Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  She said this the night before she disappeared. I’ll always remember how Rainy looked the last time I saw her—as if she had finally found some kind of peace in knowing she had wanted something enough to hurt over. Now, too, when I say, “I’ll always remember …” I think of Rainy. “It’s a pretty sure thing,” she said. “You won’t have time to forget.” Rainy never stopped reminding me that here on the Row, “always” has an expiry date.

  Rainy believed in reincarnation, that she would always be here on earth in one form or another. For that reason, she wanted the word always on her headstone. “Something simple, to make people think.”

  “Always what?” I asked.

  “See, you’re thinking.”

  I reminded Rainy Always was a brand of panty liners. Did she want people thinking about that?

  “Even better,” she said. “ ‘Always, with Wings.’ ”

  I can’t let myself think too much about what happened to Rainy. I know she wanted to die on a Monday, not a Friday—because being turned off on a Friday would be a bad start to a weekend—and in the late evening, at bedtime, when she was ready for a good sleep. She didn’t want to die in the morning, with the whole day ahead of her, because she might miss something, like spaghetti for lunch.

  The fact that Rainy didn’t have any good veins left didn’t save her. She underwent a “cut-down”: her arm was slit open—by corrections officers who had no experience as surgeons—searching for a usable blood vessel.

  Rainy’s was a high-profile case, and tickets to her execution had sold out the morning they’d gone on sale. Some people camped overnight to get the best seats in the house. That must have boosted Rainy’s self-esteem.

  One of the guards assigned to Rainy—to make sure she remained sane and healthy in the Health Alteration Unit during the days before her lethal injection—spoke to a reporter. “We give execution—lethal injection—at eleven in the morning, right after coffee. Usually it’s a Friday, end of the week; you need a break after it. On Friday, around five a.m., I go upstairs and bring the individual down to the death cell, right next to the lethal-injection chamber. Then I sit with her until it’s time to go.

  “I drink coffee, play cards or watch television with the individual. Sometimes she just likes to talk, or she’ll ask to see the chaplain. Whatever I do, I try to make her last hours memorable. My official title is Death Watch Officer, but really I’m just a glorified babysitter.”

  chapter twenty-six

  I scarcely remember those last days with Angel on Tranquilandia. To say they are a blur would be as clear as I can get. I begged Consuelo to let me stay, or, if she had to send me away, to let me take Angel with me. Without him I had nothing to live for, I told her. “We don’t choose our blessings or our curses, mijita” was all she would say.

  Angel seemed to be growing more fragile every day. When babies are hungry they cry, but Angel was too weak now to make the one sound I so badly wanted to hear. The day before I was destined to fly away with a coffin that held the body of someone else’s child, Consuelo came to say Daisy and I were to take Angel to see the one bruja she could trust, the one who lived on the mountain, at Chocolata’s shrine.

  The bruja would help Angel get strong again; Consuelo said she wanted me to understand what Angel had been born to, and how he had to survive and grow up to claim what was his own. Tranquilandia was his birthright; knowing this should make it easier for me to bear leaving my baby behind.

  She opened my curtains to let in the day; during the night someone had planted, on the sharp end of a stake driven into the ground at the foot of the borrachio tree, the half-chewed head of the miniature horse. His tongue stuck out of a corner of his mouth, as if feeling around for a last taste of sweetness. A bib of flies tucked into his throat, feasting there. I asked Consuelo to close the curtains, and after she left, saying Yepez would be driving her to the city for the day, I climbed into bed with Angel and rocked him and tried to make him eat. He kept turning his head away from me, and I felt scared. If I hadn’t had him, I could have lived my life without ever wanting anything enough to hurt over.

  My mind was a mess, and now was the moment I needed a base toke, another hit of the intoxicating mejoral, a long line of Bolivian marching powder to make my brain cells come to attention, fall in line, shoulder their rifles, beat their drums. I felt flat, lifeless. I got out of bed and broke another piece off the rock from the muestra Consuelo had left me, crushed it into smaller rocks and made a bola to carry with me. Then I broke off a bigger chunk and cooked up a toke.

  Angel started complaining again, but stopped fighting the minute I began dressing him; he didn’t even resist as I slipped his feet into his little boots, tickling his sole out of habit to make him straighten his toes. When Daisy came, a while later, she found me staring at the closed curtains. She told me Alias had stopped breathing during the night; she had shaken him and now he was feeling better, but sometimes he still had trouble catching his breath. Consuelo had taken him to the hospital in the City of Orchids, “to see the best doctor money could buy.” I told her I felt there was little hope left for any of us.

  “You only learn to know hope when everything in you is dead,” Daisy said. At the time I didn’t understand what she meant, but now I do. There is more hope here on death row than in any other place in the universe.

  I told Daisy Consuelo’s plan for me. I didn’t think I could leave my son behind. As I said these words out loud, and pictured myself walking anywhere in the world without Angel’s small body nestled up against my breast, I began to weep; my tears fell onto his face, rolled off into his ears and down his neck to the hollow place in his chest, and collected there.

  The fields surrounding the Church of Our Virgin of Mercy were deserted, except for a solitary old man, in a loose-fitting shirt and baggy trousers, turning the earth with a broken spade. He didn’t look up as we parked. El Chopo, whom I hadn’t seen since the morning he delivered me to the Hacienda la Florida, said he would wait with the car. Even before we started our climb I felt the hot, wet air on my skin. The trail looked steep, the mountaintop, Chocolata’s shrine, far away in the sky.

  A vulture kept an eye on us, higher than the clouds that hovered, whitely, like the corpses of angels. As we passed the Cementerio de Niños, a look of sadness scudded across Angel’s face. Daisy said it was a pity there was no shade in that place, only, day after day, the sun, and always the angelitos moaning for their mothers.

  She kept quickening our pace, and once we got beyond the graveyard, where the rough road narrowed into an even rougher trail, I had difficulty keeping up to her. A long line of rifles had been thrust into the earth like fenceposts to mark the trail, which might otherwise have been indistinguishable through the fields of crucifix orchids. The few trees that had been left standing grew straight and white, topped by bunches of leaves that reached for the sky like zapped hairdos.

  Propped against one of the rifles was a sign: “If You’re Going to Make a Start, Keep on Going—If You Know What You’re Doing. But If I Were You, I’d think it Over.”

  “It’s to discourage people from going to the shrine for the wrong reasons,” Daisy said when she saw my worried look. “It is not meant for people like us.”

  For people like us. What had I become?

  I had made a start, I would keep on going.

  Yellow storm clouds had begun gathering to the north, over the City of Orchids, while above us the vultures continued to make their slow rounds in the sky. The Buddhists were right, I thought: desire was the cause of all suffering. The desire to live, and for my child to live with me—to grow up whole and be allowed to hear the wild music of the world, to stumble from his dreams and to hear the humming of wild bees, know the taste of rainwater on his tongue or the smell of a campfire burning out at dawn—I had never felt desire so strong.

  I suffered as I climbed, a kind of sickness that I am beyond suffering now, sitting here in a cell the size of a rich person’s coffin. I hope I nev
er desire anything again. Or even want anything. To want is to be weak, vulnerable. Prey for the wolves. Pray for them. As Frenchy once said, “ ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.’ I don’t get it. If he’s my fucking shepherd, why shouldn’t I fucking want him? That’s the trouble with the Bible. It fucks you up.”

  But that day on Nevada Chocolata, I felt desire. The desire to hold and be held, to take Angel home with me, to smell mock orange drifting through a June window at the Walled-Off Astoria while I drink jasmine tea sweetened with wildflower honey, leaning against pillows part drifting cloud, part daydream. I desired my child, who needed me. I kissed his face as I climbed, kissed his name over and over again in my head, each beloved letter of his name, as I followed the cold line of rifles up into the higher, cooler air, stopping every so often to look down on the cemetery embedded in the hillside, to remind myself of the reasons to keep going. “When you are sad, remember that Angel exists.” It took all my resolve to pick my way around the stabbing rocks and large, meaty-leafed plants, and go on.

  At a sudden point, the stark upland scenery softened and became an almost subtropical forest, a haven for an innumerable variety of orchids growing on tree trunks, on branches and along the ground. Some rose up on erect flower stalks into lurid, contorted shapes; others jumped out at you, big enough to steal your jewellery. Even the air was filled with spidery green, jewel-like blossoms, scarcely larger than the heads of pins, drifting down from the trees.

  We made slow progress up the trail onto the last of the high ridges that trapped the clouds and barred the sun. Tiny cold streams cut down the mountain’s face. Even now, when the sun shone on the rest of the valley, the top of the mountain, a grim heath of yellowish bog grass and stunted frailjones, was blanketed by swirling cloud and horizontal rain.

  When we reached open, swampy ground, where only small clumps of grass and mosses grew, I thought I could smell a fire burning, the smut of cooking. We continued upwards until the ground levelled off again, and there in a huddle of rocky outcrops I saw a crude shelter constructed of wooden beams and different kinds of palm bound together with vines. Daisy stopped and called the bruja’s name.

  An unusually tall, black-skinned woman with a halo of wild red hair came to greet us. She hugged Daisy, her eyes fixed, all the while, on Angel, eyes the colour of Mejool dates, so soft and brown they made you want to bite into them and suck the sweetness from their centres.

  The bruja said she’d been expecting us—she’d seen us in a dream. We followed her into the hut, which offered little shelter from the elements; when my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw dismembered bits of goat hanging from iron hooks suspended at different heights over a low fire. Lumps of meat, and maize and cabbage slices, floated in a watery broth that simmered in a pot, moon-shaped wedges of onion undulating through the greyish foam.

  The bruja prepared thin slices of black bread spread with thick layers of sweet guava jam, and Daisy began to tell her the reason for our visit. The bruja held up her hand. She already knew why we had come.

  The odour of death simmered on the fire. The bruja filled a blackened kettle with water from a jug and set it over the flames. She added more logs to the fire, and Angel started to cough as the room filled with smoke. I felt sleepy and relaxed one minute, wide awake and edgy the next.

  When the water boiled, the bruja made coca tea, which she said would help clear my head—the air on the mountain was something you became acclimatized to. She prepared a glass bottle with a nipple on it for Angel too (she’d had to bottle-feed her baby goats after their mother died, she said), saying the coca tea would take away his hunger and make him very calm. She said la coca te cuida el cuerpo, takes care of the body, and Angel drank it all down without pushing the bottle away even once.

  The wind round the hut made a sound like a baby getting ready to cry, but Angel himself looked more contented than ever. Unlike me: every time I thought of the cocaine I had in my pocket, my palms started to sweat. The bruja must have recognized the desire in my eyes—there were black holes in my aura, she said, and where there were holes, there was mucho sudor, mucho peligro (lots of sweat and danger). She sighed, as if expelling the grief of the world that had suddenly burdened her.

  I drank another cup of tea when she offered it. It gave me an excuse to go outside to relieve myself and do a line. I have to admit, there’s no point at this hour of my life pretending I had any control left. Around the back of the hut, out of the wind, I reached into my pocket for the bola, opened it and crushed one of the rocks between my thumb and forefinger After I’d snorted as much as I could, I promised myself, again, I would get rid of my poison. Quit cocaine. Forever. Again.

  When I went back inside, the bruja asked if I was ready to visit the shrine; she said I should wrap my baby well, because the four winds could be very cold on the mountain and his body was very thin. She said she always paid attention to the different voices of the wind: the angry voice, like words being raked over a gutted road; the low, soft voice that speaks of the wet undersides of leaves; the complaining wind, like the sound of worn shoes dragging along wet pavement in autumn; the sensual wind that wafts towards your face carrying the scent of bruised guavas.

  Today, she said, it was a bitter wind that blew, and I heard the rasp of it through the green bamboo.

  We left the sound of the wind behind and climbed a path that wound up through a forest of clouds, beneath thin silver waterfalls and black, hanging orchids that looked like executioner’s hoods, and blue butterflies the size of bats. A fountain of water gushed out from a crack in the crown of a massive boulder, spilled over and flowed down the sides of the rock, surrounding the cave that sheltered Chocolata’s shrine like a moat. The cave, which had been carved by the wind and rain, and the constant waterfall of tears, was now sealed off from the elements by a roughly hewn door studded with iron nails.

  The bruja took three white candles from her pocket, saying she had to bring new ones each time she came to the shrine because the anti-sociales stole any she left, even the partially burned ones. In the old days, she’d kept a box of them in the cave so the true pilgrims didn’t have to knock on her window and ask for her velas.

  I’d read of pilgrims who walked seven times between a volcanic monotony of hills, fulfilling a private quest, and of those who left behind tiny silver images of their ailing body parts, which they had rubbed in medicinal earth, and of the penitents who sought transcendence through fire-walking or piercing their bodies with iron hooks then hanging from scaffolds wheeled to the shrine. But what had I expected to find? Hope? Something that would make sense of all that had happened to me since I’d been taken hostage and arrived on Tranquilandia? The bruja lit one of the thin white candles. In the yellow darkness the flame gave off a green light, making the cave feel like a crypt.

  I hadn’t expected a coffin, let alone one overflowing with offerings from those who had made the trek to Chocolata’s shrine to have their bullets or money or crops blessed—passport photographs; plastic Diet Coke bottles marked “Holy Water, Do Not Consume”; three Miami telephone directories and a worn copy of Che Guevara’s handbook on guerrilla warfare; Soldier of Fortune magazines and Penthouse centrefolds; cigar cutters; rosaries; tins of sardines; empty bottles of aguardiente. The coffin was set in a recess in the cave wall, and as I stood taking inventory, I saw the red, burning eyes of a white rat as he scuttled back into the darker chambers.

  I heard him squeal as he shuffled away, heard his frantic rustling sounds, and then only the wind, wheezing for breath, at the mouth of the cave.

  The bruja lit the other candles and set them on the stone ledge next to the coffin. Even when she was a jovencita, she said, she remembered coming here to view what was left of the pirate’s remains. In recent years people had taken away recuerdos, had worn the pieces of her body like amulets around their necks so that they might inherit the pirate’s female power.

  The bruja said she remembered a time on Tranquilandia when the crops
were bountiful and the bullets Chocolata blessed always hit the targets they were intended for. There was money for hospitals, a soccer field in the City of Orchids. Planes touched down on the island every day, and boats, laden to the gunwales with their white cargo, sailed away. The law kept its distance, well offshore. But as Chocolata’s body disappeared, so did the good times, the prosperity.

  Orphanages and schools closed down because the drug barons could no longer afford their endowments. The soccer field had become a place where addicts smoked basuco. Hospital wards became haunted by the ghosts of the angelitos. For many years, the islanders had prayed for a boy to be born with strong legs and feet: only one such as this could break Chocolata’s curse and restore prosperity and happiness to Tranquilandia.

  “He is the one,” said the bruja, smiling at Angel, “El Narcosanto is what the people are already calling him.” There was no hope, as I’d said to Daisy earlier, for any of us; the bruja, like Consuelo and the Black Widow, believed my baby was fated to become Tranquilandia’s Big Narco Saint.

  As the bruja turned to leave the cave, I saw the rat’s red eyes again, his skin whiter than a winding sheet, humping out of the darkness towards the coffin. I gripped Angel tight; then, as I backed away, the rat knocked over one of the candles and began gnawing the end of it.

  I watched, unable to take my eyes off his teeth. A quarter of the way through, he abandoned the candle, knocked down a second one and began chewing it.

  I remember my father comparing rats to bad land developers, how they eat up everything in sight. Their greed is selfish and goes beyond basic survival: rather than eating one apple or one potato, a rat will take a bite out of every potato or apple in the basket, spoiling the rest for everyone else.