Cargo of Orchids (6 page)

“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.

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 rose 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.

I tried to shake his hand.

“He’s got no control over himself,” said Thurma. “That’s why I worry; he’s got no control over
nothing
no more.”

When Thurma had wheeled him away, Carmen said Chandler’s face hadn’t always been that way. “His mouth is the only part on him that moves any more, and
still
she doesn’t trust him.” Carmen said Thurma’s biggest worry was whether her boyfriend would be faithful to her for the duration of his life sentence, and whether he would continue being faithful to her if he ever got out.

Angel said he knew one way to tell if a person was faithful, and asked to see my hand. With his middle finger, he began tracing one of the lines on my palm to where it disappeared at the base of my ring finger, then he turned my wedding ring until the gold heart, clasped in a pair of hands, faced up at him. He nodded, then smiled, as if he now knew some dark secret about me.

“My brother sees that you are a married woman, and I know him, I know what he thinks,” said Gustavo, chuckling. “That whoever has given you the ring must trust you very much to let you come alone to visit a place full of men who have been deprived of the company of women, some of them for a long time.” I told Gustavo my husband had every reason to trust me.

Angel turned the ring again, so the heart was no longer visible.

“My brother’s wife trusts him,” Gustavo went on. “If she didn’t, you can be sure he would have been dead a long time ago.”

Carmen had said nothing about Angel having a wife. I didn’t know why it bothered me.

“She must miss you,” I said. I looked away from him to the gymnasium doors.

“She hasn’t had much of a husband to miss,” he said. “I worry about her. Some nights.” He must have felt my whole body pulling away, because he let go of my hand. I hadn’t even realized he was still holding it.

He moved his chair in close, edged his hand around the back of my chair and rested his thumb on my shoulder blade.

“And you, you have how many children?” The question slammed into me.

“Oh, no. None. I mean, a dog is all. He’s like a child; he’s like ten children, sometimes. Only I doubt he’ll ever grow up. He’s my husband’s dog, actually. My husband sleeps with him. I mean, he sleeps with him on the futon.”

I felt embarrassed to be babbling on about Vernal like this, painting a sorry picture of my married life, but the way Angel looked at me he didn’t have to say what kind of a man would sleep with a dog when he had a woman like you waiting for him in bed?

“I hope you never regret coming to visit me today” is what he
did
say, after a bit.

I stared at the Mount Joy Mountain range, a deep sea green in the late-afternoon light, which I could still glimpse through the gymnasium doors, then at the clock
on the wall. I had less than an hour left. I didn’t want to leave. Part of me, at least, wished all of me could stay here with Angel.

“I like it here,” I said.

Angel reached for my hand again. My palm felt sweaty. I had seen Bonnie and Little Shit Shit, and presumably the father whom Baby missed—a small, muscular man with a tense face, wearing a red bandanna, and a black T-shirt with the words “Narrow Gauge Posse” on the back—going outside; I said I’d like to go for a walk, too.

Angel stayed close beside me as we made our way around the tables towards the gymnasium doors. Every time we brushed against one another, I felt a shiver of something lost stirring inside.

We walked in the same direction, around and around the yard. He said he’d never wanted children, but since coming to prison this time he had changed his mind. “It’s easy to think you don’t want a family until you know you are not having one,” he said.

I remember listening to him, thinking finally I had found a man, the right man for what I wanted—which was to have a child—and where did I find him? In a maximum-security penitentiary.

We made five circuits of the yard before the cold wind sent us scurrying back inside. Angel returned to our table. Carmen, who had been to the chapel, the only room off the gymnasium that wasn’t kept locked during a prison social, steered me towards the washroom. We had to squeeze past Bonnie and another woman, who were trying to reapply their makeup in the chrome of the condom machine, from
which a sign hung saying, “Sorry. Out of Order.” (The word
sorry
had been crossed out.) The other woman, wearing a red leather mini-skirt the size of a heating pad and a T-Shirt with two fried eggs on the front, tried to wipe the smudged mascara off Bonnie’s face.

“If you’re going to hang around a man who makes you cry, you should at least buy waterproof mascara,” Carmen told her.

She ran a comb through her hair. “So,” she said, turning back to me, “what do you think of my brother?”

“He’s nothing like I expected,” I said. That was a lie. He was everything I’d imagined him to be, and more.

Carmen turned to me. “Spit on a bean,” she said, her green eyes shining. “That’s how polished his face grows when he looks at you.”

Vernal came home a day early, saying Desolation Sound had been aptly named. There was no liquor store within a hundred and fifty miles.

He was catching up on a forest of newspapers in front of the living-room fire, nursing a cold and a tumbler of malt whisky. He looked up when I brought in a tray of cookies, picked out a chocolate chip and fed it to Brutus, who lay at his feet sipping occasionally from his bowl.

“Listen to this,” Vernal said. One of his habits was to read aloud, everything from the grammatical errors on milk cartons (“old-fashion taste”—
what
is the world coming to?—old-
fashioned
taste, please!”) to the list of ingredients in Brutus’s healthy dog biscuits. “ ‘Dogs Find Dead Body in Shallow Grave.’ ‘Dead body’ is an oxymoron when
the body is found in a grave.” He paused. “You know, I’ve always thought your cookies ought to be a controlled substance.”

He fed Brutus another chocolate chip.

“Don’t,” I said. “He’ll get spots.” I lay on my stomach on the carpet, flipping through a magazine. Brutus had been diagnosed with canine acne, a stress-related disorder, according to his pet-care provider at the K-9 Holistic Health Centre.

Vernal put his paper aside to light a joint.

“ ‘Would you rather die before dessert, when you still have dessert to look forward to, or after you’ve eaten dessert?’ ” I read.

“It depends.” He paused and threw a third chocolate chip up in the air; Brutus caught it before it hit the floor. “What’s for dessert?”

“Just answer the question. It’s a quiz. To see if we’re compatible.”

“It’s a bit late now. You should have asked me that two years ago.”

“I did.”

“And …?” he asked, inhaling and holding his breath.

“You were reading the newspaper.” I took hold of his left foot and began massaging it.

“I need another drink,” Vernal said, exhaling as he spoke, trying to extricate his foot.

“Drink to me only with thine eyes.” I held on tight, rubbing in between his crooked big toe and the next one.

“That won’t cure cotton mouth,” he said, pulling away and going to the cabinet for another Scotch.

We’d snorted a few lines together, then attempted to have sex, when he got off the boat. I always knew when Vernal had been with another woman, even before he got his clothes off and came to bed. He smelled different. And when he touched me, I knew the rest.

But this time
I’d
felt different too. Whatever part of me had been drawn to Angel—so much so that I even fantasized about having his child—made me feel I was betraying him by lying naked beneath a man I’d been married to for almost two years. And when Vernal began thrusting deeper, I sank my teeth in his neck and my fingernails in his back, wanting to hurt him for not sensing the distance in me. He’d stopped, rolled off me and looked away through my eyes.

“Don’t mark me,” he’d said.

I closed my magazine, sat up and hugged my knees, looking out over the lawns and formal gardens to the stone wall while Vernal opened a pack of cigarettes and found something else in the paper he thought would be of interest to me. “Listen to this: ‘Wife Who Smashed Television Gets Jail.’ ” He always began by saying, “Listen to this,” followed it by the headline, and then let me suffer until he decided whether to read me the rest of the article—another of his habits.

“ ‘Carrotty Nell Kelly—where
do
they get these names?—came home and found her husband, Seamus, peacefully watching a wrestling match. When she suggested he turn the television off immediately, and he didn’t comply, Mrs. Kelly smashed the screen with a toaster oven and went back to the bar,’ ” Vernal read.

Vernal tossed Brutus a cookie without any chocolate chips left in it; Brutus sniffed it and turned his head away, looking miffed.

“ ‘The judge said that any woman who preferred drinking to watching family television was not only a threat to the family unit, but a menace to our society,’ ” he continued. “ ‘Furthermore, women who expressed their preferences in a violent manner did not belong in the home—jail was the only place for them.’ ”

As Vernal read to me, I pictured Angel lying on his bunk, staring up at the dull green institutional gloss on his ceiling. I thought of lying on top of him, then underneath him, and then I thought, jail might not be such a bad place for a woman like me either.

I had gone back to the kitchen to get a bag of jalapeñocheese-flavoured tortilla chips—of all things Latin, Vernal liked only tortilla chips and cocaine—when I heard the doorbell ring. Vernal yelled, “Got it!” and when I went back to the living room, I-5 was there, sweating in the
sarape
he had just purchased “somewhere high in the Andes.” I could think of only one reason he’d be wearing a
ruana
(
sarape
in Mexico,
ruana
in South America, but I didn’t bother correcting him) in the house. Like most of Vernal’s coke dealers, this one was another right-wing expatriate.