In Gallup, Greed

by Tower Lowe

Everyone knew it was a lie, but such a charming lie. When she found out Jerry was from Los Angeles, too, she agreed to date him. The tall, angular boy was generous, funny and upbeat. These traits were nothing like her father, or so she thought then. Daddy sat in his chair all day and smoked Pall Malls. He growled at the little girls – Holly and her sister—who walked through his door after school every day. Holly avoided him and wanted to be with him, both at the same time.

  Jerry opened up a chance to escape from all that. Holly saw that he liked to drink, but she was sure he was different from her father. It wasn’t until after the boy’s brain injury, that Holly noticed the problem. Jerry drank more, and he laughed less. Holly tried to help Jerry see that the drinking isolated their son. To her horror, Jerry ignored her advice and sat in a chair watching ESPN for hours, the spitting image of her father when Holly came home after school. The only difference was Jerry didn’t smoke.

  When the gallery idea came along, Holly got her hopes up again, because Jerry deserted his easy chair. Soon, though, she discovered he deserted it for a chair at the bar in Sammy’s. So now he wasn’t even in the house to growl at their son. The boy interrupted her thoughts.

  “Glad Lonnie died. Hated him.”

  “Don’t say that. You didn’t hate Lonnie, you hated the gallery.”

  “Lonnie made Dad stay away. Made him.”

  “Nobody makes Dad work,” Holly explained. “Dad works to escape. He does love you.”

  “Loves Lonnie. Redemption.”

  Holly wasn’t even sure Jerry liked Redemption as much as he liked the barstool at Sammy’s. But she didn’t say that to Clark.

  “Let’s go see Dad. Now.” This is crazy, Holly thought. But she drove the SUV to Sammy’s anyway.

  Jerry crashed there every afternoon, usually drinking with Johnnie and, before Saturday, with Lonnie. She pulled into the lot with trepidation; maybe coming here was not a good idea, but maybe she didn’t care; maybe she was sick and tired of being sick and tired.

  Before she let Clark out of the car, Holly thought back to when the blood vessel burst in Clark’s brain, and Holly thought the boy would die. He lived, but Holly panicked at the thought of raising a child with a disability. She read for hours about medical interventions, physical therapy, and speech and language therapy. Essentially, she traded panic for a false sense of control over her son’s brain injury. She could fix it. If she read enough, thought enough, tried enough – Clark would be healed, normal, like everybody else. Holly insisted that Clark get every possible intervention. After all, how could she live and not give her own flesh and blood every possible chance of a good life?

  Now, right now, sitting in her hot SUV outside of Sammy’s, she realized that all the therapy, all the best interventions, all the expensive options were merely that. Expensive options. Sure, the boy needed accommodation and assistance and specialized instruction, but more than any of that he needed to know that Holly and Jerry loved him as he was, a boy with a burst aneurism and a brain injury. Holly wanted to fix it and Jerry wanted to escape guilt, but neither one of them wanted to accept the boy as he stood before them—still their son, still in need of their love.

  From the start, it was Holly that pushed for more money. And when Jerry found out he could pull in money on that venture he discovered while studying CGI, Holly agreed to it. She knew it was wrong, but she needed the money no matter how they got it, or so she thought. She was the one that insisted they move to New Mexico, where she read that they couldn’t be prosecuted. Once she dipped her toe into the source of money, there was no stopping her. But nothing went the way she thought it would. The therapies didn’t really help Clark; in fact, for the most part he resented all the specialists and extra work. He wanted to be a kid with the other kids. He was willing to work on his language and his physical coordination, but not willing to give up his friends and going to a regular school. She finally agreed to put him in public school in special ed classes, and, even now, today, he was asking to be put in the regular classroom in public school. After all the special care she had provided him, what he wanted most was to be with other kids his age. And she’d paid for all that special care with Jerry’s venture. And what she and Jerry really needed to do, from the start, was accept Clark. They needed to provide help, sure, but they needed to teach the boy that it was okay to be different, to show him they loved him exactly the way he was. What a laugh. The universe turned out to be a moral place after all—at least for Holly and Jerry.

  The bar was dim and the faint scent of yeast and sawdust greeted Holly as she entered. Johnnie sat alone in a booth by the door.

  “Jerry here?”

  “Sit down, relax,” Johnnie invited.

  “I can’t stay long. Got the kid in the car. You seen Jerry?”

  “Not today. He’s probably over counting money at Redemption. Stop a minute.”

  Holly gave in and sat down.

  “You know about Lonnie, of course. The cops asked me, but I didn’t say much,” Johnnie volunteered.

  “I told them I didn’t go—what time Jerry came home the first time – that Lonnie was troubled.”

  “Yeah. He was troubled.”

  “I didn’t say anything about the firing, Johnnie.”

  “Me, neither.”

  “It’ll be all right.”

  “I know.”

  “Lonnie was a nice kid,” Holly offered.

  “But he complained too much. When money comes, you should just take it.”

  “True.” Holly didn’t want to argue with Johnnie. She took the money when it came, but now she wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do. Lonnie figured out somehow that the money wasn’t honest, and it was a bad idea to take dishonest money. Holly saw his point.

  “So what if Blue Dog and Drew weren’t art collectors?” Johnny kept up the fight. “They paid cold, hard cash, right?”

  “True.” Holly lied. “Look, I gotta go.”

  In the car, her son sunk low in the seat, his head pointed to the dashboard. Depression. That’s what it had to be.

  But he was already on too many medications. She should add another to the mix? The cause was Jerry, not biochemistry.

  “Your dad’s not at Sammy’s today. That’s a good thing. We’ll catch him at Redemption.”

  “Doesn’t love me.”

  Holly started the SUV and drove out into traffic, feeling alone, feeling sad, feeling lost.

  ∆

  You Can’t Lose Something that Doesn’t Belong to You

  Nez heard a shout. Looking around the inside of the Gallup Wal-Mart, he saw a light brown boy, about 10, push another kid, maybe his sister, into a freezer shelf of packaged cheese. Orange and white plastic spilled into the aisle, splashing against the boy and girl.

  “You stole my Snickers bars,” the boy exclaimed, ignoring the chaos of cheese at his feet.

  “Mom bought ‘em for both of us,” the girl contended.

  “You took ‘em.”

  “I didn’t take them, you lost them.”

  A harried mother in tight black jeans and a dream catcher t-shirt grabbed the two of them.

  “I didn’t pay for anything yet, so there’s no Snickers to lose or steal! Pick up this mess.”

  She wandered back to her basket while the kids glumly picked up packets of cheese and hung them on the rack.

  “Why am I joining this half of the state at Wal-Mart on the first of August?” Nez asked himself.

  For one, it was a payday tradition in this small, economically challenged city. And no matter how much money he made, Nez still shopped like the struggling kid he’d been for most of his life.

  He stood in the produce aisle and looked around. The place was packed. It looked like the whole city was here, shopping and catching up with family and friends. The Gallup Wal-Mart was getting to be a social center. He wondered if that happening everywhere, or only in Gallup? Lolo wouldn’t be caught dead here, he thought. Once she started making real money from Redemption, she rejected
her past.

  “Money is power,” she would say.

  Then he saw her hoisting a package of strawberries. “Lolo!”

  She looked up, embarrassed. “More flavor than Safeway produce,” she explained. Her silky black hair slipped around her strong Zuni face, briefly hiding the hazel eyes she got from her dad.

  “It makes you human, like the rest of us,” Nez laughed.

  Lolo frowned. “You got any time to come to my place?”

  “Now?”

  “We’ll eat strawberries,” she coaxed him.

  “Okay.” Nez knew it was about Lonnie. He needed to talk to her, too.

  He followed Lolo’s silver Lexus 450 to her two-story stucco home on Ridgecrest Drive. Christ, Nez thought, Lolo soaks up the good life, doesn’t she? He didn’t care how she lived, but it meant she needed the money from Redemption, and that need caused a problem if the place shut down. When they got inside Lolo’s stainless steel kitchen, she rinsed and topped the berries, then told him about a dream.

  “I had a baby, a girl with gold-brown curls and amber eyes. You held her in your lap, but you kept complaining that she was too restless, so I gave her to Lonnie to keep. The scene changed, and I saw Lonnie in the bedroom at his house, but the little baby with the golden brown curls wasn’t there. I was afraid he lost her. I ran around the house looking for her and I yelled at Lonnie, ‘You lost the golden girl, Lonnie. You were supposed to take care of her and you lost her.’

  ‘She’s not your baby.’ Lonnie said in the dream. He looked feverish, Nez, like a madman. ‘She’s not Nez’s baby. She’s not my baby. The golden girl doesn’t belong to us, so I gave her to the breathless man. I think she belongs to him.’

  “I pounded on him as hard as I could. I went into the kitchen and found a carving knife. It was sharp and gleamed at the edges. I punched the knife into Lonnie. He was in the kitchen by then, not the bedroom.

  “’You took the golden baby. I’m hurting you,’ I told Lonnie.

  “‘It doesn’t hurt,’ he told me. ‘She never belonged to us in the first place. You can’t lose something that doesn’t belong to you.’

  “I ran away, Nez. In my dream, I ran out that old wooden door, down the street, through a field with scratchy grass and then I saw the spirit.” She stopped.

  “You saw the spirit. What did it look like?”

  “He was a blue storm cloud.”

  “Scary dream, Lolo.”

  “Try this wine,” she abruptly changed the subject. “I’m a connoisseur, you know. It’s called Devious Woman. A hundred bucks a bottle, which is pretty cheap.”

  “All in who you ask,” Nez commented. “But, I’ll take a glass.”

  “What do you think the dream means?”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Your mom interprets dreams. What would she say?”

  “The baby is the birth of a new idea, something new in your life. And it’s got golden brown hair and amber eyes. What does that represent to you?”

  “Gold. Money.”

  “Ah. It was your baby, then, maybe your gold.”

  “Okay, so you gave the gold to me, and I gave it to Lonnie. And he lost it.”

  “Yeah. He did.”

  “What do you think it means, what he said – that you can’t lose something that doesn’t belong to you.”

  “He said something like that to me at the party. Lonnie planned to close the gallery. I complained that we needed the money. And he said that it wasn’t our money.”

  “Lonnie was done with the gallery,” Lolo admitted.

  “You stabbed Lonnie in the dream.”

  “I did. But not in real life.”

  “Okay.”

  “Not in real life, Lonnie.”

  “Okay. What about the spirit as a storm cloud? What does that represent to you?”

  “To me storms are beautiful, and they bring about change.”

  “So maybe the gallery closing will bring about change that we need, and that change is from the spirit.”

  “That’s what you think, isn’t it?” Lolo gulped down her hundred-dollar wine. “That the art belongs to the spirit and sales need to come from the spirit? You and Lonnie convinced yourselves that Jerry, of all people, brought the spirit to Gallup. Jerry’s not a spirit guy, Nez. The dream is telling me that we all really wanted that golden haired baby, and Lonnie lost it and the spirit is mad.” She refilled her glass urgently.

  “Is that really what you think, Lolo?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nez sipped from his own glass. The wine was rich with oak and nut flavors, not the kind of taste he experienced very often. He savored it. Had he really wanted the money and the success? He knew he liked the success, and he knew the money made it easier to paint because he imagined buyers loved his work.

  “Okay, Lolo, I liked Redemption. It motivated me to keep working, keep creating. Nothing motivated me like that before the gallery.”

  “But now that Lonnie’s dead, you feel differently.”

  “We need to figure out what was going on, why Lonnie was stabbed.”

  “Did you tell the cops the boy was there?” Lolo looked away from Nez and poured a new glass of translucent red wine.

  “I didn’t even tell them Jerry was there, much less the boy. You?”

  “Of course not. It’s not the boy’s fault. Jerry abandoned the kid to work on the gallery and get drunk all the time.”

  “We don’t know the boy did it, Lolo. He came in about midnight. Lonnie was dead by then.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’d been in that room so long, that’s how. He went in there with Johnnie around 10 pm and never came out. Lonnie never stayed away from the party that long, even if he was mad.”

  “Yeah, but Jerry fired him that night.”

  “Jerry didn’t fire him. Lonnie told me he was quitting.”

  “Look, Nez, I talked to Johnnie early in the evening. Jerry told him to fire Lonnie that night.”

  “What do you think, then? That Jerry came late that night after we all left, broke into the door, and stabbed Lonnie to death after he fired him? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You don’t have any better idea. If Lonnie got stabbed early in the evening he’d have called out to us....”

  “He passed out, or he fainted from the loss of blood...or the killer put his hand over Lonnie’s mouth or...”

  “If Jerry or the boy didn’t do it, who did? Me? You? Mirage...but, wait, according to your story, Lonnie was already dead when Mirage got there. Come on, Nez. Mirage checked on Lonnie when she arrived around 11pm. She doesn’t remember that, but I do. And she has no reason to kill her brother.”

  “It all goes back to the gallery for you doesn’t it Lolo? You don’t want the gallery closed. You want the money.”

  “Jerry wasn’t going to close the gallery, whether Lonnie quit or got fired. Lonnie didn’t have that kind of power. Jerry ran the show, not Lonnie or you or me or Mirage.”

  “Okay, Lolo. It’s true. Jerry wasn’t going to close the gallery, but he didn’t want Lonnie talking us into leaving or spreading rumors, either.”

  “Were you planning on leaving if Lonnie quit?”

  “No.” Nez took a deep breath, sipped from the wine glass, thought about serenity. “I’d rather keep painting. I’d rather keep selling. Lonnie had reasons for wanting to quit, though. And I don’t know what those reasons are now that he’s dead.”

  Lolo finished her second glass and quickly poured a third. “I grew up with money for ten years, Nez. Then my parents split up, and my mom and I lived house to house or slept in the car. Eventually we moved into the little adobe house in Zuni. I’m not living like that again. My art takes precedence now because I can live comfortably and I don’t have to worry how to make the rent or the car payment.”

  “It’s more than meeting the rent, Lolo. You drive a Lexus, and live in a 3000 square foot house.”

  “What business is that of your
s? I like living like this and, with the income from Redemption, I can afford it.”

  “What if Jerry killed Lonnie? Is it worth it – all this? If it’s paid for with Lonnie’s life?”

  Lolo gulped the contents of the third glass. She wasn’t much of a connoisseur today. “Cut the drama, Nez. We know Jerry is too big a wimp to go stabbing somebody in the gut. Maybe you did it, and that’s why you’re trying so hard to pin in on Jer.”

  Nez gave it up. He didn’t know why he came here. It used to be that he could talk to Lolo, and she understood. Now, her material goods owned her, and the rest of the group didn’t matter. Lolo was all about money.

  He needed to talk with an honest, unbiased person about what really happened at the party, so he could figure out what was right. Nez didn’t want to get the boy or Jerry in trouble, but he wanted to find out who killed Lonnie. He needed to talk to those new guys, friends of Alice and Mirage, the private investigators – Burro and Cinnamon.

  ∆

  A Possibility it Really Was Momma

  After the gallery tour, Burro and I headed down Munoz Street and parked in the small lot that fronted The Grounds Café. It was in a low wooden building with glass enclosed room in the front.

  “Navajo fog, please.” Burro ordered one of the name drinks. I stuck to coffee.

  “Black, thanks.”

  “Go over the vision with me, Burro. What feelings are associated with it? How does it relate to what we know about Lonnie and the other artists?

  He called the waitress back. “One of those lemon filled donuts? With the sprinkles?”

  “Sure there’s enough sugar in that?” I joked.

  “Enough for both of us,” he shot back.

  “That works,” I agreed. “So what about the vision?”

  “The main feeling was...chaos. Every surface of the kitchen was covered in pots, old food, and money. A pizza box on the floor contained half finished pepperoni slices with bills stuck to the cheese. A heavy, sweet scent, permeated everything.”

  “Was it scary?”

  “Scary? No...more like sordid. The feeling in the room was anger and frustration combined with a sense of entitlement.”