Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

“Nope. You’re never coming back.”

So not true, sweetie. Who told you that?

“Only every card in the deck.”

Francis says something, his voice too muffled to understand.

Uncle isn’t there at all.

AT MIDNIGHT AN SUV pulls into the driveway.

Penny opens the door. “What are you doing here?”

“Your boy says y’all got a rager going.”

Kurt shrugs. “You got that weed?”

Lavelle lights a joint, inspects the stereo rack. The Descendents cut out. Wu-Tang cuts in. Half of Food 4 Thought grab their jackets, hit the street.

“Lame,” Kurt says.

“Don’t fear the natives,” Lavelle says.

Penny cuts the tarot, pulls the Vaginocracy.

“Can’t have a party without women,” Lavelle says, picks up the phone.

Within an hour sixty people dance in a sweaty mass in the living room. Others stagger around in groups, yelling. Three guys take turns throwing the same girl into the pool. One of them fishes her out and then they do it again.

Penny sinks next to Lavelle on the couch. They clink beers.

“This really y’all’s house?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t take it the wrong way, but you don’t strike me as the lady entrepreneur type. Your Martha Stewarts and such.”

“I’m one of those trust fund punks you read so much about.”

He laughs. “Can I ask you something?”

“Shoot.”

“You really think I look like Sinbad?”

Penny pictures the guy on stage, goatee, sweatpants, never once funny.

“Who?”

Lavelle seems pleased by her answer. They both watch Kurt dance in the corner with an incredibly tall woman. He’s all sweat, shirt half off. The woman wears a sarong, bangles, a headdress. She looks like Sudanese royalty.

“Now, I like your boy and all, but there’s no way in god’s green kingdom he can handle that.”

The woman sways, imperceptibly, as Kurt bungles around her.

“Sinbad to the rescue,” Lavelle says, and then dances his way in.

PENNY WAKES CURLED into a ball, shivers, the air conditioner on high. She tries to remember why she’s in a closet. At some point there was an argument. Something broke. She climbed up and away from it, remembered the space just off the attic full of used modems and never-sent birthday presents, back massagers and socket sets, slid behind a pile of old coats and let the weight of the beer drape over her like one of those heavy aprons they give you when they’re about to X-ray every last tooth in your head.

Next to her are Kurt’s socks.

Grey with green stripes.

Penny tries to rewind the videotape, nothing but static and muffled voices.

Pulls a card, the Prefrontal Blank.

Jack’s bathrobe sweeps the staircase clean behind her. Most of the furniture in the living room is on its side, plants knocked over, cans and bottles leaning against themselves. The stereo’s gone, maybe some other stuff. Not too bad. The broken wine rack sucks though, Merlot seeping into the carpet.

“Kurt?”

Her voice echoes from room to room, the house empty.

Penny, alone.

She sits on the floor in the front hallway, in a rectangle of sun, mail tucked beneath her legs. Catalogs, letters. An architecture magazine. A missing-child postcard. Have You Seen Rusty Wells? The postcard lists Rusty Wells’s height and weight, which seems dumb since it’s probably the same for every missing child ever: four feet, sixty pounds.

Your boyfriend’s kind of a tool , Rusty Wells says.

“He’s not my boyfriend.”

Oh, okay. Keep telling yourself that.

“What do you know?”

Not much. I’m dead. Under the wheelbarrow in that field behind the old church.

“That sucks.”

Tell me about it.

“Should I call the hotline or whatever?”

Nah, they won’t believe you. Psychic punk chick? Yeah, right. Hey, let’s send a diver after one of her hunches, maybe dredge the lake for the source of her bullshit. Anyway, I’m not in a hurry. The pastor’s daughter finds me in a few weeks while she’s tripping on mushrooms.

“ Wait, how old are you again?”

Can’t you read? Nine. Although six when I got kidnapped.

“ Was it a family member?”

Landscapers. Some shitbag filling out the crew for a day, dude with a taste for chubby white boys. Just my luck, huh?

“Do they catch him?”

Nah, he’s a ghost. Long gone. It’s my fault anyway. If I’d laid off of the potato chips and gone outside and burned a calorie once in a while, Luiz the Molester would have grabbed up some other kid.

“ Hey, I’m really sorry.”

Don’t worry about it. I’m the one should be sorry for what I said about your boyfriend. Honestly? I hope it works out with you guys.

“Not much chance of that,” Penny says. “He took off.”

No, he didn’t.

Kurt pushes open the door with an armload of groceries, goes into the kitchen, slices English muffins, heats a pan for eggs.

“You want coffee?”

Penny tries to remember how to speak. Mostly, you just have to find the first word.

Well, don’t leave him hanging, Rusty Wells says.

“Sure. Thanks.”

On the far wall, Jack raises a glass for a toast.

Francis, who in that picture was on the wagon, raises a banana.

It’s weird how the house feels empty and bruised, but in a way somehow also clean. Scrubbed of greed and acquisition. Spartan-punk. Like what it secretly wanted to be all along.

Penny cuts the deck, turns over Three Little Capitalist Pigs.

They’re naked and dirty, wearing barrels instead tuxes.

Smoking blunts instead of cigars.

It was time for a change.

Even the morose Germans believed in the liberating quality of having all your shit jacked.

They call it renewal-shtang .

Or something.

“This shit is so sunny-side up it’s ridiculous,” Kurt says, bringing her breakfast over on a tray.

An Aqua-Aerial Ballet

Orchestral music thunders beneath a plastic dome lined with cherubs and frescoes. Doves fly from perch to perch, groggy with chlorine. The audience boos as I swing through the rafters, high above a stage full of clowns and nymphs and polypropylene dragons.

On cue, bassoon.

And then free fall.

I’m jerked to a halt inches above the pool’s surface. The harness digs in. Piper grips my wrists. The hydraulics fire and we are reeled upward again, a dozen actors on steel wire spinning clockwise around us. Piper plays the lead, the Woman in Peril. I play Grimwald, peril incarnate. Water beads down our length, mists the cheap seats. She smiles, but I can see she no longer loves me.

“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.