The Orchid Eater (3 page)

3

“Mike, where
are you?”

The woman’s
voice startled him, coming from right outside the supply closet. Mike James
nearly dropped his clipboard. He’d been drawing a dragon with a dripping torso
hanging from its fangs. He made sure that the vacuum bag inventory list
completely covered his sketch, then he stuck his head out of the closet.

“Right
here,” he said. She was standing several feet away, with her back to the
closet. When he spoke, she jumped visibly.

“Goodness,”
she said, turning a startled face toward him.

It was the
middle sister, plump, pale and sort of pretty. She looked around the store,
flustered and embarrassed, then moved closer.

Is this it?
he wondered. Finally? Is she going to push me back in the closet
and do it to me here and now, with her sisters and all the customers right
outside, and her father in the back room? I guess she’s okay looking enough—I
mean, she’s a
woman!

She came very
close and lowered her voice. It was sweet and almost husky:

“Mike . . .
could you go count the floods in overstock and see if there’s anything we need
to put on order?”

“Okay, Miss
Glantz.” He tried to keep his disappointment from showing as he saluted her
with his ballpoint pen and headed toward the back of Glantz Appliances, past
rows of blenders, clocks and toasters, under racks of swinging mock-Tiffany
lamps, past the counter where the other two Glantz sisters stood arguing over
the week’s receipts. They were all “Miss Glantz” to him; he knew their first
names but didn’t use them, couldn’t even keep them straight.

The door at
the rear of the store opened into a dark region of handmade shelves crammed
with junction boxes, lead pipes, Bakelite sockets, spools of coaxial cable. Old
Mr. Glantz, father of the women out front, stood at his workbench in a pool of
light, dissecting a toaster, mumbling to himself, oblivious to Mike’s presence.
A wooden ramp led up between the shelves to the delivery entrance at the rear.
He paused at the door, looking out at the parking lot and alley behind the
building, where the asphalt seemed to seethe and simmer, soft as wax. He was
almost glad to be indoors on such a day. Almost.

Mike went
into a storage area near the top of the ramp and started rummaging through
boxes so light they felt empty, counting indoor floods and outdoor floods in
various wattages, in shades of amber and green. He noted the totals on a
clipboard. Someday, if he worked here long enough, he could look forward to
keeping all the different kinds of lightbulb straight in his head, like Mr.
Glantz, who could instantly name the order number of any replacement part, like
some Houdini of household appliances.

He
calculated he could spend a good ten minutes back here before anyone disturbed
him; so, resting his clipboard on a dusty wooden shelf, he peeled back the
inventory lists and returned to filling in bloodstains on the dragon’s teeth
with a red pen, drawing big splashing pools of it on the ground below the
victim. He used a little red to touch up the victim’s nipples as well.

Scarcely any
light came through the delivery door into the storage area, and while he was
drawing even this went dim. Two guys blocked the door, in silhouette. The
tallest one was his best friend, Scott Gillette. The other was lanky Edgar
Goncourt, whom Mike scarcely knew except by reputation. Mike could smell a
faint whiff of incenselike musk coming off him—a weird cologne he associated
with the Alt-School crowd.

They peered
down the ramp toward the front of the store, not seeing Mike in the shadows.
Scott said, “This is where he works.”

“Old
Glantz’s place? Man, that sucks. Imagine that hardass for your boss.”

“Hey,” Mike
said. “Over here.”

Scott
blundered into a case of three-way bulbs and knocked it over. Little packages
pattered down the ramp.

“Watch what
you’re doing!” Mike hurried to prevent further disaster, gathering the boxes.

“You get off
soon?” Scott said.

“Pretty
soon. Why, what’re you guys doing?”

“Edgar lives
up in Shangri-La, right where you’re moving. We were going to head up there.
You want us to wait for you?”

“It won’t be
till like a quarter after five,” Mike said. “I have to sweep up and stuff.”

“That’s
cool,” Edgar said.

“Mike?”
called a perpetually hoarse voice. “Who’s up
there?”

He looked up
from repacking the carton Scott had spilled. Mr. Glantz was coming toward the
ramp.

“Just some
friends of mine,” he said.

“That’s
Edgar Goncourt! Get him the hell out of my store!”

“Just
leaving,” Edgar said. “Don’t sweat it.”

“Meet you at
the library,” Scott said.

The two of
them hurried into the alley, laughing. Mr. Glantz trudged up the ramp in his
heavy boots. “I didn’t know you hung around with boys like that. I thought you
had more sense. You should choose your friends more carefully.”

Mike started
to say that he hardly knew Edgar, but although it was true, it sounded like
betrayal. He and Edgar did not exactly occupy the same orbits, since Edgar was
in the Alterna
tive School, which had a building to
itself adjacent to the main grounds of Bohemia High. The Alt-School students
took lots of field trips in a broken-down, painted-up hippie bus, and had
legendary parties where faculty and students alike supposedly took drugs,
listened to Led Zeppelin and engaged in orgies. In that notorious pantheon of
spectacular rebels and tragic, hollow-eyed losers, Edgar Goncourt was only a
minor figure, neither demigod nor semidemon. Quiet, secretive, all but
anonymous, he had never spoken even one word to Mike until just now, on the
shadowy ramp. The thought of all the things Edgar might know—the wild world to
which he was privy—turned a key in a lock at the top of Mike’s skull, opening a
magic door in the back of his dull little world. He was not about to throw away
that key, or stop that door from swinging wider. He’d always been curious about
Edgar and his friends—envious of the kids who, because they didn’t do as well
on tests, were allowed to create their own lessons. The girls in the Alt-School
all looked worldly, experienced, even somewhat jaded in their bell-tasseled
tie-dyed skirts, with their hairy legs and unshaven armpits he couldn’t help
but imagine sucking on. Girls straight out of
Zap Comix,
R. Crumb
women, sexy and seductive, who never noticed Mike (though they weren’t stuck up
in the same way as the ordinary Bohemia soshes and cheerleaders and surfer
chicks) because he looked so . . . so normal, in his
striped T-shirts and flared trousers.

Mr. Glantz
stood over him while he finished repacking the box.

“You just
ask some of the other merchants if things don’t disappear when that Edgar comes
around. He’s been arrested more than once—and not only on this street. There’s
better things to do with your time than go around with hoods.”

Mike shoved
the box back onto the shelf as hard as he could, hoping something would break.
His mind was a cloud of Alt-School orgies, vivid pictures of all the things
he’d missed out on because he was so damn square.

“Better
things than working here,” he muttered.

“What’s
that?”

“You don’t
even know me, Mr. Glantz. How do you know I’m not just like Edgar—or worse?”

Mr. Glantz
stared at him. Stared and swayed, holding on to the wooden rail that ran along
the ramp. In the dim light, his face lost all expression and his anger sloughed
away. He wasn’t looking at Mike now, or at anything. Something might have come
out of the toaster on his workbench, crawled up his arm and eaten a piece of
his brain. His eyes had melted.

Mike’s mouth
went dry; he felt sick all of a sudden. Poor old geezer wouldn’t hear anything
else he said right now. Probably wouldn’t remember the encounter with Edgar and
Scott either. Mike brushed past him, on his way into the store.

Up front,
the oldest and youngest Glantz sisters stood near the register arguing about
hearing-aid batteries. He didn’t see the middle one.

“Your dad’s
having another one of his, uh, diabetic things,” he said. Several customers
looked his way. He jerked his thumb back at the ramp.

The two
women looked peeved and worried at the same time. The older one grabbed a container
of orange juice sitting on the back counter and hurried toward the storeroom.
“You should have been watching the clock.”

“I
should have been watching?” said the younger. “Mike, could you
hold the fort for a minute?”

“I don’t
think so,” he said, and watched her face change. “He just gave me the rest of
the day off.”

“Well, we
could use your help right now. Couldn’t you stay just another few minutes?”

“I’m sorry,
Miss Glantz, I’ve got to be somewhere right away.”

He grabbed
his unseasonably heavy jacket from behind the counter and walked out the front
door, avoiding her frustrated look. She had no reason to doubt his lie, and
what could she do to him anyway? He wasn’t her slave.

Mike hurried
through the shade of a dozen awnings, past stores that sold unicorn jewelry,
driftwood sculpture, sand candles, health food and vitamins. How could he
waste his whole summer counting light bulbs? This job was worse than his paper
route, worse even than the week he’d spent with blistered palms hoeing trenches
at the experimental farm down in Dana Point. When he was counting vacuum bags
and unpacking tortoise lampshades and sorting batteries, he felt a gray
suffocation sinking down on him; something thick and heavy and inescapable,
like a soft ceiling crushing him, turning his mind to paste. The clocks on the
shelves slowed to a halt and the seconds dripped like Chinese water torture.
That’s
what had happened to Mr.
Glantz. It wasn’t diabetes. The job itself was a coma—a coma that paid three
bucks an hour.

He turned the
block and went up to the alley that ran between Glantz Appliances and the
library. The sisters’ voices echoed over the parked cars like the cries of
parrots. He hurried away from the doomed sensation it gave him, and came upon
Scott and Edgar hanging around on benches near the main doors of the library.

Scott
Gillette was tall and husky—some might say massive—yet he moved lightly, at
times furtively, wearing a heavy olive-drab army coat in all but the hottest
weather, including today’s. At the moment, without any effort, he had wrapped
both hands around the lower branch of an avocado tree that spread above the
benches and was shaking the bough, causing little withered bombs of inedible
fruit to pelt Mike as he approached.

“Watch out
for tree gonads!” Scott shouted.

Edgar sat in
Scott’s shadow: smaller, thinner, wiry, his eyes constantly darting above a
broad, sly smile.

“Hey, it’s
not five yet,” Scott said. “What’d you do, quit?”

“I wish,”
Mike said.

“That’s one
wish could definitely come true,” Edgar said. He closed his eyes and tipped
back his head, as if entering a trance. “You just have to visualize it clearly
and it’ll manifest in your life. Close your eyes and picture yourself walking
up to old man Glantz and saying ‘Kiss my ass, dick-breath!’”

“I suppose
that would work,” Mike admitted. “Is that what they teach you in the
Alt-School?”

Edgar’s eyes
opened slowly, his grin broadening. “Naw. My mom taught me that one.”

“Let’s get
going,” Scott said. “We’ve got a sortie to plan.”

“A sortie?”
said Mike.

“I think he
means a raid,” Edgar said. “Right, Scott?”

“I was just
lamenting the fact that all the avocados get picked or shaken from this tree
before they’re ripe enough to eat. Edgar let on that he knows a few trees that
are peaking even as we speak.”

“Gah,” Mike
said. “I wouldn’t care if you had a whole orchard. I hate avocados. All that
greeny brown smoosh.”

“You must
never’ve had a really fresh one,” Edgar said. “Right off the tree, they’re
sweet as butter.” Edgar licked his wide lips. “When they’re even slightly past
their prime, they get all gray and gross. You’ve got to catch them right at
that perfect moment. Which happens to be today.”