The Orchid Hunter

I glanced down. Daley waited. Alone.

Dumbass.

I released the slipknot and plummeted. The rope sang through my gloved fingers. Vines and branches whipped my legs as I dropped through the midstory leaves. Above me, the natives fell into the sky. Below me, Daley’s mouth hung open in his usual expression of slack-jawed surprise. I gradually tightened my grip over the last twenty feet, slowing. My boots thumped into the thick forest floor, raising the rich, heady scent of moist earth. The backpack whacked my rump as it caught up. I quickly hauled the remaining rope up and over the branch, then stepped back to let the bitter end slap the ground like a whip.

“Leave me the hell alone,” I grated at Daley, rapidly coiling the rope over my bent arm.

His hat had fallen back on his neck, the leather strap tight on his throat. His sweaty face was more tan than I remembered, and his blue eyes shone with anger.

“You’d better be careful,” he said. “There are other collectors far more ruthless than I.”

“Yeah.” I glanced at the natives struggling to hurry down without killing themselves. “That’s why we’re more successful than you.”

“Give it to me.” He made a grab at my backpack’s left shoulder strap.

Hopping back out of reach, I slapped his hand away. “Why don’t you dig your own orchids for a change instead of trying to steal mine? It didn’t work at school and it hasn’t worked since.”

I strode to the ledge and quickly fed my climbing rope around the stout and stubby palm tree I’d scoped earlier. I backed over the edge. Just as I started seeing rock instead of foliage, I heard the first of the Maisin hitting the forest floor. Their feet pattered on lichen. Broad brown faces peered over the edge.

Kicking off from the cliff, I touched the rock here and there. It was a long way down to the lowland rain forest but there was no need to hurry.

“Come on, luv!”

The warning tone in Daley’s voice made me look up. He lay facedown on the ledge, arms extended, pistol aiming. “Get back up here!”

Would he shoot me? I doubted it, but I shortened my strides anyway, darting back and forth in an irregular pattern while letting miles of rope slide through my fists. Daley’s shooting sucked but I’d made him mad, and some people’s aim got better when they were pissed. Tree branches raced toward me. I couldn’t see the ground. There was only the dark, mottled green of trees waking up as I crashed through the canopy on the lower ridge.

Several more feet, and the end of climbing rope not tied to my harness slipped through my braking right hand. I clamped down hard on the bitter end with my left hand, nearly yanking my arm out of its socket. Two hundred feet of rope and it was too short. Way too short. Dangling like bait on a hook, I glanced up through the leaves. The more intrepid Maisin pursuers leaned far over the cliff, looking for handholds. One had pulled his machete and was hacking away at my climbing rope. Daley took aim. Doing a buttplant on the forest floor didn’t sound like much fun but, as I reflected before letting go, it might be something I could tell my grandkids.

Two branches clipped my shoulder, then I broke through leaves like an airplane descending through clouds. Almost immediately my feet hit thick moss and I rolled hard for some distance. Either I’d fallen the last couple of dozen feet really fast or, more likely, I’d fallen five feet through the leaves of a short but elegant ficus. As I was still conscious enough to register landing pain in my shins, I gathered it was the latter.

I sat up. No nausea, no concussion. Not yet, anyway. With any luck, the rare orchids in my pack weren’t concussed, either.

A whistling hiss warned me to scoot to my right. The climbing rope shot down through the midstory, undeterred by the branches, and slapped the ground a foot away, raising a huge cloud of murky dust that danced in the filtered sunlight. I looked around to make sure the hissing I’d heard had merely been the rope. Nothing slithered.

Ignoring the days-old stink of rotting mammal from somewhere nearby, I tested fingers, toes, arms, legs and shoulders. All good. All ready to go, if a little sore. I coiled the rope and tied it off. The high-speed drops and the machete action had rendered it unsafe, but I live by a simple rule: pack in, pack out.

As I threw the coil over my head and shoulder, I spotted the remains of what looked like a canopy-dwelling spider monkey, its neck definitely broken. I preferred to think of it as a “lesson” rather than as a “warning.” Thank you, God.

Above, I could hear Daley shouting instructions at the Maisin. It sounded like they were fed up and ready to go home. If Daley had a map, he might be able to find his way to the airstrip. I didn’t need a map. And from my survey of the area, I knew it’d take him four hours to get down to me by way of the southwestern trail. Unless he wanted to free-climb down the sheer cliff face.

If I knew Daley, he didn’t and wouldn’t.

“Up. Freaking. Yours!” I shouted to him, and headed north-north-east for the airstrip and my muscle-bound Aussie.

Had my great-uncle Scooter ever bothered to put any money into it, the Slapdash Bar and Grill could have been a full step above the average East Texas honky-tonk it was. The dilapidated front porch showed Scooter’s optimistic view that a good time didn’t mean you couldn’t navigate three tilting steps down to the parking lot. These same steps seemed, as I put my pickup’s nose to the hitching rail out front, to be complicating the efforts of a drummer hoisting his gear onto the porch. His next obstacle was the life-size, paint-flaked wooden palomino pony just outside the front door. And I’m sure there’s some law against having an attached firing range, but the local sheriff hadn’t yet seen fit to enforce any regulations and in fact he was knocking back a Bud by the jukebox when I threaded past the sweating drummer and stepped inside.

“Jessie!” Hank boomed, standing to bear hug the air out of me. What little breath I had left at the end got hijacked by his aftershave. “About time you came home.”

“It’s good to be back,” I said.

He slammed his beer bottle down on the worn oak table and looked at me, his gray eyes warm with affection. “It’s good to see you again, little girl.”

I set my brown paper bag, containing a glad-to-see-you present for Scooter, on the floor. “I haven’t been gone that long.”

“Been over six weeks.” A frown’s shadow crossed his tanned forehead but disappeared almost immediately. “What’d you do to your hair?”

I guiltily ran a hand through it. “Long and red didn’t suit me. Shorter and brown’s better for my line of work.”

“Didn’t suit you, my ass.”

“I’d shave it all off if I had the nerve.”

Hank grinned. He knew I wouldn’t, but it’d give him something to rib me about later.

“Scooter around?” I asked.

“Don’t you go nowhere. I’ll fetch him.” He stalked his broad frame up to the bar where Marian, the homely blond barkeep, did her best not to pass out from lust. The fact Hank was pushing fifty didn’t seem to bother her twenty-something hormones. But, as Scooter liked to say, every pot has a lid.

What he meant was, every pot except the ones he used in the back to cook up his four-alarm chili. Hell, if he had more than a ladle and six spoons in the kitchen I’d be surprised. He’d probably worn his trademark black-iron pot down to tinfoil thickness by now.

And he wouldn’t let me replace the damn thing with a new one. A stickler about borrowing, he’d nearly had a heart attack when I’d told him I was going to get a student loan to pay for school. Hank and I had a tough row to hoe when we talked him out of selling the Slapdash to pay for my education. Hell, it wouldn’t have covered much more than tuition and books for the first two years, anyway. The money I’d made working for von Brutten let me pay off the entire loan in a year and two months.

Hank cracked the kitchen door and shouted, “Scooter! Your lady friend’s home!”

Looking around at the clean, well-worn tables, the gleaming bar, the glittering beer mugs, and the black-and-white photos of who knows whom on the walls, I felt the first thrill of seeing him again. This place was so like him—beat-up and characterful and comforting—where you could go and feel at ease and let the world slip by outside.

Being with Scooter always felt safe. When I first came to live with him after my parents died, he made me feel like I belonged here. Even though he didn’t have kids of his own, Scooter somehow knew how to guide me through my parents’ deaths in that car accident. It felt like he’d always be here, always just through the kitchen door, no matter what else was going on in my life.

I guess I was about nine when he blindfolded me and took me into the middle of a neighbor’s cornfield. He set me down between two rows and told me to count to a thousand, then take off my blindfold and come home. Maybe I counted to a thousand or maybe not, but I remember pulling off that navy-blue bandanna, squinting into the bright noon sky, surrounded by the smell of hot corn leaves going dry with summer sun, and thinking, “I better go that way.” Thirty minutes later, I was back at the Slapdash, not knowing how I’d known where I was or where I ought to head. I was just glad Scooter was waiting for me on the front porch with a glass of cold grape Kool-Aid and a hug. He’d patted my head and chuckled, then bragged about how sharp and capable I was to all his friends that night as they sat around the gleaming mahogany bar.

Now, beside the bar, Hank swung the kitchen door wider and Scooter barreled through, shoving his walker out in front of him like a battering ram. Two shuffling steps, shove. Two shuffling steps, shove. I noticed immediately the hair sticking out from under the baseball cap had silvered a lot. His face, a dull gray under a surface flush of either excitement or freshly chopped jalapeños, broke into the broad, toothy grin I remembered from the day I came to live with him. I’d been seven then and the teeth had been real.

When he cleared the door, I went to him and hugged him over the walker, feeling his loose-skinned old-man shoulders through his plaid cotton shirt. Two-day stubble scratched my ear and his arms tightened shakily around my back as he said, “Well, well. How ’bout that.” He smelled like garlic and mothballs and spearmint. If I could bottle that scent I’d remember him forever.

“Hello, old man,” I said.

“’Bout time you came back. I thought you’d done forgot me.” He winked one watery hazel eye to show me he didn’t mean it. “Marian! Bring my girl a beer.”

“What’ll you have?” she called.

“Saint Arnold.”

“You want a mug?”

“Nah.”

Scooter gestured to a table close to the kitchen. “You tell me where you’ve been this time.” He let Hank guide him into a wide-backed chair sporting a seat cushion. So Scooter had finally broken down and set himself up a receiving table. Hank settled in at Scooter’s right hand.