Cargo of Orchids (12 page)

“Wet enough for you out there?” said Roll-Over as he went through Bonnie’s purse. He sniffed her bouquet, held it upside down and shook it.

“Check with the matron before you go through,” he said, pointing Bonnie towards the body-search cubicle. I told Carmen I hoped to God they would give it a pass today, but Carmen said she doubted they made any concessions in this place, not even for grieving brides.

The guard at the main doors buzzed us through and waved us into the visiting room, where Mr. Saygrover sat with his feet up on his desk.

“My breakfast,” he said, disgruntledly picking another french fry out of a pond of gravy. “Don’t like to waste, not with all the famine and lack of food in the world today. I’m supposed to be on a diet, mind you. The wife’s idea. Not mine. What the heck, is my attitude. Life’s short enough without her always telling me to push away from the gravy.”

I saw Bonnie stiffen, and Mr. Saygrover looked at me, embarrassed. “I’ve put my mouth in it again,” he said. “Me and my big foot.”

He looked from Bonnie to the clock on the wall above the soft-drinks machine. “We’d better mosey on down the hall,” he said.

I never knew whether Jack Saygrover’s lopsided walk was a result of injuries or the weight of the keys at his waist, but I felt myself unconsciously imitating him as I walked behind. The floors were freshly mopped and the corridor reeked of disinfectant, and Mr. Saygrover told us to watch our step because he didn’t want any more casualties.

He nodded to the guard in control of the iron-barred gate, and the heavy steel doors slid back on their runners. We crossed the five further barriers before reaching the gymnasium and the chapel.

Mr. Saygrover looked at his watch and said, “Count’s going to happen in the middle of the proceedings if they don’t get the show on the road. This is as far as I go. You girls are on your own from now on.”

He shook each of our hands. I’d noticed how Jack Saygrover always seemed to take a paternal interest in both Bonnie and Carmen. Carmen could look as if she needed protection. I pitied the man who ever thought fingernails were something women grew long to make their hands look feminine.

Suddenly Bonnie reached up, put her arms around his neck and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for everything you have done to help,” she said.

She kissed his other cheek, and Mr. Saygrover blushed. The creases in his neck stayed white, but everything else above his collar turned the colour of a cardinal bird I’d once seen run over on a California road.

“I don’t know how long it’s been since anyone around here said anything they meant sincerely,” he said. He shook
her hand again, then turned back towards the steel barrier that opened to let him pass.

Daddy Lord, the only man licensed to perform funerals and weddings inside maximum security, welcomed us at the chapel door, his breath smelling of last night’s Old Grouse. He looked more like an exhausted bus driver than a man of God, with his Expo pin in his lapel and a calculator dangling from his belt. In an aqua plastic insert above his heart, he carried an array of pens, and in his hands, a copy of
Good News for Modern Man.

Treat got a full house. I saw the wedding cake Bonnie had ordered from the prison kitchen and forgotten to cancel, and an officer standing guard over the cake knife. Floating above the cake was a bunch of pink and white heart-shaped balloons. Daddy Lord began apologizing for the mix-up and said funerals were like weddings—administrative nightmares. “Paperwork till it’s coming out your yin-yang. Myself, I’d rather see a funeral than a wedding any day. At the funeral, at least you know a person’s troubles are over.”

Bonnie said it didn’t matter about the cake; it was all for looks and made of Styrofoam anyway. She could take the balloons home to Baby.

The prison-issue coffin Treat was to be buried in lay beneath the organ and the statue of the Blessed Virgin. She still faced the wall: no one had turned her back around since the Halloween social. I leaned against the wall, staring out through the bars of the chapel window, as Daddy Lord negotiated his way to the front of the room and stood to the right of the coffin. In the silence that fell, I could
hear the hum of a generator outside and men playing basketball in the gymnasium, even the internal workings of my own body—the churning in my stomach, the rush of my blood—and my eyelids opening and closing like a moth’s wings brushing against silk. I thought, too, I could hear my baby’s heartbeat.

Daddy Lord opened his prayer book. He had sweat running down the sides of his cheeks. He pulled a wrinkled handkerchief from his pocket, mopped his brow and began quoting the words of the Holy Writ, as found in St. Luke: “Be ye also ready, for at what hour you think not, the Son of Man will come.” These words, he said, were as applicable to the inmates within the walls of Mountjoy Penitentiary as they were to any other men. He then turned the service over to Bonnie’s brother, Kono, who said Treat would not want any of us to pray for him. “The only time I heard
him
pray was when he found out someone had a contract out on him because of a drug deal that got fucked up. He prayed to the Virgin because she is the Mother of God, and his mother was the most sacred thing to him.

“You can only have one mother, he’d say, but your father could be any son of a bitch.”

Everyone laughed, which seemed to release some of the tension in the room. When it grew quiet again, Kono continued. “He was a believer, but he only went to church for one reason. Whenever he ran out of rolling papers, he would go get a copy of the New Testament. He believed the New Testament had the best paper for smoking up.”

Daddy Lord thanked Kono for his remarks. “Nothing so nearly touches man as his mortality,” he said, taking over
again at the front of the room. “Daily he meets with objects and situations that remind him of the frailty of his existence here on earth, and from time to time the Angel of Death makes his periodical visit to our midst, in order to remind us that ‘it is appointed for men once to die, and after this, judgment.’ Our brother Treat has been called to give account of his stewardship before the throne of the Eternal judge of the living and the dead. Let us pray that death, the grim officer of God, will not invade our ranks for the remainder of the month.”

Even though he wasn’t in the room, I felt Angel’s breath slip into my ear, whispering its way through the fine hairs on the back of my neck.

Just as Daddy Lord was inviting everyone to congregate in the gymnasium for lunch after noon count, I heard thumping and loud voices outside the chapel door. The lights went out and alarms began going off in the building. Daddy Lord pleaded with us to stay calm.

I heard a familiar voice shouting, “Chapel! Chapel!” from the gym, and Daddy Lord fumbled to get the door open. Mugre, holding a zip gun made from a length of pipe, pushed Mr. Saygrover into the chapel; he almost knocked me down. “Now look here, you fellows know …” Daddy Lord began, starting towards Mugre.

“Stand back,” Mugre said—I’d never heard him sound so level—“or I will kill you. We’re going out.” He passed off the zip gun to Angel, who had appeared with Gustavo out of nowhere, grabbed my arms and pinned them behind my back. Mr. Saygrover charged, Gustavo grappled him and
they toppled together, upsetting the table that held the wedding cake. Mugre scooped the cake knife from the floor. Then I heard, above the pandemonium, the staccato beat of a helicopter overhead, a throaty
thwap-thwap-thwapping
out of the skies.

Mugre dragged me towards the chapel door, holding the cake knife at my throat. He told the security guards who were backing off into the gymnasium that if anyone else made an attempt to take me, I would die too. Outside I could hear the clatter of automatic-weapon fire, the muffled thud of helicopter rotors and a voice over the loudspeaker calling, “Clear the yard! Clear the yard!” The machine-gun fire, from this distance, made a hissing, sputtering sound, like sparklers on a birthday cake. Mugre shoved me towards the gymnasium doors. Carmen, Angel and Gustavo were close behind.

The guard standing in the darkness by the door had a flashlight in one hand and a truncheon in the other. He looked young and scared. Mugre kept me in front of him like a shield, making a sawing motion back and forth across my throat.

“We don’t want to have to hurt anyone; we want to leave here in peace,” Angel said.

The guard might not have understood Angel’s words, but there was no mistaking Mugre’s gesture. I glanced up at the control tower, where the prison arsenal was kept; I could see the guards lined up at the window, levelling their guns at us. They could easily open fire and prevent the escape from going any further. I looked away again, and the young guard’s eyes met mine.

Mugre pressed the blade on my dress into my neck. “If any one fires, we all die. You shoot first and she … like this!” He drew the knife first across my throat, and then across my belly. Outside, I could hear the metallic
pop-pop-pop
of machine-gun fire.

“Open the door! We’re going through,” Mugre said, straining his voice over the thud of helicopter rotors overhead and the machine-gun chatter.

The young guard stood his ground, switching his flashlight on and off again in our faces. “Surrender your weapons and let the hostage go. Don’t do anything you might regret later.” He nodded at Mugre. “Sir.”

The “sir” was a concession, I supposed, to the knife making a deep indentation in my belly. And then, as I prepared to die, the warden’s voice came over the bullhorn, a voice welcome as morphine. “What are your demands? Tell us what you want, and we will do whatever we can to assist you. But first, let the hostage go.”

The three men grew silent, looked at each other and then at me for an explanation. I tried to translate what the warden had said. The young guard stood, feet apart, flashlight going on-off at his hip.

“We want access to the yard,” Angel said quietly. “Then we will release the hostage unharmed.”

I translated his demand. The guard continued playing with his flashlight.

And as I waited, and kissed an imaginary pair of dice and tossed them high, the doors opened and the warden came on the bullhorn again, saying, “
No one gets hurt.
Let the hostage pass.” The guard stepped aside, shaking his head.

I could smell smoke as Mugre pulled me out the door; a shot from one of the guard towers shattered the wall beside us, and I saw Gustavo fall I heard more sirens and gunfire as Mugre pushed me ahead of him, still using me as a shield, out across the grass towards a helicopter hovering over the yard like an outlaw dragonfly, firing on all guard towers.

Angel fell. Mugre stopped and turned to help him. But then Carmen got hit too: she lurched forward and to one side, doubled over and clutched her bloodied shoulder. Mugre let go of Angel, pushed me towards the helicopter, dragging Carmen after him. An arm reached down from the cockpit to pull us up; looking back in terror, I saw Angel rise and stagger towards us. I heard another shot and saw him sink to his knees. The guards kept firing; his body jerked with each shot, then lay unmoving in the dirt, curled in the foetal position.

We rose to meet the sky. I sat numbly watching the blood flow down Carmen’s back, and listening to Mugre getting sick in the seat behind me.

The pilot’s face was concealed by a kind of balaclava made from the leg of a pair of sweatpants, with holes cut for the eyes and mouth. But it didn’t hide the black hair that fell in waves to her waist; for one blind moment, I thought of trying to jump out of the helicopter as it angled into the wind.

Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

I sent a kite to the warden, saying they should bring back burning at the stake. It would make great television, the flames raging out of Heaven, the eyes popping out of heads.

The warden thinks it’s because I crave the spotlight, but it’s not. I didn’t ask for the publicity I’ve been getting; it’s just
that I keep insisting that if they’re going to kill me tomorrow, they might as well kill me right now. I would have been out of here long ago, feet first in a Styrofoam coffin, if the Women’s Empowerment Coalition hadn’t taken up my cause. Most men on death row who insist upon being executed are allowed to die, but we still don’t grant women the same right to self-determination. The group fighting on my behalf says that after everything that has happened to me, I am not capable of making the right decision. American law forbids the execution of a person who is insane, and any woman who
wants
to die is not sane enough for execution. If
I
won’t apply for clemency, they will keep doing it for me.

Pile, Jr. has a brilliant theory about why so many women are being executed: the state is correcting a previous gender imbalance. You don’t even have to commit murder these days to get the book thrown at you.

In one so-called civilized country, a kindergarten teacher was sentenced to death for the “counter-revolutionary” offence of possessing manuscripts critical of the government. I read that she’d been electrocuted with the organ-transplant doctor standing by.

The story got out because the woman had not died immediately. She was kept alive, in fact, by the doctor who later came forward with details. He couldn’t live with himself, he said, and described how he had removed both her kidneys while she was still living, and how her liver had been “too hot to handle.”

“Is demand influencing supply?” read the headline in the
New York Times
after the doctor made his disclosure. “Is
the free world executing prisoners to feed a clandestine transplant trade?” The country had a thriving business that relied on prisoners’ organs for raw materials, but this business also fed an insatiable state killing machine that led to more and more executions every year.