The Albuquerque Turkey: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    * Embalmer, film editor, able seaman, construction manager, kiln operator, gem cutter, interior designer, park ranger, and urban planner, to name just a few of the fully hypothetical positions I have held.

5

How Many Solipsists?
     
    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 everreached 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.
    “Ouch, shit!” That was me savaging my thumb with a hammer instead of hitting the little wooden dowels that connected the kickboard bracket of the Reåd shelving system to the left and right support struts. And that’s because I was thinking more about my father than about hammers and dowels—and lying to Allie with my silence, which was making me edgier than I let on.
    I don’t know why I didn’t just come right out and tell her. Maybe I thought she wouldn’t believe me, would just tab the revelation as “intrigue for the sake of