The Orchid Eater (14 page)

Just then,
the light went out completely. It had been dying for so long that it made
little difference; their eyes were already used to the dark. They shuffled
along through the dust, hardly speaking, until Stoner said, “Is it true what I
heard about Craig, Hawk?”

Hawk tensed,
knowing what he meant, but not wanting it to get around. He didn’t want Edgar
to hear, for some reason; not that Edgar’s ears were tender. He had to admit
that he couldn’t protect the boys from everything—or from anything, really.

“I don’t
know,” he said awkwardly. “It’s just a rumor.”

“What is?”
Edgar asked.

Hawk wasn’t
about to say it himself, but he couldn’t stop Stoner from speaking.

“The killer
cut his balls off,” Stoner said. “And took ’em along wherever he went.”

PART
 
TWO:
 
ESP

12

Midway
through the summer, with no warning, Scott Gillette called Mike to announce
that he was moving.

“It’s
fuckin’ Walter,” Scott said. “Shit-eatin’ bastard psycho fuckhead. He’s known
for weeks, but he kept it from us. Even from my goddamn mother.”

“Knew what?
Where are you going?”

Scott
groaned into the phone. “Can you come down here?”

“It’ll take
awhile.”

“I’m not
going anywhere. Not till I go to Texas.”

“Texas? Jeez! Okay, I’m coming.”

He dropped
the phone and ran downstairs, through Ryan’s room, its white walls now covered
with sports posters and pennants, the visible portions scuffed by sneakers and
imprinted with the pentagonal patterns of a soccer ball Ryan kicked around when
no adults were home. TV sounds blasted up the spiral steps. Mike yelled down
the stairwell: “Ryan! I’m going to Scott’s! Tell Mom!”

A muted yell
answered him. He hurried back upstairs, ducking into his room for his skateboard,
his backpack and a windbreaker. Outside, he climbed steep streets toward the
highest ridge in Shangri-La, passing the vacant lot where he’d hid in the grass
his first night up here, then a huge round water storage tank he hadn’t noticed
in the dark that night, and which he hardly noticed now. He was already
accustomed to the neighborhood. How had that happened? The long, quiet streets
were home now—as familiar as the beaches. When he wasn’t with Scott or Edgar,
he sat in his room under the painted moon and drew. He had plenty of time for
it. The Glantz sisters had found his clipboard in the storeroom, legions of
gory monsters and naked barbarian women parading around under the light-bulb
inventory lists. On Tuesday following the move, Mr. Glantz had greeted him
with the clipboard and a handful of torn-up illustrations. “Now I see what you
are, boy.”

Even though
his days were free again, Mike stayed up in Shangri-La unless he had reason to
leave it. He liked the isolation, the silent streets, the absence of crowds.
The only thing he didn’t like was the utter lack of girls. There were
none
up here as far as he could
tell—hardly any families at all. Two men shared the house next door to them, a
homosexual couple—“gays,” his mother called them. Sal was apparently one of a
community up here. Not that Mike saw much of his neighbors. Jack had built him
a desk inside the walk-in closet, and sometimes he sat there six hours at a
stretch with his pens and pencils and oil pastels, drawing dragons and armored
gunmen, barbarian warriors with blood-drenched broadswords, skeleton things,
spaceships and sleek cars, lithe half-naked women clinging to the legs of brawny
soldiers. Creatures from his imagination were all that interested him. The rest
of the world was so quiet and boring in its day-to-day sameness. Even this
neighborhood had divulged but one night of excitement; then, as if spent, all
its mysteries exhausted, it had shut up so tight that it seemed a different
neighborhood entirely. It was hard to believe he had ever been afraid
here—that the house where he lived, packed full of furniture and his mother’s
flowers, was the same empty shell in which he had sought shelter from Sal’s
gang.

Right now
the nearness of Sal’s house made him recall the events of that night, but as he
stepped on the board and kicked away from the curb, thoughts of the key
vanished again for a while.

He had new
troubles staring him in the face. Scott was moving to Texas?

It seemed
impossible, not yet a real threat. He and Scott would undoubtedly come up with
a scheme to upset the whole plan and keep the move from happening. There was
plenty of time to outwit Walter.

From the
south end of Shangri-La, a long twisting street went down through the hills,
past cliff-perched houses that seemed to be made mostly out of glass.

Mike
hesitated at the top of the descent, looking down at the ocean hundreds of feet
below, wishing he had the guts and the balance to step on the board and gather
all the speed he could, cutting those dangerous curves with skill and
precision.

Edgar had
given him the skateboard and a few riding lessons, but Mike had finally begun
to admit he didn’t have the necessary reckless confidence for the sport—not to
mention the balance. He hated lugging the board around and could never stay on
for long. He was wary of tumbling and scraping up his hands and knees, banging
on the hard cement.

Still, it
was faster than walking down the long hills. So few people lived this high up
that hitchhiking was unreliable.

Compromising,
he sat down on the board, grabbed the sides, and raised his feet.

It was
speedy transportation, even sitting. Several times cars came down behind him
and honked. He banked way over to the side of the road—there were no sidewalks
or shoulders here—and let them pass. He wobbled and fell frequently; but
braking with his feet, he kept his speed well under control, and none of his
spills were painful. When he ran out of hill, he tucked the board under his
arm, walked to the Coast Highway, and stuck out his thumb. It took only two
minutes to get a ride, there were so many cars.

Scott lived
in South Bohemia, up a shady hill street. There were no crowds south of town,
since the beaches were private and restricted to residents—some of them
nudists. The warm hush suited the depression Mike felt stealing over him. Gloom
gave way to shock when he saw Scott’s house. The front deck was heaped with
cardboard boxes.

Scott’s
stepfather appeared at the picture window, making Mike flinch into the shadow
of a hedge. Walter unnerved him. This latest action—abrupt and unexpected
coming from anyone else—was completely in character. When Walter turned away
from the window, Mike hurried down the driveway. He could hear voices yelling
inside the house, as something heavy slammed down, or shut, or into something
else.

Scott lived
in a room Walter had built for him by running a partition down the center of
the garage and dropping in a ceiling. When Mike knocked, Scott pulled the
warped door open, scraping it over the cement floor of his room, which was littered
with moldy, mismatched shag-carpet remnants. Scott blinked out at the day, his
eyes looking small, red and puffy. It was dark in the long, narrow room where
one little desk lamp burned. It smelled of the oily engine parts stored in the
other half of the garage. Scott hauled the door shut behind Mike and threw a
heavy crossbar latch across it.

Mike was at
least half a foot shorter than Scott, but the ceiling was so low it brushed his
hair when he walked. Scott was forced to stoop continuously. He went to the bed
at the far end of the room and sat down heavily. The place was a worse mess
than ever. Usually Scott’s books, if nothing else, were neatly organized,
running along the walls in alphabetical order. Today they lay in collapsing
heaps, sliding over the bare floor, some thrown haphazardly into boxes.

On the bed
beside Scott were various weapons, including saber, foil and epee. It was the
fully loaded—and cocked—speargun that caught Mike’s eye. He stepped aside when
he saw the barbed tip aimed right at his crotch.

Scott
noticed, and picked up the gun. “If Walter comes in, I’m shooting him. You can
be my witness.”

“Watch out
with that,” Mike said.

Scott
grinned and pulled the trigger. The bolt flew past Mike and buried itself with
a splintering thunk in the door.

“Jesus!”

Scott got
up, hunched over as always, and stomped across the room. He worked the spear
out of the door as violently as possible, ripping it free along with several
jagged shards of wood. When he was finished, a second small source of light
pierced the gloom.

Mike glanced
over at Scott’s desk, where piles of typing paper were stacked. Scott was
writing a book about “Rupert Giles,” a boy genius who continually devised ways
of slowly killing his evil stepfather, “Wally”: domestic warfare not so loosely
based on Scott’s own life. In the latest installments, Rupert had hired a Mafia
hit man to castrate “Wally” with a steam iron. The book was called
Seascape, With Dead Stepfather.

“So
.
. .” Mike said. “How’s the book?”

“It’s
finished. I mean, we’re moving to Texas. There’s no seascape where we’re
going.”

“You could
put that in. It would be sort of funny.”

“What,
Panhandle, With Dead Stepfather
?”

“It couldn’t
be any weirder than the rest of it.” He was trying desperately to find some
bright spot in all this.

Scott
reloaded the speargun. “I may never write again. Fucking Texas, day after
tomorrow. It’s all worked out, Mike. There’s nothing I can do about it.”

“But—but,
why?”

“Walter got
a job. My mom’s been after him for fucking years to get a job, and when he
finally does, it’s in Texas! The shitty thing is, he probably won’t keep it
more than a week. We’ll get out there and something will happen, he’ll flip out
again with one of his Vietnam flashbacks, attack a state trooper instead of a
beach parking-lot attendant, and that’ll be it. Since my mom doesn’t have a job
there, and they probably don’t need more teachers, we’ll be stranded forever.
In Texas! I can’t believe it!”

Mike dropped
into the desk chair.

A fit of
screaming broke the prolonged silence. Voices came from the house. Then they
heard the crashing of glass.

“One less
lamp to pack,” Scott said.

Ms.
Gillette’s voice rose high and shrill, the words unintelligible. Walter’s
response was pitched ominously low.

“She says
she’s not going. Her own job and all. But she will. She’s already giving in . .
.”

“You’re
really going to stop writing your book?”

“My book? It
doesn’t mean anything now. It was my escape from this place. I’ll have to find
something else for Texas.”

“What
if—what if I did drawings for it? We always wanted to do a collaboration. How
about that?”

Scott
actually smiled for a moment. “Oh . . . okay . . . yeah. That would be great.
I’ll leave you the story and you can go ahead and start.”

They heard a
desperate bleating from one side of the garage. Scott’s only window was draped
with a thick beach towel. He pulled it away as if drawing the curtain on a
small, hot stage.

The window
was level with a scruffy patch of dirt yard scattered with Walter’s collection
of junk: auto parts, a cast-iron wood stove with no door, and a pyramid made
out of two-by-fours and plastic sheeting, inside of which a heap of metal scrap
was turning orange. The pyramid’s metaphysical properties (Walter claimed it
could sharpen razor blades and garbage disposal units) apparently could not
stop the advance of simple rust. Chickens pecked at the burr-clover.

In a far
corner of the yard, raising dust, Walter was wrestling with the goat he’d
bought a few months ago. A coil of rope was slung over his shoulder. They
watched him drag the goat over to the bushy lemon tree whose branches shaded
the whole yard, and without which it would have been unbearably bleak. He
pressed the animal to the trunk, pinning it in place with the weight of his
body. Walter looked grim and determined; teeth bared, he was talking to the
goat—or to himself—in a growling voice. He knelt to tie the goat’s hind legs
together, cinching them tight.

“What’s he
doing?” Mike asked.

“Lightening
the load.”

Walter slung
the free end of the rope over the lowest, thickest limb of the lemon tree and
yanked hard. The goat swung upside down into the air, screaming like a child.
Walter tied the rope to the trunk, and then moved between the goat and the window,
reaching for his belt. Mike went cold when he saw Walter unsheathe his hunting
knife.

What Walter
did next, his body hid from view; all he knew for sure was that the goat
stopped screaming even as
he
wanted to start. Walter jumped back so he wouldn’t get sprayed,
and Mike found himself staring at the goat, hanging limp, its jaws drenched in
blood that poured out and pooled in the dirt. Walter turned toward the window,
blood in his beard, and came rushing at them. Mike let out a yell, but Walter
was only chasing a chicken. He snatched it up and turned away, busy with the
knife.