Cargo of Orchids (28 page)

Once the warrant has been signed, the prison superintendent is notified and guards come to fetch Frenchy from her cell. The first couple of times she’d had no forewarning, but had been hauled to the warden of care and treatment’s office, where the warrant had been read aloud. After this she’d been told she could phone a lawyer or a family member, if she had anyone left who would accept a collect call. Frenchy only had us, and we didn’t have telephone privileges.

This time, Officers Robinson and Freedman come to get her, but Officer Robinson breaks down and starts crying before she’s found the right key to unlock Frenchy’s door. Frenchy knows right away why they’ve come for her.

She’s never had any complaints about the dancehall, where she gets a new mattress and a pillow in a case, and the cell gets a fresh coat of paint before she arrives, two-tone—light grey over green, the line right at eye level when you are standing at attention beside your bed and they come to inspect it to see if you’ve folded the corners of your sheets properly. She gets a steel toilet and a steel sink, and everything stays very clean because her cell is swept and mopped every day. Every other day her floor gets a fresh coat of wax.

Frenchy asks if she can say goodbye to us this time before she goes, and this chokes Officer Freedman, too. I wonder if
there will be tears when they come for Rainy, or for me? It is rare for a woman to survive what Frenchy has been through, and some of the guards feel, like us, that despite the rules, Frenchy should have been granted clemency.

Frenchy tries to comfort the guards, which makes it worse for them, because
they
are supposed to be in charge. Only Officer Gluckman remains unmoved. She walks by, dragging her Talking Nano along my bars to make sure I hear my baby crying for me. “I’m sick. Feed me.” The voice gets more feeble every day, and I think if there is a merciful God, the batteries will croak and I won’t have to listen to the voice I’ve buried deep inside. If he doesn’t die soon, I think, I will kidnap him and put him out of his misery.

Officer Robinson and Officer Freedman aren’t about to let Officer Gluckman know they are upset, or, in guard language, have lost control of the situation, so they take off, leaving Frenchy to dictate her obit and her famous headline: “Frenchy Fries.”

My mother sends me a magazine article about a couple in India who took their crippled six-year-old daughter to a remote river and threw her in. No one would want a crippled bride, they said. They watched her struggle and finally drown, but felt she was better off. My mother says you’d never get away with anything like that in
this
country.

She says she sympathizes with the parents. “There were times I thought of leaving you in a snowbank, or on the beach, buried up to your neck in the sand. But then the mood would pass, and I was always glad I had decided to
take you home. You were a baby, helpless, I could have done
anything.
I’m just glad I raised you before child abuse was invented.”

Frenchy’s previous death warrants were publicized by a news release issued shortly after the governor signed, and Frenchy has kept those clippings, also, stuck to her wall Frenchy says seeing her name in the paper makes her feel “like somebody.” Knowing that the whole country will be reading about her execution over their morning coffee almost makes dying worth it.

I tell Frenchy, the kind of person who can enjoy a cup of coffee while reading that justice has been done would spit his coffee out if he had to be there in person: the volts of electricity shooting through you, making your body leap and twitch; your eyeballs popping out of their sockets; your face, fingers, legs and toes left hideously distorted. Your brain temperature approaches the boiling point of water, and your body starts smouldering. In some cases, your skin even turns black. Frenchy hopes it
does
happen, so her “ugly spot” ends up the same colour as the rest of her body.

Frenchy says she’s going to order stuffed olives, lobster salad, fried chicken, french fries, “killer” garlic bread and New York cheesecake for her last meal. She’s going to ask for a second helping of everything on her plate before she goes so there’ll be that much more shit for the guards to wipe up. But the guards don’t clean anything—they make prisoners do the dirty work. That’s how Rainy knows the Chair isn’t yellow.

——

They took Frenchy out of her cell in the middle of the night. They didn’t even give her a chance to say goodbye. Why? Rules, that’s why. Or as Rainy says now, every time she gets the opportunity, “
Because.
Bitch Eats Candy Apple Until She Explodes.”

Two days before she was executed, Frenchy sent a kite saying she’d been sent to a head-shrinker. He asked her if she had ever believed she was a secret agent of God, what century we were in and the name of the current president. She said she must have got all three questions right, because the shrink declared her sane enough to die. State law forbids the execution of a woman who is insane, and if a prisoner is determined to have become insane on death row, she is spared execution until such time as “mental health is restored.”

Who among us is sane enough for execution?

Officer Gluckman says she saw Frenchy die, live, just after two. She was rebroadcast on the seven o’clock news, and again at ten o’clock and on the local news at eleven. Officer Gluckman says even the replays were hard to watch. She got tired just trying to imagine how the guard must have felt, the one who had to refasten the power lines to the Chair after the first surge of electricity, which seared Frenchy’s flesh but didn’t kill her.

I didn’t see Rainy until the morning after. Frenchy had asked Rainy to be there “for immoral support.” Frenchy said she knew what to expect. She told Rainy she would signal her if she found the ordeal worse than she had anticipated. She would make a fist.

Rainy wants me to write about Frenchy’s execution as she remembers it, starting with the guard taking a long stick that looks like a lollipop with the word Ready on it and raising it to the back window of the chamber as a signal to the warden. At 2:00 the first jolt of electricity shoots through her body, which breaks from the straps that are holding her to the Chair. The electrode on the shaved part of her leg bursts from the strap holding it in place and catches on fire.

A cloud of greyish smoke and sparks pour out from under the hood covering her face. Her body straightens and quivers, and Rainy smells burnt clothing and flesh in the witness room and wishes she could open a window. She can even taste the smoke, like Frenchy’s a T-bone on a barbecue and Rainy’s standing too close. But there are no windows in this dancehall. The current stops, and Frenchy falls back in the Chair.

Two croakers go into chamber to pronounce her dead. One puts his stethoscope on her heart, turns around and nods to the warden and the witnesses, the usual sign that a person is dead. Rainy’s eyes are still dry, and she’s mad at herself for not crying because she knows it will go on her record: “Failure to react to friend’s health alteration.” But then it’s okay that she isn’t weeping, because the croaker is explaining that he meant the opposite—he has found a heartbeat. The second doctor examines Frenchy and confirms it. Frenchy is still alive.

A guard reattaches the electrode to Frenchy’s leg and fixes the straps she’s broken. This takes a bunch of time, Rainy says, and while he’s making repairs and setting up the power lines again, Frenchy starts breathing. Her chest rises
evenly. A gush of saliva oozes from her face, dribbles out from under the black hood. There’s blood in the spit and it stains her white T-shirt, and Rainy says I should write how much the colour white suited Frenchy, even though she would never wear it by choice because she was prejudiced against it.

Her breathing comes slow and regular. But then a second jolt of current is sent into Frenchy’s body. The stench of burning flesh causes one reporter to toss his cookies (another Rainyism), and more and more smoke shoots out of Frenchy’s head and legs. Rainy sees Frenchy’s hands gripping the Chair, and wonders if she is trying to make a fist to show that being electrocuted is worse than she’d expected it to be.

Again the croakers go in to examine her. Everything is out of control; the warden says something must be wrong with the generator and the guard’s eyes are tearing and Rainy’s shouting that they’re all fucking killers, even though she knows it won’t look good on her record. Frenchy’s lawyer screams for clemency; Rainy says she’s never heard a lawyer scream like that before, unless he hasn’t been paid. “This is cruel and unusual punishment. Communicate that to the governor,” he keeps raving.

But the governor won’t interfere. He’s mad because so much taxpayer’s money has already been wasted trying to kill Frenchy he’s afraid he won’t get re-elected. Rainy says she’s in tears now, and hopes her counsellor notices and writes it down in her report. Then she forgets all about her counsellor and gets ready for the third jolt, Frenchy’s “third time lucky.” And once again her head and leg boil, and the
room fills up with smoke, and sparks shoot from her body like stars. This time the croakers stand gaping at Frenchy’s charred and smouldering body, with her skin falling off her bones like a steamed chicken’s. The time is 2:16 p.m. Rainy says she knew because the lights dimmed and the train was right on schedule. And Rainy knew Frenchy for sure must have rode the lightning over the wall this time, because when that train whistled she didn’t even blink.

Prison time is chicken bones. Something to be sucked clean.
That was Frenchy. More power to you, girl.

The first time Daisy brought her son to my room, I thought he looked sadly ugly compared to my Angel. He was small for his age, and Daisy said he hadn’t gained much weight since the day he’d come out of her, “fighting all the way.”

She had named her baby after his father, with whom she’d played Space Invaders at the Hotel Bacata in Bogotá, and who’d shown her enough love to break her heart forever. She printed his name for me on the back of a cigarette package, as if a name, once written, was evidence of existence. When I called her baby Elijas (accent on the second syllable), she corrected me. The name, she said, was Alias.

I told Daisy I had named my son after his father too, but before I could explain Alias let out a high-pitched wail,
which startled Angel; he began crying again. He hardly slept any more, and I had taken to doing lines all night to stay awake and keep him company.

After nursing her baby, Daisy put him in Angel’s cot and said she hoped the two
nenitos
would make friends. It didn’t seem as if babies needed friends, only—and always— their mothers. I told Daisy I wished Angel would develop other interests—interests other than me—and she laughed and said when that happened, I’d wish he was a baby again because a baby couldn’t roll over, sit up, run away or talk back. A baby just sucked you dry.

When Alias continued to fuss, Daisy picked him up and scolded him for not working harder at making friends. Scolding him didn’t stop him crying, so Daisy covered his tiny mouth with her hand. The screams oozed out between her fingers like bread dough when you try to close it in your fist. You can’t contain a scream. I offered to hold him—this was the closest I ever came to seeing Daisy lose her temper—but when he turned his head towards my breast and began to grope, I quickly passed him back to his mother. Daisy fed him again, and then left the room with both boys and put them in the bath.

I stayed out of their sight, snorted a couple of rails, then cooked up the rest of the gram and smoked it. Daisy watched our babies while they splashed around making noises like newborn killer whales, and afterwards, when she’d dried them off and dressed them again, I had to argue with her about the clothes she’d chosen for Angel to wear. I never saw Alias in anything but layers of clothing— woollen sweaters and knee socks and booties that covered
his tiny legs. I even accused her of having
bathed
him with his clothes on.

Daisy wanted to show me the walled garden, and went to find Yepez. Yepez, I could tell, was smitten with Daisy and the squeak of her cobra high heels. He offered her a piece of his chocolate bar, which was melting faster than he could eat it, before unlocking the gates to the Garden of Statues for us.

I stood for a moment, looking out over tangles of orchids and flitting clouds of blue and orange butterflies that filled the garden where Our Lady of Perpetual Help kept watch over the men and women, most of whom, with the exception of Lennon, had died for their country in the United States’ war on drugs.

We laid our babies side by side on a carpet of tiny orange petals that had fallen from a
guaiac
tree, next to a clump of yellow orchids. A light breeze turned the orchids’ physical similarity to bees into the frenetic appearance of a swarm, a mime show in motion. A swarm of real bees attacked the flowers repeatedly.

Daisy had brought along a textbook called
The King’s English As She Is Spoken.
She wanted me to help her study English, because one day she hoped to visit
los Estados Unidos.
Yepez didn’t leave the garden right away, but instead stood close by, pretending not to listen to us practising
locusiones útiles
(useful phrases), such as “Over the hill to the poorhouse go I,” and “I say, your skin is bone white, like an English teacup!” He was reading the plaques at the base of the statues that informed viewers how many bullets each victim had taken, and how “interested parties”
would find the entry and exit wounds clearly marked on each body. Yepez kept making cow eyes at Daisy. After a while, Daisy closed her textbook and leaned back against the statue of Pablo Escobar Gavira, the Godfather, “who died trying to make the world a safer place for crime.”

We sat quietly watching our babies, who spit up every so often and kicked their feet. When Alias kicked Angel in the shins, Daisy said her
berroquito
(courageous little one) was going to play soccer for the City of Orchids when he grew up, that he was “already practising.” I thought Angel showed great restraint when he didn’t kick him back.