Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [7]
“Go for it,” Blair answered, and in a flash Hernan was seventy feet up the tree, relaying information while Blair wrote. Clutch, two; eggs, white; nest, about the size of a Guambiano water jar. Hernan had left his rifle propped against a nearby tree; Blair eyed it while allowing an escape fantasy to float through his head, a mini-vacation from the knowledge that if he ran they’d catch him before the day was out. Still, the rifle raised a nagging question: how could he leave, now, in the middle of his research, even if he got the chance? But not to leave might be a slow form of suicide. Sooner or later something would get him, either sickness, a swacked-out punketo, or an autodefensa raid, or maybe the Secretariat would decide to make a point at his expense. The hard line had lately crept back into the MURC’s rhetoric, which Blair guessed was part posturing for the peace talks, part exasperation at the trend of the times. The Soviet Union had imploded, the Berlin Wall was gravel, and the Cuban adventure was on life support, and yet the MURC insisted it would soldier on.
“Some say the end of history has come,” Alberto intoned to the journalists. “We can all have different interpretations about what’s happened in the world during these very complex years, but the fact of the matter is that most things haven’t changed. Hunger, injustice, poverty, all of the issues which led the guerrilla of the MURC to take up arms, they are all still with us.”
True, thought Blair. He wanted to believe in the Revolution, in its alleged devotion to reason and justice, but the Revolution wouldn’t return his camera for even one day. All of his research would be deemed hypothetical unless supported by a photo or specimen. No photo, no dissertation, and he’d sooner burn every page of his notes than take a specimen.
“I could steal the camera back for you,” Hernan offered. “I think I know where they’re keeping your stuff.”
“What would happen if they caught us?”
Hernan reflected. “To me, nothing—I can just disappear. To you?” He shrugged. “They’d probably cut off your fingers and send them to your family.”
Blair considered for a second, then shook his head. Not yet. He wasn’t that desperate yet.
When the chicks hatched Hernan went up again, checking out the nests while the parents and auxiliaries seethed around his head like belligerent box kites. One egg would hatch, then the second a few days later; Blair knew the second hatchlings were insurance, doomed to die unless their older siblings died first, and he sketched out a program for taking the second chicks and raising them in captivity.
The Crimsons had saved him, in a way; maybe he’d save them in turn, but he had to know everything about them first. “There’s something wrong with us,” he told Hernan one day. He was watching the nest holes for the soon-to-fledge chicks and thinking about the news, the latest massacres and estimates of coca acreage. The U.S. had pledged Colombia $1.6 billion in aid—advisers, weapons, helicopters, the whole bit—which made Blair wonder if his countrymen had lost their minds. There was a fire raging in Colombia, and the U.S. planned to hose it down with gasoline.
“Who?” Hernan answered, cracking open one eye. “Something wrong with who?”
“With us. People. The human race.”
Hernan lunked up on one elbow and looked around, then subsided to the grass and closed his eyes. “People are devils,” he said sleepily. “The only persona decente who ever lived was Jesus Christ. And the Virgin. And my mother,” he added.
“Tell me this, Hernan—would you shoot me if they told you to?”
“Anh.” Hernan didn’t bother to open his eyes. “They’d never ask me.”
“They wouldn’t?” Blair felt an unfamiliar surge of hope.
“Of course not. They always put the new guys on the firing squads, to toughen them up. Guys like me they never bug for stuff like that.”
Over the next few days seven chicks came wobbling out of the nests, and Blair set himself