The Orchid Eater

by Marc Laidlaw

  Lupe kept laborious track of comings and goings, tallying a guest list and a schedule in his head. Eventually, he verified the fact that there was one time each morning when Sal was guaranteed to be alone.

  Precisely at ten o’clock, the front door opened. Whoever had spent the night would spill out of the house and climb into the van, leaving Sal alone. For one hour, from ten to eleven, no customer ever dropped by. Sal must have warned them not to disturb him, because they wandered in at every other hour. Not long after eleven, the van returned with groceries and art supplies. The boys were like house slaves, out on errands while the master attended to his private rituals.

  It was now five minutes to ten.

  The morning was hotter than he liked. It exaggerated his sense that everything could see him. He dreaded leaving the shade of his shelter. He could already feel the sun burning his back and shoulders, even through the branches. He kept checking the breeze for the faint whiff of charring. When it didn’t come, he relaxed a bit. Then he heard voices.

  Two boys came out of Sal’s house. Lupe had met them on the afternoon when he confronted Sal. Randy and Marilyn, that was them. They got into the van and drove away. There was no one in sight, no one watching. Lupe made his way to the barbed-wire fence.

  Halfway across the street, he paused, thinking he smelled burning. He looked back but saw only clear sky above the brown grass, nothing else, no smoke from a brush fire, no reason for the smell.

  Unless it was coming from him.

  He hurried across the street and hammered on Sal’s door. He could feel his skin beginning to smoulder.

  It took Sal forever to answer the door. When he did, his pupils were huge. Sal had closed all the shades and turned off the lights. A candle flickered in the shadows. The sight made Lupe’s spirits rise. Lupe had done a lot by candlelight.

  “Guadalupe,” Sal said. It sounded like a formal greeting.

  Lupe pushed past his brother, trying not to show his relief at entering the dark house.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “You don’t look very glad to see me. Is this a bad time?”

  In the living room, a cushion rested in the center of the floor. A votive candle burned on a low table before it.

  Sal said, “This is when I meditate.”

  He closed the door soundlessly. Lupe relaxed as it grew nice and dark again. Cavey. Sal followed him into the living room, looking remarkably at ease. Lupe had expected some surprise or tension.

  “You have nerve coming around here, Lupe,” Sal said.

  “Why’s that?”

  Sal picked up a lit stick of incense that sat on the table, fuming. He waved it in the air between them as if dispelling a bad odor.

  “I think you know.”

  “I came to say good-bye, that’s all.”

  “I thought you were long gone. I mean, you show up, you disappear, you seem to show up again, but nobody’s sure it’s you. Now you’re here to say good-bye? Why bother? I guess I’m not part of your life, Lupe. Okay. I offered my love when you first arrived—and what did you do? I don’t know what you did. I don’t want to know. You’re trouble, that’s all. You could have gone off without bothering me again.”

  “That’d make you happy, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’d be happiest if you weren’t the kind who needed to run. But since you are, I admit that I’ll be happier knowing you’re gone. I don’t like knowing you’re around my boys. Not after . . . not after that kid at the beach. If it’s true, what I think.”

  “You always were trying to get rid of me,” Lupe said. “Ditching me.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I was looking for you when it happened, Sal. I was scared and I went out looking. You stirred everything up and left me in it.”

  “When it happened,” Sal repeated softly. “You hold that against me? You think I—”

  “I went looking for you, man. I looked everywhere, without the faintest idea how big everything was. You never told me how lost I could get.”

  “You think I don’t wish I could have helped you—healed you somehow?”

  “Don’t you worry about that. I did my own healing.”

  Sal looked doubtful. “Yeah? I thought maybe you had, when I saw you at the Rock Lobster with our friend Raymond. I thought at first maybe you were like me, and had come to peace with yourself. But I don’t think so anymore. You were only using him, weren’t you? In a fucked-up, cynical way.”

  “Don’t you dare judge me, not when it was your responsibility . . .”

  “I’m sorry, Lupe, but you have to get past that. You’re not a kid anymore.”

  “No?” Lupe said. “Then what am I?”

  Sal shut his eyes in exasperation. He might be strong from his tai chi, but the muscles of his belly were soft where the knife went up inside him.

  Lupe turned the blade as if twisting a key in a lock, and Sal’s life rushed out and down his arm. His brother fell over gasping, clutching his navel. The cupped hands filled with blood but it kept coming, overflowing.

  “Good-bye,” Lupe said, alone now in the room.

  How many times had he dreamed he was the last man on Earth? At odd moments, people would shift and turn to smoke around him; only he was real. All the things that hurt him seemed phony now. They were like devils that came from the back of his head, a game he played with himself, as if his mind were a magnifying glass held up to the sun, which made little things big and brought the hot smell of smoke out of his flesh to prove to him that he was alive.

  Sal’s blood drew Lupe’s boys instantly. They didn’t mind candlelight either. The nine of them gathered in the dark, hovering over Sal, looking to Lupe for guidance.

  “Do what you want with him,” he told them. “No initiation today. Take him far from here. I want him to hurt. Forever. Like I hurt. He doesn’t deserve to be with us.”

  Sal still moved feebly, stubborn. Lupe crouched in front of him.

  “Come on,” he said, looking straight into Sal’s face. “Get out of there.”

  Sal’s eyes congealed.

  A tenth shadow entered the room.

  Lupe moved back from the body, giving Sal’s ghost a place to stand. The faces of corpse and ghost looked equally confused.

  Sal didn’t speak. The dead can’t talk. But he took one step toward Lupe and the gang closed in, blocking his path, forming a circle around him.

  The Cherokee shoved Sal’s ghost soundlessly into the arms of the Musician, who caught and thrust him away again, toward the Pump Jockey, who grinned spitefully and shoved him at the Marine, who whirled him around toward the gray-toothed Junkie. Sal went from one to the other, shoved with increasing violence. He soon stopped casting dizzy, pleading looks at Lupe. It took all his ebbing strength to hold himself together.

  “Get rid of him,” Lupe whispered.

  The nine became a blurred cage of teeth and eyes and moving hands, with something like a frightened animal trapped inside. Sal didn’t much resemble his brother anymore. He was hardly even a man: more like a fly buzzing between screen and windowpane.

  They glided through the living room. Miguel leaped ahead to beckon and urge them on. Perspectives changed, the world warping around them. Blood spattered the Marine’s fists and teeth; the Hopi threw back his head and howled silently. They kept on toward the walls, as if they might pass through them. Only then did Lupe see the window there, opening into a night city of ragged jet-black towers, a blue-black sky of weird blotches. Streaks and dabs of white on the buildings suggested broken windows; they cast a meager light on canyon streets between cliff-tall spires. It looked like a nightmare, the last place on earth anyone would voluntarily go, but the last bit of Sal dodged toward it, leaping up and away from Lupe’s boys. A gust blew out of the painting, fanning the dying spark of Sal’s ghost-light. Lupe smelled oil and asphalt, borne on the wind from the dark streets. A door opened in one of the buildings, framed by flickering light from a dim fluorescent bulb. Sal darted
for it and slipped inside, slightly ahead of the boys. Then the door slammed shut, leaving them thrashing and snarling.

  Abruptly the scene was only a painting again, a crude and lurid cityscape hanging flat on the wall of the drab room where Lupe stood alone with Sal’s equally mundane husk.

  He cursed at the canvas. After all this time, all his planning, Sal had gotten away.

  His boys spun idly around him, waiting for further instructions. In frustration, Lupe pulled the knife out of Sal and slashed the painting till it hung in tatters from the frame. He hoped that Sal was still in it somewhere, cut to ribbons.

  After that, he felt a little better. He had to be realistic and content himself with practical things. He had learned a hard lesson. He would be more careful next time; he would cut off all possible escape routes.

  By the clock on the wall, it was not even ten-fifteen. He had plenty of time before the van returned. But there wasn’t much left to do.

  He grabbed the body by the hair and threw it facedown in the hallway, half on matted shag carpet, half on blood-slippery linoleum. He folded up his knife, stowed it in his pocket, and took out the other thing he’d brought along.

  “Get his pants,” said a distant voice, somewhere deep inside him.

  23

  Someone was watching the house. Ryan James was convinced of it. Mike and Edgar had laughed at him the night of the burglary, but he’d been right then—and he was absolutely, positively . . . well . . . almost sure of it now. He hadn’t seen anyone moving down there today, but as it got darker, he became less sure of what he was or wasn’t seeing.

  For a couple of days—especially in the evenings—he’d seen movement in the gulley behind the house, creeps in the bushes. He couldn’t tell if it was one person moving around a lot, or a few people hiding out in different places. Mike had looked upset and said he was crazy when he mentioned it.

  It was probably kids. Ryan himself used to wander in the canyon, following trails through the brush. There were plenty of places you could hide where dense branches formed canopies and caves. But not now . . . nothing would lure him out now. The sliding glass door on his balcony stayed locked. Sure, his deck was on the second floor, but he’d scaled it himself and knew it wasn’t hard.

  Jack had installed security bolts everywhere. He was talking about putting in an alarm system, but that was a big project and might never happen. Ryan wouldn’t mind if it did. What scared him most was the door near his bed, which opened out under the house, by the hot tub. It had a deadbolt and a spyhole in it, but Ryan couldn’t help imagining someone standing right outside, out of the spyhole’s view, listening to every sound he made. That was the first door in need of an alarm.

  It was safe for the night, at least. Jack was out there, firing up the tub. Leonard and Davis, the homos next door, were throwing a party tonight, so Jack had offered use of the tub. There’d be a crowd in the way of anyone who tried to come through that door.

  While Ryan was looking down into the gloomy canyon, he saw the door open behind him, reflected in the sliding glass. Jack walked in, drying his hands. The tub rumbled in the background.

  “Whatcha doing, champ?”

  “Watching. In case he comes back.”

  “Hey, it’ll never happen.” Jack tousled his hair. “Vandals like that are kids, probably no older than you or Mike, hormones going haywire. You know about hormones.”

  Ryan grinned and pushed Jack’s hand away. “No . . .”

  “It wasn’t planned, Rye. It was an impulse thing, nothing personal, break in and wreck stuff up. It’s not so unusual. I mean, I’m sure you’ve done a little vandalizing, right?”

  “No way,” Ryan said, indignant, thinking simultaneously of several instances of what an adult might call “vandalism,” but which had seemed to him at the time like just plain “fun.” He saw them differently now.

  “Now, come on. I remember when I was about fifteen in Pennsylvania, in the winter we used to go out to the summer houses at this lake near us. We’d, you know, jimmy a window, climb in, throw parties, eat canned food . . . sometimes even mess the place up a bit. Nothing drastic, not like this, but . . . I can see how it might happen. Maybe this is my karma coming back at me. I wrecked somebody’s place when I was a kid, now my house gets wrecked. Cosmic, huh?”

  Ryan shrugged, still unconvinced.

  “Rest easy,” Jack said, than tramped away up the stairs.

  Ryan scanned the room, even more depressed now that he had begun to consider his own behavior. Only a few of the mirrored tiles remained on the walls; the broken ones had been pulled down, leaving bare, unpainted patches lumpy with tile adhesive. Jack had patched the larger gouges here and there, but nothing was repainted yet. Sports posters covered the worst spots. Once it had been clean and white and bright in here, everything gleaming like the beach. That was how Ryan liked it. Now it all looked grubby and sad.

  The head had even been snapped off his soccer trophy. Who would do that? Maybe somebody from the AYSO league, someone on an enemy team? What about that one goalie, the kid who’d gotten so mad when Ryan kicked the ball in his crotch? But how would he get here? Did vandals’ mothers drive them to the places they wanted to wreck, wait in the street, then make a speedy getaway before the cops showed up?

  He felt like killing whoever had done it. Hearing that it was probably a kid made him feel much better. A grown man might be too strong; Ryan would probably back down. But with a kid it was different. He’d choke him to death, or kick his face in with his soccer cleats!

  It was getting too dark to see the canyon. Suddenly he realized that standing at the glass with the lights on, he was totally visible to whoever might be watching. He jumped back and lowered the silver metal Levolors.

  So what was he going to do? Dirk was out of town with his parents. He’d been bragging they would leave him home all weekend and he would throw a kegger for his friends, but that was a typical Dirk lie. He could read: He was halfway through Super Cops, which wasn’t like the boring books they assigned in school. But he didn’t think he could concentrate on that. He had to be in the mood. Night of the Living Dead was on TV later; that was a possibility.

  Maybe . . . he blushed excitedly at a thought. Maybe Mike would go out tonight, and he could check out his stash of porno magazines. Mike didn’t know Ryan knew about them. The other night, when he was following the police around the house, one of the cops had rummaged through Mike’s desk drawers and uncovered them. The cop had pretended not to see them, though his smirk said he had.

  “Ryan?” his mother called. He went to the foot of the stairs and looked up at her, hoping she couldn’t read his face. She was brushing her hair, not even looking at him directly.

  “We’re going next door to the party for a while. Do you need anything before we go?”

  “No.”

  “There’s ice cream in the freezer.”

  He’d already eaten half of it, but didn’t say so.

  “Did you have plans for tonight?”

  He shrugged. “Dirk’s out of town. I guess I’ll watch TV.”

  “I asked Mike to keep an eye on things, but we’re only next door if you need us.”

  “Okay,” he said. She blew him a kiss and walked back into her room.

  Shit, he thought. Mike would have to stay home on the one night he might have had the house to himself.

  A steady thudding started up, pounding through the walls from next door. Disco music, like a heartbeat, boom-boom-boom. Chattering voices grew louder in the space between the houses. He checked the peephole in his back door and saw nothing but the bubbling tub.

  Quietly he undid the deadbolt and opened the door a crack, peering around the edge of the frame to see who was out there. Candles in colored glass globes were set on the steps that ran down the hillside between the two houses. In the wavering light, he could see a few couples sitting on the steps or standing in the little sculpted patio garden under the neighboring house. They were all men, of course.


  The neighbors, Leonard and Davis, were nice enough guys, Ryan had to admit. As the only homos he knew personally, he found it hard to hate them the way he was supposed to. They’d hired him to carry rolls of sod down the stairs to their lower garden last weekend, and they never flirted with him or anything. They were pretty regular, really. He might not have known they were fags at all if his mother hadn’t told him. They’d both been married and Davis even had kids.

  Most of their friends, though, were more obvious. Listening to the fruity voices rising and falling, the high-pitched laughter, the musical way some of them talked, he thought they sounded like they were making fun of themselves, mocking all the jokes he and his friends cracked about fags. He watched until he saw two men press together in the shadows. Kissing! At that, he pulled back into the room, locking the door as if the danger level had just shot up into the red.

  Stifling laughter, he ran upstairs. Jack and Mom were already gone. He knocked on Mike’s door and went in.

  His brother was lying on the bed, a sketch pad propped on his knees. He dropped the pad and Ryan saw it was blank.

  “What do you want?”

  “Did you see next door?”

  “What about it?”

  “Thay there, thweety . . . the boyth are having a pah-tee.”

  “Why are you so interested?” Mike said.

  “I’m not—not at all. But they’re all over out there! It’s hard to ignore.”

  Mike picked up his sketch pad again. “I’ve managed so far.”

  “What are you drawing?” Ryan took a step closer, only one, since he hadn’t actually been invited into the room. Mike didn’t seem to mind.

  “I’m not. I’m doing an experiment.”

  “More of that ESP stuff you and Edgar were doing?”

  Mike nodded. “I was trying . . . to reach him.”