The Texas Twist (27 page)

Kadyn gave Henry a present: a sleek and supple black money vest, ballistic nylon, with clean lines and myriad
pockets and concealed compartments. He happily accepted the gift and enthusiastically agreed with her thesis that he would find it more comfortable to wear his money than carry it.

She had a vest for Mirplo as well, and one for Radar, specialty items from her store, as Vic explained to Radar when they next met at Santa Margarita. “Please tell me this was your idea,” he said. “All these vests.”

“Of course it was,” said Radar. “But it goes back weeks, to before she went rogue.”

“Or whatever,” insisted Vic.

“Or whatever.” Radar started exploring his vest's many pockets. He didn't know exactly what he was looking for. Eyes and ears, maybe? Silent alarms? But the vest was clean, so far as he could tell. However, in one tiny zippered compartment he found something that brought a smile to his lips. It was a small slip of paper assuring the buyer that the garment had been “inspected by #6.” But what really delighted Radar was the handwritten message on the back side:
Kxx
. He showed it to Vic.

“Kadyn with kisses?” asked Vic.

“That's how I read it.”

“How do I know she means it?”

“I gotta tell you, Vic, this is not the Mirplo I know and love.”

“I know, I know. I'm that sad a sack. But she's that young, Radar, and we've put a lot of power in her hands. If she gets a choice between a good man and big money, how can we be sure she'll see the value of choosing the good man?”

“Now you're a good man?”

“I could be for her.”

“Well, let it play out,” counseled Radar. “And keep the faith.”

“I'll be fine,” said Vic without much conviction. “I just have to find my inner fool.”

Radar actually found that quite reassuring, for if a Mirplo couldn't find his inner fool, who among them could?

O
n Saturday morning, Radar went for a short run to balance his energy and review his script one final time. Upon his return, he found Adam loading several large suitcases into Sarah's blue Song Score. “We have a room at the Driskill Hotel,” Ames offered by way of unsolicited explanation. “For tonight.”

“That's a lot of gear for just overnight,” Radar observed.

“Elaborate costumes,” said Ames.

“Uh-huh,” said Radar. As he walked away he thought,
Well, it certainly looks like a shade 'n' fade. Is Sarah right? Is he going to bunny? Or does he just want me to think he is?
With this, Radar knew, he was right back in the leveling game, trying to unsnarl the knot of Adam's actions and the engine that drove them. Now, suddenly, he saw the levels in a different light. Part of Radar's strategy for simplifying the game was to make Adam play that true-believer card over and over again. But suppose Ames was working the same
trick on him? What card was Adam making Radar play with predictable consistency?

This one right here,
thought Radar.
The suspicion card. At all times, in all situations, he wants me to think the worst.
In which case, the packed blue car was just a stuffed red herring. Interesting.

Of course, booking a room at the Driskill was such a good idea that Radar had thought of it and seen to it long ago, and Saturday afternoon found Allie alone in that room, standing near the window in new white satin briefs and matching bra. She gazed down on the street below, lost in thought. Downtown Austin was quiet for a change, with no bustle, no big music festival or film festival or food festival going on. In the few months she'd been there, Austin had struck Allie as self-consciously busy, and its relentless effort to keep itself weird seemed to take more energy than it was worth. No matter how tonight played out, she thought, soon they would be moving on. This wasn't home. It couldn't be home.

She crossed to the bed and looked at the dress she'd laid out, a flowing white Chantilly silk whose art deco stylings betrayed its Jazz Age provenance. She had found it in the umpteenth resale store she tried, and paid just a resale price for it, but she knew it had been a classic once, and with restoration could be made so again. So, costume? Gown? In the end, the dress she bought was both, and what did that say about her? That she gave everything to Radar, yet held a little bit back? Well, maybe that's what marriage was: giving your all, almost. In any case, she liked the gown. It made a complex and contradictory statement, and that seemed a bit like marriage, too.

She took off the dress and hung it up in the closet as she thought about the evening ahead. There were, she knew, two parts to the snuke. The first part was the money-go-round. The second part, the crucial part, was getting to the bottom of Adam Ames. Allie understood that everything about the first part was really just there to serve the second. She hoped to hell it worked. She wanted Ames out of her life. She still couldn't figure out why he was in it.

Allie cast her mind back to her time with Green Girl Solutions. Green Girl had been a tricky sell for her. All MLMs are culty, and this one was heavily draped in sexual mystique. She made good money with it, but never felt comfortable with the sensuality it peddled at a time when she was trying so hard to desex herself. Put plainly, the docket didn't fit, and her whole time with Green Girl she felt edgy, tense, and inadequate, her self-loathing projected back to her with every sale she made or deal she closed. That night in the bar when she shot Adam down…had she been very drunk? She may have been; it was a trade show and she always played those loose, for you wrote as much paper at the bar as you did in the exhibit hall. So then: drunk and sullen. Not a good combination. Still, if all she did was blow off a guy who tried to buy her a drink.…

Then, suddenly, she remembered.

She had been walking back from the bathroom, feeling claustrophobic in the noisy and sweaty (and sexy and self-confident) crowd. A man had surreptitiously assaulted her there, shoving her into a small space between a pay phone and a cigarette machine and jamming his hand right up her skirt to her crotch. In other circumstances, she would have
just pushed him off and walked away because…
pawed by some asshole, who cares?
But that night, drunk and sullen, she had fought back: kneed him in the groin and then kicked him when he fell. And now, like turning on a light, she remembered the guy's face, his look of pain—and shame. It was Ames.

Allie went to the window and stared out at nothing, mentally kicking herself for letting something so key get so forgotten. No, not forgotten: buried; blocked from her present as a black part of her past. Sometimes it seemed to her that the whole of her pre-Radar history was myth, the story of somebody else.

Often she wished that it was.

You were who you were, doll,
she told herself.
Deal with it. Just get on top of your energy and let the game come to you. You know how to do this.

Allie sat on the edge of the bed and waited for time to pass.

Longtime residents of Austin will tell you to enjoy spring while it lasts—all ten temperate minutes of it—because summer will be on you before you know it, and summer arrived that day with a vengeance, riding a hot Mexican wind to thermometer readings in the low 90s. As Vic drove into the service yard of the Austin Convention Center, the Staccato's air conditioner going full blast, he guessed that a lot of tonight's partygoers would find themselves ruing the panty, sleevy costume choices they'd made a month ago.
Not my problem,
he thought as he parked his truck and unloaded a small wheeled cargo bag. He rolled it up a ramp to the delivery entrance where a guard recognized him—he'd been
in and out often enough that week—and waved him through to the service elevator, which he took to the fourth floor. He exited the elevator and walked down a long hall lined with meeting rooms until he came to room 23. He unlocked the door with one of several key cards he held and went inside. Placing his bag on the polished-granite conference table, he unzipped it and inspected its contents. Yep, everything was there, neat and orderly, just like he'd packed it. Getting into costume wouldn't be a problem—but getting into character might.

Vic mentally braced himself. “Get your head in the game,” he said aloud to the empty room. “This is not how a Mirplo rolls.”

Leaving his gear in the conference room, he went back down the hall to the main ballroom and slipped in through a rear entrance. This brought him directly into the Woodstock installation,
Fools in Mud,
with its rock and soul dance track and authentic Family Dog light show. From there he made his way to the Midway, a broad double row of classic carnival games: ring toss, dip bowl, tic-tac-toe. Every booth wore a garland of trinkety prizes, worth no more than Mardi Gras beads—until a certain gluttonous
gotta have it
consensus reality kicked in, at which point no price would be too high, and patrons would find themselves draining their wallets to win a stuffed dog or a kewpie doll they could buy down the block for a buck. The Midway was the party's main thoroughfare, just slightly too narrow for the traffic it would carry, and that was by design, for tight spaces create energy, and Vic was looking for a very energetic response to the Midway's games, all heavily gaffed and so favorable to the
house.

He found Kadyn standing near the dime toss, talking on a wireless device slaved to her Serengeti mini-tablet. When she saw Vic, she switched off the phone. “Well, it's official,” she said. “We're a sellout.”

“That's good.”

“Yep. Uh-huh.”

“Good gate, good get. Good. Everything else dilated in?”

If she caught his playful play on words, she chose to ignore it. “Uh-huh,” she said. “I was just about to go home and change.”

“I'll hold the fort,” he said. “My costumes are here.”

“Costumes?” she asked, then quickly amended, “Oh, yeah. I forgot about the second one.”

“The second one's the important one. You won't forget your part?”

She closed her eyes and then opened them. “Don't micromanage,” she said. “I know what to do. I just hope I don't hurt you.”

“I'm a Mirplo,” he said. “We play with pain.”

“Okay, then.”

“Okay.”

She walked away. He almost called after her, but she was already tapping her Bluetooth, making another call.

I like her too much to hate her,
thought Vic.
I hope that won't hurt the script.

T
he first group of fools to arrive was a troupe of talking mimes. They loitered just inside the ballroom entrance amid the cotton clouds and the dry ice, leaning on imaginary walls of their own construction and discussing the news of the day. Next came a glittery pop foursome, self-identified as Drabba, flaunting chartreuse jumpsuits and bad Swedish accents. Behind them came Casey Jones, forever doomed to die on his runaway train. A convincingly clumsy Kramer stumbled in, as did another; and it was momentarily Kramer versus Kramer till they decided to be friends and go find a drink. A trio of cigarette girls arrived, wearing hot pants and pillbox hats and giving away free Old Golds. Then came some fairly run-of-the-mill fools, your Mad Hatter, your Don Knotts. Then there was a lull, and the first guests milling self-consciously exposed in the vast open space wondered if they were the fools who had chosen the wrong party. But this was by Mirplovian
design, for the rainbow of feelings associated with foolishness certainly includes self-consciousness, and on this night guests would experience every stripe of foolery they cared to try—as well as some they hadn't bargained for. Soon the admission logjam was relieved and the ballroom quickly filled. A handsome bride and gorgeous groom swept in, the first of a dozen such couples that night, including many bride and brides and groom and grooms and the occasional bride and groom and bride, all of which made Radar's brainstorm seem, say, fifty percent less brainy than he'd first thought. With the contemporaneous arrival of some Hairy Krishnas, a Jehovah's Witless, and the Moron Tabernacle Choir, the rush was on. Unicyclists. Balloon-animal twisters. Rodeo clowns. Seal hunters. Peace activists. Evolutionists
and
intelligent designers. Luddites. Hussites. Scientologists. Naked San Franciscans. Ghost hunters. Jar Jar Binks. Sun Myung Moon. Richard Simmons. Richard Dawson. Charles Darwin.