The Orchid Eater

by Marc Laidlaw

  It was time to find his brother.

  ***

  His boys woke him, crawling in around him like baby rats nudging up against their mother to nurse. He opened his eyes and saw the Pump Jockey, respect and remorse in his expression, apologizing silently for every slur he’d shouted before his initiation.

  Lupe stirred, feeling claustrophobic. Golden light shone on the dirt wall next to him. Twisting around in the nest, he saw the sun just touching the horizon, seeming to melt on the water. With the sight came a pang of anticipation, again the recurrent sense that tonight, finally, something crucial would happen, some indescribable change would come over him and blow away everything that had grown old and stale. With the Pump Jockey’s power still fresh inside him, he felt a welcome renewal of hope. The feeling faded as night came on. Nothing would ever change, he realized again. Not for him. His stomach felt bottomless.

  He waited until the sun had vanished, stirring violet into the orange clouds. The boys had faded with the sun, though he had hoped they would stay and keep him company.

  He crawled out alone, feeling exposed on the cliffside and on the stairs, but no one gave him much notice. The beach was lightly populated, though it showed signs of having been crowded. People were shaking out towels, folding huge umbrellas, dragging coolers over the sand toward flights of stairs. Beer cans and broken sand toys littered the beach. As Lupe walked, continuing south, his stomach growled, reminding him that he hadn’t eaten much more than a handful of nuts since yesterday. There was money in his pocket, including a few bucks he’d taken from the Pump Jockey.

  A glimmer of neon atop the cliffs caught his eye. FOOD & SPIRITS. Broad windows overlooked the sea. The stairs that scaled the cliff below the restaurant were lined with men, most of them sitting and staring down at the waves, a few talking.

  As soon as he saw them, he knew what he was looking at. Their style of dress, the trimmed mustaches and close-cut hair, the predominance of black leather, only confirmed a more visceral knowledge, a tense anticipation.

  Many eyes played on Lupe as he walked toward the stairs. He pretended to ignore them, but he felt his body vibrate like a drum skin with the attention. As he took the first step, the young man sitting there gave him a slight nod and smile. Others said hello as he climbed past. Lupe did not acknowledge their greetings. At the top of the stairs, he found himself at the edge of the restaurant’s patio. He spied a bar inside the place, and heard the sizzling of meat on a grill. Repelled, he sought a table outside near the cliff's edge, where all he could smell was the sea. A few of the men on the stairs had tracked his progress, and now gazed up at him speculatively. He looked away as a waiter appeared and dropped a menu on his table. It showed a pair of lobster claws waving out of a dark hole—tiny beady eyes above a grin.

  “Welcome to the Rock Lobster. Can I get you a drink?” When Lupe looked up, the waiter’s expression grew pinched and nervous.

  “I’m sorry,” he said in a soft, confidential voice, leaning nearer. “You’re going to have to show me some I.D.”

  “For a garden salad?” Lupe asked, keeping his voice light, pleasant.

  “Oh, well . . . that’s no problem.” The waiter smiled and winked. “But I wouldn’t try the bar, if I were you.”

  “I’m old enough if I wanted to.”

  “Maybe you are at that.”

  The waiter walked back inside. Lupe followed his progress through the crowd around the dark interior bar. Heavy disco music pulsed out into the evening. Out here, it was much calmer; couples sat talking quietly, sipping drinks. At the small outdoor bar, separated by several stools, two men sat drinking alone. One was young and trim; he kept glancing at his watch. Lupe studied the other. Late forties, thinning colorless hair, paunchy, wearing thick plastic flesh-tone glasses.

  He thanked the waiter for his salad in a loud, friendly voice and was gratified to see the object of his study take a casual look in his direction. The look lengthened. As Lupe lifted a fork to his mouth he pretended to notice the man at the bar for the first time. The other glanced away quickly, then looked back more slowly. Lupe returned the gaze steadily, holding eye contact for a meaningful length of time. Then he turned slightly to gaze back down at the stairs.

  As he was eating, he heard another chair at his table scrape on the patio bricks. He turned, smile at the ready.

  “Hi.” It was the man from the bar. “Mind if I join you?”

  “Free country,” Lupe said.

  Doubt crossed the man’s face. He started to run a hand through his hair. “Just kidding,” Lupe said. “Have a seat.”

  The man’s look of gratitude was pathetic. He dropped down quickly. “Can—can I buy you a drink?”

  “No thanks. I’m Rico, by the way.” Lupe put out his hand and the other shook it, his hand plump and sweaty.

  “Rico, hi. Pleasure to meet you. My name’s Raymond.”

  “Rico and Raymond,” Lupe said musically, still grinning. Raymond blinked hugely behind his thick lenses, confused by hope.

  “You’re not . . . from around here, are you, Rico?”

  “No, I—”

  “Excuse me.” Raymond put up a finger, hesitant, as the waiter approached. “Could I have another margarita please? Can I get you anything, Rico? Coke? Mineral water?”

  “Sure, I’ll take a Coke.”

  The waiter winked at Raymond. “Coming right up.”

  “I’m sorry, you were saying?”

  “I’m just . . . passing through.”

  “Oh really? Heading anywhere in particular? Or from anywhere?”

  Lupe shrugged. “Away.”

  “So . . . you’re not in town for long?”

  “Maybe a night or two. Depends.”

  “On . . . ?”

  “If I can find a place to stay. You know.”

  “You don’t have any friends in town? You’re not visiting anyone here?”

  Lupe looked down at his nearly empty plate, sighed. Allowed himself to shake his head minutely.

  “I don’t mean to press, Rico. I mean, we only just met and all, but . . . if it’s not too bold of me, can I tell you what I think?”

  Lupe shrugged.

  “You’re running from something, aren’t you?”

  Lupe looked up sharply.

  Raymond smiled gently, with understanding. “Or someone? Parents? People who don’t understand you? Won’t accept who you are?”

  Lupe looked away, clenching his jaws.

  “It’s all right, Rico. You’re safe here. You’re lucky you came. This is the right place for you.”

  “I’ve been places like this before,” Lupe said.

  “Well, of course you have. You know who you are, even if other people don’t.”

  “That’s right,” Lupe said. “I have my pride.”

  “Yes! Rico . . . what you’ve done is very brave. I know that may not mean much coming from me. We’re strangers, after all. But I feel as if I know you already; and I do—I really do know your situation. If you knew me better, I hope what I’m saying would give you confidence that you’re doing the right thing. A lot of boys like you lack confidence. But I’m here to tell you that you’re right. You can trust your impulses. Whatever you decide, that’s what’s best for you.”

  Lupe said, “I wish I did know you better.”

  Raymond reached out, put a hand lightly on his wrist, almost unable to hide his eagerness, as if he were the only one doing the manipulating. “Can I offer you a place to stay?”

  Lupe let himself smile. “Really?”

  The waiter returned at that moment with their drinks and the tab for Lupe’s salad. “I’ll pay for this too, Tyler,” Raymond told the waiter, handing him a bill. Lupe watched him return to the bar that was now no darker than the night. Something caught his eye, moving through the shifting crowd of faces, lit by an angular flash of strobe light.

  Lupe jumped up, grabbing his pack. Raymond lurched to his feet. “What is it? Did I say something—?”

&
nbsp; “Can we go right now?” he said. He put his hand on Raymond’s arm and rushed him toward the patio gate.

  “What’s your hurry?”

  “This place is too noisy, too many people. I can’t handle it right now.”

  “Oh, of course, I’m sorry. You poor thing, you must be exhausted. When was the last time you slept in a bed?”

  From the street, Lupe glanced back through a hedge that encircled the patio. Through a break in the branches, he saw his brother standing in the doorway of the bar, staring at the table Lupe had just fled.

  He saw me, Lupe realized. For only an instant, but it was enough.

  “My car’s right here,” Raymond said. He stopped by a white Porsche and unlocked the door for Lupe. “There you go.”

  “I didn’t mean to rush you,” Lupe said as he slipped in. “You didn’t even get your change back.”

  “Oh, that’s all right. Tyler knows me. I’m in there almost every night, waiting for my luck to change.”

  He looked down daringly at Lupe, and slammed the door.

  ***

  Lupe didn’t expect to know where they were headed, in a town that was still so new to him; but when the Porsche began to climb up a steep hill street, he thought he knew where he was. Seeing the bare scrub at the edges of the headlights, lining the curvy road, he thought they were returning to Sal’s neighborhood. He envisioned the map of Bohemia Bay; he tried to remember the name of the place.

  “Is this Shangri-La?” he asked.

  “No, that’s a little south of here, over the hills. I’m in what they call Rim of the World. How do you know about Shangri-La?”

  “I heard somebody talking about good neighborhoods.”

  “Not exactly beachfront property, I’m afraid, but I love it up here.”

  Lupe relaxed. In such a small town, he’d be close to Sal wherever he settled, but he wanted to keep some distance between them for now.

  They came out on winding streets among trimmed lawns, rock gardens, juniper hedges. Housing tracts from the Sixties. It was a warm summer night in the suburbs. Kids were everywhere, riding bikes off the curbs, skateboarding down driveways under floodlights, building up speed for leaps off plywood ramps.

  “You like it up here?” Lupe asked, his first genuine question of the evening.

  “Sure, it’s . . . regular. I like the noise, the feeling of people all around. I don’t believe in isolating myself, hiding out in some colony away from the rest of the world. Bohemia Bay is isolated enough as it is.”

  They turned into a court, a short cul-de-sac. A sunken garage door yawned ahead of them, opening as they approached. Raymond drove down into a tidy garage with a spotless concrete floor. The Porsche’s drippings were caught in a shallow aluminum sheet. Through a door at the back of the garage, they went into a fair-sized kitchen. Wooden counters, wood paneling, cupboards, racks of wine and knives. Beyond that were a dining room and living room.

  “You live alone?” Lupe asked.

  “Sadly, yes. For now.”

  “I only meant—it looks like you could fit a big family in here.”

  Or several families, Lupe thought, remembering how he and Sal and Aunt Theresa (not to mention her men) had crammed themselves into a small two-room apartment, in a crowded, noisy building where they counted themselves fortunate because others lived with six or eight people in the same amount of space.

  “I suppose you could. Four bedrooms, two baths. But this, for me, is the main attraction.”

  Raymond walked through the dining room to a sliding glass door, and slid it open. Lupe followed him out onto a balcony that ran the length of the house.

  Darkness below, and the scent of the hills, sagebrush and horehound and anise. A breeze full of rich earthy smells came up from the earth, where Lupe could see only shadows. Bamboo clattered in the wind. There were no lights visible anywhere except for the neighboring houses in line with Raymond’s on the verge of the hills. Starlight imparted the sense of a canyon below them, a deep valley with ridges running down into it. Lupe began to guess at the secrets among those folds of earth, in hidden places marked by animal tracks, with no people anywhere.

  He closed his eyes, leaning on the balcony rail, and breathed in the smell of earth, imagining that it had blown out of caves, dreaming that the ground here fell away forever into an endless pit, with tiny trails that only he could discern spiraling down into it. He was down in the darkness with his boys, moving by touch and smell, sure-footed in a sightless world.

  Raymond’s hand startled him. “Wait till you see the sunrise from this deck.” The hand stayed on his shoulder, massaging slightly.

  Lupe turned to face him. “I’d like to sleep in, if that’s okay. Lately it’s been, you know, park benches, always getting rousted by cops.”

  Raymond pulled back, his disappointment quickly veiled. “Well, and so you shall. You’ve had a rough time of it, I’m sure. I should let you get to sleep now. There’s plenty of time to watch a sunrise or two.”

  “Where do I bed down?”

  “There’s a spare bed made up, don’t worry about that. Can I get you anything? More to eat? Do you want to take a shower?”

  “I’d just like to sleep.”

  “Whatever you want, Rico, is fine with me. Any way you want it. Just—just think of my house as your house, for as long as you care to stay.”

  Lupe must have given Raymond an odd look. He wished he could have seen his own face, to be sure what thoughts he might have betrayed.

  “I really mean that,” Raymond said emphatically.

  “I know you do.”

  And because some sacrifices were necessary at times to keep things running smoothly, he leaned forward and put his hands behind Raymond’s neck and pulled the older man slowly forward—not that Raymond was resisting.

  “You’re a very special man, Ray,” he said, and kissed him on the mouth.

  11

  “You guys are formally deputized,” Hawk told the gang gathered behind his trailer that night. Their lone lantern exaggerated everything from the whiteness of their skin to the pitchy black of the night. It was easy to imagine they were facing an enemy of utter evil, waging a campaign of goodness and light. But the faces of his boys held plenty of fear and less noble emotions.

  “Fuckin’ A,” said Kurtis Tyre. “Now we’re a real posse. Let’s beat that fag-ass queer into the ground.”

  Hawk loped down to face Kurtis, whose eyes all evening had been hot with anger and sneering rage, as if this were the occasion he’d been waiting for to vent the considerable poisons gathering inside him. Kurtis was his wickedest, his most challenging project. Abused, probably; sadistic, certainly. For that reason, Hawk wanted him in the forefront of his deputies. He thought Kurtis had more than a little of the black streak in him, and might even think like Craig’s murderer. Given the benefit of Kurtis’s sick insights, Hawk hoped he might anticipate the killer’s next moves. But it was not important that Kurtis know this. It was more important that he fear Hawk and stay in line, and be wary of transgressing their spontaneous, unspoken code.

  “We are on the side of Law,” Hawk said to him, knowing that the others would take the words as if addressed to them personally. “Not the law, which wears the face of our old friends in blue—”

  “Fuckin’ pigs,” Kurtis said.

  “—but Law itself. The cosmic principle of right action. That which is right because it is righteous, and not because a bunch of paid-off judges got together and agreed on the best way to protect the interests of the politicos who put them on the bench. Now sometimes, Kurtis—though it seems incredible—this Law, this righteousness, overlaps with the law of the police and the courts. And one of those ways is in not judging things too soon, not jumping to conclusions. If Sal’s responsible for this, we’ll find that out in time. But if you take it for granted that he’s guilty, and then you turn out to be wrong, you’ll be staring at him so hard you’ll miss the real clues in the corner of your eye. You are not judge
, jury and executioner, Kurtis. Neither is any one of us. What you are right now is my eyes, my ears, my hands.”

  “So what does that make you?”

  Hawk cuffed him lightly on the side of the head and sat down next to him on a log stump, hands clasped between his knees, looking from face to face. Howard’s eyes were red, his face pale and streaked with grime. Some of the others looked equally bad. He saw in them the realization that Craig’s death could have come to any one of them—might in fact still be on its way. It didn’t matter that they were only fourteen, sixteen, eighteen years old. They could have been dead since this morning, slashed to ribbons in a storm drain, fixed forever at their present age.

  “I can’t move around freely right now, not the way I’d like to. The cops are gonna be watching me. They’ll be watching some of you, too. I figure they think you guys are just as likely as not to off one another.”

  Kurtis kicked a bootheel at the dust. “Why is it whenever there’s trouble, we always get the blame?”

  Hawk’s grin felt to him like a nervous tic, pulling his whole face sideways. “That’s just the kind of people we are. If we weren’t, would we be sitting here right now?”

  “What are we supposed to be looking for?” Edgar asked.

  “I can’t tell you that. You won’t know till you see it.”

  “You mean there’s no clues at all?”

  “Alec didn’t see anybody around. Craig went off for a smoke by the water. It was early. That was the last he saw, and that’s all he saw. If Craig was killed in the pipe, which seems likely, then somebody had to get him in there first. And it must have been somebody he knew. I can’t see anybody dragging Craig in if he didn’t want to go.”

  “He might’ve ducked in to smoke a doob.”