Power in the Blood (59 page)

The clientele at Behan’s simply did not appreciate a good play. The Arcadians should have been engaged for an extended run at one of Denver’s finest theaters, a place of chandeliers and silk brocade curtains and plush carpeting, not the sawdust-floored imbiber’s barn they currently graced. Noble was doubly upset because the play they were presenting was from his own pen, and he considered it his finest offering to date, far and away the best of his dramas.
A Heart Divided
had a wonderful story line, in Noble’s opinion; Flora, the winsome heroine, had inherited a goodly sum of money from her ailing father, for whom she had cared at great loss of liberty for herself. Now that she was freed from her father’s sickbed, and had been rewarded for her sacrifice, Flora wished to meet with and marry a nice young man, to begin a life together. She had rejected several suitors whom she considered immodest or unscrupulous, and finally had met, quite by accident, a chaste fellow, pure of heart yet crushingly poor, a doctor who worked among the slum dwellers of New York. This character, Desmond Trueblood, was the perfect match for Flora, but he seemed not to notice her at all, even when she joined him in his work among the poor. Desmond was intensely concerned for the life of little Dorothy Daniels, an orphaned waif of the streets, dying slowly of consumption. Dorothy was not unhappy with her lot, knowing as she did that Jesus was waiting to sweep her up to his home in the sky. Dorothy, on her deathbed in the final scene, exhorted Flora and Desmond to wed, and bring into the world a child to replace herself. They vowed they would, and Dorothy died knowing she had accomplished some good in the world.

The deathbed speech had caused Noble to weep even as he penned it, and the troupe all agreed it was his finest work, but the clods at Behan’s had merely hooted with laughter and thrown articles of trash at the stage. Behan himself had told Noble the play would end its run early, that very night in fact, and the curtain had come down on his masterpiece for the last time. Noble found it necessary, after calming the Arcadians, to absent himself from their company in order that he might get drunk. There was no other remedy for such outright humiliation and disappointment. Five years had passed since the name of Noble Burgin and his Arcadian Players brought smiles to the faces of theater managers on either coast, and tears to the eyes of all who saw the heartrending plays he brought forth from his soul. Life had been good then, but life now was not good. Something in Noble had become lost, some creative tool worn down by overuse, its edge blunted by repetition, perhaps.

Ensconced in a bar, Noble attempted to pin down the flaw that rendered all his offerings these last five years unacceptable to the public. He could not see why the plays had failed, since they employed all the devices that had worked so brilliantly in his earlier works. Could that in itself be the root cause of the problem? he asked himself. Was he merely repeating, or attempting to repeat, what had gone before? But he genuinely admired such stuff. What other kind of drama could he possibly attempt? He knew he was no Shakespeare, but success should still have been his.

He drank brandy, a great deal of it, and eventually tired of attempting to analyze his predicament. He would simply get drunk and forget his worries for an evening. He did not worry about his wife and leading lady, Hortense, since she was in the hands of the Arcadians at their lowly hotel several blocks away. Hortense did not approve of his drinking bouts, and would sometimes flirt with younger men to punish him. Noble made a point of hiring only those actors who he knew with certainty were not attracted to women, as a measure against Hortense’s betraying him outright. She had performed well as Flora, even though the makeup could not conceal that her years were considerably in advance of her character’s, and the rest of the cast had been similarly excellent in their roles, especially Marcie, who was young and slender enough to play Dorothy convincingly. Noble had lately been experiencing feelings of great tenderness toward Marcie, and felt compelled, on occasion, to place an arm around her shoulders. Hortense had caught him doing this the week before, and warned him never to do any such thing again, or she would leave him and take up with a successful man, any successful man in any field. It had been a hurtful moment, and Noble promised himself never again to do what he had done with Marcie while Hortense was anywhere near.

A newspaper abandoned by a fellow drinker at the next table caught Noble’s eye, and he reached across to grab it before anyone else should think to. The headlines bored him, since they addressed political issues, a field Noble considered beneath his attention, but on page three he noticed an intriguing banner: RED SAVAGES MEET GRISLY END. He read the article, concerning the capture and deaths of two renegade Apaches named Panther Stalking and Kills With a Smile, and recalled having been aware of the depredations and mayhem these two had created for years in the southwestern territories. Trapped in a box canyon, their ammunition exhausted, the brothers had been attempting to smash their own skulls in with rocks when finally apprehended by an army unit that had been tracking them for weeks. Taken to Socorro and incarcerated in jail, the redskins had outwitted their captors, and thwarted the long-postponed expectations of the authorities to administer a stiff dose of hempen justice, by ignoring their chains and biting each other’s jugular veins open in the night, an act of such bizarre single-mindedness it took Noble’s breath away. He read on, and was apprised of their former names, Nail in His Feet and Bleeding Heart of Jesus, and of the peculiar fashion in which their grandfather and a mysterious youth had stolen the brothers away from a Spanish mission after murdering the priests. Returned to their heathenish way of life, they had reverted quickly to type and begun a bloodthirsty reign that lasted for years, only to end in an appropriately bloody way on the floor of a jail cell.

Noble felt something stirring inside himself, a familiar sensation he identified, despite his drunkenness, as the flexing of the creative muscle, the insistent prodding of the muse, and he heeded its message. Could anything be less like his former works? No innocent damsels here; no virtuous heroes or happy endings. Blood. More blood than the Scottish play.
Brothers in Blood.
That was good, but
Red Hellions
was even better. He wouldn’t even need to think up a story; it was right there before him in the newspaper, complete from first act to last, although he would need to invent characters and scenes to flesh out the basic plot. But what a plot! Barbaric. Cruel. Indigenous! This was a story wrested from the uncivilized heart of America, a true story, a tragedy steeped in redness. To write and stage such an epic would be an unprecedented flouting of conventional theater’s rules. Did he have the courage within himself to do such a thing? He must! The play already was springing ready-formed from his brain. It would be a new beginning, for himself and the Arcadians, and for
Thespis Americanus
! New theatrical worlds awaited conquest, and Noble Burgin would be in the vanguard, a bold innovator, working against the grain, leaving behind the shopworn candy apples of yesterday’s proscenium! He fell from his chair and struck his temple against the floor, was assisted to his feet, bleeding slightly, and aimed himself at the door. Destiny had called his name, and Noble would not hesitate now.

It had begun with the puppy. His mother gave it to Tatum on his tenth birthday, an adorable ball of fur that delighted in biting fingertips. He liked to play with it, but not for very long; its habit of playfully biting him annoyed Tatum in the end, and he hit the puppy to make it stop. The pup was confused, then approached him again, biting as before, and Tatum snapped its neck to teach it a lesson. He smuggled the tiny corpse from the house beneath his jacket, and flung it into a stream, then sat watching the waters flow, trying to understand what it was that he had done. Two things were clear to Tatum: it was easy to kill things, and it was possible to do so without feeling bad about it. He really didn’t care that the puppy his mother had saved her money for was dead. It seemed to Tatum that spending money on something that was so easily killed and disposed of had been an awful waste. His mother was a fool.

When he was twelve, Tatum found that riding piggyback on one of his friends in the schoolyard produced a wonderful sensation in his groin. His penis hardened in an inexplicable way, so he urged his friend to run faster, and the jerkings of a backbone against Tatum’s crotch aroused him further, pleasing him so much he demanded of his friend that he keep running and running, even when he grew tired. The friend stopped and flung Tatum off, aware that the piggyback ride had been more than just that, and Tatum smacked him hard across the face to punish him for having denied further enjoyment. The friend had cried, and Tatum despised him for that. He usually despised his friends after a very short time, without quite knowing why, but at least in this instance he had a definite reason.

Tatum found he could reproduce the effects of the piggyback ride by rubbing himself against the side of his mattress, and he kept this up until a terrible thing happened: his belly exploded and leaked a peculiar kind of fishy-smelling glue all over the front of his nightshirt. Tatum felt that death was near, but was glad to die while in a state of physical contentment that he could not explain.

Further experimentation along these lines led Tatum at last to the basic act of masturbation, but he found that however many times he might cause himself to spurt the belly glue, it was never so enjoyable as when he had ridden on the back of his erstwhile friend; in fact he could not produce the glue half so readily if he did not imagine himself again being carried around the schoolyard, high and hard.

Boys his own age soon learned to avoid Tatum; he was always trying to make them play piggyback, and they began to make fun of him, calling him piggy-wiggy. They would not allow him to play leapfrog with them, because Tatum had developed the habit of landing on top of the boys he was supposed to be vaulting over, which spoiled everyone’s enjoyment. In time he was made an outcast for his seemingly irreconcilable needs to be physically close to the other boys and to punish them with his fists when they would not play piggyback or leapfrog the way he wanted.

Before Tatum was fourteen, the school informed his mother his attendance there was no longer required, and on inquiring the reason for this surprising statement, Mrs. Tatum was told that her son had been caught engaging in unnatural acts with a much younger boy, who had also been dismissed from further schooling, even though it was clear Tatum had been the event’s instigator. Mrs. Tatum could not even broach the subject when she arrived home, and wished as she had never wished before that her husband had not died when their son was just one year old. She had struggled since then to provide him with love and a roof over his head and clothing he need not be ashamed of, but she could not talk with him of the things she had been told. It was easier to move away from Ohio and join her spinster sister Lydia in Denver, taking Tatum with her to begin again, far from the scene of such unpalatable and unbelievable allegations.

When he was eighteen, Tatum knew what he liked, but he knew also that proclaiming his likes would earn him nothing but scorn and very possibly a beating. He looked into the eyes of every young man who crossed his path, seeking out the ones like himself, and when he found them, he was kind to them, and generous with his money, until they balked at his suggestions for additional pleasures of an unusual nature. When they refused, he would hit them with the stout dog-headed cane he carried, until they begged for a chance to perform the service he had requested, a service that left them with rope burns around their necks, and more than the usual anal bruising.

Tatum became known in the gathering places of the sexually dispossessed, and stories of his excesses led some to cultivate his company, although few remained his friend for long. He was a handsome, smooth-skinned young man, with facial hair so fine it required shaving no more than once a week. He dressed well and took pains to present a neat appearance at all times. He did no work, allowed his mother to support him and wondered if he would always live thus.

In 1884, when he was twenty-one, he posed nude for an artist who was covering the walls of a large room with life-sized depictions of whorish abandon, most of it without much interest for Tatum, since it involved the penetration of women, although he was somewhat smitten by the image of a young soldier cupping his victim’s breast while brandishing a sword as he took her from behind. The juxtapositioning of the weapon and the act appealed to Tatum, and he asked the artist, a florid-faced drinker running to seed, who the handsome model might be.

“That one,” said Nevis Dunnigan, “was a mystery. Had a finger missing, but an excellent study: no twitching, perfectly composed. Would you mind not wobbling your helmet that way, my good fellow? It distracts me something awful.”

“Is that him again over there, with the spear?”

“The same, and again to your left, with the young lady’s face hiding his member. He wouldn’t stay for more posing than that. Pity. You’ll let me use you for several more studies, won’t you?”

“What was his name?”

“Ilium, he said, but I didn’t believe it. There were secrets in his eyes, buried deep. It’s hard to find young fellows willing to pose. I prefer fellows—as a painter, I mean—with all their planes and angles. Michelangelo was that way too. Ever notice how his women look like men with tits? Well, they do say he was homely, so maybe he never knew a woman the way a man should.”

Tatum had never heard of Michelangelo, but was content to let the painter drone on while he worked, for the opportunity it gave him to stare at the naked soldier on the wall. Tatum had stayed on with his aunt Lydia following the death of his mother, and held the woman in a permanent state of dread. She did not dare to question his comings and goings, or inquire who the young men entering his room might be. The one occasion when she did so had resulted in a beating around her varicose-veined legs, and the pain of it had been so excruciating and lasted so long she never again queried his least movement or choice of company. Tatum was silently provided with meals at any hour of the day or night, and Lydia could not refuse him a portion of the money she had saved over a lifetime of toil. He took, he spent, and not once did he thank her, but his aunt said nothing, valuing a life without physical pain over a life with pride.