Parrot Blues (11 page)

Terrance had outfitted me with the minicam, two thousand hundred-dollar bills stuffed into a Patagonia backpack, and an off-white Stetson with a silver concho hatband. The one nonnegotiable demand I'd made was that I wouldn't wear a black hat. These days every would-be cowboy from Gallup to Nashville wears a black hat. The conchos made the Stetson the hat of a Santa Fe cowboy, but they provided good camouflage for the minicam. Terrance ran the wire from the cowboy hat through my hair (it blended right in), down my back to a fanny pack that carried the videotape. He showed me how to turn the camera on and off without being noticed. I had to keep the crown of the Stetson pulled down so that the mini-cam sat in the middle of my forehead like a third eye. Otherwise I'd be filming the stars in the sky. Any hat feels like a weight on my head, but the minicam was lighter than I'd expected. Terrance gave us a cage for Perigee, some of the parrot's favorite toys and an avian first-aid kit in case the bird needed help. He also gave us a plastic bag of granola for a treat.

“Take good care of my Perigee,” he told us.

“Sure,” the Kid said.

******

There's a saying along the border—
no pasa, no muera.
Don't cross and you won't die. The Kid had made enough border crossings to know what to expect at night in the desert—robbery and/or death. He'd been robbed and beaten, and he got tired of the fighting and fighting back. Everybody has a nonnegotiable point, although not everybody is unlucky enough to discover that; nonnegotiable points are danger points. On the Kid's last trip as an illegal, he reached his. Somewhere in the big lonely, he was held up at gunpoint. The guy demanded his gun. The Kid handed it over. He demanded his money. The Kid gave it to him. He demanded his watch, and the Kid said no. It wasn't a prized possession, it wasn't even valuable. It was just a watch, but the Kid had been pushed as far as he was willing to go on that particular night.

“You have my gun. You have my money. You can't have my watch,” he said.

“Give it to me,” the coyote insisted.

“No,” the Kid said.

They stared each other down across the barrel of the coyote's gun. Maybe the Kid's fearlessness intimidated him. Maybe the coyote didn't think a watch was worth another illegal's life. He walked away and let the Kid keep the watch. He has worn it ever since; it is his invincible shield. It doesn't keep good
time,
but better than no time at all, which is what I wear. My never wearing a watch is also a shield; my defense against being a bill-by-the-minute lawyer. Possibly my empty wrist is as much of an illusion as the Kid's watch. You are what you are. What happens, happens.

The Kid's watch did get us out of Albuquerque at one-thirty and to Mile Marker 62 near eight. We went in his white pickup, which would provide better camouflage in Grant County than my yellow Nissan. We put the camper shell on and threw in some pillows and sleeping bags. The desert can be cold at night and dry any time. I hydrated well before I went to bed and was up all night peeing. We filled some plastic bottles with water and froze them. You stick the bottles between your legs to cool off, and when they defrost you drink the water. We brought along some chips and salsa and some Snapple Ice Tea. The only Cuervo Gold on this trip was the José Cuervo bandanna tied, Apache style, around the Kid's head. I wore the cowboy hat with the minicam hidden beneath the conchos. A cowboy hat is good camouflage in Grant County too. A pickup in rural New Mexico without at least one Resistol in the cab raises suspicion. Sometimes you see as many as four or five. Men are more likely to wear hats than women, but seen in silhouette in the cab of a truck, who can tell whether the wearer is a man or a woman? Before I got in the Kid's truck, I arranged my hat in his industrial-sized side-view mirror. The brim tilted like wings.

“Looks good on you, Chiquita,” the Kid said.

“Thanks,” I replied.

The route we took was Route 60 through Magdalena, around the high bend where Robert James Waller had an out-of-body experience and immortalized it for millions of women, and up onto the vast Plains of San Agustin. We drove past the Very Large Array, the place where white satellite ears on tracks are moved around the high plain listening for a message—any message—from space. There's a bumper sticker seen often in New Mexico that says
MAGIC HAPPENS
, and a road sign that says
GUSTY WINDS MAY EXIST
. Does that mean the winds are allowed to exist, I always wonder, and if so who is it that's granting permission? That sign also makes me think that aliens may exist. There are people who brake for them. If aliens do exist and want to communicate, the Plains of San Agustin would be the place to do it.

The message I get from this space is that there's a different vibe where there are no people. There's a lot of nothing out here, more than any I've ever seen. Some people find emptiness terrifying. I find it exhilarating. On the Plains of San Agustin you can drive for sixty miles and see one truck and three or four ranches. It's peaceful, but it's not boring. Miles of nothing may be punctuated by a split second of lightning and fear. New Mexico can have more than twelve thousand dry lightning strikes in a day, and the area around Magdalena has the most active lightning field in the state. At any moment it can bolt from the clouds like the long, crooked finger of God or of fate. I'd driven this road before in summer; I knew the lightning is always there waiting and gathering its power. I knew the tricks the wide open plains play
on
your vision. We floated in a high blue universe. The blue sky and gray-blue mountains were real. The puddles on the road and the ponds in the fields were shimmering illusions.

It was a change to see Route 60 from the Kid's truck. I was higher. I didn't have to keep my eyes on the road. I could watch the purple cloud shadows and the dance of the golden fields. I had time to think about the two thousand hundred-dollar bills in Terrance's backpack. I wouldn't be human if I didn't wonder what I would do with the money. There was a lot of space in two hundred thousand dollars, room to buy a house, a business, several trips around the world or two Mercedes Benz convertibles. It could support you for the rest of your life if you lived cheaply or in the third world. I'd given money its due and moved on to my hat, which also gave me a different perspective, a cowgirl's perspective. The one pickup we passed had
EAT BEEF
and an American flag on its vanity plate. The driver gave us a neighborly wave; I waved back.

I remembered that I had a third eye and wondered if it was seeing what I was seeing. I'm not used to looking through the eye of a camera. For the sake of practice, I turned the minicam on the Kid, who, as usual, was driving with maximum speed and total concentration. The Kid is never a chatterbox. He knows the value of words; he has to think them twice, in his first language and then in his second. He doesn't talk much, and when he drives he doesn't talk at all. He sensed that I was looking at him, and he squirmed in his seat.

“Turn that thing off, Chiquita,” he said.

“How'd you know I had it on?”

“By your expression,” he said.

******

We turned south on 270, reached Mile Marker 62 by eight, pulled off the road and parked. Somewhere down here the mile markers would become kilometer markers, but it hadn't happened yet. The Kid concealed the pickup behind a boulder, hoisted the backpack, and locked up. The ground was hard and dry enough that you'd need to get close to see any tire tracks. Whoever had sent us here knew where to look, but the boulder would conceal the truck from a casual thief. The ground beyond the boulder was too sandy to drive any farther, and we didn't know where to drive anyway. There had been no instructions as to what to do once we reached Mile Marker 62. I'd been hoping it would become obvious; it didn't. No people or tracks were visible. The only sound was a couple of squabbling ravens. Maybe we were supposed to stand here and wait, but whoever had conceived that plan didn't know me or the Kid. Waiting wasn't our style. Still, we gave it a shot. Maybe the kidnapper had run into problems and was late, maybe the kidnapper was testing us, maybe the kidnapper was waiting for darkness. Hard as it was for us to wait in daylight, it would be borderline impossible after nightfall.

This
was the desert, but it wasn't empty. Emptiness is another illusion of the road. The longer we stood here, the more we saw. Prickly pear cactus grew in a cluster of oval pods. Red fruit had sprouted from the pods and circled them like a string of two-inch hearts. The fruit is called
tuna
in Mexico, and it's sold in the market there. You need a pair of gloves to pick a prickly pear. If you cut into one with bare hands, you (and the fruit) will bleed.

Jimson weed bushes sprawled everywhere. The weed is also known as sacred datura, wild lily and trumpet lily. It's a member of the deadly nightshade family, with the ability to accumulate narcotics from the soil; it is believed that it can even absorb atomic wastes. It is hallucinogenic, and it is poisonous. In daytime it's a dumpster weed soaking up the earth's garbage, but at night it flowers with an otherworldly beauty. The flowers are six inches long, the white inside shading to lavender as the trumpets open up.

While I'd been thinking deadly nightshade thoughts the Kid had become an Apache tracker. He crisscrossed the shoulder of the road cutting for signs and found a triangular pile of stones that could have been put there yesterday or several hundred years ago. The sun was sinking, and the shadows of the cairn pointed toward a rock wall. The Kid followed the shadow, walked up to the wall and found a petroglyph that had been scratched into the rocks. A stick figure was holding a basket dripping water into a pair of wavy lines that had to symbolize a river or a stream. Petroglyphs are found everywhere there are rocks in New Mexico, and that's just about everywhere. Artist is the oldest profession in this state.

“He is giving directions to Cotorra Canyon,” the Kid said.

“How do you know that?”

“I know that the canyon is over there, and when you follow the rock pictures in the desert you find water.”

“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?”