The Orchid Thief (33 page)

“A guy sent it to me,” Dewey said. “He said it was slightly nonaggressive.” He was still holding the plant he’d picked up off the bench and suddenly remembered it.
“Laroche!”
he growled, holding it high. “Name this.”

Laroche studied the plant for an instant and then said something Latin.

Dewey smirked. “Small form or large form?”

“Let’s see,” Laroche said, squinting. “Jesus, Dewey, I’m an Internet publisher now! I’m not as fast as I used to be. I’d say that’s the large form.”

“Bullshit,” Dewey said, triumphantly. “You’re losing it, buddy. You’re through.”

It was a dazed, shambling kind of afternoon, a day seen through a scrim, the time gliding by. It had to have something to do with the plants. When I first met a lot of orchid people, they all said that time spent in a greenhouse had a rare, shapeless quality—a day could go by and they wouldn’t even notice it had passed if they had spent it among their orchids. That afternoon at Dewey’s the light shifted and dropped, and then dusk drifted in, and the time passed, and still we roved around the shadehouse picking up plants, smelling things, rubbing fingers on slick leaves, poking thumbs into dirt, and every couple of minutes Dewey and Laroche would pause and both would light cigarettes and stand in front of some delicate green sprig of something, smoking hard and wordlessly admiring it. I wasn’t in any hurry to leave, even though I should have been. Being in the shadehouse was restful in a way that being around people can never be, and it was vivid the way being around lifeless objects can never be, and in the veil of evening air it was as fantastic as a dream.

—

Before we each went home, Laroche and I made our plans for the next day. It was about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from the Miami area to the Fakahatchee, and Laroche wanted to start before dawn. “Otherwise we’ll get there late in the day and the bugs will be miserable and you’ll just get burned,” he said. “Believe me, I’m warning you. I think you should pick me up around four-thirty tomorrow morning. Or five, at the latest. I’ll be up and waiting for you at four-thirty. And what about food? I’ll get all our supplies. What kind of stuff do you like?”

I said I liked pretzels, and he said, “Well, that’s not enough. How about pretzels and those crackers with peanut
butter and maybe some kind of cheese. Maybe some candy, too. And
lots
of water. And we should have some sunscreen and dry clothes. Look, I’ll get everything. I’ll get the supplies for both of us.” He ticked off on his fingers: “Pretzels, peanut butter crackers, Hershey bars, cheese.”

“How about a compass?” I said. The rangers carried compasses. “Or a map?”

Laroche glared at me. “We don’t need a map. I’ve got everything under control. I know the Fakahatchee like the back of my hand. I mean, you
have
to know it to go in there. It’s dangerous. All those pits of mud and those big sheets of water. You can disappear and die in the swamp,”

I slept through my 3:00
A.M
. alarm and then jerked awake at 4:30, imagining Laroche standing in his driveway, chewing on a cigarette and fuming. It took me only a minute to get ready. The night before, I had laid out my swamp clothes—leggings, cheap tennis shoes, long-sleeved white shirt—and a set of clean clothes to put on when we emerged and a little camera to photograph the flowering ghost orchids I was quite sure that I wasn’t going to see. I threw on my swamp outfit and raced down through the hotel lobby, deserted and dim at that hour except for the glow of a pink neon wall clock. The street was deserted and dim, too, and all the hotels along it were still, and the surf was low and miles out, barely licking at the hard brown edge of sand. The beach itself was vacant except for a cluster of furled beach umbrellas and a bony-looking beach chair missing a seat. There is nothing more melancholy than empty festive places, and I was glad when I got to my car and started down the highway to pick up Laroche.

He was not standing in his driveway when I arrived. I guess he had been in the front hall, and when he heard my car pull in he cracked open the door and signaled me to be quiet and then stepped out. Every time I saw Laroche I was
freshly amazed. His tallness, thinness, and paleness seemed always to be growing taller, thinner, and paler. He had the bulk and shape of a coat hanger. Even though he had spent a lot of time in his life walking around the woods he was wispy and unmuscled. The aura of peacefulness and repose was not anywhere around him. Instead he had the composure of a jackrabbit.

He didn’t look dressed for the woods. He was wearing a Miami Hurricanes hat, a pair of thin corduroy pants, a flimsy short-sleeved shirt, and aerobics shoes. He wasn’t carrying anything—no pretzels, crackers, water, Hershey bars, cheese, maps, compasses, emergency flares. I asked him where our stuff was, all the stuff we’d need in the Fakahatchee. He tapped his shirt pocket and then pulled out a pack of Marlboros. “Brand-new pack. I just bought it last night,” he said. “I’ve got everything I need.”

I turned off the ignition and sat staring at the steering wheel. Laroche looked at me and shrugged. “Look, don’t worry about it,” he said. “We’ll stop and get stuff at the Indian trading post on Alligator Alley. Hey, do you want me to drive?”

—

It was not even 7:00
A.M
. when we started out, but it was already warm outside. The road gleamed in the bright light and melting tar around potholes made a bubbly sound under the tires. Laroche was steering with one half of one finger on the wheel. He was able to do this because Alligator Alley is so straight, rolling over the land like a hall runner, but more because he didn’t seem to care if we veered onto the shoulder now and then. I knew him to be one of those people who are really sour in the morning, but that day he was very talkative. He described his new computer work to me and some new software he was writing that he was convinced would make
him rich. As he was talking he saw a car coming in the other direction that reminded him of his mother’s car, so he began reminiscing about slogging around the swamp with her and recalled the time they walked through a charred prairie in the Fakahatchee and came upon a single snowy
Polyrrhiza lindenii
in bloom. The way he recited this made it sound like a fairy tale or Bible story—the bleak journey with the radiant finale, the hopeful journey through darkness into light. A more conventional, more comfortable story wouldn’t have this rhythm of struggle and victory, and instead it would have had the unswinging tempo of usualness and habit, a kind of deadly incessancy. I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration—that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.

Just then we crested a little rise in the road. On our right was the Indian trading post. Laroche swerved onto the exit ramp and into the parking lot.

“Go ahead and get whatever you want,” he said. “I’ll meet you inside.” He peered out the windshield. “This will be interesting. They hate me here.”

In the store I picked up some crackers and bottled water, and soon Laroche came in and bought cigarettes and some Doritos, and then we stood in the sweltering parking lot for a few minutes before we got back in the car and onto the road. “Nobody in there gave me any shit,” he said. “I’m surprised. All the Indians recognize me and they all hate me now because of the orchid case. We used to stop here all the time on our way to the swamp.” He shaded his eyes and looked out over the highway. “You know, I had really big plans for the Seminoles. What I really wanted was to get the orchid lab
going. The nursery was fine, but the real money was going to be in the lab. We could have been cloning orchids day and night, really made it into a huge operation. Eventually I wanted to chuck the nursery completely and just have a huge lab the size of the Seminole bingo hall. That was the master plan. Then we wouldn’t really need the nursery. We’d just be cloning native Florida orchids and wholesaling them around the world, and then we’d expand and not just clone orchids but clone everything. And in the meantime I’d be training my guys in some basic botany. They would have really gotten something out of it. We would do some mutation, some bizarre hybridizing. We were going to weird people out. It would have really been cool. Cool as hell.”

He sped down Alligator Alley and then onto State Road 29, the road that leads under three elevated panther crossings and past Copeland Road Prison to the entrance of the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve. At Laroche’s chosen speed the trees looked like green streamers. When he slowed down to eighty or so, a dirty orange blur in the sky resolved into a column of slow-moving smoke, maybe from a torched sugarcane field or maybe from the plane crash. We whipped past abandoned bungalows melting into woodpiles, and past
NO TRESPASSING
signs that were all shot up like Swiss cheese, and past a rusty boat run aground on someone’s driveway, and past fences leaning like old ladies, and then almost past a hand-lettered sign that interested Laroche, so he smashed the brakes and craned his neck to read it. “Look at this!” he exclaimed. The sign read
FOR SALE: BABY GOATS, GUAVA JAM, CACTUS
. “That’s pretty fucking weird, don’t you think?” he asked. “Now, how would you end up with those three things for sale? Is it random or do you wake up one day and say, Hey, honey, let’s have a baby goat and guava jam business. Why not something else? How about lambs, ferns, and raspberries?
Or, Christ, I don’t know—cows and tulips and orange juice?” He sighed. “What the hell,” he muttered after a moment. “People are so strange.”

At last we were at the Fakahatchee entrance. The car bounced onto the hard road and past the houses and trailers you go by before you cross the boundary of the preserve. The road bent around a creek and then cut diagonally through the swamp, through brush and weeds and trees that were woven together like wool. Every few yards there was a clearing on the side of the road that led to a flat-topped levee—the old tramways built by the Lee Tidewater Cypress Company when they came here in 1947 for the Fakahatchee’s cypress trees. Each levee looked exactly like the next levee, and each stretch of swamp looked exactly like the next. I glanced over at Laroche. His face was puckered with concentration. He caught me looking at him and broke into a smile. He had mentioned a few weeks earlier that he was thinking about buying teeth to replace all of the ones he had knocked out in the car crash that had killed his mother, but he hadn’t gotten around to it yet, so his smile was still holey, a fence missing pickets. “Don’t worry. I know exactly where we are,” he said. “I know this place like the back of my hand.” We drove a few miles more. The road was empty in every direction. At last he steered into one of the clearings and gunned the engine before turning it off. He pointed ahead into the green thicket and said this was the trail we wanted and that we’d better get moving before the day got too hot.

—

The levee was high and dry and we walked for a mile or two before we stepped off. The water we stepped into was as black as coffee. It was hard to tell how far down we would go, and when our feet touched the bottom it yielded like pudding. Duckweed floating on the water’s surface wound
around our calves. There is a deep stillness in the Fakahatchee, but there is not a moment of physical peace. Something is always brushing against you or lapping at you or snagging you or tangling in your legs, and the sun is always pummeling your skin, and the wetness in the air makes your hair coil like a phone cord. You never smell plain
air
in a swamp—you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant’s roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and water slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hurry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape, and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if someone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving but at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places deep within it, it is easy to stay awake.

—

The first orchid we saw was a butterfly orchid,
Encyclia tampensis
, that was growing in a crotch of a pop ash tree. It was a little plant with lustrous green pseudobulbs. The flower
was yellow with a lip that was white with purplish veins. After Laroche pointed it out to me, he lit a cigarette and clenched it between his teeth. “Nice little sucker, isn’t it?” he asked, examining the flower. “Cute.” I appreciated it from a distance because I could feel the land sloping downward as I moved toward the tree and I had decided I’d be happier if the swamp water never went above my waist. We turned north and slogged on. It was slow going. The water was heavy and the mucky bottom held tight, and each step was really three steps—a test step to feel for alligators and a second test to feel for cypress knees, those shin-cracking knuckles of wood that cypress trees send out from their roots to help them breathe. Then finally you commit the real step. After an hour of inching through the water we moved onto slightly higher ground, where we followed a path of palm fronds and fallen limbs so swollen with swamp water that they crumbled under our feet. Laroche stopped under a laurel oak that was draped with vines. “Toward the end of my plant career, flowering vines were my new love,” he said. “It was, sad to say, unrequited.” He frowned for an instant and then noticed a tiny clamshell orchid on a nearby tree he wanted me to see. “I found you two already,” he said excitedly. “I’m going to show you one of every orchid you want today. I’ll show you a fucking ghost orchid if it kills me.” A few minutes later he stopped and pointed triumphantly at a pond apple tree with ghost orchid roots around a low branch. I loved the look of the roots, the glossy greenness of them and their squashed tubular shape and the way they wrapped around the branch like a bandage. “Already flowered,” Laroche said. “Well, there’ll be more to see. We’re definitely going to see one in bloom.” We circled around a sinkhole, then through a tunnel of cabbage palms, then into a stand of willows. We stopped by one shrubby tree. “Here’s an ugly-ass orchid,” Laroche
said, reaching up. “Rigid
Epidendrum
. Ugly-ass. But I’m not a snob. I was always interested in all orchids, not just pretty ones. When we poached we took pretty ones and drab ones, not just the showy ones. They’re all cool, if you ask me.”