Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

“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, gamblers, “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.