The Orange Blossom Express

by Marlena Evangeline

  The eye blinked and the door swung open.

  A puff of refrigerated air welcomed the two men, and the old woman closed the door, cutting away the intense desert light. The dark cold room blurred: a chandelier hung from the ceiling, little drops of crystal and gold reflecting the dim light. The carpet, red, and worn, like the woman. A mirror behind an old tattered bar held the reflections of the three, plus the images of a few full-stomached men bellied up to the bar.

  The woman looked out of place amongst the more polished interior: a chunk of the desert herself, her visage, stark and remote. “You boys wanta drink?”

  “Love a beer,” said Hank, suddenly a little unsure of himself, no match for the old broad, he knew. A spiny hair poked from a brown mole to the left side of her chin, and her skin held crevices that remembered the desert sun. She put two ice-chilled beers on the counter along with two frosty glasses. Hank pulled a couple tens from his jeans and put them on the counter. The eyes went blank. She didn’t acknowledge the money.

  Hank shrugged his shoulders to Patrick. In the background, a CB radio tuned into the police channel squawked in the background. “You hear that?” he asked Patrick.

  “Sure do.”

  “Dumb-struck luck,” marveled Hank turning his back to the bar. “Shit,” he whispered under his breath. “We could stake someone right here and we’d know everything that was happening is this area. Mother-fuck. Dumb struck luck.”

  “No shit,” answered Patrick, looking around the room approvingly.

  “Motherfuck,” Hank whispered again as the voice on the radio droned the details of a routine traffic stop.

  “Boys,” said the woman behind the bar.

  “Yeah?” Hank turned around.

  “You know where you are, don’t you?”

  “Lydia Junction?” answered Hank unsure of himself again.

  “Yeah, honey. That too.”

  “And?” questioned Patrick curiously.

  “This is the local cat house, sweetie. You want a girl don’t you?”

  “Cat house,” laughed Hank. “Dumb-struck luck for sure!” He looked at Patrick in amazement, a big grin on his face. “Well, no, shit no. We just thought you might have a cold beer.”

  “Well, we got a little more than that. We got more company, girls,” she said in a louder voice, and two women sitting at the small tables looked up and smiled.

  “Oh shit,” said Patrick. “We don’t have time for this, do we?”

  Greenback-a-dollars …

  CHAPTER 14

  A VIGOROUS TRANSFORMATION beset the club with the load of pot, a multitude of transformations; they’d finally filled the oversized club house, these new rough riders, riders of this newish and profitable crop, this purple sage, conquering the rambling space, almost filling part of one entire room, Patrick’s room, with stacks and stacks of pink and brown and blue kilos: sixteen hundred pounds, about seven hundred and fifty kilos; and it was like Hank said, very close to a cord of marijuana.

  The marijuana had a consciousness all its own, and everyone who touched it moved in a different way: the load bonded them, for better or worse, for richer and richest. And while marijuana filled up a cord of physical space, its conscious energy spilled overfull into each nook and cranny, and every hour, minute, second became fueled by the grass. This strident consciousness demanded everything of the occupants. All the empty space diminished; people they’d never met found their way to the ranch to ogle over the marijuana, buy some, turn Hank onto another buyer, someone with more cash, and could they, might they, shouldn’t they have just another hit before they left? Hank collected the cash, kilo by kilo; the pungent smell of marijuana made its distinct presence known, saturating their clothes, permeating all the corners of the house: marijuana seeds tumbled hither and yon out into the dry desert soil where the spikey plant germinated haphazardly.

  Maggie quit complaining about the masses of people dragging through the house; her anger disappeared with the sixteen hundred pounds of pot and the arrival of cold, hard, cash. The illegal contraband demanded her attention: everyone’s attention. The illicit nature bound them together, and the Swedish pattern of taking care of men settled over her, casting her within her own mother’s particular disposition, an acquiescence to the male and what he does, right or wrong. A divided house would have brought them all to ruin, and she instinctively placed her thinking to avoid it.

  It took just three and a half weeks to off the load. A new kind of bread fermented in the house. Unbelievable bread. Big Bread. Smuggler’s bread. Big hunks of it. And this hunk of cash generated an energy just like the marijuana—intense and demanding—the cash seemed as alive as the marijuana. As if the cash too might germinate there in the desert soil and sprout. Neither Hank, nor Patrick, nor Maggie had ever seen that kind of money before: they were all from middle class homes where nine to five was the order of the day. The money that filtered through the homes of their parents never arrived in the form of green-back-a-dollars, but pale blue tokens of middle class solidarity. If a column in a savings account at home had ever added up beyond the pressing monthly bills, it was spent on someone’s braces, or another washing machine to replace the one that shimmied in the corner on spin, or the brief vacation to the lake in Crestline that would take them out of their tract houses for a momentary, but thoroughly enjoyed respite from their nine to five lives. They were children of good people who had bought into the innocence of middle-America, hook, line and sinker. They had all lived from paycheck to tenuous paycheck. The welcome smell of money wafted through the ranch like cinnamon rolls on a cold country morning, rich beyond the wildest chocolate.

  The riches of wild chocolate and cinnamon demanded attention: if they’d have just put twenty cents on each pound, they’d have been rich, but the marijuana happened to be extraordinary: a dark sultry green with red streaked resins; this stuff was way above the ordinary Mexican weed and good enough to put fifty cents a pound on the price. Fifty bucks a kilo. The arrival of dumb-struck luck fueled what Hank Hardiman already knew: he was gonna get rich. He no longer wanted to turn on the next guy, the brother who couldn’t afford his own boo. He and Patrick had already done that. They knew that that brother would always extend an empty hand. They wanted money. This wild green marijuana meant substantial money and money meant business; this green weed meant eighty thousand dollars of the other green: eighty stacks of thousand dollar bills all bunched up in twenties and hundreds and even some tens and fives, yes sir, yes sir, three bags full. Rich wild chocolate.

  And Maggie loved chocolate, yet, something, something seemed yet out of place. What? What was it? Maggie loved chocolate and money. Why didn’t she just get over it, whatever it was? Maybe she should just pour chocolate over everything. Maybe then life would taste better. Be sweeter than it seemed right then. Was it sweet already? The money wasn’t really chocolate, now was it? It didn’t taste sweet at all. But, holy mackerel, there in the closet sat eighty grand, eighty, not sixty, or twenty, or thirty or anything little like ten or eleven but eight, eighty, eighty fucking grand. She’d thought she’d better count it. Isn’t eighty grand too much? She didn’t think so even though she could barely breathe right then. Mommy, it’s eighty thousand dollars but it’s not mine really. If it were mine I’d give you some, but it’s just in my house, and I can’t and I don’t know what to think of it yet cause I’m feeling all this stuff about it. She seemed full of ragged and tattered feelings, feelings careening in and over this life living itself inside her. She couldn’t breathe as deeply as she wanted to right then. She didn’t know why, so she thought about the feelings: making a thought out of it. A curious felt-thought about feeling so very breathless. Can you catch it? That breath? That breath not breathing as deeply as it wants to do? Do you know where it came from? Where it might go? Why? Didn’t everyone she knew do this? This drug thing. They did, didn’t they? It was the sixties, wasn’t it? Yes. And everyone did it. Did they feel breathless too? She watched them sometimes, the people t
hat came to the Rough Riders Club; they came, and they came and she thought she might be the only one feeling quite so breathless about the whole thing. Where did it go, that breath not breathing itself?

  The breath snuck inside the girl standing there thinking about it, slid down her slim and pretty neck, into the lungs it liked to breathe in, changing itself then to something else, just like the pretty blonde did, there, that blonde always spilling away from herself as if blonde light pouring from a burst of sudden sun, then losing itself as it traveled those light-years between thought and experience and the feelings thought about that: the felt-thought disseminating in the vast margins of the unusual existence that breath demanded: this extraordinarily ordinary life.

  And she watched herself spill away as if she were someone besides the girl standing there thinking about these breathy and breathless things.

  How else might money come, she wondered? Would it? Could it? They had plenty of money when Hank cut firewood, oh, yeah, yeah, a few lids here and there didn’t hurt, did it? She didn’t want to work right then: too weird to work in the world with a house full of pot. That didn’t work, did it? She got the money out, the money stacked in the shoe boxes and counted it for the zillionth time. There it was, seventy grand, right there.

  Wow. Jing. Jang. Ting a ling a ling a ling a ling a ling ding dong.

  The Maggie counting the money put it all back in the shoebox and put the shoebox back in the closet: a fragment of concern spun away from inside the skull of thought: somewhere from the shadows, another younger Maggie called her mother, checking back in to some reality that didn’t seem to be where she was, did it? Is seventy grand reality? She wondered where reality might be, she’d call home to find some. Home seemed dismally the same: her parents still struggled with money and health. She knew that reality. Maybe she’d just lease this part of her life for now, try it out like a new car, drive it for a while down this bumpy road to see if it might work okay. Why wouldn’t it work? Why not? Why isn’t it working? Why doesn’t all this wild chocolate money help this day? She thinks with the feeling she keeps feeling: the felt-thought forming itself to reason. Why is that, she wonders again and again. A suspicion moves up from somewhere in her chakra, some deep breathing place, some place so hidden a breath couldn’t live there if it tried. The suspicion moves slowly like a creature intent on prey, slowly, slowly it moves towards Maggie’s consciousness, as if conscious awareness were a prey, something that would nourish the creature stalking Maggie. What is the suspicion? She couldn’t leave just then or she’d have gone shopping. Stay away, creature. Stay away. She wants to leave, but who can leave a house with seventy grand sitting in the closet? Not Maggie. Hank had said so. She couldn’t leave until someone got home, either Patrick or Hank. When would that be? When would anybody be home here?

  The money too, seemed like a living thing she had to care for, a plant, an animal, something that needed tending, something not inert like the money it was, something else, something more ominous, something elsewhere. She’s caught between all worlds, the creature of self stalking herself from within, demanding something, not yet, later, later the creature would demand more than Maggie thought she ever had, but now this inner self simply hovered under all the other selves of herself, lingering, waiting, wondering, waiting for Maggie to become who it was she really was and learn how it was she might need to live.

  Up on Cripple Creek …

  CHAPTER 15

  Las Canas, Costa Rica

  A TALL POCK-FACED WOMAN snickered when she saw Lucy being led into the tile-floored courtyard; Ruby elbowed her companion, Angel Marie Patricia Guiterrez. Angel shook her head, Eh, bambino. Bambino. Ruby lowered her eyelids curiously. Sí, said Ruby Catherine Lupe Perez, sí. She watched the gringa and smiled. Whoever she was, thought Ruby, she has guts if she’s here. She must have guts, this gringa. Maybe stupid guts, like her own, but stupid guts count, everyone has stupid guts here. She liked stupid guts.

  Ruby earned stupid guts fist fighting Jose Perez’ drunken stupors year after year. Finally, she shot him with his own gun, the pistol with the long barrel. The one he was so proud of, the one he showed off when he drank, the pistol he waved around like a fool, the very pistol she turned on him, holding the weight of the gun with two hands, as he lurched forward, bleary eyed, fist clenched ready to hit again, her eye swollen and bleeding. Three of her teeth were on the cement floor, pooled in saliva and blood. She took the pistol off the wooden table, clutching the carved ivory handle, pointing the long steel barrel, pulling the trigger, hearing the blast, watching his body take one bullet, and the next, and the next, bullets into the flesh she had touched, cared for, fed, and then, watched the dark body fall, both bloods now pooling, mingling, then she bent near the body and cut, cutting, hacking off his middle finger with his own sharpest knife, before rolling his body into the dirt street. Her crime wasn’t the murder of her husband, or cutting off the finger in revenge, the same finger he shoved into her whenever he liked, as if her body belonged to him, the same finger he shoved into Mary Gonzales, the same finger he used on them both. Murder hadn’t been enough for Jose Perez. Ruby wanted to see him rot, turn to dust, to dirt, the dirt he’d made her feel like, less than human, zero, as if her existence were nothing, and he most of all in importance, as if she needed, wanted, to clean, to scrub, to cook, and him, making it all filthy again, grunting, sweating, burping up the beans she cooked, spilling them, leaving his dirt around her, as if, as if, his dirt were sacred. Ruby’s only crime was rolling his body into the dirt street and leaving it for everyone to see. When Ruby finally killed Jose, the neighbors approved. No one liked him. He bullied everyone, so no one would pick him up. He was a mess of blood and blown-out brains and mangled flesh, so they left him to rot until news of his death reached the sheriff. The sheriff had to move him, haul the bloated flesh to a graveyard in the back of his pick-up, dig a hole, deep in the ground, cover him with dirt, shovel after shovel of dark, dirty earth, thumping over him, thump, thump, like the beat of a heart, now he could rot, turn to worms, so dirt could have him back. Ruby had simply shut the front door, and came and went by the back way while Jose’s body swelled in warm sticky sun. Dead, she wanted no more to do with him, not even look at his bloated body. Jose had always been too much bother. The neighbors thought so too, but they went to the sheriff anyway.

  They didn’t want Jose to bother them anymore and his fermenting body wanted to smell up the neighborhood and turn it sour, so Pablo Hernandez, the quiet neighbor, went, hat in his hand, to tell. His hands nervously smoothed the rim of his straw hat when he pointed down the street, drawing lines in the air to describe where the body rotted and then nodded twice and said, gracias, gracias, when the sheriffs said yes, yes, they would get the body. They would get the body right away and take it so no one would be bothered. And the sheriffs knew about Jose. How he drank and fought and bullied so they were not bothered. They would get the body pretty soon, but it was almost time for siesta and it was hot and too much bother to get the body now. Jose was always too much bother for anybody. So the sheriffs went to the cafe and ate some beans and then they drank two beers in the afternoon heat and sat back in the cafe and dozed and watched the flies buzz and land on the dog who twitched his leg while sleeping and then later, much later, when the heat had cooled, and it was almost time to go home, they cursed Jose, and even Ruby for shooting, because it gave them trouble on this day when they had wanted none at all. So then the sheriffs came to clean him up, and one sheriff took Ruby to jail with her babies, all five, except for her daughter, the daughter that ran away when Jose put his finger in her, too, and this jail was better than Ruby’s life, no one beat her, her babies were always full and clean. Here her babies were clean, there would be no fingers in these little babies, and the women there had stupid guts, like she did, most having finally stood against a man somehow, committing more crime of survival than crime of the heart. So Ruby liked this jail. This was her life now, and she never thought about how
it would be otherwise because she was there. She only thought about Esperanza Matilda Perez, her thirteen year old daughter, and if Esperanza had found her way, and if she was alright. It was not Ruby’s manner to wonder or to dream; her reality was as it came to her.

  Rainy day woman …

  CHAPTER 16

  MAGGIE TRIED ONCE TO EAT CACTUS fruit and got a bunch of stickers in her fingers. What a mess. Then her finger festered because one bitsy thorn broke off under her skin. She had to dig around with a black needle, one she sterilized with a match, and her finger turned red and sore. That’s how it was with tiny things: they lodge someplace unthinkable and fester. Sometimes you can search forever for the tiniest little bit of hurt, and never ever find it. Even if you go poking around with the sharpest needle, the tiny thing can stay buried deep under layers of thick, thick, skin. Skin so thick you would never know a thorn was buried. She sucked on her finger while the rain fell from the sky, beating, rhythmically; she closed her eyes to listen, and she felt tired, like she’d been up for hours, waiting, waiting for the rain to stop, waiting for the sticker to come to the surface once and for all, walking back and forth, while the rain fell against the windows. She’d lit the kerosene lanterns, the soft light flickering to the beat of the rain, sliding down the windows, pat-a-pat, pat-a-pat, pat-a-pat. A pair of headlights snaked up the driveway. Hank and Patrick were two days late; she’d been worried out of her mind but knew better than to start making calls. After three days, she would’ve called Jerry, and he knew what to do. If he hadn’t heard, they would have rounded up a private search team, a subculture kind of connection. Hank had been flying for six months. Everyone said he was a natural pilot, took right to the air, even soloed the first day. Hank said he could feel the plane right in his fingertips, the air, the currents, the drafts, and his fingers knew exactly what the plane needed, what blend of steel and air and engine would keep the plane aloft, banking it left or right, smooth it under clouds, around storms, through trouble. Hank loved flying, but this was his first load, the first load he flew by himself anyway. Of course, anything could have happened. Jerry stayed close to his phone, and so did she, just in case something went wrong. After two weeks they would’ve had to call the authorities. But that was the last resort. They’d decided on two weeks for that. At least two weeks.