The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (4 page)

I played the police and the press in an uncharacteristically candid manner. They wanted statements, they got statements. Pictures? No problem. I was innocent, beneficent, I had nothing to hide. It made me a little jittery, not traveling dark after so many years of concealing everything about myself—my aims, endeavors, history, talents, resources, even my name. But Allie wanted it, and I wanted her to have it. So every time I played the hometown hero card with the local cops or TV, I was really playing the change card for her.

Vic thought this was the shit. For some reason, it tickled him to see my picture in the paper, standing there with Boy by my side and a look of pure, stalwart citizenship on my face. “You’re such a Girl Scout,” he said a few nights later after dinner at our place (where he frequently dined, the mooch). “After all the time I’ve known you, who’d have thought?”

“Wrong place, wrong time.” I shrugged.

“You sure you’re not setting something up? Celebrity scam? Phony book deal? Reality TV gig? A guy like you could leverage fame pretty
hard.” He grinned like he knew what was behind door number three. “So what’s your hidden agenda?”

“No hidden agenda, Vic. I just did a good deed, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, we know those don’t go unpunished.” He snapped his fingers and pointed at me with a look of pure Mirplovian inspiration. “I should do an installation!”

“A what, now?” asked Allie. She sat on the couch with Boy’s big head in her lap, scratching the stump of his missing ear.

“Installation. An art project, celebrating Radar. Like a sculpture, but conceptual. And someone pays you to put it someplace.” Vic turned to me. “I’m telling you, Radar, the pockets in this town are de-ee-eep. Cultural funds. Nonprofits. The college. Chamber of Commerce. They’ve got it sussed. Art drives the tourist trade, and the tourist trade gets everyone fat. More art, more tourists. More tourists, more snacky snacks for us.”

“Again, Vic, I have to remind you, you’re not an artist.”

“And I have to remind you that that doesn’t matter. Look, I already look the part.” He waved his hands in front of his body, spokesmodel style, showcasing his sweatshirt with the cut-off sleeves, vintage Converse sneakers, and, yes, those paint-stained blue jeans that made him look more arty. I had to admit that he did exude a certain bohemian chic, perfect for Santa Fe, though in any other context he would look more hobo than boho. “Besides, with these installations, all you really need is a sexy name. We’ll call it”—Vic paused to compose—
“The Persecution and Resurrection of Saint Radar (on a Tuesday).”
He momentarily switched into his Uncle Joe persona, a basso vapido fantasy sportscaster, one of whose signature lines, “And the crowd goes wild!,” he indulged in now.

“And what,” I asked, “would this installation look like?”

“Who cares? Doesn’t matter. Get some old mattresses, spray-painted cinder blocks, maybe a refrigerator with holes drilled in it. An upside-down Buddha. It’s all about symbolism with this art crowd. The more perplexing the better.”

I mulled this over. I could feel a certain stirring deep in my gut
as the play laid out before me. It had, I had to admit, a certain appeal: Play your cards right, you could do installations everywhere. Then I looked over at Allie. She continued rubbing Boy’s head while silently shaking her own.

The problem with living with a world-class grifter is that she almost always knows what you’re thinking.

“Well, good luck with that, Vic. I’m sure you’ll be the next Paul Klee.”

“Who?”

Say this about a Mirplo, they never let ignorance stand in their way.

After a while, Vic departed to make the rounds of bars and boîtes where, according to his dim understanding of the Santa Fe art community’s status system, one could advance one’s reputation merely by showing up—or getting kicked out.

“There’s a poetry slam at Stalacti,” he said. “Maybe I’ll crash.”

“Now you write poetry, too?”

“What can I tell you?” he said. “I’m a Renaissance dude.”

The thought of Vic writing poetry sent a shudder through my linguistic orthodoxy, but I clapped him on the back as I sent him on his way. “Knock ’em dead, kid.”

“He shoots, he scores!” bellowed Uncle Joe in reply.

That night, Allie and I made love—slow, sweet, and tender, just the way normal people do when their time is their own and their conscience troubles them not. Later she said, “I’m proud of us.”

“For what?” I asked.

“Doing this the right way. Trying, at least. I know it’s hard.”

I basked in her approval but lay awake long after she fell asleep. Being in the public eye troubled me. Too many people now knew my name, and though I had nothing (currently) to hide, it made me feel unsafe, like a squirrel who’d strayed too far from the trees. Boy lay curled up at the foot of the bed. He farted in his sleep, and I found the expanding bubble of noisome fume oddly comforting.
I’ve got a woman and a dog
, I thought.
A place to live. Fifteen minutes of fame
.
How bad can things be?
But the last thought I had before drifting off was Vic’s observation about good deeds—“We know those don’t go unpunished.”

The next day, incredibly, I actually applied for a job. Okay, not a
job
job, not like a greeter at Walmart or something. What I did, I went over to the community college and offered my services as a career counselor. I figured, who better to counsel careers than one who’s had so many?
^*
But I couldn’t talk my way past the lack of a college degree without flat-out lying, which the current terms of embargo forbade. The human-resources director told me she found me quite qualified. And charming, which struck me as good news, for it meant that I still had my old Hoverlander mojo. Absent that sheepskin, though, her hands were tied. It made me wonder whether the first step in my remedial reconstruction wouldn’t have to be education in earnest. I flashed on myself sitting in the back of a civics or an English class, parsing the three branches of government, or a sentence. Somehow, I couldn’t make that dog hunt.

Bootstrap education, then? Find a job that requires nothing more than initiative and will—what your granddaddy used to call gumption—and build a career from the ground up? I thought I had what it took to be a self-made man. God knows I’d self-made myself often enough. But again I could forehear the dismal subaudial drone of days. Where’d be the fun in doing over and over again what I’d long since mastered? That seemed a death sentence of sorts.

I went and chased these cheery thoughts through a plate of steak and eggs at a Rudi’s Eatateria, lately franchised and spreading like an algae bloom from its Los Angeles roots because even, or perhaps especially, in these troubled times, people take great comfort in a terrific
plate of steak and eggs. It’s my habit to sit by windows when I eat, partly to people-watch, but mostly just out of good con hygiene. You never know when knowing what’s coming in the front door will buy you a half-step head start out the back. This Rudi’s had a southern exposure, and sunlight washed through tinted windows, splashing a silvery yellow glow across the retro Formica four-top at which I sat. People passed by outside at an uneven pace, as if they couldn’t decide whether the day was a pleasant one to savor or a hot one to get in out of quickly. Such can be Santa Fe in June: In shadows, you stroll; in sunshine, you stride.

One pedestrian on the opposite sidewalk impressed me as perhaps the most singularly unattractive woman I’d ever seen. From her chunky black kitten heels to her cankles to her shapeless red dress (which even I could tell the shoes didn’t go with) to her clownishly made up face and drab blown hairdo in wig-shop brown, this was one saggy citizen.

Who, I noticed, was looking at me.

Well, window-shopping, I guess you’d say, scanning the storefronts as if skimming for just whatever happened to catch the eye. But as she was across the street, the logical storefronts to scan were the ones on the sidewalk over there. Instead, she let her gaze graze along Rudi’s facade, and though I doubted she could see me through the tint of Rudi’s windows, she seemed determined to try. She covered her eyes with one meaty hand and peered hard in my direction from beneath furred and furrowed beetle brows. Then she reacted to something—the loud growl of a passing car?—and I thought I saw a flicker of fear break across her face. She turned quickly and hobbled off down the street. Clumsy as she looked on those teetery low heels, I wished her a pair of Reeboks for Christmas.

There’s a certain sort of tickle I get in the back of my mind when something’s not quite right—call it Radar’s radar—and I got it just then, big-time. So big that I was half inclined to trail her. But there were these eggs and steak to finish, and besides, I couldn’t be a hundred percent
sure I wasn’t projecting. Allie was right about the difficulty of detox. The razzle’s a buzz, the best I’ve ever found, and if I was going through withdrawal now, in the unwilling company of my brain’s understimulated pleasure centers, it was logical to think that my mind might play tricks on me. Perhaps it was playing one now, concocting intrigue for the sake of intrigue by turning an ugly window-shopper into, I don’t know, a KGB operative.

I’m saying, if you want to see ghosts, you see ghosts.

I shrugged off the episode, downed the last of my lunch, and headed out to meet Allie at IKEA, for we had determined that some stand-alone bookshelves were an indispensible part of our conventional new lifestyle. Arriving in the midafternoon lull, we worked our way along the giant store’s serpentine layout, a yellow-brick sojourn through the spectrum of domesticity, with leather couches left and right, entertainment consoles in our wake, and kitchen treatments dead ahead. And it was fun: all giddy domesticity and this hand-holdy,
look what we’re building together out of prefab furniture
, workaday romance. I’d never been to IKEA before, and I was immediately intrigued by the product tags. Fläkig, Kramfors, Flört … who comes up with these names? Now that’s a job I could do till the end of days.

Allie had advanced to bookshelves and was already weighing the relative benefits of melamine versus birch veneer, but I lagged behind, distracted by a bin full of tapered plastic cylinders, the Crüst, at $2.99 each. I spent a long moment failing utterly to grasp what they were for, then hustled to catch up. In the nature of IKEA, partitions sliced the space like canyon walls, with punched-out cutouts and archways yielding glimpses of consumer bliss available in other aisles. So it was that as I headed in Allie’s direction, I happened to look through a pass-through into the children’s bedroom section.

And there sat the lady in red. To her fashion-casualty wardrobe she had added a pair of oversize daisy-frame sunglasses. She bounced heavily up and down on the bottom bunk of a bunk bed. Testing its firmness, I suppose.

She stopped when she saw me. Tilted her sunglasses down and peered over the top of them. Our eyes met.

The story is told of a man who wanted revenge on a woman who’d broken his heart. “Remember me,” he warned her. “Remember my face. Because someday, somewhere, many years from now, you will see this face again. And if you don’t acknowledge me instantly, I will kill you where you stand.” How horrible it must’ve been for the woman to carry that weight of wariness with her for the rest of her life, fearful lest she forget. I wasn’t thus tormented, but there was not the slightest doubt in my mind that I’d seen those eyes before.

“Radar?” Allie had backtracked to find me.

The lady in red held a fleshy finger to her lips, bidding my silence. Then she rose and walked away. I stared at where she’d been. Every part of me felt frozen.

“Hey, lover.” Allie waved her hand in front of my face. “Hello?”

“ISS,” said a canny fellow shopper with a knowing smile. “IKEA stress syndrome. My husband gets it bad.”

“ISS, Radar?” asked Allie. She has a formidable radar of her own and must have known that there was more to my stupefaction than the riddle of the Crüst.

I shrugged. “I guess I just don’t have the shopping gene.”

Well, what was I supposed to say? That the woman in the red dress was actually a man, one I hadn’t seen in over twenty years?

Woody Hoverlander, in fact.

My old man.

I
f your father walked out on you when you were eight years old, how much of him would you remember? Of Woody I remembered much. The way he always smelled of Old Spice and the panatelas he smoked. The hand magic he could do, like making a quarter disappear (and then not giving it back, to teach me a lesson in credulity). The frequent, unexplained absences, which I realized long after the fact were either undercover stints on the snuke or time in jail. And then the final big disappearance, which he made worse, I think, by perpetrating the false hope of his imminent return. This he did with a string of postcards that, as a sort of running gag, bore portmanteau photographs of that mythical western critter, the jackalope, all furry haunches and grafted antlers. His handwritten messages were usually riddles like

Q: How many solipsists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Who wants to know?

The postcard flow dwindled over time, then petered out altogether. Later, when I started on the snuke, word of his adventures occasionally reached me by roundabout means. I’d meet a grifter who knew a grifter who’d worked a government grants thing with him, or a Jake—a cop or detective—who’d note a resemblance and say, “You’re not that son of a bitch’s son, are you?” I often wondered if word of my exploits ever
reached him. Was he proud that his son had followed in his roguish footsteps? Or could he not care less? I tried to track him down once, just for drill, but apart from the aggrieved screeds of several women who’d discovered themselves to be his coetaneous wives, I didn’t get close. When you’re a master of the vanishing act, it’s no trick to stay lost. As to how he’d found me, I didn’t bother to wonder. The way I’d been lighting up the media with my name and picture, I was practically on MapQuest.