What do I know about Timothy Allen Teague? Hatchet asked himself as he lay in the bed of his truck with the wind giving voice to the creosote. Why would a man straight out of Harvard Business School, fresh off kicking Wall Street’s ass come back to his podunk hometown? To flaunt his riches? Why would he go back to that shithole? Shove all that art down their throats? What kind of rumors were floating around in 1975 when a twenty-eight year old Timothy Allen Teague constructed a Japanese style castle on a ranch hidden in a stretch of canyon lands south of town? When he threw lavish and influential parties? Flying in important people from all over the world to rub shoulders with the town’s old money? The old players. Players who held such an inflexible grip on the city’s puppet strings. What was his need for such influence? Why Japanese? Why would he spend years building a working a profitable ranch when he didn’t need for cash? How much real estate and cattle had the guy actually bought up? Why, when he finally ceded management of the ranch and several feedlots to more interested employees, did Teague find it necessary to wage war on the city? Again, was it sheer boredom? Was it boredom that drew him to other more daring and provocative things to do with his time and fortune? How much had he paid that famed graffiti artist from New York to deface a downtown high rise owned by a real estate competitor? What was his motive when, after TIME magazine reported the incident and Teague was taken to court and fined $125,000, he sent a fourteen year old boy wearing nothing but a Mohawk and a pair of soiled underwear to pay in cash at the municipal clerk’s office? How many of the reporters on the scene asked for interviews with the boy? How many succeeded in getting one? Quite a few, weren’t there? And that kid disappears? How did this creepy thirty-something become such a charismatic influence on a generation of kids? Was it really just the money? Or was he really all they could find to relieve the eternal remoteness of that inescapable place? Why recruit only the wildest, most unrestrained of the children who came begging for a benefactor? Hatchet wondered how many Dog Boys he had seen squeezed through the juvenile justice system when he worked at the detention center. How many were they at any given time? Fifteen? Twenty? Weren’t most of them over eighteen? How many of them actually fell victim to Teague’s emerging pederasty? All of them? Was it part of the job interview? Did some kids just not pass the test? Why tombstones? Why unleash a lengthy campaign of littering the city with genuine marble tombstones? Why the nonsensical rhymes chiseled into them? How much had it cost him to fight the successful lawsuit filed by the city to stop him? Did it even come close to the cost of the project? What year was it that the Dog Boys disassembled and reassembled a couple of ambulances in a pair of city attorneys’ offices? What about that sculpture? The Boeing 727 with the words Red White Blue painted down the fuselage? The Flag? How had they done it? How did they get it there? Just outside the city limits, one hundred yards from Interstate 40? Buried nose first as if it were a knife thrown into the dirt with its massive silhouette reaching into the sky above dumbfounded passers-by? How did they do it without anyone seeing them? Did he anticipate the sculpture’s appearances in TIME and LIFE? Did Popular Mechanics ever actually figure out—as they claimed they would—the technique they had used to erect the thing with so much speed and secrecy? Was it Teague and the Dog Boys who released a plague of red and yellow sickle stenciled rats in the airport during a Reagan campaign stop? Were they ever found culpable? How many works of art did he wring from those boys? How many warehouses had he filled with it? Were the rumors true of mountains of canvases, photographs and sculptures filling his high rise offices? In layered rows and stacks, filling closets and unused space wherever he walked or sat or slept? How much could it all be worth by now? How many tales of the Dog Boys’ decadence had Hatchet heard over the years? How many tales of unrestrained drug binges and crime sprees? Had Teague truly argued with a colleague in New York that vandalism too was an art form? Why had the Dog Boys’ nearly forty year campaign of graffiti still not yet been deterred by local law enforcement? Who did he know? Who did he have by the balls? Was it true that he hadn’t seen a doctor since he was twelve? A bout of pneumonia had almost killed him in the late eighties, hadn’t it? Was it true that Teague had a daily routine including a morning skinny dip with the kids in his synthetic lake? What was it the Dog Boys call it? The Loe? What were the chores he had them perform around the most private sections of the ranch? Clearing brush? Mending fences? Did Teague still prefer the garb of the typical rancher? Gleaming ovate belt buckles? Tall straw cowboy hats the shape and size of sleeping yellow dogs wrapped around his head? What did he find so attractive about these boys scurrying about in punk rock T-shirts? Combat boots? Dragging mesquite limbs and performing controlled burns? And was the depth of his depravity anywhere near what the rumors and some Dog Boys’ testimony described? Did he really, at night, when the halls of the house were silent of any gala, dress certain Dog Boys in silk robes and pony-tails in the heart of the castle and watch old samurai films and snort cocaine and fuck them into shit covered heaps till dawn? How many of these boys had escaped his clutches? How many had gone on to do great things? Some had become bona fide rock stars, hadn’t they? And several became leading artists in their fields? Most of them in Europe, now? Hadn’t one directed a famous documentary film? Wasn’t there something about one or two organizing protests at world economic summits? But how many died early senseless deaths? Usually attributed to drugs and alcohol? Or other risky behaviors with sex and sports cars? Why did Teague drop out of public view by early 2001? How was it now that most people wouldn’t know his name like any washed up actor or debutante? What of Clancey? What kind of art was Clancey churning out for the ol’ perv up there on the penthouse floor of that office building? Is it morbid? Astringent? Profane? What could Teague have to do with a Faberge Egg? What could be his angle here? Did he have an angle? But aren’t all rich men prone to desire that which seems wholly unattainable?
Aren’t all men prone to such behavior?
Clancey’s betrayal felt too simple to involve Teague. When Hatchet weighed the facts, applied Occam’s Razor, simple greed seemed obvious. Any involvement by Teague is speculation, he told himself.
He dreamt the tattooed hand and the samurai sword could carve perfect Japanese symbols into the sides of hanging beef. He saw the sword sling human blood across white canvas and panes of glass. He dreamt Clancey sucking on a white snake, deepthroating it head first with blood foaming at the corners of his mouth... his eyes smiling...
Aren’t all men prone to such behavior?
Clancey’s betrayal felt too simple to involve Teague. When Hatchet weighed the facts, applied Occam’s Razor, simple greed seemed obvious. Any involvement by Teague is speculation, he told himself.
He dreamt the tattooed hand and the samurai sword could carve perfect Japanese symbols into the sides of hanging beef. He saw the sword sling human blood across white canvas and panes of glass. He dreamt Clancey sucking on a white snake, deepthroating it head first with blood foaming at the corners of his mouth... his eyes smiling...
Edit 11.25.2018