Cargo of Orchids Read online

  “I’d like to get my hands on the individual that did this.” No charges had yet been laid, Mr. Saygrover said—the “incident” was under investigation.

  Treat, who had been discharged from the infirmary at the beginning of March, shortly after the Corazóns had been let out of segregation and back into the population, had received a wedding gift: a stainless-steel cutlery set, pilfered from the prison kitchen. Knives, forks, even the dessert spoons had been driven into his flesh. His rectum had first been carved out with a knife to permit the entry of “an object larger than the normal man,” though the report didn’t specify what kind of object, or what part of a normal man.

  I held the photograph in my hands, thinking Treat looked like a piece of performance art with all that cutlery sticking out of him. I was ashamed of myself, too, for wanting to laugh. Looking back, I believe I was anaesthetized by shock. I told Mr. Saygrover I didn’t think Bonnie needed to see the report, or the photograph; he put it away in a file before she came back into his office.

  All Treat’s worldly goods fit in the shoebox on Mr. Saygrover’s desk: a key chain with no keys, $2.36 in change, a toothbrush, a rosary and an unopened bag of Cheetos. Mr. Saygrover emptied onto the desk a brown paper bag containing the clothes Treat had been wearing when he’d been discharged from the infirmary, the red bandanna, the black T-shirt.

  “I hope he gets a clean shirt to wear,” I said, folding the T-shirt and laying it in the shoebox with his other belongings.

  “Sally Ann donates us a suit,” said Mr. Saygrover. “I think they found one that would fit him. He won’t be getting any heavier, that’s for sure …” His voice trailed off.

  Bonnie had washed the streaks of mascara off her face, but her eyes looked even blacker now with grief. Mr. Saygrover patted her on the back again and handed her the whole box of Kleenex. “Keep it,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”

  Before I returned to my apartment after picking up Treat’s effects, I kept another appointment—at the hospital. That evening, I made a pot of tea and sat watching the day grow dark, a jasmine-scented candle filling the room with its hot-night fragrance. Outside I could hear the howling March wind bowling the day’s litter of bad news down the alleyway.

  I called Carmen and asked her to come. I switched the radio on, but the reception was no good. I sat with the fuzzy ultrasound photograph in my hands, listening to a woman sing a love song through the static.

  I’d had the blood work done when I first suspected I was pregnant, and now the ultrasound the doctor recommended because of my age. “Women want to find out whether they are carrying a child with birth defects, one they may choose to abort.” Having any baby, but especially one that required more attention because it was born with Down’s syndrome, or with fins instead of feet, would be hard. But since when had I turned my back on anything the moment life became hard?

  I turned the black-and-white photograph over in my hands. The fetus, half-fish, half-human being, rubbed its eyes as if trying to shield its face from the probing camera. Ten fingers, ten toes. What had given birth in my heart now kicked in the womb, small enough, still, to fit inside a tear.

  Carmen opened a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and poured us each a glass. She asked if I had thought of a name: even though the ultrasound hadn’t indicated the sex of the baby, Carmen felt sure it would be a boy, because that’s what Angel wanted most of all, a son. I tried explaining to her I didn’t want to raise a child who thought going to prison to see his father was a normal way of life. I didn’t want my son’s diapers examined or his tiny orifices probed in the name of security, I said. I didn’t want him growing up thinking razor-wire was “pretty.” Besides, Angel had a wife, one who smuggled grenades. What might she do to a woman like me? I wanted this baby, I said, but I wasn’t going to see Angel again.

  Carmen said Consuelo was not a big problem, but insisted that Angel would want his son to be part of his life. She poured more champagne, put on Pachelbel’s Canon over the sound of a heartbeat, as recorded from inside the uterus, and waltzed around the room caressing her belly. “Sweet Baby Dreams,” the tape was called. I envied my friend, how she could spin about the room and laugh without effort, or carry on a conversation without having to close her eyes mid-sentence. I was too tired to walk as far as the bathroom to brush my teeth, or to the kitchen for a glass of flat ginger ale and a couple of soda crackers—the only breakfast I wouldn’t lose. Most days, I simply curled up on the couch in a floor-length flannelette nightgown and furry sleepers, with a strip of Scotch Magic tape between my eyes to prevent frowning wrinkles.

  The funeral was held on Good Friday, Bonnie’s wedding day. The chapel had been reserved anyway, she said. She pinned a corsage to my lapel—one that complemented her bouquet of orchids—before we set out in the rain for Agassiz. Bonnie had ordered the flowers for their wedding; she said there was no point cancelling the order—people appreciated flowers at their funerals also.

  Carmen, who had insisted on coming to the funeral—to pay her respects, and for Bonnie’s sake, she said; it was not their fight, she maintained, but the men’s—said it was just as well Bonnie wasn’t getting married today, because it was raining so hard that it would have been an unlucky wedding. “Lady Unluck has the rain for her train,” she said to us.

  The smell of the orchids filled our rented car, and when the windows began steaming up, I almost convinced myself I was driving through some tropical rain forest, not the Fraser Valley. Torrential rains had washed out a bridge on Highway 1, and we had to take a back road through the mountains. Grey moss overhead, a ghostly presence in the pervasive green, trailed from tree to tree, reaching for the ground or the surface of the water in the overflowing creeks. Bonnie, sniffing and dabbing at her tears, told us what the tree moss meant to her people. A girl was killed by an enemy tribe during her wedding ceremony, and her mother cut off her daughter’s hair and spread it on the limbs of the spruce tree where they buried her. Her hair blew from tree to tree, eventually turning grey, enduring as a tribute to those who are not destined to live out their love.

  Neither Carmen nor I had an unhappy ending to top that one. We drove on in silence, encountering holdups even along the alternate route—two minor accidents and a police roadblock warning us of the possibility of landslides. I had never known it to rain so hard as when we pulled into the Visitors Only lot, where a sign read No Parking for the Wedding. Perhaps the same official who had tried to prevent Bonnie from entering the prison because she wasn’t Treat’s blood relation had unwittingly posted the sign. Feeling frustrated and angry, I dropped Bonnie and Carmen at the front gate.

  I parked on the road and walked the quarter-mile back. We had to stand outside in the rain, waiting, until the big hand on the clock inside gave its single-digit salute to the sky and Roll-Over buzzed us in. Our clothes were soaked through, and Bonnie’s hair hung in bedraggled ropes around her shoulders.

  “Wet enough for you out there?” said Roll-Over as he went through Bonnie’s purse. He sniffed her bouquet, held it upside down and shook it.

  “Check with the matron before you go through,” he said, pointing Bonnie towards the body-search cubicle. I told Carmen I hoped to God they would give it a pass today, but Carmen said she doubted they made any concessions in this place, not even for grieving brides.

  The guard at the main doors buzzed us through and waved us into the visiting room, where Mr. Saygrover sat with his feet up on his desk.

  “My breakfast,” he said, disgruntledly picking another french fry out of a pond of gravy. “Don’t like to waste, not with all the famine and lack of food in the world today. I’m supposed to be on a diet, mind you. The wife’s idea. Not mine. What the heck, is my attitude. Life’s short enough without her always telling me to push away from the gravy.”

  I saw Bonnie stiffen, and Mr. Saygrover looked at me, embarrassed. “I’ve put my mouth in it again,” he said. “Me and my big foot.”

  He looked from Bonnie to the
clock on the wall above the soft-drinks machine. “We’d better mosey on down the hall,” he said.

  I never knew whether Jack Saygrover’s lopsided walk was a result of injuries or the weight of the keys at his waist, but I felt myself unconsciously imitating him as I walked behind. The floors were freshly mopped and the corridor reeked of disinfectant, and Mr. Saygrover told us to watch our step because he didn’t want any more casualties.

  He nodded to the guard in control of the iron-barred gate, and the heavy steel doors slid back on their runners. We crossed the five further barriers before reaching the gymnasium and the chapel.

  Mr. Saygrover looked at his watch and said, “Count’s going to happen in the middle of the proceedings if they don’t get the show on the road. This is as far as I go. You girls are on your own from now on.”

  He shook each of our hands. I’d noticed how Jack Saygrover always seemed to take a paternal interest in both Bonnie and Carmen. Carmen could look as if she needed protection. I pitied the man who ever thought fingernails were something women grew long to make their hands look feminine.

  Suddenly Bonnie reached up, put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for everything you have done to help,” she said.

  She kissed his other cheek, and Mr. Saygrover blushed. The creases in his neck stayed white, but everything else above his collar turned the colour of a cardinal bird I’d once seen run over on a California road.

  “I don’t know how long it’s been since anyone around here said anything they meant sincerely,” he said. He shook her hand again, then turned back towards the steel barrier that opened to let him pass.

  Daddy Lord, the only man licensed to perform funerals and weddings inside maximum security, welcomed us at the chapel door, his breath smelling of last night’s Old Grouse. He looked more like an exhausted bus driver than a man of God, with his Expo pin in his lapel and a calculator dangling from his belt. In an aqua plastic insert above his heart, he carried an array of pens, and in his hands, a copy of Good News for Modern Man.

  Treat got a full house. I saw the wedding cake Bonnie had ordered from the prison kitchen and forgotten to cancel, and an officer standing guard over the cake knife. Floating above the cake was a bunch of pink and white heart-shaped balloons. Daddy Lord began apologizing for the mix-up and said funerals were like weddings—administrative nightmares. “Paperwork till it’s coming out your yin-yang. Myself, I’d rather see a funeral than a wedding any day. At the funeral, at least you know a person’s troubles are over.”

  Bonnie said it didn’t matter about the cake; it was all for looks and made of Styrofoam anyway. She could take the balloons home to Baby.

  The prison-issue coffin Treat was to be buried in lay beneath the organ and the statue of the Blessed Virgin. She still faced the wall: no one had turned her back around since the Halloween social. I leaned against the wall, staring out through the bars of the chapel window, as Daddy Lord negotiated his way to the front of the room and stood to the right of the coffin. In the silence that fell, I could hear the hum of a generator outside and men playing basketball in the gymnasium, even the internal workings of my own body—the churning in my stomach, the rush of my blood—and my eyelids opening and closing like a moth’s wings brushing against silk. I thought, too, I could hear my baby’s heartbeat.

  Daddy Lord opened his prayer book. He had sweat running down the sides of his cheeks. He pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his brow and began quoting the words of the Holy Writ, as found in St. Luke: “Be ye also ready, for at what hour you think not, the Son of Man will come.” These words, he said, were as applicable to the inmates within the walls of Mountjoy Penitentiary as they were to any other men. He then turned the service over to Bonnie’s brother, Kono, who said Treat would not want any of us to pray for him. “The only time I heard him pray was when he found out someone had a contract out on him because of a drug deal that got fucked up. He prayed to the Virgin because she is the Mother of God, and his mother was the most sacred thing to him.

  “You can only have one mother, he’d say, but your father could be any son of a bitch.”

  Everyone laughed, which seemed to release some of the tension in the room. When it grew quiet again, Kono continued. “He was a believer, but he only went to church for one reason. Whenever he ran out of rolling papers, he would go get a copy of the New Testament. He believed the New Testament had the best paper for smoking up.”

  Daddy Lord thanked Kono for his remarks. “Nothing so nearly touches man as his mortality,” he said, taking over again at the front of the room. “Daily he meets with objects and situations that remind him of the frailty of his existence here on earth, and from time to time the Angel of Death makes his periodical visit to our midst, in order to remind us that ‘it is appointed for men once to die, and after this, judgment.’ Our brother Treat has been called to give account of his stewardship before the throne of the Eternal judge of the living and the dead. Let us pray that death, the grim officer of God, will not invade our ranks for the remainder of the month.”

  Even though he wasn’t in the room, I felt Angel’s breath slip into my ear, whispering its way through the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

  Just as Daddy Lord was inviting everyone to congregate in the gymnasium for lunch after noon count, I heard thumping and loud voices outside the chapel door. The lights went out and alarms began going off in the building. Daddy Lord pleaded with us to stay calm.

  I heard a familiar voice shouting, “Chapel! Chapel!” from the gym, and Daddy Lord fumbled to get the door open. Mugre, holding a zip gun made from a length of pipe, pushed Mr. Saygrover into the chapel; he almost knocked me down. “Now look here, you fellows know …” Daddy Lord began, starting towards Mugre.

  “Stand back,” Mugre said—I’d never heard him sound so level—“or I will kill you. We’re going out.” He passed off the zip gun to Angel, who had appeared with Gustavo out of nowhere, grabbed my arms and pinned them behind my back. Mr. Saygrover charged, Gustavo grappled him and they toppled together, upsetting the table that held the wedding cake. Mugre scooped the cake knife from the floor. Then I heard, above the pandemonium, the staccato beat of a helicopter overhead, a throaty thwap-thwap-thwapping out of the skies.

  Mugre dragged me towards the chapel door, holding the cake knife at my throat. He told the security guards who were backing off into the gymnasium that if anyone else made an attempt to take me, I would die too. Outside I could hear the clatter of automatic-weapon fire, the muffled thud of helicopter rotors and a voice over the loudspeaker calling, “Clear the yard! Clear the yard!” The machine-gun fire, from this distance, made a hissing, sputtering sound, like sparklers on a birthday cake. Mugre shoved me towards the gymnasium doors. Carmen, Angel and Gustavo were close behind.

  The guard standing in the darkness by the door had a flashlight in one hand and a truncheon in the other. He looked young and scared. Mugre kept me in front of him like a shield, making a sawing motion back and forth across my throat.

  “We don’t want to have to hurt anyone; we want to leave here in peace,” Angel said.

  The guard might not have understood Angel’s words, but there was no mistaking Mugre’s gesture. I glanced up at the control tower, where the prison arsenal was kept; I could see the guards lined up at the window, levelling their guns at us. They could easily open fire and prevent the escape from going any further. I looked away again, and the young guard’s eyes met mine.

  Mugre pressed the blade on my dress into my neck. “If any one fires, we all die. You shoot first and she … like this!” He drew the knife first across my throat, and then across my belly. Outside, I could hear the metallic pop-pop-pop of machine-gun fire.

  “Open the door! We’re going through,” Mugre said, straining his voice over the thud of helicopter rotors overhead and the machine-gun chatter.

  The young guard stood his ground, switching his flashlight on and off again in our faces. “Sur
render your weapons and let the hostage go. Don’t do anything you might regret later.” He nodded at Mugre. “Sir.”

  The “sir” was a concession, I supposed, to the knife making a deep indentation in my belly. And then, as I prepared to die, the warden’s voice came over the bullhorn, a voice welcome as morphine. “What are your demands? Tell us what you want, and we will do whatever we can to assist you. But first, let the hostage go.”

  The three men grew silent, looked at each other and then at me for an explanation. I tried to translate what the warden had said. The young guard stood, feet apart, flashlight going on-off at his hip.

  “We want access to the yard,” Angel said quietly. “Then we will release the hostage unharmed.”

  I translated his demand. The guard continued playing with his flashlight.

  And as I waited, and kissed an imaginary pair of dice and tossed them high, the doors opened and the warden came on the bullhorn again, saying, “No one gets hurt. Let the hostage pass.” The guard stepped aside, shaking his head.

  I could smell smoke as Mugre pulled me out the door; a shot from one of the guard towers shattered the wall beside us, and I saw Gustavo fall I heard more sirens and gunfire as Mugre pushed me ahead of him, still using me as a shield, out across the grass towards a helicopter hovering over the yard like an outlaw dragonfly, firing on all guard towers.

  Angel fell. Mugre stopped and turned to help him. But then Carmen got hit too: she lurched forward and to one side, doubled over and clutched her bloodied shoulder. Mugre let go of Angel, pushed me towards the helicopter, dragging Carmen after him. An arm reached down from the cockpit to pull us up; looking back in terror, I saw Angel rise and stagger towards us. I heard another shot and saw him sink to his knees. The guards kept firing; his body jerked with each shot, then lay unmoving in the dirt, curled in the foetal position.