The Orchid Eater

by Marc Laidlaw

  “Would it be all right if Mike stayed at my house tonight?” Edgar asked.

  She looked over at Jack, who could hardly suppress his grin as he worked the key off the ring. “Well, there is still a lot of packing to be done, but Ryan somehow slipped away for the weekend with Dirk’s family, so . . .” She shrugged. “Just be sure you ask Edgar’s mother first. If she has any reservations, we’ll come pick you up.”

  “She won’t care,” Edgar said.

  “Oh, don’t say that. Say she won’t mind.”

  Jack tossed Mike the key.

  “Thanks! This is gonna be great!”

  “We’ve got Sunday brunch planned, so don’t come home too late. You’ve still got packing to do.”

  Mike dropped the key in his pocket and patted it for security as the car pulled away.

  “Your mom’s pretty cool,” Edgar said.

  “She’s all right,” Mike admitted sheepishly, as if a cool mother were a source of humiliation. He felt he should do something to counteract the image Edgar had of him, innocent and with an easy life. He didn’t feel innocent. He wanted to be seasoned, tough, mature, experienced, worldly—even a little bit dangerous. But he couldn’t even get the nerve to ask a girl out on a date. He was terrified of school dances. He could easily die a virgin.

  Yeah, at least death was reliable—the one experience he could count on having. For that reason, he looked forward to it with a morbid curiosity.

  “We don’t have to stay at your place,” he said suddenly, shoving away all the assumptions and expectations he felt piling up on him. Why was everyone so sure he was a “good kid,” so sensible and innocent? His soul wasn’t so simple that a stranger could read it at a glance. Mike himself didn’t know its depth.

  “She’ll never know if we sleep in our house,” he said.

  “It’s no big deal,” said Edgar. “We’ve got blankets at our place.”

  “I mean, it’s my house, too.”

  “But you don’t have any furniture,” Scott said.

  “I’m just saying, we can if we want to.” He let it go at that, slightly deflated by the realization that they really didn’t care if they stayed in the house or not.

  “What I want right now is an avocado,” Edgar said. “Come on, these drivers are jaded. Let’s get their attention.”

  Edgar dropped to his hands and knees. “No one can refuse the human pyramid.”

  Scott laughed and got down beside him. “Come on, Mike. Climb up.”

  It was an embarrassing stunt, but that had never stopped him before. He clambered on, gouging them with his knees, arms wide and waving to the oncoming traffic.

  It’s summer, he thought. Anything can happen! Those beach-bunnies could still come along.

  The very next car, with a nice old lady driving, gave them a ride.

  4

  From the bottom of Shoreview Road, as he turned off the Pacific Coast Highway, Sal saw three boys hitching. By the time he got to the corner of Shoreview and Glen Ellen, they had vanished. Bushes quaked near the roadside. He laughed, shaking his head as he drove past.

  “You see that?” he asked Randy, who was sunk down in the passenger seat sucking at a yellowing roach clamped in an alligator clip.

  “No. What?” Randy’s voice sounded tight and scratchy.

  “Hawk’s boys. Scared shitless of me. You can imagine what he tells them.”

  “Fuck Hawk.”

  Sal laughed, stamping the pedal to the floor for the steep climb. “You wish.”

  “Don’t Bogart that thing,” said a voice from the back of the van.

  “It’s already dead,” Randy said.

  “So roll another. Humphrey Bogart, that’s your name from now on.”

  “You roll it.”

  “Humphrey,” other voices repeated. “Hump-Free!”

  The van filled with high laughter. It was dark in the windowless back, where some of Sal’s students and workers huddled on the floor. A youth with long bleached platinum hair climbed up between Sal and Randy, reaching for the glove box. He dug out a pack of rolling papers and a Ziploc Baggie containing several tight buds of gold-speckled sinsemilla.

  “Don’t make a mess, Marilyn,” Sal said. “I don’t want seeds and stems in the carpet. It’s a bitch dragging the vacuum cleaner out to the van.”

  “A bitch for who?” Randy said. “I’m the only one who does any cleaning. If it were up to you, this van would look like it belonged in the canyon. You know what Turtle Wax has done to my hands?”

  “Bogart and Monroe, together for the first time,” said a voice in the back, to more laughter. “Don’t miss that cinema classic, The Maltese Bus Stop.”

  “Maltese Butt-Fuck, you mean.”

  “What is that, a new position?”

  “Mm,” said Marilyn. “Sounds like fun.”

  Sal slowed for the hairpin turn where cars were always going off the road and smashing into the shacky wood houses; he had to floor it again when the real climb began. The road snaked up through bare sandstone hills, past houses under construction and recently leveled plots where foundations had yet to be poured. The boys in back shrieked each time the van banked around a curve and sent them rolling. The van came out above a grove of avocado trees, the leaves all dark and glossy, with Bohemia Bay and the Pacific Ocean stretching out below. The boys’ laughter made Sal smile.

  The van began to lug on the next and steepest stage of the ascent; the boys shifted around as if redistributing the weight would help. The road leveled out in a terraced ridge community, apparently the top of the hill; but there was another climb ahead of them, and yet another after that. So they climbed through the long afternoon, up a long stretch of fairly level road with a huge sage-choked gulch on one side and a single row of houses on the other. New houses stood along the far end of the gulch, bearded by gravelly flows of excess cement that had dripped down the slopes during construction. He followed Shoreview Road to the easternmost edge of the Shangri-La development, a dirt ridge topped by barbed wire. Sal’s house faced the Bohemia Greenbelt, hundreds of acres of dry-brush hills, canyons and gulleys and meadows preserved as wilderness, though ranchers had worked the land continuously since the early Spanish settlement of California.

  As was usual for this hour, the neighborhood was quiet, the baking streets deserted. There was no sea breeze to cool the houses, no trees except a few silver-dollar eucalyptus saplings planted hopefully in the yards. Many of the houses were still unsold, unoccupied. It was not the most desirable region in Bohemia Bay, but Sal had paid nothing for his house, and the near-isolation suited him. Many of the places sold so far had gone to single gay men or couples; it was turning into a bit of a colony within the larger colony of Bohemia Bay. One of the Shangri-La developers, Buddy Loomis, was an old customer who had managed the deal in exchange for Sal’s arrangement of a permanent Colombian connection. Buddy had probably earned back many times the value of the house by now, tax-free. Sal didn’t mind the lost income; he never would have seen that money anyway, not without totally changing his image, repressing some essential part of himself. He didn’t run with businessmen. He preferred a lifestyle that allowed him free and open expression of his character. Buddy was almost certainly a closet-queen, judging from various neurotic quirks and the way he eyed Sal’s students. Sal could usually tell when people were hiding their feelings, or hiding from them.

  If Buddy had been twenty years younger, Sal might have tried to bring him out, goading him down the tricky paths of insight and confession where he had taken many of his students. But Buddy was timid and lacked a young man’s daring; his hopes and ambitions lay in business, where risk was all financial and all the paths were freshly paved. Sal had taken another, less-traveled course, struggling for balance until the struggle became second nature, and finally a discipline. That rugged road had led him out of a self-tormenting existence in Los Angeles, where gangs, drugs and violence had added to the more intimate torments of his spirit; led him to this house in quiet
hills above the ocean whose very name meant peace. He had come a long way for a Cholo from the barrio, few of whose natives ever left; but he had been an outcast there. That world would almost certainly have destroyed him by now if he’d remained.

  Randy jumped out of the van. The boys in back were slower, since they were hungrily watching Marilyn light the joint he’d rolled.

  “Save that for later,” Sal said. “I don’t want you stoned when we work out, I told you that.”

  “But Randy smoked that whole joint by himself,” Marilyn complained.

  “He also did tai chi for two hours this morning while the rest of you were goofing off or sleeping late.”

  “That’s ’cause he horned about a pound of coke while you were meditating. He couldn’t sit still, in case you didn’t notice.” Sal climbed out of the van, unsure whether he was angrier with Randy for taking his coke, or with Marilyn for ratting on him.

  “Randy,” he called, “we have to talk.”

  Randy stood at the side of the house, staring at the door. He put a finger to his lips and beckoned urgently.

  Sal hissed at the boys to be quiet. He joined Randy at the door, the others following.

  Randy pointed at the doorframe; the wood next to the knob was splintered. Someone had worked a pry bar into it. No one inhabited the house next door, and with the street so deserted it would have been easy to pop the lock in broad daylight. Hell, he’d done it himself in crowded neighborhoods. Sal couldn’t tell if the intruder had succeeded or not.

  “Go around the back,” he whispered to the others. “Watch the windows and the back door, any way they can get out.” The boys scattered around the house. Sal slipped his key into the deadbolt. He was just about to twist it when Randy whistled softly from the back yard.

  “They got in here,” he whispered. “Window’s broken.”

  Sal tried to figure how much he might have lost. He’d been sitting on over forty thousand in cash, most it owed to his suppliers. He also had large new stashes of grass and coke yet to be sold, and fresh sheets of acid in the freezer. Everything in quantity.

  All that was bad enough. Worse was the question of who’d hit him. If it was only a common burglar, that wasn’t so bad; the guy had struck it lucky once, and next time around Sal would be waiting for him. But if it was an associate, someone he did business with, well . . . that added a whole new element of mistrust to what was already a routine founded on suspicion. The thing was, he’d never know who hit him. He couldn’t call the cops, couldn’t do much of anything. He was helpless in a case like this.

  He let himself in, peering sidelong down the hall into the living room. Most of the drugs were kept upstairs. At least, he saw, the thief hadn’t wasted time slashing furniture. The painting on the main wall, in particular, was safe: a cityscape of Los Angeles, its downtown skyline rendered at night against a backdrop of bizarre splotches like hallucinated galaxies. The picture was garish and awful, but it meant everything to Sal, who had sold its like from door to door, in bars, motels and waiting rooms, when he was trying to start a legitimate life away from the easy money and brutal stress of hustling. That shitty sales job had seemed pointless for a while, selling crap art instead of his body. He had almost given up on it when the door into money opened. A salesman—whose face meant less to him now than the lurid streaks of color in the ugly nightscape—had seen in Sal some of the qualities necessary to deal drugs. He had never stopped selling the paintings, although now they were a front for his other sales. This painting was the first he had done himself, when he was learning the assembly line trade. It had been done by the numbers, built up in layers, simultaneous with a dozen others almost exactly like it. But this one had sentimental value.

  He was so intent on the painting that at first he didn’t notice the figure lying in the dark on the couch below. A drab army-issue jacket had been thrown over one arm of the sofa, and a knapsack sat on the floor next to a metal crowbar that could have come from Sal’s own garage. The fruit bowl on the coffee table was almost empty. Peels, cores and broken walnut shells were scattered on the glass.

  “Hello, Sal.”

  Sal didn’t move for a moment. He knew the voice, high as a girl’s, but the body that went with it was all wrong.

  “Guadalupe?” he whispered.

  “Caught up with you.”

  Sal flipped on a light. He hadn’t seen his brother in more than five years, and life had changed him in ways he never could have predicted. Lupe had always run to fat, slouching around like a sleepwalker, a born victim, natural prey for urban predators. But now he looked trim and strong, in need of no protector. His blue jeans and thin T-shirt were stretched tight over lean, dense muscles. His face, though . . . his face hadn’t changed. Fatcheeked, round and soft, like a baby’s head on a soldier’s frame, as though none of the body’s hardships had been able to affect that grinning moon. His hands were scarred, his brow smooth.

  “How’d you find me?”

  “Wasn’t hard. Why? Were you hiding?”

  “It’s just. . . you’ve been out of touch so long, I didn’t know how to tell you where I went.”

  “You didn’t tell many of your old friends either. I was in L.A. for a week, asking after you. Aunt Theresa . . . you didn’t even tell her.”

  “I especially didn’t tell her,” Sal said, suddenly uncomfortable, as if Lupe had reached into an old source of shame and drawn out Sal’s personal demons. He felt attacked. Lupe’s appearance brought a flood of unwelcome memories, things he had been glad to leave untouched for as long as possible.

  Sal heard steps in the back of the house. Realizing that his boys were coming in, he relaxed.

  “I didn’t want any of those fools following me,” he said, wishing he didn’t sound so defensive. “I wanted to leave all that shit behind. Like you did.”

  Lupe shook his head and laughed, a high-pitched childish sound. “I didn’t leave anything behind. I went to meet it.”

  “So what’d you do? Join the army?”

  The girlish face looked astonished. “You think they’d take me? No, I been traveling. All over the country.”

  “No kidding? New York?”

  Lupe nodded. “I was there a while. I like the country better.”

  Sal found himself laughing. “Who’d have thought it? We’re a long way from our roots—not many like us. You’re a world traveler, and me . . . ”

  “Yeah. What are you, anyway?”

  Randy stepped into the room.

  In the instant of silence that followed, Lupe grabbed for his coat, fingers closing on the pocket.

  He’s got a knife, Sal thought. I wonder if it’s the same one . . . the switchblade I gave him?

  “What’s going on?” Randy said. “Who is this?”

  “This is my little brother Lupe. He’s come for a visit.” Lupe stared at Randy.

  “He couldn’t wait till we got home?” Randy said. “He had to break the fucking window and jimmy the door?”

  “Cool it,” Sal said. “This was unexpected. For all he knew, I might have been out of town for a week.”

  Randy shook his head and went toward the back of the house. “Wait’ll you see this,” he called. “Sal has a brother.”

  “Who’s he talking to?” Lupe said.

  “My friends,” said Sal. He could see that Lupe was disappointed they wouldn’t be alone; Randy’s appearance had jarred him. To be fair, he’d have to set aside some time to spend alone with his brother—send the boys out for a while so they could talk in private.

  Meanwhile, he was curious to see how Lupe would react to the gang.

  Marilyn was the first into the room, fingers toying with his long platinum locks. When he saw Lupe, he let his hands fall.

  “This is Lupe,” Sal said.

  "Loopie?” said Marilyn, gaping. “Is that a nickname? You’re not loopie, are you? Nuts, I mean? If you are it doesn’t matter, not to me. I’m a little loopie myself. Just ask my parents. They’re always trying to have m
e put away.”

  Marilyn extended his hand while he chattered but Lupe only stared at the long red nails. Marilyn pursed his lips, offended, and drew back his hand.

  “I don’t bite,” he said. “Do you?”

  Lupe pushed up from the couch, his smooth face contorted with disgust. The other boys were trickling into the room.

  “Who are they?” he said.

  Sal put a hand on Lupe’s chest, calming him gently but forcibly. “Lupe, man, I haven’t seen you in five years. Wherever you went, that was your business, your life. But I have my life, too, okay? These are my friends and students, and they work for me. I expect you to treat them with respect.”

  Marilyn shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me, Sal. I get it all the time.”

  The other boys, picking up on Lupe’s hostility, were treating him to their own brand of it. Randy and Douglas put their arms around each other and engaged in a flaunting kiss.

  Well, Sal thought, so let them. He had meant what he said.

  Lupe scowled and looked away from the boys.

  “This is who I am, Lupe. If it bothers you . . .”

  “I know what you are, Sal,” he said.

  Sal had to remind himself that Lupe had been through hell. His childhood had ended with a violent initiation into adulthood, of a sort. The boy had almost died. Sal, as he had so often before, regretted that he hadn’t been there to protect Lupe.

  Yet Lupe now looked steady and strong, sure of himself, nurtured by an inner source of strength.

  “Okay, Lupe,” Sal said, trying not to let a bittersweet compassion turn saccharine in his mouth. “These are my friends. Boys, this is my brother. I hope you can all get along. If you want to stay here, Lupe, you’re welcome to.”

  “I don’t want to put you out,” Lupe said mockingly.

  “It’s no bother.” He turned to the boys. “Is it?”

  “Hell no,” said Randy, with a smug grin. “He can take my bed, Sal. I’ll sleep with you.”

  If the comment was supposed to get a rise out of Lupe, Randy must have been disappointed. Lupe only nodded then sank back down in the couch.