Cargo of Orchids Read online

  A harried Ida, wearing a white T-shirt with “Live Bait” across her chest and flamingo-pink stretch pants, pointed us to take any one of the unoccupied driftwood tables, held together by rusty spikes and littered with crab shells. I couldn’t tell if the shells were part of the decor or if Ida hadn’t got round to cleaning them up. We ate boiled shrimp and blue-point crab with sauce piquante, and piled our shells on top of the others. Consuelo ordered iced tea, which came in tall blue glasses with cracked ice and mint leaves. I watched her pop a sprig of mint into her mouth, chew it, then swallow.

  Consuelo wanted to know what live bait meant. I said it meant Ida was in the hostage-taking business too.

  Early that evening, we drew up outside the gates to an above-ground cemetery on the outskirts of a small town called Jean Batista. Consuelo let me out of the truck but told me to stay by the gates while she went across the road to make a phone call. I had a chance to read the glassed-in directory map of the cemetery, which showed where the town’s VIPs were buried, including the smuggler and privateer after whom the town had been named.

  When Consuelo had made her call, we walked up Jesus Steet to Business. The graveyard, which turned out to be a perfect replica of the town its residents had relocated from, had streets and avenues, some of them tree-lined, others littered with garbage. Most of the more well-to-do dead were housed in miniature replicas of the plantations or white-pillared mansions they’d left behind. The less well off had been crowded into six-storey blocks of coffin-sized apartments.

  Planters full of Holy Ghost orchids surrounded the Cattle family’s real estate. “Here Lies Major Desiard Cattle, Erected by His Wife,” I read when we stopped in front of the major’s resting place. I was trying to explain to Consuelo why this was amusing, when she pointed to a plot I hadn’t noticed, a simple stone with the name Tiny Cattle inscribed on it, his birth date, then a dash and the year he had died. “He should be here soon,” she said, and sure enough, shortly afterwards, Tiny Cattle arrived, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat without a crown; his long white hair, tied in a top knot, spilled out over the hat’s rim. His face was a translucent white; he wore dark glasses and an AA medallion around his neck. His once-white shirt was half tucked into his wrinkled khaki trousers. One of the largest men I’d ever seen, he was also barefooted.

  He wiped his sweaty palms on the sides of his trousers before shaking hands with Consuelo. He didn’t look at me; I suspected she had told him that where I was concerned, he was to mind his own business. He kept looking at the sky instead, as if he expected someone else to join us.

  When Consuelo asked him about the headstone, Tiny looked embarrassed and said there’d been a sale on tombstones and a bunch of his buddies got together and bought one for him, thinking he was going to drink himself to death that year. “I fooled everyone,” he said. Though he admitted he was looking forward to joining the rest of the family, “the most executed family in Luzianne,” starting with his great-grandad, Desiard Cattle, who grew loonified in his twilight years, robbed the Merchants and Farmers Bank in Nakitish with a pair of pearl-handled duelling pistols and got hanged for crimes against property.

  “I’m the last—and the worst—of my line,” Tiny said; he spoke Spanish with a distinct southern accent. “My old man’s over there; cops shot him. I buried him with his pager and a roll of quarters. So’s he can keep in touch.”

  Consuelo, I could tell, was not interested in Tiny’s geneology. “When can you get us out of here?” she asked.

  Tiny wiped his brow and adjusted his hat. “You’re free, white and twenty-one. You can walk right out of here any old time.”

  Consuelo shot him the look. Tiny checked himself. “No problemo. I can get you out tomorrow night. Where you all headed?”

  “Tranquilandia,” said Consuelo.

  Tiny scratched at his face, pulled his ear, then began twisting his medallion as he pulled a flask from his hip pocket and took a drink. He said he could think of only one good thing to say about Tranquilandia, and that was that no one on the island owed him any money. “Last time I flew down, I got shot at,” he said. “The only law they got in that place is the law of gravity, and even that don’t work most of the time …”

  Consuelo waited until his words trailed off. “Tonight. Can you get us out of here this evening?”

  She walked Tiny back to the road where our trucks were parked. “Mañana, por la tarde,” he said. “Tomorrow evening, soon’s it’s dark.”

  A bumper sticker on Tiny Cattle’s truck said “Easy Does It, Jesus.” He raised the flask to his lips and had another swig. Consuelo took the flask, sniffed it and made a face.

  “Come and pick us up in the morning. Nine o’clock. We will wait for you. Don’t be late.”

  Tiny’s relaxed demeanour, his style of walking and talking, had changed since Consuelo mentioned Tranquilandia.

  “Where can we get a room and something to eat?” she said.

  Tiny adjusted his straw hat again, so it shielded his face from hers. “Hotel Eden down on Canal Street. Got a good diner. Reasonable rates, too.”

  Her face didn’t soften.

  “It would be on me,” he said. “No problemo.”

  Problema came out “problem-o.” Consuelo said she had the payment for the plane; they discussed a price. Tiny would take plata de polvo, powder money.

  “Hasta mañana,” Consuelo said. “And if it’s later than la mañana de mañana, you can start digging your own grave under that bargain-basement stone.”

  We left Tiny standing at the entrance to the graveyard. I watched him disappear in the rear-view mirror as we pulled onto a yellow dirt road, the windows rolled down, the smell of the bayou and burned chitterlings filling the evening air. The road twisted beneath a canopy of vine-choked oaks. Further on, where the river became hidden by the levee, we passed a row of shotgun houses—each identical, imitation brick tarpaper on the outside. Compared to the cemetery, everything here had an air of melancholy and decay. In one garden, where someone had beaten a path through the weeds to the door, a bulky oak had lifted the rusty iron fence with its bulbous roots. Empty Milk of Magnesia bottles had been strung up in the tree’s branches. I heard a tinkling sound as we passed, the dark blue bottles colliding with the roofing nails that had been lashed together to form sharp silver crosses.

  Further along, the posts of a falling-down fence were crowned with the sightless heads of dolls. A woman armed with a toilet plunger sat in a rocking chair at the side of the road, guarding her mailbox. Behind her, a copper-coloured pool of stagnant water stretched across her lawn, where a half-submerged Armed Response sign greeted anyone foolish enough to try to deliver a parcel to her door. Consuelo said the plunger was probably loaded.

  She reached under her arm, then slipped her .38 back in her belt. “There’s something unnatural about that Tiny,” she said. Then, after a pause, “My mother taught us a prickly palm belongs to a man who does not always tell the truth. He means to, perhaps, but he can’t. That’s Tiny. He wants to tell the truth, but he doesn’t know how.”

  By the time we reached town, the sun had torched the western sky and was hovering above the horizon. Consuelo turned up Gun Hill Road, past a row of attached houses where women leaned over their balconies—small jungles of potted geraniums and banana leaves—blowing kisses to the men below.

  Consuelo drove on, slowly, in the heat. The sky had darkened and a warm jasmine-scented rain pocked the sidewalk. I expected to see lightning soon, as I’d seen every night, in the foreboding sky to the south.

  chapter twelve

  An illuminated plastic palm tree at the entrance to the Hotel Eden advertised all you can eat for $5.95 in the adjoining Rib Room. Consuelo had dinner sent up to our suite.

  That night I dreamed I had filed for divorce. I sat at the back of a courtroom, waiting, the last on the list for the day. A woman in a T-shirt saying “I’m Not Fat, I’m Pregnant” pushed away from the man who sat bowed on the seat next to her and limped to
the witness box.

  Angel held my hand as I waited in the courtroom; Vernal refused to be present.

  When our names were called, two newspaper reporters lifted their heads. The walk to the witness box seemed longer than the walk up the aisle the day I got married.

  “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?” the judge asked.

  “I do,” I said, though the last time I’d said “I do,” things hadn’t worked out.

  “Any chance of a reconciliation?” she said, frowning over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses.

  There was, I believed, always a chance. “No chance of a reconciliation, Your Honour.” My lawyer had instructed me to answer no to all the judge’s questions. It would be quicker that way.

  The judge looked at me suspiciously. “One of these days, someone is going to surprise me by saying yes,” she said.

  It wasn’t too late, I thought. I could still change my mind. “She’s asking for nothing, Your Honour,” my lawyer was concluding.

  The judge shuffled her papers. “Then that’s all she’s going to get.”

  My lawyer had to help me out of the witness box. Matrimony is one thing, but no one leaves a divorce court feeling holy.

  Angel led me to the elevator. The woman who was not fat but pregnant got in with us and said, “My old man had to come to court, the jerk!” and Angel and I got off on the third floor because I had to go to the bathroom. There was only one toilet, and it looked as though someone had miscarried in it. I sat there, over a great purple jellyfish of blood, reading the graffiti on the cubicle door (“Live Life Like a Dick: When It Gets Hard, Fuck It”) and weeping for the way things might have been, for myself, for Vernal. I wept for the dead shapeless child in the toilet, whose brief appearance on earth had to end this way.

  Afterwards, Angel disappeared and I had lunch with Vernal and we tried to celebrate. I asked Vernal, finally, if he was happy, and he said, “Yes, but I like you.”

  We took Brutus for a last walk along the waterfront. Her canine acne was getting worse. When Vernal dropped me off at my apartment, he said he wondered how things would have turned out if I’d got pregnant with him instead of Angel, and I said I just didn’t know, but if he and I ever got together again, would he mind looking after someone else’s baby?

  “Oh, I suppose not,” said Vernal.

  We had breakfast in our room while we waited for Tiny Cattle. Consuelo paced while I stood at the open window, looking out over the town square. Facing our hotel was a bail-bond office, a tattoo parlour with a Confederate flag painted on the broken glass of the window and the Negro Grocery Store.

  The square was full of people. Consuelo came to the window to see what I was looking at. “Drug addicts,” she said disgustedly, pointing to a black man with a wooden leg begging for change. “To them, everything is simple. You snort a few lines, you forget to eat. You smoke a few lines, you forget to live.”

  I asked her what made her say the crippled man was a drug addict.

  “What else could he be?” she said.

  She didn’t think his injury was “legitimate” either. “Some parents, they mutilate their children so they can get them into the begging business before they are old enough to eat from a spoon,” she went on matter-of-factly. “He is lucky he misses only one leg. We have a man in La Ciudad, he has nothing. A torso only. He is propped up outside the bar one day, the bank the next. For fifty centavos, you can butt out your cigarette on one of his stumps. For a peso, he’ll eat the stub afterwards. I refuse to give him money because I know his father—the one who did this to him—will get every cent of it.”

  Strike a match on Consuelo’s soul …

  The man with the wooden leg had joined two women in chenille dressing gowns. “I change my mind,” Consuelo said. “That cojo (cripple) is a pimp.”

  … she wouldn’t flinch.

  The one-legged man and the two women bought green ice cream cones and sat on an iron-scrolled bench in the square, letting the ice cream drip onto their hands. I said I didn’t care who they were, I envied them the freedom to do something as simple as buying an ice cream cone and letting it melt all over themselves.

  “To free yourself is nothing,” Consuelo said, lowering the blind so I couldn’t see out any more. “The real problem is to know what to do with your freedom.”

  Tiny Cattle arrived in the late afternoon, looking morose and jittery. He was late, he said, because he had an appointment he’d forgotten about, and by the time he remembered it the doctor was in surgery.

  “Es tarde, amigo. Es la tarde, ahora,” Consuelo said.

  Tiny pulled a prescription from his back pocket. “I’m not so tarde,” he said, speaking English now and aiming his words at no one in particular. “It’s your fucking Spanish day that takes place so tarde. I told you I’d be here en la tarde, the evening, comprehendo? Now you tell me your “tarde” means afternoon or it means evening or it means we’re late. It’s not my fucking problemo. You say “mañana,” you mean this morning or tomorrow or the day after that. But I got a worse problemo now.” He broke into Spanish again. “I can’t wear shoes. I get foot itch.”

  Consuelo looked disgusted. “You kept me waiting because of a foot?”

  “Feet. It’s disaffected both of them.” He took a wad of bills from the same back pocket. “I imagine you’ll be checking out right about now?”

  “You imagine?” said Consuelo. Her eyes grew blacker than the storm clouds I’d seen gathering over the gulf.

  Tiny pushed his hair out of his eyes and tried to tuck it up under the brim of his hat. “You sure you all want to take the trip in weather?” he asked. “There’s a system over the Gulf, means a storm, big one. I still got to fill this prescript …”

  His voice trailed off as Consuelo stabbed him with her look. “No me mames gallo,” she said (literally, “Don’t make me suck clit,” but used to mean “Don’t waste my time,” “Don’t be running a game on me”). “If the storm comes, that will be your problem.”

  I had given up trying to find logic in Consuelo’s reasoning. Perhaps she believed that if Tiny’s plane didn’t make it through the storm, it would be none of our business, and only he would die in the wreck. She told him to wait for her outside while she took care of our bill.

  “No problemo,” said Tiny.

  He was sweating, even though the air outside felt cool, tossing his hat high in the air and catching it behind his back when we met him later in the parking lot. He glanced at our bug-encrusted vehicle and swiped the sweat from his forehead with the palm of his hand. I felt a strong gust of wind from the south, before the rain began spitting down on our heads.

  “Storm’s coming in all right,” Tiny said. And then, looking at Consuelo’s face, “Heard it on the news.”

  The sky overhead had turned solid and cold, like a stopped heart. Consuelo ordered Tiny to drive, and abandoned our red truck in the parking lot. On the outskirts of town we passed another graveyard, where a young couple arranged flowers on a freshly dug grave. Further down the road, a pair of lollipop-white panties drooped from a mailbox; a man with skin the colour of burnt cork urinated beside a crěpe myrtle.

  We passed another row of shotguns, white-shingled houses with deep front porches, and yards full of pecan trees, vegetable patches, chicken coops and rabbit hutches. Tiny braked as a cow ambled across the road, leaving a train of manure behind her.

  When we reached the small airstrip, he parked his truck and pointed across the tarmac. “That’s her, the Fat Lady. She ain’t much on the outside, but she’s full of guts. I interior-decorated her myself.” The small plane had fire-engine red flames along its cowling. The paint had run, making it look like a nosebleed.

  We crossed the tarmac, fighting the wind, and climbed aboard the Fat Lady. The interior had been gutted, and most of the cabin space was taken up with wooden crates marked Danger Explosives, and This Way Up (they weren’t). Tiny said the Fat Lady had always carried more weight than
she was built for.

  His “interior decorating” consisted of a human head. It was that of a woman, her eyes closed peacefully as though in thoughtful sleep. Her lips had been sewn together with a white fibre of some sort, but had come undone, as if the force of her words, of trying to tell her story, had torn the stitches from their fleshy hold. I couldn’t tell how old she had been, or how scared; I hadn’t known it was possible to shrink a human head until it was the size of a Christmas orange, an ear to the size of a burnt almond. The sight of it, and the fumes from Tiny Cattle’s auxiliary fuel tank (a mixture of smells—oil and beer and fuel) was making my stomach turn.

  Until this stage of my life, I had flown only on aircraft where you were assigned your own seat, one bolted to the floor, an aircraft where the lavatory had a door that told you whether it was Occupied or Vacant. I had felt a sense of security (probably a false one) knowing that these regulated airlines spent a million dollars a day on maintenance.

  Tiny’s idea of maintenance was to twist himself into the pilot’s seat and blow the dust off the instrument panel, which consisted of a series of circular holes with most of the instruments missing. He told Consuelo he’d learned the hard way, that no one left instruments “lying around” in a plane like this one, which often sat for days on remote jungle airstrips. People were not trustworthy any more, and would steal anything, “even your shadow, if you happen to turn your back,” not like in the old days of la movida. “A marijuana deal used to be done with a handshake,” he said, “but a coke deal is done with a gun.”

  He told us each to grab a seat, and he meant it literally. I carried mine, which looked as if it had been salvaged from a bus that had tumbled off a mountainside in Mexico, to the front of the plane and set it down by a window. The dirty maroon plastic had been ripped open, and I had to depress the broken springs before sitting on them. I kicked a space for my feet amongst oil cans and empty Jax bottles.

  Tiny blew a kiss to the shrunken head, and then struck himself on the forehead. “My goggles,” he said. “I forgot my goggles. I bring you anything? A twenty-sixer?”