Cargo of Orchids Read online

  As well as new clothing, you are also given your own television, and the freedom to watch whichever religious or educational programs they choose, at any hour of the day or night. When my counsellor asked me what I liked to watch, I made a mistake by saying I preferred not to watch television. Mrs. Dykstra said my failure to take advantage of my viewing privileges demonstrated that I had a negative attitude, to which she hoped I would make a positive adjustment, so she could write a more favourable psychological report.

  Officer Gluckman must have conducted her investigation by reading Mrs. Dykstra’s files, because one morning my punishment changed. After that, I was unable to turn my television off, and when I tried to cover it with my towel, they cranked the volume up. It was, for me, a no-win situation. If they turned the volume down, I said, I promised I would watch the television. I always have to pretend I’m watching it when Officer Gluckman’s on shift.

  ——

  My mother, while waiting to board her ship for the Caribbean island, had to spend the night at a Miami Beach motel. The motel had been recommended by her travel agent, and it turned out to be the choice of the local prostitutes also. All night long, men kept banging on my mother’s door, imploring “Fuckface” to “open up.” My mother, who was “out of her element,” spent the whole night searching for a place to hide her watch. The “rude men” at her door, the rasp of the palm fronds against the window all night—it was a holiday made in hell, she told me; she wished she’d never left home.

  But, she says, East Oyster, the town thirty miles north of Vancouver where I was born and raised, is almost as foreign to her these days. She no longer recognizes faces on the street. A sign on the outskirts of town is a constant irritation to her. East Oyster. Population 276, and Still Growing.

  That’s one thing about Heaven—I recognize everybody’s mug. Some faces get too familiar, sometimes. Over the past ten years the population has declined, though at the moment it has stabilized and there are just three of us. After reading my mother’s letter and birthday card (I turned forty-seven on March 12, 2000), I thought of putting up a sign: Death Row. Population 3, and Still Shrinking.

  My mother’s card was shaped like a wedge of Swiss cheese. “Happy Birthday,” it read. “Another year shot to hell.” We got such a kick out of it that Rainy and I decided to make our own line of death-row greeting cards, available in time for Christmas next year, by mail order.

  Rainy was responsible for the graphics. For her first effort, she drew a bunch of turkeys getting decapitated by an axe-wielding Santa. When you opened the card there was Santa Claus, strapped in the electric chair. I had to think up a message. I penned, “Hope you get a charge out of this.”

  She drew another picture, same theme—only this time it was Jesus in the hot seat, trying to blow out a life’s worth of time on the birthday cake in his lap. I wrote, “More power to you.”

  Then Rainy went a bit too far, I thought, and drew Mrs. Claus being ambushed by a firing-squad disguised as a party of carollers. I wrote The Executioner’s Carol across the cover of the book Mrs. Claus died reading.

  But what kept me awake at night was trying to think of words to go with Rainy’s depiction of lethal injection. She drew Santa lying on the gurney while the guards tried to find a vein for the IV drip. Rainy says the hospital gurney they strap you to is shaped like the gingerbread-man cookie cutter her mother used to use. Her mother made gingerbread men every Christmas, and she let Rainy decorate them. Rainy gave them eyes and noses, and before she was old enough to spell her own name, she began giving them erections. Her mother wanted to know where she was getting her “ideas.” From her father, Rainy said.

  I wrote, “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”

  Rainy didn’t make the connection. She says I have to think the way someone buying a card would think—whatever that means.

  This was one business venture doomed from the start.

  ——

  When it comes to choosing the form of capital punishment that best suits your personality, there’s no book in the library to consult. So I devised a guide for those who can’t make up their minds, or people with multiple or nonexistent personalities. I wrote it after I heard a psychologist being interviewed about the idea that we all have a personality. He said most of what people think of as their “own personalities” are “absurdist idiosyncrasies” at cross-purposes with their lives and happiness.

  In my Guide to Capital Endings, the personality description would come first, followed by an appropriate Final Solution:

  1) You’re very committed—to work, friends and relationships; when the going gets tough you’re always there: hanging.

  2) You’re aggressive, crave adventure, live for the moment: electric chair.

  3) You’re a little unsure of yourself, never quite certain what you’re looking for: lethal injection.

  4) You’ve got a big heart, love everything on earth that lives and breathes: gas chamber.

  5) You’re nurturing, impulsive, a little preachy, but get a bang out of everything: firing-squad.

  Methods of torture and killing people have evolved, like everything else, to keep abreast of the times. (I’ve left out other antiquated methods of capital punishment—the guillotine, beheading with an axe, gibbeting, breaking at the wheel, stoning, pressing, drawing and quartering, crucifixion.) For instance, one modern form of torture used by guerrilla terrorists in repressive Third World regimes is to force a starving rat into a woman’s vagina, then to stitch up her labia so the rat will have to gnaw his way out through her stomach if he wants fresh air. In one case I read about, the woman happened to be pregnant. They waited until she went into labour before proceeding with the questioning.

  All these methods were devised (surprise! says Rainy) by men. Rainy’s let a childhood of being sodomized, an adolescence of being forced to have sex with dogs and an adulthood of being beaten with wire coat hangers colour her attitude. The only reason she has accepted Christ is because she wants at least one sympathetic male figure in her life.

  Here I am getting a touch preachy. My rule is there’s no room for preachiness on the Condemned Row. Frenchy admonishes me. “Rules are for breaking. What else would anyone make them for?”

  But don’t get too attached to Frenchy. She doesn’t make it to the end of this book. Hardly even to the middle. She chose the firing-squad. The first time.

  The prison chaplain, the guards, your classification officer, your care and treatment counsellor—all work on you to choose the firing-squad, or hanging, so that your organs won’t be damaged. They distribute all these pamphlets urging you to “Be an Organ Donor.”

  When you choose the firing-squad, they tie you to a chair and pin a red tissue-paper heart to your chest. (I guess they must figure the heart doesn’t count as an organ, or that people needing a transplant would rather die than go on living with the heart of a condemned criminal.) The guards stand behind a screen with a slit in it, facing you. If any one (or all) of those five guards likes you, or even feels sorry for you, she’ll aim as far away from the bull’s-eye as she can get without missing you and getting a demotion for gunnery. This could mean four bullet holes in the right side of your chest (one of the rifles has a blank in it) and you bleeding to death, slowly, while everyone reloads.

  Gary Mark Gilmore, who helped revive capital punishment, donated his eyes. Something else I know about him—he ordered pizza for his last meal and then couldn’t finish it. (His eyes must have been bigger than his stomach, Rainy says.) I always wondered who got his eyes. When you stop at Pizza Hut for your pepperoni and pineapple two-for-one special, is that pimply faced boy taking your order looking out at you through Gary Gilmore’s eyes?

  His last words were “Let’s do it.” No muss, no fuss, no bleeding to death before getting executed properly. When they did it, the four shots overlapped in the centre of the bull’s-eye, like a four-leafed clover, without the luck usually associated with four-lea
fed clovers.

  Rainy’s chosen “legal injection.” She figures it gives her a chance; Rainy’s been a drug user all her life—there’s hardly a vein in her body that hasn’t dried up or collapsed from the constant barrage of dope. The only usable blood vessel left is under her tongue, she says, and she doubts whether anyone will find it.

  Lethal injection is made to look like an everyday medical procedure. They even swab your forearm with a disinfectant before trying the most likely vein, as if you have a medical future. Two people sit in different rooms and each presses a button: one cocktail goes into your vein through an IV drip, the other down a drain. This means the person pushing the button never really knows if she is the one doing the killing. The executioner can always console herself: “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”

  That’s how I console myself too. I know I screwed up at the trial by saying I would have done anything to save my baby. I didn’t mean it literally. Anything didn’t include killing him. I was just telling the truth.

  That was another mistake: telling the truth. Hindsight, as Frenchy would say, is 30–30. Frenchy used a .30–30 on her boy in that bank. She should know about hindsight.

  Rainy is looking forward to having her execution televised. She hopes it will deter other people from killing their kids. She tells Officer Freedman that she should buy stock in the network doing the televising, that her execution—the instant replays and summer reruns—will make investors a ton of money.

  Executions began being televised when the state of California went pro-choice in 1995, five years after I moved to the Row. I figured that in a culture as show-business oriented as ours, executions, when they wound up being a continuing series, and a repetitive series at that, would lose their appeal and be cancelled for poor ratings. When people could turn on their TV sets any night of the week and see daycare centres being blown apart by bombs, or schoolchildren gunning each other down outside the classroom, I didn’t think they’d be too likely to have a continuing interest in the executions of convicted murderers. I was wrong. “Executions Live!” continues to get better ratings than “Larry King Live” or even the Super Bowl.

  Widely reported press conferences are held every day with notorious death-row inmates; every week we see televised images of ambulances bearing away the bodies of executed men and women. The papers flash news photos of mourning friends and relatives outside the prison on the night before the execution, and the local Nazis, or Klansmen, always gets a lot of coverage, with placards saying, “Fry Gay Preverts [sic]” and “Gas: A Sure Cure for Black Crime.”

  There may be X number of days left until next Christmas, but when you live under a sentence of death, you never know if there will be a next year. Any one of us could be history by then. That’s not soon enough for Officer Freedman. She’d like us to die laughing in the meantime.

  She calls it “having a sense of humour”: who but a moron would think “No noose is good noose” a joke? We call it guard humour. Their jokes harass me more than Frenchy’s train, but I’d never let Frenchy know that.

  Another year shot to hell. There’s a real joke for you. I can still see my mother standing in Jonesy’s Book and Stationery in East Oyster, trying to find the right greeting card to send her birthday girl on death row.

  I admire my mother—she’s got guts. And a sense of humour. A lot of mothers would have nothing more to do with a daughter who did some of the things people say I’ve done.

  My mother never knew my baby, but she knows how much I loved him, through the letters I’ve written to her since coming to prison. She knows how much he changed me, insofar as one person is capable of being changed.

  Insofar as. I am starting to sound like Vernal. He sent me a memo for my birthday, and a twenty-dollar bill (Canadian). The memo said he was celebrating fourteen days of sobriety. These weren’t consecutive days, he wrote, but a ballpark figure for the nineties.

  Frenchy’s got her “last meal” order in already. She’s requested steak and onions and pie à la mode. “At least I don’t have to worry about it repeating on me,” she says.

  After questioning Frenchy at some length, I’d discovered that she thought “à la mode” was a flavour, like lemon meringue or cherry. We heard she finished her last meal, leaving a wedge of pie “for later.”

  chapter six

  I moved into an unfurnished apartment in the same building as Carmen. Vernal worked late the day I went back to the house to pack up my life, most of which I decided to leave behind. I didn’t want the memories, or the reminders. I took a few cookbooks, some pots and pans, and—I needed something to sleep on—Brutus’s futon. I figured with me out of the house, Brutus would be moving onto our Beauty Rest anyway. Later that week, Vernal phoned to say two of his Time-Life cookbooks were missing. I sent them back to him in a cab.

  In the weeks that followed, I got a series of memos, by courier, signed from Brutus, saying how much he missed me and how he wished I would come home to bake cookies, with the odd P.S. from Vernal saying Brutus’s cognitive therapist was worried about the effect our separation was having upon him, that dogs from broken homes were more likely to think less highly of themselves than other dogs. The day Vernal fired his secretary and sent me a memo begging me to come with him to Mexico, where we could “relive our honeymoon all over again,” we ended up having another row: I called him and said it was redundant to say “reliving all over again”; it was almost as bad as “old-fashion taste.” He said he didn’t want to sleep with someone who corrected his grammar, and I said, is that what Brutus is doing these days, correcting your grammar?

  Carmen, Bonnie, Little Shit Shit and I rode with Thurma out to the prison every Saturday morning most of that spring (I’d sold my car because I couldn’t afford the insurance now), and for two hours we sat, always at the same small square table in a corner of the visiting room, played cards and drank bad coffee from the machine. Once a month, a social would be held in the gymnasium, often with entertainment for the visitors—a movie, a skit put on by the prisoners, music or a comedy routine. I saw little of Mugre, who spent all his time rehearsing. Mugre was going to play a prison guard in a production staged for the Halloween social in November, Angel said.

  I became Angel and Gustavo’s unofficial translator, rendering everything from prison regulations and lawyer jokes into English, and translating the guards’ demands into Spanish also.

  Counts and Accountability

  12:20 a.m.… Counted in your assigned bed

  3:00 a.m.… Counted in your assigned bed

  5:00 a.m.… Counted in your assigned bed

  4:00 p.m.… Standing count in your assigned cell

  9:15 p.m.… Counted in your assigned cell

  Memo from Corrections Services Canada to Inmate Gustavo Corazón Gaviria: “There will not be any kicking of the volleyballs or basketballs. If you come to the recreation yard wearing a jumpsuit, it will remain on.”

  Memo from Corrections Services Canada to Inmate Angel Corazón Gaviria: “Authorized items may be considered contraband when found in excessive quantities or altered in any manner. Possession of unauthorized contraband [sic] is subject to disciplinary action.

  The following Food Services–issued food items are allowed for possession by inmates at any one time:

  2 chocolate bars

  15 packets of sugar.”

  Memo from Corrections Services Canada to Mugre Corazón Gaviria: “It is against the rules to tie a knot in a handkerchief and throw that around.”

  On the last weekend in June, the Native Brotherhood sponsored a social. Thurma couldn’t find a car, so she and Carmen and I travelled to Agassiz by bus. We were about to phone for a cab to take us the rest of the way to the prison when a car pulled up at the curb. Bonnie rolled down the window, and I was hit with a cloying pine-forest smell coming from the green Christmas tree dangling from the mirror “Climb in,” she said.

  The passenger doors were riddled with bullet holes and rusted shut; Bonnie had meant it
literally when she told us to “climb in.” I struggled through the window, across the laps of the women packed in the back. The front of the car was empty except for the driver, a big man with two braids and a beaded headband. He didn’t look at us. “This in Kono, my brother,” Bonnie said. His name meant “a tree squirrel biting through the centre of a pine nut,” she explained.

  Little Shit Shit, dressed in the same deerskin jacket and pants she’d worn since the first time I’d met her, lay sprawled on Bonnie’s lap. She snatched my purse and began chewing on the strap.

  “She sure likes your bag,” Bonnie said, as the woman next to the window reached over and offered me a toke. I said no thanks, and tried to get my purse back before Little Shit Shit took an interest in my credit cards as well.

  Bonnie said she would be sending out her wedding invitations soon. “All we need now is permission from the attorney general,” she said.

  Kono began speaking, choosing his words as if measuring each one for its impact. “Why should you ask the attorney general for anything. He is not our attorney general.”

  I nodded. Best to remain neutral, especially when someone is giving you a ride, though judging by the noises coming from under the hood, and the smell of the fumes, I was surprised when the car made it as far as the prison. Kono parked, and we piled out into a cloud of blue smoke the same moment as two patrol vehicles drew up on either side of the lot, eyeing us.

  The process of signing in, getting scanned and stamped, waiting for Jack Saygrover to lead us from the visiting room to the gymnasium was beginning to feel too familiar—the men standing behind the barrier waiting and waving, and the women approaching, awkwardly, like girls at a junior high sock hop.

  Gustavo came over to greet us. The doors to the yard were wide open and I could see a group of Native men, including Treat and Kono, standing in the doorway, holding drums.

  I looked around for Angel; he saw me at the same time and waved me over to where he stood talking to Mugre.