Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  “Remember what I tole you?”

  Buster figured it was no use trying to make a fair fight of it. He swung his barstool up in the air and conked Cookie squarely, but it only dazed him. Cookie reached down and grabbed Buster by the legs and started swinging him like an axe with which he intended to chop all the tables into kindling.

  Across the counter, one of Sheriff Dudival’s reserve deputies was having a grilled cheese and bacon sandwich with a chocolate milkshake. People said the deputy had been a Hollywood screenwriter before moving out to Lame Horse Mesa and was looking for “material” for a buddy comedy. He was not happy to see this fight break out—him being there all alone. Discretion, the better part of valor, he crouched under the counter and called dispatch for back up on his radio.

  “Aren’t you gonna do something about this, Deputy?” Mary said standing over him.

  “Yes, ma’am.” When, was the question. The deputy thought prudently that the Hispanic gentleman might tire himself a bit before he tried to represent authority. He looked down at his duty belt. The 9mm? No. The ASP? It probably wouldn’t make a dent on him. The Taser? Yes. Surreptitiously, he slid it out of its bracket holster and pointed it at Cookie’s back as he approached.

  “All right! That’s enough! You’re under arrest!” Cookie had caught sight of the nimrod in the bar’s mirror and, without turning around, grabbed the Taser out of the deputy’s hand and shot him with it. The deputy immediately fell to the floor with electrostatic convulsions. Try as he might, he was not able to conjure up this colorful detail when finally regaining consciousness. Not that he wanted to include it in his police report. He had been struggling to come up with a decent demonstration of evil for his bad guy in the first act of his screenplay called, Demon Run.

  Cookie pulled the unconscious deputy’s gun from its holster and was just about to shoot him in the head, when four farm-sized deputies from the SO showed up. One of the deputies grabbed his hair. The other two grabbed his arms and tried to twist them into bent wristlocks, a pain-compliance technique that quickly put most normal people up on their toes. The third stood in front of him and hosed his face with a can of pepper spray.

  “Racist pigs!” Cookie screamed with his eyes closed. “This is how they treat Hispanics!” Finally, to everyone’s great relief, Cookie put both of his hands behind his back, palms touching, and submitted to being handcuffed. As one of the deputies led him out, the other two turned their attention to Buster. They found him out cold under a slash pile of broken barstools and tabletops. He wasn’t as surprised to be arrested as Mallomar was—for it was the rule in Western bar fights to arrest everyone regardless of who started it.

  Down at the sheriff’s office, Buster and Mallomar shared a cell. Cookie sat down the row, carving his name and the date into the wall with his own tooth that Buster had been lucky to dislodge. As for Buster, both of his eyes were swollen shut, his temples blue, his lips cracked and bleeding, and his right ear partially serrated—the result of Cookie’s King Salmon-like underbite.

  Mallomar was dazed, his nose crusted with blood. A few of his hair plugs had been deforested—a routine forensic examination would find them under the dirty fingernails of Cookie’s good hand.

  “Hey,” Mr. Mallomar finally said, “I did pretty good, huh?”

  Buster stuck a finger into his mouth, scooping out the remnants of the sourdough biscuit. He was happy to find his own teeth tight in their sockets and in good working order.

  “Oh, yor a reg-lur whirlwind, you are, Mr. Mallomar.”

  “And I’ll tell you something else.” Mallomar held a finger along his right nostril and sniffed. “I can breathe out of this sinus. I’ve never been able to do that in twenty-five years—even after turbinate reduction surgery!”

  All Buster could muster was a weak smile. But nothing was going to throw a wet blanket over Mallomar’s joie d’vivre. To him, everything about being in the eighty-year-old jail was fascinating—from the thirty coats of pea-green puke paint on the walls, the marks on the bars where other criminals before them had gripped and yelled for a lawyer or a cigarette, the toilet without a seat, to the Draconian locks. He stopped to contemplate each item as if he was an art student on a field trip to the Museé D’Orsay.

  “Hey,” he said turning to Buster, “…thanks for all this.”

  By the time they had made bail, Mallomar had already figured out that if the inmates were allowed to make their own lunch, the jail could save as much as $120,000 a year. Sheriff Dudival may have been the only person in town who wasn’t swept away by Mallomar’s whirlwind even when Mallomar presented him with—on the back of his paper lunch plate—preliminary designs for a state-of-the-art new jail and offered to arrange a low-interest bridge loan. As Buster hobbled to his truck, impounded in the jail parking lot overnight, he looked back to see Mallomar—hands framing the future site of the new jail like a film director. He turned to Buster and winked.

  “It needs to be built into the hill, don’t you think?”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Work Begins

  With the Big Dog house well under way, Buster began his work to resuscitate the Big Dog land. As he had promised that night on the elk hunt, the sage was bush-hogged, and native grasses were planted. The place was finally taking shape and he was proud of his work. It was only natural that he’d want to show the place off a bit. So he invited his old bunkmates, Ned Gigglehorn and Doc Solitcz, over for lunch.

  “How many people live here?” Gigglehorn asked as he stood before the Mallomar residence regarding it somewhat like an archeologist might regard a Mayan pyramid in Tikal.

  “Two,” Buster said.

  Gigglehorn turned to Doc Solitcz. “Two people live in this house.”

  “I heard him.”

  “Almost ev’r’body in town worked on the dang booger,” Buster said defensively.

  “Trickle down economics” offered Doc Solitcz. “Can’t quarrel with that, Ned.”

  “How much does it cost to heat this behemoth?”

  “Ah don’t rahtly know.”

  “You must have some idea, you’re the damn foreman.”

  “Somethin’ like…eighty-five hunnert a month,” Buster admitted sheepishly.

  “That’s over a hundred grand a year, for chrissake!”

  “All right, Ned. That’s enough. He invited us over for lunch not a damn audit.”

  But Ned had to admit that Buster had done well by the land. If one were to place a thumb, using the old oil painters’ trick of judging scale, over the house—a stunning landscape of rock outcroppings, rolling hills and wildflowers were revealed. The place had drastically changed since that day of the Puster auction—they had to give Buster that.

  Buster had prepared a picnic of elk sausage, baked potatoes, heirloom tomatoes, and a bottle of Mallomar’s wine for his old friends. The three rode to an earthen bench two hundred yards above the house. After they ate, Doc took a nap while Buster tapped out a portrait of them on a pie plate, and Ned unpacked his easel to paint. He put a friendly arm on Buster’s shoulder as they walked the bench to find a good spot for composition.

  “Kid, you did good with this place, but will you let me give you a little piece of advice?”

  “Sure.”

  “Get the hell outta here. This is no place for regular people like us.”

  “Mr. Mallomar’s done a lot for this town. He’s not what you think.”

  “This is all an amusement for him. But this is our life. A guy I grew up with on the commune has a cattle ranch in Paradox. He’s looking for another hand. Let me tell him you’re interested.”

  “Ah ain’t a hand no more. Ah’m a foreman. And ah ain’t goin’.”

  “You dumb cluck! Listen to me before it’s too…too…”

  Suddenly Ned’s eyes started blinking rapidly, and his legs started to wobble. He keeled over and vomited.
Doc woke up and ran over to him, calmly knotted his napkin and stuck it in Ned’s mouth so he wouldn’t bite off his tongue. Once that was accomplished, he patted Buster on the shoulder.

  “Congratulations. Looks like you have water here.”

  When Buster brought the drilling company back to the spot Ned Gigglehorn had his seizure—which was carefully marked by an empty bottle of Mouton Rothschild 2000 Pauillac—the drillers hit water going only fifty feet down. The well supplied a generous three hundred gallons a minute through a six-inch pipe. And so it was here above the house, that Buster made the fateful decision to build a reservoir. Mallomar leaped at purchasing his own bulldozer. He chose the Caterpillar D-9, the model favored by the Israelis for removing the homes of Palestinians whose relatives had been connected to acts of terrorism.

  Second only to the Miramonte Reservoir in neighboring San Miguel County, the Big Dog was to be the largest private reservoir in all of southwest Colorado. Since Mallomar contributed the first real funds to the building of a new jail, Sheriff Dudival reciprocated by allowing a chain gang of able-bodied convicts to lay the reservoir bottom. Rolls and rolls of heavy-duty plastic sheeting were laid down to prevent the water from seeping into the soil. In fact, so much plastic sheeting was ordered that it forced the plastic company’s other big customer, the conceptual artist, Cristo, to postpone his wrapping of Fort Knox. In true Mallomar style, lunch for the County jump-suited group—primarily drunks and wife beaters—was catered.

  Cookie Dominguez, who’d heard about the deal from one of his Bees incarcerated for pandering with a minor, drove the delivery truck and used the opportunity to transfer a half of a kilogram of meth to the jail population by way of four Trojan chicken burritos. Neither Mallomar nor Buster saw him in his white kitchen outfit. On the drive out, he stopped at the Mallomar house. Knowing that no one would disturb him, he took an unhurried tour of the place that so many people in town had been talking about.

  “Así que esto es como un hombre rico con una gran cantidad real de dinero vive,” he said approvingly. He appreciated the interior color scheme that utilized colors derived from their outdoor surroundings. And the Western paintings were similar to the ones that he’d seen in a museum when his fifth grade teacher took him to Denver on a school trip. In Mallomar’s office, he helped himself to a handful of cigars and noticed some opened mail. Of particular interest was a bill from Mrs. Mallomar’s psychiatrist in New York and a corresponding payment from an insurance company. The diagnosis by the psychiatrist was in code, but the letter the insurance company sent stated plainly that they had paid for psychiatric treatments for “substance abuse.”

  b

  Mrs. Mallomar, meanwhile, returned fresh from the ashram to her Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. For five months, she had kept an oath of silence and ate only brown rice and vegetables. Finding the apartment empty except for a bed and a few articles of clothing, she assumed that either they had been robbed or her husband had put everything in storage for redecorating.

  “How are you feeling?” Mallomar asked when they later spoke on the phone.

  “I feel recharged. Strong.”

  “That’s great, Dana. I am so glad to hear that. How did it go at the ashram?”

  “It quieted me. I liked not having the distractions.”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “By the way, where is everything?” she asked.

  “It’s all gone.”

  “I know it’s gone. Where did it go?”

  “Sotheby’s, mostly.”

  “All my jewelry and clothes?”

  “Yes.”

  “All our paintings?”

  “I wanted to simplify our lives.”

  “Those were my things. How dare you take it upon yourself to…”

  “Dana, get a good night’s sleep and hop the plane to Montrose. We’ll both be a lot happier at the ranch. You’ll see. I’m very proud of this place. We’ve just finished the reservoir. We’ve got native grasses coming in. A five-acre organic food plot I put in just for you. And in a couple of months, we’re going to have our first yearlings for sale. It’s all so beautiful. New businesses on Main Street… We even sponsor the rodeo, for chrissakes.”

  “You sold all of our things,” she responded in a depressive monotone voice.

  “That’s not who we are.”

  “Marvin, I could fucking kill you!”

  “This, from somebody who just came back from an ashram.”

  “Don’t you think you owed it to me to tell me you were going to do something asinine like this?”

  “How could I? You took a fucking oath of silence!”

  She hung up and looked for a vase to smash—but they were all gone. So, she sat on the floor cross-legged, concentrated on her breath and cleared her mind. Three minutes later, she was swallowing tranquilizers. By morning, the doorman alerted Mallomar to his wife’s odd behavior. Apparently, she came down to the lobby in her bathrobe and ordered a taxi in a language that sounded like Swedish, but wasn’t.

  b

  Despite their acrimonious relationship, the news of Dana’s recidivism caused Mallomar untold anguish. He immediately called the FBO in Montrose to fuel his plane for takeoff. His second call was to Sidney Glasker, to find yet another addiction specialist and to get the ball rolling on the necessary paperwork.

  Four hours later, Mallomar stood at the foot of Dana’s bed. She had been intubated and heavily sedated to calm her down. Mallomar had seen versions of this before, but this was truly one for the books. She had a couple of shiners, a big, bloody scab on the end of her nose and stitches on her chin—the result of a header into a curb? The skin on her knuckles was raw—from punching something or someone? Mallomar pulled up a chair next to the bed, holding her non-IVed hand.

  Dana Karlsson—her stage name metamorphosed from the original Donna—grew up in Shaker Heights where her father, Don, created a middle-class life for his family from a middle-management position analyzing land leases for Standard Oil. Dana’s mother, who began as a dedicated homemaker, came to express her wild side by watching The French Chef in the morning and hosting martini klatches comprised of fellow Standard Oil wives in the afternoon. Dana’s younger sibling, a brother, having escaped the fuzzy attention of his Boodles inductee-mother, became an ardent liar and defacer of public property. But Donna was a star in the community. She had a B-plus average, a diversified portfolio of volunteer work through the church, and a position as the youngest dancer with the Buckeye Ballet. Things took an unexpected turn for the worse, however, when Dana, by the age of twelve, had become preternaturally beautiful. What would ordinarily seem like a blessing became the beginning of a curse over which she had no control. Up until this time, her father had no problem hugging her, holding her on his lap, and telling her how proud he was of her. But when she became beautiful—a younger and more refined version of his wife—he became uncomfortable expressing physical affection toward her. Instead, he suddenly adopted a stern, arm’s-length attitude. She was not allowed to wear any kind of makeup, even lipstick. She was not allowed to go out on dates. He pushed her into sports, for he thought that a young girl, who looked like Dana, should have something to redirect sexual energies—when it was really his sexual energies, or at least his subconscious—that was the problem.

  Dana’s perceived rejection by her father had the effect of wanting to please him even more. She tried out for the gymnastics team and showed a particular talent for the uneven bars. To say she threw herself into it was no exaggeration. When Dana was competing, she came out of a pike with such velocity—throwing her pelvis into the lower bar with such force—that people in the audience would audibly gasp. Dana’s performance won her team the All-State Women’s Finals two years in a row.

  Her coach, a one-time state champion himself, believed Dana had a shot for the Olympics. This, of course, required even
more work and dedication. It also required of Dana more time spent with her coach—who, while trying his best to look upon Dana’s form clinically, was also having a problem. He was thirty-five and Dana, by this time, was fifteen. The other girls on the team, who giggled over how handsome he was, also took notice of the singular attention he paid Dana. There was an undercurrent of gossip. Dana’s father and mother questioned her and made her feel badly. And while the coach was circumspect, he admitted to himself and his priest that occasionally he did have improper thoughts. The priest suggested that he find employment elsewhere. He did, at a competing school, and left Dana hanging as the person responsible. The kids on the team now hated her. Many unkind things were said to her and her parents. Dana had her first nervous breakdown.

  Her parents sent her to a school that specialized in uncontrollable girls. There, she discontinued her interest in gymnastics, but not her desire to escape gravity. In fact, for the rest of her life she was determined to regain that feeling of freedom that she experienced when she left her body. She studied yoga and meditation. When she got lazy, she achieved her out-of-body experience by getting loaded.

  The men, that were to follow in her life, offered her positions in the chorus line, trips to Mustique, and apartments in unsold condominiums. All of these affairs ended the same way—with the men discovering that she was just a nice girl from Ohio with a B-plus average. And then she met Marvin Mallomar. He was, by no means, the best looking of the men she had previously known. He was rich, but that wasn’t what she was attracted to. What impressed her was his ability to defy his own gravity—that of being a stubby, ill-educated man with tufts of hair on his back—and his facility for self-reinvention. Unfortunately, it was an art he didn’t care to share with anyone else, not even his own wife.

  b

  The door to the room opened and a doctor accompanied by two orderlies wheeled in an impressive machine—requiring Mallomar to move into the corner to provide them room. He had found, through Sidney Glasker’s contacts in the medical world, an experimental detox therapy that involved the use of ultraviolet blood irradiation. It had been a promising direction for addiction under study by the Germans in the 1940s, but was discredited because of the stigma it carried—it being tested on people in concentration camps. Mallomar stayed in her room while Dana received her first treatment that night then went home.