The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel (32 page)

Like Martybeth instinctively clinging to Louise, who shoved her aside with such open hostility that Martybeth finally understood how and why she’d been used.

Or Jay looking flatlined, though I knew that the color draining from his face was less about any sudden and tragic deaths than about a sudden and tragic nosedive in income projections. It took no genius to calculate that Mirplopalooza without Mirplo was just palooza.

Or Woody dodging the sidewheels and slipping away into the crowd, which struck me as exactly and precisely the right thing to do, so I grabbed Allie and we did the shade and fade, retreating across the festival ground, lost in the teeming mob.

Or the human tide sweeping us past the Gaia hospitality tent, where I caught a glimpse of Honey waddling around, portly in his bear suit.

Or the ride we thumbed out of there with a vanload of Mirplomaniacs from Reno, or the series of regional flights we caught from there back to Santa Fe.

Or when I started crying.

It shouldn’t have ended like this. We had a good plan, a righteous plan to snuke a most suspicious mark by shoving his own suspicions back down his throat until he choked on them. First we spellbound him with the spectacle of Mirplopalooza, then we drowned his doubts in all that conflict between Woody, Vic and me—played right into his
smug security that “the enemy of my enemy is my date to the prom.” I like to think I played my ire well enough to bury all of Jay’s suspicions in the angry, desperate efforts of a hurt and heartsick son trying to destroy his father out of spite. But credit really had to go to Vic, not just for his acting ability—changing his game face as the situation demanded—but really for injecting Mirplopalooza with legitimate artistic energy. True, I had heavily hedged that bet by hiring not just the event staff, but all the festive festivalgoers as well. Mirplomania, bought and paid for from the start; no wonder it looked so good to Jay. Next year’s affair, not thus artificially propped, would have flopped, but by then Jay’s money would have been long gone, distributed among us all from the joint account that Jay’d paid into. At that point, what could he do about a fickle public turning its back on last year’s fad? Mirplo would’ve given it the good ol’ college try, but you can’t catch lightning in a bottle twice. Probably by the third year, Jay’d realize his investment was crap, cut his losses, and quit. Then Vic would’ve been free to pursue whatever flights of fancy next tickled him to try.

That was the plan.

But the plan hit a wall, disintegrated and burned, along with my best friend.

Along, also, with our million bucks, which Allie said was a mistake: There was supposed to be a switcheroo.

This she told me the night we got back from Nevada. We were sitting on the front porch of our cottage, still in shock. We’d retrieved Boy from Zoe’s dad and, sensing the mood of the moment, he lay between us in solemn repose.

“We had a bag swap on,” Allie said. “It was Vic’s idea. When I told him you’d been kidnapped, he thought we could pay your ransom and still keep it.”

“He knew about the Gaia duffels?”

“Sure. Remember, he’s the one who sold Wolfredian on doing the hospitality tent. He must’ve seen the swag when the casino loaded it in.”

“So you two set up a switch.”

“We three. Woody was in on it, too.”

“He was, huh?” I got a sinking feeling, the same one I always got when Woody was in on things. Because Woody already knew about the kidnapping. Fed Jay the idea, in fact. “How’d it work?”

“Easy. I just signatured one bag with a TSA lock and planted another one, a dummy, in with all the rest. I made the switch during my scuffle with Vic.”

I could see it. I could almost replay it in my mind’s eye. Vic and Allie go down in a hail of swag bags. Allie grabs a second locked bag and loses the first among the others, with plans to come back and collect it later. The ol’ switcheroo. Except …

“Why didn’t you go back for the money?”

“Because it wasn’t there.”

“What do you mean?”

“Remember when Honey hit me? We fell down and rolled around. I was trying to move him off the play, but he must’ve thought I was giving him cover. He switched the bags back.”

“But why?”

“Maybe he didn’t know the switch had been made.”

“But it makes no sense. Why bother swapping at all when Vic’s supposed to end up with our cash anyhow, then kick it back to us later?”

“Well,” said Allie, “because …” Her voice trailed off. After a minute, she said, softly and with no conviction whatsoever, “Belt and suspenders.”

“Come again?”

“Belt and suspenders. Extra protection. That’s what Woody called it when he called the play.”

“I thought you and Vic called the play.”

“I thought so, too. But now I’m not so sure. You know how your
father is. When he gets talking, everything seems so reasonable, you kind of lose your mind.”

“So,” I said, “Vic ended up with the money and decided to spew it all over the festival ground.” I thought back to the performance. “But that didn’t seem like improv. It really seemed planned, part of the show. Its whole point, really.”

“Maybe it was,” Allie thought for a minute, then said, “Maybe … Radar, I don’t like to say this, but maybe that was Vic’s move all along: Steal our money and Robin Hood it out to the crowd. An employee bonus, like. Or a statement.”

“What statement? ‘Art irritates life’?”

“Something like that.”

“I don’t buy it,” I said. “For that to be true, he’d have to have been double-crossing us for real and not for show. It wasn’t Vic.”

“Then who?”

“Well, who else?”

“Woody,” said Allie. “But how?”

I replayed Honey’s and Allie’s struggle in the tent. Yes, Honey had come up with the bag: the real one, not the dummy one; unless …

I snapped my fingers. “Of course! Allie, Honey didn’t switch the bags back, he switched in a third one! Then bootlegged the money out later. No wonder he looked all portly. He had a million dollars’ worth of bear fat.”

“But we saw the money fall from the plane.”

“We saw
some
money fall from the plane. Who’s to say how much?”

“Maybe not much,” agreed Allie. “Maybe just enough to make us think it was all of it.”

“Right, like salting a gold mine.”

“Vic did have some cash,” she mused. “The high-roller roll you had him bring to Vegas.”

“Which maybe he put in the plane beforehand.”

“So it all comes back to Woody. At the end of the day, he snuked us right out of our stake.”

And when we checked the joint account? Yeah, he’d snuked us out of that, too. Is anyone here surprised?

The thing plagued me, though; it did. Maybe I put too much trust in Radar’s radar, but I just couldn’t believe Woody would do me like that. The evidence was there. The facts stacked up. The narrative was completely consistent. But I didn’t vibe it. Deep down in my gut, the explanation wouldn’t take hold. Still, what could I do? Woody was in the wind, and Allie and I were left holding the bag. A great big bag of nothing.

We started looking for straight jobs. Our hearts couldn’t have been less in it if they’d been surgically removed and shipped to South Africa. Still, we managed to land something. Allie caught on at an arts council, writing grants. Honest grift—I knew she’d be good at it. Me, I got a job groundskeeping a golf course, suitably mindless work, driving a rider-mower all day and listening to books on tape.

In my quiet moments, I mulled Vic’s death, trotting out every rationalization I could think of.
He made his own choices. He never had to say yes. And he didn’t have to go to such ridiculous extremes
. But I never could shake the feeling that Vic’s blood was on my hands. It was me. All me. I made him fly too high. If I hadn’t, he’d still be holed up somewhere doing horrible things to dolls and stuffed animals, making a modest name for himself. It wouldn’t have been a bad gig. Anyway, worthy of a Mirplo.

A month passed.

Zoe came to see us. She didn’t look too terrific. Her dyed hair had grown out, her brown roots emerging neglected and ignored, and she’d devolved her dress to sweatpants and a dirty shirt. Her skin was dark, though, for she’d been spending lots of time outdoors. “I’ve been walking,” she explained. “That’s all I do is just walk.”

She told us she was selling Vic’s stuff, and did we want to buy any of his tools or supplies? I said all I wanted was
The Albuquerque Turkey
.

She shook her head sadly. Wolfredian already bought it.

What a vulture the man was, picking over the bones.

And that wasn’t all. Zoe said he’d arranged to buy it all, every last piece Vic had produced in his short career. I guess he thought of it as a consolation prize, cornering the market of the doomed.

“Who organized the sale?” I asked.

“Your dad,” said Zoe. “Somehow he controls the estate.”

Well, why did that not surprise me?
My damned old man’s still snuking us all, even after the fact
.

I made it a point to be at Zoe’s the day a fat van rolled up to cart Vic’s works away. Jay had sent Red Louise to oversee the operation, and she wasted no time getting the moving crew humping their loads. When she saw me, though, she stopped and—literally—cracked her knuckles. “You’re not going to do anything stupid, I hope.”

Actually, I think she hoped I would. “Where’s Wolfredian?” I asked.

Louise snorted. “Like he’s got time to trek out here. There’s other whales to fry, you know.” She reached into her back pocket and pulled out a piece of paper. “You’ll probably want to see this.” It was a document giving Woody control over Vic’s art. Possibly bogus, but what did it matter? Control is control.

I stayed through the load out, making sure that, if nothing else, Vic’s stuff was properly packed for travel. This was his oeuvre, his legacy, and while I hated seeing it in Wolfredian’s hands, I’d have hated worse to see it damaged or destroyed. There was lots of it, too, more than I’d imagined. Guess Vic had mastered that whole “procrastinate later” thing in the end.

At last Louise was ready to go. She couldn’t resist a parting shot. “You’re looking at this wrong, you know. Jay’ll make your friend immortal.
Tragic young deaths sell big. Swear to God, in the end that flake’ll earn more dead than he would’ve alive.”

That’s when I hit her. Hard enough to break her jaw, but also my hand.

I don’t know if that made us even. It sure didn’t make us friends.

A
week later, we get a postcard.

On the front is a photo of a cowboy astride a giant jackalope, herding cattle, with the caption, “Roundup Time.” On the back, in Woody’s familiar hand, a riddle of sorts:

Q: When is Las Vegas not Las Vegas?

A: When Charlie does Sunday brunch
.

“Don’t buy into it, Radar,” said Allie. “He’s just messing us around again.”

“It looks like he’s inviting us to brunch.”

“Where?”

“In the Las Vegas that’s not Las Vegas. The one in New Mexico.”

The one just an hour and change down the road from Santa Fe. The one with a restaurant called Charlie’s Spic & Span. Did we go? Of course we went. I wanted answers. I figured he owed me that much, and figured he figured so, too, else why the postcard?

We arrived on Sunday just before noon and found Woody seated in a booth by the window, placidly eating pie. The distant and obscure meeting place had suggested sequestering, so I was a little surprised to see Woody casually and normally dressed, no more disguised than the ranch hands at a nearby table or the old woman in the next booth over. I sat down opposite him, with Allie by my side.

Oblique as ever, he opened with, “Try the pie. It’s prune.”

“Prune pie?”

“House specialty,” he said, his mouth full. “It’s better than you think.”

“What I think,” I said, “is you’d better tell us what happened to our money.”

“Oh, it’s right here,” he said. He moved his leg under the table and shoved something solid against mine: a laundry bag, large and overstuffed. Allie bent down to explore the contents. She came up with her eyebrows arched.

“Cash,” she said softly. “A whole damn lot of it.”

“Yeah, sorry about the bank account. I had to sweep it clean before probate stepped in.”

“You couldn’t let us know?”

“I’m letting you know now. I wanted to make sure Jay was buttoned up first.”

“And you couldn’t warn me I was going to get kidnapped?”

A shrug and a smile. “True believers sell best.”

“And is he?” asked Allie. “Jay, I mean: sold.”

“Completely. He bought the collected works at yard-sale prices. He’s thrilled.”

“And the Mirplopalooza money?”

“Of course he doesn’t get that back. A deal’s a deal. But he thinks he’ll make it back in the posthumous Mirplo market. Personally, I don’t think he’ll find the market all that strong. The kid was kind of a flash in the pan.”

“Dad,” I said, “don’t speak ill of the dead.”

Woody eyed me thoughtfully. “You know,” he said, “I think that’s the first time you’ve called me Dad.” He kicked the bag with his foot. It made a resonant, dull thud. “Anyway, that’s your share of the get, with an extra twenty-three thousand out of my end. You didn’t think I forgot about that, did you?” He grinned entirely inappropriately. “Oh, plus your million. Sorry I had to play a little fast and loose with that. You figured out how it went down?”

“Yeah, we figured out how,” I said. “Still haven’t figured out why.”

“Well, you don’t want to leave that kind of cash in the hands of a Mirplo.”

I repeated quietly, “I told you not to speak ill of the dead.”

“I’m not,” he replied.

“He’s really not,” said the old woman in the booth behind us—in the voice of Uncle Joe!

“Vic!” I dove straight over the banquette and landed upside down in Vic’s lap. I jarred my broken hand and suffered a shiver of pain, but I didn’t care. Then Allie was in there too, squirming around and burying granny in her affection. No doubt we looked mad to the ranchers, but they politely focused on their sopaipillas and left us to our antic reunion.