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.
“I’ll do better than just tell you.” I set the brown paper bag on the chair next to me and took out Phalaenopsis donerii, a delicate beauty whose petals gleamed a pure, bright yellow. The lip—the insect pollinator’s landing platform—resembled a leopard’s skin, dark brown and golden. “Fresh from Micronesia,” I said. “She’s small, but she’s fertile. I made sure of that before I turned her siblings over to the boss.”
Scooter’s liver-spotted hand stopped trembling as he touched the plant’s shiny leaves. Just like some stutterers can sing flawlessly, so his hands became steady as a rock around an orchid.
“Wide leaves. Understory t’rrestrial,” he murmured, turning the pot gently. “Monopodial. Better not keep your feet wet, lovely girl.” His fingers lightly traced her lines. “What pests?”
“The usual. And spider mites on the underleaves.”
“Pollinator?”
“The male leopard moth. She blooms for two weeks before the female moths hatch.”
“So the gents make love to her until their lady friends show up.” He shook his head. “Somethin’ else, ain’t it?”
“Timing is everything,” I admitted.
“This is the prettiest since my Laelia anceps. My first orchid.” His voice softened. “Long time ago now.”
“What about the Draculas I brought you last year? Or the Brassia verrucosa the year before that?” I’d nearly broken my neck for the blood-red Brassia.
“There ain’t nuthin’ like the first.” He seemed to want to say more, but didn’t. His eyes sharpened when he tore his gaze from his orchid to look at me. “Couldn’t catch me a couple of moths?”
“You know I don’t do moths. I’m only licensed for plants.”
He nodded. “Appendix One?”
He was referring to the CITES, pronounced sigh-tees, regulations about transporting animal and plant products across international borders. Had I been caught in customs with Scooter’s little Phalaenopsis, I’d be in jail and facing a hundred-thousand-dollar fine. It would have been fun because I’d had four of them packed in my luggage at the time.
I shrugged, noncommittal. Best I not admit to anything in front of Hank, who was, after all, the law. Better for Scooter, too. U.S. Fish and Wildlife raids on orchid growers, even here in the free United States of America, weren’t unknown. Heck, a well-respected Florida botanical garden got nailed a few years ago because they neglected to tell Fish and Wildlife they were preparing to formally register the previously undiscovered Phragmipedium kovachii.
Abruptly, Scooter smiled. “Good girl,” he murmured.
I swigged my ice-cold Saint Arnold while my gut warmed with pleasure. Getting rare orchids into the States under the noses of customs and wildlife agents satisfied us both—me because of the challenge and ultimate monetary payoff from von Brutten, and Scooter because he was a true conservationist.
Scooter had explained to me how the CITES rules worked when I first decided at the ripe old age of ten I wanted to find orchids for a living. It’s simple. You can’t take a plant listed in CITES Appendix One out of its country of origin. It doesn’t matter whether you want to conserve it, study it or clone it. It doesn’t even matter if everybody knows that same country of origin is about to bulldoze the last one under to build a road. That plant can be the only one in existence, and CITES won’t let someone like me save it by taking it out of the country. It’s just one of those things: good intentions gone bad.
Scooter got me started on orchids with his collecting hobby, but I’ve never had the love of the things he does. I like the grittier side. Ever since he told me the horror stories about the Victorian hunters—Roezl losing his arm but tramping across the Americas for the sake of a single orchid, the intrepid von Warscewicz hunkering down in the wildest Colombian floods with his foul-smelling guide—I’ve wanted to be a field collector. For me, it’s the chase, the challenge. If I have only the foggiest idea of what I’m looking for, nothing grabs my gut more than trying to track it down in the middle of a choking jungle. And the tougher the job, the better.
“What else you got for me, Ladybug?” he asked.
I spread five plastic sleeves across the table like a winning flush. As I named the powdery seeds inside them, Scooter’s smile got wider and wider until I thought his jaw must hurt.
“Marian!” he called. “Take these into the greenhouse office for me.”
“The plant, too?” she asked, sweeping up the sleeves.
“No.” He caressed the orchid’s pot with a tremorless hand. “I wanna look at it for a while.” He raised his liquid gaze to my face. “I’m glad you came to see me, Ladybug.”
“Me, too, Scooter.”