Parrot Blues (5 page)

The Sandias have many moods, and from the Kid's shop you can see them all. They can be dusky mauve against a deep blue sky, watermelon pink in the glow of the setting sun, a black cutout backlit by the rising moon, gray hulks with hunks of rock shaped like gorillas' buns. Cumulonimbi get snagged by the peaks, falcon-winged cirri hover over, snow clouds slide down the face of the mountain and wash it clean. There is one view from Albuquerque's Valley and another from the Heights. Some people like to look out, and some like looking up. I was becoming a Valley person myself.

“The Indians believe that's where the goddess of the wind lives,” the Kid told me, pointing toward the Sandias' peak.

“You coming for dinner?” I replied. “I have an interesting case I want to tell you about.”

“Okay,” he said. “I'll bring the food.”

He met me later at my place in La Vista Luxury Apartment Complex with a Lotta Burger bag—two double burgers with green chile and a mound of fries. The green chile was a little bland for my taste, but blandness was a novelty for him. We cleaned up, as usual, by throwing the papers away. Most evenings I don't talk about what I did at work; it's too boring, but the Kid is always interested in animals and in birds.

“The case involves wildlife,” I said. The Kid nodded. He has thick black curls and is sometimes known as
El Greñas,
the mophead. When I got to the parrot part of my story, his hair, already electric, took on an extra buzz.

“My client is a bit of a blowhard,” I said. “I don't know whether or not to believe him.”

“What is a blowhard?”

“Someone who likes himself too much and who talks too much. His wife and a very rare parrot have disappeared. They appear to have been kidnapped.”

“What kind of a parrot is it?”

“An indigo macaw.”

“I never heard of it. Where is it from?”

“Brazil.”

“How does he treat the bird?” the Kid asked.

“Good. He feeds her treats. He lets her nibble on his ear.”

“Does she like him?”

“She's crazy about him.”

“The Indians say a man who is good to animals has a good heart.”

“Anglos say that about a man who is good to his mother.”

“Claro,”
said the Kid. When he quoted the Indians, I figured he was really talking about himself.
In
this part of the world, Indian myths are so pervasive and powerful it's hard to tell where you leave off and they begin. It's easy to believe that there was once a better and more harmonious life in New Mexico, but you never know how much of the myth is true, how much of it you believe because you want to believe. Often there is nothing to go on but relics, artifacts and skeletons like the fourteen macaws found in the ruins at Chaco Canyon. Did the macaws reproduce because they'd found a harmonious home? Were the Indians breeding them for their feathers? Or their meat? Did the anthropologists and archaeologists put their own spin on the parrots' bones? Who knows? The facts are usually vague enough that you can leave your own imprint.

“If you could have been an Indian in the old days before the conquest, what kind of Indian would you have been?” I asked the Kid.

“In Mexico, an Aztec. Here, an Apache,” he said, mentioning two warrior tribes. He'd have made a good Apache. His long legs and strong thighs could have covered the Chiricahua Mountains as well as a soccer field. He could look wild and romantic with a scarf tied around his head, and he wouldn't look bad in a blue coat and white pants either, the Apache scout uniform after the pale eyes arrived.

“Me too,” I said, although I was grinding out a cigarette in my plate, and my legs hadn't been running anywhere lately.

“And I know
who
I'd be,” the Kid said.

“Who?” Not Geronimo, I hoped; he'd already been over-emulated.

“Mangas Coloradas. He was a leader. He was six feet six inches tall and lived to be seventy years old. That was a long life for an Apache. When he was fifty he was shot by the soldiers and his men put him on a … how you say it? … a
litera.
”

“A litter.”

“And they ran him all the way to the doctor in Mexico.”

“I'd like to have been Dextrous Horse Thief Woman,” I said. “She could ride, shoot and steal horses as well as any man.” Mythmaking for sure. The truth was, I hate riding, and I don't like horses. But I do like doing things as well as a man. “Did the Apaches have parrots?” I asked the Kid. “The Indians at Chaco Canyon did. Chaco isn't that far from Apache country.”

“I don't know. There were parrots in that part of New Mexico then, but they only live in old Mexico now. I saw them sometimes coming across the border. The
lorobandistas
color their heads yellow so they will look like
Amazonas.
When the feathers grow, the roots show.
Amazonas
are more valuable because they can talk.”

“I met a parrot named Max at UNM who imitated my voice perfectly. What do
you
hear in my voice?” I asked him.

“I hear…” the Kid imitated a certain sound, not perfectly, but close enough. I wouldn't want a
parrot
to get hold of
that
and repeat it to death.

“Is that all?” I asked him.

“I hear a lawyer sometimes. Sometimes somebody else.”

“Like who?”

“I don't know. Dextrous Horse Thief Woman.” He laughed.

“Um,” I said.

There are voice analyzers that can tell whether or not a person is lying. Terrance Lewellen would know where to get one and how much it cost. But there isn't any equipment, as far as I know, for analyzing where you've been. I heard New York State and New Mexico in my voice, but the Kid hadn't mentioned that. Maybe the differences in states were too subtle for a non-native English speaker to notice. The differences in countries are more obvious, and in his Spanish I hear Argentina and Mexico and even the U.S.A. In his English I hear the outlaws, the solitaries, the artists, all the people who come here alone to get away from someplace else. New Mexico is a place that values roots, tradition, family, history. People come here because they are attracted to those things, but they have to sever their own ties to do it. There is the code of the communal and the code of the individual in New Mexico. Sometimes they coexist in harmony, sometimes not.

Telling the Kid about Max the parrot jump-started one of his stories, which are never very long but are always fairly complicated. I lit a cigarette, adding another layer of gravel to my voice, moving another step away from being Dextrous Horse Thief Woman. “When I was a boy in Argentina,” he began, “we hear parrots on my street. They knew the children's names, and they call the names when we go by the house on the way to school and when we go home again.
Que cacofonia.
”

“What did they call you?” I asked.

“
El Pibe.
” That means kid in Argentine Spanish. “Every time I go by the house I hear
El Pibe, El Pibe,
” he squawked in a good imitation of a parrot. “That is what my brother, Sebastian, called me. Now everybody calls me that. We always hear the parrots,
pero
the curtains are always closed and we never see them.”

Pero
means “but,” and it's the last word a native Spanish speaker gives up.

“My brother and I wanted to know what the parrots looked like, and what color they were. We knew about parrots because my uncle had them, and we gave them their food when he was away. My brother said the parrots were
Africanas.
I said they were blue-fronted
Amazonas,
a bird that lives in Argentina. Their voices are different from
Africanas.
One day we tricked them. My brother walked in front of the house and I went along the side very quiet. ‘Sebastian,' the parrot said to my brother when he walked by. ‘
Hola,
Sebastian.' There was a space,” he separated his hands a few inches, “and I looked in the window.”

“
What did you see?”

“An old lady,” he said. He hunched up in his chair like a woman who hadn't been taking her calcium. “There were no parrots in the house, only an old lady who lived alone and sat in the window and talked to the children. She knew all our names. She was all alone and she had nothing to do.”

“Why was she pretending to be a parrot?”

He shrugged. “Maybe she thought a parrot would be more interesting to children.”

“Did she ever find out that you knew?”

“Never,” he said.

******

Even though I got up early the next morning, the Kid had already left for work. It's a good idea to greet the wind goddess in the morning and bow down to her before going to bed. From my window at La Vista all you can see over the rooftops and telephone poles is the tip of the mountain, not how widely or firmly it is rooted. Still, I paid my respects.

When I got to the office, Anna stood in front of the mirror spritzing her hair with a spray bottle and scrunching it up. Anna has enough hair for three people without adding frizz, but the increase in volume did emphasize the compactness of her body. Her hair was a twenty; her body a six. She was wearing high-heeled shoes with ankle straps over black ankle socks. It was one of those fashions that can only be worn by the very desperate or very young, a style that had its time and place. The place was East Central. The time was after midnight. But what did it matter what she wore as long as she did her work?

“Could you cover the phones for a minute?” she asked me. “I have to go to the bank.”

“You're spritzing your hair to go to the bank?”

“Hey. Any place you go now you're on camera.”

“You're not planning to stick up the bank, are you?” And look her best on the most-wanted poster?

“No. I'm gonna use the ATM, but there's a camera there too. I don't want some guys sitting around watching the surveillance tapes and saying I'm a mess.”

“Could you wait a minute?” I asked. “There's a phone call I have to make.” Actually, it was a phone call I
wanted
to make, the reason, in fact, I'd come in early.

“You got it,” Anna said.

I went to my office, dialed the Relationships hot line and sat through the operator's instructions, as impatient as a SWF hot on the trail of a SWM. Terrance was right again; the message had been changed. The plaintive ambisexuous voice now said, “Max a million. I am
verrry
valuable,” rolling the
r
in the “very.” The words were perfectly clear, but what the hell did they mean?

The
phone rang. “For you,” Anna called.

It was Terrance. “You hear the message yet?”

“Yeah.”

“What do you think it means?” he asked in his gruff, hard-driving, corporate raiding voice.

“I don't know,” I had to admit.

“Well, I know,” he said. “Brown thinks he's gonna get a million dollars out of me. No bird's
that
valuable. You be around this afternoon?”

“Yeah.”

“I'll be by,” he said.

“I'll be here,” I replied and hung up.

“Now I'm going to the ATM. Okay?” Anna asked me.

“Okay,” I said. I listened to her walk down the sidewalk toward her car, which she'd parked in the lot tucked behind the Hamel and Harrison building, and I couldn't help comparing the sound of her footsteps to the sound of Deborah's. Deborah had been crisp and commanding in her high-heeled shoes, at least before the abduction. Anna was tentative and teetering in hers, which she never was in life. Maybe she had a loose ankle strap. Her walk had the fluttering uncertainty of prey; I'd have to warn her to be careful where she stepped in those hooker's shoes.

******

Terrance had said, “
I'll
be by,” but he didn't show up at my office,
they
did. That's the kind of guy who calls to tell you about the vacation he just took, never mentioning that he took a woman with him. When that kind does show up with a woman, he doesn't tell you who she is. Some men like to make introductions about as much as they like to ask directions.

“This is Sara,” Terrance said, sitting down in a client chair and plunking his briefcase on the floor. Sara sat next to him and dropped her beaded and fringed suede purse into her lap. He'd made an introduction of sorts, but it didn't tell me anything
I
wanted to know, like Sara who? So I began my own discovery, a combination of interrogation and observation.

“I'm Neil Hamel, Terrance's lawyer,” I said.

“I know,” Sara replied. “Terry told me about you.” She smiled at Terrance, who didn't seem like a Terry to me. He didn't correct her, he didn't smile back. Sara was definitely a bottle blond, possibly a trophy blond. Her hair was pulled up on top of her head with wispy tendrils hanging down around her face. Her eyes were the color of a Texas bluebonnet. I'd say she was a good twenty years younger than Terrance, which didn't make her young. It made her close to forty, in fact, an age I know well, the age at which a lot of women come to New Mexico to find themselves. If they end up in Santa Fe (and I was
already
convinced that Sara was a Santa Fe woman), the first step is to throw out all the old clothes and buy into Santa Fe style. Sara had done that with a vengeance. The next step is usually to find a guru or a mission. No problem; there are plenty of those around. Then comes finding an affordable place to live, a job and a man, and that's where the trouble starts. There aren't many of any of the above, and there's a ton of competition (some of it rich and beautiful) for the few there are, and this at an age when a woman doesn't need competition. Santa Fe breeds female insecurity like Yuma, Arizona, breeds killer bees. Sometimes women find the life they're seeking in the city different, sometimes not. The chic life isn't always an easy life.