The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  The Orange Blossom Express

  PUBLISHED BY CARAPACE BOOKS

  a division of The Carapace Publishing Group, LLC, 1450 West Horizon Ridge Parkway, Suite B304, Henderson, NV 89012.

  www.carapacebooks.com

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, or any other means without permission of the publisher.

  Copyright © 1998, 2008. All Rights Reserved.

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Publisher’s Cataloging-in-Publication:

  Evangeline, M. (Marlene Evangeline)

  The orange blossom express / M. Evangeline.

  p. cm.

  LCCN 2007934770

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9798410-0-2

  ISBN-10: 0-9798410-0-3

  1. Hippies—California—Fiction. 2. Female friendship—Fiction. 3. Drug traffic—Fiction. 4. California—Fiction.

  5. United States—Social life and customs—1945-1970—Fiction. 6. Autobiographical fiction, American. I. Title.

  PS3555.V2O73 2007

  813’.54

  QBIO7-6000219

  Printed in the United States of America.

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Cover Design: Valerie Osterling, Gordon Sterling Design, gordonsterling.com

  The Orange Blossom Express

  M. Evangeline

  To My Newest Flower Children: Liam, Mhairi, and Isaac

  Prologue

  Zihuatanejo, Mexico 1970

  This was not the Mexico of Tijuana, but a southern Mexico of heat full of water and weight and energy dormant and volcanic; here, in the small town, a blonde, luminous, intense as vivid light, stood on the Mexican Street in front of a small marketplace. She lit a cigarette and took a long drag. The smoke spilled into the air in a small stream as she exhaled. She felt volcanic herself, as if she would erupt any moment. She breathed the smoke deep into her lungs. She hated cigarettes, but the smoke felt dry and good. Everything annoyed her just then, the thought of smoking, the bleak Mexican street, the sepia colour of the world, the filthy brown dog snarffling the dirt street, the weird, prancing, wide-eyed rooster with a ream of golden-feathers that spilled from the toggle of red jiggling flesh under its beak. She waited. She smoked. She waited and smoked. The rooster crowed.

  Striking, even at this idle pose, Maggie stomped one cigarette into the dirt and lit another: she felt a rigorous determination, a strenuous resolve. Inside her pretty skull the machinery spun: steel and lace, iron and rust.

  A raisin-faced man led a burro down the street and tied it to a post next to where she stood. The animal shifted its weight from one back hoof to another. She patted the burro’s wiry rump, and dust shifted under her fingers.

  She breathed smoke and wet air and wondered when the smoke would kill her. Soon, she thought. She paced back and forth.

  A brown woman emerged from the market and stared at Maggie, then turned away. The woman seemed bored and curious, not suspicious. Maggie was grateful. Not that the woman shouldn’t be suspicious. A blonde woman alone in this village should arouse curiosity and suspicion. But the woman didn’t care. Maggie was the only one who cared. She cared about the money. She took another drag on the cigarette.

  Aside from Maggie, thin and thirtyish, a few squat, short-legged Mexicans sauntered about their tasks, slow moving like the wisps of morning fog troubling the town. Three more mangy dogs snarffled the dust for traces of food. A spotted gray dog broke from the pack and chased a ruffled red hen into the market. Maggie studied the vagrant carousing animals and the display of fruits and vegetables restlessly. The burro leaned his head into her shoulder, and she petted the animal again. A smudge of smoke spilled from her lips and into the air like passing time. As if the smoke were a part of intricate memory that she might leave here, as if she might leave this memory behind, perhaps this very part of herself claiming ownership of this experience happening, or perhaps some other experience, some experience now past, spilling away in the wake of all newness. And in the rills of smoke as she waited, once forgotten events puffed into the humid air, rising like vagrant smoke rings, twisting in memory, rising, turning in slow time like fragile mists, disappearing, rising, then vanishing.

  The farther South she traveled, the slower time moved, lagging behind her jetlike, minutes and hours reaching back, back, backwards, as if time clutched spent experience like a small child fingering a faded bauble, reaching then towards another smoky, drifting world of her.

  She puffed on the cigarette and sucked all her pasts back into herself, to the here and now of this Mexico and this last task. She watched an iguana slither by with fancy goosesteps.

  Fog gusted up the street, slow moving, an almost tangible fog slitting the sun away from the earth, disappearing as she walked, as if filtering the past through the matrix of this presence into another side of herself, an intangible brimming self, a still different self than the one spilling away in each diminishing ring of sullen smoke, and then she stopped and squatted, puckered her lips round and perfect and blew another thread of smoke into the humid mist; barely visible, the smoke spun, then rose straight up, a circular O, like a singular vowel sound or maybe high C, a sopranic burst, almost an aria of smoke and perfection. She stood again for no reason and as she did, her lithe frame erased the perfect zero of smoke and several existences seemed to flitter away like summer leaves in sudden winds, and she strolled on into the small market. She threw away the cigarette, ground it out on the bottom of her black Converse All Star, and picked an orange from a basket. She thought about bananas, but she was overdosed on bananas.

  She handed a woman in the market three pesos.

  Maggie dug her stubby fingernails into the rind, pulling back the thick orange skin to reveal the skull of fruit, ripping it down across the fruit, exposing the inside flesh as if peeling thought away from consciousness, or perhaps peeling thought and consciousness away from the subconscious, as if this experience of digging deeper into consciousness of mind and experience seemed juicer and richer than the thick fancy thought above it, as if thought itself were only the casing, the thick protection grown around the essence of fine fruit: this mandarin moment. She nibbled the inside rind with her teeth and spilled more rind upon the ground as she peeled. The fleshy throated iguana had climbed a decaying rock wall and stared blinkless into the fog, the gray eyes slit. The iguana rose, taut and poised, then slithered down loose rocks, avalanching, and moved decidedly towards long grasses. A bee hovered by her ankle, worrying about the orange rind she’d dropped but landing on her All Stars. She shook her foot; the bee buzzed. Felipe was still not there.

  She waited. She wondered if the plane had taken off, and thought it had, but it was hard to tell about time. This time was just like old times, and sometimes like no time at all, just a space between times.

  Be bop a loo la …

  CHAPTER 1

  Redlands, California 1954

  MAGGIE PRACTICALLY GREW in an orange tree, curled in an orange branch like a California embryo, a budding globe of blonde fruit; she clambered through the joists of the dark limbed trees like the other children of early California, swarming the groves like bees seeking the mysterious nectar of the deep groves, groves that spread back through the verdant green of their own shading branches, creating their own mysterious aura that pulsed with the green blood of growth and the pungent scent of citrus: lemon and orange: navels and valencias, and grapefruit: ruby and white, and the children searched through the gr
een caverns of leaf and fruit and climbed in the deep branches and clung there in the sultry afternoons like sweet sap: California children grown in sun and light. And in the sweet groves they found mysteries other than that of the straight rows of homes their parents occupied: the homes full of early promise. The homes after the first wars. The homes full of California’s obvious potential. In the early years of the budding 1950s, the rich furrows of churned earth were more plentiful than freeways, and the roads that wound through and around the fruit-laden groves were lined with towering palm trees that stretched as far as the eye might see, like the dreams that grew there; as verdant and rich as the groves and the soil, the fronded heads of palms rose high against the strong-blue sky, their fronds sunburnt to frothy brown.

  The southern sun drowsed in the expansive citrus groves that stretched a coverlet of green over California’s arid soil, and the deep sullen groves were caverns of mystery and suspense and magic, and these groves belonged to the children of early California as light belonged to the sun, and rain to the clouds, and red earth to the town of Redlands. Maggie knew the dense limbs of orange trees better than her own light skin—dark-limbed branches, dusty with red ants ambling over juice-drenched fingers. She seemed to come to life in the branches of the enormous dark trees, a small waif-like globe of sun and light, as if grown herself from the dark expansive trees, huddling in the joists of the large branches, as if she herself, a fruit or leaf. And here in the joist of dark branch, she knew herself to be other than the child she experienced elsewhere. She troubled the citrus growers like an orange-dog, a butterfly or fritillary, a free-spirited bright thing that darted in and out of the groves like a small nymph, trampling the red furrowed earth of irrigation trenches, and teasing and being teased by the brown fruit pickers who moved through the groves like locusts during harvest. The long glowing sun of early California, drowsy with first light, became her constant companion; and the fragrance of blossom, lemon and orange, the piquant crush of citrus leaf and the spice of peppercorns scented her childhood. The shade of dark-leaf and the light of bright summer, her childhood playground.

  She knew the gusty song of summer wind as it rustled through leafy citrus boughs; and, each fall when the thundering Santa Ana winds raged over the sanded dunes of Southern California like lateral tornados, tangling barbed weeds into fences, skittering tumbleweeds through the mysterious groves that created a buffer between Maggie and the bright sand of the desert, skittering then over the red dirt like a brisk firestorm, waking all in its path like a bright flame: Maggie woke too, like a small orange flame. Those troubling winds riled up the dry red dust, banking into the quiet town of Redlands through silvery green branches of black oaks dripping with moss and spreading through the wide magnolias, pregnant with flower and leaf, and tussling the tassels of peppercorns that hung in the low slung pepper trees into sudden mariachi-like rhythms before quieting. But before that wind settled, it riled more than red dust. Those winds slipped under Maggie’s freckled skin tethering restlessness to her very bones.

  Maggie knew her town by its trees, and she knew that beyond the thick canopy of groves existed a different world. Beyond the trees was her future, beyond her smallness, and her smaller self sensed that someday her bigger self would blow like seed to some distant soil, some moist green womb of earth, some organic matrix of nourishment. Until then, she was bound by the red soil like the trees that grew in it. The trees filtered the winds and loosened their seed as the gusts rippled through the dry Southern valleys, carrying, too, dark specks of golden poppy seed along with the prongs of thistles and thorn that seemed to germinate in the dry air itself. Tufts of dandelions too, tall and spindly, caught the sudden winds, seeding themselves singularly, or in random clumps of threes or fives, not paired in horticultural symmetry.

  When the winds almost blew her out of the branches, her tiny fingers coiled to the tree, almost rooted, while the fierce air tangled her hair, twisting the blonde of her into the citrusy limbs. From those leafy branches, she watched headless roosters run in bloody circles before Sunday dinner; high and above the paths of the erratic dying creatures, the trees kept her safe from sudden surprise, but later, she would crawl down as dinner cooked to trace the path of blood from rooster to pot, and wonder. Alone, ambling in the yard of trees and full of bright afternoon, she’d make companions of light and sun, and create wild tales to enchant the sow bugs that curled under the rich soil like small marbles, hurl them unimaginable distances to see how far they might travel, and imagine then, other creatures, smaller even than Maggie, fairies and elves, other creatures of shadow and light. But even when her feet were on the ground, her eyes settled on the weather vane spinning over the house next door as if she could know the day by knowing how the wind blew and where it might wander.

  The enormous yellow Victorian had dormers jutting outward like great wings as if those enormous dormers might spread wide and catch that wind itself. Far below the third story, where the winged dormers perched, hand-turned railings spiked the partially screened veranda and descended wide wooden steps that led to a garden pungent with the fragrance of rose and lavender. Beyond that were beds of pungent lantana and even further into the deep green yard orange blossoms frosted the trees already in fruit, and then lemons, yellow and tart, bunched like grapes from the vigorous trees, and the wind scattered the intoxicating scent throughout the neighborhood. Dwarfed next to all this stood Maggie’s house, seemingly far too small and much like her when she lived there.

  The small wooden house, built in 1910, seemed quaint amongst the larger, grander houses on Grant Street, but Johnny Morrison, Maggie’s father, wasn’t born in the Grant Street house; he was born in Sweden when the fashion of the time was to go west over the Atlantic to the Northern plains of America.

  Zihuatanejo

  The Mexican wind blew a scattering of hazy dust into a small cyclone, churning the fog to a burnished brown, almost sepia, understated and full of potential eruption; the tarnished, rust tinted haze skittered along the dirt street and over the small hoofs of the burro who stamped in annoyance as if the haze had texture, as if it could be felt like a wayward bramble or a rumpled rope bound round his fetlocks; the burro pulled away from its tether and brayed to the wrinkled old man who had wandered off. The small dingy animal moved towards Maggie and put his flat-bristled head against her chest, slyly nibbling at the orange in her hand. She pulled the orange away and wondered where the man might be going; she picked up the damp rope that had unwound from a small pole and tied it again with a slipknot.

  She left the tethered burro and wandered down the road to admire a display of coppery pots and bowls; some copper chimes outside the small shop tinkled in the breeze and below the chimes, the burnished copper displayed a pounded shine. She ventured into the stall to see herself in a mirror framed in hammered brass; the copper man offered her a good price for the mirror, but she didn’t want to buy even though she thought the brass frame accentuated her bright blonde hair; even in the slight sepia light, the reflection of blonde on blonde shone provocatively; her green blouse with pink flowers seemed faded, slighter in this light, but the blonde much brighter. She turned sweetly in front of the mirror and admired herself; she seemed sweeter in her reflection, she thought, sweeter than she felt or seemed to feel. Who was that sweet girl? Some blurry image of someone else? This Maggie turning or just her bright reflection? The images seemed to spread backwards as if they might meet somewhere behind her reflection, some elsewhere, refracted-by-the-lens Maggie. The bright reflection throbbed deep in the back of her skull like an enlarged heart, thump, thump thump; her mind throbbed and pressed against the slight frontal lobe of her skull where thought pressed outward like a disembodied spirit, a mythic nymph, staring at her own shimmering reflection through the lens of time, and time, refracted against its own presence, adjusted, slid like a water snake, consciousness always in pursuit of a presence that seemed fueled and seeded by the phenomena of the recent and remote past. The thought moved like a
n insect and made her uncomfortable again, became self-conscious as thought as it did so. The immediate reflection became a variation of the reflection thinking about itself; as if her awareness of the moment existed in several states of consciousness, one immediate, as she stood watching her reflection in the mirror, but another, remote, independent, and another, more recent, but essential to the others, and then, beyond the prolonged refraction of image were a multitude of side shadows, vague, unnatural, unattainable; she felt a flurry of dark shadows looking back through the mirror into the consciousness that observed the reflection. Mesmerized, she turned again, seeking the variations of herself shining back through the brass mirror: blonde on blonde, burnished beauty, shadow on shadow, archetypal monuments to this moment or that. She smiled sweetly to the sweet reflection knowing the absurdity of sweet and its insipid taste that felt toxic to the reality of any moment. She’d think about the reflection another time, she thought; but the immediate reflection seemed provocatively distracting and she lingered in herself a moment more, then sighed in resignation as if she must leave herself. Somewhat annoyed, she turned, and as she did the covey of dark shadows lifted somewhere like a flock of dark birds, rose upwards through her thought and disappeared. She took a deep breath and went back to the street to wait. She hated waiting and put the orange in her pocket so she could smoke again. She didn’t feel sweet at all but she knew her reflection always seemed that way: the immediate reflection seemed entirely sweet, but the other shadowy images, the side shadows of those unsettling reflections were intoxicating. She fumbled for the cigarettes, annoyed, not sweet at all and lit another cigarette to prove it.

  Pity the Poor Immigrants ……