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Authors: Marc Laidlaw

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Still want
to cry? he asked himself.

Tears would
get in the way with what he had to do, so he gave them a chance to finish up,
get it over with.

Nothing
came. He couldn’t feel a thing.

Back at the
bottom of the house, he saw the strobe of lights across the canyon. One of the
cars was driving away.

“Stick
around,” he said softly, positioning the prybar in the track. “You can come
over here in just a minute.”

Breaking
into his own house was, in Edgar’s words, baby-simple.

19

 

Lupe ran
through the sagebrush hills with a pack of shadows at his heels. The boys could
have moved much faster, but they were patient with him, knowing that he carried
a knapsack packed with cans and cartons, vegetables, eggs and bread, kidney
beans and fruit cocktail—anything he had managed to stuff inside it.
Delicacies, compared to the roots and nuts and cactus pears he’d been living on
since finishing off the emergency cache he’d hidden away while living with
Raymond.

It had been
stupid of him to trash the house, a voice in his head said now. But that voice
had been silent while he prowled, after passing through the door his key had
opened.

You could
have fed there again, he told himself. You could have taken a few things, only
what you need for a few days, nothing they’d really notice, then struck again
and again whenever supplies ran low.

Instead he’d
gone wild. He couldn’t help it. He’d snapped, seeing everything so neat and
perfect that it mocked him. It was a life he would never know, the nuclear
family in a TV house with dishwasher, garbage disposal, washer and dryer—all
the fixtures sparkling, of course. He had wanted to destroy it—had been forced
to settle with making it merely uninhabitable. Let them live in filth; let them
see how their lives could have been.

As he
smashed the mirrors that covered walls in several rooms, he was amazed to see
what he looked like. His hair was matted, crazy, full of stickers and straw. He
must remember to steal a comb. He took his time, on a stroll of destruction. On
the second level, he entered a room full of plants. Flowers grew everywhere, on
the outer deck and inside, giving a perfume to the air. He stared enrapt at
softly speckled hoods of orange and violet, yellow and brown frills, swaying on
dark green stalks. The flowers caught his attention, but it was the roots that
fascinated him. At the base of several plants, thrusting up from the soil,
were nutlike clusters, small and ovoid, of pale brown and green. He grinned at
the sight and snapped a couple from the soil of one pot, breaking off the stems
attached to them. They were firm, resilient, cool in his palm. He rattled them
together for a moment, then—an urge irresistible as that of destruction—thrust
them deep into one of his trouser pockets.

Now, as he
hurried through the hills, he rubbed his palm against his pants, feeling the
oval lumps near his crotch, jiggling them slightly in the pocket’s pouch. He
closed his hand around them and squeezed through the fabric. Tightened his
grip, desperately dreaming of the agony and nausea he was supposed to feel.

But he felt
nothing. He had trouble imagining—or remembering—what such pain might have
been like. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the bulbs, and popped them
into his mouth. He rolled them on his tongue. Saliva squirted, despite the
bitter taste. The texture was all wrong, and they were too hard, poor surrogates.
He gagged, fighting the reflex that almost made him swallow them. They might be
poisonous. He spat them out. Not all vegetables were good.

But at least
he had real food. And weapons. And shelter—grand shelter! He knew the h
ills
and canyons
thoroughly, from roaming them ceaselessly, day and night. He went to his cave
only for the deepest and darkest of necessary sleeps. The rest of the time he
moved stealthily, spying, storing information. Shuttling between Rim of the
World and Shangri-La, avoiding the fire roads that linked them, taking more
hidden paths. He had watched Raymond leave for Hawaii alone, keeping the house
empty as a lure, a deliberate temptation. A trap, yes, devised by Sal. He had
seen his brother in and around it, Sal and his boys, keeping watch in case Lupe
returned. What Sal did not know was that he, too, was being watched. Sal’s
watchers, however, had lost heart after the disappearance of their clumsy
giant.

Lupe still
wasn’t sure who had sent the big man. At first he’d thought the black van
watching Sal’s house held police interested in the drug deals going on. But
Lupe had found a driver’s license and Social Security card that both indicated
he had killed a “William Stone.”

He had
chuckled when he read that. Killed a Stone with a stone.

Thinking of
which, he wondered again if he should have taken Stone’s strength, conducted an
actual initiation. It had been an occasional regret ever since the killing. He
was bigger and older than Lupe usually liked, but that might have been an advantage
in the days ahead. He had looked very strong, despite the fact that his skull
had cracked like an eggshell. All that power could have been Lupe’s . . .

But it
hadn’t seemed right. Not only was he the wrong type, but the killing had been
done without his special blade, in full sun. The glaring light, the heat and
dust, had robbed the death of meaning.

More
attractive to him was the growing appeal of the boy whose room he had entered
tonight. He was already thinking of him—in the same way he thought of the Pump
Jockey, the Junkie, and the Marine—as the
Artist.

Imagine, an
Artist for his collection.

Returning
from the lower rooms of the house, he had noticed a door under the stairs, one
he’d missed on the way down, in his frenzy.

He opened
the door, found the light switch, and walked out into the hills . . .

It was
cooler in there, with a breath of the night, as if he were stepping through a
magic door into a dream. It was a room of green hills and soft, scented
breezes. The full moon hung in a starless sky. Standing there with the rest of
the house in shambles around him, he spread his arms and heard an owl hooting
in the distance. Wilderness. Incredible hills. Squinting, he imagined roaming
through the folds, down among the crevices the painter had left hidden. All it
lacked, to make it perfect, was one decent cave.

The absence
troubled him until he thought of how to remedy it.

With his
knife in hand, cutting the hole, he had felt how right it was. Paradise. It was his cave he carved, he realized. The wall was a map of this very moment—or
one a few nights from now, when the moon would be exactly as full and round as
the one on the wall.

Backing away
to put the cave into perspective, he saw a desk littered with pens and paper,
crayons, brushes, paint. Tacked inside the closet walls above the desk were
many sketches, some extremely violent, surprising in their starkness. A
generous use of red for splattered blood. Dripping fangs, bloody swords and
daggers, severed heads and arms. A man being drawn and quartered; scenes of
torture. Lupe’s breath caught in his throat, arrested by recognition. It was as
if whoever inhabited this room had looked into his mind, reached down into his
nightmares, wrenched them out and thrown them quivering on the page; as if the
artist had stood beside Lupe in all the caves since the First Cave, watching
his eyes, hearing his heart, drinking it in and putting it on paper. Here.

He crumpled
a sketch in his hands, then realized he was destroying it. With wracking guilt,
he tried to flatten it on the desk. Then he backed away, feeling he had damaged
something irreplaceable—some part of himself.

At the same
time, a feeling of jealousy began to warm within him.

He had drawn
once, long ago. It seemed so far in the past that he could hardly remember. Why
had he done it? How had he known what to do? What was the point of it all?

And why—why
had he stopped?

Unthinking,
he picked up a pencil, then a pen, and then handfuls of them. He thrust them
into his pack, among the cans and loaves of bread. He grabbed a drawing tablet
and stuffed that in, too. Suddenly he wanted these things more than the food,
wanted to remember and reclaim whatever he’d once had. He could hardly
understand his excitement, which felt as if, finally, he was about to find fulfillment—release.

He tried not
to feed his hopes, for they had always betrayed and disappointed him. It was
impossible that he would ever change. Still, it was impossible not to want to
hold on to the promise.

It was then
he conceived the idea of collecting not only the art, but the
Artist.

Family
photographs stood on the desk. One snapshot in a lucite picture-cube showed two
boys with their arms across each other’s shoulders. He studied their faces,
thinking of what he’d seen in the house. The room downstairs belonged to one
boy; there were soccer balls, baseball mitts, football helmets and posters
everywhere. This other room, with its lovely scenic walls, might almost have
belonged to a girl . . . might have, except for these sketches.

These were
no girl’s visions, of razors and murder and decapitation, of muscular men with
absurdly buxom women wrapped around their legs.

He noticed a
pencil sketch pinned up in the closet. It was the shorter of the two brothers,
the one with eyeglasses. Labeled “Self-Portrait,” it showed a boy with a
dripping sword in one hand and his own severed, bespectacled head in the other.
Both heads smiled grim identical smiles. He had used red pencil for blood, the
only color in the picture—in most of these pictures.

That was
him. The Artist.

It dawned on
Lupe that this boy was the very one who had left him the key. The one who had
invited him in. The one who knew his mind and thoughts as surely as if they
shared the same dreams.

The Artist
understood him.

Lupe looked
back at the wall, feeling that he should leave a gift, something special for
this boy whose mind was so full of horror. Something, also, to make the map
completely accurate.

Gentle as a
lover sliding a flower into a buttonhole, he slipped one of his grenades into
the wall.

Lupe stood
still, gazed grinning at the hills, basking under the moon.

His boys
gathered around. A breeze blew up from the canyons, from the cave that awaited
him.

In the
distance, he heard an owl call.

 

PART
 
THREE:
 
A
 
WALK
 
ON
 
THE
 
MOON
 
WALL

 

20

 

The next
day, on foot, Mike trudged up Old Creek Road. He had sworn off hitchhiking. It
only led to trouble.

How can all
this be happening to me? he thought. I’m not even old enough to drive.

After the
morning’s long house-cleaning, he had figured it was probably safe to call
Edgar. Since he called every day anyway, it might be more suspicious if he
suddenly stopped.

“Hi, is
Edgar home?”

Ms. Goncourt
recognized his voice immediately. “Uh . . . no, Mike. In fact, I haven’t seen
him since yesterday.”

“Really?
Wow. I wonder where he is.”

“When was
the last time you saw him?”

“Oh, uh . .
.” He remembered that Ryan had seen them together yesterday. Better play it
close. “Yesterday afternoon, till about five or six. We were going to go
downtown but he changed his mind so I went alone.”

“He didn’t
say anything about where he was going?”

“Nope . . .
uh-uh.”

“Well, gee.
Okay. Would you do me a favor? Tell him to call me if you see him? There’s . .
. someone who needs to talk to him.”

He sensed
that she meant the police. She sounded worried, which was unusual; she took
pride in being unfazed by any of Edgar’s schemes. She always seemed pleased not
to have raised simply another zombie. It was she, Edgar confessed, who had
enrolled him in the Alt-School, as if it might make him even more unorthodox.

“I’ll tell
him,” he promised. “I hope everything’s okay.”

He hung up.

It was then
he thought of finding Hawk, which would take care of two things at once: the
key and Edgar’s disappearance. Maybe Hawk knew Edgar’s hideout. They could
bring him food and water while he was lying low. Hawk might not do it if he
knew about the burglary, so he would have to make up some story just to get
Hawk moving. Let Edgar deal with the truth, later.

All he knew
about Hawk was where he lived. There obviously wouldn’t be any listing for a
plain “Hawk” in the phonebook. For all Mike knew, his name was “Hawk Jones.”

Half a mile
up the canyon road, he realized he should have called one of the other guys in
Hawk’s gang. Kurtis or Howard or Mad-Dog. Any of them would have known the
number. He wasn’t thinking straight, though. He’d gotten so little sleep that
it was hard just putting one foot in front of the other.

He had spent
most of the night following cops around his house, eavesdropping on their
conversations, answering their questions. Dirk’s mother had brought Ryan home
in the middle of the night, and after the initial shock, he joined Mike in
tagging after cops. When the police asked Mike where he’d been, he blurted, “I
went downtown. Alone.” Only later did he realize that his story left Edgar
without an alibi if he ended up a suspect in the other break-in. Since both
houses had been entered in the same manner, on the same night, the two crimes
would certainly be linked. Edgar might end up being accused of burglarizing
Mike’s house!

The cops
said nothing about the other break-in; they were quiet, talking mainly to each
other. The missing art supplies intrigued them. Jack, too, trailed after the
cops and asked them pointed questions about the investigation, showing off a
command of cop talk gained from “Columbo” and “Adam-12.” Mike’s mother sat on
what remained of the upstairs sofa and wept, since the police would not allow
her to straighten anything—not even to put her orchids back in their
pots—until the crime lab had been through.

Around three
in the morning, a short fat man in a rumpled business suit showed up to powder
and brush the sliding glass door. He transferred the sharpest fingerprints to
pieces of clear adhesive tape, which he then pressed onto white index cards for
preservation. Ryan and Mike watched this procedure with an intense curiosity
that overpowered sleepiness and even, in Mike’s case, shame. Finally, along
with Jack and their mother, the boys submitted to having their fingerprints taken.

That’s it,
Mike thought. I’m on file.

Since the
government now knew who he was, he could forget about ever being a master thief
or assassin or anything like that. Not that he’d want to, after this. His
fantasies were spoiled.

Therefore he
approached Hawk’s residence with dread, since it meant a return to the domain
of vaguely illicit activities. Hawk’s One-Way Gang, the pack of juvenile
delinquents whose company he had for some reason sought and cherished, all
sickened him now. Or else he was getting the flu. He felt queasy and tired and
feverish. The sun wouldn’t leave him alone. Was it going to be summer forever?

Old Creek
Road
was packed with cars. Their exhaust
made the heat seem worse; blue-gray tailpipe vapor darkened the sky without
cooling it, like clouds that gave no shade. He passed the driftwood stockade of
the art festival, where people crowded in by the score. Bohemia’s festive
displays couldn’t cheer him; he felt more an outsider than any tourist. The
town’s population, bloated by the sun, didn’t ease his sense of isolation. In
fact, the crowds might simply offer more cover to the man with the key. Sal’s
brother. Lupe—or “Loopie.” It sounded like a nickname, one that made his skin
creep the way it hinted of both whimsy and psychosis. That wacky ol’ cut-up
“Loopie” might be following him even now, a guy in baggy Bermuda shorts, sun-visor,
and a Hawaiian shirt. It was awful to realize that he didn’t even know what
Lupe looked like, though the guy must know him well by now—even intimately.

What kind of
weirdo would take my art supplies?

The crowds
faded out. He might as well have stood on a featureless plain, alone with his
shadow and one other. The shadow of a man he couldn’t see, a silhouette against
the scorching sun. He felt as if he were being pursued by the shadow as much
as the man. For now, Lupe was less substantial than the horror he inspired.

Farther up
the canyon, things weren’t set up for tourists. You didn’t see sunbathers
flocking into auto repair shops for souvenirs or snapshots—although compared
to the sculpture exhibited in the festival, the corroding heaps of oily metal
scrap outside the garages looked imaginatively composed. This was the real Bohemia Bay. People lived and worked here; not orthodontists or lawyers, not retired movie
stars or brain surgeons; just people.

Beyond a
junkyard, eucalyptus trees fringed a dry dirt lot. Hawk’s trailer squatted in
the sun like a lunatic’s chapel.

He had
always wondered about this place—never dreamed he might visit it. It looked
like some kind of crazed miniature golf course, a blend of cemetery and
scrapyard. The chassis of stripped cars and motorbikes looked like bones pulled
from a tar pit. He trudged toward the trailer through the shadows of giant
Candyland crucifixes.

The trailer
door hung open, presumably for ventilation. Mike walked up the steps and stuck
his head into an atmosphere of yeasty mildew. It was dark, but he could hear
someone muttering.

“Hawk?” he
called.

At the far
end of the trailer, in the elevated niche that held the bed, a shrouded shape
rose up. It was Hawk, in a tangle of sheets. “Who’s there?”

Beyond Hawk,
Mike glimpsed curves of flesh and realized he was looking at a woman’s
buttocks. Hawk pulled the sheets over her as he dropped from the bed.

“Sorry,”
Mike said, retreating toward the door. At that moment, someone poked him in
the kidneys and squeezed into the trailer. It was Dusty.

“Heeeey, how
you doin’, kid? Back on earth again?”

“Where’d you
come from?” Hawk said. “Dusty, what’s he doing here?”

Dusty
shrugged. “Ask him.”

Mike cleared
his throat. “I, uh, thought you might know what to do with this.”

He
unshouldered his backpack and set it on the crowded little formica table. The
pack was stuffed with a huge beach towel for padding. He dug his hand through
wads of terry cloth and found the hard egg nestled safe at the cushioned
center.

Hawk’s eyes
bulged when he saw it. He grabbed it from Mike, shrieking:

“What are
you doing, you idiot kid? Where the fuck did you get this?”

He didn’t
wait for an answer. He rushed outside and for a moment Mike imagined him
running into the road stark naked, causing an accident that would end in a
movie-style fireball.

Laughing,
Dusty pushed Mike out of the trailer. They watched Hawk run up the hillside
behind the lot, where he set the grenade down gingerly in a pile of crispy bark
and eucalyptus mulch. On his way back down, cursing, he grabbed a frayed towel
off a drying line and wrapped it around his waist. Finally he stalked up to
Mike and shook his index finger in the time-honored manner.

“Do you know
what you were carrying around? Do you have any idea what it could do to you?
You’d be lucky if they found your shoes! And then you have the balls to bring
that thing into my house!”

“It’s one of
Stoner’s, man,” Dusty said. “Where’d you get it?”

“Yeah.” Hawk
hesitated. “Where
did
you get it?”

“I found it
in my bedroom last night.”

“Your
room?

Mike found
himself abruptly on the edge of tears. Hawk’s admonishment came close to the
punishment he had been awaiting from his mother, but which had never come. He
was tired, hot and dizzy; and sick of all this.

“It’s that
key,” he choked. “Someone used it last night to break into my house. They
wrecked the place. They cut a big hole in my wall and stuck that inside it.”

Hawk looked
at Dusty. “Stoner?”

Dusty
shrugged. “How’d
he
get the key?”

Some kind of
look went between them. Hawk shook his head. “Shit,” he said, and went
tiptoeing back to the trailer, avoiding all the bits of twisted wire and jagged
metal that littered the lot. “Start your van,” he yelled at Dusty.

“It was
lugging last night, man, so I . . . I been working on it.”

Hawk
stopped, shook his head, sighed. “God help me.”

“Jeep’s
okay,” Dusty called out hopefully. “I haven’t touched that.”

“And you
better not.” Hawk went in and slammed the door. When he came back out, he was
dressed and ready for action. He squinted at Mike a moment before slipping on
his sunglasses. “I tried calling Edgar, have him meet us up there. You know
where he is?”

Mike shook
his head. He hadn’t cooked up a story yet.

“We might
need him to find the spot again. I don’t suppose you know the place he and Leo
dug?”

“No.” That
must be his hideout, Mike thought with relief. Hawk knows it.

“Well, we’ll
give it a shot without him.” Dusty was already in the Jeep. Mike started to climb
in back until Hawk noticed and stopped him with a look.

“What do you
think you’re doing?”

“Going . . .
with . . . ?”

“No way. You
stay here till I get back.”

Mike backed
off, in no mood to insist. Besides, if he went with Hawk he’d have to do some
explaining along the way, come up with a story, and he wasn’t ready to be
grilled. With mixed feelings—mostly relief—he went back and sat on the trailer
steps. Hawk tore out into traffic, nearly causing a collision.

A story, he
thought, a story. I have to come up with a story—something to protect Edgar and
fool Hawk. Because once I start telling the truth,
if
I ever do, I won’t be able to edit
it just any old way I please.

“Hey. Kid.”

He twisted
around, looking up into the trailer. The woman from Hawk’s bed stood above him,
tugging a pair of bluejeans up over her hips. A flash of pubic hair between the
zipper halves nearly stopped his heart. She pulled up her black sweatshirt and
zipped herself. Her hair was tangled, her eyes dark and circled. A cigarette
fumed between her lips. But he hardly noticed these details while the memory of
dark curls blocked his mind’s eye.

“Where’d he
go?” She had a raspy smoker’s voice.

BOOK: The Orchid Eater
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