The Texas Twist Read online

  “They do put on a show,” observed Allie drily.

  “I’m writing them into my book,” said Vic.

  “And I’m taking a closer look at her,” said Radar.

  This he did the next day, starting with a search on social media, where he found her not. That was odd for this day and age, but he considered that she might have dropped off-line when she went con. Many do, for it’s easier to maintain no internet presence than an elaborately fake one. Or maybe she just didn’t go online. Some people were like that. Even in this day and age.

  But Radar didn’t give up. He pointed his Grape to an esoteric search engine and poked around among fake-patient scams, just on the off chance. He knew how these worked: You showed up in a small town with a supposedly sick kid and preyed on folks’ generosity to generate a modest earn in cash and small checks. Sometimes your plight made news. Radar canvassed a country press archive for just such print-perpetuated tales of woe. He found a lovely one about a boy with brain cancer and his mother who’d been evicted, humiliated, denied health care, and run out of her own hometown. Now she and her suffering son were enjoying the largesse of the good people of Tyler, Texas. Though their names were pure bafflegab, their pictures were unmistakable.

  Sarah and Jonah, oh-ho.

  Backstory Wink

  Bam! Bam! Bam!

  Sarah hammered on the door in hysterics. “Radar! Radar!” she cried as she pounded. “Quick! Come here quick!” Radar and Allie rose and threw on clothes. Vic beat them to the door, pulling a T-shirt on over his gym shorts. He opened it and Sarah spilled in, her face blotched and wet with tears. “Jonah was having a seizure! Adam took him to the emergency room! Radar, can you drive me? Please, I need to see my son!”

  Allie’s eyebrows bounced. Vic pushed his tongue into his cheek. Radar’s discovery of Sarah’s shenanigans in Tyler had cast all of her actions in a new light, but even without that, the obvious question would have to be asked, and Radar asked it: “Sarah, why didn’t you go with Adam?”

  Sarah broke stride. “What?”

  “Why did you not get in the car and go with Adam and Jonah?”

  “I…” mumbled Sarah, “guess I should have.” She threw herself down on the couch. “Oh, I didn’t do that well at all.”

  “Do what well?” asked Vic.

  “The dramatic flair thing. Like to get you all nervous and act rash, right? I believe con people call it rushing the mark.” Off their reactions, she said, “What? I’ve been reading up.”

  “On cons? Why?”

  “For my war with Adam.” She looked at them, shifting her gaze from face to face. “Wait, you thought I was with him? I mean with him with him? Well, that’s good, at least. At least I fooled you on that.”

  “So Jonah’s okay?” asked Allie.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And this midnight hysteria is.…”

  Sarah shrugged. “Practice. But I think I need more.” She frowned, then bounded back. “Oh, plus, tomorrow night I think Adam’s going to make you an offer or proposition of some kind. I heard him talking about it on the phone. That smells fishy, right? Not that you’d be fooled. But play along, okay? I’m building a case against him, a legal case. I’ve talked to a lawyer and everything. I’m going to nail him for trying to rip you off.”

  “Sarah,” said Radar, “A, that’s entrapment, and two, it sounds like you’re running another script here.” Sarah cast down her eyes. “Sarah, look at me.” She looked up. “Have you been to a lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you lying?”

  “I’m not. I’m being a con artist.” Her shoulders sagged. “Just not a very good one. But I still want to hurt him, though,” she said fiercely. “And I’m going to, whether you help me or not.” She stood up and pivoted completely unself-consciously into hostess mode. “So, any special food requests? Vegan? Nothing with a face?” They shook their heads. “No? Okay, well, Adam won’t know I was here. He sleeps like a log.” She slipped out the door and closed it quietly behind her.

  Said Vic, “That, to me, looked like batshit crazy.”

  “Was it intended to, I wonder?” mused Allie.

  Before Radar could offer his observations, Sarah knocked on the door once more. This time she only stuck her head in and said softly, “I forgot to tell you: Actually I sent Jonah away. To his grandma’s. She knows how to take care of him, and I need to focus all my energy on punishing Adam right now. Which is good for me, I think. You know? It takes my mind off things. Thanks for your support, by the way. You guys are good friends.” She blew them a kiss and withdrew.

  Vic said again, with exactly the same inflection, “That, to me, looked like batshit crazy.”

  “Yet Jonah is out of the picture,” said Radar.

  “As spake the cortisol forecast,” noted Allie.

  “I’m high on hormones,” said Radar. “What can I say?”

  They went back to bed, but Radar lay awake, reviewing Sarah’s performance. It was contradictory, sloppy, emotionally promiscuous. It shifted shamelessly from mood to mood. It lied, got caught in a lie, and lied some more. What was the hidden logic of that? Maybe Vic’s assessment of batshit crazy was correct. Maybe Sarah just lacked the remotest trace of self-awareness. Maybe she was on a script. Maybe even a script aimed at herself. People do that all the time, tell themselves a series of lies until it sounds like the truth. In any event, her performance was consistently inconsistent, which meant that she no longer had to explain any irrational act, for irrationality was now firmly woven into the warp and weft of her docket. If docket it was. Radar still didn’t know, and he realized that his best guess was just that—a guess. He was frustrated by this, but at the same time, he had to admit, intrigued. He felt himself embracing the situation in a new way. Leaning into it, almost. Whatever the true state of their union, Adam and Sarah now posed a pair of puzzles to be separately or severally solved. And when was that ever not fun?

  Which may have explained his sunny mood the next night as he dressed for dinner, humming, for no particular reason, Matt Bunsen and the Burners’ classic “Burnin’ in a White Room” and pausing at intervals to play abortive games of fetch with Boy. Such games were always abortive because Boy always turned them into keep-away or tug-of-war, guarding his prize—in this case a bald tennis ball—with quick and jealous jaws.

  Dog behavior, reflected Radar, is an admirable quality if you are, in fact, a dog.

  Allie came out of the bathroom, naked and fresh from a shower—yet not quite as fresh as she’d like. “I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” she said. “I’m beefing up a storm.” Before Radar could speak, she added, “And no, I don’t need you to make that part of your pregnancy voyage.” She flowed to him and held herself against him, the buttons of his vintage Hawaiian shirt tickling her sternum. She inhaled the fragrance of him, tilted her head to kiss him.…

  And damn near burped in his mouth.

  She stumbled away, laughing. “I’m so sorry, Radar.” She tapped her chest with stiff fingers. “Internal combustion in here like you wouldn’t believe. I feel like a frickin’ fracking site.” She returned to him and looped her arms around his waist. “Will you still want me when I’m blimpy?”

  “You have to ask? Trust me, Allie, no woman attracts me like my frickin’ frackin’ baby mama, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  And they slipped in a quickie before dinner.

  Mirplo was nowhere to be seen. They waited for him till half past polite, but when he still hadn’t shown, they put on their party faces and trundled down the hall to Sarah’s flat, holding hands. “Are we couple dating, Radar?” asked Allie. “This is weird for us.”

  He swung her arm lightly. “Honey,” he said, “we’re the crowned king and queen of bafflegab. If we can’t make a night’s worth of small talk, who can?”

  The trick, of course, would be to ignore all available subjects in the subtext, and these were not few: Adam’s snuke moves on Sarah; her potentially
deranged ripostes; and whatever this impending pitch of his was. Nor did Sarah seem at all interested in dwelling on Jonah’s suffering. Her perky party mood revealed itself the moment they knocked on the door and she responded with a lilting, “Be right there!” She threw the door open and squeaked happy greetings to them both, air-kissing Allie’s cheeks and hugging Radar hard enough to telegraph the absence of a bra. She wore a linen blouse and flowing harem pants, and the glass of wine in her hand was evidently not her first. Ames strode up and gave them hearty handshakes. He had on charcoal khakis and a black polo shirt with a burnt orange Texas Longhorns logo. Camouflage, thought Radar. Local coloration. The man is fitting right in.

  They were still settling in when Vic arrived, breathlessly monologuing. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “Got on a writing jag, lost track of time. You know how that goes. First you tell the story, then the story tells the story, then the story tells you. I haven’t missed anything have I? Dinner? Yeah? No? Party games? Charades? Hors d’oeuvres? Hello, Sarah.” He tossed her a wave, then turned to Ames. “I don’t think we’ve really met.” He stuck out his mitt like the last glad-hand standing. “Mirplo.”

  “Uh, mirplo to you, too?” said Ames uncertainly.

  “No, that’s his name, darling,” said Sarah—and Radar noted the endearment she tucked in. How did that square with her attitude that Ames must pay? Well, it didn’t. And that was the weird thing: He knew it didn’t fit, he just didn’t know how.

  “Named after Saint Mirplo,” prattled Vic, “patron saint of mixed drinks.”

  “Really?” asked Ames, blown back on his heels by the rushing wind of Mirplo’s bafflegab.

  “Not really,” said Vic. “Help myself?” He made a beeline for the bar, for even this version of Mirplo, massively advanced over earlier builds, still felt the gravitational pull of free booze. Or did he? Radar recognized Vic’s blast of white noise as a megaphone move, a standard grifter’s grab for control of the room. But why had Vic chosen this script? To fight batshit crazy with batshit crazy? Or just to lay down a new docket? Sarah knew Vic only vaguely; Ames knew him not at all. Therefore, he could engage them now with any clean slate he pleased, and apparently he pleased to engage with the loud, non sequitur Mirplo, all manic all the time. “And by the way, it’s Doctor,” said Vic. “Dr. Mirplo.”

  Radar genuinely struggled not to snicker. Allie did, too, but, why not a doctor? she thought. It’s your docket. You can make it what you want.

  But please, God, good driving habits.

  As Vic devoured a quick scotch and something, and started in on a second, Ames asked Allie where she was from. She gave him a backstory that Radar had never heard before, a myth of middle-class Midwest normality with a minister mother and a stay-at-home dad dwelling in, of all places, Ames, Iowa. Radar immediately recognized this as a backstory wink because…Ames, Iowa? It was so ridiculously on the nose, clearly intended to provoke a response. It either would or would not get one, but either way it would tell them something about Ames: how attentive he was; how good he was at hiding it. In the same vein you might use a name wink, like Olivier de Havilland, to rate your mark’s cultural literacy. Sometimes it helps. People think grifters do these things for whimsy, but they don’t. There’s always a reason.

  Ames left the remarkable coincidence unremarked as he forcefully percolated his own personality through detailed elaborations of his newfound love for Austin, Texas. To Radar, Adam’s nonversation appeared almost formulaic. No, it was formulaic. 1) Name an Austin trait or landmark. 2) Express admiration for one of its qualities. 3) Make a self-deprecating joke. 4) Swear loyalty.

  He did this four times.

  “I mean, the food in this town? I had ribs at the Salt Lick. Seriously delicious. But I’d better be careful.” He patted his stomach. “Flab city, right? Anyway, the locals tell me that Artz’s is the real deal for barbecue. I can’t wait to try them all.

  “Hook ’em Horns, yeah? Big 12 champions, baby. If I had a spare arm and a leg, I’d get season tickets.

  “South by Southwest, does anything rock harder? Not that me and my tin ear would know. Still, great for the city, huh?”

  And so on.

  Radar felt his mind starting to go numb. Was that Ames’s intention? To make his own bafflegab so stultifying that Radar lost his edge? Feeling the need to clear his head, Radar retreated to the kitchen where Sarah was chopping salad. “Your guy’s in love with Texas,” he said.

  “He hasn’t been here in summer.” She put down the knife and wiped her hands on a dish towel. “Radar, I’m sorry about barging in last night.” She turned to face him, leaning against the kitchen counter in such a way as to pull her blouse tight across her breasts. Radar could see the high-relief outline of her nipples. “I know I’ve been acting weird,” she continued. “I can’t help it. You…you make me not help it.” She took a step forward. Then, as if winning an internal struggle, she abruptly turned away. “Dinner will be ready soon,” she said. “I’ll let you know.” He saw her rub her eye with the back of her hand.

  He gave her the kitchen and went back into the living room, where Mirplo had captured the colloquy with his true fact, bar fact bit: how there’s two classes of reality, things that are true and things that sound true in bars late at night, and you have to guess which. “For example,” he said, “Napoleon invented Napoleon brandy. True fact or bar fact?”

  Ames, forced into the role of indulgent host, pondered for a moment, then said, “True fact?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I think I just made it up, but I might have heard it somewhere. Reality is tricky that way.” And while Ames contemplated the trickiness of reality, Radar found himself almost outside himself, lost in analysis. Adam hadn’t risen at all to the “Ames, Iowa” bait. He seemed to be tolerating Mirplo’s megaphone move with equal equanimity. In all, he gave not so much as a hint that anything here was anything other than what it was. Maybe they needed a stronger sort of probe.

  Merging into the Mirplovian flow, Radar diverted the discussion back around to Adam’s honeymoon with Texas. “It’s not a honeymoon,” said Ames. “It’s true love. This state and I are going all the way. You don’t know it, Radar, but I’m out there every day, meeting people, getting the lay of the land.”

  “Meeting folks,” corrected Radar.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Around here you don’t meet people, you meet folks.”

  “Okay, well, thanks for the tip.”

  “Will it be easy to pull up stakes?”

  “What?”

  “No ties that bind left behind?” This was a nod to Raluca. It said, I know about the girlfriend, friend, and you don’t know how much more I know. Radar searched Adam’s eyes for a flicker of acknowledgment—and got it! For a split-second, a different person was present there, a man of Adam’s true past, not his ingenuine present.

  But the flicker died and Ames said, “Nope. This ol’ cowboy is footloose and fancy free.”

  “Then welcome to Texas, cowboy. Someone get the man a yellow rose.”

  A few minutes later Sarah served the meal, a spicy salchicha lasagna that she washed down with quantities of a quaffable Bulgarian red, which went straight to her head and made her the sing-songy life of the party. By the time she brought out her special dessert—homemade strawberry pie, thank you very much—she was calling the wine “Marilyn,” as in Marilyn merlot, and regarding herself as the height of hilarity. As she doled out the pie, she yattered on, summing up the evening and how she thought it was going so far. “We’re all having a good time, right?” she said. “A good time?” She handed Radar and Adam their plates. “Friends are friends, bygones have… bywent.” She giggled tipsily, then continued, “So we’re all good. We’re all all good. And I think that’s…” she cast about for the right word “…good.” She cut Allie a robust slice of pie. “Okay, mommy, this is for you, blimp you up right and proper.” She served Allie her plate—and flipped it into her lap. It sure looked like an accident, a triu
mph of alcohol over motor control, but Radar thought that situational faux clumsiness could not be ruled out. “God, Allie, I’m so sorry!” cried Sarah. “Such a clumsy clod!” She jumped up and immediately improved the situation worse by knocking her sticky pie knife off the table and onto the white condo carpet. At that she started laughing, a defense response to humiliation, and said, “Wow, I should definitely not drink.” She scooped up the pie knife and grabbed fistfuls of pie out of Allie’s lap. “Come on, girl,” she said, “let’s get you cleaned up.” She led Allie toward the kitchen and called back over her shoulder. “You boys go out on the balcony. I’ll fix this all.”

  Ames took Radar and Vic out on the balcony. “In a sense,” he said as he slid the glass door closed behind him, “that was a happy accident. I did want to talk to you men alone.”

  Here comes the pitch, thought Radar. He wondered what Adam would try to hit them up with. He anticipated maybe an insider trading gag or some other sort of can’t-miss disinvestment.

  He did not expect the Texas Twist.

  The Texas Twist

  I’ve been talking to a man from a university,” said Ames.

  “UT?” asked Radar.

  “No, Saligny.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Vic.

  “It’s small. But it’s been around forever. Named after a French friend of the old Texas Republic. Its fans are rabid. And it has an interesting problem: money it can’t spend.”

  “I love that sort of problem,” said Vic.

  “Apparently, there are these old endowments that have been on their books for years, money that was donated to the school, but with odd strings attached, terms that couldn’t be fulfilled for one reason or another. So they’ve become orphans in a sense.”

  “Poor things,” said Vic. He was rapt. Well, he had a rapt act.