The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (14 page)

“By then, of course, you’re long gone.” I didn’t realize I was thinking out loud. “So no problem. It’s a solid scam and it works. Only not this time, because Wolfredian knows you and doesn’t trust you. You’d need something he’s impossibly wet for, something that trumps all reason.”

“I’ll tell you what trumps all reason,” said Allie.

“What?”

“You. Trying to solve this bogus problem.”

“I’m not solving anything. It’s just … hypothetical.”

“Oh, really? Hypothetical? And if you found the right scam, would you go for it? Hypothetically?”

“Of course not,” I protested. “Not unless we discussed it and decided—”

“Decided what? To shitcan all our plans?”

“Not can,” I said. “Shelve. Temporarily set aside.”

“Yeah, right,” said Allie. Boy trotted into the room.
It got chilly in here. Does anyone need me?
“And not for nothing, but how many times does he have to lie to you before you catch on that that’s what he does?” I just blinked. I had nothing to say. “I mean that’s
all
he does. Seriously, what in the world makes you think he’s telling the truth now?”

“He just is.”

“He just is?” Allie stared at me incredulously. “Oh, for Pete’s sake.” She grabbed Boy’s leash from its wooden dowel by the door. “Come on, Boy, let’s go for a walk.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re being mooked, Radar. I don’t know why you can’t see that.” To Woody she said, “Don’t be here when I get back. I don’t want to know you anymore.”

She left. I gawked. Honey may have been asleep. The moment opened and poured silence into itself. Then Woody said softly, “Honey, did you ever hear the story of my first anniversary?”

Honey didn’t open his eyes. “I believe I did.”

“Mind if I tell it again?”

“Knock yourself out.”

“Man, was I broke. But it was our anniversary and we needed to celebrate, so I took Radar’s mom out to the fanciest place I could find. When she found out I couldn’t pay, she threw a fit like you wouldn’t believe. Yelling, screaming, right there in the restaurant in front of God and everybody. Chased me out, even. Then she started to cry. They felt so sorry for her, they comped the meal.” Woody turned and looked at me from beneath his wooly eyebrows. “You get where I’m going with this, Radar?”

“You staged the fight.”

“Of course we did.”

“But that’s not—”

Woody stopped me with his hand. “Radar, it’s fine. She’s better off out. Safer, no doubt. And if she feels she needs to cover her retreat with some amateur theatrics, that’s fine, too.” Woody gave Honey a hand up from the couch. “We’ll go,” he said. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate your problem, son. Women make us do all kind of crazy things. Like
pretend to go straight. So you’re stuck in the middle of what you want for her and what you want for you. What you don’t realize is, you can have both.”

“How?”

“Bring her around. She’s a smart cookie. We’ll find her a place in the play.”

“That’s not going to happen, Dad. You saw her reaction.”

“I saw her performance. All that tells me is, what she thinks is out of her system ain’t.” Suddenly Woody hugged me, then clapped me on the back with two hearty hands. “I’m so glad you’re on board, son. We’re going to have such a good time.”

On board? Who the hell said I was on board?

W
hen Allie came home, she blamed herself for being so see-through. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I guess I came on too strong.”

“You came on fine. He busted the play, but he still thinks you’re out, which is all we need.”

This we had decided on the phone during my long ride home, in a conversation that started with Allie asking me did I think my ribs were broken.

“Just bruised, I think. Though from a pain perspective it doesn’t make much difference.”

“Well, hurry home. I’ll kiss them and make them feel better.”

“While I don’t doubt the salutary effect of your lips on any of my body parts”—

“I love it when you talk dirty.”

—“we’ve got a bigger problem to deal with now.”

“I know,” she said with a sigh that articulated her disappointment, for if my road trip had been a test, I’d kind of failed. “So much for going straight.”

“It’s not the end of the world,” I said, lightly. “We can always go straight later.” Guys do this sometimes, try to sell something they know in advance won’t sell. As expected, my airy promise of “future considerations” was met with stale silence. “Allie?”

“I heard you,” she said.

“But you don’t agree.”

“It’s our jones, Radar. We can’t just take it or leave it.”

“Yes, but what if it’s not our jones? Or no, yes, our jones, but more, too. Our calling. Our art.”

“What, now all of a sudden we’re Mirplo?”

“You said it yourself, it’s half marketing. What’s wrong with marketing how smart we are?”

“That sounds like a rationalization.”

“Well, you know what they say: Rationalization is the act of a rational man.” Another ugly silence, but I pushed on, for when it came to rationalizations, I had mine stacked and circling like planes over O’Hare. “Okay, how about this? Whatever we make on this snaggle, we’ll plough into a … a charitable foundation.” I could almost hear Allie’s eyebrows arching, and why not? In our world,
charitable foundation
is code for
money press
. “No,” I said, “for real. We’ll pick a cause, any cause you like. Save the Jackalope, whatever. And we’ll—”

“I think we should break up.”

The elevator dropped. From the observation deck to the subbasement in a slashed second. My stomach churned. My heart raced. My fingertips tingled. I started sweating. Hyperventilating. I struggled to keep my eyes open—nearly put Carol in a ditch. How could everything change so fast? One second I’m bantering with my baby, the next second my future opens and swallows me whole, hurling me into a grim, gray, solo dystopia. I see it all in an instant, me without Allie, wasting my days on sad, lonely scams, devolving down at last to some bitter old flimflam man running burglar-alarm snukes on baffled housewives and going home to a frozen potpie.
Please, God, no. I can’t. I just can’t
.

“What?” I said. I may have mewed.

“Oh, poor Radar, I don’t mean for real. I mean for the snuke.”

The rope breaks. The hanged man falls to freedom, safe and whole. A miracle rescue. Love lives.

Even with the coppery taste of panic still on my tongue, my rational mind kicked in, and I saw that breaking us up made total sense. Not only did it buy Allie a measure of safety, it left us free to reinvent
her later as necessary. In the grift, we call this a trapdoor spider, otherwise known as a player to be named later, and they’re never not handy to have.

So we break up. Yet the question remained, “On what grounds?”

“These right here. Your backsliding. You won’t admit you have a problem.”

“I have a problem,” I said, still shaky from the adrenaline spike. “You’re my problem.”

Allie seemed genuinely surprised. “Did I scare you?”

“Yeah, you scared me. I thought you were serious.”

“So that was kind of fun. Now I know you love me.”

“You knew that before.”

“I guess I did.”

“Allie, I’m sorry we’re still stuck with him. My dad I mean.”

“We’ll get unstuck. Don’t worry, Radar. He’s not smarter than both of us.”

So that’s why Allie went off on me in front of Woody, and that’s how it worked out both worse and better than we expected, with Woody seeing through our subterfuge but misinterpreting its intent. Meanwhile, though I didn’t trust Woody, did I believe him? Only in the sense that it would not serve him for his partner to make decisions based on bad data. So now I had a filter for whatever he told me. It might or might not be objectively true, but it could be measured against an objective standard. If he saw Jay as a target and me as a means to that end, then the information he now gave me must necessarily help me play my role or he’d be working against his own interest. It’s like your basic busted space telescope: If the lens is defective, you write software to compensate.

The next night, I went to see Vic’s latest undertaking, the Mirplo Show, a one-act play about Vic, starring Vic, written by Vic, directed by Vic, with music by Vic. His logic seemed to be: Go off in all directions
at once, you’re bound to get somewhere somehow. At least he was over being horrible in public. In this new work, he told a picaresque saga of his life, all of it myths, of course, but colorful ones, and in the end you got the impression that the storyteller just very much wanted to be liked, and that was Vic, truly. Thus by roundabout means did he arrive at a deeply revealing honesty.

I joined him afterward in the lobby, where Zoe, now firmly embedded as Sedgwick to his Warhol, sold DVD copies of the performance, plus bonus tracks of Vic singing original songs. I waited for the clot of well-wishers to dissolve, then told him how much I liked the show, especially the honesty part.

“But that’s what art is,” he replied. “Honesty.”

“Honesty? Really?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Anyway it’s fun. Come on back to my studio.” By which he meant Zoe’s garage. “We’ll hang out. I’ve got beer.” I asked Vic how he was coping with the loss of his Quonset hut. “It’s in the past,” he said. “They’ll put a plaque on the spot one day. ‘Mirplo’s first studio.’ By the way, it’s just Mirplo now. Like Bono or Beck.”

Of course it was. Why wouldn’t it be?

Walking back to Zoe’s, I brought Vic up to date on the latest with Woody, and my Hubble Telescope solution to trusting him. It was an ad hoc solution, though, and I worried it wouldn’t hold.

“Burn that bridge when you come to it,” said Vic, acknowledging what we both knew to be true: that grifters can go through whole complex snukes without ever perfectly trusting one another. You watch your back and figure your partners are watching theirs. Somehow the job gets done, for even if you don’t have mutual admiration, you can still have mutual benefit. In a properly designed snuke, it’s in everyone’s interest to stay the loyalty course, and self-interest will often serve where trust is wanting. If not, you make late adjustments. You burn that bridge when you come to it.

It felt good to share all this with Vic, partly because he was someone I
could
trust, and partly because, in his singular way, he had become
something of a touchstone for me. His off-center interpretations always challenged me, or maybe he just had better eyes for my blind spots. For instance, when I told him about how stringing along with Woody was now the only real choice I had, he said, “Yeah, no it’s not.”

“Come again?”

“For instance, you could get in the wind if you wanted to, but you don’t want to.”

“Why not?”

“Duh, Freud. It’s your father. You want to be a man for him. Make him proud.”

“Bullshit. I just want him out of my life.”

“And we see how well that’s working. Radar, he’s got you warped around his finger. And you know why?”

“Why?”

“He’s got an ally.”

“What ally? Wolfredian?”

“You, nimrod. Man, you are really losing the plot.”

“So I’m subconsciously conspiring with Woody against me, is what you’re saying?”

“In a nutshell.”

“And why would I do that?”

Vic fixed me with the kind of look parents use with slow children. “Because, my demented friend, you don’t want to go straight. I’m surprised I have to spell it out for you.”

“No, that’s not it. He’s just sticky, that’s all.”

“So you
do
want to go straight.”

“Yes, absolutely.”

“Then you should run. Just fade.”

Problem was, running wouldn’t work. I mean, suppose we pulled it off. Shaded and faded on up to—randomly selected—Minnesota’s Iron Range. We successfully reinvent ourselves as—again randomly selected—Zev and Dusty Yevksy of Main Street, Hibbing. Then what? Settle down and have kids? Live a life and leave a legacy? But what
platform do we stand on? One of deceit from the start. Those tend to crumble over time. Worse, our kids grow up Yevksies. Their lives are a lie and they don’t even know it. That sort of seemed to defeat the whole point of the exercise.

No, for the time being I was stuck where I was, and if I secretly liked being stuck … it’s a thought I put out of my mind.

We reached Zoe’s garage. Vic had done a decent job of converting it into a workspace, complete with an ancient La-Z-Boy for contemplative naps and a round-shouldered ancient Frigidaire filled with the necessities of creative inspiration, namely chilled candy bars and beer. He cranked up some tunes (Vic’s own and, I had to admit, not half bad), then showed me his work in progress, an elaborate braid of twisted aluminum I-bar that rose from a bed of granite, swirled and jutted ten feet in the air, and then … just … flew. I can’t explain it, but I felt like I was flying, too.

“It’s nice, Vic,” I said. “It’s …” I groped for a more expressive word. “Light.”

“I know, huh? You get the bird thing, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do. I really do.”

“I call it
The Albuquerque Turkey Takes Flight.
” He fired up an industrial airbrush. “Mind if I work while we talk? I’ve scored two more commissions, and I’m starting to get jammed up.”

“You’re gonna have to clone yourself soon.”

“If only a clone had my vision,” said Vic with a serious sigh. “The vision’s what they’re buying.” With that, he started darting and dancing around the piece, spraying it at odd intervals to, so far as I could tell, no effect whatsoever.

“What are you spraying?”

“Aerosolized aluminum and contact adhesive.”

“Why are you spraying aluminum on aluminum?”

“Texture,” he said, as if that explained everything.

I circled the sculpture, examining it from different angles. I found it completely compelling, not in the grotesque, watching-a-train-wreck
manner of Vic’s earlier works, but with a palpable soaring glory. And if you looked closely, you saw that aluminum on aluminum did add texture. Vic was getting a clue, and no denying it. “It’s really coming along,” I said. “You’ve been working hard.”