on tight.
When my father came home that evening, Pretty Bird was safely back in his cage, and I relayed the afternoon’s excitement to him.
“We’ll have to trim his wings again,” he said. “They apparently grew back.”
“They can do that?” I asked. Wings grow back?
“Like fingernails,” he said, “They keep growing.”
I double-checked the wire around the lock before going to bed, and I put his cage on my nightstand. All night I could hear him shuffling around, restless. But I pretended not to hear.
When We Were Ghouls Page 22
