Cargo of Orchids

by Susan Musgrave

  I climbed aboard the plane, which was filled with orchids, the scent as rich and numbing as the smell inside the Black Widow’s solarium. Each orchid was wet, as if it had been picked weeping. There were orchids with flushed lips and slashed purple throats; orchids with white beards and bloodshot eyes. I even recognized one—“with flowers more curious than beautiful, and a scent,” Yepez had said, “that may be intoxicating or fetid, depending on the species.” I squeezed past the coffin on its bed of crushed virgin orchids, releasing their strong smell of sex and death. The scent made me want to take off my clothes and roll around in them, let their beautiful sensuous tongues lick off some of the hurt.

  I felt as if the orchids were alive—human, alert presences on board the plane—as if they had me under surveillance, each with their own version of my story to tell How she got here. Why she stayed. What she planned to do with the rest of her life. When the rest of her life would begin. What her death would feel like. What the sweet hereafter would bring. I wondered, too, as I buckled myself in next to Tiny Cattle, whether the plane itself wasn’t a coffin meant for me—if we would drop into the sea, and I would cling to the wreckage in an ocean alive with orchids, before sinking forever into an orchid darkness.

  Flores para los muertos. Thinking of that journey makes me almost too sad to go on telling this story. I want to shut everything down, close the book on it. Stop the images, like the one where my womb is an orchid and Angel is wrapped in it, struggling to get free.

  And then there’s the image of the plane being diverted to Panama, and the one of me deciding to flush the rest of my cocaine. Or the image of me being locked in a room at the airport, snorting as much as I could. A room with no view. A room with only one door to leave by, a door that opened inward.

  It was in Panama where it all began to go wrong. Now I remember. But I am jumping ahead of myself. The way love jumped away, jumped out of me.

  I looked down over Chocolata’s island as Tiny Cattle drove the plane up into the air. I almost felt homesick, leaving that world of nightmares and dreaming. Having as much cocaine as I wanted, and having my baby in my arms whenever he needed comforting, had become home to me, familiar and routine. What lay ahead were different dreams, new nightmares.

  Why would anyone want to get away from Las Blancas? I wondered what Angel was doing at this moment, if Daisy was feeding him coca tea. I wondered what kind of life, by leaving him behind, I had sentenced my child to.

  Tiny Cattle was unusually silent. He chewed a wad of coca leaves; his jaw creaked when he chewed, as if it were opening and closing on rusty hinges. I looked down on Las Blancas’ fleet—at the warship where El Chopo had spent his last months, making knives for therapy. I didn’t know then what I know too well now: that memories are all we have. We remember what we have survived, which gives us hope for the future. Through memories, we make our peace with time.

  While Tiny Cattle poured the last of the aguardiente down his throat, I looked over my shoulder at the coffin, as if making another kind of memory. The smell of the orchids was like a drug itself, and the scent made me think again of the moment Angel was born, how full of death his small life had been, how I would like to think he would go on living. I know one thing is true: I loved that baby, and I would have done anything for him if I thought it would spare him pain. I said this to the jury and they took it literally, not just as a way of speaking. They were supposed to be a jury of my peers, twelve well-intentioned men and women. Not one of them, not one American, when it came right down to it, could understand that there is a fate worse than death. I believed, I still believe, there is a fate far better than life.

  All moot points now, as Pile, Jr. would say. Moot and mute. I heard the radio crackle, and Tiny reached for his radio phone and began to sweat harder as other voices filled the cabin.

  “We’re going to be doing some sightseeing,” he said. I couldn’t follow the instructions being issued from the radio. “We’re taking the scenic route.”

  I could feel the cocaine I’d stashed inside me, as if it was about to come out prematurely, sliding slickly and whitely into this world.

  Tiny Cattle didn’t look at me. “It’s Panama. I’m supposed to have a window. Nothing to worry about.”

  Nothing to worry about, he repeated, as long as I kept my story straight. “You need backup, I got this.”

  He patted his jacket, reached inside, and then said, “Take it and keep it next to you. Just in case.”

  But when I didn’t reach for the weapon, he placed it in my lap. “Tec-9. Semi-automatic. Reputable kill rate.” He looked over his shoulder, as if to make sure no one else was listening. “I wouldn’t leave home without one. It’s the ideal holiday gun.”

  chapter twenty-eight

  Tiny Cattle grew more talkative as we broke through a bank of thick, grey cloud and circled that bleak no man’s land that surrounds every airport I’ve ever been to. He prattled on like a tour guide, pointing out ships lined up at sea to enter the canal, vultures over the Hilton “where there were the best pickings” and off the coast, in the distance, the paradise island of Contadora (where the shah of Iran had stayed while in exile). Tiny said he’d lived “somewhere down there” with a Costa Rican beauty. He could always find his way back to their apartment because there was a bust of Einstein in a little traffic island across from his building’s main entrance. “Alfred Einstein. You know, the genius.”

  As we came in for a landing, I saw bunches of green bananas hanging on clotheslines and a pack of dogs scratching at a mound of dirt. Tiny Cattle tucked our small aircraft in under the wing of an Avianca jet, as if the jet were a mother hen. I half expected to be surrounded by loudspeaker-toting police officers with their Uzis trained on us, but instead we sat, with the engines shut down, watching other peoples’ luggage being loaded onto the jet.

  After a while, a thin, harried-looking man holding a clipboard came out of the building, and Tiny opened the door of the plane and lowered the steps so he could climb aboard. The little man glanced at the coffin, crossed himself, then asked to see my passport, which he held upside down: either he didn’t know how to read, or he couldn’t be bothered. He flipped through, saw no entry or exit stamps and frowned. He questioned Tiny Cattle about our point of departure, and Tiny said they didn’t have authorities on Tranquilandia; the official said he knew—every time he visited his brother on that island he got taken in by someone pretending to be an authority, some gordo maricón. Tiny said thieves were a problemo everywhere these days, which was one good reason for staying home, where the only surprises you got were the ones on television.

  “Sí, cómo no,” the man said wearily, and he wrote on his clipboard and pulled at his chin as if he didn’t know what to do next. He asked Tiny where we lived and the purpose of our visit to Tranquilandia, and Tiny said I was a tourist. The little man glanced at the coffin; Tiny began whispering, as if I wasn’t supposed to hear, “the señora, qué lástima,” and jerked his head to indicate the coffin.

  “Claro, qué lástima,” the official said, but he didn’t sound as if he thought it was clearly very sad. He asked what had happened, and Tiny Cattle said we were sightseeing and there had been an accident. The señora was taking the body home to Los Angeles—“her niño querido.” My beloved boy.

  The official shook his head and said he wouldn’t detain us much longer; he just had to make sure my papers were in order. As he probably knew, there were many problemas these days: planes loaded with contraband, narcotráfico. What was worse, he added, as if his feelings had been hurt, many of the narcotraficantes had tried to cut the Panamanians out. They weren’t receiving their fair share, their mordidas.

  He pointed to a group of baggage handlers hunched together with two men dressed as pilots, all of them sharing a cigarette under the wing of the Avianca jet. “You see that? They are smoking drugs. That plane was supposed to have left an hour ago. The pilot gets drugs and steers his plane into the Andes? No problem. They find another pilot.
Every hijo de puta is a pilot.” He went on to recommend that Tiny Cattle do his negocios blancos with the police. “They get everything for nothing, so they can sell it cheap.” He had a brother-in-law on the police force, he said, if Tiny was ever interested in making an honest connection.

  Tiny Cattle thanked him, opened his wallet and gave the man his mordida.

  “Sí, hay muchos problemas,” said the official. He said he didn’t go looking for trouble, but problems always seemed to find him.

  Tiny Cattle then asked if he would like me to open the coffin, so that he could inspect the remains. It had been a messy accident, he said. The official looked at the coffin and scratched his face again. No, he said, he did not think it would be necessary to open the coffin. Out of respect, he said, looking at me sideways, for the señora.

  He bent down to sniff one of the orchids. He touched it, and then sprang back and began wildly shaking his hand and shouting, as if in terrible pain. I looked closer at the orchids to see what could have hurt him: the official had been bitten by a fire ant.

  I remembered Don Drano, in the garden at the Hotel Viper: “Virgin orchids,” he’d said, “Never pick them. They are not what they appear to be.”

  The shaken official told us to come with him at once to the terminal. Another problem had found him.

  I saw posters on every wall as we made our way through an underground tunnel into the terminal building. “Missing,” they said, a word summing up a lifetime. And, underneath the word missing, the smiling, gap-toothed photograph of some four- or five-year-old who was probably, by now, turning seven in an unmarked grave: “Have You Seen This Child?” I wanted to turn and run back to the plane, fly back to Tranquilandia, take Angel in my arms and never let him out of my sight ever again.

  Inside the building, Tiny Cattle disappeared with the official and I was left to wait in a room with a chain-smoking American who wore a loose, oatmeal linen suit, a cowboy hat and a T-shirt that said “I Scored.” He had missed one flight already because of these people’s incompetence, he said. An American passport was supposed to open doors, and it did everywhere else in the world, but not in Panama. “As far as Latin Americans are concerned,” he said, “fuck them all but six, and leave those for pallbearers.”

  A Panamanian businessman, who’d also been detained, offered to buy us both a whisky once they had returned his wallet.

  When half an hour had gone by and Tiny Cattle hadn’t returned, I decided to find a washroom. I wanted a pick-me-up, and I thought if I could get to a bathroom I would take out the cocaine I’d stashed, do a little bit, then stash it back inside.

  The only nearby washroom in this secured area was closed, “for inspection.” I tried the door, but it was locked, and when I backed away, as if to give myself a run at the door before kicking it down, I saw a young policeman, holding an oily lunch bag, watching me. He wore his white gun-belt aslant, cowboy-style, and he strolled over and asked if he could help me. I said I was looking for a lavabo.

  “Está enferma?” he asked. He reached into his bag and pulled out a fistful of pork scratchings, popped them between his greasy lips. His mouth reminded me of the hole in the floor of my baño at the Hotel Viper.

  I told him no, I was not sick. I didn’t think I should be required to give him a reason for wanting to go to the bathroom. He munched on his chicharrones for a while, trying to look important, and then asked to see my papers.

  I explained that my passport had been taken from me. He asked where I was born, and I said Canada.

  “You are very far from home. Your husband is not with you?” He stuffed his bag of pork rinds in his trouser pocket as an older policeman, who seemed to be in charge, headed our way. The young officer asked his jefe for permission to search my bag; the chief smiled, showing two teeth rimmed with gold.

  I gave up my bag to the young officer. “Hay una problema?” I asked the jefe. He patted his revolver. It wasn’t the answer I’d been hoping for.

  I felt cold all of a sudden, and for the first time I noticed the bad smell in the terminal, half-diesel, half-human. By the door a campesina was selling oranges she had built up into a little pyramid. The jefe walked over and helped himself to one, peeled it, then broke it into pieces. He sucked the juice from each moon-shaped section, spit out the seeds and dropped the rind on the floor.

  At that moment, the young policeman found Tiny’s “ideal holiday gun.” The jefe told him to check to see if it was loaded, and it was.

  “She is not a tourist,” I heard the jefe say to the young police officer.

  The official who had boarded our plane alerted security. The jefe showed him the gun they’d found in my purse, and said he wanted me detained for questioning. When I protested, and started shouting that I wouldn’t say anything until I had spoken to a lawyer, the jefe suggested the official put me in “the small room” where I could rest, and that he should call a doctor to “investigate” me.

  When the jefe left, I tried to calm myself down; I told the official I didn’t need to be put in any room—I would answer whatever questions they he had for me now, on the spot. Tiny Cattle said nothing, but mopped his brow with a handkerchief and mumbled about killer humidity and needing to get the show on the road as soon as possible. I felt, suddenly, that I had dried up inside, the way a river dies in a time of drought. I said my baby’s name, I said Angel, and it was then that the dried-up places inside me began to crack. The fissures widened, so that whichever way I turned I was doomed to fall.

  The official laid a hand on my arm. “Por favor, señora,” he said. Por favor. There was something so hopeless about his words, so resigned to sorrow, at least when I allow myself to think back over that day. It was almost as if he would have saved me if he could.

  He led me away to a windowless cell with a hard, narrow bed, a single (stained) sheet, no air conditioning. I had a sink, a toilet. The room was bigger than my prison cell is now, but it felt small to me then, and less hospitable. A dead-end room, the first of many. No way out but the future.

  Before he left, I did what I had seen Consuelo and Tiny Cattle do. I took off my shoe and offered the official my mad money, “for his trouble.” The official turned it over in his hand, and then smiled and shook his head sadly, as if I had insulted him. It was a billete chimbo, he said: Pamananians were not estúpidos who accepted fake bills passed off on them by greedy norteamericanos.

  He took the counterfeit money anyway and left, locking the door behind him. Time closed in on me; I felt as though I hadn’t slept for days. How long would I have to wait? I thought of Angel, the way he reached for me. I banged on the heavy door, using my fists and then my head. “Señor, por favor, ayúdeme” Help me. Please help me.

  I had no watch, no clock, nothing but the slow ticking to death of time inside my rib cage. One bright light bulb, surrounded by a wire cage, burned down on me. I sat on the toilet and pushed out the condom of cocaine I’d been saving.

  I had nothing to chop it with, no X-acto blade, no hundred-dollar bill with which to suck the coke up into my nostrils. I took a pinch and snorted it straight from my hand, inhaled as much as I could, then blew my nose into a piece of waxy brown toilet paper. My nose was full of blood, and now my head began to sing and spin, but it didn’t go numb the way it used to, or was supposed to, and everything felt too clear. I slipped the cocaine into my shoe and crawled under the sheet, trying to stop the racing of my heart, the congested feeling in my head and chest.

  I had to flush the rest of my stash down the toilet. Once it was gone I could confess, explain to the official that I was a hostage trying to make her way to freedom, a woman who’d been forced to leave her baby behind. But then Consuelo’s words came into my head: how well I played the part would determine Angel’s fate.

  I took the remaining cocaine out of my shoe and poured it (most of it) down the toilet, where it dissolved slowly into a white river before I flushed it away.

  A while later the official came back with a bologna sandwi
ch (no butter) and a plastic glass of fake orange juice. I didn’t have an appetite. I asked to make a phone call, to contact my husband, but he said to make a call you needed a “message slip.” I asked if he could find one for me. He didn’t think so.

  He informed me that a doctor would be coming to examine me. He wouldn’t look me in the eye as he spoke, as if he was embarrassed for me. He toyed with his clipboard. I think he might have been afraid of the desperation he saw in my eyes.

  He didn’t return that night. I didn’t know it was night, of course, it was only a guess. The cocaine I’d snorted before flushing most of it away kept me from feeling hungry, so I didn’t care when nobody brought breakfast. I’d slept very little—it’s hard to sleep under a burning light bulb with only a thin sheet to cover your head—but I decided to come fully awake by doing a line, knowing that whatever I had to face in the new day would probably not be pleasant.

  I still had the coke in my shoe. I fished it out. The humidity, and the fact that I hadn’t had time to seal it properly, had turned the fine white flake into a grey, mucousy pulp, like something I might have blown out of my nose after a night of excess. I would like to be able to say I flushed the rest of it down the toilet—all but a rock or two, which I decided to try to save—I would like to say I flushed it for the right reason (to get rid of it, to show I had power over it), but I didn’t. I kept it, even though it was useless to me now. The only way I might have been able to save it would have been to dry it out under a heat lamp.

  That’s when the bulb went on in my mind. I could save what I had left of the sample by drying it under the bright light burning down on me.

  I was standing on my bed, which I’d pushed into the centre of the room, my hands reaching towards the light, when the official, the jefe and two other men—undercover agents who had DEA written all over their pressed Levi’s, black T-shirts, mirrored sunglasses and shoulder holsters— burst through the door. I remember thinking, Why didn’t they just unlock it? They owned the keys.