Cargo of Orchids Page 4

  “Go back to work,” Carmen said. She was running out of money. “And you? What are you going to do with your life?”

  I hadn’t realized it until that moment, but ever since Angel had met my gaze, I’d felt a hot, secret tugging—to be somewhere else. I couldn’t remember the last time Vernal and I had danced, or confided in one another, made love, or made anything but small talk. We weren’t doing well, in the marrow of things.

  I told Carmen that sometimes I thought I wanted a different life. Carmen dipped her knife into her Caesar and swirled it twice.

  I should have tossed the visitor’s application form in the recycling box, but instead I completed it the same day Carmen brought it home to me. I checked “No” beside most of the questions: no criminal record, no outstanding warrants, no communicable diseases, no plans to smuggle contraband (weapons, drugs or books) into the prison. Under “Marital Status” I left a blank.

  Fourteen days later, I was approved to visit Angel Corazón Gaviria. Carmen suggested I come with her to the Valentine’s Day social; I knew I could get away without Vernal asking any questions, because he had his own plans—to go sailing and dry out in Desolation Sound with two of his partners. I told him February wasn’t the best time of year for boating, and he reminded me I’d said the same thing about August.

  Vernal didn’t own a car (he claimed he’d rather drink than drive), and mine was too small to transport Carmen and her entourage to the prison. Carmen said her new friend Thurma, who had moved to Vancouver to make sure her incarcerated boyfriend “stayed out of trouble,” would find us a ride.

  Thurma, dressed in an African-style tent dress imprinted with stampeding giraffes and flying monkeys, picked us up at the apartment Carmen had rented in the west end. Thurma could have been Frenchy’s double, but I didn’t know Frenchy back then. At every red light she opened her purse—scarlet leather, black onyx clasp—and brought out a tube of Day-Glo orange lipstick, which she reapplied to her lips. By the time we stopped at the Pay ‘n’ Save to gas up, my own lips were drained.

  Thurma ground the gears as we jerked away from the gas station in the VW van the colour of her lipstick. She confessed she’d never stolen anything with a gearshift before, but that she’d found the van idling in front of a bank. “I loves to steal,” she said. “I looovvveeees to steal.”

  This is something else Frenchy has in common with Thurma. Frenchy would steal your last tampon. I know.

  Carmen said it didn’t count as stealing if the owner left his keys in the ignition, but that didn’t make me feel any better. At that time, I wasn’t used to stealing as a lifestyle. I slunk lower into my seat, afraid we would be arrested; Vernal had taken a five-day weekend, and I’d have to wait until Thursday for him to bail me out.

  We pulled into a lane behind a high-rise apartment building, and the van sputtered to a stop. Thurma leaned on the horn until a tall, delicately built Native woman, with black hair so long she could tie it in a knot and still sit on it, pushed open the Emergency Exit Only door carrying a canvas bag that said “Born to Shop” and a bundle that turned out to be a baby.

  Bonnie climbed in the back beside me, clucking to the bundle, whom she addressed as Little Shit Shit, and who was dressed in a beaded deerskin jacket and pants and moccasins decorated with porcupine quills. I held tight to Bonnie’s arm to keep her from crushing Little Shit Shit against the door as Thurma jerked back onto the road.

  “Baby likes your bracelet,” Bonnie said, clucking her approval of the silver band with a frog design. Vernal had taken it from a client, in lieu of a retainer, and given it to me on my birthday.

  Baby sneezed, without letting go of the bottle stuck between his lips, and his eyes watered. “She misses her dad,” Bonnie said. She? I took another look as Bonnie wiped the baby’s nose with a Popsicle wrapper she found in her purse.

  She kissed Baby’s nose. “You better give up that bottle soon or you’ll end up just like your dad.”

  I didn’t ask what Little Shit Shit took in her bottle. Bonnie said Little Shit Shit was the nickname Baby’s father, Treat, had given her, that Baby’s real name was Kingfisher Sky. In the old days, she said, it had been the custom in her village for a woman to name her baby after the first thing she saw when she opened her eyes upon giving birth, like Salal Berry or Raven or Stones Being Pulled Back by Water on the Beach. She too was trying to follow the old ways, even though she’d given birth by Caesarean at the hospital in Rupert. She’d looked up to see sun coming through the skylight in the birthing room, and then when she turned her head, she saw the tiny blue irises her sisters had left for her. They looked like baby kingfishers.

  Thurma, having scraped her way into second gear, was driving full out now. After two near misses (a school bus and a cyclist club), we roared onto the freeway. She ignored my offer to take the wheel and opened her purse again, fishing around. I watched as she unscrewed a bottle cap with her teeth. “You want to feel good back there? Get in the mood for a good visit?” she said.

  “No. Thanks, I feel fine,” I said, as we zipped under an overpass where someone had spray-painted the message “See You at the Alter Beefy.”

  “Treat and me are getting married for sure this time,” said Bonnie. “Not like the last times; he never even turned up at the church or paid for the rings. I just hope he doesn’t stand me up again.”

  Thurma laughed as she emptied a bottle of black pills into her palm, and then proceeded to eat them, as if they were Reece’s Pieces. “Hope to die if I knows where we is headed!”

  “Straight ahead, bullhead,” said Bonnie.

  I was going to tell Bonnie I figured there were three things certain in life—death, taxes and that if you married a man in maximum security he would be waiting for you at the altar—but I suddenly felt as if to say such a thing would be tempting fate.

  “When we get married, we can have trailer visits,” Bonnie said. “The way normal people live. Watch TV.”

  The valley, once lush and green, stretched before us, a wasteland of leeched soil, used-car lots and trailer parks with names like Chuck ‘n’ Flo’s RV Heaven. Thurma stopped at a rest area and for takeout coffee at the Instant Café outside the small town of Agassiz, half an hour from the prison. It took her longer, each time we stopped, to get the van started again, and she swore next time she wouldn’t steal something that coughed blood every time you turned the key in it.

  Mountjoy Penitentiary, which had been completed the previous summer and opened its six-hundred-pound doors in time for Remembrance Day, squatted like a concrete womb at the northern end of the valley. Referred to as the Joy, by convicts and prison staff alike, the institution was cut off from the world by mountains on three sides, their western flanks cloaked in blue shadow. Thurma parked her stolen van in the Visitor’s Only lot, facing a fence topped with razor-wire that surrounded the near-empty tract of land set aside for the prison cemetery.

  I got out of the van, stretched and stood staring at the two lonely white crosses, each with a black number stencilled on it, no name.

  “No one wanted them when they were alive and now nobody wants them,” said Thurma, following my gaze. “I told my old man, You die on me in here, I’m going to bury you in leg-irons. Just so’s you don’t go to hell and try stepping out on me before I get there!”

  I looked at my watch: 12:45 p.m. and the sun still hadn’t made it over the top of the imposing Mount Joy Mountains (so imposing they named them twice, Vernal would say). Carmen held Little Shit Shit while Bonnie opened a soft drink labelled “Freedom of Choice: Big Gulp Brand” and topped up her bottle. The four of us joined the line of visitors waiting to be buzzed in the front gate at one o’clock.

  “It’s busy today,” Thurma said. “A lot of people come when there’s a social. The food’s good. Better than those machines in the visiting room.”

  I eavesdropped while we waited: one woman bragged she’d been partying all week because a judge had reduced her husband’s sentence to two “lifes” instea
d of four.

  “Don’t say fuck. You’re not old enough to say fuck,” another admonished her adolescent son; her younger one, in a stroller, kept pointing at the razor-wire glinting in the sun, saying, “Pri-ttee, pritt-ee, pri-ttee.”

  Two bikers joined the end of the line and talked about a party over the weekend at Scutz Falls. One of them kept leering at Carmen, the other, wearing a T-shirt that said, “I May Not Go Down in History, But I May Go Down on Your Daughter,” asked Bonnie how old the baby was.

  “Old enough to know better,” said Bonnie.

  Carmen ignored the bikers and explained the visiting procedure to me in Spanish. Some guards would let visitors in early, give them time to store their purses or wallets in a locker and be scanned by the metal detectors, but there were others, like the one on duty today, she said—the one she’d nicknamed Roll-Over—who believed rules were not meant for bending. Sure enough, it wasn’t until one o’clock sharp that Roll-Over rose with a yawn, belched, stretched, adjusted the thin belt that held his fat belly from sagging any further and buzzed us in.

  I let Bonnie and Baby go ahead of me in the line because I needed to use a washroom, but both the men’s and the ladies’ in the identification area had out-of-order signs on the doors.

  “It’s to prevent you from flushing anything at the last minute, in case they decide to search you,” Carmen explained.

  I watched Bonnie walk through the metal detector, and then saw Roll-Over pointing her towards a door marked No Entry Staff Only.

  “It’s because of that Treat,” Thurma said when I asked what was happening. Bonnie was about to be “skin-searched,” she said, which meant she’d have to take off all her clothes, squat over a mirror and cough. If the man you were visiting had been causing problems inside, or was a gang member like Treat, you would more than likely be subjected to an internal search.

  “They know she ain’t packing,” said Thurma. “It’s a humiliation score. They hurt you, it hurt your old man more. That’s the way they play it around here. You can tell who’s been stirring up shit inside by who gets to squat, spread their cheeks and crack a smile out here. They do it to her every time.”

  Suddenly I had an urge to flee from this place, from the company of these women for whom life meant stealing cars, squatting over mirrors, swallowing uppers and downers by the fistful, wiping their baby’s noses with Popsicle wrappings: I felt, as my mother would say, out of my element.

  “Whom are you here to see?” Roll-Over asked when it came my turn to sign in.

  “Angel Corazón,” I said, scribbling my name. I wrote “None” beside the space reserved for “Relationship to Visitor”.

  Roll-Over’s fat eyes glanced from the visitor’s book to his computer and back again. I crossed out “None” and wrote “Friend’s husband’s brother,” but this still didn’t seem to satisfy him. When I said this was my first visit, a wary smile cut into his face like a knife mark in bread dough waiting to be punched down. He asked me to remove my jewellery and said I’d have to leave my comb in a locker (the sharp end, he said, could be used as a weapon). After I walked through the metal detector, he tugged at my hair to make sure I wasn’t wearing a wig and asked me to remove my footwear (his fancy word for shoes), which he bent back and forth to make sure nothing was stashed in the soles. He seemed almost disappointed they were not filled with drugs, and handed me a sheet of yellow paper, the visiting room regulations.

  Bonnie and Little Shit Shit were still in the special room reserved for those who were visiting troublemakers inside. As I waited for the others in front of the electronic grill, the matron appeared.

  “You can get dressed now,” she said, over her shoulder, to Bonnie and the baby. “Have a nice social.”

  We had to walk outside again, up a concrete path to the front door of the prison; I shivered in the cold wind funnelling down from the mountain. Thurma, who’d had to leave her comb in a locker also, said she wasn’t going to be able to face her old man with her hair looking like a tornado in a steel-wool factory. Carmen said lots of people paid good money to have their hair look like that.

  Another guard, who didn’t get up from the chair he sat in by the entrance, pushed a button to admit us to the visiting room. Here we had to wait for the visitors and correspondence officer to escort us to the gymnasium, where the social was being held.

  Behind a wall of glass adjoining the visiting room, the officer sat, eyeing the clock on the wall and eating Hershey Kisses out of a paper bag. There was nowhere left to sit, so I leaned against the Coke machine (“Use at Own Risk”), reading the list of rules Roll-Over had given me. A kiss and embrace are permitted at the beginning and at the end of the visiting period. Necking, petting, fondling, embracing, tickling, slapping, pinching or biting is PROHIBITED. No running, shouting, excessive laughing, standing on chairs, swearing, cursing or use of unnecessary language.

  An empty yoghurt container with a note taped to it had been placed on the floor next to the Coke machine. “Cigarette foils, please. Jim’s cat chases them. Thanks.” Whoever Jim was, he had collected quite a few foils. Smoking was one of the few pleasures allowed in this room, and it looked like everyone took advantage of it.

  One of the bikers had given Bonnie his chair. The other, explaining to Thurma how he’d earned the black-and-green wings he wore pinned to his sleeveless Levi’s jacket by going down on a venereally diseased black woman, bounced Little Shit Shit on his knee.

  “Those Latino broads are nice, very nice,” the first biker said to Bonnie, grinning again at Carmen, who pretended not to understand. “They really turn me on. But you know what the men are like. You fuck with the sister, you also get fucked by a bunch of mafioso assassins.”

  Another baby in the room began to wail.

  “You never hear an Indian baby cry,” said Bonnie, wiping Baby’s sticky face with one of Jim’s foils.

  Little Shit Shit, clutching her empty bottle, had gone to sleep.

  chapter four

  The V&C officer wore a black plastic badge with his name, J. Saygrover, in gold lettering; he ushered us into a corridor smelling of turpentine and fresh paint. The walls were an avocado green, the ceiling a chocolate brown and the floor a dirty rust. Whoever wrote “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron bars a cage,” couldn’t have been much of an interior decorator.

  Mr. Saygrover stopped us at an iron-barred gate. He nodded at the younger guard in the control bubble. I watched the heavy steel doors parting on their runners. We passed through five more identical gates before reaching the gymnasium. I wondered what would happen if anyone had to leave this place in a hurry.

  Vernal once told me that prisons exist for one purpose: locking people away from life’s good things, most often other people’s good things. Up ahead, behind the last gate, I saw a crowd of men who looked as if they had been locked away from other people’s things for a number of very good reasons, each one craning his neck to see us as we approached. On either side of the gate, the air throbbed with expectancy. All of a sudden I missed Vernal, pictured him tacking towards Desolation Sound, the Manchester Guardian open on his lap, a bottle of near-beer in one hand and a Gitane burning in the other.

  The gymnasium had been decorated with red balloons and white streamers, which were affixed from corner to corner and had lost their elasticity. A giant heart, made of papier mâché, encased in barbed wire, had been inscribed with the words “For Life.”

  I stayed close to Carmen, who told me that every social was sponsored by a different inmate group. This one was being hosted by the Lifer’s Committee, which meant it would be done properly, the implication being they had the most time on their hands. We worked our way through the riot of bodies, across the room to a banquet-sized table laden with bottles of soft drinks and plates of food—sandwiches, fruit, cookies, a heart-shaped cake that had been hacked into pieces—where her husband and his brothers sat in a cloud of cigarette smoke under a Thank You for Not Smoking sign.

  The men r
ose to shake hands with me, and when it was Angel’s turn, I couldn’t meet his eyes and my face began to burn. Far away up the valley I heard the whistle of a train, and deeper inside, the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire in my heart.

  Mugre, who looked even thinner than I remembered him from court, addressed me (or more accurately, undressed me) in rapid-fire Spanish.

  “Pay no attention to him,” said Gustavo. “He is very ill-mannered. We have all been to the same reform schools, but Mugre has never graduated.”

  Carmen said her husband was making a joke. The three of them had spent most of their life in prison, but that was no excuse for bad manners.

  The coffee machine percolating at the back of the room sounded like someone vomiting. Mugre got up from the table and went to join a group of men who looked as if they had ridden down from the hills with Emiliano Zapata and gone on a shopping spree at K-Mart.

  “Our crew,” said Angel, nodding at the group of Mexicans. “Campesinos. Indios.” He shook his head sadly. “My brother Mugre belongs with them. We get a visitor, and what does he do? He runs away.” He looked at me again; I felt my heart knocking on the back of my front teeth as he pulled out a chair for me. I sat, hoping I didn’t tip over in my nervousness.

  Carmen took an orange and an oatmeal cookie from a platter and broke the cookie in half. Gustavo took the other half from her hands; I watched it shrink under his moustache. I wondered if it was proper prison etiquette to help oneself to the food, and was just going to ask Angel, when I felt someone tap my shoulder. I turned and saw Thurma, standing behind a man wearing jeans, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and bright yellow headphones, sitting in a wheelchair.

  “This here is Chandler,” Thurma said. “The one I told you about?” The boyfriend she was determined to keep out of trouble had a grin that turned his mouth into an accordion being played by a drunken acrobat.