The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

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 percentsure 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.