Welcome Thieves

by Beaudoin, Sean

  “Let go,” she says.

  “I’ll never let go,” I say.

  And then do.

  It’s in the script.

  Grimwald Discovered

  The producers are a husband and wife team, the Arbuckles, who arrive dressed in cowl necks and cream espadrilles, like extras from Spartacus. It’s said they have a nose for undiscovered talent and, to a lesser extent, top-­quality cocaine. Which still fails to explain how they find me in Salt Lake City, laboring in a jazz-­fusion production of The Tempest.

  “We need real artistry,” Jack Arbuckle says backstage, pinching arms, inspecting teeth.

  The company laughs. The Arbuckles are philistines.

  “Someone with a grasp of the classics as seen through a postmodern lens.”

  Even if that made sense, we would never.

  Jack Arbuckle lights a cigar.

  “Last chance, amigos.”

  I step forward.

  The laughter stops.

  Ms. Arbuckle circles, takes my measurements. After a third orbit, she nods.

  “Good. You’re hired. Pack your stuff.”

  “Right now?” I ask.

  “Yeah, friend, now. You think we’re spending another night in Mormonville?”

  Gasps rise from the chorus. Saints, latter day or otherwise, are well represented.

  “But I need time to prep my understudy.”

  “Okay, you have fifteen.”

  “Days?”

  “Minutes.”

  The company gathers. Trinculo clasps my shoulder. Prospero strokes his rayon beard. I know then, truly, that we are a cohort. Family. Bound by a love of the theater, through long practice and a reverence for craft.

  “I’m sorry, but I cannot leave Caliban midrun.”

  Ms. Arbuckle uncaps a marker, writes something across my palm.

  “What’s this?”

  “Your salary.”

  I slide books into a duffel bag, fold a few ratty leotards. Miranda, with whom I’ve spent three months sharing both a cot and a stage, eyes me dolefully.

  “You said you didn’t care about material things.”

  “I’ll write.”

  “You said you were composing a poem cycle about us.”

  “It will culminate with the twin themes of distance and longing.”

  She grabs a towel, removes her makeup with a swipe. Beneath is the expression I once saw on the face of a man who’d been stabbed with a pen over a game of dice.

  “Were you always this much of a liar, or have you just stopped acting?”

  Miranda really is lovely, a touch plump but with sad brown eyes, like something from a Bob Dylan ballad about a West Village depressive who spends most of 1963 nobly expiring of tuberculosis.

  “I’ll put in a good word with the Arbuckles. Perhaps you can join me later.”

  “Perhaps you can eat shit and die.”

  The rear exit is dark. I channel my character’s sense of loss, his quiet regret. It’s not just the money; lucre can always be had. It’s not the exposure, although an audience of more than a dozen would be a welcome change. It’s that I saw my reflection during morning dress, looked into eyes without direction or purpose. After all these years, just a player among other players. After all these shows, owner of nothing but a mildly Victorian bearing, the face of London’s usurper class.

  Even though I’m from Queens.

  After midnight a panel truck arrives, Night Dreams painted across the side. I step into the hold, which smells like canvas and cooking oil. Huddled forms slumber along the metal floor. In the corner a bearded man notches triangles of pear, swallows them from the tip of a knife.

  “You must be Grimwald.”

  “Who is that?”

  “The villain, of course.”

  “I have not yet been cast.”

  “And yet you appear born for the role.”

  I put down my things.

  “Who are you, the cook?”

  “My name is Rhydderch.”

  “So take it up with your parents.”

  He smiles grimly.

  “I play the Hero. I will also be your instructor.”

  Taking It in the Chassis

  For three days we cross the length of mercenary Nevada, bounce over desert ruts, bodies folded and then clamshelled open again like so much empty luggage. We eat Vienna sausages, piss into thirsty sand, tarantulas and armadillo skulls crunching beneath our boots. At dusk there are often rude whispers, low voices around the fire. The company is primarily Welsh, an extended family, cousins and stepsisters and third removes. They accost the driver, demand cold sodas and rum, threaten to bundle their things with twine and slip into the moonless night, jump a crab boat back to Wrexham or Llangollen.

  “You will not,” Rhydderch says.

  The whispers cease.

  By dawn we arrive at a warehouse on the outskirts of Babylon, half the cast already ensconced with stew pots and bedrolls. Crones gather kindling. Children squeal with murderous glee. Above the campfires a neon haze looms, as rehearsals begin without delay.

  For some.

  The company juggles cleavers and executes tuck rolls while I am made to unload trucks.

  “You have a back for acting,” says a strapping Taff, who carries six boxes to my two.

  “And you have a face for radio,” I say, half-­hoping he doesn’t understand.

  Jack Arbuckle finally arrives and gathers the cast. Crowbars are found, crates wedged open. Oohs greet each bolt of fabric, aahs the frightening masks. There are waterproof dresses and robes, wetsuits made to look like period costume, faux velvet and mock muslin and skeins of blood-­red Nu-­grosgrain. If the Arbuckles have spent a penny at all, it is on these ingenious garments.

  Although mine appears to be a large rubber glove.

  “Try it on,” Jack Arbuckle says.

  It slides easily over my left hand.

  “Over your head, genius.”

  I unzip the side and roll it past my ears like a green condom. The nostrils are plugged, the horns inverted. It’s excruciating.

  “The genius doesn’t fit his shit,” Jack Arbuckle says. “We got anyone is 20 percent less a gangly disaster?”

  “But I thought you took measurements.”

  Ms. Arbuckle uncaps a marker, writes something across my palm.

  FUCK OFF.

  I decide they can unload their own trucks. It’s not too late to hitchhike back to Salt Lake, wrest Caliban from the understudy, present a sheepish but lyrical poem to Miranda.

  And then a woman emerges from beneath the stage, knifes into the pool, gracefully strokes its length. She is tiny, elfin. Her hair has no color, as if it wouldn’t deign to be blond. She is like an advertisement for silk pajamas, a castle on Lake Como, someone else’s decidedly better life.

  “No, please. I can make this work. Just give me a moment.”

  “Fine, Shakespeare. You got sixty.”

  “It will not require an hour.”

  “Seconds.”

  Costumers yank. Seamstresses flit. I spin upstage, fangs bared, channel the pain of ill-­designed latex and a newly compressed spine.

  Come to me now, oh fire of my loins, and I will stretch your canvas, paint you a masterpiece of pleasure and sweet suffering!

  Hey, I didn’t write it.

  Ms. Arbuckle claps and twirls.

  Some of the other players join in.

  “Now that’s a Grimwald,” Jack Arbuckle says, knuckling the scalp of a passing gaffer. “Can this guy do Totally Feral, or what?”

  Piper breaks the surface, sloshes water across my toes.

  “Who are you?” I whisper.

  “The Woman in Peril, of course.”

  “You mean I am to play your opposite?”

  “I guess so, yo.”

  As she turns and swims away, a man in a purple robe grips my shoulder.

  “The lizard would do well to be less inflamed, for she is also Rhydderch’s wife.”

  Three-­Sixty-
­Five of Rehearsal Crammed into Seven

  Ten hours a day in the pool and then a final walk-­through at night, Jack Arbuckle’s voice a constant stab.

  “Fifty percent more erotic! Sixty percent more wanton!”

  Nymphs frolic harder. Swordsmen cross weaponry. Ladies- ­in-­waiting lie in costume, ready to be taken in the shallows.

  “Grimwald! Eighty percent more evil! Ninety percent more bend-­overish!”

  It is not easy to balance lust with a piteous mewl.

  Especially since it is my role to seduce Piper underwater.

  And then hold her there.

  Forever.

  “Release the Night’s Guard!”

  Players drop from the rafters around us, tethered by wrist and ankle, swing in ovals and figure eights. If the sequence is even slightly off, they tend to collide, spears and wings and golden helmets splashing into the pool.

  “Wind it up again!”

  Guy-­wires snap. Harnesses break. Bruises rise like dark flora.

  In the midst of this madness I am expected to act. But Rhydderch is always there, with his enormous jeweled codpiece, quietly suggesting, calmly teaching, appallingly decent. Rhydderch is always by my side, whispering instructions, brandishing his sword, gripping my arm in the throes of choreographed violence that is really closer to a form of love.

  “Lean away,” he repeats, as we dangle in one another’s arms, going over the handholds as Piper floats beneath us.

  Winking up at me.

  “Do you see now, Grimwald? In this position your weight must shift. Here and here, or it will not work. Here and here, or I will fall.”

  Oedipus Suspended, Prometheus Trussed

  It’s forty-­eight hours from open. Rehearsals run long, verge on chaos. Scenes are cut. And then added. And then cut again. Players grumble, machinate.

  There’s talk of a strike.

  Jack Arbuckle smiles, nods, hires a security firm, wheat-­faced Pinkertons suddenly posted at every corner.

  We are almost caught twice.

  Once behind random tapestry and the other a rubber spear pyramid, forced to hunker next to Rhydderch’s trailer out in the dusty lot.

  “This is so swag,” Piper whispers, hand jammed into my costume. “You feelin me, Boo?”

  I am. And smelling her, too, like a light rain on the outskirts of Cardiff.

  “Grimwald!” Jack Arbuckle yells. “Where is my goddamned lizard?”

  “I have to go.”

  Piper pulls me closer.

  “I hate this show. These Arbuckles. Vegas eats the dick. Perhaps we should escape to New York via Greyhound bus.”

  I picture us back in Queens, busking. Stacks of dirty nickels. A puppet theater.

  “But Friday is opening night.”

  “YOLO, Boo.”

  “Please translate.”

  “Quit being such a puss.” She grips me painfully. “Also, Rhydderch isn’t my husband. He’s my father.”

  Tympani rolls boom across the water.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  Piper kneels down and claws at the dirt, unearths a small wooden trunk, heavily padlocked, then retches into her hand, where a brass key gleams in a tiny slick of bile. Inside the box are many strange items, like children’s teeth and links of vertebrae, like raven’s claws and baggies of marmot dust. It’s breathtakingly odd, in a way that could make an otherwise fully employed and relatively sated person long once more for the barren flats of Utah. But I am not superstitious. I know she’s playing a role. I’d seen it happen with actors before, when eccentricity becomes a drug, when they lose themselves in caricature because they barely had a self to begin with.

  “So you are a hobbyist witch?”

  “Nah, that’s just the movies.”

  She removes a figurine, eyeless and ancient. Possibly the totem of a people who once worshipped the feet of a people who once worshipped trees. It also appears to double as a fertility candle, since she strikes a match and lights the thick hawser’s wick that protrudes from its genitals.

  “Is it my imagination or is that utterly terrifying?”

  “Can you shut your pie hole for a sec, Boo?”

  Piper draws a chalk star around the totem, places fresh giblets along its ordinal points, and then exposes her neck.

  “Bite me.”

  For some reason, I do.

  “Harder.”

  My incisors puncture the skin. The candle extinguishes itself. An unearthly howl whisks across the desert floor. She stands and wipes blood from my lips, then uses it to inscribe a word into the trailer’s siding:

  NUR!

  It could definitely be some sort of benediction.

  A term of devotion in Pagan Welsh.

  Or, spelled backward, it could also say,

  RUN!

  They Whisper of a Production Cursed

  The next morning Rhydderch comes down with a fungus. An archipelago of blotches that span his chest and neck, raw and red, flaky at the edges. He walks slowly, as if having been drained or sucked dry, a shock of hair gone silver, aged twenty years overnight.

  I watch him limp to the coping, gaze sadly at his reflection in the black water.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, my friend.”

  “It definitely looks like something.”

  “It’s true that none among us can escape the Sorrows for long.”

  I find Piper behind the producer’s box, yukking away with a muscular sound tech.

  “The giblets?”

  “Obvs.”

  “But what about the show?”

  “What about it?”

  “It’s opening night. We can’t perform without Rhydderch.”

  “So totally the point.”

  “Don’t you at least want to see if the production is any good?”

  “No.”

  “What about the other players?”

  “Play yourself and you pay yourself.”

  “I’m sorry, but you must reverse the spell.”

  Her smile mirrors the ghastly face of the totem.

  “Sorry, Pipes. Should. Probably should reverse it.”

  She turns on one heel.

  “You are seriously starting to work my last nerve, yo.”

  Two Hours

  “What’s wrong with my Hero?” Jack Arbuckle yells at the final walk-­through. “He looks like a moldy Dalmatian.”

  Ms. Arbuckle takes scrapings of Rhydderch with a butter knife, runs them through a CDC app on her Moto X.

  “Unknown?” Jack Arbuckle says, swiping through the results. “How can there be a strain of clap left on the planet that’s unknown?”

  The company huddles and whispers, concludes the opening is cursed, the sores a retribution due us all from something dark and unappeasable, but most likely a combination of national immigration policy and uncashable checks.

  Rhydderch spreads his arms, soothes in his native tongue. He insists he is fine, that rumors are rumors, that evil will ultimately be vanquished. He wraps the sores in a moss poultice, dons his codpiece and helmet, bids everyone to gather, as is custom, behind the curtains.

  We peek as one through the brocaded split.

  “The good news is we have a full house,” Jack Arbuckle says, as the crowd files in and takes their seats. A church group. A softball team. Older couples in shorts and sandals. Children sticky with icing. Breaded moms, portly dads, the entire front row fanning away their boredom with keno tickets.

  “The bad news is we have a full house,” Jack Arbuckle says.

  A Review in the Laughlin Entertainer

  Trust me friends, this splashy production is all wet. Does Marco Polo roll a pair of snake eyes? You bet. The daring young man on his flying trapeze drowns in a sea of lousy acting and pure cheese. Why waste your hard-­earned slot points? At fifty bucks a ducat this reporter can think of much better ways of getting soaked. If I wanted to watch a princess going through the motions, I’d have stayed home with the wife. Sorry, ga
mblers, “Night Dreams” is a poxy two hours even Siegfried wouldn’t wish on Roy. This humble reporter declares it a crap out to be avoided at all costs.

  Fusarium, Ustilago, Cochliobolus

  During the night Rhydderch’s fungus breaks the neck barrier, eats into his cheeks and hairline. There isn’t enough makeup in the world to disguise it. An ambulance comes but the paramedics refuse to touch him. A team in hazmat suits follows, finally taking him away in a large Mylar balloon.

  “Oh my God, with this show already,” Jack Arbuckle says. “I might as well just hand out twenties on the Strip.”

  “Grimwald could take over,” Piper says. “For the Hero.”

  “I do know all the lines,” I admit, force myself not to slowly run a finger along Rhydderch’s gilded breastplate.

  “Great idea,” Jack Arbuckle says. “Arm the lizard.”

  Ms. Arbuckle kicks a prop, which means the show is closed for the weekend. They disappear into the producer’s box to strategize.

  “Let’s celebrate,” Piper says. “Let’s go get crunked up.”

  We cab over to an Arthurian-­themed motel, the lobby full of men with folded newspapers, caps pulled low, obsessively rechecking the line on the Lakers and Jets.

  “Business or pleasure?” the clerk asks.

  “Boot knocking, fool,” Piper says.

  We pass a bottle of Hennessy, spend the afternoon watching cartoons. For dinner Piper makes a Welsh specialty on the hot plate, something called teisen lap, which tastes exactly like it sounds. Afterward she showers, comes out in a cheap robe, snuggles deep into my armpit.

  Maybe it’s the lack of chlorine-­resistant makeup, or harsh bedside light, but it seems possible she is actually in her midforties.

  Or even a hundred.

  “I’m way down in the dumps, Boo. I need my man to make this night all right.”

  “You’re just tipsy.”

  She strokes my cheek. “Screw Night Dreams, okay? It’s doomed. If they want a production to work in this town it needs to be called Biggest Free Tits. Or, like, Crazy Money Rape.”

  When I laugh she says, “It’s so not funny.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I mean, don’t I have a right to the pursuit of happiness?”

  “Of course.”

  “To marry a billionaire and watch my domestic Mexican serve important guests raw wagyu?”