Cargo of Orchids (11 page)

He pushed into me, harder still, as if by trying he could disappear up inside me and escape forever into the orchid darkness of my womb. When he came, his whole body stiffened, as if it hurt him to come so hard. We lay that way, me underneath and he still inside me, until he moved down on me and began licking me again, making me come with his tongue, his lips and his fingertips. I cried when I came and doubled up, curling into myself. He began kissing me, from my toes up along my legs and the insides of
my thighs, over my belly and breasts, up my neck and onto my face and in my hair.

Afterwards, as I lay on a bed of bruised petals, licking the drops of sweat that had rolled down his chest and collected in the hollow above his heart, he said coming inside me was like coming on velvet rails.

Tension between the Tranquilandians and the Posse had escalated even further after the Halloween social, and Angel and Gustavo had also been moved to segregation. Four and a half months passed before I was to see Angel again, on Good Friday, the day Bonnie and Treat were finally to marry.

The Friday before Good Friday, Bonnie was called with bad news. She wept from the time she handed Little Shit Shit over to Thurma at the bus depot and we boarded the bus in Vancouver to the moment we pulled into Agassiz, blowing her nose, over and over again, into a sodden hand-kerchief.

A light snow had begun falling. I called the only taxi company, and when the cab arrived, the driver said he didn’t know if we would make it as far as the prison, “the way she was coming down.”

He asked if we minded if he smoked, then lit one anyway. He had an opinion on everything from Native land claims to capital punishment. He believed all men in prison were queer. He said all he’d ever wanted was a warm girl in his bed every night, and all he’d ever been was disappointed.

He rubbed the blue shadow of his beard. He said he wanted a girl with pride and femininity too. The last girl he’d taken a shine to admired women older than herself.

“That shows great intelligence,” he said, “admiring a woman older than yourself.” He accelerated as we passed a sign saying Slow Children Playing.

“She liked my beard; she thought it looked masculine,” he said. “She was a real intelligent girl.”

He swerved, trying to hit a reserve dog slinking across the road. “Now you take Sean Connery.
He’s
masculine. James Coburn. John Wayne. They wouldn’t do the dishes either.”

Bonnie let out a sob from the back seat.

“I say something?” the driver asked.

I didn’t answer. Bonnie buried her face in her hands. The snow had turned to freezing rain, and a fierce wind tugged at the car, nearly pulling us off the road. Our driver kept his eyes on the road the rest of the way, then let us off in the parking lot, as close as he could get to the front gate.

Bonnie’s throat was raw from crying. I explained to Roll-Over, when he finally buzzed us in, that we had come to pick up Treat’s effects. Roll-Over told us to sign the book while he called the Admissions and Discharges officer.

“Got two for Discharge, sir. No paperwork on it.”

He paused and looked at us. “One of you … relative to the body?”

I nodded towards Bonnie. “They were going to get married. He’s … he was the father of her child.”

Roll-Over half turned his back on us as he spoke into the phone. “No relation. That’s right—that’s what I’ve got too.” He looked back at Bonnie. “Computer says here he’s got no next of kin. I can’t let you in. I’m sorry, ma’am. Them’s the rules. I don’t make ’em. I don’t break ’em either. That’s why I only work here; I don’t live here.”

I could picture us standing this way forever. I asked Roll-Over if he could do us one favour and call Mr. Saygrover, who might be able to straighten out the problem. To my surprise, I watched Roll-Over look at the phone, as if he were about to do something he’d never before attempted to do on his own: make a decision. He picked the phone up, dialled, then, after a brief conversation, shook his head and looked at us.

“If you say so, Jack. Will do. Right away, sir. Yes, sir. I’m aware of that now, sir.”

Roll-Over went through my purse, taking apart my fountain pen and getting ink all over his hands before putting it back together again. I was allowed to take a tube of liquid foundation, but not the tampon I’d always kept, just in case, in a pink plastic holder in a zippered pocket of my purse. Roll-Over handed me a key so I could leave the tampon in a locker. “Safety measure,” he said. “Inmate could suicide himself by choking on one.”

I passed through the metal detector and then waited while Bonnie went into the room marked No Entry Staff
Only. Surely they weren’t accusing Treat of making any more trouble? When Bonnie reappeared, the matron popped her head out of her office and handed me a Kotex maxi-pad, to replace the contraband tampon, I guessed. No inmate, evidently, would try suiciding himself with a sanitary napkin.

The snow fell harder as we walked between buildings. Mr. Saygrover saw Bonnie and waved us through the glass doors into his office, where a notice read, “Tomorrow has been cancelled due to lack of interest.” A leaning tower of files stamped Classified was stacked on his gunmetal desk.

“Feeling bad just isn’t good enough for some people—they got to make everyone else feel bad too.” He indicated the files. “They send me all this from the warden’s office … all these complaints. This one’s toast is too hard. That one’s toilet paper’s not soft enough. This one’s mattress has teeth marks on it. I tell you.”

Mr. Saygrover shuffled through his paperwork until he found what he was looking for: release forms in triplicate for Bonnie to sign.

Bonnie began crying again, and Mr. Saygrover looked embarrassed. He patted her on the back, offered her a fresh piece of Kleenex. He looked at me, helplessly.

I said I was going to get a cup of coffee from the machine.

“Get one for me too. Extra sugar and whitener, if you don’t mind.” Mr. Saygrover reached in his pocket and pulled out a handful of change. “Here you go. It’s on me.”

When I returned with the coffee, Bonnie had gone to the washroom. Mr. Saygrover told me no one “higher up”
had given permission for the body to be released, so Treat would be laid to rest in the prison cemetery. “That way, we can keep an eye on him.” He winked at me.

I asked if it would be possible to arrange to have his body flown back to his last address, which was Bella Bella.

Mr. Saygrover shook his head. “Too late now. You got to plan ahead.”

Mr. Saygrover sniffed his coffee, then asked if I wanted to see the autopsy report. I nodded, and he handed me a file marked Confidential. He hadn’t started out as a visitor’s and correspondence officer, he told me—years ago he’d taken a St. John’s Ambulance course at the YMCA, which had qualified him to work on the daily sick line. He’d wired more jaws, sewn more torn anuses, he said, than you could shake a stick at. But never, in all his years at the infirmary, had he seen anything as sick as this.

“I’d like to get my hands on the individual that did this.” No charges had yet been laid, Mr. Saygrover said—the “incident” was under investigation.

Treat, who had been discharged from the infirmary at the beginning of March, shortly after the Corazóns had been let out of segregation and back into the population, had received a wedding gift: a stainless-steel cutlery set, pilfered from the prison kitchen. Knives, forks, even the dessert spoons had been driven into his flesh. His rectum had first been carved out with a knife to permit the entry of “an object larger than the normal man,” though the report didn’t specify what kind of object, or what part of a normal man.

I held the photograph in my hands, thinking Treat looked like a piece of performance art with all that cutlery
sticking out of him. I was ashamed of myself, too, for wanting to laugh. Looking back, I believe I was anaesthetized by shock. I told Mr. Saygrover I didn’t think Bonnie needed to see the report, or the photograph; he put it away in a file before she came back into his office.

All Treat’s worldly goods fit in the shoebox on Mr. Saygrover’s desk: a key chain with no keys, $2.36 in change, a toothbrush, a rosary and an unopened bag of Cheetos. Mr. Saygrover emptied onto the desk a brown paper bag containing the clothes Treat had been wearing when he’d been discharged from the infirmary, the red bandanna, the black T-shirt.

“I hope he gets a clean shirt to wear,” I said, folding the T-shirt and laying it in the shoebox with his other belongings.

“Sally Ann donates us a suit,” said Mr. Saygrover. “I think they found one that would fit him. He won’t be getting any heavier, that’s for sure …” His voice trailed off.

Bonnie had washed the streaks of mascara off her face, but her eyes looked even blacker now with grief. Mr. Saygrover patted her on the back again and handed her the whole box of Kleenex. “Keep it,” he said. “It’s the least I can do.”

Before I returned to my apartment after picking up Treat’s effects, I kept another appointment—at the hospital. That evening, I made a pot of tea and sat watching the day grow dark, a jasmine-scented candle filling the room with its hot-night fragrance. Outside I could hear the howling March wind bowling the day’s litter of bad news down the alleyway.

I called Carmen and asked her to come. I switched the radio on, but the reception was no good. I sat with the fuzzy ultrasound photograph in my hands, listening to a woman sing a love song through the static.

I’d had the blood work done when I first suspected I was pregnant, and now the ultrasound the doctor recommended because of my age. “Women want to find out whether they are carrying a child with birth defects, one they may choose to abort.” Having any baby, but especially one that required more attention because it was born with Down’s syndrome, or with fins instead of feet, would be hard. But since when had I turned my back on anything the moment life became hard?

I turned the black-and-white photograph over in my hands. The fetus, half-fish, half-human being, rubbed its eyes as if trying to shield its face from the probing camera. Ten fingers, ten toes. What had given birth in my heart now kicked in the womb, small enough, still, to fit inside a tear.

Carmen opened a bottle of non-alcoholic champagne and poured us each a glass. She asked if I had thought of a name: even though the ultrasound hadn’t indicated the sex of the baby, Carmen felt sure it would be a boy, because that’s what Angel wanted most of all, a son. I tried explaining to her I didn’t want to raise a child who thought going to prison to see his father was a normal way of life. I didn’t want
my
son’s diapers examined or his tiny orifices probed in the name of security, I said. I didn’t want him growing up thinking razor-wire was “pretty.” Besides, Angel had a wife,
one who smuggled grenades. What might she do to a woman like me? I wanted this baby, I said, but I wasn’t going to see Angel again.

Carmen said Consuelo was not a
big
problem, but insisted that Angel would want his son to be part of his life. She poured more champagne, put on Pachelbel’s Canon over the sound of a heartbeat, as recorded from inside the uterus, and waltzed around the room caressing her belly. “Sweet Baby Dreams,” the tape was called. I envied my friend, how she could spin about the room and laugh without effort, or carry on a conversation without having to close her eyes mid-sentence. I was too tired to walk as far as the bathroom to brush my teeth, or to the kitchen for a glass of flat ginger ale and a couple of soda crackers—the only breakfast I wouldn’t lose. Most days, I simply curled up on the couch in a floor-length flannelette nightgown and furry sleepers, with a strip of Scotch Magic tape between my eyes to prevent frowning wrinkles.

The funeral was held on Good Friday, Bonnie’s wedding day. The chapel had been reserved anyway, she said. She pinned a corsage to my lapel—one that complemented her bouquet of orchids—before we set out in the rain for Agassiz. Bonnie had ordered the flowers for their wedding; she said there was no point cancelling the order—people appreciated flowers at their funerals also.

Carmen, who had insisted on coming to the funeral—to pay her respects, and for Bonnie’s sake, she said; it was not
their
fight, she maintained, but the men’s—said it was just as well Bonnie wasn’t getting married today, because it
was raining so hard that it would have been an unlucky wedding. “Lady Unluck has the rain for her train,” she said to us.

The smell of the orchids filled our rented car, and when the windows began steaming up, I almost convinced myself I was driving through some tropical rain forest, not the Fraser Valley. Torrential rains had washed out a bridge on Highway 1, and we had to take a back road through the mountains. Grey moss overhead, a ghostly presence in the pervasive green, trailed from tree to tree, reaching for the ground or the surface of the water in the overflowing creeks. Bonnie, sniffing and dabbing at her tears, told us what the tree moss meant to her people. A girl was killed by an enemy tribe during her wedding ceremony, and her mother cut off her daughter’s hair and spread it on the limbs of the spruce tree where they buried her. Her hair blew from tree to tree, eventually turning grey, enduring as a tribute to those who are not destined to live out their love.

Neither Carmen nor I had an unhappy ending to top that one. We drove on in silence, encountering holdups even along the alternate route—two minor accidents and a police roadblock warning us of the possibility of landslides. I had never known it to rain so hard as when we pulled into the Visitors Only lot, where a sign read No Parking for the Wedding. Perhaps the same official who had tried to prevent Bonnie from entering the prison because she wasn’t Treat’s blood relation had unwittingly posted the sign. Feeling frustrated and angry, I dropped Bonnie and Carmen at the front gate.

I parked on the road and walked the quarter-mile back. We had to stand outside in the rain, waiting, until the big hand on the clock inside gave its single-digit salute to the sky and Roll-Over buzzed us in. Our clothes were soaked through, and Bonnie’s hair hung in bedraggled ropes around her shoulders.