The Orchid Eater

by Marc Laidlaw

  On every page Lupe had drawn a different boy. Mike wanted simultaneously to linger on each image, and to rush through seeing them all.

  One was so thin as to be crippled; sunken-faced, skeletal, with teeth that looked broken and jagged; lank greasy hair. In one glance, Mike felt that he knew everything about the boy—could see his entire miserable (and probably brutally short) existence clinging to him like a coat of grime. Abuse, addiction, unending despair and waste. He had one hand out, palm up, begging for something. Anything. Begging for the world.

  Another, a black kid, wore a guitar on a strap over his shoulder, staring out from the page with a resentful, brooding look. Here was a musician who had never played a note, never sung a tune. The guitar was unstrung. The set of the boy’s mouth told him he was mute. The anguish of the boy’s unsung, unwritten songs was overwhelming. He felt as if the boy were standing there before him.

  A small brown-skinned boy—his bitter expression mixed with spiteful humor—glowered at Mike, or at the artist. Though young, he was no innocent. To judge from his eyes, he had already seen far more than most adults, and dreadful sights had warped him into something most adults could only fear. Uncivilized, a wild boy held in chains, caged by the lines of Lupe’s sketch, his ferocious power strained to break free.

  And then a boy masquerading as a man, with closely-shaved hair, dressed in military fatigues. Fear haunted his face, and he had a whipped look. But there was brutality there, too, as if he were more than ready to take out his fear and frustration on anyone who crossed his path, eager to pass down the line his share of the suffering life had handed him.

  Next an Indian youth with long black hair, black eyes, endless loss and hopelessness carved in the bones of his face. In one sketch Mike read the story of an entire culture destroyed, its remnants torn and scattered. The anonymous agony of extinction was invested in this lone boy, who had no one to speak for him but Lupe, in strokes of violent skill.

  And then came someone familiar. It took Mike a moment to recognize the boy, because he had never seen Craig Frost so simply and directly. Never really seen him, while he was alive. As a boy, nasty and stupid, vicious and vindictive: yes—a boy. In one glance, Mike knew him better than he had after years of studied avoidance. But with recognition, the pages began to tremble unbearably in his hands.

  He glanced up sharply.

  The candle lit only Lupe’s eyes, specks of glare that hypnotized him. Here they were again, on the wall of his room. He could hear the thud of disco music from next door, tomtoms booming in his ears.

  “Well?”

  Lupe’s hesitance was horribly at odds with the power he commanded.

  “They’re really good,” Mike whispered.

  “They are? You think so?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

  Lupe stepped closer in swirls of dust. As he did, the hazy echoing cave seemed to fill with people. The dust was on the verge of solidifying into columns of misty flesh. He tasted acid in the back of his throat, and felt an LSD twinge. For a moment, cast upon the dust, taking form within it, he clearly saw the faces of boys—these boys.

  One stepped toward him, stirred up by the suction of Lupe’s movements. A dim, familiar face.

  Edgar. His friend’s eyes flashed and were gone.

  “No,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  He stammered, looking down at the next page, to which he had turned with hardly a glance.

  And there was Edgar.

  Edgar, sketched in perfect detail, convincing Mike that all the others had been taken from life and were equally true to their models. His wide thin mouth, his unmistakable nose. And in the eyes, his sad hollow eyes, Lupe had in a few simple strokes captured Edgar’s desperate need to find something beyond the mundane, to penetrate and partake of all mysteries, to merge with the shadows, transgress all boundaries, and take hold of the truth—even steal it, if that was the only way.

  Mike, however, could hold on no longer. The sketches floated from his hands. He looked for another glimpse of his friend, but the dust motes were swirling and Edgar was gone. Only his image remained, fluttering facedown on the floor.

  “Hey, are you crazy?” Lupe said. “What’s the matter with you? Didn’t I respect your art? Didn’t I?”

  He came angrily forward, slashing the air with his knife. Mike backed toward the niches at the rear of the cave. Avoiding a silver flash, he tripped at the threshold of one alcove and tumbled backward, striking his head on the stone wall. He landed on something soft.

  Someone. There was someone under him. Cold skin. Hands and arms and a face. All sticky and wet with a cloying scent he finally recognized, the smell that made his eyes and nose itch and water. Patchouli. Whimpering, he thrashed around trying to regain his balance and free himself, even if it meant rushing back into Lupe’s arms. Lupe had him by the ankle anyway, and was dragging him back into the candlelight. But he became tangled with the other, and they both tumbled out together. Not exactly face to face, but close enough.

  At his third vision of Edgar, Mike wept.

  Lupe pulled him back, but not before he saw the red gash gaping in Edgar’s throat, the many other wounds caked with blackish-red mud, slathered like paint upon the pale skin. Worst of all, his eyes went irresistibly to the slashed rags of Edgar’s sex. He should not stare; he should not possess the cold, clinical part of his mind that observed how the scrotum had been opened and emptied of its contents, like a cut purse.

  The stench of patchouli was everywhere. An empty vial lay in the dust at the mouth of the niche. Lupe must have poured it over Edgar’s corpse to mask the smell of decay. Instead it had created a new, charnel fragrance—one he felt he would remember even in death.

  In death . . .

  Lupe rolled Mike onto his back and straddled him, knife drawn. His full-moon face shone down. The candle danced above his head, sending sparks through his wild black hair. Lupe put his free hand on the waist of Mike’s bluejeans and fumbled at the silver buttons.

  “Get his pants,” Lupe said, as if he were talking to someone else. “Come on, boys. Come help.”

  Mike gasped as Lupe’s knees dug into his thighs. He gazed up at the high roof of the cave, wishing he could believe it was only the ceiling of his room, but knowing that no one would hear him if he screamed.

  Frustrated with the tight fly buttons, Lupe started hacking at them, nicking Mike’s flesh through the denim. Mike pissed his pants at the cold pain, as if that were some defense.

  Now, Mike thought. I’m actually going to die!

  Lupe hesitated, looking down toward the cave’s mouth. Mike heard faint noises advancing in the sudden silence. He twisted his head sideways, daring to look.

  In the moonlight at the opening stood a crowd of shadows.

  When he saw them, Lupe smiled. “Come on,” he said, nodding frantically. “Come on up. I got another for you. An artist!”

  Mike watched in growing horror as they stepped into the cave, moving soundlessly in the dust, gliding up the slope and merging with the blackness of the tunnel.

  “Oh, they’re bright tonight,” Lupe said gleefully, sharing his excitement with Mike—as if only another artist could appreciate or understand it. “I think drawing them, really concentrating, made them stronger.” He looked back at them. “Come and help!”

  “Lupe . . .”

  Hearing his name whispered caused Lupe’s smile to die. He jumped to his feet, leaving Mike as he rushed to the top of the slope.

  “You can’t talk,” he said.

  “No? Why not?”

  The boy who spoke stepped into sight. Mike knew him only slightly from around town. What he was doing here, Mike couldn’t imagine.

  Randy was his name. Randy something.

  Behind him was another kid with bleached blond hair, his mouth a smudge of lipstick, his eyes a smeared mess from weeping. Behind them, still more boys were on the slope. Sal’s boys, he realized. The same who had chased h
im that first night.

  Lupe didn’t seem to know what to do. His fingers tightened on the switchblade’s handle.

  Mike crawled slowly toward the back of the cave, out of the way, as quietly as possible.

  “You killed Sal,” Randy said.

  “Get away!” Lupe said.

  “You killed your own brother. And my lover.”

  Lupe raised his knife, then lowered it, remembering all the power behind him. He rounded on his heel and saw Mike, only inches from the trunk and the grenade that lay atop it.

  Mike screamed and grabbed the grenade first, but Lupe’s hands closed around his own. They were strong hands, strong enough to make him feel as if his fingers would be ironed permanently into the metal. But no sooner had Lupe grabbed him, than they were both engulfed in a rush of bodies.

  Mike sucked in a lungful of dust and started choking. Lupe’s switchblade swept down at his hand, but someone deflected it. The blade clashed against sandstone, throwing sparks, and snapped clean off.

  Lupe howled and buried his teeth in Mike’s fist.

  The pain was unbearable, but the crushing weight of bodies was easing. Since the boys could not manage to pull Lupe off Mike, they were pulling Mike away from Lupe. A united surge of strength left him feeling torn in two. They all flew backward. Some of Sal’s gang went tumbling down the slope.

  Lupe sprawled against the wall, panting. Crouched at the edge of the high chamber, Mike looked down at his hand, covered with blood and purple tooth-marks, throbbing. He turned it over slowly, reassuring himself and the others that he still had the grenade. There was a communal sigh.

  Lupe chuckled and raised his own hand. The trigger pin glinted in the weak yellow light.

  Then he turned slowly, still grinning, and began to unsnap the latches on the trunk.

  While Lupe looked down, Mike’s eyes flew up to the owl’s roost near the ceiling of the cave. He felt no fear. He didn’t quite believe in the legendary power of grenades. He had carried them twice now, and nothing had happened. Even so, without a second thought, he gave this one an underhand toss.

  It sailed straight into the bird’s hole, as if he had practiced the shot every day.

  Lupe glanced up at the clattering sound. “There’s my bird.”

  And that was all Mike saw, because Randy grabbed him from behind, hauling them both backward down the slope. He never had time to find his footing; it was faster to fall. The other boys had already hurled themselves outside.

  Seconds later, the moon blinked at him; but it came from the wrong place, shining between his feet. He went tumbling through bushes, down the hillside, into the canyon and a dry stream bed.

  He was still falling when the hillside exploded.

  The moon went out. The sky turned black. Dust and rock blasted from the cave, as if from a cannon. A cannon around whose barrel he had wrapped himself.

  The explosion echoed over the hills, demolishing the Greenbelt’s peace, rocketing out through the night and back again. Dogs began to bark by the dozens, a whole pack baying in pursuit of the thunder.

  He lay a long time listening to the thudding of disco before he realized that it wasn’t music at all, and it wasn’t coming from next door.

  It was his heartbeat.

  The dust finally settled and the moon reappeared. He found that he had landed beneath a ledge in the dry creek. Crawling out slowly, he looked up to find that the cliff had crumbled, collapsed, fallen in on itself. All the other boys were coming out to look as well, but he supposed he was the only one of them who saw the moon wall lying in ruins.

  25

  Food in the Bohemia Bay jail was the same stuff eaten by waterlogged, sunburned and dehydrated tourists who straggled up off Central Beach to the Plankwalk Cafe. Instead of the true nourishment they so desperately needed, the beachgoers received a variety of burned, fried, stale and soggy meats and starches. Hawk was relieved to discover that at least the cafe did not noticeably worsen the food it prepared for prisoners, probably because Gus, the ex-con “chef,” felt compassion for those inmates who would eventually open the lukewarm cardboard boxes featuring the Plankwalk’s tantalizing emblem: skull and crossbones on a flapping black buccaneer’s flag.

  Last night he had been too tense to eat the hamburger and fries provided. But this morning, waking after a remarkably deep sleep, he felt a fresh optimism that enabled him to wolf down the congealed home fries, cold scrambled eggs and almost half of a warm, mealy apple. He could bring no enthusiasm to the slightly brown coffee, which looked and tasted like hot water from a rusty pipe. But he said his prayers all the same. He suspected he had plenty to be thankful for.

  Late in the night, as he lay tossing on a wire cot that left honeycomb patterns on his skin, he had heard a boom echoing through the hills and canyons of the Greenbelt. This was followed by a frenzy of cops in corridors, shouting and yelling, doors slamming, sirens going full blast as what sounded like every available patrol car raced out of the lot.

  After the sirens faded, his nervousness increased in proportion to the silence. He had a fair idea of what must have caused the sound, and he couldn’t help imagining all the possible outcomes. Worst of them, somehow, was the picture of the James house in ruins, bodies strewn everywhere—his boys among them.

  Later, the cops began wandering back, loudly disappointed, sourly informing their station-bound peers as to the outcome of the call. In the cement-walled jail, their echoing conversations were easy to follow.

  According to their speculations, the explosion had been caused by a stash of old, unstable explosives in a cave. The site was deep in the Greenbelt, away from all possible harm to Bohemians. It had shattered a hillside, woken some residents, but nothing else. There were no witnesses.

  Hawk relaxed then. His words must have gotten through to Randy. Otherwise a body or two would surely have been found.

  Yesterday afternoon the police had descended on Hawk’s trailer, interrupting him in the middle of trying to convince Maggie to give him one more chance. He hung up the phone and went peacefully.

  During the interrogation, they let slip the whereabouts of his missing chrome crucifix, and Hawk realized that Lupe had set him up. He must have followed Hawk and Dusty on the fire road; skulking, he had listened to their plans, then run ahead to prepare a distraction that would give him the best shot at Mike James. Hawk knew better than Lupe that as soon as his boys heard about the arrest, there would be not even the pretense of a vigil. Lupe would get his chance, all right, and Hawk’s vow to help Mike would come to nothing. That troubled him more than his own arrest and the charge of murder—which was far from being proven, after all. Even the cops could not believe he would have left such an obvious marker, and sensed that it had to be a frame-up.

  “I could understand why you’d do it and all,” one of them had said. “Fuckin’ faggots—I can’t stand seein’ it either.”

  “I didn’t do it.”

  “So you said. Then who hates you and Sal both so much he’d try to take the two of you down in one move?”

  He was not about to mention Lupe. He still clung to the notion that he might somehow catch the killer himself, though how he was going to manage that in his present position was a problem he couldn’t quite figure out.

  When it was time for his phone call, instead of seeking a lawyer, he called Sal’s house.

  Randy answered. Hawk knew he didn’t have much time before Randy would simply hang up, so he tried to talk as fast as he could, describing his thwarted plan while Randy hung on in what might have been shock or disbelief.

  “You’ve got to believe me, Randy,” Hawk said at last. “I had nothing against Sal. Nothing. I want the same thing you do—to get the guy who killed him. You’ve got nothing to lose by watching this James kid’s house. I mean, look, if I’m the murderer, they’ll nail me for it. I’m already in jail. But if I’m not the one, then Lupe’s still out there. And only you can stop him now.”

  “I have to go,” Randy said. His
voice was thick from crying. Hawk wondered how much—if any of it—had gotten through.

  “Will you do it?”

  “I’m going now.”

  Maybe he’d done it, Hawk thought. Maybe it was going to be okay.

  The cops had also informed him (playing along hypothetically with his insistence that he didn’t know the details) that Sal had been murdered sometime between ten and eleven o’clock that morning. Hawk had been alone then, asleep, with no particular alibi since neither Maggie nor Stoner was around anymore to vouch for him. Even if Randy succeeded, it would be tricky to defend himself, especially once Stoner turned up. He had stayed vague about his activities, waiting to see what they already knew for certain, but eventually he was going to have to account for his time. It would be best if Lupe turned up with a confession. But Hawk had the feeling that Lupe was buried under a load of rock.

  If not, then things were about to get much worse all around.

  He couldn’t convince himself to worry. He swilled down the last of the coffee and settled back to wait.

  He was torn, in the moment of relative inner peace, between working on a sermon about the dark night of the soul, or rallying his defense. He decided that a sermon would be premature; things could still bottom out. As for his defense, he had some things in his favor. Not many, but some: Dusty had been working on his jeep, despite all Hawk’s threats and pleadings, and the vehicle was completely kaput. Unfortunately, there was a working motorcycle on the lot, Stoner’s old Harley. Everyone who knew Hawk knew he didn’t ride anymore—but that wouldn’t necessarily persuade a jury faced with an ex-con biker accused of murder. He knew how to ride, and there was a working bike at his disposal. So . . . the transportation defense left something to be desired. If he’d only broken down and taken the fucking bike to go see Maggie—as he had been sorely tempted to do that morning—he’d be safe now. He’d have an alibi.