The Orchid Eater (30 page)

“I’d like to
stay longer, but I don’t want you thinking you can, you know . . . get away in
there.”

He was
looking at the painted hills.
Get away
how?
Mike wondered.

Lupe started
toward the door, then turned back abruptly, as if remembering Mike. He beckoned
with the pin.

“Come on.
You don’t want this getting away from you.”

Mike shook
his head.

“Put on a
jacket, something with pockets. It’s chilly. Fall’s on the way.”

Mike grabbed
a sweatshirt. It was hard pulling it on one-handed; his swollen fist barely
squeezed through the cuff. Lupe offered no help. His eyes were on the painted
moon the whole time.

Lupe went
behind him up the stairs and out onto the front porch. Men from the party were
climbing into a car next door.

“Put your
hand in your pocket,” Lupe said.

He could
hardly move his arm; the elbow had locked up. His entire hand was numb. He
couldn’t feel his fingers. What if they started opening?

They waited
until the car pulled away, splashing them with light, then Lupe nudged him
across the carport and into the street.

“Which way?”
he asked.

“Up.”

Lupe walked
beside him, up the hill and across the vacant lot where he had hid his first
night in Shangri-La. Dry grass crackled around their legs, his shoes and cuffs
caught in stickers. On either side, lights glowed in shaded windows, but no one
looked out to see them pass. It had been the same on the night this all began:
people safe in their homes, none knowing what went on outside.

In the
middle of the lot, he wondered if Hawk’s boys were out here. Maybe Hawk himself
was hiding in the shadows. But why would they, when everyone thought Lupe was
in jail? It didn’t make sense. Who had they locked up for the murder of Sal
Diaz, if not Lupe? Who else could have been mistaken for him?

It came to
him then.

A cross,
Ryan had said. A cross up the butt.

The cross
was Hawk’s thing. If the cops found a cross on Sal’s body, Hawk would be their
first suspect. Stories would come out about the night with the key and the
shotgun, the avocado smear, and who knew what else?

Hawk was in
jail.

He felt
certain of it suddenly.

Lupe jabbed
in him the ribs. He had stopped dead, there in the middle of the field. “Keep
walking.”

So none of
the One-Way Gang was here tonight, watching over him. With Hawk in jail, they
were probably in hiding themselves. Without a leader, they’d be helpless. The
field was empty. No one would help him. His life wasn’t bait, or even a
sacrifice. It was just going to be wasted.

He could
hardly walk. He was without hope. At Lupe’s urging, they threaded their way
between houses, emerging on the farthest street of Shangri-La. It was darker
here, as always. The thought occurred to him that he would never live to see
this neighborhood fill up.

Mike looked
over at Sal’s house. It was completely dark tonight. He remembered Sal standing
silhouetted in that doorway, shapes pouring out around him, one of them Lupe.
He felt sick at the thought of Sal’s death. Because of him . . . yes? A stupid
prank that backfired, bringing Hawk to the rescue, and now Sal’s death in order
to distract the cops from Lupe.

My fault,
all of it . . .

“Keep
going.”

They crossed
the street and clambered up the dirt bank. Lupe had to help him up the slippery
slope. Glancing back from the top, he saw the neighborhood spread out behind
him, the ramparts of houses facing the wilderness like little forts grouped
together for safety on a hostile plain. From now on he was beyond their pale.
He desperately hoped to see Hawk’s boys streaming across the street after him;
hoped he was wrong about Hawk being in jail. But he knew he was right, and he
saw nothing.

Lupe spread
the barbed wire for him and he ducked through.

On the other
side of the fence, they went on walking. His eyes adjusted slowly to the dark.
Moonlight made the distances deceptive. Sometimes he thought he was on firm
ground, but then he would step into a hole. Once he tripped and barely caught
himself one-handed. He walked into bluffs and brambles. Lupe seemed to know the
way intimately; he walked at Mike’s side and never stumbled. They moved in
silence over the uneven ground, and the hill moon shone steadily down.

I’m alone,
he thought. Hawk isn’t going to save me. Not now, not ever. No one is.

He’s going
to—to kill me. He killed Craig Frost, didn’t he? Now he’s killed Sal. What
chance do I have? I’m not nearly as tough as either of them.

In
self-defense, Mike’s mind clenched like his fist. He would not think of the
future, for that was only death. He would think of nothing but the urgency of
each and every moment. He would survive this moment, and this one, and the
next. That was all he could ask of himself. He wouldn’t try to look beyond the
instant, wouldn’t wonder where Lupe was taking him, since there was no
resisting anyway. The grenade was only one way Lupe controlled him; there were
many more, subtler. The night—the entire universe—might have conspired to bring
them here together.

Full moon.
Blue-black sky. Hills rising and falling in the distance. It all looked
artificial, and somehow familiar.

With growing
certainty and little sense of shock, he realized that he was walking on the
wall of his room.

Yes . . . it
was so right.

He hadn’t
left the house at all. The acid trip had never really ended. The strangeness
wound on and on, carrying him to new levels. He had walked right into his
bedroom wall. Lupe had stepped out of that hole gouged in the hills, right out
of his nightmares, and dragged him up into a two-dimensional world. No wonder
he couldn’t run or shout or even think. This wasn’t real! It was less than a dream;
it was all taking place on a small, flat space. On the moon wall.

How
fascinating to explore it finally. He had so often wondered how it would be to
roam these hills, exploring unpainted canyons that only the painted moon could
see. He and Lupe were the first through this place, apart from the artist. Now
that he could see it for himself, it was a revelation.

He looked
back from a ridge, before they started their descent into the canyon, and saw
lights. They might have been streetlights, or windows in the farthest row of
houses; but it seemed more likely they were seeping through the blinds in his
room, falling on the wall from the party next door. As they started down, the
painted hills rose up to hide his lights. The painted moon hung full overhead.
He could hear the clock-radio on the nightstand by his bed; its rolling numbers
crackled as they turned to midnight, making a sound like wind in weeds. If he
could only penetrate the illusion for an instant, wake up enough to make out
the dimensions of his room, then he would happily lapse back into unquestioning
dreaming. But he couldn’t quite manage the trick. And sometimes, in a
nightmare, even waking was a dream, proving nothing.

The trail
followed a dry streambed that brambles gradually choked. Cactus fingers poked
from dusty soil, moonlight glittering on the spines. The trail led steeply
downward, seeking and then finding a deeper ravine to trace. At one hand was a
sheer drop; at the other, gray cliffs rose up. Far ahead of them, the canyons
opened into a broad darkness of fields and meadows where a thin silver stream
lay peacefully gleaming in the moonlight. He hoped that might be their
destination. It was beautiful.

Lupe stopped
him with a word: “Here.”

Here, Mike
thought. Here we are. Time to die now. Time to step off the wall and back into
reality.

Then he
looked up, and found he was on the wall after all. It was another false
awakening.

Above the
trail, partially hidden by bushes, was the mouth of a cave. The very cave Lupe
had carved on his wall. Mike looked over at Lupe in surprise and saw a knife in
his hand. Lupe pointed at the cave, making a stabbing gesture. Mike thought he
was trying to enlarge the opening, gouging the moon wall still further.

He scrambled
up a few yards of rugged sandstone, one hand flailing for balance, the other,
throbbing, thrust deep in his sweatshirt pocket. He began to cough at the
clouds of dust that rose. Lupe climbed up next to him, waited for the dust to
settle.

“Give me
your hand.”

Lupe fit the
pin into the trigger, then slowly untied Mike’s hand. Needles pricked him as
the blood worked slowly through the skin and through his joints. Even with the
twine undone, he could not straighten his fingers. Lupe pried the grenade from
his hand; the knuckles snapped as he forced them. Finished, Lupe dropped the
grenade into his own pocket. He nudged Mike toward the darkness, relying on the
knife now.

Ahead, there
was no light for his eyes to grow used to. He found himself on a steep uphill
slope; he kept stumbling and falling to his knees, several times thinking that
he was about to slide or roll all the way to the bottom again. Each time, Lupe
grabbed his arm and pulled him to his feet.

Once, when
he fell, his half-clenched hand closed on a strange brittle shape, smaller and
lighter than the grenade, and far more mysterious. He tried to understand it as
he climbed. It felt capsule-shaped, about two inches long, an inch in diameter;
the texture was that of brittle, compressed twigs. He realized that he was
treading on more of the things, crunching them underfoot. He clung to it as he
climbed, as if it were a talisman; besides, his hand was locked in the perfect
shape to hold it, since his fingers still refused to uncurl.

Suddenly the
slope leveled out. Misjudging a step, he fell face forward. They must have come
nearly to the crown of the hills, high inside the cliff.

He got
slowly to his knees, robbed of breath, dust in his mouth, clutching the capsule
of twigs. Looking back, he saw a pale glimmer of moonlight far below; the cave’s
entrance looked like a dead eye.

A match
hissed. Light filled the chamber, flickering over smooth sandstone walls,
hardly penetrating several black niches. In the choking dust, his eyes began to
water and his nose to sting; he sneezed several times, then gasped for breath.
He could smell wax and ashes and sweat, urine and rot and faint perfume. Lupe
touched the match to a candle stub, which he set on a small rock shelf. As the
light settled down, the shadows took up assigned places.

Glancing
down at his hand, Mike saw a tiny fanged skull staring at him—if stare is the
word for eyeless sockets—out of a dense mass of little crushed bones and clumps
of matted fur. He dropped the pellet in the dust; many like it littered the
powdery ledge. He brushed his hand clean, working to uncramp his fingers as he
looked around.

Lupe had
managed to find what was probably the only true cave in Bohemia Bay. It was deeper than any he’d ever dreamed could exist in these hills. All the “caves” he’d
seen were merely shelves of rock, pocks in sandstone faces. Up here, the main
chamber had a high, almost domed ceiling. Overhead, fifteen feet up the
farthest wall, was a dark pocket full of shadow.

“Big old owl
lives up there,” Lupe said, noting his interest. “Only he’s not here tonight.”

The chamber
had numerous alcoves, recesses so dark they looked like doorways into other
caves. Lupe must have been using some of them as toilets, judging from the
rank, putrid smell. Only the coolness kept it bearable.

Pushed back
against the middle of the far wall was a large green trunk with black letters
stenciled over it: PENDLETON.

Stoner’s
hand grenades, he realized. That whole trunk must be full of them.

The trunk
was in use as a makeshift table, holding neat rows of pens and colored pencils,
lined up next to a drawing tablet. Mike recognized his own materials.

“These were
for you,” Lupe said. Mike found the “were” ominous. “I—I was going to have you
draw my boys, all of us together. But then I remembered how I used to be pretty
good at it myself. And I thought, well, why not? It’s been so long . . . I was
rusty. If you don’t do it, you lose it, I guess. But I don’t know, they’re
better than I thought I could do. Maybe I should have stayed with it. I mean,
you’re an artist. What do you think?”

Lupe set the
grenade on top of the trunk like a paperweight, took a stack of pages from
underneath the tablet, and shyly handed them to Mike. He seemed timid in the
face of a critic. Still, there was that knife.