Sean Beaudoin - Welcome Thieves

“Can I help you?” the clerk asks.

“Probably not, but we’ll take a room anyhow.”

The elevator rises. They unpack, have a few drinks.

“Let’s watch porn,” Eve says.

“Really?”

“Quick, before I change my mind.”

Adam dials it up, throws her on the quilt, takes her face in his hands and stares meaningfully.

Eve yawns.

He kisses her ankles, the aristocratic tilt of her neck, closely admires the way her pubic hair forms an elegant Helvetica V , a wily lure furrowed into tight little curls. She stops yawning, kisses him back. They are slow and considered, thighs tense, strangers on a guided tour in the south of France who slip away with half a bottle of wine and a blanket, kill the afternoon fumbling all over each other under the looming Provençal vines.

Or maybe that’s just the plot of the movie.

In the end it’s a good one, definitely worth $29.95.

THE CLOCK RADIO BUZZES. Eve gets up and showers, goes to town on the free soaps and lotions. Adam sits at the tiny desk, turns over the cover of The Man with the Golden Arm , and affixes a stamp.

Dear Gabriel,

Here I am in Las Vegas, which some people call Lost Vegas and other people call Hell on Earth. I’m going to a wedding tomorrow. Weddings can be fun, but mostly I think if you were here, you’d wish you weren’t. When you’re eighteen I’m going to drive by in a stolen big ole truck and take you on a roadie short ride. We’ll go backpacking in Idaho and live off the land for a while and eat bugs like men camp responsibly according to established forest service regulations. Also, we’ll drink whiskey milk and meet girl backpackers a couple of buddies and go skinny-dipping home at midnight. But don’t tell your mom that.

Love, Uncle Adam

“What are you writing?”

“Nothing.”

Eve holds out her arms, spins. She’s in a tiny black bikini, red lips, sandals. Her body is a monument to sleek engineering, to experimental hydraulics and efficient design.

“You look ridiculously hot, but I’m pretty sure there’s no pool here.”

“Put on your trunks. We’re hitting the beach.”

“Sounds fun and all, but I’m pretty sure we’re in the middle of the desert.”

“Did you happen to notice that big metal shed when we drove in?”

“Yeah.”

“Put on your trunks.”

THE HANGER’S MASSIVE, the kind they park blimps in. The sign says CALIFORNIA DREAMIN: AN IMMERSION. Two registers, a turnstile, eighty a ticket.

The atrium is all glass, huge sun lamps bolted to ceiling rafters. The floor is covered with metric tons of sand. A giant machine slides back and forth along the far wall, like a printer cartridge, producing sets of waves, three-footers at least. They break, get sucked back, roll in again. The beach is packed with families and umbrellas, floats and balls and shovels.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Adam says.

“I know. Isn’t it awesome?”

They walk down to the water, feet in the surf. Eve’s bikini is smaller than the price tag still clipped to it. Frat dudes swivel their necks, test out their baritones. Eve lays down a blanket, arranges creams and aloes and water and books and sunglasses. She puts on a cowboy hat made of straw, the kind men who pick artichokes might wear on a Saturday night in Berdoo.

“Incoming,” Adam says, as one of the frat boys strolls over, frozen drink in a plastic tube, cheap wrap-around shades and a complete lack of belly. His bright orange shorts have a WELCOME THIEVES logo across the hem.

“What’s up, bro?”

Adam can’t process the bro , let alone respond. A devastating punch wells in the coiled spring of his filmic imagination.

“So me and my boys were wondering if y’all were just friends. Like maybe beach pals or whatever?”

The other guys laugh their asses off, wrestle and pound sand.

Eve rises on one elbow, points at Adam. “This here is my cousin Biebs.”

Adam knows he’s supposed to play along, but hates this sort of meta shit. Acting like there’s a camera just out of frame. No one sure who the joke is on, but three-to-one it’s not them.

“Cool. So you and Biebs got plans tonight? Or maybe just you?”

“I bet there’s a killer party,” Eve says. “I bet you know just where it is.”

“Damn straight.”

“How about a club? A hot new club and you’re besties with the door guy?”

“True. Also very true.”

“You going somewhere, Biebs?” Eve asks.

Adam walks down to the water and hikes the length of the beach, pokes around the dunes for a while. Some kids are making out. Others smoke dope hunkered in the vinyl grass. He finds a quiet spot to dig in his toes, pulls out the cover of Theodore Sturgeon’s Killdozer! and affixes a stamp.

Dear Gabriel,

I want to write a poetry collection, but before I get busy with the stanzas and pentameter and shit, I need a killer title. Which do you think is best?

1. Storming the Battlements, Battling the Stormaments

2. A Most Contemptible Contretemps

3. Six Thieves for Seven Dollars

4. Smarter Than You, Deader Than Them

5. Girl Wrestler, Boy Maid

6. The Last Half-Bright Nebraska Dawn

Adam started with the postcards when Gabriel was eight and his sister’s husband left her.

“For, can you believe it, some Indian chick?”

“You mean like Calcutta or Trail of Tears?”

“Seriously,” Beth said. “Gabriel needs a man in his life.”

“Try a bar. Wear something low-cut.”

“He’s started lighting things on fire. They caught him at school burning a desk. And eating the lining of someone’s jacket.”

“Hey, I’m sorry.”

“Great, thanks. That’s already made a huge difference.”

Adam pictured himself at Gabriel’s age, the smirking turd he’d been. “I’ll email him, Beth. How about that? Or we can FaceTime. You have a computer, right?”

“He already spends about fourteen hours a day online. Don’t you think that’s part of the problem?”

“How the hell would I know?”

“Exactly, Adam. How would you?”

He and Beth had never been close, two years apart, different mothers, a state-to-state traipse all through high school as their father chased jobs that more accurately reflected his skill set, which in the end meant running a boutique hotel that offered continental breakfast, free cable, amd fabulous duvets.

“Fine. Listen, I’ll think of something, okay?”

The next day Adam was in a used bookstore, leafing through a stack of old pulps, like Ladies in Hades and Pickup on Sin Street . The art was lurid. Ridiculous. Also completely excellent. Almost pretechnology. An admission that we were all lonely and furtive, that at one time even grown men lacked access to the rudiments of self-pleasure.

He tore away the cover of She Was a Shark! and put it back on the shelf. The cashier continued to text. So he tore two more.

“Gabriel loves them,” Beth reported. “Honestly, Adam? It’s genius. Without the actual book, there’s, like, this weird liberation. He tacks each cover to the wall above his bed. Stares for hours. Makes up his own plots to fit the titles. I had no idea he was so imaginative.”

Adam became the scourge of East Bay indies, perfected a rip-disguising cough. Clerks hovered, oblivious, as he liberated Jim Thompson and Stanislaw Lem, Hubert Selby and Iceberg Slim. He felt empathy for the little paperbacks, stripped and vulnerable, spines bare and raw.

But not enough to stop.

At first he had no clue what to write. How are your classes? Or Playing any sports at school? But that got boring almost immediately. Plus, Adam remembered how much he hated being asked that sort of thing. In the end, he just let the pen decide. Gabriel never responded, instinctively knowing that wasn’t part of the deal.