Cargo of Orchids Read online

  I watched Consuelo remove the pillow from Carmen’s face. Then she pulled out her gun and turned to where her brother-in-law lay, the sound of his laughter like water lapping at the holes in a shipwreck’s hull.

  The silencer made the shot sound no louder than a sigh.

  chapter eleven

  Carmen’s body had a smell to it that lodged itself in my throat, crabbed and small, and threatened to choke me when I breathed. The smell reminded me of the hunting trip I’d taken with my father when I was small, butchering the doe in the bathtub at home, what it felt like to cut open a body with a knife and plunge your hands into the guts of something that had once been beautiful. The smell of rain falling on the summer dust, the warm stink of the dead foetus inside the deer’s body as we emptied her out: how quickly beauty could be transformed into something else.

  Before it got dark, Consuelo had made me go with her as she dragged Mugre’s body up the road, away from the shack. I followed, struggling up a bank, hanging on by the roots of the high, ancient trees, until I stood on a ledge overlooking the swamp. Phallic shoots of plants gave off a musky, post-coital odour. Consuela pushed his body into the black water. I felt dirty just being there—the kind of dirty you can’t wash away.

  On the afternoon of the second day, it began raining, not the misty rain I had grown up with in the Northwest, but a dingy, obscuring rain that dropped straight from the sky. Consuelo stood naked in the rain, a few feet from the door of the shack. She was soaping her breasts, holding them up to the sky, then letting the water slide down off her nipples. I remembered as a child standing in the rain and lifting my face, opening my mouth wide to catch the water that trickled down my hair onto my waiting tongue. I remembered the taste of the rain after it had washed through my hair. I wondered why it had been so long since I’d stood in one place long enough to let the rain soak me through to the skin. All my adult life I’d tried to keep dry, taking shelter whenever it rained, staying inside. Back then, the driving rain had hammered into me a kind of joy; both madness and divinity had been introduced to me by the rain.

  By mid-afternoon, the rain had stopped and the sun was a chip of fire in an otherwise colourless sky. Consuelo went inside the shack and poured diesel fuel on Carmen’s body. Then she came out and sat with me.

  She had prepared many bodies for death, she said, “ever since the day me and my youngest sister, Magdalena, were selling lottery tickets on the street and the guerrilla heroes came.

  “They drove past in a shining red truck like that one parked over there,” she said. “They invited all the kids in the neighbourhood to join their camps. A lot of us went along, because it was something to do. They promised us a better life—so it didn’t take much to convince me to go with them. I learned how to handle guns, to make explosives, to organize military operations. But then the police raided our camps and there were shoot-outs with the army, and the guerrillas took off to the hills.”

  Her brothers started their own self-defence group in the neighbourhood, she told me as she rolled a cigarette, where other gangs had already grown up and were spreading terror. One Saturday, Magdalena, who was pregnant with her first child, was coming home from work, and four pelados (kids who at twelve or thirteen are already learning how to assassinate people) wearing black hoods, followed her, dragged her into the middle of the street, raped her and shot her in the face. “They did it because she was my mother’s daughter, because any child of hers would grow up to be more trouble for their gang, and they wanted control of our neighbourhood,” Consuelo said, striking a match, lighting her cigarette. “Where I come from, it is considered more hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleras while they are in the womb than in the mountains or the streets.”

  Magdalena’s body was taken to the morgue. Consuelo said she spent the next day making her dead sister’s hair look beautiful. Then she organized a wake.

  “The whole family and everyone in the barrio came to pray for her and offer their condolences. Then around midnight, the pelados burst in with their revolvers and made us all kneel in a straight line against a wall. They ripped the flowers and palm branches off the coffin and smashed the candelabra, started breaking up the furniture in the room. Everyone was screaming. The intruders were still aiming their guns at us; they tipped over the coffin, and my sister fell out on the floor. When my brother tried to straighten the hem of her dress—it had ridden up to her knees—they tied him up, too, and beat him, and then they put two more shots in our sister’s head. All that time fixing her hair—for nothing.”

  Consuelo got up, closed the door tight and circled the shack, leaving a trail of diesel behind her as she walked. She lit another match and tossed it into the grass. We climbed into the red pickup as tongues of black smoke licked the air.

  She didn’t speak again until we reached the paved road.

  “Things like that happened every day in our neighbourhood. You learn not to care about it. You look after your back, because no one else is going to.

  “Over the years I’ve watched dozens of people die—friends, relatives. It’s not the same thing when you are the one doing the killing. If I have to kill someone, I don’t think about it. All I think is: too bad for him; he crossed my path. If his back is to me, I tell him to turn around first, to make sure I have the right person. I only pray I don’t kill the wrong person by mistake. If I’m going to kill, there should be a good reason.”

  Consuelo had said to me only the dead cannot be judged. I wonder if she believed, too, the dead would not judge her.

  There were no other vehicles, not even a road sign to indicate how far we were from the nearest town or highway. We passed a trickle of a creek where a turkey buzzard fed upon the carcass of a dead cow. On a solitary oak tree, someone had carved a heart and the words “Stella Loves Bill Bob Forever,” with an arrow piercing the heart, and I looked ahead up the empty road, hating my loneliness, the sadness I had come to at the edges of my life.

  Years ago, in high school, my boyfriend had climbed to the top of a cliff to paint our names inside a giant heart. When we broke up, six months later, I demanded he climb back up and paint them over, but he wouldn’t. He said whenever I drove by that cliff with a new love, I would look up and see my name—and his; in this small way, I would belong to him forever.

  A black man with little clouds of white at his temples stood in the dust at the side of the road and tried to flag us down as we rounded a corner. Consuelo slowed, came to a stop and waved out the window to the man. I watched him approach in the rear-view mirror, sticking his tongue in and out through the gap where his front teeth were missing. He carried a metal washtub with a mop handle protruding from it, which he tossed in the back of the pickup. Then he climbed in beside me.

  His name was Junius, and he smelled of the road. His clothes were shabby; he’d lost all the buttons on his shirt but wore it pinned together down the front. He said he was one lucky man to have a couple of beautiful ladies stop for him; he had been overheating at the side of the road all morning; he always appreciated the company of ladies. He told us he had been married once, and that everything about his lady had been beautiful too, even her name—Antoinette. He told us his stomach had always bothered him. He told us he had thirteen brothers and sisters, and that one of his brothers ran a concession stand at Max Allen’s Reptile Gardens, which we would have seen if we’d ever driven south on Highway 54. I was reminded, again, of the willingness of strangers to divulge their life story to other strangers when thrust together by a common journey, for as long as it lasted.

  Consuelo looked bored and restless; she didn’t understand what he was saying. Junius told us he’d planned on having a big family, but that Antoinette had barricaded herself in a room when their first son was born, then smashed the baby’s head against the bedpost and thrown him up to the ceiling, where he hit the fan before starting down. He told me he’d had to wash the blood off everything, including the doorknob. He said he’d never forget how it felt to hold a doorkno
b wet with his first son’s blood. He said when he turned the doorknob, it had opened up the place inside him where he locked his grief.

  I listened to him talk, peering through a window smudged with sunlight and dirt, the live oak trees at the side of the road full of mockingbirds and screeching blue jays. After that incident, Junius continued, his crazy wife took blankets and stuffed them under her skirts, pretending there was another child, as if she could fool him. Every Saturday, she took the blankets out and waded into the flooded cypress trees and stood on one leg like a great blue heron. Then she would beat on the blankets with a stick, until one day she got sick and dried up inside. He took the blankets away and washed them, then rolled her up in them and buried her next to the body of his son.

  Junius mopped his brow with a oily handkerchief and asked Consuelo if she might happen to be driving all the way to Lafayette, which he pronounced “Laughyet,” where he was going to hunt for a job on the gut bucket. I translated for him. Consuelo told me to ask him how much further it was to Lafayette, and he said that all depended on how long they took to get there. Consuelo wanted to know if we would arrive before dark, and Junius said maybe yes, maybe no, depended on if she kept driving the way old people made love. I told her what he’d said, and immediately regretted it; Consuelo drew her .38 out of her waistband and asked him if he thought he’d get there faster if he got out and walked. She pointed her gun at Junius’s feet; no translation was necessary. Junius started lifting his feet one at a time, as if dancing. His tongue lodged itself permanently between the gap in his teeth.

  I told him Consuelo wasn’t going to hurt him as long as he co-operated. Consuelo cursed. Junius, who seemed to have become more shadow than flesh, began to moan and rock back and forth in his seat. His face had ballooned with fear, and his jaw was working overtime; he seemed to be chewing air and swallowing it. He had spit coming out at the corners of his mouth. I half shut my eyes against the glare from the road, wishing the world could be another kind of place.

  Then—I couldn’t help it—I told Consuelo to leave the man alone. It was the wrong thing to say; I had once again showed contempt for her ways. I could see it in her eyes, the triumph of one who has gained dangerous power over another.

  The air inside the cab felt dense and wet. Consuelo drove, avoiding potholes, avoiding conversation, still holding her .38, which rested on the steering wheel. I kept my eyes on her hands as she drove, trying to read my future. I already knew what was going to happen to Junius.

  She took everything he had, except his undershorts, and left him, the sun teetering over the tips of the pines, at the edge of a wood bordering a sandy red track that cut through an endless pecan field.

  “Don’t think he wouldn’t have robbed us if we’d given him half a chance,” she said.

  The sky to the south trembled with dry lightning. Consuelo pulled into the oyster-shell parking lot of the first motel with a Vacancy sign and parked between two rain barrels full of empty Jax bottles. When she opened my door, the truck filled with the smell of creosote and burnt diesel fuel from the railway tracks across the road, where a Southern Pacific freight car was on fire. The fire seemed to draw the night sky down around it, enveloping two men with flashlights who stood a short distance from the wreck, trying to contain the flames.

  When I translated for Consuelo what the motel manager had said, that the nearest accommodation was a mile up the road, that he wasn’t looking for more business tonight, Consuelo told me to ask him to reconsider. She left a hundred-dollar bill on the counter, then went to get a Coke from the machine. The manager, who smelled of nicotine and a franchise chicken dinner, said the Coke machine was on the blink and the ice machine was broken too. As far as he was concerned, he said, ice was for Eskimos.

  “You girls travelling alone?” he asked me, toying with his moustache.

  “Help me,” I tried to whisper. “Help me get away from her. Call the police.”

  He looked at me sideways, lit a cigarette and sucked the smoke in through teeth that were stained as yellow as his moustache.

  I pushed the smoke away with my hand, and tried to communicate, by using sign language, that I was desperate. He nodded his head, trying to appease me, as if to say he would agree with anything just to keep me happy until the men in white jackets arrived. He stubbed out his cigarette in an ashtray filled with nail clippings, then covered the ashtray with a wad of invoices stamped Overdue.

  “She got some kind of problem?” he asked Consuelo when she came back to the counter. He nodded towards me, then looked at Consuelo and raised his eyebrows. “I don’t need any trouble here,” he said. “I have to call the police, it will only bring more.”

  Consuelo narrowed her eyes at him, and then at me. If she didn’t understand the words he spoke, she must have understood my intentions. Behind him, on the wall, I could see rows of room keys hanging on hooks. I thought of what had happened to the last man who hadn’t surrendered his key. The manager stared at us, not moving, but Consuelo had a way without words. He shook his head, then tossed her the key to Room 0.

  “Leave it in the room when you check out,” he said. “I don’t do mornings.”

  The night air felt cooler when we went back outside, and a light rain washed over me as I lifted my face, exhaling the unpleasant fumes of the day—the stale air, cigarette smoke and chicken grease. As we crossed the parking lot, through glazed pools of yellow light from the street lamps, the blue neon Vacancy under the Pair-A-Dice Motel sign, I sensed a new loneliness taking shape around me, and I wanted to run out onto the highway leading down into darkness in both directions and wait for the ride that would take me away from myself.

  Then the lights went off inside, and the word Sorry replaced the neon Vacancy. Consuelo pushed me across the shell parking lot into the blackness.

  Consuelo tied me to the bed, saying that if I was going to behave like a loca, she would start treating me like one. I said I was her hostage, that I would be crazy if I didn’t try to get away. She reminded me again that the only reason she wasn’t going to hurt me was because of the baby. I said she had hurt me enough, keeping me tied up, giving me food I wouldn’t have fed a dog. She replied that I had much to learn, and left me lying there on my back while she sat flicking through the channels on the television. I caught snippets from a world I felt further away from than ever before: “… more people are alive today than have died in all of …”; “… over and touch your toes, now count …”; “Before me, she was vegetarian …”; “In seahorses, it is the male who gives …” and “1,250 prisoners on death row have gone on a hunger strike …” She didn’t switch right away from the Spanish-speaking news channel, and I heard that a woman from Tranquilandia had been arrested for smuggling, that customs officers, “aroused by the unusual shape of her buttocks,” had conducted a search revealing two eight-inch-long incisions in her buttocks stuffed with bags of cocaine. The newscaster called the incident, in English, a “bust bummer.” Consuelo asked me what this meant, and when I didn’t reply she turned off the television.

  In the middle of the night, I was awakened by the sound of gunfire and glass breaking. The room was bright, lit by a full moon that had bullied its way through the clouds. The sound of guns going off had become so familiar to me that I almost rolled over and went back to my dream. I had followed a glass bird into a forest, where it fed on small white seeds of moonlight as I watched: inside the bird a transparent egg, and inside the egg an unborn bird whose cut-crystal wings were splinters of glass. Consuelo, as she stood before the window, blending with the moonlight, looked like the bird I had followed deeper and deeper into the night, and now I couldn’t remember my way back. I lay on the bed, lost, trying to remember where I belonged, as she peered out at the sultry darkness, the dirty lace curtains enveloping her.

  There was a breeze smelling faintly of ozone, dust from the shell parking lot, and gun-metal. I could hear a motor running. Consuelo backed away from the window and stood beside my bed, motioning f
or me to keep quiet. I heard a man shouting, “Sireena, SI-REEEN-A! If you won’t fuck me, FUCK YOU!” and a car door slamming shut. I heard the squeal of tires across crushed beer cans and oyster shells, and then peace again, except for the sound of my own heart beating. I lay back, waiting for the black heavens to close around the moon and leave me in darkness. I lay that way for the rest of the night, brooding, like a small idea in a disturbed mind.

  Consuelo untied my hands as soon as we had daylight, but kept a grip on my arm as she steered me towards the truck. Neither of us spoke as she headed south down the highway.

  I thought of the woman called Sireena, waking in a room with a broken window and no way out. Sireena with her hotbox heart, splashing cold water on her face, bringing the swelling down. The crackling radio playing inside her head, Sireena, Sireena, why can’t you be true? Sireena wearing dark glasses in the sanctuary of the shower, singing off-key and aching.

  By now the sun was threatening to rise, bleeding rusty streaks across the sky, and I could make out the silhouettes of clapboard beer joints, brick warehouses and tumbledown paintless houses built along railway spurs, as if they might suddenly decide to pack it in and hop a freight train out of there.

  We drove through the morning, heading towards the coast, past distant islands of sawgrass, dead bald cypress trees twisted like peppermint sticks, fishing shacks built up on stilts above flooded woods, pirogues tied to cabin pilings, herons lifting on extended wings to the strains of “La Jolie Blonde” on the truck radio.

  At noon, Consuelo pulled in to a ramshackle restaurant called Ida’s Home Cooking and Live Bait Shop. She took the keys and tied my hands to the wheel, but halfway to the door of the restaurant she changed her mind. I could come in with her, she said, as long as I didn’t open my mouth except to eat.