The Orchid Eater

by Marc Laidlaw

He looked up from repacking the carton Scott had spilled. Mr. Glantz was coming toward the ramp.

  “Just some friends of mine,” he said.

  “That’s Edgar Goncourt! Get him the hell out of my store!”

  “Just leaving,” Edgar said. “Don’t sweat it.”

  “Meet you at the library,” Scott said.

  The two of them hurried into the alley, laughing. Mr. Glantz trudged up the ramp in his heavy boots. “I didn’t know you hung around with boys like that. I thought you had more sense. You should choose your friends more carefully.”

  Mike started to say that he hardly knew Edgar, but although it was true, it sounded like betrayal. He and Edgar did not exactly occupy the same orbits, since Edgar was in the Alternative School, which had a building to itself adjacent to the main grounds of Bohemia High. The Alt-School students took lots of field trips in a broken-down, painted-up hippie bus, and had legendary parties where faculty and students alike supposedly took drugs, listened to Led Zeppelin and engaged in orgies. In that notorious pantheon of spectacular rebels and tragic, hollow-eyed losers, Edgar Goncourt was only a minor figure, neither demigod nor semidemon. Quiet, secretive, all but anonymous, he had never spoken even one word to Mike until just now, on the shadowy ramp. The thought of all the things Edgar might know—the wild world to which he was privy—turned a key in a lock at the top of Mike’s skull, opening a magic door in the back of his dull little world. He was not about to throw away that key, or stop that door from swinging wider. He’d always been curious about Edgar and his friends—envious of the kids who, because they didn’t do as well on tests, were allowed to create their own lessons. The girls in the Alt-School all looked worldly, experienced, even somewhat jaded in their bell-tasseled tie-dyed skirts, with their hairy legs and unshaven armpits he couldn’t help but imagine sucking on. Girls straight out of Zap Comix, R. Crumb women, sexy and seductive, who never noticed Mike (though they weren’t stuck up in the same way as the ordinary Bohemia soshes and cheerleaders and surfer chicks) because he looked so . . . so normal, in his striped T-shirts and flared trousers.

  Mr. Glantz stood over him while he finished repacking the box.

  “You just ask some of the other merchants if things don’t disappear when that Edgar comes around. He’s been arrested more than once—and not only on this street. There’s better things to do with your time than go around with hoods.”

  Mike shoved the box back onto the shelf as hard as he could, hoping something would break. His mind was a cloud of Alt-School orgies, vivid pictures of all the things he’d missed out on because he was so damn square.

  “Better things than working here,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?”

  “You don’t even know me, Mr. Glantz. How do you know I’m not just like Edgar—or worse?”

  Mr. Glantz stared at him. Stared and swayed, holding on to the wooden rail that ran along the ramp. In the dim light, his face lost all expression and his anger sloughed away. He wasn’t looking at Mike now, or at anything. Something might have come out of the toaster on his workbench, crawled up his arm and eaten a piece of his brain. His eyes had melted.

  Mike’s mouth went dry; he felt sick all of a sudden. Poor old geezer wouldn’t hear anything else he said right now. Probably wouldn’t remember the encounter with Edgar and Scott either. Mike brushed past him, on his way into the store.

  Up front, the oldest and youngest Glantz sisters stood near the register arguing about hearing-aid batteries. He didn’t see the middle one.

  “Your dad’s having another one of his, uh, diabetic things,” he said. Several customers looked his way. He jerked his thumb back at the ramp.

  The two women looked peeved and worried at the same time. The older one grabbed a container of orange juice sitting on the back counter and hurried toward the storeroom. “You should have been watching the clock.”

  “I should have been watching?” said the younger. “Mike, could you hold the fort for a minute?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said, and watched her face change. “He just gave me the rest of the day off.”

  “Well, we could use your help right now. Couldn’t you stay just another few minutes?”

  “I’m sorry, Miss Glantz, I’ve got to be somewhere right away.”

  He grabbed his unseasonably heavy jacket from behind the counter and walked out the front door, avoiding her frustrated look. She had no reason to doubt his lie, and what could she do to him anyway? He wasn’t her slave.

  Mike hurried through the shade of a dozen awnings, past stores that sold unicorn jewelry, driftwood sculpture, sand candles, health food and vitamins. How could he waste his whole summer counting light bulbs? This job was worse than his paper route, worse even than the week he’d spent with blistered palms hoeing trenches at the experimental farm down in Dana Point. When he was counting vacuum bags and unpacking tortoise lampshades and sorting batteries, he felt a gray suffocation sinking down on him; something thick and heavy and inescapable, like a soft ceiling crushing him, turning his mind to paste. The clocks on the shelves slowed to a halt and the seconds dripped like Chinese water torture. That’s what had happened to Mr. Glantz. It wasn’t diabetes. The job itself was a coma—a coma that paid three bucks an hour.

  He turned the block and went up to the alley that ran between Glantz Appliances and the library. The sisters’ voices echoed over the parked cars like the cries of parrots. He hurried away from the doomed sensation it gave him, and came upon Scott and Edgar hanging around on benches near the main doors of the library.

  Scott Gillette was tall and husky—some might say massive—yet he moved lightly, at times furtively, wearing a heavy olive-drab army coat in all but the hottest weather, including today’s. At the moment, without any effort, he had wrapped both hands around the lower branch of an avocado tree that spread above the benches and was shaking the bough, causing little withered bombs of inedible fruit to pelt Mike as he approached.

  “Watch out for tree gonads!” Scott shouted.

  Edgar sat in Scott’s shadow: smaller, thinner, wiry, his eyes constantly darting above a broad, sly smile.

  “Hey, it’s not five yet,” Scott said. “What’d you do, quit?”

  “I wish,” Mike said.

  “That’s one wish could definitely come true,” Edgar said. He closed his eyes and tipped back his head, as if entering a trance. “You just have to visualize it clearly and it’ll manifest in your life. Close your eyes and picture yourself walking up to old man Glantz and saying ‘Kiss my ass, dick-breath!’”

  “I suppose that would work,” Mike admitted. “Is that what they teach you in the Alt-School?”

  Edgar’s eyes opened slowly, his grin broadening. “Naw. My mom taught me that one.”

  “Let’s get going,” Scott said. “We’ve got a sortie to plan.”

  “A sortie?” said Mike.

  “I think he means a raid,” Edgar said. “Right, Scott?”

  “I was just lamenting the fact that all the avocados get picked or shaken from this tree before they’re ripe enough to eat. Edgar let on that he knows a few trees that are peaking even as we speak.”

  “Gah,” Mike said. “I wouldn’t care if you had a whole orchard. I hate avocados. All that greeny brown smoosh.”

  “You must never’ve had a really fresh one,” Edgar said. “Right off the tree, they’re sweet as butter.” Edgar licked his wide lips. “When they’re even slightly past their prime, they get all gray and gross. You’ve got to catch them right at that perfect moment. Which happens to be today.”

  Scott said, “Mike’s still a ripe avocado virgin.”

  Mike shoved Scott, who hardly budged.

  “So where are these trees?”

  “There’s a grove in this old farmer’s back pasture, halfway up the hill to Shangri-La. He doesn’t have any friends to give them to, doesn’t sell them or anything, so I just help myself. They just fall and rot otherwise.”

  “It occurred to u
s,” Scott added, “that we should invest in a few giant grocery bags. Between the three of us, we could bring home quite a booty.”

  Mike shrugged. “What are we waiting for?”

  They walked abreast down Glen Ellen Boulevard, the thoroughfare of choice for local traffic, now that the Coast Highway was perpetually clogged with its summer load of tourist cars. Striding along with a raid in the offing—an adventure of almost mythical promise—Mike found himself laughing for no reason. Well, there were good reasons really. He was out of school, so why waste his summer in an appliance store? It’s not as though he had a family to support. Hell, his mother’s boyfriend Jack was buying a house, freeing them from the tiny two-bedroom seacliff apartment they’d been living in for a year. Mike and his brother Ryan would have their own rooms for the first time. No more moving from place to place. He was set!

  They went into the Glen Ellen Supermarket. Edgar idled before the snack rack with great deliberation, picking through the assortment of candy and gum. He finally settled on a small packet of Chiclets, but not before a man with a push broom came out of an aisle and stood behind them. He followed them to the register.

  “Will that be all?” asked the checker, a fat woman who kept staring suspiciously at Scott, enfolded in his thick army coat.

  “Yes, please,” said Edgar, handing her a few coins. “I’ll bag it myself.”

  He reached around the end of the counter, pulled out a large paper bag, and shook it open. The woman glared at him as if she wanted to hurry him up. Mike at first assumed he wasn’t attracted to her, since she was fat and all, but even so he couldn’t help imagining her with her clothes off, as a sort of thought-experiment. He realized, with faint humility at the stirring in his underwear, that he would have accepted it even from her. If she’d have him.

  Edgar, meanwhile, had taken out a second bag, shaken it open, and shoved it down inside the first.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  He unfolded a third bag and fit it into the others, straightened the edges, thumped it several times lightly as if to check the sturdiness of his construction. Then he picked up the tiny packet of Chiclets and tossed it in.

  “I don’t want the bottom falling out,” he said, lifting the triple-lined bag in his arms. He grunted as if it weighed a ton, staggering toward the door. Mike looked at the woman, shrugged apologetically, but couldn’t meet her eyes. He was still seeing her as a pale opulent mass of sticky, sweet-smelling, seductive flesh.

  He ran after Scott and Edgar, all of them straight-faced until they reached Glen Ellen. They had gone nearly a block before they could speak without choking. Edgar scooped out the Chiclets and folded up the bags, then started pulling handfuls of candy from his pockets.

  “Who wants what?” he asked.

  “I pay my own way,” said Scott, shaking a Snickers bar out of his sleeve.

  Edgar offered candy bars to Mike. “Three Musketeers, Baby Ruth, or Rocky Road?”

  Mike looked back down Glen Ellen to see if anyone from the store was watching, then shrugged and took the Rocky Road. “How’d you do that?” he asked as he tore the wrapper with his teeth. “I was right there watching you.”

  “So was the manager,” Edgar said. “That’s the challenge.”

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Listen to you,” Scott said. “As if you never stole a thing.”

  “Yeah, Mike?” Edgar said. “I’ll bet you could get away with anything, innocent-looking guy like you.”

  “Well, I haven’t—I mean, nothing big. But I always think it would be great to be like, you know, an international jewel thief. Planning big heists. Wouldn’t it be great to commit the perfect robbery? Like that movie Gambit. Do it once and make a million bucks, then retire.”

  Edgar shook his head, laughing. “Man, you think big, don’t you?”

  “It would sure beat fixing broken toasters the rest of your life.”

  “I always took you for a . . . well, I won’t say it.”

  Mike choked on the last bite of marshmallow. “Just ’cause I don’t hang around with the Bathroom Gang? I could plan crimes those guys would never even think of.”

  “Yeah? But could you pull ’em off?”

  “Sure. Anyway, who’d suspect a kid?”

  “Maybe they wouldn’t—a straight-looking kid like you.”

  “We should start our own gang.”

  Edgar laughed. “That’s too much work. You just have to find the right one and join it. Right, Scott? Should we tell him about Hawk?”

  Scott smirked. “You mean the Sunday School gang?”

  “No, man, Hawk’s cool. Don’t get the wrong idea. He was on his Jesus trip today, but he’s not always like that.”

  Suddenly Mike felt like a bit of an outcast.

  “Hawk?” Mike said tentatively, aware he’d been left out of something. Usually he knew exactly what Scott was talking about—knew better than anyone.

  “Forget it,” Scott said. “He’s no international jewel thief.”

  “Hawk’s the real thing, man,” Edgar said defensively. Mike couldn’t figure out what they were talking about, so he said nothing.

  His sense of camaraderie slightly tarnished, Mike turned his eyes to their goal, the curving range of coastal hills that hemmed in Bohemia Bay. The slopes, which grew green for a few months in winter, were yellowish brown by now. The highest, hindmost peaks of Shangri-La were hidden by the lower hills mounting up to them. From here at sea level, the heights were cloaked in the slithery silvery green of eucalyptus. They stopped walking at the base of Shoreview Road, which ascended and vanished among these leaves.

  Edgar said, “From here we hitch.”

  They took a stand by a stop sign where a constant stream of cars came up from the Coast Highway, heading into the hills. Edgar stuck out his thumb. Scott and Mike stood behind him and watched the cars. A few drivers glanced at them without slowing. A woman in a run-down VW gave an apologetic shrug, as if to say her car would never make it to the top with the added load. One man held up his thumb and forefinger as if pinching a dime. In response, Edgar spread his arms as wide as they would go. The man grinned and kept driving.

  “Comparing dick size?” Scott asked.

  “No, man, he was only going a few blocks, and we’re going all the way.”

  All the way, Mike thought.

  He could see a big black van at the bottom of the hill, turning off the Coast Highway. What if it stopped for them and there was, say, a beautiful blond beach-bunny driving, and this amazing brunette in a bikini next to her, and they offered us a ride and we got in and the whole van was packed with these girls, sexy and horny and just dying to get ahold of a virgin, really show him how it was done. Of course, they could do stuff with Scott and Edgar, too, that’d be okay, but mainly—

  The van drew closer, stopping at the sign across Glen Ellen. It was only then Edgar noticed it.

  “Holy shit!” he shouted. “The enemy! Get back, fast!”

  Edgar shoved them into a hedge. They huddled down and watched the road through the bushes.

  “See this van?” Edgar whispered. “Burn it into your memory.”

  The huge black van rumbled past, gathering speed for the climb. It was shiny as a new hearse, freshly waxed and polished.

  “That’s Sal Diaz,” Edgar said. “When you see him coming, boys, you’d better get out of the way. If he pulls over, say you’re not hitching. Whatever you do, don’t get inside that van.”

  Mike watched the van heading uphill, toward the ceiling of trees. “Why?”

  “Sal is lethal. He’s a self-defense instructor, but he only teaches boys, if you know what I mean. Get in that van with him, he’ll ask if you know how to protect yourself, offer you some free lessons. Next thing you know, he’s grabbing your cock.”

  Edgar bent closer, pitching his voice low as if telling a ghost story: “And if you say you don’t want a lesson, he’ll just pin you down and do it to you then and there. Right up the ol�
�� poop-chute.”

  “While he’s driving?”

  “His boys chauffeur him around. He’s the most dangerous man in Bohemia Bay, believe me. Hangs out at the Rock Lobster watching the surfers. If he sees someone he likes, he hunts ’em down and fuckin’ rapes ’em. Course, those surfer jerks don’t go down without a fight, but Sal likes that. He just sort of toys with them.”

  Mike crept cautiously out of the hedge, a bit awestruck to think of such a psycho loose in Bohemia Bay. He looked after the van, but saw instead an all too familiar yellow Volvo cruising downhill toward them. It was Jack’s car. He almost jumped back in the hedge, but the presence of the other two froze him.

  The Volvo eased to a halt across the street. Jack Harding was driving, Mike’s mother next to him. “Hey, guys!” Jack called. Mike crossed the street reluctantly. The other two followed.

  “We were just up at the house,” Jack said.

  “Roddy and Nathaniel are all moved out,” said his mom. “Everything’s ready for us. What are you boys up to?”

  “Oh, uh, this is Edgar Goncourt. He lives in Shangri-La. He’s going to show me around the neighborhood.”

  “Edgar?” she said. “Are you Nan Goncourt’s son, the child psychologist?”

  Edgar blushed. “Well . . .”

  “How nice to meet you! Your mother consults for some of the district’s counseling programs.”

  “That’s my mom,” Edgar said softly, with mixed pride and embarrassment.

  “Have you seen the house yet?” Jack asked, with explosive heartiness.

  “Only from the outside,” Mike said.

  “Let me give you a key.” Even before Mike could answer, Jack was digging into his pocket and hauling out a ring. “The three of you can take a tour.”

  “Wow, cool,” Mike said. “You mean we can all go in?”

  “Why not?”

  His mother said, “The house is so beautiful, you’ve never seen anything like it. I already know which room Mike will want.”

  “Great,” Edgar said.

  “You boys just . . . be careful,” she said in a slightly sterner voice. “The phones aren’t hooked up yet. I don’t want you in there after dark.”