The Nirvana Blues Read online

  In the front part of the property he hoped to construct an alligator wrestling pen and pool. The snouts of the small gators would be bound with leather belts so nobody could be bitten. And the prize to any tourist capable of pinning one of the beasts would be a miniature Bible, or a plastic cross that glowed in the dark, or a fluorescent portrait of Jesus. The theme, in keeping with the spiritual nature of his complex, would be “Wrestle a Gator for Christ.”

  One thing Cobey did not know: Roger Petrie was a double agent. He reported the embezzlements in detail to Skipper Nuzum as they occurred, and for a substantial remuneration into the bargain. In this way Skipper kept tabs on his financial empire. At least, so said Tribby Gordon.

  According to Tribby, “Skipper figures he’ll give Cobey enough rope to hang himself. He may even let it reach the point where Cobey buys Eloy’s land. Then he’ll lower the boom, file charges, send Cobey to jail, and grab the land as legal restitution for some of his losses.”

  “What does Skipper want with more land?” Joe had asked. “A million acres already isn’t enough?”

  “He couldn’t care less. But Natalie wants it for the Simian Foundation: she’s working hand in hand with Nikita Smatterling and Nancy Ryan to obtain it for the temple site.”

  Meantime, if what Heidi had gathered from Roger Petrie’s ex–girl friend, Bliss Chamberlain, could be trusted, Roger himself had his eye on Eloy’s property. He knew Skipper was going to lower the boom on Cobey once Cobey had the land, but he figured he could manipulate some money out of the embezzlements into his own bank account. More importantly, having separated the water rights from the land before Skipper’s agents could ram the case into (let alone through) a court, he would sell them quickly to a buyer who’d already made a large downpayment (held in escrow) to assure them for himself once the deal went down. With all that instant cash, Roger would be in a position to buy out Eloy, if the old geezer was still involved, or to wield a heavy hand in any auction that occurred.

  The buyer who had already made a substantial downpayment on the water rights was Eloy’s flamboyant lawyer, Scott Harrison. Scott expected that he himself would wind up in control of the property, on which he planned to build a tax-exempt Universal Life Church, a tennis court, and a swimming pool. His major goal in life, according to his sometime mistress, Annie Dallas (who’d confided this to her good friend, the Cinema Bar waitress Diana Clayman), was to salvage Eloy’s beautiful property (in Eloy’s name) from the school of sharks intent upon either its ownership or dismemberment, and then grab it himself as payment for his services. He foresaw complications, however, sensing that Skipper Nuzum’s convoluted procedures represented significant dangers to his own plotting. Hence he thought to tilt the scales in his favor by sewing up those gallivanting water rights if at all possible, even if, in the end, it turned out they could not be legally separated from the terrain in the manner he’d chosen.

  Through all this, Joe’s major ace in the hole was the fact that Eloy liked him and would try everything under the sun to see that he wound up with the property.

  Joe had started toward the Nuzum-Dallas-Petrie table when Diana Clayman slipped an arm around his waist, giving him a squeeze. “What are you up to, Joe? You look terrible.”

  His heart deep-dived, his crotch prickled. Diana was twenty-five, a classics scholar from McGill, born and bred and bored stiff in Grosse Pointe, Michigan. She loved the ancient Greeks, gave poetry readings with one of the groups in town, roomed with two idiotic teen-age female junkies when not visiting her occasional boyfriend (a harbinger of malice known simply as Angel Guts), and always had car trouble. Her raven hair and snow-white skin aroused him. Her heroes were Robert Graves, Antonin Artaud, and Baudelaire. Joe had met her several times in bars accompanied by her menacing “Apache” with his horribly pitted skin. This sidekick posed as a silversmith: he refused to talk with white men except when drug deals were going down. Diana had enormous dark eyes and an altogether melancholy world-weary mien until she smiled. Then her face bloomed, her mouth radiated radiance.

  “I feel okay,” Joe said. “I mean, my kids are healthy, I just put some earnest money on a beautiful piece of land, and if everything goes without a hitch, we’re gonna build a house this summer. It’s all falling together. I’m gonna be a secure and happy man.”

  “Oh you poor thing.” Stretching, she brushed her lips against his cheek, touching almost hidden, yet impossibly full breasts against his arm. “You’re gonna fit into a slot, Joe, it’s so sad. You used to be beautiful.”

  For a second their eyes met—hers were so dark. Intimations of beautiful tragedy … smoldering sexuality. Her fingers fluttered off his shoulder … and then she was by him, carting two Coors, six Dos Equis, and a bourbon old-fashioned to a corner table.

  * * *

  JOE TRIED TO suck in a deep breath without actually sucking in a deep breath: the air was so full of smoke that an honest-to-goodness inhalation probably would have triggered his asthma. Nervously, he cast about for Tribby and Ralph. Everywhere bodies cavorted, undulated, danced, and jabbered. Half the crowd was in costume. People wore outsized rubber ears, gorilla masks, Hanuman T-shirts. Several couples sported head-to-toe brown fur costumes made from dyed coyote pelts. Pink helium balloons, monkey faces painted on their silky rubber skins, bobbed and popped loudly. A dwarf, Ephraim Bonatelli, the wayward son of Chamisaville’s Godfather, Joseph Bonatelli, was drunk and obnoxious as usual. At the top of his voice, as he toddled about snapping his teeth against the numerous plump rumps at his eye-level, Ephraim sang, “‘Abadabadabadabadabadabadaba’ said the monkey to the chimp!”

  Joe spotted Eloy Irribarren. Across the room, seated at the bar, he wore an old straw cowboy hat, a faded dungaree jacket, overalls, and heelless cowboy boots. One hand self-consciously clasped a beer; in his lap he guarded a small pile of benefit goodies—a rubber monkey mask, a Hanuman T-shirt, and a Speak No Evil, See No Evil, Hear No Evil statuette. The old man looked bewildered.

  Joe took a step in Eloy’s direction. But his progress was immediately arrested by the great man himself, Nikita Smatterling, a middle-aged (but svelte) Jungian analyst who dabbled, on the side, in everything from biofeedback and LSD therapy to aura adjusting and group gropes. He was the brains behind the local Hanuman craze, the founder of the Simian Foundation, and definitely a spiritual hombre for all seasons. The door to his eclectic vision and healing powers was always open: night and day disciples gathered at his feet. With some he drew mandalas; with others he rapped on Edgar Cayce and performed feats of psychic yoga. On Sunday mornings his students gathered for sufi dancing. His Moslem name was Jamal Marrakesh. He had a tanned and powerfully wrinkled face with an iron jaw and startlingly vivid pale blue eyes. His smile could reduce granite to oily puddles; his white hair was the valley’s most perfectly “leonine mane.” Handsome was hardly the word to describe his fantastic stage presence. Had he chosen an acting career instead of this spiritual charlatanism, the man undoubtedly would have been typecast as God.

  Rarely had he spoken with Joe. Tonight, however, he threw his arm around the budding convict’s shoulders. “Joseph, m’boy, I want you to meet my good friend, Paula Husky.”

  A hefty, nubile girl with short-cropped blond hair and a peppy cornfed-healthy face glacéed with sleazy makeup, Paula couldn’t have been more than sixteen. A transparent peach-colored rayon blouse and an even skimpier aqua miniskirt left her body definitely out there, in the spotlight, On a Platter. Drunk as a coot, she giggled, having a wonderful time.

  “I just jumped the carnival,” she explained. “I told Charley to shove it, and split. All I’ve got are these clothes on my back, but look at my luck—I’ve just met this adorable man. Christ I dig monkeys!”

  This Adorable Man, Joe knew, had an official girl friend—Belle London (rumored to be the great-granddaughter of the writer Jack London)—and three children: Sanji, Tofu, and little Siddhartha. They all lived in a homemade mansion on a hillside north of town. After two years shrink
ing Navajos in Arizona, and twelve months counseling archcriminals in Soledad, Nikita had shown up in Chamisaville nine years ago to work construction jobs at the Pueblo’s abuilding racetrack and Ya-Ta-Hey resort compound: immediately, he had commenced plying his maverick spirituality. Beige turtleneck jerseys under tweed sportcoats were his uniform. That, or fluffy-sleeved Pakistani blouses unbuttoned to the navel, exposing the mezuzah on a silver chain against his macho hairy chest. His public personality oozed sympathetic, friendly vibes. Yet Joe had never been much attracted either to the myth or to the man. He thought of Nikita, rather, as a spiritual bigwig on a cosmic power-trip who liked to get laid a lot.

  To boot, he drove a pink Lamborghini.

  “Joe’s one of our little town’s most highly respected sanitation engineers,” Nikita boomed.

  “Oh gosh,” Paula chirped. “You mean you’re the guy who’s gonna try to pull off that big dope deal that starts tonight?”

  Joe assumed he had heard incorrectly, excused himself, and, fending off the frenetic bodies, plowed through the crowd until he reached Eloy. “Mr. Irribarren,” he gasped breathlessly, “what are you doing here?”

  Eloy shrugged. “I don’t know. They invited me.”

  A short, simple man in his mid-eighties, Eloy had a weather-beaten wrinkled face and arctic green eyes. His full head of neatly trimmed white hair was slightly mussed when he removed his hat; little wings fluffed out all over. A thin moustache gave his cheerful face a macho tilt. Wide shoulders and almost simian arms, a barrel chest, and small powerful hands completed the picture. A rope instead of a belt held up his loose-fitting dungarees.

  Joe grimaced. “It’s too loud. All these people are crazy.”

  Eloy sipped from his beer. “Every ten minutes somebody comes up to me and wants to buy my land. I’m a very popular man. The zopilotes are circling.”

  Joe asked, “What are those things in your lap?”

  “Compliments of the house. That lady at the door gave them to me.”

  “What are you gonna do with them?”

  Eloy smiled impishly. “I think I’m going to don this T-shirt and gorilla mask and rob the First State People’s Jug of enough money to pay off all my debts.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “Don’t ‘ha ha’ me, muchacho. If I want to, I can do it.”

  Alarmed, Joe said, “Wait a minute. What about me?”

  “If I haven’t robbed the bank by Monday a week from now, and you come up with the cash, it’s all yours. If you don’t come up with the cash, and I haven’t otherwise solved my problems by then, I think I will rob the bank. It’s worth a shot, anyway. We could even rob it together.”

  “But sir, you can’t be serious.” Here it comes, Joe thought frantically. I risk my life to raise sixty thousand dollars, but the day of the closing, Eloy waltzes into the damn bank wearing a rubber gorilla mask and a Hanuman T-shirt and gets himself blown away by Tom Yard (the EAT ME drummer moonlighting as a bank dick during daylight hours), and I’m left holding a bag full of money while the banks, the creditors, the Scott Harrisons, the Skipper Nuzums, the Cobey Dallases, and the Nikita Smatterlings carve it into little pieces.

  “I’ll tell you something,” Eloy said. “In all my life I never would have thought to rob a bank. I obeyed all the laws. I trusted people and treated them like human beings. In return they annihilated my neighbors with every legal and illegal trick in the book. They cheated me in every money deal I ever made. They robbed me of my insurance money, my Medicare, my social security when Teresa was dying. They have tried to dispossess me at every turn. So sometimes I wake up gloomy and feel like robbing their bank. I been too gentle my first eighty-three years.”

  Joe said, “Look, don’t worry, I’ll have the money.”

  “How will you get it? You found a genie in an old well who grants wishes?”

  “My grandmother,” Joe mumbled, lying through his teeth. “Her estate—”

  “You’re lying through your teeth.”

  “Hey, I’ll get it, don’t worry.” A monkey mask hovered near Joe’s shoulder—all ears? What in God’s name had driven him over to Eloy Irribarren in the first place?

  But the monkey mask saved him. It said, “Ho ming no kum chowki.”

  “Oh, it’s you, Egon.”

  Egon Braithwhite being a randy fellow and former flutist with the Cincinnati Symphony. He had arrived in Chamisaville with novel-writing on his mind. His bucks he scammed by giving music lessons, tuning pianos, and making runs to western Kansas, where he bought old uprights for a song, refurbished them, and unloaded them on those of Chamisaville’s new upwardly mobile denizens into music. He also held down a part-time job at the bus station four days a week. Part of his spiritual penance as a newly initiated Hanuman disciple was his vow to speak only in an invented Eastern language for six months.

  Irritated, Joe replied, “Murasaki shikibu.”

  Egon said, “Toyatoami! Hideyoshi!”

  “Fukada tanaka kawasaki!”

  Eloy said, “Qué es lo que les están pasando, huevones?”

  Joe explained, “He always talks like this. He took a vow.”

  “What kind of a vow?”

  Egon explained, “Shur op chop chitty mai mai!”

  Eloy said, “We should send him to rob the bank.”

  Wearing a be-belled jester’s cap and World War II aviator goggles, Ralph Kapansky materialized at Joe’s other elbow. At Ralph’s side was his enormous, dingleberry-decorated and constantly farting shaggy dog named Rimpoche. “Hey,” Ralph said, “what’s up? We been waiting for you.”

  Basically, Ralph was the most exasperating and obnoxious SOB that Joe had ever liked. Around women he was a green chauvinist slime. A self-taught orphan who had had a remarkable rise producing records in the cutthroat rock world, at thirty-one too many acid groups had jarred loose the thread, and five years later Ralph lived alone in a tipi beside Tribby Gordon’s Castle of Golden Fools (in which Joe and Heidi also resided). Frantically, Ralph dieted on molasses and lemon juice hoping to shave off a few of his 260 blubbery pounds. And gulped one Elavil and one Pertofrane antidepressant pill every 10:00 P.M. just to make it through the night. By day, when he wasn’t being an expert, part-time maintenance man on the Forest Service’s two helicopters, Ralph tried, from a two-hundred-dollar-a-month crib over Peter Caspian’s Hairstyling for Men on the plaza, to write pornography, male adventure stories, and gothic novels, while awaiting inspiration for his first serious novel. Since inspiration of any kind rarely arrived, Ralph spent most of his daylight and nighttime hours wandering hepatically around Chamisaville hustling the ladies, and begging his life to begin again. Dying terrified the beautiful slob. If he made no killing on Joe’s dope deal, Ralph had plans to move, with Rimpoche, to an ashram somewhere in India, near Raipur. Or was it Darjeeling?

  “Where,” Joe wanted to know, “is Tribby?”

  “Over there. At our table near the exit.”

  “That guy in the gorilla mask?”

  “Yup.”

  “And who’s the female clown with the green rock in her nose?” The woman seated beside Tribby also wore a purple turban, green mascara, chalky powder on her sallow cheeks, glistening passion-pink lipstick, a bulky tie-dyed muumuu, and an acre of powder-blue poppette beads. A Tiparillo in a white plastic holder provided the proper finishing touch.

  “She’s a roadie I promoted in the Prince of Whales Café this afternoon. Name is Gypsy Girl. She’s on her way from Bloomington to Mount Shasta to ‘get a hit of those powerful vibes out there.’ She’s cool. Her head’s a little tipsy, of course—I think she’s got a retention span of three seconds. Too much glue before her adolescent years.”

  “We’re just about to get involved in a major felony operation that is gonna require secrecy and nerves of steel,” Joe rasped, “and you have to pick up some kind of Fellini grotesque with a rock in her nose?”

  “Oh don’t worry about her,” Ralph said. “She’s cool.”

  And he forge
d ahead, pushing across the bar. “By the way,” he added nonchalantly, “apparently news of this coke your friend’s bringing in on the two thirty-five bus has leaked around town. And certain parties aren’t too happy.”

  Joe’s heart went off the three-meter board in his chest and belly-flopped somewhere down around his ankles. His pores immediately ejected a gallon of nervous stench. Oh shit, he thought—the cops? Or worse, an incipient drug war? It had never occurred to him that they might be violating somebody else’s territory, and that that somebody might take umbrage. But then, it had never occurred to him that anyone else, besides their little group, could ever find out.

  In Chamisaville?

  They reached the table. Tribby said, “Ah-hah, all the dastardly conspirators are in place, so we can begin.” His voice came out muffled through the rubber mask. Underneath that mask, Custer-length prematurely white hair circled his half-bald dome. Tribby—or Theodore Reginald “Butch” Gordon, that is TRB (phoneticized to Tribby)—was an adventuresome maniac from Kitchener, Ontario. He had received a highly privileged private education in America from the ninth grade through college thanks to his hockey prowess. Next, he had triumphed at Harvard Law School and married a Cliffie named Rachel Parquielli, the cultured daughter of a Detroit Mafia family. Currently, she, like Joe’s wife Heidi, taught preschoolers at the Shanti Institute. Tribby himself, somewhat haphazardly, plied a legal trade that had earned him the sobriquet “The Mortician of Marriages.” Physically, Tribby checked in as five foot seven inches and 160 pounds of plump, coordinated murder on the ice, and a daredevil Hotspur off it. With impunity, he switched from hang-gliders to helicopter skiing in Canadian avalanche country. Easily bored stiff, he was one of the few people Joe knew who enjoyed instigating free-for-alls in bars. In Vietnam, in the same outfit as Ralph Kapansky, he had flown Cobra gunships, and piloted little Cessnas that called in air strikes, laying waste the jungle with napalm.