Improbable Fortunes

by Jeffrey Price

  Sheriff Dudival, even knowing Jimmy all these years, had never been taken to the mine—let alone, heard the Miracle of the Spirit. One night, when the last of the holy pilgrims’ buses had left, he drove out there to take a look around. He pried off the creosote slats that barred entry and went inside with a torch and climbing rope. The wind had come up with the sunset, and the “whispering” that people interpreted as the Word of God began. From inside the mine, Dudival could feel the wind at his neck as he followed the sound. With his flashlight, he illuminated the vent tunnel above him that traveled upwards one hundred yards to an opening at the top of the mesa. There was just enough room for a man to climb. Slowly, he made his way up until something blocked his path. He made sure he had a secure footing before shining his light on the obstruction. In front of him were the bullet-ventilated skulls of three men. Dudival could only assume that they were the rapists whom Jimmy had dispatched some twenty-five years ago. When the wind came into the mine at sunset, it traveled up the air shaft and through these skulls—stacked one on top of another like dried peas in a child’s whistle—sending out the “Word.” Sheriff Dudival clambered back down and, in honor of Jimmy’s memory, took her last secret to the grave beside her, two days later.

  Lame Horse Mesa’s much-publicized rondo of violence had a deleterious effect on the real estate market. Vanadium found itself characterized as the most likely place to die of a homicide on a short list after Chicago and Mogadishu. As a result of this disaffection, the Svendergard golf course project was put on hold, and its attendant condominium and townhouse development evaporated. The Stumplehorsts and the other ranchers, who had prematurely set their sights for early retirement on Kiowa Island, had to reconcile with the fact that they would probably be spending the rest of their lives getting up at four in the morning to shovel shit out of cow stalls. Many of them, witnessing Buster’s success on the Big Dog Ranch, grumpily followed his lead and returned native grasses to their land.

  Buster continued to care for the Mallomar herd even though it was never asked of him. He figured it was the least he could do to honor Mr. Mallomar’s memory. If Mrs. Mallomar ever got out of the hospital, she would have a nice little business and a healthy place to raise their child. Buster had already explained the situation to Destiny Stumplehorst. She was, of course, jealous. Having a child with another woman, however, failed to stack up against her losing her Buttercup to the gas chamber, and eventually she let it go. If she had learned one thing from the Thessalonians Home Study Course of Oxford, Mississippi, it was that the most enduring lessons from the Bible were always the ones attached to the most violent or lustful stories. And that was probably why the people who lived in Vanadium would not soon forget what had happened here. Did that mean they would go back to the way things were before Mr. M appeared on the scene? There was probably no going back—even if some of the old ranchers felt a smug moment of victory over progress with a question mark. Someone would surely be arriving any day, emboldened by undervalued land prices, to risk his neck for development. Would they allow the newcomer to once again tilt the delicate balance of the Vanadian ecology—that had been so carefully tended to by Jimmy Bayles Morgan and Shep Dudival? Who would be the one to do what needed to be done? That, of course, remained to be seen.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Cha-pol-loc, the Ute

  From the time she had arrived at the secret clinic in Park Slope, Brooklyn, Mrs. Mallomar had remained incommunicado and under heavy sedation. It was not her doctor’s judgment that required this particular treatment, but her late husband’s consigliore, Sidney Glasker. Trazadone was administered partly to block her anguish over what had happened the night of her husband’s death and partly to block subpoenas for her testifying at the tabloid free-for-all which was Buster’s trial. To make sure that the doctor was on the same page, Glasker had approved an endowment of five million dollars to the clinic on behalf of the Marvin Mallomar Trust.

  While on this chemical vacation, Dana’s health was strictly monitored and it could be said that she, while unconscious, was in the best shape of her life. To the attendants on duty, she seemed to have an active dream life and she often vocalized, but her mumblings were not allowed on her chart. Sometimes she called out for her husband. Sometimes she would yell for “Buster”—who the nurses assumed was her pet dog.

  Glasker would make a point to come visit her every other day. He would bring his lunch and sit with her. He liked Dana, and it wasn’t for sinister reasons that he kept her on ice, but rather what he felt to be his ongoing responsibility to protect the Mallomar family. Typically, he would find her in a fetal position—with an almost transcendental expression of beatitude. And he would think, why did Marvin have such a difficult time with this lovely creature? When he heard from the public defender that the defense was now about to make its closing statement and Dana Mallomar’s testimony was now moot, Glasker instructed the doctors to remove her from the sedative. However, Dana did not seem, at first, interested in regaining consciousness. The place that she happened to be was too warm and comfy, so filled with love that her mind refused to be taken from it.

  This love mantra, if you will, played out in a series of simple images. The first was that she was standing in her Colorado house wearing Vietnamese-style clothing. She had gone to some trouble making a special dinner, despite the fact that she didn’t cook. She was excited about something. Then her guest arrived. It wasn’t Marvin. It was the cowboy who worked for them. She opened some champagne to tell him this incredible news. She was pregnant. Every fertility doctor in New York had told her it was impossible, but there it was. She was pregnant. And the cowboy was the father. The cowboy even offered to marry her. What an incredibly kind thing to say, she said. But she told him it wasn’t necessary. She wept, not because she was sad, but because the cowboy was so kind, despite the fact that she had been so mean to him. She put her arms around him. She felt the cowboy stiffen. Someone else was in the house. She turned to find her husband. He had surreptitiously entered the house and had heard their conversation. He was standing on the staircase holding a gun. He said that he had come home to shoot them. Then, just when they thought they were going to die, he said he had just had an epiphany. He was not the victim in this, he said—rather Dana. He said that a great injustice had been done to her—that all these years, she had been made to feel inadequate for not being able to conceive—when the inadequate one had been him, Marvin Mallomar. Then, her husband broke down and cried. He said the two people who he loved most in the world were standing in front of him. Dana Mallomar said, You mean, you’re not going to leave me? And he said, That’s how some schmuck from Bensonhurst would act, not Marvin Mallomar. I love you, darling, he said. I’ve always loved you. She said, Marvin, I love you. The cowboy started to cry. Mallomar said, It’s okay. It’s okay. Mrs. Mallomar started to walk to her husband. She wanted to put her arms around him, when suddenly a wall of mud came crashing through the living room wall and wiped the staircase and her husband from frame. The gun went off. She tried to go after him, but the roof collapsed on her and the cowboy.

  Mrs. Mallomar played this dream over and over. Her private room was on the second floor of the clinic overlooking the playground of a children’s school. Their laughter and chatter created the ambient noise of the dream, prompting her to wonder—“Did I have the baby?” And there was one other thing. For some reason unknown to her, there was a herd of cattle in the living room.

  b

  Sidney Glasker was just grabbing a cigar to take to lunch and was almost out the door when he received a phone call from the Securities and Exchange Commission. They were dropping the insider trading case against Marvin Mallomar.

  “I’m sure he’d be very happy to hear about this, except he’s dead.”

  “Yes, we know,” they said.

  “Not that I’m looking a gift horse in the mouth, but why are you doing this now?”

  “We’re not a
t liberty to say. We’re just dropping it.”

  “You just had to make his last moments on earth a living hell, didn’t you, you miserable shits?”

  Glasker hung up the phone and sat sadly back down in his Eames chair. He forgot he was indoor and lit his cigar with a platinum lighter that bore the inscription, I’M NOT AT LIBERTY TO SAY. It had been a gift from the mysterious Marvin Mallomar on his sixtieth birthday. Sidney had never been allowed to tell anyone that he had known Marvin all of his life. They grew up together in the Bronx, both coming from working class families. Marvin had ambitions that required him to shed his skin several times. He started with a new name. His given name was Danny Dingle. His parents were from the Dingle Peninsula, County Kerry. Marvin knew a person with a name like Danny Dingle would never be taken seriously, so he changed his first name to Marvin after Marvin Miller, the actor who played Michael Anthony in the fifties TV show The Millionaire. He was the guy who delivered the million-dollar checks to deserving people from the eponymous millionaire, J. Beresford Tipton. For his surname, he chose “Mallomar” after his favorite cookie. Marvin Mallomar and Sidney stayed close for the rest of Mallomar’s life. It was Sidney, unbeknownst to all the other lawyers, who actually knew everything.

  “Marvin, you crazy sonofabitch, you beat it,” he said to the lighter. “I don’t know how you beat it, but you beat it.” Sidney put the lighter back in his pocket, swallowed the lump in his throat and walked out through the reception area. He was having lunch with a group of downtown landowners opposing the building of a mosque at the site of the World Trade Towers. As he passed the receptionist, she tried to get his attention.

  “Uh, Mr. Glasker…” she whispered. She made a funny face and wiggled her eyebrows in the direction of the seating area.

  “There’s a man over there who wants to speak to you, but I…I mean, he didn’t look right…so I’ve already called security. You may want to wait until they take him out of here.”

  Sidney looked in the direction the receptionist was gesturing. There was a man sitting on the floor, cross-legged with his back to him. Glasker slowly approached. The man wasn’t wearing any shoes. The bottoms of his feet were black with the grime of New York sidewalks. He was wearing tan Levis and a gaudy cowboy shirt, rolled up at the sleeves—his hands and arms red, the color of a Navajo. Glasker walked around the man, and feeling charitable from the SEC’s decision, decided to talk to him.

  “How may I help you, sir?”

  The red man, about sixty years old, wearing a large turquoise amulet around his neck, bald on top with long strands of grey hair that fell to his shoulders, looked up at him with amused sparkling blue eyes.

  “Hello, Sidney.”

  “Oh my god!” Sidney gasped, and fell to the man’s knees, sobbing. Marvin Mallomar chuckled softly and patted his old friend’s back while he waited for him to get over the shock before he told his story.

  b

  The night of the mudslide, Mallomar had in fact, gone to the house consumed with anger. He was so out of his mind that he considered killing Buster and his wife, and then himself—if he still had the stomach for it. Miraculously, the mudslide interceded and he was swept crime-free from the house. He tried to ride it out, but the tide was too strong for him. It tore at him, ripped out all of his hair and abraded his skin so badly that it absorbed the color of the red mud like a tattoo. He finally stopped trying to fight the power of it and gave in. Unconscious, he was carried down from his ranch all the way to Main Street where a dumpster behind Einstein’s Book Store shielded his body from further abuse. When he came to, he managed to get to his feet and stagger naked into the street. A double amputee, named Shaman Longfeather, had his driver stop his truck for him. Mallomar was, of course, delirious at the time. His mouth, nose, and ears were filled with mud. Shaman Longfeather rolled down his passenger window and asked the man to identify himself. All Mallomar could get out of his mud-choked mouth were the sounds, CHA…POL…LOC. To Shaman Longfeather, the prophecy that he had received in sweat lodge had come true. The Great Spirit had sent his Messenger, Cha-pol-loc, borne of Mother Earth to save the tribe. There was little conversation after that realization. Mallomar was hurried into the truck and driven deep inside the reservation. No one was allowed to see him. Only the tribe’s chief was permitted to gaze directly at his face and only after eating peyote—the fear being that looking soberly into the Messenger’s face without preparation could drive a man crazy. The Utes believed that Mallomar’s trauma was due to his difficult rebirth from the Mother and further complicated by being put in the presence of Man so quickly. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of the faithful, stood outside his teepee and waited as Shaman Longfeather—strapped into a wheel chair—chanted over him. Blindfolded women gave him the nourishment of a human being, but none of them were allowed to touch his sexual organs or watch him defecate—out of sensitivity to Cha-pol-loc’s new encumbrance with both of these human complications.

  When Mallomar finally regained some of his strength, he had no knowledge of the murder trial or anything else. His vocal cords had been so damaged by the mud and debris that he wasn’t sure he could still speak. The Elders immediately put his body on a stretcher and drove him to the very top of Sleeping Ute Mountain—the holiest of holy places for the Utes. There, with seven pots of sagebrush burning, the tribe finally put it to him.

  “Our people are tired and hungry—our youth, disenchanted with the Old Ways and we are poor. Cha-pol-loc, he who has been sent to us from the Great Spirit, guide us and tell us what should we do!”

  Mallomar blinked his eyes and swallowed. He licked his lips and worked up a little saliva and beckoned for his tribesmen to come closer.

  “Build…a…casino,” he said.

  b

  Glasker was incredulous. This was all too much.

  “I came here to secure the financing…and straighten up a few other things,” Cha-pol-loc said, helping himself to a cigar from the inlaid box on Sidney’s desk.

  “Marvin, I don’t know what to say.”

  “I’m not Marvin anymore, Sidney. I’m Cha-pol-loc.” Sidney searched Mallomar’s face for a trace of a kibitzing twinkle, but there was none.

  “Did anybody tell you what happened after your…disappearance?”

  “I heard they tried the kid for murder, but he got off,” Cha-pol-loc said, with an easy cast of his hand.

  “You seem kind of blasé about it, Mar…Cha-pol-loc.”

  “I knew it was never going to stick.”

  “How could you be so sure?”

  Cha-pol-loc just shrugged.

  “The same way I knew the Mallomar Man was going to get off on the insider trading charge.”

  “You already know the SEC dropped the case against you?”

  Cha-pol-loc smiled.

  “All right.” Glasker said and then decided to test Cha-pol-loc’s sanguinity. “Dana’s in a mental hospital…and pregnant.”

  “I’m aware of that also.”

  “This is your opportunity to divorce her in a way that protects your core assets.”

  Cha-pol-loc did not betray an opinion about that one way or another.

  “It’s not your child, Cha-pol-loc. You know that, too…right?”

  “Cha-pol-loc has many powers. Procreating with a human being is not one of them.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Once again, Cha-pol-loc smiled enigmatically.

  “Sidney, I will need you to get copies of the Mallomar Man’s identification and credit cards.”

  “You mean, you’re walking around New York without identification or money?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then how did you get here?”

  “My tribe brought me here across the land of the Apache, Sioux, and Cherokee.”

  “Uh huh. When I get your…his things, how will I find you?”

/>   “My teepee and my men are hidden behind the reservoir in Central Park. But I will know when you have what I have asked for and will find you.” Cha-pol-loc rose from his seat.

  “A casino, Sidney. Quickly.”

  The meeting was over.

  Four days later, Mallomar’s identification in hand, Cha-pol-loc and his braves broke camp for Brooklyn and the research laboratory of Dr. Howard Simes. He fitted Shaman Longfeather with the T-1000 titanium leg prostheses—complete with the cutting edged “Chandler Socket.” By moonrise, the Shaman was walking without a cane and, playful prankster that he was, tripping some of the braves when they tried to look cool strutting down Atlantic Avenue.

  “May I help you?” said the night orderly at Mrs. Mallomar’s clinic, somewhat nervously. The portico of the institution was filled with thirty Ute braves dressed for a healing ceremony wearing coyote skins over their heads.

  “I have come for the Mallomar woman,” Cha-pol-loc said simply.

  The orderly considered calling the police, but there was a racial profiling lawsuit to consider. He decided to act like he was playing it out one more step and pulled Mrs. Mallomar’s file.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but Mrs. Mallomar cannot be released without the authorization of her doctor or her husband,” he said, reading the cover Post-it note.

  Cha-pol-loc calmly retrieved Mallomar’s driver’s license from his elk skin medicine bag and handed it to the orderly along with a one-thousand-dollar bill folded into the size of a piece of Wrigley’s chewing gum.

  Mrs. Mallomar was asleep in her room when Cha-pol-loc, dressed in a full eagle feather headdress, gently slid his arms under her and lifted her off the bed. He looked at her belly, which bore a cantaloupe-sized protrusion. Mrs. Mallomar awoke, and stared blurry-eyed into the face of her rescuer.