Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  We began our descent, flying south along the coastline, very spooky and piratical, with pelicans massing over the crags. Tiny Cattle circled a sheltered cove where Las Blancas moored its fleet—a sailboat, Conejo Blanco; a cruiser, La Mordida; a cigarette boat, Pablito E; and their most recent acquisition, a U.S. Coast Guard cutter.

  The airport runway, on a thin spit of sand leading up to the edge of the dense forest, looked quiet—suspiciously so. “I’m going to give it a fly-by,” Tiny said. “They didn’t let me get in this close last time, so we may be in luck.”

  He took a low pass across the strip, buzzing the harbour. “Basuco,” he said, pointing to the Fat Lady’s predecessor, a half-submerged Convair. “I got so addled that time, I must have missed the runway.”

  I closed my eyes, half expecting the same thing to happen now, but Tiny touched down and stood heavily on the brake pedal to bring the plane to a halt before the dirt strip ran out.

  “Whoooooaaa little dowgie!” he cried, pumping harder and harder on the brakes. “Whoooooaaaa little dowgie,” again, as we bumped up the runway.

  Even after Tiny had shut down the plane’s engines, the air continued to hum. I think the mosquitoes, which must have sensed fresh blood, would have broken down the door if Consuelo hadn’t punched it open first.

  A lone figure in a white suit strode towards us from the direction of the yacht basin. His hair was cropped short, making his head seem almost too big for the rest of his body. He carried a machete in a yellow holster.

  Consuelo embraced the man, who looked as if he had just finished shaving—with the machete. El Chopo (the Gun) had applied little pieces of toilet paper to the places on his neck and cheeks where he had nicked himself. His suit was made of sharkskin, his designer cowboy boots from a couple of unlucky pythons. He had a blood-red orchid pinned to his lapel.

  Consuelo pushed the man away, held him at arm’s length so she could get a good look at him. “Cómo estás, tío mío?” she asked.

  Her uncle said everything was “copacetic,” a word, I learned, he used every chance he got, and asked if she liked his new suit, said he’d got it off a butcher in Baton Rouge who’d reneged on a loan. He lifted up the orchid to show two clean bullet holes, then grinned. El Chopo had Consuelo’s lips, unusually red for a man, so thin they could have been razor-nicks that had never healed. When he grinned, which he did often and without provocation, the lips got even redder, as his cheeks pulled them tight.

  Consuelo told him to get rid of the suit, that he looked like a pimp or a drug dealer in it. Looking back, with the objectivity I’ve since gained, I think, had I been on my jury, I would have concluded we were all criminals. El Chopo’s sawed-off cowboy boots were as much a part of him as the .38 Consuelo carried tucked in the waistband of her army fatigues.

  We left the plane, and I was led to the basin where the boats were moored, a bay ringed by ancient mango roots. The bare roots pointed out of the mud like bony fingers. Consuelo seemed impressed by the Coast Guard cutter, her uncle’s new lodgings, which had anti-aircraft guns mounted on its foredeck and a swivelling M60 on its bridge. The warship’s bridge house was decorated with symbols—four giant red marijuana leaves (each looked like the maple leaf on the Canadian flag), signifying that the ship had made four marijuana busts, and three white tear-shaped snowflakes, each representing a seizure of cocaine. These had been his sister’s loads, El Chopo said, which is why she finally got fed up and ordered Las Blancas to apprehend the vessel, and why he had been appointed to guard the ship.

  He showed us into the galley and told us to make ourselves at home. “Take a pew. Sit. Over there. Not on that,” he said to Consuelo, pointing to a worn-out sofa. “It’s falling apart. Everything around here’s falling apart, present company included. That chair’s still copacetic. Sit. Siéntense.”

  Consuelo removed a gun holster and a box of vicious-looking knives that El Chopo said he had made “for therapy”; she told me to sit on the pile of newspapers on the chair. There were weapons everywhere, even hanging on the walls, along with a series of paintings, on velvet, of a woman looking bereaved. I could have been looking at Consuelo a few more years of suffering from now.

  “The sister is always in mourning,” El Chopo said when he saw me studying the paintings. “It is all she lives for, the death of others. That and making money.” He paused and looked at me sideways. “She has an instinct about people. You know, she will tell you if your nenito will make a lot of money when he grows up or end up like his father in prison.”

  I said I hoped my child would have other choices.

  El Chopo looked past me to where his sister, the Black Widow, wept tears of velvet from the wall. “Tu eres inocente,” he said. You are still innocent. And then, “It doesn’t matter what you believe.”

  A true innocent is a person who doesn’t know the meaning of the word. “It matters to me,” I said.

  “The two of you, you think too much,” said Consuelo, making a dismissive gesture towards El Chopo, frowning at me. She opened a cupboard door, then closed it again. “At this moment, we do not need your philosophy of life, tío grande. We need food.”

  El Chopo tossed a handful of coffee grounds in a blue enamel pan and added water. “I live alone,” he said. “I have time to think.”

  “Amor, stick to killing. It is what you do best,” Consuelo said. Carmen had said the same thing about Consuelo. I wondered if these words applied to everyone in this family.

  “My mother has always said my uncle is unkillable,” Consuelo continued, as if for my benefit. “Time will tell. Verdad?”

  El Chopo grinned, and set about frying a flying fish in coconut oil, preparing boiled yams spiced with ginger and red beans. I watched the way he worked, using his machete for slicing and chopping the ginger, and for flipping the fish, even for decapitating the bottle of coconut oil. Every so often, he would stop and stare at a blank space on the wall, or the floor, or out the window, as if he had forgotten where he was and had to descend into a trance to remember.

  After this “small meal,” he served figs from Buga, in southern Colombia, and licorice-flavoured aguardiente, and when Consuelo asked about her mother’s deteriorating mind, he motioned me out of my chair and flipped through the pile of papers. El Chopo said his sister had become so irritated by the frequent raids the combined forces of the Drug Enforcement Administration and the United States Coast Guard had attempted to make on the island ever since the cutter had been apprehended, she had threatened to cut off everyone who relied on her.

  “She is fed up. She is paying bribes to the campesinos, to the army, the port authorities in La Ciudad, as well as to the DEA in Miami, customs and the Coast Guard, and they can all go to hell, she told them. They can all starve. Now look at the lies they are telling about her in the papers.”

  He spread the paper open on the table. “Black Widow Bites Back: Drug Baroness to Dump Chocolata’s Paradise?” the headline read, followed by an article speculating on whether the Black Widow would soon be putting her whole operation on the market, and how this would effect “la otra economía.”

  El Chopo pulled a crumpled pack of Pielrojas from his pocket and a box of tiny, waxy white matches. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke over his shoulder towards Tiny Cattle. While Consuelo and her uncle discussed whether the Black Widow had lost what was left of her faculties, I tried to read the rest of the article.

  The Black Widow’s paradise, Hacienda la Florida, was an eight-thousand-acre finca, big enough to encompass a small city within its borders. The Black Widow, who got her start flying 1,200-pound loads of marijuana from Colombia via Tranquilandia into Florida at fifty dollars a pound, and from there spread her operation west and north, had now acquired real estate all over the southern states, and carved landing strips in the swamp lands there the way she had in Colombia. On Tranquilandia she had built a network of roads, three artificial lakes, an airstrip with two hangars (inside which her planes could be loaded and unloaded), her large, s
prawling country-style mansion, a cluster of thatched bungalows to house her staff and security guards, a clubhouse, restaurant, stable for her miniature pet ponies, and other outbuildings amid gardens filled with rare orchids and wild animals roaming at large, and aviaries filled with exotic birds.

  The Black Widow had continued to control Tranquilandia, even if it was now from the shadows. People put up altars with her picture, and lit candles for her, all over the island. They believed she could perform miracles. No woman in their history, with the exception of Chocolata herself, had ever possessed a talent like hers for getting what she wanted out of her people.

  There was an aerial photograph of the estate, including the mud-flats, the black fringe of mangrove swamp around the yacht basin and the remnants of a dark river wriggling out to the distant sea. El Río Negro flowed down from Nevada Chocolata and wound through the Black Widow’s land. The first time the Hacienda la Florida got busted, the bodies of twelve soldiers killed by Las Blancas were pulled from the river. During the second bust, the raiding party dumped so much cocaine into the river that its once-clear waters turned white. Two file photographs pictured the dead soldiers on the riverbank and the drugs being dumped out of fifty-five-gallon drums into the river. “The river takes blood without changing colour—but not cocaine,” the caption read.

  Tiny had begun fanning the air, as if the smoke insulted him, and fiddling with the dial on the short-wave radio. He wanted to get the weather; he asked Consuelo if he could have gas for the plane, because he had done what he’d been paid to do and wanted to get home to pick up his foot ointment at the pharmacy. He began scratching his feet, picking at the dead skin between his toes and letting it fall to the floor.

  “Feet giving you problems? I cut off both feet for you,” said El Chopo, chopping the air with his machete, exhaling more smoke in Tiny Cattle’s direction.

  Tiny repeated that he needed fuel, not surgery.

  “Sure, we got gas.” said El Chopo. “Lots of it.” He could make something innocent sound sinister. It had to do with the way the words he spoke poked out at you, from the tip of his tongue into the slits of his lips.

  Tiny turned red in the face. He stared at Consuelo, blowing air, then sucking it in again through his open mouth. El Chopo left the room and returned with a package the size of an airline pillow, wrapped in red cellophane and coded with symbols. He set it on the table and handed Tiny Cattle a small knife with a retractable blade. “Take a look for yourself. Está muy puro.”

  Tiny slit open the package containing his plata de polvo. He broke off a piece of the flake—it came away like a chunk of shale—and crushed it in his hand. “There’s too much glitter in this,” he said, fingering the sample as he spoke. Cocaine began leaking from the slit he’d made, like an infection from under the scab of tape.

  Consuelo, after touching some of the white flake to her fingers and tasting it, said, “No, señor, es muy puro. Primera calidad.”

  Tiny made a face. “Es bastante ordinario,” he said. He told Consuelo that the stuff was basura, garbage, and that snorting lines of this so-called primo-grade merchandise would be an insult to his nostrils.

  “Then I will keep it for someone whose nostrils are not so easily offended,” said Consuelo. The powder trickled from the package as she picked it up and turned it over in her hands. She scooped out a couple of rocks and put them in her pocket.

  Tiny groaned, grabbed the package from her and turned it right side up again on the table. Then he went down on his hands and knees, trying to sweep up the trail of white powder that had spilled onto the floor, separating it from the flecks of dirt, the tiny particles of dust. He gave up finally, and strode out onto the deck.

  “His father would not like to see him now,” said Consuelo.

  El Chopo too looked disgusted, and muttered something under his breath about unpleasant black people from the coast, before tossing back another shot of aguardiente and joining Tiny Cattle on the deck. The two men disappeared from sight.

  At first I had been confused by Consuelo’s attitude towards drugs. Now I was beginning to understand. Those who dealt drugs in large quantities looked down on people who used any substantial amounts. Users were referred to as “niggers” or by other racial epithets. You did not, as I often heard Consuelo say, sleep on your own poison.

  Consuelo poured more aguardiente for herself, then turned to me. “When I was at school, my sisters and I used to chase the other girls to the wall—we had a wall around our school for security—and kiss them and marry them,” she said. “Only the smart girls would let themselves be kissed. The stupid ones, and the beautiful ones, used to scream and get away.

  “When I grew up I wanted to kiss someone, to marry someone, who could give me children. Someone like Angel.”

  Rule #3: Keep the hostage-taker talking; the more personal she gets, the better. “You must miss him,” trying to sound as if I cared.

  “Talk of love isn’t for people like us,” she said. She looked at me, hard. “You don’t miss Angel. You remember him.

  “Recordar. It means to remember, to pass again through the heart. El corazón.” She toasted one of her mother’s pictures on the wall. “And Gustavo,” she said, “and Mugre too. Even though he was a bad brother-in-law sometimes, I remember him.”

  She downed the shot, adding that aguardiente was not known as a women’s drink, and that if I was ever seen drinking it in public, I would be assumed to be either an intellectual or a whore. Then she bit into a quarter section of lime that had been soaking in salt and chewed it until her eyes watered.

  I had expected to hear the Fat Lady’s engines turning over and the plane idling on the runway, but I heard nothing. “Ten years ago, Señor Cattle got shot down in the jungle. He was captured and tortured by the Mujeres Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (the Armed Women Revolutionaries of Colombia, the most powerful guerrilla group next to Las Blancas), who thought he worked for the CIA.” She paused. “Do you want to know what they did to him, the Mujeres Armadas?”

  She emptied her pocket on the table, took the knife Tiny Cattle had used to slit open the kilo and drew up a small amount of mother-of-pearl-like flake on the blade’s flat side, then held it under her nose. I thought she was going to snort it, rocks and all, but then she lowered the knife, tapped the cocaine onto the table and began chopping it, cursing whenever one of the tiny crystal rocks jumped away.

  “The revolutionaries, they did unnecessary things to Señor Cattle. They stripped him and tied him to the bed. They put a curling iron up inside him … like this,” she demonstrated, making a circle with her finger and thumb, and poking the knife in and out through the centre of the hole. “Then they plugged in the iron. They left him like that all night.”

  She cut the coke into two thin lines. “They let him live, only so he could see what they did to his wife. They were amateurs. You saw their work? That ugly head?” She wrinkled her nose, as if to say these revolutionaries couldn’t even shrink a head without destroying it.

  She took a crisp hundred-dollar bill and rolled it into a thin straw. Bending her head low to the table, she vacuumed a line into her right nostril with a single snort. She shuddered, held her breath, jerked her neck back.

  “Smuggling is like a drug to him now,” she said. “It is his therapy, what gets him through the day.”

  She bent down to repeat the procedure through her other nostril, wiping up the leftover cocaine dust with her finger, massaging it into her gums, making a face.

  “My uncle is right,” she said. “Drugs are for the niggers.”

  chapter fifteen

  The matron unlocked my handcuffs so I could bear down. She wore an apron with “Happi Flour: It Rises to the Occasion” printed on it, and there were dark smudges where her dirty fingers scratched continually at her groin. I saw rusty tongs on a red Formica counter, nests of lice under the matron’s arms.

  The doctor wore a black hood over his head. Two young guards stood outside the steel doo
rs that kept opening and then slamming shut. One guard, off guard, caught his reflection in the mirror they’d placed between my legs so I could see the baby’s head when it came out; he raised his rifle and took aim.

  The baby wanted to stay deep inside me, attached to me, dressed in camouflaged fatigues, size 0.

  I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. I lay that way for a long time, on the hard bunk in the dark cabin where I’d been left, afraid to go back to sleep because I knew the dream hadn’t ended. I called for Consuelo, but she didn’t come: now I felt the pain inside me, and brought my knees up to my chest and rocked my body from side to side, wondering what was going to happen to me, if I was going to lose my baby. I felt the nausea coming in waves, closed my eyes again and heard the open moan of the sea, the waves breaking on the reef beyond the lagoon, the wind wearing a sailor suit, a blouse with anchors, puffing and heaving towards me, her skirts blowing up over her face.

  “Hey, hey, take it away! Get that ball and fight!” the greasy matron chanted. If my feet hadn’t been in stirrups, I would have kicked her. The doctor told me to relax my shoulders, and gave me a shot in the hip. He said he wanted to get this over with because he had an appointment on death row.

  The doctor had on a bloodstained baseball mitt. Without warning, he reached up inside me. “There’s nothing in there,” he said. I could hear his irritation, see his beady eyes through a slit in the hood.

  “Fuck a priest, there’s nothing in there.”

  Then I heard Angel say, “You shouldn’t worry so much. Don’t start worrying until they start shooting, and even then you shouldn’t worry. Don’t start worrying until they hit you, because then they might catch you.” And I laughed because the doctor couldn’t catch the baby, not even with the mitt.

  The doctor put his hand on my stomach, punched it hard, and it started to go down. “Happi Flour. It Rises to the Occasion.” The matron snapped the handcuffs back in place, breathing on me with her swampy breath. The doctor began rinsing off his mitt.