Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [5]
“Go on,” he dared them, stepping up to the desk. “Either let me do my work, or shoot me.”
There was a heat, a grim fury about Blair that most people would associate with madmen and martyrs. The comandantes eyed the gringo at a wary slant, and it occurred to Blair that, for the moment at least, they were actually taking him seriously.
“Well,” said Alberto in a cautious voice, “what do you think, Tono?”
Tono blinked. “I think he’s a good man, Comandante. And ecology is important to the Revolution.”
“Yes,” Alberto agreed, “ecology is important to the Revolution.” He tried to smile, to inject some irony into the situation, but his mouth looked more like a fluttery open wound.
“Okay, Joan Blair, it will be as you wish. I give you permission to study your birds.”
Blair was twelve when it first happened, on a trip to the zoo—he came on the aviary’s teeming mosh pit of cockatoos and macaws and Purple-naped Lories, and it was as if an electric arc had shot through him. And he’d felt it every time since, this jolt, the precision stab in the heart whenever he saw psittacidae—he kept expecting it to stop but it never did, the impossibly vivid colors like some primal force that stoked the warm liquid center of his soul.
He’d known a miracle was in these mountains, he’d felt it in his bones. For five rainy days he tramped ever-widening circles out from the base, traversing ridges and saddles and moiling through valleys while the armed guard followed him every step of the way. Hernan, Blair guessed, was another of the comandantes’ jokes, a slight mestizo youth with catlike looks and a manner as blank and flaky as cooled ashes. By now Blair knew a killer when he saw one; Hernan would as soon shoot a man as pinch off a hangnail, but as they trudged through the gelatinous drizzle together Blair began to get the subtext of the comandantes’ choice.
“So how long have you been with the MURC?” he asked.
“Always,” Hernan replied in a dreamy voice.
“Always?”
“That other boy,” Hernan said in a gaseous hum, “that other little boy they called Hernan, he died. I have been a revolucionario my whole life.”
Blair studied the youth, then went back to scanning the canopy. Alberto had returned the binoculars but not the camera.
“So I guess you’ve been in a lot of battles?”
“Yes,” Hernan said in his humming voice, and he seemed to reflect. “Yes, many,” he added.
“What’s it like?” Blair asked rudely, but the kid’s catatonia was driving him nuts.
“Oh, it’s not so bad. Once the shooting starts everything’s okay.”
Which Blair took for a genuine answer; five days through some of the most beautiful, rugged country in the world, and the youth showed all the emotion of a turtle. It might not matter what you hit him with—a firefight, a bowl of stew, a trip to Disneyland, Hernan would confront each one with the same erased stare, but when Blair passed him the binoculars on the fifth day, pointing down a valley at a grove of wax palms and the birds wheeling around like loose sprockets, Hernan focused and gazed in silence for a time, then burst out laughing.
“They’re so silly!” he cried.
And they were, Blair agreed, they were delightful, this remnant colony of Crimson-capped Parrots whose flock notes gave the impression of a successful cocktail party. The Crimson-capped Parrot, Purpureicephalus feltisi, aka Felty’s Crimson: there’d been no sightings since 1973, when Tetzlaff et al. spotted a single breeding pair in Pichincha, Ecuador. CITES listed the species as critically endangered, though the more pessimistic literature assumed extinction. That first day Blair counted sixty-one birds, a gregarious, vocal group with flaming crowns and chunky emerald green bodies, their coverts flecked with blues and reds like glossy M&Ms. Sixty-one birds meant that God was good: not only was there a decent chance of saving the species, but if he lived and made it home with his data intact Blair was going to knock the ornithological