Cargo of Orchids Read online

  I was horrified—I picked the larger flakes, the pure mother-of-pearl shale, out of his hair and blew the rest off his scalp. I felt I had contaminated something pure, someone innocent. When Consuelo left, I chopped up one of the larger flakes and snorted it through the rolled-up bill; I could smell his baby-scalp smell mixed in with the smell of money and drugs, and it made me feel afraid. Up until that moment, I had believed nothing could have been stronger than my new love for my child.

  I stashed the flap of paper in a drawer, but I should have known from the days when Vernal and I had coke in the house: once you know it’s there, you can never forget about it. When I couldn’t get to sleep that night, I decided I’d cut myself another bump. Just a taste, a small one.

  I don’t know if anyone would have acted differently had they been in my place. It has been more than ten years since I’ve used cocaine, but even today, or whenever I think about it, my mouth waters and my palms start to sweat. Somewhere deep in my old brain there must be a memory stored from the first time I did a line and cocaine became my fate, my sweet annihilating angel. But you never understand the nature of the drug—you only understand the nature of the sorrow.

  They say one line is too many, a kilo isn’t enough; I took another whiff and, an hour later, one more, and then a couple of pick-me-ups when I began to come down. Angel was more restless than usual that night; when I nursed him, I thought I could hear his heart racing. I worried that the cocaine I’d snorted had passed into my milk, so I stopped feeding him, but that made him fuss all the more. In the end, I let him nurse until he fell asleep with his lips locked on my nipple.

  Each day Consuelo brought another flap of paper, and I kept getting high; one night she cooked up some cocaine and handed me a glass pipe, and I had my first taste of basuco. Each time I inhaled, I rode a bicycle into the stars—then coasted in a paralytic state, plotting the exact coordinates of eternity, wondering where, along the way, I’d left my mind.

  Somewhere in that universe of exploding stars and bicycle parts, I found my friend Daisy. She said she was from Colombia (she said it like a warning), pronounced her name “Day-see,” and wore cobra stilettos, which made her seem taller than she was, a red T-shirt and sprayed-on jeans. Daisy wanted to model my lingerie, and took off all her clothes, but even afterwards, when we were naked together, she kept those cobra heels strapped on.

  It only happened once: I lay naked, except for the coke spoon around my neck, on the bed with Daisy, and Consuelo took photographs. Daisy could be sweet and rough, and I liked her touching me the way I needed to be touched. I didn’t think anything of it until the prosecutor produced the photographs to show what kind of a mother I really was. A lesbian, crack-addicted one. All you could see of Angel was one arm, his little hand knotted into a fist, poking out of his cot. It is the only photograph of him I possess, and you can’t even see his face, can’t see whether he was crying. But he wasn’t crying, I remember, because I wouldn’t have been ignoring him if he’d needed my milk. Just for the record. Somehow, writing about it now, I sound defensive, but with Daisy back then, it wasn’t anything warped or perverted, only a sort of tenderness and, I suppose, the drugs. When you smoke basuco, all you want to do is have your nipples and clit sucked. Well, that’s not true. You want sex, but first you’d rather have one more toke. I did worry that the drug would contaminate my milk, not like the prosecutor said: she said I never gave it a thought.

  My baby was not a drug addict. He was not neglected. As a mother, you know it at the time. You know if you are neglecting your child.

  part six / annihilating angel

  Cuándo se danza con diablo, No se da un paso falso.

  (When you’re dancing with the devil, Make sure you get the steps right.)

  —Popular song

  chapter twenty-one

  Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

  You are not allowed to talk in a place where conversation is prohibited. You should not start rumours in order to put other inmates’ or prison officials’ minds into confusion.

  —Inmate Information Handbook

  When you’re going through hell, keep going.

  —Winston Churchill

  After they failed to hang Frenchy, Rainy spent her days trying to make her gain weight: she wanted Frenchy to get so fat, she said, she wouldn’t fit in the Chair. If she survives a third attempt on her life, Rainy is certain they will grant her a stay of execution. I wouldn’t be so sure if I were Rainy. The state is pretty mad at Frenchy for not dying the first two times.

  I tell my counsellor Frenchy deserves a break. Why does anyone have the right to put her through the ordeal all over again? Mrs. Dykstra just sucks in her cheeks, purses her lips and taps her finger on the Inmate Information Handbook. “One, it’s in the book, that’s why; and two, we follow the book, that’s why.” She looks at me, as if to say everything I need to know is in the book in front of me. In black. On white.

  She glances at the clock. My time is up. I don’t make a move to go. “And three,” she says, beginning to sound exasperated, “because.”

  I sit there, staring at the Velcro fasteners on my shoes, thinking how long it’s been—more than ten years, at least—since I’ve owned a pair of laces.

  “Do I have to spell it for you?” she asks. “Because. B-E-C-O …” I leave before she has a chance to embarrass herself any further.

  “I’ll spell because for you,” says Frenchy when I get back to my house. “B-E-C-A-U-S-E. Bitch Eats Candy Apple Until She Explodes.”

  Frenchy’s chosen the Chair because she’s running out of options. Her only other choices are lethal injection or the gas chamber. She says she picked the Chair because it’s yellow, and yellow is the one colour that makes her feel alive. Rainy’s seen the Chair and says it’s not yellow any more—it’s brown like a Teflon frying pan when the grease has been burned into it.

  But Frenchy wants to fry, and once she’s made up her mind, she shuts Rainy and me out every time we try to get close to her on the subject. Still, Rainy buys her zuzus and wham whams at the commissary, and Coke Classic; she hoards her dessert every night, her bread, cookies, Twinkies, whatever else she can scrounge, and saves it for her friend.

  Frenchy started gaining weight, slowly at first, and then noticeably. She went from 110 pounds to 133 in less than three weeks. I didn’t tell Rainy Frenchy’d have to weigh 250 for low before she’d be too fat for the Chair. Trying to make Frenchy gain back all the weight she’d lost trying to get so thin they wouldn’t be able to hang her gave Rainy a goal, something to look forward to. She’d watch Frenchy step on the scales every day after her shower, a smile cutting her face in two when Frenchy stepped off again.

  Rainy and I both saved our doughnuts for Frenchy. Frenchy is addicted to doughnuts; I’ve often heard her say she would kill for one. Then Rainy tells her to shut up, because they write down everything we say and it will go on her record. It won’t look good for her in the future.

  When Officer Gluckman chains me up to take me back to my house, and after a trusty has finished her search for drugs, I ask her a riddle. “How did the little moron break out of jail?”

  Officer Gluckman says that if I expect a serious answer, I’ve got something else coming.

  “He broke a doughnut in half. Two halves make a whole, and he crawled out the hole,” I say anyway.

  Officer Gluckman is probably still trying to figure out how I plan to escape through a doughnut hole. Apart from coming up with new ways to make my life miserable, she doesn’t have a whole lot to think about.

  I ask Rainy the same riddle. “What’s a moron?” she says.

  “It’s what I do with the tomato sauce on my noodles,” I go. “Put more on.”

  Every Wednesday we get spaghetti for lunch. I like lots (lots) of sauce on my noodles. Rainy puts the noodles in one section of her metal tray, sauce in another. She spoons on sauce, eats a couple of spoonfuls, puts more sauce on, eats a couple more spoonfuls, spoons m
ore on.…

  She says that’s the right way to eat spaghetti. I say, “Well, I like a lot of sauce covering my noodles.” She says, “But that’s not the way to eat it.” I say, “You eat your spaghetti the way you want, and I’ll eat mine the way I want.”

  In the chow hall it seems Rainy and I always get into these life-or-death issues. Rainy argues that although she is accused of killing her twins, they were born joined, and as far as she is concerned, that is only killing one person.

  The whole point is, she says, no one understands what she went through. To have these joined-together twins who screamed all the time because she couldn’t afford to have them separated, to decide to put an end to their misery— did the jury think that was an easy thing for any mother to do? And then to walk away?

  “What was I supposed to do?” she says. It’s already been done, I tell her.

  I think Rainy expected a medal at least, and her mug shot on the cover of Parent and Child. Instead, she got twin death sentences.

  Rainy says she has profound feelings of love for me, and for Frenchy. But she never loved anyone else in her life, except for her twins, and she hates every one of the guards, right down to the squeak of their rubber-soled shoes. When Jesus said love thy neighbour, I don’t think he was talking about people it is easy to love, I tell her. This must have hurt Rainy’s feelings, because she never expressed her love for me again until the day Frenchy received her third date certain. Rainy says only one thing is certain: it’ll be the hottest date Frenchy’s ever going to go out on.

  The announcement of Frenchy’s impending death came, as it had done both times before, after her death warrant had been signed by the state governor. She greeted the news with a shrug. She was positive she was going to “get hers” this time—it would be third time lucky—and she had even written her own headline. She hoped it would be in every newspaper across the country.

  She asked us to tell the reporters this: “Le Ethel Opaline Lafitte, Frenchy to those who give a shit, said goodbye to this cruel world, and to Laverne, whom she never stops missing, aged thirty-five years old, on April 1, 1998.” She wanted this information to be published in the Obituaries section of her hometown paper. I say they probably won’t print “shit” in a family newspaper.

  “Then fuck them and the train they rode in on,” Frenchy says.

  I tell her, if she is turned off this time, she’ll be frontpage news, or at least front-page news in the Living section. She won’t get stuck like the rest of the world in Classified Ads, Births and Deaths, or worse, in the Entertainment section, where I’ve seen a lot of celebrities end up. If I were a famous person, I’d be choked to find my death announcement next to an ad for a wet T-shirt contest at the cross-dressing hangwoman’s roadhouse.

  A death warrant is a single-page document bordered in black. Very final and official-looking, written in legalese so when you read it you won’t understand a word of what is about to happen to you. They write it this way on purpose, because obscurity makes no emotional impact. Pile, Jr. can, in good conscience, have me sign a statement saying, “I hereby give and convey to you, all and singular, my estate and interest, right, title, claim and advantage of and in my life, together with all its blood, flesh, organs and parts hitherto undisclosed and all rights and advantages therein with full power to electrocute and otherwise to terminate the same by hanging, gassing, shooting or lethally injecting the same away with or without removal of said organs, anything hereinbefore or hereinafter,” when what he is really saying is, “The state is going to kill you.”

  Frenchy has kept her previous death warrants as mementos. She sticks them on her wall with spitballs. Each bears the state seal and has been signed by the governor, whose signature is in turn witnessed by an official whose John Henry has become a straight line trailing off into a wisp from having to sign so many death warrants, day after day. He (or she) probably didn’t even read any further than the first whereas, let alone the name of the person who had been sentenced to die. He was probably thinking about the lamb chop he was going to have for lunch. “WHEREAS Le Ethel Opaline Lafitte, Frenchy to those who give a shit, did on the eighteenth day of September, 1982, murder Huey Troy Earl; WHEREAS Le Ethel Opaline Lafitte was found guilty of murder in the first degree and was sentenced to death on the eleventh day of March, 1984 …”

  Once the warrant has been signed, the prison superintendent is notified and guards come to fetch Frenchy from her cell. The first couple of times she’d had no forewarning, but had been hauled to the warden of care and treatment’s office, where the warrant had been read aloud. After this she’d been told she could phone a lawyer or a family member, if she had anyone left who would accept a collect call. Frenchy only had us, and we didn’t have telephone privileges.

  This time, Officers Robinson and Freedman come to get her, but Officer Robinson breaks down and starts crying before she’s found the right key to unlock Frenchy’s door. Frenchy knows right away why they’ve come for her.

  She’s never had any complaints about the dancehall, where she gets a new mattress and a pillow in a case, and the cell gets a fresh coat of paint before she arrives, two-tone—light grey over green, the line right at eye level when you are standing at attention beside your bed and they come to inspect it to see if you’ve folded the corners of your sheets properly. She gets a steel toilet and a steel sink, and everything stays very clean because her cell is swept and mopped every day. Every other day her floor gets a fresh coat of wax.

  Frenchy asks if she can say goodbye to us this time before she goes, and this chokes Officer Freedman, too. I wonder if there will be tears when they come for Rainy, or for me? It is rare for a woman to survive what Frenchy has been through, and some of the guards feel, like us, that despite the rules, Frenchy should have been granted clemency.

  Frenchy tries to comfort the guards, which makes it worse for them, because they are supposed to be in charge. Only Officer Gluckman remains unmoved. She walks by, dragging her Talking Nano along my bars to make sure I hear my baby crying for me. “I’m sick. Feed me.” The voice gets more feeble every day, and I think if there is a merciful God, the batteries will croak and I won’t have to listen to the voice I’ve buried deep inside. If he doesn’t die soon, I think, I will kidnap him and put him out of his misery.

  Officer Robinson and Officer Freedman aren’t about to let Officer Gluckman know they are upset, or, in guard language, have lost control of the situation, so they take off, leaving Frenchy to dictate her obit and her famous headline: “Frenchy Fries.”

  My mother sends me a magazine article about a couple in India who took their crippled six-year-old daughter to a remote river and threw her in. No one would want a crippled bride, they said. They watched her struggle and finally drown, but felt she was better off. My mother says you’d never get away with anything like that in this country.

  She says she sympathizes with the parents. “There were times I thought of leaving you in a snowbank, or on the beach, buried up to your neck in the sand. But then the mood would pass, and I was always glad I had decided to take you home. You were a baby, helpless, I could have done anything. I’m just glad I raised you before child abuse was invented.”

  Frenchy’s previous death warrants were publicized by a news release issued shortly after the governor signed, and Frenchy has kept those clippings, also, stuck to her wall Frenchy says seeing her name in the paper makes her feel “like somebody.” Knowing that the whole country will be reading about her execution over their morning coffee almost makes dying worth it.

  I tell Frenchy, the kind of person who can enjoy a cup of coffee while reading that justice has been done would spit his coffee out if he had to be there in person: the volts of electricity shooting through you, making your body leap and twitch; your eyeballs popping out of their sockets; your face, fingers, legs and toes left hideously distorted. Your brain temperature approaches the boiling point of water, and your body starts smouldering. In some cases, your skin even tu
rns black. Frenchy hopes it does happen, so her “ugly spot” ends up the same colour as the rest of her body.

  Frenchy says she’s going to order stuffed olives, lobster salad, fried chicken, french fries, “killer” garlic bread and New York cheesecake for her last meal. She’s going to ask for a second helping of everything on her plate before she goes so there’ll be that much more shit for the guards to wipe up. But the guards don’t clean anything—they make prisoners do the dirty work. That’s how Rainy knows the Chair isn’t yellow.

  ——

  They took Frenchy out of her cell in the middle of the night. They didn’t even give her a chance to say goodbye. Why? Rules, that’s why. Or as Rainy says now, every time she gets the opportunity, “Because. Bitch Eats Candy Apple Until She Explodes.”

  Two days before she was executed, Frenchy sent a kite saying she’d been sent to a head-shrinker. He asked her if she had ever believed she was a secret agent of God, what century we were in and the name of the current president. She said she must have got all three questions right, because the shrink declared her sane enough to die. State law forbids the execution of a woman who is insane, and if a prisoner is determined to have become insane on death row, she is spared execution until such time as “mental health is restored.”

  Who among us is sane enough for execution?

  Officer Gluckman says she saw Frenchy die, live, just after two. She was rebroadcast on the seven o’clock news, and again at ten o’clock and on the local news at eleven. Officer Gluckman says even the replays were hard to watch. She got tired just trying to imagine how the guard must have felt, the one who had to refasten the power lines to the Chair after the first surge of electricity, which seared Frenchy’s flesh but didn’t kill her.