The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (3 page)

Behind and beneath all this, I suspect, was the fact that we two were not well practiced in candor and were both working hard to keep our maturing affection on the fully up and up. To turn our attention to snukes—cons, that is; jivin’ and connivin’ for fun and profit—would be to place a layer of professional lies atop our attempted personal honesty. It was bound to leave us confused. So that night in Mexico, we decided to accept this cosmic gift and embrace our second chance as avidly as we’d always each embraced the main one. We sealed the deal by making love waist deep in the warm sea, with the rhythm of the waves serving as languid counterpoint to our own and the full moon illuminating our bodies for any creature, land or sea, that cared to check us out. I may have been stung by a jellyfish. I think I didn’t care.

Some beer-driven ideas don’t make much sense the next morning, but this one took. So we did our research, settled on New Mexico, Land of Enchantment, as our land of opportunity, wired our bankroll to a Santa Fe savings and loan, packed our meager things, and rolled. Vic, as Vic will, rolled with. If we were determined to go straight, he announced, he’d better come along “for mortal support.” We flew to Houston, where I bought a used Song Swing, the nimble little Chinese SUV that used to be called the Scat until its makers realized that while scat means “go away quickly,” it also means, inaptly, “poop.” Vic, in the Mirplovian tradition of naming cars, named it Carol after a (mythical, I suspect) lost love. We headed west till we hit the Rio Grande, then north until we hit, well, here.

And here I was, on a sun-blanched sidewalk halfway between the converted Quonset hut Vic had rented from some down-at-the-heels artist
^*
and the little adobe cottage where Allie and I currently laid our
heads. It was about a fifteen-minute walk between the two places, and every time I walked it, I felt a little better about being a citizen for once. I’d never felt guilty about my chosen profession but had become quite accustomed to feeling furtive. Now I was trying to take on board the notion that there was nothing wrong with people on the street greeting me by name. I even used my real one, Radar Hoverlander, rather than any of the dozen disposable slip-ons I’d cobbled up over the years. And why not? For once in my life, I had nothing to hide. It felt great going straight. I had every confidence I could keep it up.

And I did, too.

Until that dog came along.

B
ut the dog came later. First came Allie, who was sitting at the kitchen table studying some catalogs when I got home from Vic’s. She looked completely matter-of-fact, with her bare feet, painted toenails, denim shorts, and halter top. But something about her—maybe the way she absently pushed her cinnamon hair off her face or ticked the end of a pen against her perfect white teeth—made me crave her even more than I usually did, which was plenty.

“What are we looking at?” I asked.

“Career paths,” she said. She held up a pair of catalogs and asked, “What do you think, mechanical engineering or nursing?”

“Engineering,” I said. “Somehow I can’t picture Allie Quinn as a nurse.”

“Can’t you?” She unfolded from her seat, stood, cocked a hip, and dropped her voice into a breathy coo. “It’s time for your sponge bath, Mr. Hoverlander.” She reached behind her neck. “Sadly, this is my only top. I dare not get it wet.” Deftly untying it, she tossed it away, then crossed to me and pressed her chest against my shirt. “Now then, where shall we begin? Tell me where you’re
dirtiest.
”

“I know what career you should choose,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“Porn star.”

She slapped me a little, but that was okay. It was the start of something great.

Afterward, we sprawled together on the cool tile floor. From where I lay, I could just reach Allie’s toes. I gave them the little piggy treatment and thought about how lucky I was. “I’m loving this,” I said.

“ ’Course you are,” she said. “You’re getting sex in the middle of the day.”

“No, not that,” I protested. “I mean, yes, of course that. But more than that. This. All of this. This domestic bliss. This relationship shit.”

Allie propped her head up on her hand and eyed me sardonically. “This relationship shit?”

“You know what I mean. We’re … I don’t know … normal. I’ve never been normal before. It’s nice. I could get used to it.”

“Well, you’d better. Because I’m going to be a nurse—”

“Or mechanical engineer.”

“Or mechanical engineer.”

“Or porn star.”

Allie ignored this. “And what are you going to be?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Tick-tock, Radar. Rent’s due on the first of the month. We can’t live off our savings forever.”

“No, just”—I pretended to do a rough calculation in my head—“a decade or so. If we cut back on caviar.”

“So you’re not going to take this seriously, is that it?”

“Wait, what?”

“This domestic bliss. This relationship shit.” I could tell that all of a sudden Allie wasn’t having a good time. Were I Mirplo, with his malaproptic bent, I’d say I’d pinched a nerve. “If we’re going straight, Radar, we have to go all the way straight. That means going to school or getting a job or finding some sort of purpose, just like straight people do. It doesn’t mean coasting.”

“Not coasting,” I said. “Transitioning.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I can’t buy that word. Before, maybe, when I didn’t have anything to lose.”

“But now you have something to lose?”

“Of course, you numbskull. You. Us. We backslide into a scam, next thing you know we’re arrested or worse. I don’t want that, Radar. Do you?” I shook my head. “Okay, then, we have to go cold turkey. Man up. Find something productive to do with our lives. Be citizens.”

“Why do I have a feeling being citizens means less sex in the middle of the day?” This was intended as a joke, but it landed flat as a karaoke diva. Allie shot me a sour look, a look I’d already come to recognize as
You’re not as funny as you think you are
.

This relationship shit is tricky—land mines everywhere you look. Like the sign says, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, not in relationships, not in anything. Everyone wants the good stuff: someone to light candles for, curl up next to at night; someone to bring them soup when they’re sick. But if you want the good stuff, of course you have to put up with the rest. Moods. Privacy jags. Not being as funny as you think you are. Most of all, the land mines. Everyone has them—Allie and I had them in spades—psychic sore spots that take a lifetime to bury and then a lifetime again to disinter and disarm. That’s two lifetimes right there, and I don’t know anyone who’s got that kind of time. So instead of doing a thorough, safe sweep of the area, sometimes you just blunder ahead.

And sometimes you step on a mine.

“How’s it going to be, Radar? I mean, really, how is it going to be? Do you plan to do this thing, actually do it? Or just hold back, play at being citizen like you’ve played at numismatist, talent scout—God, I don’t know—whatever other roles you’ve played.”

“I’ve never played God.” Another badly misfiring joke, this one actually propelled Allie to her feet. She stormed around the kitchen, picking things up and noisily putting them down. Our little bungalow with generous and low-slung windows stood close to a fairly busy street, and I imagined some passers-by getting an eyeful of the unself-consciously
naked Allie. I remained on the floor. I didn’t see much point in two of us putting on a show.

At last she came over and crouched down beside me. She touched my cheek. It sort of made me melt. “You don’t get it,” she said. “Radar, I love you, but this is gonna be
hard
. Hell, it’s hard enough to say I love you without freaking out. Look, we’ve been on the snuke all our lives. Both of us. You think we can stop on a dime? We’ll get bored, frustrated, thwarted in our ambitions. It’s gonna stress us out, and stress our relationship. And why? Because we won’t have the comforting demands of the grift to distract us. We won’t have all that
noise
in our heads. We’re going to have to face each other, face ourselves. I’m not afraid of that, but I know what it means: questions, Radar. ‘Is this the right person for me? Can we grow together? Can we become people of substance?’ ”

“You make it sound like we need a twelve-step program.”

“Maybe we do.”

I sat up and took her by the shoulders. “Okay, first of all, there’s one question I definitely know the answer to. Are you the right person for me? Yes. Absolutely. Case closed.”

“What about the rest of it?”

“Uh … don’t ask, don’t tell?”

“Not good enough, Radar. We’ve got to figure this shit out. That’s what straight people do.”

“Straight people don’t figure this shit out.
Swamis
don’t figure it out. I should know, I’ve been a few. Look, Allie, there
are
no answers. There’s just questions. Questions and more questions. The type of questions that if you keep asking them long enough, of course you freak out. That distracting noise you’re talking about? I’m glad for that noise. We didn’t have that noise, we’d slit our wrists before breakfast.”

Allie stood again. I thought I heard a squeal of brakes on the street. She looked down at me and shook her head sadly. “Not good enough,” she repeated. “We have to do better than that.” She grabbed her halter top and shorts, and went in the other room.

Like I said. Land mines.

Times like these, I half wished I smoked, because this would have been a perfect moment to say I was going out for cigarettes. Instead, I called, “I’m going out for gum,” which sounded as dumb as I thought it would and really just meant that I was angry and confused and had to walk it off. I got dressed, grabbed my keys and cash, and cruised.

Relationships
are
tricky. Even a rank beginner like me knows that. After all, there you are with your One True Love, right? The one person you can count on to accept you, warts and all. But no matter how many of your hidden demons you reveal and how many she accepts, there’s still more to reveal and still more to accept. And some of those demons are fierce. Take me: abandoned by my mother and father. Mom at least had the legitimate excuse of dying of cancer. Dad just bailed, leaving nothing but tales of his conny exploits, a trail of jokey postcards, and a fading picture of his face in my mind. I thought it was my fault. Little kids will do that, place themselves in the center of the universe and blame themselves for every supernova that explodes around them. Later we get smart enough to know that each of us is the center of our own universe, and if your father left you or beat you or drank or ran around, it’s because of crap in
his
universe, not yours. But no matter how smart you get, that little kid’s still in there somewhere, and guess what? When you’re being all vulnerable with your OTL, the demons come out. You can’t help it. It’s just the way things are. Maybe what Allie was driving at, with all this drive to change, was just the need to leave her old universe behind.

I paused to put that thought to my reflection in the window of a corner store, one selling the newly popular Geoid Equipotential, a tablet computer that, it was boasted, could do everything but wash your socks. Ignoring the new toy, I studied this year’s model Hoverlander: a young man, reasonably robust, presentable, with shaggy hair consciously cut boyish, a slender frame topping out just south of six feet, and the dress and demeanor of, well, of a guy on vacation.

I
was
on vacation. Son of a gun, Allie was right. I was holding this tantalizing clean slate at arm’s length. She and I had been partners in crime. Our successful resolution of the California Roll had proved
how we were good together and, in some weird way, good for each other, too. But that was then. Now what she wanted—what I guess she needed—was a partner not in crime but in change. That wasn’t so much to ask, was it? Not of your OTL. But she’d asked, and I sure as hell hadn’t answered, which dug a trench of a sort between us. What’s that phrase? Never kid a kidder. Allie was an expert grifter, which meant an accomplished liar, which meant atavistically aware of the lies around her. I hadn’t actually
lied
to her. I’d told her she was the one for me, and that was a truth, the bedrock sort of truth you can lock down and build on. After all we’d been through together—all the myths and countermyths we sold each other while pulling off the California Roll—wasn’t that enough? What more did she want? A job? A 401(k)? Jury duty and backyard barbeques?

Yes. All that. Exactly.

And when you think about it, why not? In my life on the grift I’d played all sorts of roles. Why couldn’t I play the role of a normal person for once? People adjust. They do it every day. It’d be no different than, say, going vegetarian. A change of habit. No big deal. All I had to do was not be a scam artist and just be me. Next year’s model Hoverlander: brand, spanking, shiny new, new as a Geoid, a seat-belt-wearing, salary-earning, grass-mowing, taxpaying citizen. All for my One True Love.

So there I was with a silent promise to Allie to stop running cons.

Two hours later, I’d already broken my word.

I
t was for a good cause, though, duping a tweaker and saving a child, and Allie understood that. It think it was Boy who sealed the deal, because within about ten seconds of meeting, they were down on the floor rolling around like old best friends. And in the next days’ onslaught of police and press inquiries, the question of Radar’s life trajectory got temporarily shelved.