Cargo of Orchids Read online

  “Those drums are giving me a pain,” Mugre said. “It is like being in the jungle, that noise. All night I couldn’t sleep.”

  Angel told him he was going to get himself in trouble with the Posse if he didn’t keep his complaints to himself. Mugre made as if to spit on the ground, then glared at the group of Natives.

  “That one there, he insulted my brother,” Angel said to me, pointing to Treat. “He said to him, ‘What kind of Indian are you, anyway?’ Where we come from, to call someone an Indian is a sign of disrespect. It is like calling him malparido—which means ‘born from a really bad place’.”

  This time Mugre spat. “Hijo de la chingada!”

  Angel and I went outside and walked in circles around the big yard. Angel said his brother was starting to talk like a Mexican—“hijo de la chingada” was the worst thing one man could call another in Mexico. The Indian women had been raped and carried off by the Spanish invaders, and to this day Mexicans of Spanish descent still refered to los indios as “hijos de las chingadas”—sons of fucked mothers.

  I watched the convicts keep as close to the perimeter fence as they could get without being out of bounds. Angel told me he missed me every time I left, the way he missed the stars at night. In prison, he said, you couldn’t see stars because of the glare from the sodium lights on the yard. “Someday I would like to take you to Tranquilandia—the stars there, they keep you awake with their brightness.”

  To some extent I had always romanticized South America—the last frontier! And when Angel spoke to me the way he did, I conjured up images of afternoon sex under slow-moving fans in the shade of jagged bluish mountains swept by light breezes from the Central Cordilleras. Of evening sex, and morning sex, too. I looked at him and saw, in the gleam of his shadowy eyes, a depth of wanting that promised heaven.

  Months later, I realized the desire must have been my own reflected back, that the promise I thought I saw had been nothing more than the neglected spirit of my own lust.

  My life took another twisted turn the day Carmen called to say Angel’s wife would be coming in the fall to visit him.

  I was curious to learn as much as I could about Consuelo de Corazón, the wife Angel had said he worried about at night; but from what Carmen told me, he had nothing to worry about except his own mortality. Angel was Consuelo’s third husband.

  Nothing had stopped Consuelo since the time she picked her first pocket, Carmen said. She graduated to stealing tombstones from cemeteries, chipping off the names of the deceased and selling them back to their families. By thirteen she had become a courier, sewing drugs into the ribs of a line of underwear she’d designed herself, making weekly runs to Miami and Los Angeles. When she met her first husband, Don Mario, he wanted a more traditional stay-at-home wife, and so he set her up in a new business, Hits for Hire, which meant she didn’t have to travel. Because the city was crawling with “confidence tricksters”—gangs of teenaged boys posing as sicarios, assassins—it was acceptable for customers to require a muerto de prueba, a test killing, which could be of anybody, for as little as fifty dollars. Consuelo was a good businesswoman and before long had several hundred women on her payroll, and two years later she claimed responsibility for wiping out a rival crime family to gain control of its trafficking network. This, Carmen said, led to more problems at home.

  When Don Mario himself was assassinated, Consuelo relocated to Tranquilandia and immediately remarried—this time a contrabandista from Medellín. Her second marriage ended abruptly when she shot her husband because he said no to her—no, he didn’t want another drink—in the bar of the Hotel Viper shortly after he had presented her with an emerald choker.

  Consuelo had told Carmen that she felt, in retrospect, it had been a senseless thing to do, one killing that could have been avoided if they both hadn’t had so much to drink. She had always been a fast learner, and unlike many of her countrymen, she quickly learned that killing people had unpleasant side-effects. For one thing, Carmen said, she had to sell the choker to pay her lawyer’s costs.

  “She got bored with smuggling,” Carmen said. “She wanted to retire from the business. That’s when she opened Cositas Ricas (Tasty Little Things), the boutique she’d always dreamed of.” She specialized in intimate apparel, Carmen said, and used her shop to recruit cover girls—women paid to pose as tourists on small planes loaded with cargoes of cocaine destined for southern Florida. One day, Angel Corazón wandered into the boutique and took her to a party at the Hotel Viper, where three hundred guests munched quail eggs dipped in wildflower honey and drank the best champagne. “It used to be a respectable hotel, back then,” Carmen said.

  The next day, Consuelo put a Closed for Stock-Taking sign on the door of her boutique, picked up Angel and flew him to New York, where they rented an apartment together. They kept a limousine parked outside, with a driver who stood at attention beside it at all times. Angel bought her white orchids and sweet oranges and gold buttons. He bought her jewellery and flew her to Hong Kong to see the one man in the world he could trust to polish the hole that held the cord to her pendants. Angel’s heart at that time, Carmen said, was “as big as the Rock of Gibraltar”: he bought Consuelo a different-coloured Mercedes for every day of the week.

  Carmen paused and looked at the sky, as if Consuelo might descend at any moment to pick up where she’d left off in her love story. “She has been parted from Angel before. The last time Consuelo smuggled a grenade in her choca [vagina] into the prison where they were keeping him, in Medellín. They say no one escapes from El Zancudo, not even a mosquito. Forty people died trying to stop them from getting away.

  “But now,” Carmen continued, “she has decided to become a nurse. I told her, amor, killing is your business. You don’t know how to do anything else.”

  I saw Angel only once during the summer; my own work—deadlines—not to mention my mixed feelings about his wife’s impending visit, kept me from travelling out to the Joy as frequently as I had in the past. Relations had grown more strained between the Posse and the Tranquilandians, which meant Carmen didn’t feel comfortable driving to the prison with Bonnie and Baby Shit Shit and Thurma every week. Carmen said it was not likely that the two groups would reconcile. “Gustavo always says forgiveness is for people who lack an adequate form of revenge.”

  The day Consuelo de Corazón landed, in her Lear jet, in Vancouver, Carmen rented a car to pick up her sister-in-law at the airport. She invited me to drive with them to the Prison Justice social. Angel’d had little to say about his wife’s visit. “She likes to drop in on me once in a while. But at least she lets me know when she’s coming. Back home we have an expression: It is a sin to be surprised.”

  Consuelo de Corazón had a steamy, smouldering way of carrying herself, as if she might have been conceived in a strange greenhouse, then raised wild. The second thing you noticed were her lips—like razor nicks—but what she lacked, she made up for in lipstick so fierce and thick that it almost sucked your eyes out of your head. A small, dark-skinned woman, with black hair falling in waves to her waist, she sat in the front of the rented car, next to Carmen, who tried to introduce me. Consuelo took no more notice of me than she might have of her bodyguards riding in the back of her car on Tranquilandia, though she showed more interest when Carmen told her Angel had been trying to persuade me to take a holiday on Tranquilandia. “Price-wise, a woman like her could be worth quite a lot,” Consuelo said, as if she had read Angel’s mind.

  I leaned forward and, in her language, said that from what I had been told about Tranquilandia, no one could expect to be accepted socially in the best circles until they had survived at least two kidnappings. Consuelo, who didn’t seem fazed, said it was true, the crime page and the society page were the same thing in the City of Orchids newspaper—but a single, pro forma kidnapping for a foreigner like me would be enough to open a few doors.

  When we got to the prison, Consuelo disappeared to the chapel. I sat with Carmen and Gustavo and Mugre,
who drummed on a metal plate with the back of a stainless-steel spoon. If you ever needed to find Mugre, Gustavo said, you waited until it got close to meal time. You could always find him at the chow-hall door twenty minutes before a meal.

  “He wants to be first at something,” Gustavo said, and Mugre brought the spoon down on the back of his brother’s hand and tried to grind it into his flesh.

  Carmen sighed and said why did men want to be first at everything? Why did they insist on having virgin snow they could cut up with their skis, and virgin forests they could cut down? Mugre might be the first one in line for dinner, but he was the only one of the bunch who hadn’t gained weight since they’d arrived in Canada, she added. Even though the food was better here, and there was more of it than most people got at home, Mugre’s illness had left him without an appetite.

  I watched Mugre picking at a running sore on his hand. He had not been himself since he got out of prison the last time, Carmen said. She’d gone to El Zancudo with Gustavo to pick him up and had found him passed out on the floor next to a thin broth of rotten horse meat he’d cooked up in his cell, his arms around the whore they called Salsa Picante.

  “I’ve always said it was that soup, not the whore, that gave him the virus,” said Gustavo.

  I waved to Bonnie and Thurma when I saw them sitting together on the other side of the room, and made a face for Little Shit Shit. When Angel and Consuelo joined us, Angel didn’t look at me. He sat close to his wife, with his arm around the back of her chair, the way he usually sat with me. I heard Consuelo tell Carmen that they had jimmied the lock on the chapel’s folding doors, behind which the prison chaplain stored his chalices, paraphernalia and prayer books, and that she and Angel had gone in there to have a private visit. It wasn’t what she would call intimate, she said, kneeling beneath an organ under the eyes of the Blessed Virgin.

  A group of inmates began erecting a makeshift stage in the centre of the gymnasium, and Mugre left the table. “I think he has stage fright,” Angel said when Consuelo said she’d never seen Mugre look so pale.

  We sat back in our chairs as the lights dimmed. A spotlight came up on one of the Mexican crew members who was dressed as a priest—the play we were about to see was called Rehabilitation, he said in broken English; it had been written and produced by the prison writing group. I was looking forward to the entertainment. For one thing, it meant I wouldn’t have to make small talk with Angel and his wife.

  Mugre and Treat stepped onto the stage, Treat wearing the same red bandanna he always wore and the black T-shirt with “Narrow Gauge Posse” on the back, and Mugre in a guard’s jacket and hat, carrying a very realistic-looking baseball bat. Treat, I thought, had either studied method acting or was on drugs: he moved warily and uneasily. The prisoners in the audience began whispering to one another. Mugre thumped his bat on the floor for silence.

  When that didn’t get everybody’s attention, Mugre swung the bat and connected with Treat’s skull. We all gasped as Treat fell to his knees, clutching his bleeding head. Only Angel and Gustavo sat still, their faces expressionless.

  “That’s not in the script, not to fucken kill me, man,” Treat cried.

  He looked dazed, and blood trickled from between his fingers.

  Mugre scowled and looked at the priest, who held up a crucifix and cried, “Show time!”

  Treat tried to stand up but only made it as far as one knee. He looked around for help, his face contorted with confusion, as if Mugre had forgotten his lines or who he was supposed to be. “You been rehabilitating me for the wrong job,” he managed to whisper, as if sticking to his script, when all else failed, might save him. “All you teach me to do is mail-bag repair, and they don’t do that nowhere except in here.”

  The men in the audience began whispering again. Mugre slugged Treat with the bat a second time, knocking him off his knee.

  The real guards, who had been standing in an uncomfortable silence, muttered to one another. I buried my head in my hands, wondering how I would make it out of here to safety, wishing I understood what was happening.

  “Now—when you get out, where do you go to get a job?” the priest shouted. There was blood everywhere, and Treat had curled into a ball on the floor. Mugre spat on him and kicked him in the ribs.

  “Back to prison,” Treat moaned.

  Mugre struck him once more. “Now you are getting with the program,” the priest cried.

  The warden appeared by the door marked Emergency Exit. It was clear to me by now that Treat was badly injured, and yet the Tranquilandians and the Mexican crew were applauding, stamping their feet. The priest lurched onto the stage, turned Treat over with the toe of his foot and crossed his arms over his chest.

  “This prisoner has been rehabilitated,” said the priest, placing a paper lily in his hands.

  A siren went off and a voice came over a bullhorn. “ALL INMATES TO LINE UP! THE WALL!” Guards rushed the stage; Mugre raised his bat and the guards began to swing their batons, beating him back. Most of the audience looked lost, the visitors not knowing what to do. The guards put Mugre on the floor, handcuffed him; the whole incident seemed to be contained, then one of the guards brought the butt of his stick down on Mugre’s head.

  I tried to get out of the way, but got knocked down on the floor as Angel and Gustavo pushed a row of chairs aside and scrambled towards Mugre, who was being dragged out of the gymnasium by his feet, tangled in balloons and streamers. Then everyone in the gym froze—all the convicts had left their visitors and formed a circle around the guards. The loudspeaker blared out repeatedly, “CLEAR THE GYM, RETURN TO YOUR UNITS, CLEAR THE GYM, RETURN TO YOUR UNITS,” and the siren screamed in our ears. Consuelo de Corazón bent down, took me by the hand and pulled me towards the door. Carmen was right behind me. When I looked back over my shoulder, I saw the prisoners keeping the six guards surrounded and moving in on them, inch by inch. Then, as we reached the exit, the loudspeaker went dead.

  I saw the warden give a signal to the control centre as the gate slammed open. A wave of uniforms poured into the gym—Star Wars figures with Plexiglas face shields, helmets, padded gloves, black leather boots. Tear gas exploded; I heard the swish, the sickening thud of flesh being pounded down, as riot sticks filled the air.

  Consuelo still had me by the hand; we pressed ourselves against the wall, inching towards the barrier. I tried to find Angel, and at the same time as I saw him coming towards us, I saw Little Shit Shit on the floor, smiling and waving her bottle at the crowd of rioting men. Angel scooped her up, delivered her into my arms. I stayed long enough to see him catch a baton across the shoulders and then go down; I fled through the gates as more guards arrived in the gymnasium.

  Jack Saygrover met us in the hall and hustled us through the remaining barriers. I waited in the visiting room with Carmen and Consuelo, and when Bonnie finally arrived, she looked as bruised and beaten as Treat had been. I started to ask her what had gone wrong, but she grabbed Little Shit Shit, gave Carmen and Consuelo a look of contempt, and didn’t say a word to any of us. We were all held for another half-hour, and they searched us, one by one, as we left the prison building.

  chapter seven

  On October 29, Vernal and I had dinner together. He came to pick me up in a taxi, and arrived early for once. I asked him to wait in the living room while I took a shower.

  “Listen to this,” he shouted so I could hear over the hiss of the water. I’d already read last weekend’s news, so for once I knew what was coming.

  “ ‘Inmates surrounded and attacked six guards after a riot broke out during a play, in what CSC officials are calling a race-type riot.’ What’s a race-type riot, as opposed to a race riot, know what I mean? Anyway, it looks like one of Gustavo’s bad brothers took a baseball bat to a Native … because the Native had insulted him by calling him an Indian.”

  I finished showering and then went into my bedroom wrapped in a towel. “What do you mean, ‘one of his bad brothers’?”

&
nbsp; Vernal followed me in and sat on the edge of the bed. He didn’t answer my question. “Here’s a woman who says she went to the Prison Justice social looking for “Mr. Right” and got tear-gassed instead. It amazes me how many squirrelly women there are out there. There are 750 men in that prison. Each one of them has a dick and an imagination.”

  He put the paper down and lit a Gitane. I asked him not to smoke in my bedroom. “That place has been open less than a year and already it’s nothing but trouble,” Vernal said, pointing to an aerial photo of Mountjoy Penitentiary on the front page of the newspaper. “Harder to get into than all the other country clubs put together,” he added, meaning, I supposed, you had to be pretty hard-core to be sent there.

  “A lot of those men probably haven’t done anything worse than you or I have ever done,” I said.

  Vernal gave me an odd look. “I never raped a retarded child and bucked him up with a chain-saw afterwards. Like that Chandler? The one the cops beat so badly he’ll never walk again? You said you’d leave me if I even considered defending him. I hear he’s got some woman chasing after his wheelchair now. Wanting to marry him. Some women think love can change anything,” Vernal said, “even homosexuality.”

  I was sitting on the opposite side of the bed, still wrapped in my towel, waiting for him to leave the room so I could put my clothes on. He leaned over and kissed me and tousled my hair. “But then again,” he said, “so do some men.”

  I asked him to leave, then got dressed, wondering how much Thurma knew about her boyfriend’s past—she had met him through an ad he’d placed in a magazine, looking for penpals. I thought, as I slipped on my black stockings and hooked them to my garters, how little we know of anyone, especially the person we go to bed with every night, who is also the one most likely, statistically, to kill us. I wondered, too, if I would end up in bed with Vernal before the end of this night.