Parrot Blues (15 page)

“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 behind 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?”

“His cousin,” the Kid said. “I can't track the horse on the highway.”

“I know.” Paved roads were something Apaches didn't have to contend with.

He leaped up. “He didn't get the birds, did he? You hear them?” Parrots would probably be a better alarm system than a guard dog or the Viper.

“Not a squawk.”

“
Bueno. Vamos.
Maybe we can catch him.” The Kid pulled on his shoes and ran over to
his
white horse, the pickup, but it had been hobbled. The right rear tire had been slit and it was sinking into the dust. “
Mierda
,” he said.

The parrots were still there and glad to see him. He gave them water and food. I offered him the plastic bag of Terrance's special granola treat.

“What's that?” he asked.

“Granola.”

“That's not food for a bird,” he said, but Perigee gobbled it up.

While he changed the tire, I climbed the rock stairs and crossed the butte to see if there was any sign of Wes Brown. “I tell you he's not there,” the Kid said, but I went anyway. The Kid was right; Brown had untied himself (or someone else had untied him) from the mast. It stood alone in the boat. The pickup truck with the NRA bumper sticker was also gone.

“Vanished,” I said when I got back down.

The Kid shrugged. That didn't surprise him.

“What time is it?” I asked.

He looked at his watch, gave it a shake, looked again. The watch had stopped running. He saw it as a bad omen, an indication that someone's time had run out. The question was, whose?

******

When
we reached Range around eight, I was wired tired. The strings that seemed to be controlling my movements were stretched taut. Range had the shimmering unreality of a movie set, as if the buildings were six-inch façades with nothing behind them but the beams that propped them up. I felt that if we came back a week later, the town would be dismantled. It was already hot enough to sweat through the Kid's bandanna and my shirt. The ice in the water jugs had long since melted.

We stopped at Bruno's Cafe for breakfast and to call Terrance Lewellen. Fortunately, Bruno's had food and depth. The
latilla
ceiling in the patio was made up of branches with the leaves still on. We found the one that offered the most shade and sat under it. A swivel-hipped waitress took our order. The patio walls had the smell of adobe. I leaned against mine. There's nothing that shelters as well as an adobe wall. The bathroom had vending machines pushing pink and blue New Mexicondoms, the huevos rancheros and chorizo were eye-opening hot, but by the time the food showed up I'd lost my appetite. While we'd waited I'd called Terrance from the pay phone outside, planning to tell him that I'd given up his money but hadn't gotten back his wife. Would he care? I wondered while the answering machine went through its five-ring dance.

“Come on, Terrance,” I said after the beep. “Pick up the phone.” But he didn't answer.

“What happened?” the Kid asked when I returned to the patio.

“Nothing. He didn't pick up.”

“Maybe he had to go somewhere.”

“Maybe.”

I called again three hours later from the pay phone at the Kmart in Socorro. The machine answered after the second ring, indicating that Terrance had not taken the first message. This time it was, “Terrance, pick up the goddamn phone.” Still no response.

“Our little lives are rounded by a beep,” I told the Kid after I returned to my seat in the sweltering pickup.

“What?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I replied.