The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  The hotel served the needs of a jail quite well since the inmates were women, and the women brought their children to the jail; this was common in this part of the country, since the women usually had nowhere else to put the children. Since the revolution, years before, there was not much real crime in Rosendo de la Rosa, and the sheriffs and even the mayor thought it best to ignore most criminals lest they themselves come under suspicion of some kind. But lately they had had to take prisoners for the federal government since the federal prison had run out of room. The officials at the federal prison had sent Lucy on to Rosendo de la Rosa because she was pregnant and American, and they did not want her in their overcrowded jail.

  Lucy sat down on the thin metal bed exhaustedly; the rattle fell to the tile floor. She bent over with difficulty and picked it up. The guard left her turning the rattle over in her hands. The door was wide open, and from the bed Lucy could see a blue and yellow macaw in the courtyard pace the length of an iron-perch, eyeing a child with a peanut in her hand. The heat of the afternoon swelled like a shroud, making her feel less than she knew herself to be. She knew what had brought her, but she could not come to terms with this reality. She felt as if she were sleepwalking in her own life, but this life seemed no longer to be hers. This was not the Lucy that she knew. This was an entirely different girl. The macaw grabbed the peanut from the child with its strong black beak and the child cried, sobbing like Lucy had as they escorted her by car to the federal prison to fill out papers. The tears, like the tears of the child, would not stop.

  They had not let her use the telephone and she couldn’t understand what they had said to her. She moved as if in a daze from one place to the next while one tear after the next evaporated in the heat. There was no way she could use all her tears, and as one vanished, another appeared. She could not translate the experience into something acceptable anymore than she could will the tears to stay inside her eyes. She did not know how to conjugate the new action; this was a new language and she didn’t know how to speak it. What tense should she use? Intense! The frustration turned to anger and then to bitter silence as she moved from car to jail to car to jail regretting the moment she had first seen Jackson Swackhammer; she had let him talk her into a new language—and had lost something precious—too precious—for this chaos! This language she could not speak! Darkness brewed inside her along with the feisty kicks of her baby that jolted her every now and then to acknowledge its presence and the potential harm she might be doing. But she did not feel guilt, she felt only frustration and fear and anger at herself for being used in this foolish way. The frustration welled inside the heat of her own body as well as outside in the raspy air. This flame of frustration grew and fired itself like heat flashing to a certain spark of fright and of what might happen in this faraway place, this once grand hotel that now bound her to its matrix like a seed inside a womb. Lucy pushed her hair away from her face and took a deep breath, bringing some more of the heat back into her. The baby kicked again. She put her hand on her stomach thoughtfully, and knew that too much anger might harm this child, and to harm the child would be to harm herself. If she could please no one else, she would now please herself and her baby; she promised herself that she would find a way to make the best of this. She rubbed her hand over the top of her child, not considering this lump of new flesh anything but joy, but a joy that must learn to love her as she was, in this jail she had inadvertently but decidedly chosen. The baby kicked again, as if in protest, and for the first time that day Lucy smiled and it seemed she could hear a whisper, a tiny word, like her baby’s breath, echo against the empty walls of the room. Lucy leaned back on the bed, still holding the rattle, watching the child in the courtyard wipe her brown cheeks as the macaw devoured the peanut and then squawked.

  Lucy put the toy on a white table next to the bed and turned the water on in the small gray porcelain sink. Even the tepid water was a relief; she splashed her face and neck and looked in the mirror. She looked much the same, but not the same. Her eyes were different, she thought, and she moved her face close to the reflection to see what the difference might be, exactly, but the same-colored eyes stared back at her; the same familiar green with flecks of raw-umber, sparkled back at her, but something deeper moved inside the green, something she could almost recognize but something she could not hold in the reflection. She squinted her eyes shut and opened them quickly, as if to catch it unawares, but the deepness rippled away from her in the afternoon light. She patted her cheeks dry with a gray towel as she moved to the door. In the courtyard, a gray haired woman was settled in a wicker chair, her fat thighs squished against woven reeds, her fleshy upper arms waving as she embroidered an intricate pattern, poking the hook, confidently in and out white threads, stitch after tiny stitch creating a snowy white flaky piece of lace.

  She stood for a while absorbing the dry heat and the smell of the dusty air that was turning to dusk. Then she turned and crawled in bed under the covers and curled her legs up and pulled the blue blanket over her.

  Ruby Perez and Angel Guiterrez appeared at the door.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Ruby, in broken English. She was very proud of her English and happy that she had a chance to use it.

  “No, just tired,” said Lucy, tucking the blanket under her warm chin and wondering who the women were but too tired now, really much too tired, to really want to know.

  “When you are hungry, ask me, I will find you some food,” said Ruby.

  “Thank you, do you know if there is a phone here?”

  “A telephono? Yes, but we can’t use it.”

  “What will I do?” Lucy’s voice cracked in spite of her effort to control it.

  “You wait. Maybe you can use it. I will see.”

  “Thanks,” her eyes drooped uncontrollably.

  “Drugs? Are you here for drugs?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Ah,” Ruby nodded her head knowingly. “Drugs. Get her some soap, Angel. And a towel, see if you can find a towel. You want to talk?”

  “No. Just sleep,” said Lucy. “Maybe later.” The air seemed heavier and hotter; there was no ocean breeze now, and heat blanketed over her swollen brown loaf of stomach. Her eyelids fluttered, sinking down, pregnant, and fat, too warm, too sweaty, into the thin mattress as if she might disappear here under this blue coverlet, then watching the women leave, letting her eyelids sink, blocking out this reality, this small room, the squawking of the parrot, the murmuring of strange voices, the lyrical laughing embedded with sorrow and crying. A child’s cry? A woman’s? Her own? Cries sounding through her like gritty waves then turning dark and quiet and thin in her dream of this nightmare.

  Ruby Catherine Lupe Perez awoke and swung her long legs out from under the sheet, careful not to disturb the two children sleeping, rumpled by her side. Another bed pushed into the corner of the room held two other children, older, a boy seven, and a girl of eight. The small girls sleeping with Ruby were four and two. Light streamed in the window over the two year old’s face, cutting a line of brightness over the wooden-framed bed and splashing the dull wall with morning. She tucked the sheet back around the children and walked to the door and opened it, bringing more light inside the small room. The sun was still cool and fresh, and Ruby rubbed her arms in the bright light. She went back inside and grabbed a pack of cigarettes and a book of matches and went out to the courtyard in her slip and sat in a large willow chair next to the macaw whose head was still tucked in sleep. As if there were a breeze, she cupped her hand out of habit, to light the cigarette, but the air in the courtyard was quiet. Three finches pecked in the dirt near the scarlet-parrot, looking for grains and seeds, while the rainbow colored bird dozed, his head tucked down. Even its closed black-rimmed eyes gave the impression of wakefulness because of the startling white face. In the center of the courtyard, a circular pond built of stone and clay was slick with moss and lily pads, and underneath those, large gold and white carp finned their way slowly through the mu
rky water. The sun lit the magenta bougainvillea that climbed over the tall adobe walls to the outer landscape where people lived as they pleased in their simple freedoms; yet here, Ruby lived in a freedom she had not known until the structure of this jail had been put around her. Not that she thought of that now; she did not. She thought only of the smoke rising above her head, and how, when the cigarette was burnt to the end, she would get up and wake the children, and then go to the kitchen, like she did each morning, and make tortillas with Angel, and cook eggs and make coffee and sometimes boil potatoes for breakfast. Then she would pour the pinto beans into the sink and sift through them with her lithe fingers for small stones that sometimes hid like beans amongst the pintos and pick them out and then put the beans in a large pot to soak before cooking them for dinner.

  When she finished smoking, she did wake the children from their drowsy sleep, running her long fingers up their spines, blowing lightly with her smoky breath over their cheeks and ears, stirring them into the morning like cream into dark strong coffee. After slipping on a dress, Ruby left for the kitchen, while Catherine Marie, the eight-year-old dressed herself in faded red pedal-pushers and a white blouse. Martin Luis pulled on his jeans and a navy blue t-shirt and left for the bathroom while Patricia Anne drifted back to sleep and Consuela, a pert four-year-old, scrambled out of bed in her drooping panties and picked out her clothing for the day from the pile of half-folded clothes on a wooden table near the door. After getting the brush from the sink, Catherine led Consuela outside, and sat her down in front of a chair while Catherine placed herself down, straddling the smaller child between her legs, brushing her long black hair, then braiding it.

  By now, other children swarmed the courtyard, and women straggled from their rooms half dressed, in blouses not yet buttoned over sleepy wrinkled breasts—some tethered by bras, and some swinging free and sagging—but some freshened and pert—with wide brown nipples in the midst of soft gold-brown skin. The women came yawning into the sun. The jail matron, Firma Louise Reina, cut across the courtyard in a brisk walk intent on the new prisoner, clapping her hands at the children and swooshing them off to their mothers and breakfast. Most of the children scurried behind cotton skirts, holding to the mothers, but Consuela flipped her newly braided hair and glowered her dark eyes at the hefty woman. Catherine led Consuela back to their room and they woke Patricia and dressed her and went off to breakfast with the others.

  The clatter of morning woke Lucy. As if waking in a hospital, she seemed bound to the thin bed, opening her eyes to the gray shadows of the cracked ceiling; the cracks webbed outward and down beneath the peeling paint on the walls, and underneath the paint the once smooth surface was chipped, exposing earthen adobe bricks. The hallway echoed with the mumblings of a language she could not understand, and she curled into herself, pulling the covers around her, staring in disbelief at the inside of the splintering wooden door, that muffled, somewhat, the activity outside.

  On the chair next to the doorway, a clean blue smock: she wondered who had put it there and when. She heard the startled squawk of the parrot and the giggling of children and the firm commanding voices of women starting their morning, but she did not want to start hers; no, she curled tighter into the bed and closed her eyes and listened to the swooshing sounds of this morning that rocked around her, lulling her to sleep once more amidst the common sounds of rising. A thin stream of light suddenly peeked in one corner of the singular window that sat high on wall, the sun outside having risen higher in the clear morning sky, casting its spark into the gloomy shadow of the small room. The brightness of the slivered light cut into her drowse and she shielded her eyes against the sun while rising, first on her elbow, then pulling away the covers and swinging her feet over the side of the mattress.

  The door opened, flooding the room with the noise of the morning, and Firma Louise stood, arms folded, but smiling as Lucy pulled the covers around her.

  “Are you ready?” Firma asked, knowing by looking that, surely, the woman in front of her was anything but ready for this day.

  “Oh,” said Lucy, not certain what she should be ready for, and certainly, not ready for it, whatever, it might happen to be. She had pulled away from the light of the window, and sat shadowed by the large figure of the woman standing in the doorway.

  “I’m not dressed,” said Lucy, wondering if not dressing was an offense, and thinking it surely must be, but not certain how serious the offense might be in this particular setting, but knowing that her own mother would have been annoyed if she were not dressed properly for some particular occasion, but was this an occasion? An event, a disaster, yes, but an occasion? Must one dress for incarceration? And the look on the woman’s face at the door told her yes, yes, she must dress for this, even if it’s one disaster after another, she must dress, and dress, and dress, and brush her hair, and wash her hands and face, and maybe clean her nails, and put on that fresh clean cotton smock, and pretend that it’s silk, or maybe spun gold, and pretend that there are no wrinkles underneath, and that the blue color of the frock is pretty, and not drab, and exactly like the other blue frocks she would surely see if she went outside this room. Yes, she must dress, yes, she could see that now, that dressing for disaster was appropriate.

  “I can see that you are not dressed,” said Firma Louise, “but you must and then go down the hallway, here,” she said pointing, “and you will find the kitchen and the dining room.” Firma Louise spoke English with a heavy accent, but she had spent four years in the States with her cousins, so she was comfortable with the language, and even happy to have the opportunity to use it.

  The gringa was an oddity here, and pregnant at that. When they called her to say that they were sending her an American prisoner, she had smiled, actually, because of the novelty, and the fact that she herself could speak English, and that that would please her a great deal, that pleasure of speaking the same language. And the crime? Drugs? So what? Always here, it was not the crime because everyone broke laws. All laws were broken at sometime or another. Firma Louise knew this because she had seen, in her years as matron, all laws broken. And perhaps, if we invaded her privacy, her private thoughts or her journal or her sacred letters, we might find that she had even broken laws herself. We could even throw suspicion on Firma Louise, and Firma Louise knew in her heart of hearts that a life without crime was a life of luck and not pureness of habit. Not that she had committed true crimes, like the gringa, but that Firma Louise was human and capable of great and astounding error that could be perceived by some as crimes, even though, they might have indeed been only errors in thinking. Things not thought well. Yes, getting caught was the crime, yes, thought Firma Louise, the gringa was unlucky and she had been caught, and the man, yes, there had been a man, there was always a man when it came to a woman, and he had gone free, back to the States. Firma Louise had been told that he had bought a ticket as officials arrested the gringa, and that the man had slipped onto the first plane, which had flown, some said, to Florida, and had been boarding right when Lucy was arrested, and that the man, the one who had used her, had not waited, not for one instant, to see what Lucy’s fate might be.

  Firma Louise left Lucy to dress for breakfast, forgetting to shut the door. Lucy moved across the cool morning tiles of her room and closed the door and slipped on the blue smock that tugged tightly across her brown stomach and breasts, breasts browned by the sun and the very same color of the breasts that had earlier that morning peeked beneath the open blouses of the Costa Rican women. The wide nipples of Lucy’s breasts squished underneath the cotton dress, smearing dark spots beneath the blue, and Lucy wished now she’d had on a bra, but she didn’t own one, and suddenly it seemed like her breasts had grown too heavy and that certainly, if anything, she should have a brassiere, and that she was feeling undressed without one, or was it really a brassiere that she needed? Something else? Maybe, but it seemed at that moment that it was a bra that she needed and wanted the most. She opened the door to the stran
ge and frightening landscape, but this was not a still life, this jail was full of commotion and clatter and three children rushed to her side excited just because she was there and that, for a comforting second, made her smile, and the smile lingered and, for a brief moment, in the comfort of the children, she forgot her fearfulness. Consuela tugged at Lucy’s skirt brazenly, demanding attention as Patricia giggled and grabbed Consuela’s hand away apologetically, but Lucy grabbed both hands, one of Consuela’s and one of Patricia’s and asked in her poor Spanish where breakfast might be. The children led her down the hall towards the clatter of the dining room. When Lucy swung open the large doors a rush of voices engulfed her, and the smell of the tortillas and warm milk made her instantly nauseous. She sat, quickly, at the first long table on the edges of the large hall that hinted a vanquished eloquence, and sank into a rickety wooden chair and gasped lest the nausea overwhelm her. The voices seemed too loud, clinking against each other like glass, then shattering to high splintering laughter, and sinking and clinking and turning to soft scattered murmurs. Many of the women who noticed her entrance looked up curiously, watching, wondering who she might be and how it was she got there, but she had sunk quickly out of sight, so they mostly went back to eating, except Ruby who, naturally, had noticed her own children with the gringa. Ruby got up from her place on the far side of the room, near the paned windows that looked out to the thin sliver of river and the mountains beyond that that were dotted with scrub oak and mesquite and dusty sage, and walked to the kitchen and poured a fresh cup of coffee and dished a plate of scrambled eggs with chilies and two corn tortillas and took this to Lucy, putting the breakfast down on the oak table with carved ornate legs that had once offered plates of fine china rather than the plastic one that Ruby placed on it then.