Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  “No me mames gallo,” Consuelo repeated.

  I watched him scuttle back over the runway to the truck. Tiny’s father had taught him to fly without lights at night, Consuelo explained as he disappeared from sight. He left him a pair of special night-vision goggles—ones that magnified the light from the stars and moon more than fifty thousand times.

  “His father was an hombre de negocios, one of the best,” she said. He had spent years studying the testimonies in all the big drug cases, learning from other people’s mistakes, and by doing so had created a nearly fail-safe system. He taught Tiny how to fly his plane through “windows” in Panamanian airspace, when, at prearranged times, the military looked the other way, for a mordida, a bite, a pay-off.

  He taught Tiny how to fly back into U.S. airspace, too, without being detected. You flew low, and slow, so that on radar screens your plane looked like a helicopter coming ashore from an oil rig in the Gulf. When you reached land, you flew over a radio checkpoint, and if the spotter on the ground figured your plane was being tracked, you aborted your mission. If you had no tail, your plane followed VFRs to drop sites, like the one we’d left behind, in remote parts of the Louisiana bayou. “At one time, he and Tiny parachuted hundreds of children (a code-name, I learned, for kilos of cocaine) into that swamp every week,” she said, “until he lost his nerve.” She nodded at the shrunken head but didn’t elaborate.

  By the time Tiny Cattle returned, it had begun to grow dark and the storm was gathering strength under cover of darkness. As the engines spluttered, then roared into life, Tiny tapped the fuel gauge, which read empty.

  “Let’s hope the gauge is inaccurate in our favour,” he said. “I got back-up anyway. See that wire poking out of the gas tank … over there, up front to the right?”

  Consuelo nodded.

  “It’s connected to a cork. We start running out, the cork sinks.”

  I knew, as we putted onto the runway, my life was in the hands of some far greater power than Tiny Cattle. I took a deep breath and kept my eye on the bobbing wire that was attached to the cork as the Piper thundered fatly down the runway and laboured into the air. A red light warning Engine Fire Push came on. Tiny kicked it and it went off. My lungs hurt.

  “My truck back home, the brake light comes on too,” he said. “I’ll get it fixed one of these centuries.”

  We stumbled against the southern wind, ascending into a sky filled with bouldery black clouds. The Fat Lady climbed up and up until we were clear of land and flying over open water. This plane seemed to have more of an affinity with heaven than with earth.

  Tiny’s wire, his back-up fuel gauge, had stopped bobbing the moment land had disappeared from sight. He kissed the shrunken head every so often for luck; the head seemed morbidly alive in the glow from the Engine Fire Push warning button, which had come on again.

  “She’s rising like a homesick angel,” he said. “Nothing ain’t over till the Fat Lady falls apart.”

  I waited for the worst—for the engines to die, and then for my own death, a falling out of the sky, that rush, the cracking open, the heart giving a final finger to the wind. And then the bite of water, the blue sting.

  In my mind, I heard the Fat Lady singing, “This is the End.”

  part four / tranquilandia

  It is a sin to be surprised.

  —Tranquilandian saying

  chapter thirteen

  Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

  If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time you are considered out of bounds without authorization and subject to disciplinary action. Running away from the prison or attempting to escape is strictly forbidden.

  —Inmate Information Handbook

  There is more hope on Death Row than in any place of similar size in the world.

  — Stephen Levine, Death Row: An Affirmation of Life

  I’m not here so they can teach me how to walk across a room with a book on top of my head. Prison is not charm school, I would have told my mother, if I’d hadn’t run out of space. I’m here because I’m doing the book. Right to the very last page, the page that’s been ripped out so I don’t even get to know how the mystery is going to end.

  I’m reasonably sure it’s going to go one of three ways. I’ve ruled out lethal injection and the firing-squad. Which leaves the gas chamber, hanging and the electric chair.

  Rainy says I should be thankful I’m not in a concentration camp. She watched a documentary called Heaven Commando (the name for people who worked in the crematoria at Auschwitz), which showed women being tortured “to see how much they could take.” One woman took the beatings, the immersion in a tank full of raw sewage, but still wouldn’t give up the whereabouts of her child. In the end, they got so mad at her they threw her in a cell on top of a mattress that had been stuffed with barbed wire. “That would be the last straw,” says Rainy. Definitely not the Ritz.

  I ask Rainy if they ever found the child. Rainy says it was a trick; they knew she was dead all along. They showed the kid leaving her teddy bear on top of a pile of clothes at the entrance to the showers. They showed another prisoner stealing it, then trading it for an onion.

  Right as Rainy. I mean, she’s right—I have much to be grateful for, like a permanently positioned TV, operative (unless they’re mad at you) from your house, access to books, recreation time for an hour once a week in the long, windy corridor atop the north block, where we can play dominoes or Sorry. By the time I am executed, I could be a qualified hairdresser, scuba-diving instructor, real-estate agent or undertaker. I should be grateful, too, for a permanent mailing address.

  ——

  Frenchy used to go shopping, which would always make her cry, but she wouldn’t call shopping or crying a hobby. A hobby was something you were supposed to enjoy doing, like tearing wings off butterflies, not standing in the middle of an aisle weeping over whether to buy one-ply toilet paper or two. She’d often wondered how many other women felt like weeping, too, but kept shopping instead, holding themselves together until they got home, where they could take it out on the kids. She thought maybe that’s what set her apart from other people, that they could keep their tears inside even when they were mad at something and didn’t know what it was. And that most people didn’t lose hope the way she did.

  As Frenchy says, hope rhymes with dope—you got any?

  Frenchy doesn’t have friends, only interests. Drug interests, mostly. Like the Mafia, but she’s a one-woman mob. She claims drugs are what made her lose her nature before she came to prison and had to change her ways (by ways she means the ways she gets her drugs, the ways she gets high and so on). I haven’t figured Frenchy out all the way yet, and I probably won’t have time to, considering.

  It just seems Frenchy never had chances. The women’s group that is fighting my case, for instance—why don’t they take up hers? I know why: because she’s a poor, black, drug-addicted lesbian with an ugly spot, one who doesn’t give a flying fuck what happens to her next.

  Frenchy’s been in and out of prison most of her life. Her relationship with Laverne ended like everything else in her life, when she was not in a position to do anything about it. They pulled her out of noon count and told her, point-blank, “We just got the call your friend is dead.”

  “I’ve never been down on my knees in my life,” Frenchy said, “but I was on my knees to Mrs. Christianson. Wasn’t there any way I could get out for the day to make arrangements and attend her funeral? Mrs. Christianson said what the judge had told me—that Laverne had cancer at the time I committed the crime, and I should have considered that.”

  My father used to tell me, “Look your last on all things.” The last time I got to look inside a punishment cell was the night my father died. I’d been on the Row for six years at that time. My counsellor said it was for my own protection, so that I didn’t hurt myself. They probably expected me to throw some kind of fit, then they could have used tear gas to subdue me for my own good. I think
I disappointed them, because when I was informed of his death, I asked if it was true that after you die your fingernails keep growing. I’ve been a nail-biter all my life. In death, I hope to have “to die for” fingernails.

  Your hair keeps growing too. Frenchy insisted on getting a haircut the day before (the second time round), but the matron said no, last time her hair blunted the scissors. Frenchy said if her hair had been blonde, they would have shaved it. It’s whatever you want, or don’t want, in here that gives the authorities the power to break you before they finally kill off whatever’s left.

  A week before my father died, I was allowed to make a three-minute “condolences call.” I could hardly hear my father’s voice, it was so small; he asked when I was coming back. I cried and said I didn’t know, and asked if he had forgiven me for everything I’d done to hurt them. I love you, I tried to say over the long distance, and then my mother came on the line. I knew my father couldn’t speak because he had nothing left to say that would give me anything to hang on to.

  Then the line went dead. And it was as if I had been left with no one.

  Vernal writes that he’s been seeing a psychiatrist. He pays her ninety-five dollars an hour to tell him he has trouble getting close to people. So far he has learned two things: that at every moment, whether we know it or not, we choose between having good things now and better things later; and that life is short and there may be no tomorrow, therefore it is pointless for him to continue to delay all forms of gratification.

  Vernal has started drinking again, “just for today.”

  Officer Freedman told us another firing-squad joke. Arthur and Rose, a middle-aged Jewish-American couple, are touring South America. One day, Arthur unwittingly photographs a secret military installation and soldiers march the couple off to prison, where they are held and tortured in an effort to get them to divulge the name of their contacts in the CIA. Eventually, they are tried in a military court, charged with espionage and sentenced to death by firing-squad. The next day at dawn, they are taken out and made to stand against a wall, and the sergeant asks them if they have any last requests. Rose says she wants to call her daughter in Chicago. The sergeant says that’s not possible and turns to Arthur. “This is crazy!” Arthur shouts. “We’re not spies—we’re tourists!”

  “Arthur!” Rose cries. “Please! Don’t make trouble!”

  Most people say they’ve died and gone to heaven. For me, it’s the other way around.

  People make a lot of jokes about Heaven. Most of them are only funny if you haven’t been there. You don’t get many women here who live to say, about their experiences on death row, “Been there, done that.”

  “I’ve got a joke for you,” I say to Frenchy. “What’s black and knocking on the door?”

  “Fuck that motherfucker and the train he rode in on,” says Frenchy.

  The right answer, I say, is “The future.”

  Frenchy doesn’t get it. How can something that doesn’t exist, like the future, be knocking on the door?

  Rainy gets out her pencil, but then she can’t think of anything to draw. The idea of the future doesn’t inspire her at this time. I say we should all be concerned about the future because we have to spend the rest of our lives there, and I tell another joke, about Poland, where a curfew has been imposed. Two soldiers are leaning against a lamppost. It’s seven-thirty at night and one of the soldiers suddenly jumps up, raises his rifle and fires, killing a young woman who is walking down the street. The second soldier is horrified. “Why did you do that? It’s only seven-thirty—curfew’s not until eight o’clock.”

  First soldier: “I know where she lives. She never would have made it home on time.”

  Dostoevsky maintained that at the moment of imprisonment, life, as you’ve known it, stops. You lose the use of your life, even as you go on living, and your mind must find a way to endure this knowledge.

  Dostoevsky also said that two plus two was the beginning of death. When I asked Frenchy what she thought that meant, she told me for her it had always been one trick at a time, and only two choices: “A straight or a Frenchy.” I learned two things: that Frenchy hadn’t been reading Dostoevsky in her spare time, and how she got her name.

  “What’s two plus two?” I ask Officer Gluckman. Her eyes start bulging, even more than usual. Officer Gluckman’s eyes are too big for the rest of her face, and instead of trying to correct this fault, she accentuates it. Looking into her glasses is like gazing into the eyes of some terrible deep-sea fish that has surfaced only long enough to know it doesn’t belong anywhere but in the bleakest depths.

  I ask her again if she knows the answer, and she tells me to shut my cake-hole. She suspects I am making a joke at her expense. Unlike the others, Officer Gluckman doesn’t believe in humour—she finds sicker ways to harass us. For instance, she won’t use our names, but she alludes to them all the time.

  “You better walk between the rain drops, ‘cause I’m gonna be watchin’ real close,” she said to Rainy. “And the first time you get wet, I’ll come down on you.” “Pardon my French, ladies,” she says whenever she descends into the vulgate.

  When I drew her attention to the fact that all the women guards employed on the Row have male pronouns in their surnames—Officer Robinson, Officers Gluckman and Freedman, Officer Hissick, Officer Hennessy—she told me she’d had enough of my lipping off.

  “What’s she going to do, put you in jail?” Rainy says.

  She found a way to get to me eventually. Guards are not descended from Planet Compassionate. We get them from earth.

  Officer Gluckman brought a Talking Nano to work—one she must have taken away from her kids for an infraction of playroom conduct—a virtual pet you have to feed, put to sleep, wake up and otherwise look after. Officer Gluckman doesn’t take care of it properly, on purpose, and when she walks by my house, I hear its plaintive voice: “Feed me. I’m sick.” And there’s nothing I can do, of course, no way I can save myself from having to dig up everything I regret, everything I’m ashamed of, everything I’ve buried. Every day I have to listen to the one tape I’ve tried, over and over again, to erase. “Feed me. I’m sick.”

  The worst part about guards is that their behaviour is unpredictable. For instance, ever since the firing-squad failed to kill Frenchy, we have been on lockdown and haven’t been let out to take a shower. Once a week they bring a basin full of cold water and set it outside our cells. We have to sit on the floor and stick our arms through the bars to reach the basin if we want to have a whore’s bath (what Rainy calls it when you wash yourself in the sink).

  They don’t allow us dental floss or our own deodorant. If you want deodorant, you have to stand by the door of your house, naked from the waist up, arms raised above your head, at five to eight every morning. At 8 a.m., a nurse walks down the row with a can of Right Guard and sprays your armpits.

  We are allowed lipstick, even though none of us wears any. There’s no point trying to figure out the way the guards think—why we can have lipstick, eyeliner and face powder, but no deodorant. No use trying to figure out where they get their ideas, or what they think about when they’re alone, driving home after their shift, or if they have a world-view that doesn’t come with bars around it. I know one thing for certain: guards are the only people who come to prison every day voluntarily. Their own unhappiness, I believe, causes them to behave even more cruelly towards others, as though cruelty could prove to them that they have a hold on life.

  In victims, Pile, Jr. told my judge and jury, what starts out as a primitive urge for survival can turn into a fondness for one’s captors. Psychologically, it is explained as a return to infancy, to the days when the human baby depends on others for food, warmth and comfort. When, as adults, we find ourselves in a similar state of dependency, as I had found myself when I had initially been taken hostage, we revert to the same tactics we used to please our mother to win over the person or persons who now hold over us the power of life and death. To all th
is add the fact that I was pregnant, and had my own baby to protect—didn’t it make perfect sense that I would wish to befriend Consuelo de Corazón? All I had been trying to do, in fact, was to become, in the eyes of my captor, a human being.

  The reporter from Newsmakers called Rainy “a cruel and heartless mother.” Rainy says even though she now has a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, she still can’t forgive herself for leaving her twins on those railway tracks. If she’d only left one of them, she would only feel half as bad, but she could never have afforded the operation.

  Newsmakers had a picture of Rainy with her twins. They had been born joined at the hip and shoulder. They also shared the same brain. Rainy said they had screamed all the time because they were in constant pain, and she had to learn how to give them needles every four hours. She took to using the drugs herself, and that made her babies worse.

  If she could turn back the clock, she would pick her babies off the tracks before the train turned them into a fine red mist and hug them to death (her words). She’d hug those kids so hard her arms would snap off like sugar peas.

  How you feeling? I’d asked her one day when she was sitting with the photograph in her hands, staring somewhere beyond it.

  “I used to think only good things hurt,” Rainy said to me.

  I say, next time someone asks her to compare being given the death penalty to being hit by a train, tell him this: no mother is so heartless and cruel as the society that executes her.

  chapter fourteen

  I dreamed I was trying to bury Angel again. His body was lowered into the earth. I woke up as one of the guards lit a cigarette, took a few drags, then tossed it in after the coffin.

  Dawn coloured the eastern sky, and when I looked out my window, I got my first glimpse of the island that looked like an upside-down fish hook. I had pictured it as being flat, a speed bump above sea level, but Tranquilandia was bisected by a range of bottle green, black-ridged mountains.