Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [4]
The notebook became his means of staying clued to reality, of ordering time which seemed to be standing still or maybe even running backward. The only thing the guerrillas would say about his ransom negotiations was that Ross Perot might pay for his release, which Blair guessed—though he could never be sure—was some kind of inside joke. A group of the younger rebels took to hazing him, los punketos, ruthless kids from the city comunas who jittered the safeties of their guns whenever Blair walked by, the rapid click-click-click cascading in his wake like the prelude to a piranha feed. Sometimes he woke at night totally disoriented, unsure of where or even who he was; other nights it seemed that he never really slept, sinking instead into an oozing, submetabolic trance that left him vague and cranky in the morning. One night he was drifting in just such a haze when a punketo burst into the shed, announcing through riffs of soft hysterical laughter that he was going to blow Blair’s head off.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Blair said flatly. The kid was gig gling and twitching around, literally vibrating—hopped up on basuco was Blair’s guess. He’d probably been smoking for hours.
“Go fuck yourself,” said the kid, jamming his gun into the notch behind Blair’s left ear. “I’ll kill you if I want.”
“It’ll be thrilling for a minute, just after you pull the trigger.” Blair was winging it, making it up as he went along; the main thing, he sensed, was to keep talking. “Then it’ll be like having a hangover the rest of your life.”
“Shut up you cocksucker, just shut the fuck up. Shut up so I can kill you.”
“But it’s true. I know what I’m talking about.”
“You? You never killed anybody in your life.”
“Are you kidding? The United States is an extremely violent country. You must have seen the movies, right? Rambo? Die Hard? Where I come from makes this place look like a nursery school.”
“You’re a liar,” the kid said, though less certainly.
“Why do you think I’m here? I have so much innocent blood on my hands, I was ready to kill myself I was so miserable. Then it came to me in a dream, the Virgin came to me in a dream,” he amended, remembering how the rebels fell to their knees and groveled whenever the Spanish priest came to say mass, and the punketos were always the worst, weeping and slobbering on the padre’s ring. “‘Follow the birds and you’ll have peace,’ that’s what she told me in the dream. ‘Follow the birds and your soul will know peace.’”
“Bullshit,” the kid hissed, clanking his gun into the back of Blair’s head.
“I’m here, aren’t I? You think anyone other than a desperate man would come to this place? I came for the birds,” Blair continued in a lulling voice, “the most incredible birds in the world live here, and they do the most amazing things. For instance, did you know that the bellbird’s call can be heard several kilometers away? In contrast to the puffbird’s soft, heavenly whistle, which he sings just once a day, right before dawn. Then there’s your famous oilbird who flies only at night, navigating with his headful of radar equipment…” And Blair talked on in the most hypnotic, droning voice imaginable, cataloging the wonders of Colombian avifauna until the punketo finally staggered off into the night, either entranced or stupefied, it was hard to say which. But when dawn broke and Blair was still alive a weird peacefulness came over him, along with the imperatives of an irresistible conviction. As soon as the cuffs were off he strode across the yard to Complaints and Claims, brushed past the guard, and walked into Alberto’s office without so much as a knock. Alberto and Tono were spreading