The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (16 page)

She loves you! She left you the dog!

Boy ambled in. I took him down to the floor and held him for a long, long time.

“I don’t know, Radar,” said Vic. “Things are going pretty good for me right now. I’ve got orders … The Goro-Lubke Gallery wants to do a show, and they’re prestigious as hell.”

“Do you have enough stuff for a show?”

Vic didn’t answer immediately. He seemed lost in his yogurt and cereal. Lost, really, as I was in mine as I sat across from him at the yellow Formica table in Zoe’s kitchen. I could hear Zoe in the other room, singing one of Vic’s songs. It was hooky, catchy, evidence upon evidence of Mirplo as a Renaissance dude.

This was the morning after the night before, a long and mostly sleepless night I’d spent alone in a big bed, pining for Allie’s warmth. Boy had joined me around dawn, hopping up and sprawling out beside me, instinctively trying to fill the void. But a big, prickly mutt with dog breath and restless leg syndrome was no substitute for the woman I loved, not by orders of magnitude. I lay awake watching sunlight crawl up the adobe wall and wondered if Allie was watching the same sunrise. I didn’t know where she was staying. Hell, I didn’t even know if she was still in town. This was bad. Verisimilitude is one thing, but the thoroughness of her departure suggested something more fervent
than mere verisimilitude. Yes, the true believer sells best, and yes, we wanted Allie on the outside for reasons both of safety and of strategy, but I couldn’t help wondering, Was there a third reason as well? Had she decided that a Hoverlander (ha! now we’re a clan) can never go straight and that it was therefore time for her to cut (A) her losses and (2) me loose? In other unhappy words, was our trapdoor spider plan actually her exit strategy? I didn’t know, couldn’t know, and had nothing to rely on but my faith in her love and the potentially deflective evidence of a dog left behind. Faith was hard for me to come by—I didn’t have a lot of practice in that area. As for Boy, who knew? Maybe she’d cut him loose, too.

Vic, meanwhile, had finally gotten to the bottom of his granola. “Enough stuff?” he repeated. “Enough for a bluff, I guess. It’ll have to do.”

“Well, that’s what I want to do, too. Run a bluff. Take your game to a higher level. Look, when you do a show, what are you saying to the world?”

“That I’m an artist.”

“An artist bigger than you are, right?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, that’s how you step up.”

“Okay, then, so it’s all self-fulfilling prophecy. And that’s all I’m saying: Think big. You create a market for yourself by saying, ‘Well, there should be a market for me,’ yeah?”

“Yeah …,” Vic allowed.

“So let me pump you up a little. Make you look bigger than you are. Then you’ll go to Vegas and splash some money around. What’s not to like about that?”

“I lived in Vegas, you know. Back in my poker days.” I knew about those days. Vic had decided that his destiny lay in tournament poker; however, unburdened by skills, stones, or the remotest whiff of card sense, he’d quickly sailed the ship of that career onto the rocky shoals of extreme poverty. I understood that when he decamped to Los Angeles he’d left some unhappy backers behind. “Some people,” said Vic, “might not remember me fondly.”

“I gotta say, Vic, you flatter your past if you think the guy you once were is worth settling a score on.”

Vic nodded solemnly, acknowledging the truth of this without suffering it. I had to hand it to him, he had the most straightforward ego I’d ever seen. One could go to school on it. “You’re right,” he said. “Not that I’m not better now.”

“Inarguably,” I said, and I wasn’t just fluffing.

In the next room, Zoe unsuccessfully essayed to hit a high note. “What about Zoe?” asked Vic. “Can she come, too?”

“Your entourage,” I said. “Your call.”

“Entourage,” he mused. “I’d like to have an entourage. And what the hell, I could even get something going there, artwise. I am ready to step up.” He collected himself. “All right, Radar, I’ll do it.”

“Thanks, Vic. I appreciate it.”

“Mirplo,” he said.

“What?”

“Not Vic, just Mirplo.”

“Oh, right. I forgot.”

Mirplo. Just Mirplo. Sheesh.

I’ve lost myself in my work many times. If you love what you do, this can be a Zen thing, where past and future recede to a vanishing point and leave nothing but the perfect vexing, challenging, beguiling now. I’m told that golf nuts feel this way, that the buzz of golf is really how it lets you (okay, makes you) forget about everything else for the four or five (okay, six) hours you’re out there. Well, the grift is my golf, and there’s nothing I like better than subsuming myself in the prep and planning of a cool snadoodle. If I lost myself in this one with a rather greater sense of urgency than usual, I think I can be forgiven. I was trying to keep Allie off my mind.

First thing I did was backpredict Mirplo’s arc as an artist. I built him a website using 1990s tools (hello, HoTMetaL; hello, Front Page)
and filled it with bitmapped photos of the sort of jejune, self-referential artwork you’d expect of a late adolescent. Harsh, earnest self-portraits, charcoal drawings of disproportionate nudes, that sort of thing. I parked the site in a dead-letter corner of the Internet where, if Jay Googled hard enough, he’d find it. This is basic housekeeping. You don’t know if the mark will do his due diligence, but you can’t assume he won’t. So you leave an electronic paper trail. People think the Internet makes it harder to fabricate histories, but actually it’s easier. Back in the day, you needed forged documents and live testimonials—hard copy, real-world shit. Now all it takes is a Facebook page and a Wikipedia tap dance. The proof is in the pixels. In fact, I was probably going way the extra mile; when Mirplo hit town, the only thing Jay would likely check was the color of his money. But like I said, I had reasons to get wrapped up in the work.

Stepping forward through the stages of Mirplo’s fictive career, I awarded him indifferent stabs at writer, performance artist, sculptor, and musician—the sort of flake’s progress you’d expect from someone who took fifteen years to be an overnight sensation. I wrote a backdated grant proposal for something called the Blue/Red River Project, which, had it been funded (or existed), would have placed a flock of ceramic cerulean emus alongside a certain North Dakota watercourse. In the files of the Grand Forks Arts Council—a public database, easily hacked—you’ll find a nice letter rejecting Mr. Mirplo’s grant request but wishing him well in future endeavors, particularly ones in other states. I likewise inserted into the online archives of a certain literary magazine a turgid short story entitled “Dread Reckoning” about a guy who goes to Jamaica and smokes a lot of pot. And an accompanying poem about lizards. (Poor Vic, what was he thinking?) There was a scathing review of a modern dance thing he tried, and reports of vandalism against an offensive statue he erected in a park somewhere. All of these things taken together notionally led up to the Vic of today: an artist who’d passed through some pretty funky phases en route to finding his groove. You could easily imagine—well, Wolfredian could—that the guy was about to achieve critical mass, and explode.

Next came the exploding part, which entailed planting “real” news stories in legitimate online art sources. Again, not as tough as you might think, for these sources barely spell-check their incoming press releases, let alone vet them. So starting with
The Albuquerque Turkey
and extrapolating imaginatively from there, I gave Vic a sudden spike in popularity and a verifiable (though completely bogus) chain of lucrative commissions stretching into the indeterminate future. A rough calculation of accounts receivable indicated that Vic would soon be quite rich. Now all that remained was to seed a bank account with some crumbs from the California Roll, so Vic could flash appropriate cash at the casino.

Vic balked at this. “I’m not gonna piss away my money at a craps table,” he said. “That’s not how I roll.”

“Don’t worry,” I told him. “The money’s just for show. All your gambles will be high churn, low variance.”

“Of course,” repeated Vic, “high churn, low variance. Radar, what are you talking about?”

“You place lots and lots of bets—that’s the churn—but only on even-money propositions. That’s low variance.” Of course, there are no true coin flips in a casino; the house always has its edge. If you bet, say, dead red at roulette, you give away 5.26 percent a spin, so you’re bound to lose over time. But not much and not fast, and if you place enough bets, the house will note your action and start to rate your play—measure, that is, your betting size and frequency. They’re much more interested in how high you play than in exactly how you play, or certainly whether you win or lose in the short run. They know they’ll always grind out their cut in the end. Still, someone who bets dead red doesn’t look like much of a player, so I’d worked out some mutually hedging complex bets that looked like wild gambles. They essentially canceled each other out, but with enough “action bafflegab” to give the impression of high rolling. The overall effect was rather like a grifter’s roll. It seemed like a ton of risk, but really it was not.

Well, explaining this to Vic was a bit like talking to the taxman
about poetry, so I drove him down the highway to Sandia, an Indian casino just north of Albuquerque, to demonstrate. There he ploughed through a Saturday night playing my system at $25 a bet. By bona fide whale standards, that’s not much, but even at a quarter a throw he caught the eye of the pit boss, who invited Vic to join Sandia’s players’ club, which was another point of the exercise, for it contributed to the evidence trail of Vic as a gambler on the upslope of his jones. This being Sandia, arguably New Mexico’s poshest casino, and therefore not such a much, it would also make plausible Vic’s later desire to trade up to something more high-toned. Something like the Gaia.

Vic found the enterprise entertaining. The gambling didn’t get him off—he just wasn’t wired that way—but he got a big kick out of being the big shot. After so many years of cadging drinks (and everything else) from friends or strangers, he probably liked being the one throwing the party. It made him giddy. Me, I just enjoyed the simple, straightforward, comforting company of a Mirplo. For a grifter, he didn’t have a devious—well, successfully devious—bone in his body. So I could relax with him, and that’s something I hadn’t done much of lately. Truth to tell, the stress was wearing on me. For the first time in my life, I could sort of see the benefits of a life not shot through with duplicity. Such a life would be less intense, for sure, but also less tense.

While Vic banged away at the tables, I called Woody to see how things were going on his end. He had departed a few days prior, heading back to Vegas to alert Wolfredian that I’d hooked a whale and to prospect for a way past Jay’s defenses to his cash. He’d told me he thought the fact that Vic was an artist showed promise, and he wanted to pursue that angle. Well, that was the plan, but I couldn’t confirm its progress, for Woody didn’t answer his phone. Maybe he was still in transit across the desert, out in the wasteland where no cell towers bloom. Maybe.

We rolled back into Santa Fe after midnight, cresting a hill on the Turquoise Trail to see the low-rise lights of the Pojoaque Valley spread out before us, a man-made mirror to the big bowl of stars above.
“Know what?” said Vic. “I’m still kind of wired. You want to stop in somewhere, get a drink? My treat.”

Mirplo’s treat? For that alone I’d have liked to say yes, but, “I have to walk Boy. He’s been cooped up all evening.”

“He’ll keep,” said Vic. “That breed has intense bladder control.”

“You don’t even know what breed he is.”

“Well, neither does he, but I bet he can hold it another half hour. Just one drink, Radar. There’s this place you have to try.”

The place I had to try turned out to be a basement dive called the Cave, a dimly lit, stone-floor den with a long, varnished burl-wood bar, tables made of cable spools, and enough wall-mounted cow skulls to make Georgia O’Keeffe come. The skulls had been drilled out and implanted with electric candles, the artificially flickery kind, so that the faces of the patrons winked in and out of shadow at odd intervals. Were it not for the fact that the crowd seemed abnormally normal—as if Santa Fe’s Young Republicans had discovered the latest hipster hangout first for a change—you’d have feared an outbreak of Santeria, or possibly zombies.

Leaning against the bar while Vic ordered drinks, I noticed one citizen sitting alone at a spool table, opposite an empty chair with a big black handbag slung over its back. Dressed way too business for a Saturday night, he had the arrogant air of someone with all the answers, or at least all the ones that mattered. For his Suit Warehouse wardrobe, his bland complacency, and his smug self-absorption, I kinda felt sorry for his date.

Till she returned from the bathroom.

And it was Allie.

I think I threw up in my mouth.

A
good grifter plays emotions like a good fielder plays shortstop. You stay on your toes, think ahead, and react quickly. If the moment calls for rage, you rage. If you’d appropriately be showing sorrow, then sorrow’s what you show. You give the situation what the situation demands. Not your honest reaction. Not ever. You clasp emotion in the firm grip of self-interest, and you do so automatically, intuitively, like a shortstop backhanding a hot smash faster than even his conscious mind can track. So, though inwardly I felt as though I’d just swallowed a hand grenade, the only outward move I made was to crowd close to the bar and put myself in Vic’s umbra, shaded from Allie’s view.

“Vic,” I said, not raising my voice above the level of bar chat, “how come you chose this place?”

“I don’t know, you know. I heard it was cool.”

“Really? Who told you?”

“What, you don’t think it’s cool?”

“That’s not what I asked.”

I glanced at Vic, who ostentatiously absorbed himself in trying to catch the barmaid’s eye. “Man,” he said, “who do you have to screw to get a drink around here?” He essayed a smile, which, of course, gave him away.