The Orchid Eater

by Marc Laidlaw

  THE ORCHID EATER

  By Marc Laidlaw

  Freestyle Press

  “Write like yourself, only more so.”

  marclaidlaw.com

  ISBN: 978-1-5323-1078-2

  This ebook edition published in 2016 by Marc Laidlaw

  Copyright © 1994 by Marc Laidlaw

  First U.S. edition published by St. Martins Press in 1994

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, including information storage and retrieval systems, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the author at marclaidlaw.com.

  This ebook is protected by U.S. and international copyright laws, which provide severe civil and criminal penalties for the unauthorized duplication of copyrighted material. Please do not make illegal copies of this book. If you obtained this book without purchasing it from an authorized retailer, please go and purchase it from a legitimate source now and delete this copy. Understand that if you obtained this book from a fileshare, it was copied illegally, and if you purchased it from an online auction site, you bought it from a crook who cheated you and the author.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Cover design © 2016 by Nicolas Huck (www.huckworks.com).

  Cover photocollage created by Marc Laidlaw based on a photograph found on Wikimedia Commons having been released into the public domain by its creator, J.L. DuBois.

  For Robert S. Gillespie

  And for my brother Brian

  (This book owes its life to Tim Ferret)

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE: THE ONE-WAY GANG

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  PART TWO: ESP

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  PART THREE: A WALK ON THE MOON WALL

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  Sandstone walls appear in leaping bursts of bluish light that come with a roar and fade, like the flame of revelation in a nightmare that shows a monster’s grin for an instant, then shuts off and strands you in darkness.

  This is a darkness full of laughter, full of fingers digging into your flesh, pinning you to the ground.

  When the light flares again, you see a blue tongue of flame licking from the nozzle of a blowtorch. Hissing and spitting, it kisses your cheeks, singes your eyebrows, then goes away somewhere out of sight.

  Somebody says, “Get his pants.”

  You can’t believe where the flame goes next. . . .

  PART ONE: THE ONE-WAY GANG

  1

  The reek of the Greyhound’s chemical toilet woke him shortly after dawn. The aluminum door banged open and an old man emerged in a cloud of cigarette smoke, hacking into a handkerchief. He dropped down in the seat next to Lupe.

  Looking down and sideways through half-open lids, pretending to sleep on, Lupe saw a pint bottle clamped between knees so bony that a three-inch gap showed between the skeletal thighs. Filthy checkered trousers hung slack from the bones.

  A fly buzzed, circled, and settled on the old wretch’s undone zipper. Scabby sunburned hands with swollen knuckles worked at the bottle cap, and suddenly Lupe smelled rubbing alcohol. He gagged, twisting away from that and all the other odors, urine and sweat and infection mingling like a human compost from which anything might grow.

  A hand fell lightly on his leg. He sat up, blinking at the old man, seeing thin hair dyed red, a scalp spotted with freckles that looked like burst bloodscabs, his nose a mass of blue webs and pores. He wore a tattered suit, gray shirtfront stained with coffee, vomit, booze. The hand stayed.

  “Hey, kid.”

  Lupe stared at him, digging deep into the pocket of his coat, finding his security there.

  “Want to make some easy money?”

  With his bottle open, wafting its medicinal odor across the seats, the old man went working his fingers into the flaps of his gaping fly. Before he could do any more than that, Lupe laid his switchblade on the checkered lap.

  “Now, now,” the old man said. “Now, now.”

  The blade looked as if it might float up between them, under its own power.

  Lupe turned back to the window. The old man, wheezing and groaning, struggled out of the seat and down the aisle. A few rows toward the front, the geezer stopped and looked down into another seat. “Hi there, sweetie-pie.” He lowered himself out of sight.

  Rubbing gummed eyelids, dreams in full retreat, Lupe looked out through a tinted window blurred by a million tiny scratches and the accumulated breath of ten thousand riders. The bus was on a narrow two-lane highway, headed down a dry canyon where night’s shadows had already begun to evaporate. The low sun laid its fingers on the crowns of hills, making dead weeds shine like gold. Tire tracks scored the grass, running parallel to power lines. Green clumps of cactus, penned in by barriers of sagging barbed wire, huddled together like frightened sheep in the shadows of weathered ridges.

  An outcropping of wind-gnarled sandstone drifted past, looking like beige dough that had been folded on itself a billion times before hardening. His pulse quickened when he saw that the doughy rock was pocked with holes like mute gray mouths. No true caves among them—even the deepest looked no better than a shallow shelf or pocket—but the sight made him straighten in his seat to search the hills more carefully, fully awake now. The stink of the old man’s booze and trousers was finally starting to leave him. Face pressed against the glass, he sucked in the tepid recirculated air that seeped up from vents below the window. He could almost smell the stale cool desolation of real caves somewhere near, the deep winds blowing up from underneath the world. He would find them, sniff them out. Dr. Brownhouse would be proud to learn how Lupe had conquered his fears. He had mastered them completely.

  The hills piled up higher the closer they came to the coast. Headlamps of Mercedes, Porsches and BMWs cut through the persistent gloom at the bottom of the valley, purring past and then gone. The hollows in the hills were dense with vegetation, dusty pines and eucalyptus with peeling silver bark and leaves like long green daggers. The first houses appeared among the trees, rusted cars and catamarans on wheeled trailers parked in dirt lots around them, surfboards propped against fences. The bus passed a boatyard, then a corral where several grimy horses stared sleepily at traffic. No Porsches parked down here in the canyon. Wind chimes of abalone shell and colored glass dangled from the eaves of dark-shingled shacks with clumsy driftwood fences. He could almost hear the chimes, a sound like chattering teeth. On came junkyards full of metal scrap in advanced decay. Then what might have been a churchyard, its bare parking lot prickly with crosses, presided over by a battered trailer with black hand-lettering all over the side.

  Lupe pulled a Baggie of dried figs from his pocket and began to chew, wishing for something to help wash them down. An old scavenger with the look of a faded athlete—bare chested in a baseball cap, his sunburned teats hanging nearly to the waist of his shorts—sauntered down the highway as though it were midday, stabbing beer cans with a spike and dropping them in a burlap sack. Lupe shuddered. Old men!

  Above the eucalyptus and the auto shops, he co
uld still see the hills; but no more sandstone, no sign of caves. On the ridges, seeming to revolve into sight, were buildings of stained wood and glass and polished steel gazing west toward the sea. Others, just as elegant, bore roofs of curved Spanish tile, whitewashed stucco walls, arched gateways. Porsches up there, he’d bet.

  The hills stepped back from the road. Four lanes now. Ahead he saw the square, drab, ordinary buildings of the town.

  The driver’s voice crackled from a speaker: “Bohemia Bay. We’ll be stopping here five minutes before heading on to San Diego.”

  Lupe had seen plenty of bus stations. They had a way of turning their surroundings into slums. It was as though a gas emanated from the lounges, souring the faces of old houses that might otherwise look merely quaint, exhaust fumes turning green lawns gray. It was no different here. The shacks in the canyon had looked comfortably weather-worn, but for the space of one block around the bus station Bohemia Bay had the look and feel of a ghetto.

  Standing at the edge of the parking lot, knapsack over his shoulder, Lupe leaned against a cyclone fence and stared down into a dry aqueduct as he finished the last of the figs. The cement channel was deep enough to accommodate raging winter torrents, but it held nothing now except a trickle of stagnant water; banks of sandy mud held fast to a litter of blown-out tires, beer bottles and bloated wood. A rancid briny stench hung over the canal, a stronger but staler version of the smell that blew up the streets from the beach. Across the viaduct, a black child peered down at him from a tenement window that backed up directly on the foul-smelling trickle.

  Inside the station Lupe bought a cup of scalding cocoa from a machine. The phone book, stolen from the booth, was survived by a frayed tether of steel cable. He drank the chocolate in two gulps—pouring it past his tongue, head tipped back—and studied a large yellowing map of the town mounted on a bulletin board. Later he would buy a pocket map, but for now this gave him a sense of the place, a thinly inhabited crescent with empty land on one side and emptier sea on the other. When he could see it with his eyes closed, he went back out.

  The morning air was humid and warming, though a sea chill lingered. The canyon road led straight toward the beach; beyond a traffic signal, he could see the silvery swell of waves. Their sound carried faintly. Shops were opening. He passed a florist, a dress shop, a five-and-ten, two ice cream parlors. Across the street from the beach, a Jaguar came rolling out of a corner gas station. Lupe spotted a phone booth at the nearest edge of the lot; the directory was still intact.

  A kid in a greasy blue uniform, with long sun-bleached hair under his blue cap and skin tanned brown as Lupe’s, watched him approach the booth and pick up the book. Lupe could feel the attendant staring as he paged through the D’s.

  Diaz.

  There was only one of them, first initial “S.”

  Too easy. In L.A. he’d had to look for days before learning that Sal had left the city around the same time he had. It was the first time a little whitebread town like this had ever made his life easier. Sal must be feeling pretty safe here, so far from the old neighborhood, to go listing his name. Guess he figured he’d put everything behind him.

  Lupe tore off the lower half of the page, taking what he needed. He wasn’t too good at remembering numbers.

  “Hey, asshole,” said a voice.

  He turned and saw the pump jockey standing behind him.

  “The fuck you just do?”

  The boy was taller than Lupe. He had strong arms, grease-smeared hands. Lupe didn’t say anything, only stared up into eyes like pale blue broken crystals. The sun topped the hills right then; he felt its first rays burning on the back of his head. He could almost smell burning hair.

  “What are you anyway?” the boy said. “You a guy or a girl? Takes some kind of nerve for a faggot like you to go ripping off public property like that.”

  Lupe started to step around him. The kid grabbed him by a sleeve.

  “Where you going, greaser faggot?” Fingers clenched in the baggy sleeve of Lupe’s green army-surplus jacket, twisting him closer. “You look like a girl, you know that? Do you even shave? Come on, you fucking queer, hand it over.”

  Lupe’s hand was in his pocket where he’d tucked the phone book page. His fingers stroked the warm bone handle as he thought of the cold polished metal folded up inside it. His thumb played across the silver button in the handle, stroking it as he would a nipple. He hadn’t wanted to waste it on the old man, but now . . . given this and the burning . . .

  The sun felt like a blowtorch turned up to full, searing the back of his skull, boring into the center of his brain, destroying the wall between the halves. He caught the stink of charred flesh and blood.

  Caught unsuspecting in Lupe’s shadow, the kid thrust out his hand again. “Stupid fucking homo, give it here.”

  Lupe took his fingers from his pocket and started to lay the crumpled paper in the pump jockey’s hand, imagining that it was the blade of the knife. Seeing the silver cut down into the fleshy whiteness of the grimy palm, seeing the blood well up.

  He looked into the pale blue eyes, seeing them full of respect now. And fear. A rich mix of emotion in those humiliated eyes. He had tasted this blend before; not that any two were ever exactly alike. The flavors of fear could keep him busy forever, tasting them, stirring up new varieties.

  Then the pump jockey grabbed Lupe’s wrist and fingers and started bending them back. The paper dropped to the ground. Pain chased the fog of dreams from Lupe’s eyes, and as his vision cleared, he saw that there was no respect in the pump jockey’s face, not really. No fear of him, either. Only an angry, smirking disgust.

  He wished for his knife, but it was too late.

  “Stop,” he gasped. “Stop or . . .”

  “Or what, faggot?” The kid’s face swam closer; Lupe’s fingers were going to break. “Or what?”

  A car glided up to the pumps and beeped its horn.

  The pump jockey dropped Lupe’s hand and backed away, grinning. “You’re welcome to try me, cocksucker. I see you around here again, I’ll show you or what.”

  He turned away, exulting in Lupe’s humiliation, striding proudly toward the pumps. For a moment Lupe couldn’t feel the sun, which was a relief even in his misery.

  But the feeling wouldn’t last. He couldn’t stand here all day. It would be hot and bright soon, hotter than he liked it, his shadow withering as noon approached.

  More cars pulled in off the street. The kid hustled to handle them, and a stocky older man, also in uniform, rushed out of the station office to help.

  With no one looking his way, Lupe bent and snatched up the crumpled phonebook page, stuffed it back in his pocket. Aching fingers stroked the blade.

  “I saw that!” the pump jockey called. The other man grabbed him, steering him toward a customer, sparing Lupe another assault. “Next time, faggot! Next time you’re mine!”

  Lupe ran across the street to the beach, looking back once to see the pump jockey watching him as he violently sponged a windshield.

  Lupe was shaking now. His guts were all twisted. Hard to keep calm. At least the sun didn’t seem to burn, and he couldn’t smell the charring.

  He walked over a patch of grass, then a splintered boardwalk, and stepped down onto sand. His steps turned slow and awkward; it was like moving into a dream, except for the sand grains already chafing in his boots. A string of pelicans bobbed up and down on the waves; otherwise the shore was deserted. The sun cast his shadow ahead of him onto the sand, beside the longer shadow of a tall white lifeguard lookout that reminded him of a prison gun-tower. One of the windows was broken, a corner piece of glass missing. Something gray hopped around inside, then stuck out its head and flew toward him. It was a seagull, carrying what looked like something bloody in its beak. As it swooped overhead he saw that it was part of a hot dog, dripping ketchup. He felt a small disappointment.

  He looked around casually, expecting nothing more than sand and birds. The lonely calm fed him
as little else could. But far south down the beach, a yellow jeep appeared around a sandstone point, bouncing past cliffside apartments, high houses and hotels. An official-looking vehicle. Fluorescent orange floats strapped to the roll-bar startled him with their brightness. Lupe turned away, looking for a refuge, and was amazed to see a perfect circle of darkness awaiting him.

  The pipe emerged from the sand beneath the boardwalk, taller than a man and infinitely deeper. From its lower lip a shallow pool of water drooled, flecked with bilious brown foam, fringed with rotting seaweed like a tramp’s beard, and swirling with flies. He could see the sheen of liquid stretching back like a tongue in the black throat. He almost gasped with anticipation, feeling himself on the verge of some critical event or revelation. But his life was always like that: fraught with tension, always about to happen. Change was in the air, but for Lupe it never came.

  Before the mouth could call his name, he hurried into it.

  The storm drain swallowed him. Broken glass snapped under his boot soles as he sloshed through muddy water. He knew that if he kept going he would end up in the aqueduct behind the bus station. Sudden thunder filled the tunnel. At first he thought it was cars on the Coast Highway above; then he recognized the sound of surf, echoing and amplified.

  A short distance into the pipe, speckled light filtered down from holes in a manhole cover. The passage divided here, changing from a circular tube into two broad, squared-off, low-ceilinged corridors, each with its flotsam of Styrofoam and low banks of mud. Choices. Forward, to right or left? Or back, to wait for the jeep to pass? He brought his knife out and held it in the faint light. He tried to make his mind a bright, hard, sharp thing, like the knife, to cut through this problem.