The Orchid Eater (11 page)

“You can’t
go messing around in there, God damn it!”

Hawk sank
back, blinking out at the beach, seeing for the first time that he was the
center of a mob’s attention. A few of the lifeguards came to help hold him. He
shook them off, looking past the cop into the dark core of the tunnel.

“Who is it?”
he said. “Which one?”

Mike’s fever
intensified. One of Hawk’s boys . . . one of the One-Way Gang. He wanted to be
far away from here now, far from last night or any knowledge of Hawk. But his
legs wouldn’t carry him. It was all he could do to climb back onto the
boardwalk and find the nearest bench.

A minute
later, Hawk hauled himself up from the pool onto the boardwalk and shook like a
wet dog, sprinkling bystanders with mud and brine. He paced back and forth, his
heavy wet boots loud on the planks, muttering, until he noticed Mike watching.
Then he strode over and dropped down on the bench beside him.

“What do you
know?” he said.

Mike tried
to speak, but his mouth was as dry as the beach. He spread his empty hands.

Hawk gazed
at him, then shook his head in surrender. “Ah, fuckin’ cops.” After a moment he
looked at Mike again, as if finally recognizing him. “What’re you doing here,
anyway?” “I was up . . . there.” He gestured feebly toward the cliffs, the
Dumas P
è
re.

Hawk lurched
to his feet and strode over to the edge of the boardwalk again; he peered down
at the tunnel, then stormed back. This time he stared over Mike’s head, at the
highway.

Mike twisted
around. A stocky man was hurrying through the crosswalk from the gas station.
He wore the station uniform, a blue cap and a blue workshirt. He was greasy up
to his elbows. When he saw Hawk, he changed direction slightly, ambling toward
him. He took a cigarette from his mouth and cocked his head in a casual nod.

“Hawk.
What’s up?”

“Alec.
Something real fucked.”

“A murder,”
Mike blurted.

“No shit? I
been watching for a few minutes, but it’s hard to get a chance to come look.
Craig peeled out early today, left me fuckin’ stranded over there.”

“Craig?”
Hawk said suddenly. “Where’d he go?”

Alec
shrugged. “Said he was taking a break for a smoke. I saw him head over to the
beach—and then he must’ve just cleared out, the shit. He knows it’s just him
and me Sunday morning. Usually he’s reliable. I was hoping you might know if
anything was up with him, girl trouble or something.”

Mike said,
“Craig . . . Frost?”

Hawk grabbed
Alec by the arm, wrenching him around, marching him toward the tunnel. “When
was this?”

“Shit,
what’s wrong? Early—you know how early he comes on. Takes his first break
around seven-thirty. Watch it, Hawk, you’re gouging me!”

“Hey!” Hawk
yelled again, holding Alec as if he might thrust him over the edge. “Come out
here!”

“Tell that
fuck to go away,” came a hollow, echoing voice.

“Just tell
me one thing. Is it Frost? Craig Frost?”

The same cop
came out of the tunnel and squinted up at them, shading his eyes. “I talk to
the parents, Hawk. Not you. You’re nobody.”

Hawk let go
of Alec, who staggered backward, windmilling his arms for balance.

“Hey,” Alec
said. “Craig? You mean—? Are you—is this serious?”

Hawk spun
him toward the highway. “Let’s go.”

“What’s
happening? Go where?”

Mike, almost
in spite of himself, fell in behind the men, as if to miss this would be to
miss everything. He couldn’t resist gathering any possible scrap of
explanation. Craig Frost had for months been a familiar sight early in the
morning, at the pumps. To think that last night they’d been hiding in Mike’s
house together, Craig swearing and laughing and dreaming up stupid schemes, and
now . . .

Behind them,
the cop was shouting: “Bring him back here, you bastard!”

“I guess
they want to talk to you,” Hawk said smugly.

“Why?” Alec
asked.

“Because
it’s Craig in there, and they just figured out you’re probably the last one who
saw him. But I get first shot at you, don’t I?
Don’t I, Alec?
”

“First shot
at—Oh Jesus, Hawk, what are you saying? What happened to Craig?”

They reached
the street. For once, the traffic was moving, Sunday drivers flying by, so
close that Mike could have reached out and touched the chrome trim of the
Cadillacs, or whacked a sideview mirror so hard it would take off his hand.
Hawk glanced back. Mike looked, too, and saw the cop struggling up onto the
boardwalk.

“I’m going
to let go of you, Alec,” Hawk said. “When I do, I want you to get in your truck
and drive out to my place. Then we’re going to have a talk, all right?”

“But I can’t
leave the station now, it’s—”

“Alec, you
just had a death in the company. For Craig you can shut down.”

“Oh. Yeah.”
Alec looked numb; but Hawk looked as if he had been switched on, as if he had
always carried inside him all kinds of strange, dark, quiescent machines
waiting to be thrown into life . . . and now they were finally running. “For
Craig,” Alec said.

“I’ll meet
you there.”

Cars slowed,
stopped for a light, leaving the crosswalk clear. Alec rushed into it, heading
for the gas station. There was another kid over there, in the blue shirt and
cap. Mike could hear Alec yelling at him: “We’re closing up!”

Hawk made as
if to follow. Then, as if he were totally aware of everything Mike had seen and
heard and thought, he glanced down at him and said, “Go home, kid. Remember
what I said last night? You don’t want any part of this.”

Mike kept
his mouth shut, but he was thinking:
Yes I do!
Wanting it with a hot, desperate energy, as if he’d been charged
up somehow, as if there was something in him the equal of anything in Hawk. His
veins felt flooded with fear and electricity—in short, with life.

Hawk crossed
the street an instant before the light turned red. By the time the cop finally
reached the sidewalk, everything on his belt clanking heavily, the cars were
pouring past. He looked red and swollen and sweaty in his dark, heavy uniform.
He gave Mike a look of utter disgust and irritation, as if he were the cause of
all the cop’s woes.

“What are
you looking at?” he snapped.

Mike took
off running.

10

After
leaving the storm drain, early, Lupe walked south along the shore. There was
such a warm glow in his belly that he hardly felt the chill of the ocean air.
Except for footprints of daybreak joggers and beachcombers, the sands were bare
of humanity. Although he was confident he had left the pipe without being
seen, it wasn’t till he had strolled around several juts of the shore cliffs,
hands thrust deep in his army jacket, that he felt he could relax.

In a
tortured snarl of sea rocks, where the waves rushed gurgling through pockets in
the slick brown stone, he crouched down out of sight of the apartment buildings
that covered the cliffsides and washed his hands in a tide pool. He peeled away
the film of drying blood. He cleaned beneath his nails. Wishing for a mirror,
he splashed his face with seawater in case any blood had spattered there. An
oceanic taste filled his mouth, both salty and sweet. The power of the sea, of
all nature, was spreading through him; he relished the surge of new strength.
He opened the switchblade and started to wash that as well, until he remembered
that salt water might rust the spring. Contenting himself with scraping off the
flecks of tissue before they scabbed over, he watched sea anemones groping at
the sifting rain of small fleshy particles that drizzled into their pools,
seizing the tidbits and plunging them into their soft gullets; tiny crabs
darted out from under rocks, fighting over the fragments.

The
initiation of the Pump Jockey had gone very well, he thought. The boy was right
for his collection.

The Pump
Jockey had been easily lured with the promise of a climax to yesterday’s
confrontation. Lupe had discreetly let himself be seen from across the Coast Highway, and then retreated as if in terror. When the boy followed him into the pipe,
he had run as far as the branching tunnels before stopping in pretended
confusion, though he had explored the sewer in darkness and knew that both
routes joined again not far ahead. There, beneath the manhole cover, he had let
the boy catch up with him.

The Pump Jockey’s
laughter, his low threats of “faggot,” had long since faded from the world, but
in Lupe’s ears they were nearly as loud as the waves. Nearly as loud as the
shrieks that had come while cars rushed overhead, while church bells rang in
the distance and gulls screamed on the beach.

Now, hearing
a scrabbling sound like something digging up from the rocks, Lupe shoved the
knife into his pocket. A big Irish setter came running over the rocks, bounding
toward him. He hurried away before the dog’s owner followed.

As the air
warmed, he stripped out of his jacket and stuffed it into his pack. His eyes
constantly roved the cliffside for shelter, dark places. Although the shadow of
the cliff was still long and cool, nearly touching the tideline, he knew the
heat was on its way. Where not completely covered by buildings, the cliffs were
so overgrown with iceplant that they looked like freeway embankments and
offered as little shelter. He needed a hole, and there were no overpasses or
bridges here to hide him.

Far down the
beach he saw a yellow lifeguard jeep approaching. A flight of stairs ran up
between two houses that seemed to float above the sand on enormous cement
columns. Lupe started up the stairs, heading for the highway. Halfway up, he
spied a dark recess beneath one of the houses, less substantial than a crawl
space, but large enough for a boy or a small man. He scuttled into it, grateful
for the cool and dark, suddenly conscious of his exhaustion. He had been up
all night, wandering the streets, making his way back to the beach and the
tunnel, sometimes fingering the knife he planned to use that morning, sometimes
tracing the edges of the key, whose time would come later.

He had taken
out and studied the key many times since the night before, wondering what it
meant, where it fit in. Silver, gleaming like a fallen piece of the moon, it
was an unmistakable invitation—a promise for some future date. For now it lay
buried deep in a pocket, safe and sleeping.

The crawl
space was cramped, littered with rusted plumbing, clogged with spiderwebs. He
turned around several times like a dog settling down to clear itself a bed.
From here, daylight was only a narrow band of glare. He turned his back on it,
curling up in the deepest corner of the cave, head pillowed on his pack. Dreams
were not long in coming. Neither were the boys.

***

Long after
nightfall, the boy found himself on a road he didn’t know, beneath shattered
streetlamps, above a huddle of dark apartment buildings. The smog-shrouded
valleys of Los Angeles lay below; above him rose a dark crest, hunched like the
back of a sleeping dog. A huge loom of black metal stood atop the hill, soaring
into clouds whose bellies held a smutty reflected light. The night felt charged
with energy and stank like a leaking battery. Snapping sparks fell from the
power lines that swept up to the tower from the horizon. The hairs along his
arms and spine stood on end. He thought he heard laughter in the wires, but
when he turned to go back the way he’d come, he discovered that the laughter
was behind him. It was real.

The boys
came up from the houses, or flocked out of nowhere, silent as shadows,
surrounding him. But shadows could not have grabbed him so forcefully; shadows
could not have pushed him up the hill and into the cave.

That was the
First Cave. All he’d seen or could remember of it—fragments.

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

This was a
darkness full of laughter, full of fingers digging into his flesh, pinning him
to the ground.

When the
light flared again, he saw a blue tongue of flame licking from the nozzle of a
blowtorch. Hissing and spitting, it kissed his cheeks, singed his eyebrows,
then went away somewhere out of sight.

Someone
said, “Get his pants.”

He couldn’t
believe where the flame went next, roaring over his crotch, kissing him with
fire. It was more pain than a soul could bear—though a body might. He fled from
that place the only way he knew, escaping into darkness with nothing but his
mind and imagination to carry him. His spirit was a thing of pure agony,
neither awake nor asleep, alive nor dead, but suspended somewhere in
between—somewhere he had never dreamed of finding.

Skin
shriveled, sizzled. Blood-rich tissue swelled, popped, burst. Thanks to the
torch, his wounds were instantly cauterized.

He dreamed
that he was floating in the sky, a god inhaling burnt offerings, his own flesh
the sacrifice.

That dream
never ended.

***

The boy
spent months in white rooms, surrounded by white people. His soul was likewise
bare and antiseptic—cauterized. Sometimes he felt blindingly white, as if the
fire that purged him still burned somewhere inside. Sometimes he only
burned,
without reason, and he fled
the light, fled the world again. The sun was a blowtorch burning holes in the
walls where he hid, trying to get at him. The doctors were agents of the fire,
boring into him in their own way. They brought him food on trays, chunks of
meat, the smell of which sent him reeling back into memories and left him
vomiting. They stopped feeding him anything that had ever been able to bleed.

But the
doctors, determined that he should return to the world at any cost, remained
ignorant of what they were sending forth. Something had hatched in the First Cave, a remote, detached divinity that inhabited his altered body, taking up residence
in all the empty places the original Lupe had left behind.

His chief
therapist was a long-haired, bearded young man who considered himself
streetwise. Dr. Brownhouse was flush of face and shiny white, his eyes gleaming
with all the new wisdom he had to dispense, things he claimed could heal the boy
through and through. This eager young fellow, with psychedelic posters on the
walls of his clinic, had been through countless seminars of the new school, and
he had learned a bold language of holism.

Whatever
happened to you, Lupe, you’re young enough to get past it. You have to tell
yourself that you will get over it. You have allies within. I want you to claim
them, seek their help. I want you to see them clearly, call them to you.
Visualize them—draw their power into you. Bring yourself together. You’re an
artist, I’ve seen your sketches, I know you can make these pictures in your
mind. So use that power. Make them as strong as you can.

Some of
Lupe’s sketches were tacked to Dr. Brownhouse’s walls, but they were old work,
childish fantasies from all the time Lupe had spent confined and dreaming in
his Aunt Theresa’s house, in the small room where she locked him so he’d be
“safe.” Her worst threats of what might happen to him if he left the house had
not come close to matching the reality. As if stunned by how thoroughly life
had shamed his imagination, Lupe had not touched so much as a crayon since the
incident.

He kept
busy, though, putting the doctor’s words to work:

Face what
you fear.

It was sound
advice, and once he was able, he followed it.

He was afraid
of the dark as he had never been before, afraid of caves and holes, so that was
the first fear he forced himself to face. He shut himself into dark rooms,
closed himself into closets, found windowless basements and huddled in the
blindest corners until terror seeped away and the dark became an ally.

Eventually
he found his way back to the First Cave. He watched it till nightfall, staring
into the empty socket as if an eye might emerge to stare back at him. When
nothing came, he knew that he had conquered his fear completely, though he was
not ready to reenter that particular place. Not yet.

Miguel was
his first initiate. He took him in an ivy-choked, abandoned tunnel not far from
the First Cave, luring him with a tale of a suitcase he’d found filled with
hundred-dollar bills, maybe the stash from a bank heist.

In darkness
he claimed that first life. It was a bloody initiation, no less for himself
than for Miguel. He consumed the boy’s power, literally absorbed his vitality,
and afterward stood in the dark imagining Miguel as he had been in life, in
full flower. Opening his eyes, he saw the soul-shadow standing before him.

And Miguel
remained. Because he was the first, and the source of so much inspiration, Lupe
allowed him to keep his name. Small, thin-boned, a fierce but silent companion,
Miguel had followed Lupe east out of L.A., as if eager to join in the search
for companions.

They crossed
the country, hitching rides in empty trucks and crowded cars, through parched
farmlands and plains wracked by thunderstorms. Often, when the company of
people seemed unbearable, they went on foot.

Lupe found
initiates wherever he went.

They were
drawn to him from all over the lands through which he traveled. He won their
trust easily, because he was—or looked—so young, so innocent, simply another
boy like themselves, traveling alone. The Hopi had sullen eyes but a quick
smile; he could not believe Lupe had come all the way from Los Angeles to the
colored deserts of the Southwest. He showed Lupe a wind-carved notch high in a
sandstone bluff where they sat drinking whiskey and smoking weed while the sun
went down behind a distant butte. At the moment the first star appeared, Lupe
introduced the Hopi to Miguel, and the second boy’s strength warmed him all
through a cold desert night. Falling snow melted when it touched him. He was a
flame among the stones. He found a road and followed it till daybreak, when the
two boys (friends now, closer than they’d ever be to Lupe) disappeared.

Gradually
the desert sun had come to seem too bright. Facing his fear of the fire had
always been harder than facing the dark. He knew this was a weakness, but was
helpless. Fire could not be endured in the same way as darkness. The stars
shone like white flames; even the moon threatened to scorch him. Seeking
shelter, he traveled east over broad lands whose flatness frightened him,
since no secrets could be kept there. He traveled as quickly as possible,
sometimes wishing he had remained in the desert, with its canyons and eroded
walls and ancient sculpted stone. But soon he found himself in rich countryside
like none he’d ever seen, among other kinds of shadows: shadows of woods,
shadows of mountains, shadows of caves. This land was fertile with darkness.

Virginia
, Tennessee, Kentucky, the Carolinas. Limestone caverns had gnawed
and wormholed away the underside of every surface. There were big caves like
subterranean Disneylands, full of lurid lights and guided tours, offering
ridiculous souvenirs. He knew he could never be comfortable in these places,
though he always looked with longing at the unlit side tunnels, the regions no
one had mapped. Once he slipped away from a tour and lost himself for days in
the dark, living on icy water and imagining himself a slippery blind thing that
had dwelt there forever.