Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  I tried to shake his hand.

  “He’s got no control over himself,” said Thurma. “That’s why I worry; he’s got no control over nothing no more.”

  When Thurma had wheeled him away, Carmen said Chandler’s face hadn’t always been that way. “His mouth is the only part on him that moves any more, and still she doesn’t trust him.” Carmen said Thurma’s biggest worry was whether her boyfriend would be faithful to her for the duration of his life sentence, and whether he would continue being faithful to her if he ever got out.

  Angel said he knew one way to tell if a person was faithful, and asked to see my hand. With his middle finger, he began tracing one of the lines on my palm to where it disappeared at the base of my ring finger, then he turned my wedding ring until the gold heart, clasped in a pair of hands, faced up at him. He nodded, then smiled, as if he now knew some dark secret about me.

  “My brother sees that you are a married woman, and I know him, I know what he thinks,” said Gustavo, chuckling. “That whoever has given you the ring must trust you very much to let you come alone to visit a place full of men who have been deprived of the company of women, some of them for a long time.” I told Gustavo my husband had every reason to trust me.

  Angel turned the ring again, so the heart was no longer visible.

  “My brother’s wife trusts him,” Gustavo went on. “If she didn’t, you can be sure he would have been dead a long time ago.”

  Carmen had said nothing about Angel having a wife. I didn’t know why it bothered me.

  “She must miss you,” I said. I looked away from him to the gymnasium doors.

  “She hasn’t had much of a husband to miss,” he said. “I worry about her. Some nights.” He must have felt my whole body pulling away, because he let go of my hand. I hadn’t even realized he was still holding it.

  He moved his chair in close, edged his hand around the back of my chair and rested his thumb on my shoulder blade.

  “And you, you have how many children?” The question slammed into me.

  “Oh, no. None. I mean, a dog is all. He’s like a child; he’s like ten children, sometimes. Only I doubt he’ll ever grow up. He’s my husband’s dog, actually. My husband sleeps with him. I mean, he sleeps with him on the futon.”

  I felt embarrassed to be babbling on about Vernal like this, painting a sorry picture of my married life, but the way Angel looked at me he didn’t have to say what kind of a man would sleep with a dog when he had a woman like you waiting for him in bed?

  “I hope you never regret coming to visit me today” is what he did say, after a bit.

  I stared at the Mount Joy Mountain range, a deep sea green in the late-afternoon light, which I could still glimpse through the gymnasium doors, then at the clock on the wall. I had less than an hour left. I didn’t want to leave. Part of me, at least, wished all of me could stay here with Angel.

  “I like it here,” I said.

  Angel reached for my hand again. My palm felt sweaty. I had seen Bonnie and Little Shit Shit, and presumably the father whom Baby missed—a small, muscular man with a tense face, wearing a red bandanna, and a black T-shirt with the words “Narrow Gauge Posse” on the back—going outside; I said I’d like to go for a walk, too.

  Angel stayed close beside me as we made our way around the tables towards the gymnasium doors. Every time we brushed against one another, I felt a shiver of something lost stirring inside.

  We walked in the same direction, around and around the yard. He said he’d never wanted children, but since coming to prison this time he had changed his mind. “It’s easy to think you don’t want a family until you know you are not having one,” he said.

  I remember listening to him, thinking finally I had found a man, the right man for what I wanted—which was to have a child—and where did I find him? In a maximum-security penitentiary.

  We made five circuits of the yard before the cold wind sent us scurrying back inside. Angel returned to our table. Carmen, who had been to the chapel, the only room off the gymnasium that wasn’t kept locked during a prison social, steered me towards the washroom. We had to squeeze past Bonnie and another woman, who were trying to reapply their makeup in the chrome of the condom machine, from which a sign hung saying, “Sorry. Out of Order.” (The word sorry had been crossed out.) The other woman, wearing a red leather mini-skirt the size of a heating pad and a T-Shirt with two fried eggs on the front, tried to wipe the smudged mascara off Bonnie’s face.

  “If you’re going to hang around a man who makes you cry, you should at least buy waterproof mascara,” Carmen told her.

  She ran a comb through her hair. “So,” she said, turning back to me, “what do you think of my brother?”

  “He’s nothing like I expected,” I said. That was a lie. He was everything I’d imagined him to be, and more.

  Carmen turned to me. “Spit on a bean,” she said, her green eyes shining. “That’s how polished his face grows when he looks at you.”

  Vernal came home a day early, saying Desolation Sound had been aptly named. There was no liquor store within a hundred and fifty miles.

  He was catching up on a forest of newspapers in front of the living-room fire, nursing a cold and a tumbler of malt whisky. He looked up when I brought in a tray of cookies, picked out a chocolate chip and fed it to Brutus, who lay at his feet sipping occasionally from his bowl.

  “Listen to this,” Vernal said. One of his habits was to read aloud, everything from the grammatical errors on milk cartons (“old-fashion taste”—what is the world coming to?—old-fashioned taste, please!”) to the list of ingredients in Brutus’s healthy dog biscuits. “ ‘Dogs Find Dead Body in Shallow Grave.’ ‘Dead body’ is an oxymoron when the body is found in a grave.” He paused. “You know, I’ve always thought your cookies ought to be a controlled substance.”

  He fed Brutus another chocolate chip.

  “Don’t,” I said. “He’ll get spots.” I lay on my stomach on the carpet, flipping through a magazine. Brutus had been diagnosed with canine acne, a stress-related disorder, according to his pet-care provider at the K-9 Holistic Health Centre.

  Vernal put his paper aside to light a joint.

  “ ‘Would you rather die before dessert, when you still have dessert to look forward to, or after you’ve eaten dessert?’ ” I read.

  “It depends.” He paused and threw a third chocolate chip up in the air; Brutus caught it before it hit the floor. “What’s for dessert?”

  “Just answer the question. It’s a quiz. To see if we’re compatible.”

  “It’s a bit late now. You should have asked me that two years ago.”

  “I did.”

  “And …?” he asked, inhaling and holding his breath.

  “You were reading the newspaper.” I took hold of his left foot and began massaging it.

  “I need another drink,” Vernal said, exhaling as he spoke, trying to extricate his foot.

  “Drink to me only with thine eyes.” I held on tight, rubbing in between his crooked big toe and the next one.

  “That won’t cure cotton mouth,” he said, pulling away and going to the cabinet for another Scotch.

  We’d snorted a few lines together, then attempted to have sex, when he got off the boat. I always knew when Vernal had been with another woman, even before he got his clothes off and came to bed. He smelled different. And when he touched me, I knew the rest.

  But this time I’d felt different too. Whatever part of me had been drawn to Angel—so much so that I even fantasized about having his child—made me feel I was betraying him by lying naked beneath a man I’d been married to for almost two years. And when Vernal began thrusting deeper, I sank my teeth in his neck and my fingernails in his back, wanting to hurt him for not sensing the distance in me. He’d stopped, rolled off me and looked away through my eyes.

  “Don’t mark me,” he’d said.

  I closed my magazine, sat up and hugged my knees, looking out over the lawns and
formal gardens to the stone wall while Vernal opened a pack of cigarettes and found something else in the paper he thought would be of interest to me. “Listen to this: ‘Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail.’ ” He always began by saying, “Listen to this,” followed it by the headline, and then let me suffer until he decided whether to read me the rest of the article—another of his habits.

  “ ‘Carrotty Nell Kelly—where do they get these names?—came home and found her husband, Seamus, peacefully watching a wrestling match. When she suggested he turn the television off immediately, and he didn’t comply, Mrs. Kelly smashed the screen with a toaster oven and went back to the bar,’ ” Vernal read.

  Vernal tossed Brutus a cookie without any chocolate chips left in it; Brutus sniffed it and turned his head away, looking miffed.

  “ ‘The judge said that any woman who preferred drinking to watching family television was not only a threat to the family unit, but a menace to our society,’ ” he continued. “ ‘Furthermore, women who expressed their preferences in a violent manner did not belong in the home—jail was the only place for them.’ ”

  As Vernal read to me, I pictured Angel lying on his bunk, staring up at the dull green institutional gloss on his ceiling. I thought of lying on top of him, then underneath him, and then I thought, jail might not be such a bad place for a woman like me either.

  I had gone back to the kitchen to get a bag of jalapeñocheese-flavoured tortilla chips—of all things Latin, Vernal liked only tortilla chips and cocaine—when I heard the doorbell ring. Vernal yelled, “Got it!” and when I went back to the living room, I-5 was there, sweating in the sarape he had just purchased “somewhere high in the Andes.” I could think of only one reason he’d be wearing a ruana (sarape in Mexico, ruana in South America, but I didn’t bother correcting him) in the house. Like most of Vernal’s coke dealers, this one was another right-wing expatriate.

  He was living off the land again, he told Vernal—which, I assumed, meant he’d sold the timber rights on his property, as well as the mineral rights. He’d built a “pine shack” on the outskirts of the city, no running water, no mod cons.

  “What do you heat with?” Vernal asked.

  “A .44 Magnum, man,” I-5 said, patting the bulge his ruana covered, making a snorting sound in his throat before cutting out a dozen lines for us to sample on Vernal’s Criminal Code. I-5 got his name because he was famous for laying out lines as long and straight as the interstate highway that ran the length of Florida. I did my share, then went back to the kitchen to reheat the Chicken Quito Ecuador I’d made from the Time-Life series.

  I heard Vernal laugh, then the rustling of newspapers. I-5 snorted through his throat again, a constant irritating habit of his. “Shallow grave! What’s this friggin’ guy talking about? I spent an hour digging in that friggin’ hard scrabble. Look at these blisters! I oughta put that reporter in a shallow grave. Makes me look like a friggin’ amateur.” He left soon after, saying he had an appointment with a landscape artist, but by that time neither Vernal nor I had an appetite for Chicken Quito Ecuador.

  I lit a fire in the bedroom fireplace and went to bed early while Vernal played Frisbee in the kitchen with Brutus (his K-9 heart specialist said this would prevent “misdirected energy”) then went for his evening jog. Later he came to bed with Under the Volcano, which he opened to the middle, not the best place to begin in this sort of book. But when he started reading it upside down, I knew something was wrong. After a while he closed the book on his chest, crossed his hands over it and stared up at our ceiling, as if somebody close to him had died: I couldn’t imagine who it would be, because Brutus was dozing on his futon and I-5 had left the house looking healthier than either of us.

  “Something’s the matter,” I said to Vernal. It took time, but I finally weasled it out of him. Vernal felt it would be compromising my integrity to expect me to be faithful to him. He said he should have told me before we were married, but he didn’t want to lose me then. We weren’t going to have a family, he said. He’d had a vasectomy.

  I was engrossed in a mystery—Vernal had complained since our honeymoon that I preferred mysteries to him—and waited until I got to the end of a paragraph before I turned to him. “Is there something else you are trying not to tell me?” I said.

  Brutus, who had only been feigning sleep, opened one nosy eye. Vernal said yes, that he’d been seeing a lot of his secretary. I said it made sense, since they worked in the same office.

  “Oh, you know what I mean,” he said glumly. “She came sailing with me and … I can’t go on living like this. She feels guilty about it, too; I’m the one to blame, really …”

  I grabbed the book from his hands and threw it in the fire. It didn’t burn, just lay there growing thickly black. Then I switched out the light. I heard Brutus sigh, and after a few minutes Vernal got out of bed and joined him on the futon. I thought of Vernal saying, “Don’t mark me,” and knew now it had nothing to do with him not wanting to appear in the Court of Appeal with a love bite. Vernal didn’t want his secretary to know he still had relations with his wife.

  For better or worse, mostly worse. Till death us do part. I should have parted his cranium right then with the Steuben paperweight he kept next to his bed, covering his greasy little wad of phone numbers. When I saw Carmen the next day, she said she knew a trustworthy person who’d kill your best friend for a hundred dollars. As far as I was concerned, I told her, Vernal was not a friend.

  part two / no parking for the wedding

  Set the foot down with distrust on the crust of the world—it is thin.

  —Author Unknown

  chapter five

  Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

  Clear conduct, excellent sanitation and positive adjustment will be the basis for television viewing. No items will be stored on top of the television except for a religious book.

  —Inmate Information Handbook

  Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill all and you are a God.

  —Jean Rostand

  Rainy’s hobbies are shopping and crying. The papers said she’d never wanted children, that she killed her twins because they’d prevented her from having a life. Nothing could be further from the truth, she swears. From the day her twins were born, they never stopped her from doing anything she wanted to do. “If I want to go to the mall, I just strap them in their car seats and take them to the mall with me,” she says.

  You don’t get to do a lot of shopping in here, but old habits die hard; that’s why Rainy still speaks in the present tense. Your chances of staying sane are much better if you have somewhere you can go, to get away to—in your head. Rainy gets out of bed every morning, changes her sheets, has six cups of coffee, locks the kids in the trunk of the car and then goes shopping.

  Rainy wears a T-shirt that says “Property of Jesus Christ.” She talks to God twice a day in the interfaith chapel and says He can save Frenchy and me too, as if God were a form of oxygen mask or a life-jacket. Frenchy, who swears she won’t go down on her knees for any dead man on a cross, says next time Rainy talks to God she should tell him to drop the capital H when it comes to words like He and Him because it looks like God thinks he’s a whole lot holier than the rest of us. I’ve made it clear I’m not about to be converted, either.

  I used to blame my parents for the spiritual vacuum in which I’ve spent most of my life. They didn’t make me go to church. I had no friends who weren’t forced to go, and one Sunday morning I was playing in the ditch when two kids from down the street walked past, dressed in their party clothes. I asked what they did all morning at Sunday school; I thought I might be missing something.

  “We learn about Jesus Christ,” the boy said.

  I was impressed. “You get to study a swear word!” I said.

  At that point my parents decided it was time I had some religious instruction. I attended Sunday school for two weeks, learned that “Eve made a b
ad choice” and then dropped out.

  I have a history of dropping out. I dropped out of kinder-garten the first morning, after nearly hanging myself in the playground. My father threatened to sue; he said that in designing the equipment, the architects had resorted to the aesthetics of the torture chamber. My school claimed the equipment had been designed by a child psychologist.

  My care and treatment counsellor here at HV says I have the wrong attitude: I’ve always believed that’s the only kind to have. Mrs. Dykstra says I am glib; I don’t take life seriously. How can she expect a person who is told she is going to be executed on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time to take anything seriously, least of all life?

  When you arrive on the Row, you are given your clothing issue: 3 Jumpsuits; 5 Pairs of Socks, useful for padding your 3 Brassieres (White), which look like the mailbags they’re always busy making back in the general population; 1 Jacket; 7 Pairs of Underpants (Coloured); 5 T-shirts; 1 Pair of Shoes (no laces). The same intake officer who hands you those Extra-Large Jumpsuits will give you underpants too extra-tiny for a kid going through toilet-training. You wear a different coloured pair of underwear for each day of the week (i.e., Red Monday, Blue Tuesday, Yellow Wednesday and so on). It took me a few weeks to figure out the colour code is their way of making sure you put on clean underwear every day, in case you are “differently motivated.”

  If a guard catches you wearing yellow underwear on Monday or red on Thursday, it is considered an infraction of prison rules and you are subject to disciplinary action. My red underwear fell into some bleach by accident (Rainy was sterilizing her needle) and became orange, and I tried to explain this to Officer Gluckman (the only guard who bothers to check). My excuse wasn’t good enough for her. She said there would be no exceptions to the rule that all Death Clinic inmates were to wear red on Monday, and as a result of my failure to comply with prison regulations, I would be forced to relinquish my television-viewing privileges until she had conducted a further investigation.