The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (11 page)

Here he came, smoking a clove cigarette, a black man with closely cropped salt-and-pepper hair atop a high, shiny forehead. Deep smile lines flared out from either side of his broad, flat nose, framing a gray moustache. A white polo shirt clung snugly to his broad shoulders and incipient paunch. He wasn’t fat, exactly, but had reached the age, roughly sixty, I’d say, where most efforts to stay in shape are a holding action at best. But with taut muscular arms and legs he looked casually strong and reasonably light on his feet. What struck me most, though, as I glanced at him from the shadow of the car hood, were his barn-owl irises, set against creamy ivory sclera, irises so dark that you couldn’t tell where they left off and the pupils began. These were intelligent eyes. They made me think,
This cat’s been around
.

I stood up as he walked past. “Shit,” I muttered underneath my breath, then backed into him accidentally.

He caught me without giving ground. I uttered some more frustrated obscenities in the direction of the fuming engine. “Engine trouble?” he asked. I’d made the question obligatory.

“No, the engine trouble’s passed,” I said. “Now I got tow troubles.”

“As in …”

“As in how I’m gonna afford one out of this godforsaken hole.”

“That broke?”

“That broke.” I waved a distracted hand toward the Sharp, not indicating that I thought it was his. “Price of gas … we can’t all drive these green machines.”

“True,” he said, indicating no ownership in turn.

When you’re running the car trouble grift for real, you need to string together a few components before you make the pitch. First, you try to bond with the mark, make like you’re kindred spirits somehow, so that
when you put the touch on him, he’ll feel like he’s hooking a brother up. Next, you roll out a sob story, something perilous but credible, like employment desperation or a medical emergency. Finally, you have to sell that you’re good for the money, and will pay him back as soon as you reach your checkbook. Garb has a lot to do with this; a three-piece suit would be a good deal more assuasive than the traveling clothes I was wearing just then. Not that I was trying to vend the grift, per se. Like I said, I was pinging the target. I wanted to see if he’d out himself.

So I ran the script.

“Where you coming from?” I asked.

“Santa Fe,” he said. This disappointed me a bit. I was hoping he’d go fabricat on me right away—start lying, that is—as that would confirm my growing suspicion.

“Me too,” I said. “Nice town. Can’t swing a dead cat without hitting an artist, though.”

“You an artist?”

“Of a sort.”

He took a drag on his clove cigarette and blew out a cloud of its characteristically tangy smoke. “What sort?”

“Draftsman, really. I’m on my way to Phoenix. Got a job lined up.”

“Yeah? Moving there for good?” I felt good about the way he asked the question. He sounded engaged. Made me think he was buying in.

“Gotta go where the work is,” I said.

He peered inside my rig. His eyebrows arched. “You’re traveling pretty light,” he said. It was a canny observation, for if I were genuinely relocating from point A to point B, I’d doubtless have a few more household goods.

I covered as best I could. “You know how it is,” I said. “Pawn shop got half, girlfriend the rest.” I essayed to establish a link. “I guess we’ve all been there.”

He nodded solemnly. “That we have,” he said. “That we have.”

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I can’t get to Tucson now.”

“Phoenix.”

“Phoenix.” I’d made this mistake on purpose to see if he’d catch it. He caught, but didn’t seem to mind. “My brother wired some money ahead, plenty, but …” I looked at my car and blew frustration through my lips. “It might as well be on Mars.”

He took a last drag off his clovie, threw it down, and ground it out under his shoe. “So, how much you think a tow might be?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “maybe thirty, fifty bucks.”

“How would a hundred set you up?”

Damn. If he was ready to Franklin me on the strength of this weak grift, shot through with intentional errors, then clearly he wasn’t in the game. I fretted that my assessment of his intelligence had been so far off. Still, I had to see the thing through. “That …,” I said, choking up, “that’d be great.”

He thumbed through his wallet for a bill and handed it to me. I took it, intending to disengage as quickly as possible, wait for him to take off and then get my ass back on the road. But when I touched the bill, I almost had to laugh out loud. It utterly failed the fingertip test, and I knew that when I looked at it, I’d find it to be a clownish counterfeit. It was. Some smarmy car salesman grinned out from where Big Ben should be, and on the back it said, I
N
W
ALT
W
E
T
RUST—
S
IOUX
C
ITY
D
ODGE
. I studied the bill as if taken aback. “I, uh, I don’t think this is real.”

“Oh, don’t you?” I could hear the chuckle in his voice. I looked up to find him grinning at me, like he’d just played the greatest joke in the world. He waved a hand at my car engine. “Any more than your steam-powered breakdown is real?”

“I, uh …” I ran out of words.

“I think you’re going to say, ‘I’m ready to cut the crap.’ ”

What could I say? “I’m ready to cut the crap.”

“Yeah, you are.” He extended a beefy hand, one silver ring on his pinkie. “Honey Moon,” he said.

“Honey Moon?” I said. “Really?”

“Radar Hoverlander?” he said. “Really?”

And just like that, we were friends.

W
e convoyed just across the Arizona line to a truck stop in Lupton called Speedy’s, where we stopped for a coffee and a confab. I had one eye on the clock, for Vegas was still seven hours down the road and I knew I’d need some sleep along the way. But what I needed more, obviously, was Honey Moon’s data dump. He’d gone to some lengths to make himself available to me—to let me discover him, that is—and I had to know why. Fortunately, he didn’t play hard to get with me.

Nor with the perky waitress. When she asked him how he liked his coffee, he winked and said, “Like my ex-wife: hot and bitter.” She rewarded him with a smile and a wiggly retreat. “Mm-mm,” he murmured, admiring her walkaway ass, “like two puppies in a pillowcase.” His voice was smooth and creamy, with Southern roots and Midwest overtones, and he pitched it just soft enough that he seemed not to be addressing her, yet loud enough that she might hear. And that’s how you deliver a lewd compliment without being offensive. I knew he was ghosting that waitress, getting inside her mind and motivation. Day in and day out, no doubt, she gets groped and grab-assed by every horny trucker within armshot. Annoying? Hell, yeah. But validating, too; the kind of validation that brightens a dead-end day. Honey’s approach gift-wrapped all that approval and tied it with a bow of respect. Not run-of-the-mill. Not in her line of work. Some call this charm, but with grifters it’s supercharged charm, because it goes deep into the
mark’s mentality, discerns what she wants and gives it to her. For some it would be the difference between getting slapped and getting laid, but I got the feeling that it was just Honey Moon’s standard practice to enchant anyone who crossed his path, because the enchanted are more likely to become allies … or marks. I wondered which I was intended to be. “So why were you following me?” I asked.

“Who said I was?”

“You did, when you said my name.”

“Now come on, I could—”

I cut him off. “I know: You could have recognized me from my picture in the paper and just wanted to shake a hero’s hand. But you didn’t. We were in Santa Fe, then we were at that rest stop, now we’re here. So, what’s that phrase you used?”

Honey smiled, showing teeth stained brown from too much coffee and too many clove cigarettes. “The one about cutting the crap?”

“That’s the one,” I said.

“Okay,” he said. “Crap cut. Your daddy asked me to keep an eye on you.”

“See I get to Vegas on time?”

“See you get there at all.” The way he said this sent a shiver down my spine. I’d been so focused on the danger to Woody—trying to determine what level of fabricat it was—that I’d basically looked off the possibility of risk to me. But it stood to reason: If Woody was in real jeopardy (granted, an as yet unsubstantiated if), then so might be his succors, i.e., me. This cast Mr. Honey Moon in a different sort of light.

“You’re my guardian angel?” I asked. “Is that what you’re selling?”

“Not selling anything, amigo. Woody Hoverlander asks a favor, I say yes, and that’s from way back. How you deal with it is all on you.”

The waitress returned with our coffee. She glanced at Honey and found him making eye contact with her. He communicated much with his look. Another dose of approval, sure, but also a depth of understanding for her lot in life. I saw it pass between them: his blanket acceptance of everything she was and everything she did. I now got
that the earlier lewd compliment had just been his way of speaking to her in a lingua franca. His real message was here in his silent look, his intelligent eyes, and his not-half-trying smile. He seemed beatific in this moment, almost religious, and it had an effect. The waitress, surely no giggly girl, giggled girlishly, and withdrew in a fluster, fully seduced by his acceptance.

“You made her feel good,” I said.

“Everybody’s on their own road, Radar. And every road is hard. No need to strew nails.” It occurred to me that this resonant philosophy may have been Honey’s means of schmoozing me. But it didn’t feel like schmooze. It felt like belief.

I sipped my coffee. It was, according to specs, hot and bitter. I wondered if I’d forever think of bad coffee as a cup of ex-wife. “So, Guardian Angel,” I said, returning to the subject at hand, “what kind of danger am I in?”

“I wonder what I could tell you,” Honey drawled, “that you’d believe. Your daddy says you’re not a credulous man.”

“My father doesn’t know me,” I said, with rather more bristle than I’d intended.

Honey eyed me thoughtfully. “Maybe not,” he said. “But I suspect you don’t know him all that well, either. I know him well. We’ve run more games together than you can count. And ever since I met him, he’s the one man on God’s green earth I trust with everything. So let’s start with that and see where we get from there, hmm? I’ll tell you my tale, and you decide if it’s the truth.”

“There is no truth,” I said, “only consistent narrative.”

Honey smiled. “That there sounds like something Woody would say.”

It probably was. That’s probably where I got it.

They met in a pool hall, as grifters will, though by that late date, the early 1990s, pool-hall culture was a relic, a shadow of its former self. You could
still find a game, even rustle up a hustle, but the big money had disappeared. Neither one of them could quite figure out where the big money had gone. They’d both enjoyed reasonably successful runs through the Reagan years, for deregulation had blown the lid off interest rates, and money market funds had boomed. Putting a Ponzi tap on that vein required little more than some Mayflower names on Letraset letterhead and a quarter-page ad in a metropolitan daily. But Woody and Honey had their vices, and by the time Reagan’s trickle-down detumesced into recession, they were down at their respective heels, reduced to a sad handful of short cons and the dwindling opportunity of pool-hall plucks.

“Tried to hustle each other,” said Honey. “Believe that? Sandbagged our asses off and were both so good at playing bad that we got ten games deep before we cottoned. So we racked our cues, sat down, got acquainted. Been partners of many sorts ever since.”

“And these vices you mentioned?”

“Mine was the powder,” said Honey, “of course.” He shook his head in mournful memory. “Damn, I must’ve sucked six Cadillacs up my nose before I got wise. Your daddy helped me with that. Kept calling me stupid, and wouldn’t take ‘I know’ for an answer. One of the reasons I owe him.”

“And his?”

“Oh, gambling, for sure. You must know that.” But I didn’t, and the fact that I didn’t struck me with sudden worry. I quickly combed my earliest memories for any resonance of card-room trips or track runs but came up empty. Which meant that Woody’d been more than usually adept at hiding his habit from his near and dear, and if you think it’s a piece of cake to pull this off, it’s not. Just ask the pothead papa who only ever sparks up in the garage. His kids know. They don’t know
what
they know, but they know. Now Honey claims that my dad was disastrously hooked on outcome, but it’s news to me, and if I can’t backpredict any evidence of it, then that’s a hole in Honey’s tale.

Check again, Radar. Your recollections are rusty. They’ll take some prying loose
.

I let my mind slide back to that narrow span of years before Woody
got gone. Was there anything? A kitchen table poker game? Church bingo? Powerball tickets? Even scratchers? Nope, nothing. It struck me as strange—an inconsistent narrative—that someone like Woody, who based his life and business model on high-risk, high-reward exploits, should be so devoid of the gamble. No, not devoid.
Cleansed
. I continued to plumb my past. For practical reasons, I wanted to find something, anything, that validated Honey’s claim. Why? Simple. If Honey’s on the straight, then he’s an ally or at least a resource. Otherwise, he’s a problem, and I already have enough of …

Wait, problem: There it is. An argument, heard through walls, between my parents late one night. “You have a problem!” says my mom. Woody’s saying no, and she’s firing back with the fierce rhetorical, “Then what’s in the medicine bag?!” What indeed? And at the next opportunity, curious young me checks out the beat-up doctor’s satchel Dad keeps on a high closet shelf. Does Woody play doctor? I wouldn’t put it past him, but there’s no medicine here, just random plastic circles of various colors and kinds
.