The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (31 page)

“Shut the nuck up!” He put his head down and charged at Allie. She easily sidestepped him, but he grabbed her as he hurtled past, and they went down together in a pile of swag bags.

I advanced to help Allie but found myself checked by Louise’s gun—and Jay’s grin. “Let it play out,” said Jay. I picked off the look that passed between those two and understood that I’d been right all along: You don’t just go watch a random woman play softball; you watch your
lover
play softball. In that instant, my heart went out to poor Martybeth. She wasn’t gay, straight, bi, or anything but a big amorphous mass of emotional desperation. Just one of the minor players in a snuke who gets hurt more than they deserve because they hold so few useful tools for defense.

Meanwhile, Vic wrestled the bag free from Allie, but he lost his grip and it went skittering in among others. They both threw themselves after it. Allie reached it first, her fist closing around the green TSA lock as she bounced to her feet and put her back to the wall of the tent. Vic came after her but stopped abruptly when her hand flashed from one of her pockets and a box cutter appeared, blade out.

Allie slashed out with the blade, and Vic flinched.

But he wasn’t the target.

Instead, Allie deftly sliced open a floor-to-ceiling seam in the tent. She stepped through, ready to run—then explosively fell backward, straight-armed by the great, brown paw of an exceedingly lifelike and faintly clove-smelling Kodiak bear.

“Damn, Honey,” I said, “I thought you were on our side.”

Honey removed the costume head and fixed me with those luminous brown eyes. “I told you from the start whose side I was on.” He indicated Woody. “He says guard a tent, I guard a tent.” To Allie he said, “Sorry for the hard hit. This getup steals motor control. Give me the bag.” He reached down to take it, but she wouldn’t let go. In her fury, she kicked his legs out from under him and he toppled sideways. They wrestled for a moment, but the outcome was never in doubt. He was stronger and, with the bear suit, much heavier. He basically just
lay on top of Allie until the fight went out of her. Eventually he stood up, clutching the locked duffel in his paw. Woody took the bag from Honey and brought it to Vic, who grasped it with both hands.

Allie sat on the floor, panting, defeated. Without a struggle, she let Louise take the utility knife away.

Vic turned to me, his eyes glistening with triumph. “You’re such a wet,” he said. “It was fun mooking you.” Then he turned to Allie. “Not you,” he said. “I liked you. You’re better than he deserves. Say hey to Boy for me.” Then he addressed everyone with utmost Mirplovian grandiloquence. “And now, friends … fans … if you’ll excuse me, as I said, sunset won’t wait, not even for me.” He adjusted his Stetson on his head at a jaunty angle and, swinging the swag bag like a schoolboy, left the tent.

I saw the smile on Jay’s face. There stood a satisfied man. I could imagine some past conversation among the conspirators in which either Woody or Mirplo had pitched going after the California Roll. It must have appealed to Jay not just as a way to reduce his own cash outlay but also to test his allies. Yes, Jay seemed well pleased. He invited us to join him for the show. I don’t know which he thought would be more fun, watching Vic’s performance or watching Allie and me suffer through it. But he insisted. And his sidewheels wouldn’t take no for an answer.

Vic Mirplo stood stock-still in the middle of the balloon basin. The setting sun bathed him in golden light and stretched his shadow out behind him. Spa music played. A dance ensemble swirled around him like flowing water. When the music and dance ended, a helicopter came flying in from the south and dropped to a low hover over Vic. A length of purple netting unfurled, spooling out below the chopper to dangle like a ship’s rigging just above Vic’s head. Still holding the duffel bag, Vic did a buccaneer’s leap into the netting and cocooned himself inside it—upside down. As the chopper lifted, I saw him reach a hand
into the bag and withdraw a broken bundle of hundred-dollar bills, which he set free to flutter down among the crowd. How to win friends and influence people.

As we sat together in our reserved seats, Jay said smugly, “At that rate, his walking-around money won’t last long.” He wore the contented look of an impresario who’d locked up the star act of a generation. Slot this act into the Gaia’s main theater, and Jay could write his own ticket straight to the chairman’s desk. Who cared what sort of nitwit behavior the star indulged in, so long as his show dropped jaws?

And this one did.

The helicopter airlifted Vic up to the cliff top and deposited him there among the pines. Just then, the massive sound system let loose with a sharp squeal of attention-getting feedback, and everyone looked to follow the sound. Immediately on its heels came a blast of percussion that resolved itself into the signature beats of Japanese
taiko
drumming. It started out loud and got louder, undershot with bass notes so profound they made the ground shake. The drumming gave way to the single tenor drone of a great Irish warpipe, which held and held and held, then shattered in a glissando of falling notes unrecognizable as that of any particular instrument (and therefore probably synthesized) that landed in a lake of full orchestration. All at once the air was alive with music of richness and sophistication, rife with tension and conflict. The dancers started up again, moving in complex choreography, a feast for the eyes. Vic, meanwhile, had left the line of pines; he was nowhere to be seen.

Next, a series of firecracker-pops explosively untethered the balloons. Controlled from below by dozens of young functionaries cradling Geoids, the dirigibles formed up in a lazy promenade. The controllers’ fingers danced on the pads, and the airships overhead danced in kind. I didn’t know the Geoid could serve as a radio controller, but I wasn’t surprised; with the proper peripherals, it could doubtless walk my dog.

A draped and decorated scissor-lift cranked up from ground level
to a height of fifty feet, and there stood Zoe, resplendent in rich crimson robes, hair dyed to match. Her own Geoid in hand, she presided over the show like a conductor. You had to wonder how much of Mirplo’s achievement could be attributed to her. Behind every great man stands a techie queen?

The music morphed again, dipping down into long, low frequencies that made the sand on the basin floor bounce, and that’s some sub-woofing there. This gave way to something like a Sousa march filtered through cellophane, at once stirring and incredibly banal, a call to arms that made a mockery of calls to arms. The balloons separated into armadas of good and evil and moved to opposite sides of the basin, one near the hoodoos and the other in the lee of the cliff wall.

The crowd stood spellbound, and I noticed Jay mentally counting the house. Measured in demonstrable fan devotion, his investment was looking better by the second. Now a hum rose from the sound system, and it seemed to be the signal for a certain balloonageddon to commence.

The dirigibles closed on one another in attack phalanxes, then broke into a panorama of slow-motion dogfights. The name of the game appeared to be to engage your foe broadside and spike him with your stiletto tip. The operators’ faces turned tense with concentration as small twos and threes of balloons coordinated their efforts, forming teams that could attack the enemy and defend each other’s flanks. When one balloon speared another, the victim exploded in a shower of metal confetti, as if to convey that death may be pretty, or at least shiny. The Mylar corpses that landed in the crowd were raised above many heads and marched about like fallen gods. This seemed not to have been planned, just an enthusiastic, spontaneous response to noble sacrifice. Whatever Vic had tapped into here, it was primal stuff; folks had lost their minds.

Art is power, is what it is.

The two sides struck a rough balance, so that every time good or evil seemed to get the upper hand, its adversary adapted, changed tactics,
regrouped. This may have been intended to show that morality needs strategy or that good and evil regress to the mean. Or something else, I don’t know. Ask Vic.

He must be around here somewhere.

The dragonfly ultralight suddenly appeared above the cliff tops, clearing the pines on takeoff, then looping far around to the west. Now it returned, flying in out of the sun. It thrashed among the balloons, using nothing but prop wash to scatter the order of battle and create chaos. Then it climbed high, circling, surveying. Crimson sunlight caught the facets of the dragonfly’s bulbous compound eyes and shot reflected flashes of red-green fire into the crowd.

The battle rolled on, good fighting evil for mastery of the sky. And now the black hats began to gain the upper hand as they relentlessly parlayed a small numerical advantage into a big one. The engagement, it seemed, would be over soon.

Or maybe not. For just then the ultralight descended from high orbit and made strafing runs on the evil balloons. You couldn’t see anything being fired—bullets, darts, St. Elmo’s Fire—but every time the plane lined up on its target, the target exploded. This mystified me until I glanced at the operators and noticed them fingering their Geoids at strategic instants. Interesting. The balloons were rigged with self-destructive charges. I suppose that said something about something—the futility of war?—but I couldn’t form the thought. The spectacle had wiped my mind clean of most notions save the perplexing conundrum of whether Mirplo had made art or art had made him.

Soon all the evil balloons had been destroyed, and when the last one fell, a cheer went up from the crowd. The dragonfly flew a lazy victory lap around the arena, waggling its wings in acknowledgment of the crowd’s support.

Then blasted every remaining balloon—all the surviving good guys—clean out of the sky.

Well, people were shocked. You could read it in their faces, hear it in their gasps. They’d been seduced into supporting their heroes, been
rewarded with victory, and then, in the throes of their euphoria, seen even the victors summarily and arbitrarily wiped out. There was bafflement. How could a just and loving dragonfly do such a thing? The crowd became restive, unruly. I shared their unease. On a gut level, below reason, I felt betrayed.

The ultralight flew low over the crowd. The nacelle opened for two seconds and a small flutter of paper puffed out. Characteristic rectangles. Big Bens.

Blood money? Maybe. It altered the group mood in an instant.

Where the money fell, people went predictably nuts, stampeding, competing for their share of the windfall. Meanwhile, the dragonfly swooped and weaved here and there, releasing more cash in long or tantalizingly short bursts.

One of the bills wafted down into our midst, and Wolfredian snatched it. He examined it with a practiced eye, then pocketed it. “Look at that,” he said. “Return on my investment already.”

The battle was already a memory, for the frenzy of free money changed everything. Money is like that. It trumps good and evil. It trumps almost everything.

The music stopped. The dragonfly droned out beyond the hoodoos and lined up for another run over the crowd. Down on the basin floor the only sound was the undifferentiated growl of feral clashes for cash. The ultralight gathered speed. The dragonfly entered the basin. The nacelle cracked open, and a huge stream of hundred-dollar bills ribboned out.

Then … the ultralight’s engine quit.

It started again, sputtered, then died for good.

And in the sick silence that followed, the plane drifted across the basin, describing a low, sinking parabolic arc. It smashed into the red cliffs about halfway up, exploded in a ball of flame, and vaporized at once.

This time there was no BASE jump and no parachute with a Mirplo logo. Just a minimal cloud of debris that rained down, including many charred hundred-dollar bills.

A
llie and I held a service for Vic in Memorial Gardens, an ecumenical resting spot on the southern edge of Santa Fe. I’d toyed with the idea of romancing him into the Santa Fe National Cemetery as a war veteran, but to what end, beyond slapping a bogus exclamation point on the end of his life sentence? While such chicanery might have tickled Vic, I think Memorial Gardens would probably please him more. It was so nondenominational as to be completely noncommittal, its approach to eternal repose as hodgepodge as Vic’s constantly slurving definition of art. I don’t know, somehow it suited.

We had a simple marker placed beneath a palo verde tree, red sandstone to clash with the tree’s green blooms, then went back and forth for a while on what to inscribe on the stone. I wanted something Mirplovian, something like N
UCK THIS
or N
OW
I
’M REALLY BORED
. Allie preferred the modern allegorical R
UST NEVER SLEEPS
. In the end we settled on I
’LL BURN THAT BRIDGE WHEN
I
COME TO IT
. Next we sent word to the Santa Fe art community, announcing the day and time of Vic’s memorial. Zoe didn’t come—apparently she preferred to mourn in private—but quite a crowd turned out to eulogize, as they saw it, an artist of vision and great promise, tragically cut down in his prime. They admired that he died for his art.

I spoke a few words. I had intended something grand, perhaps a proposal to turn the site of his first studio into a monument after all, but in the end I just echoed Woody’s observation about the slender
thread by which we all hang, and encouraged those who love each other to love each other a little harder and make it known while there’s still time. Allie held my hand. Boy lay at my feet. It seemed like the right thing to say.

While others chipped in with words of affection for a man they knew less well than I did, my mind wandered back to the aftermath of the accident.

There had been chaos. In the horror of the instant, people started screaming and swarming, going off in all directions at once. It’s the small moments I remember.