Cargo of Orchids (36 page)

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 sandwich (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.

“When you find yourself listening to their keys, and owning none, you will come close to understanding the white terror of the soul …” The white terror of the soul had been, for me, the prospect of living without cocaine. Maybe if I hadn’t held on to that last small bit, my testimony would have had more credibility. I was caught, red-handed, as they say, with an ounce of what had once been pure flake. They exaggerated: it wasn’t an ounce—it was, at the most, a couple of grams. But it didn’t matter in the end, because they opened the plane’s luggage compartment and found two hundred kilos.

I had no bargaining power. Tiny Cattle had disputed my story, turning on me and telling a whole different version to the Panamanian officials, so that by the time the combined forces of the DEA and DAS were called in, I didn’t stand a chance.

Frenchy said my mistake was cornering a rat, that he had to do what he did in order to save himself. I see that now. All I could think of at the time was what would happen to Angel. A good mother wants what’s best for her kids, Rainy always says. At least Rainy knows
her
kids are in a better place than this one.

The following is the scenario as told to the Panamanian
authorities by Tiny Cattle. He had been hired to fly me to the States with a deceased infant. He’d been around a long time, and one of the reasons was that he knew better than to get mixed up in any drug dealings with Las Blancas. He signed a deposition saying I had planned to sell the drugs for personal gain when I got to Los Angeles.

It isn’t written anywhere, but I know Tiny Cattle bribed the Panamanians, paid them to back up his story. Tiny Cattle turned state’s evidence in exchange for immunity.

Frenchy said, “Don’t blame yourself. You got kidnapped; they got you doped up. They stole your baby, and they set you up.” I should have had Frenchy for a lawyer. Whatever else she might screw up, she wouldn’t assassinate my character.

I was the missing link, the police maintained. Las Blancas had been under surveillance in what they called Operation Orchid, for five years. While they couldn’t touch Consuelo or the Black Widow as long as they stayed on Tranquilandia, they had her people in Panama and Los Angeles. And they had me.

I was under arrest for murder. I tried to stay calm, even when a doctor came and told me to take off my clothes; I told him they had already found everything I had. Two soldiers helped him strip me and strap me to the bed. The doctor took my temperature, rectally, then conducted his oily rape. “There’s nothing in there,” he said. I could hear his irritation, his little eyes like slits in the birthmark covering his face. It seemed to me he kept his fingers inside me for much longer than was necessary, but when you’re arrested
you lose all your rights—you’re banished from commerce with mankind.

The doctor tested me for venereal disease. He asked when I had lost my virginity. If my feet hadn’t been restrained I would have kicked him. The soldiers snickered. I heard Angel saying,
“You shouldn’t worry so much. Don’t start worrying until they start shooting, and even then you shouldn’t worry. Don’t start worrying until they hit you, because then they might catch you.”

I had been caught. The doctor told me to get dressed, to wait. Then one of the DEA agents came back with the photographs.

Before he led me out of that room, in leg-irons and with a chain wrapped around my body, the agent asked if I had any requests. I asked him to give back the picture of my baby, the one they’d taken from my shoe, and he did. This small act of kindness was more than I could bear. After they had restrained me, and jammed a needle in my arm, I sat quietly, between two Drug Enforcement Administration officers, on a U.S. military plane bound for Los Angeles and tried to sleep. Everything that could not be finished by weeping or enduring seemed to brush past me into the night, taking flight towards the next world that awaited me.

Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

If childhood is a time when we allow the creation of gods, adulthood is bound to be a disappointment. The damage is that in writing, you may recall what you’ve tried to erase,
you dig up what you buried, then
phhtt
—a flying cockroach hits the bug-zapper—the moment you find out what it is you don’t want to know about yourself. Then it’s over. Your ringing, shining life.

The photographs of Daisy and me in bed were exhibits for the prosecution, numbers 3 to 10. They had been found in the coffin, along with my journal, my pipe for smoking
basuco
and my X-acto blade. Even in court, the sight of the pipe and the blade made my mouth start to water.

The photographs of the baby wearing the coke spoon I had around my neck when I was in bed with Daisy were exhibits for the prosecution, numbers 11 through 21. When I first saw them, I wasn’t prepared for the colour transparencies. Somehow I’d always pictured death as being in black and white, as if all the colour drained out of you along the way. Most of the pictures you see of dead bodies are in black and white, after all, as if there’s no point in wasting colour film when there isn’t a heartbeat. I’d even accepted that dead people’s
blood
was black.

This time they’d spared no expense and used Kodachrome, so the blood looked real and the baby’s skin the colour of the cocaine paste I’d been holding under the light when the authorities came through the door.

The American coroner testified that the baby had not died from natural causes. His chest had been split open and his heart removed. All his vital organs, in fact, were missing. The coroner said there was evidence the organs had been removed while the baby was still living.

Some of the jurors got sick looking at those photographs. One, who was pregnant, started crying, and the
judge let everybody go home for the rest of the day. Everyone except me.

In the photographs, the baby is lying on a porcelain slab; I think that’s what affected me more than anything else. If I have had a moment in my life that mattered, it was the moment Angel was born, and I looked up and saw the wreath of crucifix orchids and the baby boots sprouting, from their heels, a pair of newborn wings.

This morning I am served with a copy of the State Execution Guidelines (by Officer Gluckman, who else?). I sit in my house as she leans on my bars and complains about how she sometimes wonders if all the people who expect normal, productive, reasonable, cheerful, effective behaviour from her every day have ever gone through the kind of pain and anguish that she has over the past months because of her back.

There is a moment, though, when she looks at me and I think she might possess some empathy. But the moment passes, and she asks if I want anything; I say, “A cup of hot tea would be appreciated,” and she goes away and comes back half an hour later with a lukewarm coffee.

The State Execution Guidelines give me an idea of what I can look forward to. Next will come the reading of the death warrant. I’ll be moved to Death Watch and isolated from other Death Clinic inmates. With Rainy and Frenchy gone, I’m used to living alone.

When Phase I of Death Watch begins, all my “personal items” will be taken away, including my wedding ring, which I’ve asked to be returned to Vernal. The only
books I’ll be allowed are “religious tracts, maximum possession ten (10).” I’ll be given tobacco, though I don’t smoke, and couldn’t smoke even if I wanted to: the dance-hall has been designated a smoke-free environment, and their policy is one of zero tolerance. The state legislators have gone even further: they decided to air-condition the death chambers at Heaven Valley “to make it more comfortable for everyone.”

Once Death Watch begins, all visits with “outsiders” will be “non-contact.” Legal visits may continue to be of the “contact” type, up until one week before the execution, when Phase II of Death Watch begins. It won’t make any difference in my case. All my visits with Pile, Jr. have been non-contact, even when we’ve sat side by side sharing a soft drink in the visiting park. Non-contact in every sense—with Pile, Jr. being utterly beyond reach.

With Phase II of Death Watch, whatever property you have left is taken from you, except for a few “comfort items”: “one (1) TV (located outside the cell), one (1) deck of cards, one (1) Bible.” Very specific day-by-day regulations go into effect as the countdown to D-Day begins, starting with “Execution Day Minus Five (5),” when your executioner, wearing a black hood over her head, comes to introduce herself. On “Execution Day Minus Four (4),” testing of the equipment to be used for the execution begins. This is the day, too, when you take an inventory of the property they have taken from you and make a list of who gets what. You also write down what you hope will be your funeral arrangements, and get measured for the clothes in which you will be executed.

I have asked that my remains be sent home for burial. Vernal is supposed to be looking after this. He still can’t forget about Angel. “I would have looked after him, you know. You only had to ask.”

Vernal says we need to talk about “practical matters,” like a last will and testament and where I’d like to be “put.” I tell him, “in the same place as Dad,” and that I don’t want Mum ordering anything like “Rest in Peace” for my headstone. I never was, and I never will be. At peace with anyone or anything. Except Angel.

Another practicality is the dog. Brutus has been diagnosed with Canine Cognitive Dysfunction Syndrome. “It is difficult to watch your dog age,” Vernal writes, with a P.S. from Brutus to show me how far the disease has progressed. “I used to remember where I buried every bone, but now I can’t even remember how to bite.”

He wanders aimlessly, sleeps more during the day and makes mistakes on the carpet, Vernal says. His pet-care provider recommends a new drug that is supposed to give old dogs a new lease on life, but there are side-effects.

“I’d give him a choice between lethal injection and the firing-squad,” I write. But Vernal never sees the humour in anything I say.

On “Execution Day Minus Three (3),” you get the day off. A guard will be posted to sit outside your cell to record, every fifteen minutes, what you are doing—probably as close as most of them will ever get to creative writing.