Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  The sun had been squeezed out again as the fists joined and became one defiant hand. I felt cold and wanted to move around to get warm; I asked Consuelo if I had to be tied up all the time. Lines from Carmen’s book kept coming back to me, how her kidnappers had had rules, and those rules had been harsher than those of any prison. Starting with the first day, harsh treatment was the method used to demoralize a hostage.

  “It’s for your own good,” Consuelo said. She wanted to know if I’d ever been taken hostage before, and when I didn’t answer, she said to consider myself lucky, because very few norteamericanos ever got an opportunity to live with the guerrilleras, share their dreams and their hardships.

  My wrists felt raw from where the rope had cut into them. The slow burn spread up my arms, across my breasts, over my neck and face. “You hurt people,” I said. “I don’t want anything to do with you … or your cause. You talk about freedom, your dedication to human rights. Well, what about my rights? Don’t I have any?”

  Her face darkened. “Only the dead cannot be judged,” she said.

  I considered myself warned. I knew that by showing what I felt, I had violated the first rule when it came to dealing with kidnappers, (one I’d learned from Carmen): Do not show pity or contempt for their ways. I tried to drop the contempt from my voice when I said kidnapping pregnant women wasn’t high on the list of Canadians’ favourite pastimes. She seemed curiously disappointed. Did canadienses place such little value on maternity? A pregnant hostage in her country seldom had to be killed, because the father or the grandparents would pay anything to get the victim back.

  I remembered another of Consuelo’s warnings: “A woman like you could be worth a lot of money.” I reminded her that my husband and I were estranged—why did she think he would pay to get me back?

  She looked at me as if I were stupid. “It is you who will pay,” she said. “Eventually.”

  Outside, the snow was coming down. A green van pulled out of the loading-dock area and made its way up across the prison parking lot. It pulled over by the gates to the cemetery.

  The gates opened and the van drove through. I watched a coffin being lifted from the back of the van by four corrections officers who were soon out of breath, struggling with their load. I watched the snow settling on the fake-fur trim of the guards’ brown winter jackets as they lowered Angel into the earth.

  I woke up shivering, not knowing where I was, feeling something kicking me; then the world came into focus, sadly, the way desire takes shape sometimes. I lay rocking, coaxing my baby back to sleep, trying to recall how I’d come to be lying on the cold, hard floor of the Cessna. The last thing I remember, we had been climbing into the clouds, and now we were on the ground again and, judging by the sounds I heard, the plane was being refuelled. I could see nothing in the darkness; I wondered if I would live to see daylight. The baby kicked me a second time, hard, as if to stop me from having these kinds of thoughts—ones that wreck with their futility.

  I curled up on the floor, closed my eyes and vowed not to open them. I dozed, but when I woke it was always to the same agony, the same emptiness. I felt nothing but dread.

  Carmen lay next to me, her breath making a gurgling sound. Eventually, the evil-smelling jacket was thrown over my head, and then I heard the plane door being shut and felt the plane shuddering into the air again.

  The next time we put down, Consuelo let me off the plane. I didn’t want to get up and walk as far as the stairs, but I remembered another rule: Never say no to a hostage taker. There was nowhere to go—not a building in sight, no welcoming farm or convenience store or gas station on a distant horizon. Nothing but high moraine wheat fields and dirt roads that stretched on in silence to little hills.

  A lightning storm struck the benchland to the west. Consuelo told Mugre they had un trabajito, a little job to do, at a drop site in the bayou, and she estimated we would be arriving there shortly after dusk. From what little I overheard, I gained that the two men employed by Las Blancas had also been working as informers for the DEA. They were the ones responsible for the bust that had put the Corazón brothers behind bars. Even the DEA treated these men as disposables: they had code-named them Walking Death I and Walking Death II. WD1 and WD2 for short, but not for long, Consuelo said.

  We took off again, and I felt lonelier than I’d ever been before, looking down at the prairie, blowing and grey. The sky was so big a cloud would have to pack a suitcase to travel from one horizon to the other.

  Gradually the continent below us began to grow dark again; above us the distant galaxies shone like dust. Our moon looked close enough to touch, flirting behind the milky sails of clouds and stars dangling in the wind.

  Mugre had fallen asleep in the co-pilot’s seat, and was honk-shooooing over the engine drone in the back. Consuelo shook him awake and said, “I’m bringing her down. Now.”

  She reached under her seat and brought out a sawed-off shotgun. “They were expecting us an hour ago,” she said. “Cover me when we land.” Consuelo banked to the left as we lost more altitude. We levelled out again, the plane’s nose dropped, the engine went quiet and Consuelo glided towards a narrow runway.

  Mugre slid his side window open and aimed the gun into the blackness. Both barrels were loaded. He pulled back the hammers.

  There was silence after Consuelo cut the engines, then a couple of shots rang out. Mugre swore into the darkness. I heard more shots; I rolled over next to Carmen and tried to flatten myself to the floor as the plane tipped to one side. We’d been hit.

  Consuelo grabbed the shotgun, pushed Mugre out of the way, kicked open the airplane’s door and fired into the night.

  Through the doorway I saw a flashlight beam slice the dark and two men creeping towards the plane. One carried a pistol, the other a light submachine gun. Consuelo threw the shotgun out the door and stood, largely, in the spotlight.

  “Estas tarde, amiga,” said the smaller of the two, holding the machine gun. “Es la tarde, ahora.” He said Consuelo had told him she would be arriving in the afternoon, and now it was already evening.

  Consuelo climbed down from the plane, wrenched the machine gun out of the man’s hands, pushed past him and began haranguing the other. She said she had more important things to do with her life than get killed by some hijueputa (son of a whore) who couldn’t tell the difference between a plane and a bird. And now, because of their incompetence, she had an even worse problem. She pointed over her shoulder at our wounded aircraft. A hole in her fuel tank: how did they expect her to get the plane back up in the air and keep it there?

  Walking Death I, as if trying to buy time, produced a bottle from inside his coat. He unscrewed the cap, threw his head back and drank. I could see his throat muscles working. When he offered the bottle to Consuelo, she shook her head, stared straight ahead into the darkness. “Not when I have work to do,” she said.

  I spent another night trying to get comfortable on a cold metal floor, listening to the sounds issuing from Carmen’s body and Mugre muttering in his sleep. I heard him get up twice during the night and leave the plane, to be sick.

  When sunlight cut through the canopy of buds and branches and tapped on the window beside my head, I looked around and saw that I was alone—except for Carmen, who hadn’t moved since we’d landed. I sat up and sneaked a glance out the window. Our plane lay in a clearing surrounded by a black-water swamp. The snaky roots of tupelo and bald cypress, their branches depressed by Spanish moss, held up soft, spongy banks on either side of a sunken road leading away through the swamp.

  When Consuelo came to check on us, she took Carmen’s pulse and looked worried. She told her they were going to move her to a bed inside as soon as they had taken care of business. I thought I heard Carmen groan. In some ways, it was a blessing she was too sick to know what was happening. I figured she was better off dead than knowing she’d been kidnapped by Las Blancas again, and that her sister-in-law was a major player in this guerilla organization.

&
nbsp; Consuelo got off the plane again, signalling me to come with her. There was a smell in the air of spring, of life born again out of decay and rot. In the woods all around, the red buds and white blossoms of dogwood fought for light under the evergreen canopy. The slow swamp water moved darkly, full of rank and eggy life. And as we walked towards the shack I hadn’t seen from the plane’s window, I could smell meat frying, bacon smoked with sweet maple or hickory perhaps. A shiny red pickup was parked outside, and a yellow dog with runny eyes, locked inside the cab, snarled at us, his spit icing the rear window.

  I could hear Mugre inside the shack, coughing. Consuelo pushed open the door and told me to watch my step. She pointed to Walking Death I lying on the floor, but paid no attention to him after that, other than to complain about the dirty flies that lifted from his staring eyes as she stepped over him.

  Even though sunlight filtered through the cracks between the rough planks, the room appeared cold and threatening, like a dark jail cell with luminescent bars for walls. I stumbled over WD1’s leg, which jutted at an unnatural angle from his body, then drew back when I saw Walking Death II slumped over a plywood table, one arm bound by a frayed nylon rope to the chair behind him, the other stretched out straight and ending in a garbage bag. I took in the cleaver, the table’s surface a pond of blood so clear you could see your face in it.

  Mugre stood over a propane burner, an egg-lifter in one hand, a fat reefer in the other. He took a long toke, exhaled, then passed the joint to the hand turning black and crisp in the frying pan.

  “You snitched us off,” Mugre said to the hand, snatching the joint back out of the fingers as if he had decided not to share after all. “Wheelchair dope,” he said to himself, offering Consuelo a toke. Consuelo said she’d never seen the point in smoking anything that made you paralyzed. Mugre said he kept hoping it would paralyze his intestines so he wouldn’t throw up anymore.

  “Did you get the key to the truck?” Consuelo asked.

  Mugre grunted. “I had to chop off his whole fucking hand.”

  He turned the shrivelled hand in the frying pan, then handed Consuelo the key to the pickup truck. I watched the fingers curl in the greasy heat. Mugre flipped the hand back into the centre of the pan, where the heat was the most intense. After a few minutes, he turned the burner off, slipped the hand onto an aluminium pie dish and set it on the table in front of WD2’s swollen lips. He scooped the hand up with the egg-lifter and held it under the man’s nose.

  WD2’s eyes rolled up into his head. Consuelo tried prying his mouth open, putting one hand under his chin and then pushing down on the top of his head, but he passed out again and she let him fall forward, the hand wedged obscenely between the table and his chin.

  “It’s too late,” Consuelo said. “He’s not going to talk.” She picked a plum from a white bowl on the counter, squeezed it, put it back and chose a riper one. She told Mugre we’d wait outside until he’d cleaned up, then led me back over WD1’s body in the doorway to the far side of the truck, where we stood listening to the spitting dog. I wanted to throw up, but there was nothing in my stomach and I ended up retching in some bushes. Consuelo said I was getting as bad as her brother-in-law; she would have to give us something that would settle both our stomachs for good; she sucked the meat out of the plum and spit the pit at the spitting dog. It stuck to the truck’s rear window and further enraged the animal. “I hope you will write about this in your book. It might make the next hijueputas think twice before crossing us.”

  Later that afternoon, after the bodies had been disposed of, Mugre and Consuelo carried Carmen into the shack. They laid her down on a mattress in a corner of the room. She seemed barely alive.

  Mugre, who hadn’t been sick for a while, insisted on cooking a meal. Consuelo hovered over him, telling him how to do everything, even how to boil water to make coffee. I watched as she took a bullet from her pocket, removed the lead and emptied the gunpowder into the coffee pot.

  “Hermanito, for you,” she said, “This will calm your stomach and steady your nerves.” She poured a cup of her brew for me also.

  Mugre made a face. “You’re going to kill someone one day with your quackery,” he said as he spooned a gruel made of oatmeal and pasta, with a tin of sardines mixed in, onto each of our plates.

  I picked through my food, trying to avoid eye contact with the greasy sardine floating in the greyish milk, then set it aside with the coffee smelling of death and metal. Consuelo asked for my opinion of Mugre’s concoction; I wanted to say that short of lowering my naked foot into the weeds at the bottom of that black-water swamp, I could think of nothing more revolting. Instead I said I had never thought of making soup from porridge and sardines before, and Mugre seemed to take that as a compliment. Consuelo said she had never understood why people thought it was all right to eat every part of the sardine—bones, guts and excrement—just because it was so small.

  Mugre looked hurt. “Algo es algo; peor es nada,” he muttered. Something is something; nothing is worse. Then he went around the side of the house to be sick again. Consuelo looked discouraged. The gunpowder hadn’t taken effect. “Remind me not to waste any more bullets on my brother-in-law,” she said.

  Later, Mugre ransacked the shack and found more drugs; he sat with a butane torch in the corner, on the mattress beside Carmen, smoking basuco (a derivative of coca, adulterated with lead and sulphuric acid, lethally addictive to all who smoke it, and leading to a very early grave), which, Consuelo said, fuelled the craziness of even the most normal people. Mugre tried to rouse Carmen, to give her a hit of basuco. He glared at us when Consuelo told him to mind his own business, then went outside to tease the dog, holding the dead man’s charred hand up to the window, pretending to gnaw at it himself.

  Consuelo pushed back from the table, saying she’d had enough of Mugre’s depravity. She grabbed the key and went outside to unlock the truck. Instead of leaping for Mugre’s throat, the way I think Consuelo had hoped the dog would do, he stood cowering, his tail between his legs, sniffing the air as if the air were a woman into whose warm crotch he could nuzzle and disappear. Then he lay down and started snapping at his testicles.

  “There’s something unnormal about that dog,” Consuelo said, as Mugre, who’d pinned himself against the side of the truck, began edging his way back towards the shack. “He does not act like any other dog I’ve met.”

  Just as she spoke, the dog saw Mugre out of the corner of his eye and charged, knocking him over—almost all in one motion. He lunged for his master’s charred hand and bounded up the road, the hand dangling from his mouth. He ran flat out, his skinny flanks rising and falling in the furrows.

  Consuelo swore at Mugre. It was sloppy work, she said, to leave bits of evidence behind. Mugre picked himself up and ran after the dog before Consuelo had a chance to go inside the shack and get her gun. I believe she would have wasted no time shooting Mugre right then.

  Under the canopy of the tupelo and bald cypress trees, I sat and waited for the day to stumble to a close. After an hour had gone by and Mugre still hadn’t returned, Consuelo went looking for him. She didn’t tie me up this time but took away my shoes so I couldn’t go far. The moment she was out of sight, I did precisely what the prosecutor said I’d never tried to do: I tried to get away.

  I crept through the bush behind the shack and came out on a dirt track running parallel to the road. I started running, clutching my heavy body; hot and sticky, the oven air seemed to hum. My imagination, too, grew legs and began to run flat out in front of me, as if on a reconnaissance all of its own, so that when I rounded a bend where the remains of a high metal gate swung on its rusted hinges and a sign saying Keep Out Unprotected Territory Not Subject to State Law had been tossed at the side of the road, I envisioned my own body lying in the ditch, unprotected from the laws of nature, to be discovered by hikers ten years hence: the perfect skeleton of a woman with the skeleton of a baby imprisoned in the cage of her bones.

  I had not
gone far before I heard Consuelo shouting—and I dove into a tangle of blackjack. My mouth was dry and my scalp tingled. I smelled fear in the damp earth under me and in the clouds that moved over me.

  I waited for my heart to slow down. It was getting dark, and the insects had come out to feed in the cooler air. I decided I should stay well away from the road, and began crawling on all fours through salt-poisoned grass, skirting a dead lake dotted with dead cypress, keeping the most colourful part of the sky, violet slashed with crimson streaks, to the east, over my right shoulder.

  A sudden wind banged into my face, a hot wind carrying with it sand from the dunes and pine needles and flying insects. When I opened my mouth to catch a deeper breath, a small bug flew into my throat and caused a coughing spasm. I lay down, covering my head with my arms, trying to muffle the sound.

  As I lay there, trying to suppress my cough, I felt my face being pushed into the sand, a hand on the back of my neck pinning me down. When the hand released me, I rolled over and looked into Consuelo’s .38. Her eyes, the blade of swamp grass between her teeth, it was all I could do to keep a blank face and not let my fear of her be any more plain.

  She spat out the blade of grass. She said she’d heard my coughing, and decided to rescue me before the alligators had me for their for dinner. She said I had much to thank my baby for, then led me back towards the clearing.

  My feet were cut and bleeding. When we reached the shack Consuelo pushed open the door, and I could see Mugre lying naked next to Carmen’s body, grinning awkwardly, as if Consuelo should have had the decency to stay away a little longer.

  A pillow covered Carmen’s face. My first thought was that Mugre had placed it there out of some twisted sense of decency—so Carmen would not have to look into his face—but that was naive of me: he must have smothered her. The dark closed in around me, and silence drew me in like a sucking undertow. I felt dizzy, unsure of my footing. The world seemed to be sloping away.