The Orchid Eater (18 page)

“His real
name is Lupe. Guadalupe Diaz.”

“Lupe?”
Raymond spun toward the deck. Outside, through the sliding glass doors, Sal saw
a distant range of mountains through the summer haze; nearer were lines of
hills, far ridges of the same Greenbelt canyons that ran behind Shangri-La.

Raymond
rushed toward the glass and pressed up against the pane as if trying to see
around the corners of the house without opening the door. “Where . . . where
did he go?”

“Was he
here?” Sal said, not quite believing it.

“He called
himself Rico . . . 
”

Raymond’s
voice trailed off as he unlatched the door and slid it open. Sal joined him on
the deck. Together they looked down on tangles of dense brush, islands of
bamboo, clumps of cactus edging the bluffs and outcroppings of worn sandstone
that dropped away into the deeper canyons. The hot wind shook every shrub,
making it seem as if someone was crawling away under the landscape.

Smelling
smoke, Sal looked down at the deck. Scattered coals smoldered on the redwood
planks; a piece of dirty steak lay folded in one corner like a discarded rag. He
tried to imagine the scene he had interrupted.

“Gone,”
Raymond whispered. He started to drag a hand across his face, then hissed and
pulled it away.

Sal glanced
over at him. “Jesus!” He hadn’t noticed in the dark house, but one side of
Raymond’s face was a mass of blistered, cracked and oozing skin; his hair had
been singed so recently that shiny blobs still clung to the ends of the
brittle, damaged strands. His hand was scored with a grid of fierce red lines,
patterned on the hibachi’s grill.

Sal took him
by the shoulders and drew him back into the house, leading him to a sofa.
“Where’s your burn cream?”

“In the
bathroom,” Raymond gasped, weeping openly now. “He lied about his name. Lied
about . . . everything, I guess.”

“Don’t worry
about that right now. My car’s outside. We’d better get you to the hospital.”

In the
bathroom, Sal found a huge aloe plant thriving in the filtered light from a
frosted window. He broke off a thick green tendril and carried it back to the
sofa, along with a bottle of aspirin. Cool syrup dripped from the broken frond,
pooling in his palm. He smeared the gel gently over Raymond’s burned face and
hand. Raymond shut his eyes and sobbed, but without further tears.

“Who are
you?” he said.

“I’m Sal
Diaz. Lupe’s brother.”

Raymond opened
his eyes. Stared for a moment, examining his face, then nodded. “You look like
him, a little. But I recognize you. And your name’s . . . familiar.”

“I got your
name from Tyler at the Rock Lobster; you’ve probably seen me there. Your office
told me you were going away. I’m glad I caught you before you left.”

“I won’t be
going anywhere now. Rico—I mean, Lupe and I—were traveling together. He’s your
brother, then. I—I was desperate when you rang. I didn’t want to be alone with
him. I didn’t want to leave the house, though, with him out there. I might have
called the police. He did this to me!” Raymond gestured at his face with his
burned hand, now cramping from the pain.

Sal went to
the kitchen for a glass of water, which he offered to Raymond with several aspirin.
“Take these. You’re probably in shock right now, but the pain is only going to
get worse. When you’re ready, I’ll drive you.”

Raymond
nodded, choking down the aspirin. “Thank you. Why were you looking for him?”

“Because I
was afraid he might hurt someone. If he hadn’t already.”

Raymond
shook his head, then took a huge breath. He pushed himself upright, staggering
slightly so that Sal had to support him. “All right,” he said. “I’m ready for
anything now.”

***

Sal had
never been in such a quiet emergency room. South Bay Hospital seemed deserted
at midday. There was sand on the floor, and trails of water where a surfer had
come in right behind Sal and Raymond, still in his dripping wetsuit, his hair
matted with blood. The nurses had literally pushed Raymond aside to reach the
surfer. When the one nurse remaining at the desk finally returned her attention
to Raymond, she informed them that they would have to wait for treatment of
such minor injuries. There was only one doctor on duty, and he was busy. Yet,
as they waited, more emergency patients came in—a vomiting child, a man with a
sprained ankle, a girl with a bloody toe—and each was whisked away out of the
waiting room while Sal and Raymond were left to wait. Raymond kept an ice pack
pressed to his face, but Sal couldn’t believe it was cold anymore; he could
hear it slosh without the crunching sound of ice.

He noticed
that the nurse kept glancing at them, as if wishing they would give up and go
away. Her eyes said,
Faggots.

“Let me tell
you about Lupe,” he said after a while.

“Yes . . .”

“We grew up
in L.A., in a building that should have been condemned. I spent most of my
early life in the same apartment; 1 guess that was some sort of stability. It
was cramped and falling apart, and there were always men visiting my Aunt
Theresa. Our mother died right after Lupe was born; Theresa took us in, not too
willingly. I’m not sure why she didn’t abandon us right off. She didn’t have
what it takes to raise children. Things might have turned out better if she had
dumped us.

“Lupe never
knew any other way of life. But I was always angry—at my mother for leaving us,
at my aunt for taking us in, at the world for being the way it is. I was always
fighting and running away, hanging out with a gang. Theresa couldn’t complain;
as a role model, she left a lot to be desired. I guess I was following her
example when I got into hustling myself.

“I had, I
guess you might say, an aptitude. I used to spy on her pimp, peeking through
the door to see him naked, strutting around proud. Even at a young age, it
excited me. One day the pimp came over while Theresa was out. He talked me into
letting him in. I was thirteen. I can still remember his mouth and the smell of
booze, the way he looked at me when he decided what he was going to do—knowing
I couldn’t stop him. Anyway, I wasn’t sure I wanted to. It was violent, but
not so different from my fantasies. You’d be surprised. I had practical
knowledge, you know, from watching him with Theresa; I already knew he was
rough. The real thing turned out to be pretty close to some of the scenes I’d
been carrying around in my head, you know, in that desperate way a horny
adolescent wishes for someone to touch him, no matter who.”

“Adolescent?”
Raymond said wearily. “I still feel that way.”

“After that,
it was like all the chains just snapped. I figured out I could make it on my
own, and make money, too. Even save it, since I never cared about doing drugs.

“I’d sleep
with whoever would take me in for a night, or even a few hours. Lupe was my only
tie with home. He was at Theresa’s mercy. Once I ran away for good, she became
even more protective, she started locking him up in her room. She’d padlock it
from the outside, so if there’d been a fire or something he would have been
trapped. Maybe because he didn’t know any better, Lupe never seemed to mind. He
was an artist from early on; as soon as he could hold a crayon he was drawing.
Good, too—he had natural talent. He could draw anything, things he’d only seen
on TV. At least I guess that’s where he got them from. He certainly wasn’t
drawing from life. He’d never been out to see anything.

“I used to
go crazy, thinking about him locked up like an animal in a kennel. Sometimes,
when I knew Theresa was out, I would break in and take him out and around with
me, my little brother.”

“How’d you
get him out?”

“My aunt
would leave the key in the front room—less chance of losing it there, I guess.
Anyway, Lupe looked up to me. I took him places where I was known, where I had
a few friends. Not my old gang, though. I stayed away from them once I started
hustling—which I only did where I wasn’t known. Even so, word got around of
what I was up to. Things got dangerous for me.

“One day we
came home and Theresa was there. We got in a huge fight about how she treated
him. Then her pimp came in. He’d been waiting on her and since I was slowing
her down, he beat the shit out of me. I could barely crawl away. He said he was
moving in with Theresa and threatened to kill me if I came around again.

“The next
day I stole a gun and went back for Lupe. I had this idea I was going to set up
house for the two of us, away from Theresa. I found her pimp alone in the
apartment, and pulled the gun on him. But Lupe wasn’t there. He said Lupe was
in the hospital and Theresa was with him. That news maybe saved his life. I had
really wanted to kill the guy.

“By the time
I found the right hospital, Lupe was in stable but critical condition. Lupe had
broken out and come looking for me. But the poor kid—he didn’t know the
neighborhoods where he would be safe. He didn’t know shit, only that he had to
get away and I was always the one who said I’d protect him. I sort of pieced
together from my aunt that the guy had gone after Lupe the night before, after
he’d warmed up on me. So he just wandered around looking for places I’d shown
him, looking for people who knew me . . . and from what I finally figured out,
he finally went up to a gang of boys—you know, I mean a
gang
—and asked them if they knew
me.

“You can
imagine how they took this. Plenty of them knew
of
me. Even my own old gang wanted to
kill me. I’d been chased a couple of times. Probably would have been killed if
they’d caught me. I was learning some martial arts from an old guy in the
park—karate, white crane, and then tai chi—but the main thing I’d learned was
to keep away from trouble. Lupe walked right into it.

“Someone
found him in the morning. I went up to look at the place, for clues,
gang-signs, to figure out who’d done it to him. It was this big hill covered
with garbage; on the peak was a huge metal pylon where the powerlines came
through. You could hear them buzzing and crackling up there. Cactus everywhere,
flies and shit, stripped cars. Down under the pylon was a big sandstone cave,
so much broken glass on the ground it was like pebbles on the beach. Pretty
deep, too. That was where they’d taken Lupe. In the back I found an old
ripped-up mattress, stained with blood. And an acetylene torch. That was the
worst part.

“You know,
they . . . they wounded him. And cauterized him with the torch, so he wouldn’t
bleed to death. There were burn streaks like whiplash scars all over his legs
and butt. But they’d held it a good long time between his legs.”

Raymond sat
with his head between his knees, just listening, not responding. Sal was
grateful for the silence. They continued to wait for medical attention, but the
looks from the staff at the counter suggested that no one was in a rush to help
a couple of queers.

Sal cleared
his throat and continued.

“He got
better, slowly. Real slowly. But how can you ever get over something like that?

“He lived
with me for a while, when he got out. I made him follow through with his
therapy, and there was a lot of it. But it was like the whole experience pushed
him over some edge I could never really understand. He all of a sudden seemed
much older than me, in a weird way. More independent. It’s hard to explain.

“I sat in on
some of his counseling sessions, and I could see him taking to them, working
them around to suit him. The doctors kept working on Lupe to . . . to
not let anything stop him. To face his fears, that was the main thing. To get
power from the things that terrified him. They gave him visualizations, you
know, like meditations to do. Imagining himself whole again, and healthy, and
strong. I sometimes think he took these things too seriously. I know he stopped
drawing, period. I tried to convince him to keep at it, as therapy, but he had
stopped listening to me. I always felt he sort of blamed me. Because, you know,
I wasn’t there for him.

“It wasn’t
long before he left my place. He lived like I had for a while, on the street,
among strangers. But he wasn’t afraid of anything. The worst had already
happened. I tried to help him when I could, but he rejected my help. He didn’t
need me anymore; and in some strange way, I felt he didn’t trust me.

“I ran into
him less and less . . . and eventually, my own life got to be more than enough
for me to deal with. I was working hard to get myself together, onto a path of
strength and healing. I tried to stop hustling, tried to make money at a few
other shitty jobs—though that was hard, since the pay was nothing. But one of
them, an art sales job, led to something more rewarding. . . . And that
eventually let me get away, let me come down here. I hadn’t seen Lupe at all
for years, until a few weeks ago. Then I saw him for only a few hours, and he
vanished again. Or I thought he had.”