Cargo of Orchids (2 page)

After Laverne shot her boy’s teeth out, Frenchy told me they went on a road trip, stealing a Grand Prix, refuelling with hot credit cards. Laverne made one more mistake, Frenchy said, when she paid for a Diet Coke with a gold American Express card at a Holiday Inn. Then when the card came up invalid, she pretended she didn’t speak English and left Frenchy holding the bag. When she went to trial, Frenchy asked Laverne for a character reference, “because Laverne, whatever else she might screw up, wouldn’t screw up my character.”

I found one book in the library that says there are five ways to die, all of them painful. Even when you die in your sleep, it hurts. Those five painful ways don’t include the choices I’ve been presented with under the state’s new pro-choice with a twist policy. Pro-choice means the freedom to choose which form of capital punishment is best suited to your personality—lethal injection, gas chamber, electric chair, hanging or the firing-squad. If you can’t make up your own mind, they choose for you. “Dead if you do, dead if you don’t,” says Rainy.

Unlike those whom society invests with authority, most people who live on the Row have learned that killing
people is wrong. When I write that the death penalty is an unambiguous disgrace to civilized humanity, I suppose there are people who say that’s because I have an axe to grind. I do, and it’s blunt from being ground down over the ten years I’ve lived waiting to die in prison.

Another book I read says the key to understanding capital punishment is to be found in its ritual element. Many cultures have made ritual sacrifices—the Aztecs, for instance, spread their victim on a stone altar, cut open his chest with an obsidian blade, then ripped his heart out. State-sanctioned murder should be, in theory, no more curious than that.

Rainy has come with me to the library to see what I do with myself all day. When I describe how poor Aztec children were sold to priests by their parents, who couldn’t afford to keep them, she wants to know if those children got their hearts torn out, too. Not unless the priests wanted it to rain, I say; they believed the rain god favoured little children’s tears. Rainy says those kids were lucky if getting sacrificed was the worst thing that ever happened to them in their lives.

Rainy never learned to read or write; she thinks a sentence is something you have to serve. She’s never been in a library before, and didn’t know God had created that many books. The one book she recognizes is the Bible. I tell her parts of it were written in prison, and that capital punishment, like feeling guilty about having sex, has all its roots in religion.

Rainy thinks about this, then says
she
hasn’t had sex for so long she is afraid her parts have healed shut, like a pierced ear you don’t wear a post in.

I sign out
The Rituals of Human Sacrifice
to save Frenchy the trouble of stealing it for me. Frenchy prides herself on her ability to steal, but where books are concerned, I’ve had to tone her down.

When we were back in the general population, I caught her tearing the last page out of a mystery I’d been on the waiting list to read. She claimed to have “edited” hundreds of books this way; if she was going to die, she said, she wanted to make sure those left behind would remember her. I said I’d pay her a bale of tobacco for every book she could steal for me that came
with
an ending. Before long I had to put a limit on the number. It was easier for Frenchy to pinch books than it was for me to find places to hide them, and soon I was paying her to steal books
back
to the library.

When I told my mother I was writing a book, she begged me to write it under a pseudonym. I’ve never heard of a person writing her memoirs under an alias; if anyone reading this wonders why I’ve left my name out of this story, one reason is to make my mother proud of me. When I asked her not to visit me here, I think she was relieved. She toured a dungeon once, in the Azores, and found it “stuffy.”

I write to her once a week, but I’m careful about what I say. She’d only worry if she knew I lay awake at night thinking up ways to short-circuit the electric chair, or calculating how long I’d be able to hold my breath in the gas chamber.

In her most recent letter, she told me she was going to the Caribbean, “to some island where they speak English, I hope.” She will be wearing the watch passed down from her
great-great-grandmother, with its diamonds and sapphires “worth more than my house.” She wears it because she’s afraid she’ll lose it otherwise. There’s logic.

If anything happens to her, and she doesn’t make it back in one piece, she says, I should be sure to file a claim. I don’t remind her where I live, or that I won’t be able to spend her insurance money where I’m going, but I do warn her that if she flaunts the watch, some cracked-out desperado might hack off her whole arm with a rusty machete. That might not be such a bad thing. A lost arm would provide her with a permanent conversation piece now that my father is gone, or, at the very least, give her something new to talk about besides the unreliable lamp in her life.

Last night I dreamed I buried my face in my father’s nut-brown jacket, reaching for the smell of him in the old corduroy. I could smell his pipe tobacco, the kind I used to catch a whiff of on the street, like sugared leather dipped in wildflower honey mixed with dust. My mother still keeps his jacket over the back of his chair, as if she expects him to walk in from the garden with a handful of the Chinese tea roses he bred. In my dream, the roses smelled like tea leaves when you bruise them.

When I first came to the Row, they made me sign forms saying that in the event of death or injury sustained during my incarceration, I would not hold the institution responsible. I can’t say they haven’t been taking care of me.

When they escort me to the chow hall, they attach a trip chain to my leg shackles so the guard behind me, holding the chain, can pull my feet out from under me if I make
a break for it and try to vault the seventeen-foot-high fence of electrified wire—assuming I make it through all six electronically controlled doors and across six hundred feet of open yard first. My wrists are handcuffed too, although they undo the cuffs to let me eat. Then they just watch me extra hard.

I have been classified as an escape risk, among other things. It doesn’t take them long to classify you. They read your file, look you over, ask your age, race and religion, and then write down whatever Representation of Female Evil they figure you most closely represent.

My classification officer got excited when I asked her to read again the definition of an Explosive Avenger. When she reread it, watching my face this time, I asked for clarification on “Premeditation is far from clear.” She said “premeditation” meant you had planned your crime in advance; it wasn’t just something you did because you lost control of your reason in a moment of passion. I said I understood what the word meant, but I didn’t understand the meaning of “Premeditation is far from clear.” Did that mean it was unclear whether the crime was premeditated, or that the premeditation itself was not very well thought out? My CO looked at the words, frowned, then admitted it must be a mistake, that the line ought to read “Motivation is far from clear.”

I went back to my house, feeling I had made one small step for Female Evil. However, nothing changed. My CO wrote that I probably had a “lesbian-type affiliation” with Consuelo de Corazón, which is why I maintained the illusion I was being held hostage. In her opinion, I had clearly murdered my child, “though premeditation is far from clear.”

Rainy says that if it is any consolation, she too has been classified as an Explosive Avenger/Cold Calculator, even though she never made one dime from killing her twins.

Everyone here gets classified as a Something-American.

Rainy. Age: 32; Mexican-American; Explosive Avenger/Cold Calculator.

Frenchy. Age: 35; African-American; Robber-Predator.

Yours Truly. Age: 47; Canadian-American; Explosive Avenger/Cold Calculator.

I appealed my classification, saying I did
not
have U.S. citizenship, but the classification officers who reviewed my case could not conceive of a nationality that wasn’t at least half American. “Everybody’s got to have
some
good in them,” they said.

Once you have been classified, that’s what you have become. And you go to your grave here with your classification papers stuffed in your hand like a diploma.

My husband (more about him later) hired a lawyer to represent me—Ferdinand Pile, Jr.—the self-acclaimed “Cadillac of lawyers.” As soon as I heard his name, I figured Vernal must have a million-dollar insurance policy on my life.

Even though I don’t think Pile, Jr.—who promised he’d get me out of prison if it took him the rest of his life—had ever defended a murder case, I’m not blaming him for the fact I got the death sentence. I want it to go on record that I take full responsibility for what I did. That’s one reason I’m writing this book.

It’s so easy to get sidetracked in here. To lose my train. Alone in my house I open
The Rituals of Human Sacrifice
, and turn to a section of photographs. A child’s shoe in the grass—this one makes me saddest. I think how much of a story that shoe, with the mindless persistence of objects, has to tell. I imagine slipping my baby’s narrow foot into it, tickling his sole when he curls up his toes, the way he always did.

I fed my child; I did what I could. But even in my dreams he is always hungry, and no matter how much I feed him, it’s never enough. He sucks his thumb and pulls out his eyelashes with his fingers. Sometimes he dips the eye-lashes into honey, or something else sweet, like treacle or molasses, then plays with them between his teeth. I honestly think he swallows them, though by that point the dream is usually over.

I can only guess what he might have become. Sorrow is nourishment forever.

In books, people meet on tropical islands or in high-class restaurants or when they’re both doing something dangerous in a foreign country and are thrown together because they narrowly escape stepping on the same land mine; I met Vernal in a public washroom. Both of us were so embarrassed that we never could remember afterwards which one of us had been in the wrong place. We both remember apologizing, each one tripping over the other, as we Canadians do, to apologize first.

It was April 1985. I’d just turned thirty, and I’d been flown to New York to attend the launch of a book I’d translated from Spanish into English. I had majored in languages, and had a job freelancing for a publishing house with offices in Vancouver (where I lived), New York and Bogotá.

My assignment had been to translate the memoirs of a woman who was connected, by marriage, to one of the major Colombian drug cartels. Carmen María de Corazón had been kidnapped by a narco-terrorist guerrilla group called Las Blancas (The White Ladies), who had taken to abducting wealthy foreigners and nationals alike, using ransom monies to finance their drug-smuggling operations and the recruiting and training of young
guerrilleras.
Carmen had been released once a ransom of six million dollars had been paid by “undisclosed sources.” Kidnapping had become so prevalent in Colombia that a new law had been passed: when a national was abducted, his or her bank account was automatically frozen, to prevent ransom payments being withdrawn.

Carmen’s orange-haired bodyguard, who introduced herself only as Bret, met me at JFK. It was my first time in New York, and I was there because Carmen had insisted—all expenses paid. On the way into town, Bret gave me an envelope full of cash, including a hundred-dollar bill “for the mugger.” She advised me, too, not to walk through Central Park “with that pack.” The Canadian flag, with its bull’s-eye maple leaf, was an open invitation.

When the cab let us out at the Ritz (“Carmen María wants you to feel at home”), Bret pointed me to one of the overstuffed chairs in the lobby while she checked me in. There was a problem with the room, in that they didn’t have one, but I was quietly upgraded to the honeymoon suite, and given a complimentary bowl of fruit and a bottle of chilled champagne—just the sort of treatment I would have expected at the Ritz.

As we went up in the elevator, I told Bret the Ritz had always been part of our family mythology. Every summer, from the time I was ten years old, we’d spent two weeks “getting away from it all” in the Kootenays. I resented the leech-infested lake, the pack rat that stole my mood ring, the outhouse with its “If You Sprinkle When You Tinkle, Be a Sweetie and Wipe the Seatie” sign and the fact that there were no boys within fifty miles, boys being the “it” from which my parents were intent on getting me away. I’d be picking the scabs off my mosquito bites and the mouse droppings out of the butter, and complaining that I couldn’t just go to bed and sleep for two weeks because my mattress had no springs in it, when my father would say, “What do you think this is, the Ritz?”

Bret looked at me as if I came from Canada, and when we got to my suite, asked if I liked Chinese. I said yes, assuming she meant food (I had been warned not to take anything at face value in the Big Apple), and she rolled her eyes again and said she’d be back to pick me up at five-thirty.

My suite took up two floors: there were three television screens, a computer and a fax machine, and a king-size bed with a mirror on the ceiling that made me feel a pang for the crab fisherman from Prince Rupert I’d been seeing in the off-season. I had a seashell-shaped bathtub made of green marble, with gold faucets, and a toilet that flushed soundlessly. The glass cases, antique, were filled with clay figurines. I examined these closely before getting undressed and wondered if anyone else had noticed that the rain god had a double-headed penis, or that the child lying on his
back holding up his heart to the rain god had a hollow place in his chest, a bowl to catch his tears.