Cargo of Orchids (7 page)

He was living off the land again, he told Vernal—which, I assumed, meant he’d sold the timber rights on his property, as well as the mineral rights. He’d built a “pine shack” on the outskirts of the city, no running water, no mod cons.

“What do you heat with?” Vernal asked.

“A .44 Magnum, man,” I-5 said, patting the bulge his
ruana
covered, making a snorting sound in his throat before cutting out a dozen lines for us to sample on Vernal’s Criminal Code. I-5 got his name because he was famous for laying out lines as long and straight as the interstate highway that ran the length of Florida. I did my share, then went back to the kitchen to reheat the Chicken Quito Ecuador I’d made from the Time-Life series.

I heard Vernal laugh, then the rustling of newspapers. I-5 snorted through his throat again, a constant irritating habit of his. “Shallow grave! What’s this friggin’ guy talking about? I spent an hour digging in that friggin’ hard scrabble. Look at these blisters! I oughta put that reporter in a shallow grave. Makes me look like a friggin’ amateur.” He left soon after, saying he had an appointment with a landscape artist, but by that time neither Vernal nor I had an appetite for Chicken Quito Ecuador.

I lit a fire in the bedroom fireplace and went to bed early while Vernal played Frisbee in the kitchen with Brutus (his K-9 heart specialist said this would prevent “misdirected energy”) then went for his evening jog. Later he came to bed with
Under the Volcano
, which he opened to the middle, not the best place to begin in this sort of book. But when he started reading it upside down, I knew something was wrong. After a while he closed the book on his chest, crossed his hands over it and stared up at our ceiling, as if somebody close to him had died: I couldn’t imagine who it would be, because Brutus was dozing on his futon and I-5 had left the house looking healthier than either of us.

“Something’s the matter,” I said to Vernal. It took time, but I finally weasled it out of him. Vernal felt it would be compromising my integrity to expect me to be faithful to him. He said he should have told me before we were married, but he didn’t want to lose me then. We weren’t going to have a family, he said. He’d had a vasectomy.

I was engrossed in a mystery—Vernal had complained since our honeymoon that I preferred mysteries to him—and waited until I got to the end of a paragraph before I turned to him. “Is there something else you are trying not to tell me?” I said.

Brutus, who had only been feigning sleep, opened one nosy eye. Vernal said yes, that he’d been seeing a lot of his secretary. I said it made sense, since they worked in the same office.

“Oh, you know what I mean,” he said glumly. “She came sailing with me and … I can’t go on living like this. She feels guilty about it, too; I’m the one to blame, really …”

I grabbed the book from his hands and threw it in the fire. It didn’t burn, just lay there growing thickly black. Then I switched out the light. I heard Brutus sigh, and after a few minutes Vernal got out of bed and joined him on the futon. I thought of Vernal saying, “Don’t mark me,” and knew now it had nothing to do with him not wanting to appear in the Court of Appeal with a love bite. Vernal didn’t want his secretary to know he still had relations with his wife.

For better or worse, mostly worse. Till death us do part. I should have parted his cranium right then with the Steuben paperweight he kept next to his bed, covering his
greasy little wad of phone numbers. When I saw Carmen the next day, she said she knew a trustworthy person who’d kill your best friend for a hundred dollars. As far as I was concerned, I told her, Vernal was not a friend.

Death Clinic, Heaven Valley State Facility for Women

Rainy’s hobbies are shopping and crying. The papers said she’d never wanted children, that she killed her twins because they’d prevented her from having a life. Nothing could be further from the truth, she swears. From the day
her twins were born, they never stopped her from doing anything she wanted to do. “If I want to go to the mall, I just strap them in their car seats and take them to the mall with me,” she says.

You don’t get to do a lot of shopping in here, but old habits die hard; that’s why Rainy still speaks in the present tense. Your chances of staying sane are much better if you have somewhere you can go, to get away to—in your head. Rainy gets out of bed every morning, changes her sheets, has six cups of coffee, locks the kids in the trunk of the car and then goes shopping.

Rainy wears a T-shirt that says “Property of Jesus Christ.” She talks to God twice a day in the interfaith chapel and says He can save Frenchy and me too, as if God were a form of oxygen mask or a life-jacket. Frenchy, who swears she won’t go down on her knees for any dead man on a cross, says next time Rainy talks to God she should tell him to drop the capital
H
when it comes to words like
He
and
Him
because it looks like God thinks he’s a whole lot holier than the rest of us. I’ve made it clear I’m not about to be converted, either.

I used to blame my parents for the spiritual vacuum in which I’ve spent most of my life. They didn’t make me go to church. I had no friends who
weren’t
forced to go, and one Sunday morning I was playing in the ditch when two kids from down the street walked past, dressed in their party clothes. I asked what they did all morning at Sunday school; I thought I might be missing something.

“We learn about Jesus Christ,” the boy said.

I was impressed. “
You
get to study a swear word!” I said.

At that point my parents decided it was time I had some religious instruction. I attended Sunday school for two weeks, learned that “Eve made a bad choice” and then dropped out.

I have a history of dropping out. I dropped out of kinder-garten the first morning, after nearly hanging myself in the playground. My father threatened to sue; he said that in designing the equipment, the architects had resorted to the aesthetics of the torture chamber. My school claimed the equipment had been designed by a child psychologist.

My care and treatment counsellor here at HV says I have the wrong attitude: I’ve always believed that’s the only kind to have. Mrs. Dykstra says I am glib; I don’t take life seriously. How can she expect a person who is told she is going to be executed on such-and-such a day at such-and-such a time to take
anything
seriously, least of all life?

When you arrive on the Row, you are given your clothing issue: 3 Jumpsuits; 5 Pairs of Socks, useful for padding your 3 Brassieres (White), which look like the mailbags they’re always busy making back in the general population; 1 Jacket; 7 Pairs of Underpants (Coloured); 5 T-shirts; 1 Pair of Shoes (no laces). The same intake officer who hands you those Extra-Large Jumpsuits will give you underpants too extra-tiny for a kid going through toilet-training. You wear a different coloured pair of underwear for each day of the week (i.e., Red Monday, Blue Tuesday, Yellow Wednesday and so on). It took me a few weeks to figure out the colour code is their way of making sure you put on clean underwear every day, in case you are “differently motivated.”

If a guard catches you wearing yellow underwear on Monday or red on Thursday, it is considered an infraction of prison rules and you are subject to disciplinary action. My red underwear fell into some bleach by accident (Rainy was sterilizing her needle) and became orange, and I tried to explain this to Officer Gluckman (the only guard who bothers to check). My excuse wasn’t good enough for her. She said there would be no exceptions to the rule that all Death Clinic inmates were to wear red on Monday, and as a result of my failure to comply with prison regulations, I would be forced to relinquish my television-viewing privileges until she had conducted a further investigation.

As well as new clothing, you are also given your own television, and the freedom to watch whichever religious or educational programs they choose, at any hour of the day or night. When my counsellor asked me what I liked to watch, I made a mistake by saying I preferred
not
to watch television. Mrs. Dykstra said my failure to take advantage of my viewing privileges demonstrated that I had a negative attitude, to which she hoped I would make a positive adjustment, so she could write a more favourable psychological report.

Officer Gluckman must have conducted her investigation by reading Mrs. Dykstra’s files, because one morning my punishment changed. After that, I was unable to turn my television
off
, and when I tried to cover it with my towel, they cranked the volume up. It was, for me, a no-win situation. If they turned the volume down, I said, I promised I would watch the television. I always have to pretend I’m watching it when Officer Gluckman’s on shift.

——

My mother, while waiting to board her ship for the Caribbean island, had to spend the night at a Miami Beach motel. The motel had been recommended by her travel agent, and it turned out to be the choice of the local prostitutes also. All night long, men kept banging on my mother’s door, imploring “Fuckface” to “open up.” My mother, who was “out of her element,” spent the whole night searching for a place to hide her watch. The “rude men” at her door, the rasp of the palm fronds against the window all night—it was a holiday made in hell, she told me; she wished she’d never left home.

But, she says, East Oyster, the town thirty miles north of Vancouver where I was born and raised, is almost as foreign to her these days. She no longer recognizes faces on the street. A sign on the outskirts of town is a constant irritation to her. East Oyster. Population 276, and Still Growing.

That’s one thing about Heaven—I recognize everybody’s mug. Some faces get
too
familiar, sometimes. Over the past ten years the population has declined, though at the moment it has stabilized and there are just three of us. After reading my mother’s letter and birthday card (I turned forty-seven on March 12, 2000), I thought of putting up a sign: Death Row. Population 3, and Still Shrinking.

My mother’s card was shaped like a wedge of Swiss cheese. “Happy Birthday,” it read. “Another year shot to hell.” We got such a kick out of it that Rainy and I decided to make our own line of death-row greeting cards, available in time for Christmas next year, by mail order.

Rainy was responsible for the graphics. For her first effort, she drew a bunch of turkeys getting decapitated by an
axe-wielding Santa. When you opened the card there was Santa Claus, strapped in the electric chair. I had to think up a message. I penned, “Hope you get a charge out of this.”

She drew another picture, same theme—only this time it was Jesus in the hot seat, trying to blow out a life’s worth of time on the birthday cake in his lap. I wrote, “More power to you.”

Then Rainy went a bit too far, I thought, and drew Mrs. Claus being ambushed by a firing-squad disguised as a party of carollers. I wrote
The Executioner’s Carol
across the cover of the book Mrs. Claus died reading.

But what kept me awake at night was trying to think of words to go with Rainy’s depiction of lethal injection. She drew Santa lying on the gurney while the guards tried to find a vein for the IV drip. Rainy says the hospital gurney they strap you to is shaped like the gingerbread-man cookie cutter her mother used to use. Her mother made gingerbread men every Christmas, and she let Rainy decorate them. Rainy gave them eyes and noses, and before she was old enough to spell her own name, she began giving them erections. Her mother wanted to know where she was getting her “ideas.” From her father, Rainy said.

I wrote, “Run, run as fast as you can. You can’t catch me, I’m the gingerbread man.”

Rainy didn’t make the connection. She says I have to think the way someone buying a card would think—whatever that means.

This was one business venture doomed from the start.

——

When it comes to choosing the form of capital punishment that best suits your personality, there’s no book in the library to consult. So I devised a guide for those who can’t make up their minds, or people with multiple or nonexistent personalities. I wrote it after I heard a psychologist being interviewed about the idea that we all have a personality. He said most of what people think of as their “own personalities” are “absurdist idiosyncrasies” at cross-purposes with their lives and happiness.

In my
Guide to Capital Endings
, the personality description would come first, followed by an appropriate Final Solution:

Methods of torture and killing people have evolved, like everything else, to keep abreast of the times. (I’ve left out other antiquated methods of capital punishment—the guillotine, beheading with an axe, gibbeting, breaking at the wheel, stoning, pressing, drawing and quartering, crucifixion.) For instance, one modern form of torture used by guerrilla terrorists in repressive Third World regimes is to force a starving rat into a woman’s vagina, then to stitch up her labia so the rat will have to gnaw his way out through her stomach if he wants fresh air. In one case I read about, the woman happened to be pregnant. They waited until she went into labour before proceeding with the questioning.