Cargo of Orchids (15 page)

Mugre looked hurt.
“Algo es algo; peor es nada,”
he muttered. Something is something; nothing is worse. Then he went around the side of the house to be sick again. Consuelo looked discouraged. The gunpowder hadn’t taken effect. “Remind me not to waste any more bullets on my brother-in-law,” she said.

Later, Mugre ransacked the shack and found more drugs; he sat with a butane torch in the corner, on the mattress beside Carmen, smoking
basuco
(a derivative of coca, adulterated with lead and sulphuric acid, lethally addictive to all who smoke it, and leading to a very early grave), which, Consuelo said, fuelled the craziness of even the most normal people. Mugre tried to rouse Carmen, to give her a hit of
basuco.
He glared at us when Consuelo told him to mind his own business, then went outside to tease the dog, holding the dead man’s charred hand up to the window, pretending to gnaw at it himself.

Consuelo pushed back from the table, saying she’d had enough of Mugre’s depravity. She grabbed the key and went outside to unlock the truck. Instead of leaping for Mugre’s throat, the way I think Consuelo had hoped the dog would do, he stood cowering, his tail between his legs, sniffing the air as if the air were a woman into whose warm crotch he could nuzzle and disappear. Then he lay down and started snapping at his testicles.

“There’s something unnormal about that dog,” Consuelo said, as Mugre, who’d pinned himself against the side of the truck, began edging his way back towards the shack. “He does not act like any other dog I’ve met.”

Just as she spoke, the dog saw Mugre out of the corner of his eye and charged, knocking him over—almost all in one motion. He lunged for his master’s charred hand and bounded up the road, the hand dangling from his mouth. He ran flat out, his skinny flanks rising and falling in the furrows.

Consuelo swore at Mugre. It was sloppy work, she said, to leave bits of evidence behind. Mugre picked himself up
and ran after the dog before Consuelo had a chance to go inside the shack and get her gun. I believe she would have wasted no time shooting Mugre right then.

Under the canopy of the tupelo and bald cypress trees, I sat and waited for the day to stumble to a close. After an hour had gone by and Mugre still hadn’t returned, Consuelo went looking for him. She didn’t tie me up this time but took away my shoes so I couldn’t go far. The moment she was out of sight, I did precisely what the prosecutor said I’d never tried to do: I tried to get away.

I crept through the bush behind the shack and came out on a dirt track running parallel to the road. I started running, clutching my heavy body; hot and sticky, the oven air seemed to hum. My imagination, too, grew legs and began to run flat out in front of me, as if on a reconnaissance all of its own, so that when I rounded a bend where the remains of a high metal gate swung on its rusted hinges and a sign saying Keep Out Unprotected Territory Not Subject to State Law had been tossed at the side of the road, I envisioned my own body lying in the ditch, unprotected from the laws of nature, to be discovered by hikers ten years hence: the perfect skeleton of a woman with the skeleton of a baby imprisoned in the cage of her bones.

I had not gone far before I heard Consuelo shouting—and I dove into a tangle of blackjack. My mouth was dry and my scalp tingled. I smelled fear in the damp earth under me and in the clouds that moved over me.

I waited for my heart to slow down. It was getting dark, and the insects had come out to feed in the cooler air. I decided I should stay well away from the road, and began
crawling on all fours through salt-poisoned grass, skirting a dead lake dotted with dead cypress, keeping the most colourful part of the sky, violet slashed with crimson streaks, to the east, over my right shoulder.

A sudden wind banged into my face, a hot wind carrying with it sand from the dunes and pine needles and flying insects. When I opened my mouth to catch a deeper breath, a small bug flew into my throat and caused a coughing spasm. I lay down, covering my head with my arms, trying to muffle the sound.

As I lay there, trying to suppress my cough, I felt my face being pushed into the sand, a hand on the back of my neck pinning me down. When the hand released me, I rolled over and looked into Consuelo’s .38. Her eyes, the blade of swamp grass between her teeth, it was all I could do to keep a blank face and not let my fear of her be any more plain.

She spat out the blade of grass. She said she’d heard my coughing, and decided to rescue me before the alligators had me for their for dinner. She said I had much to thank my baby for, then led me back towards the clearing.

My feet were cut and bleeding. When we reached the shack Consuelo pushed open the door, and I could see Mugre lying naked next to Carmen’s body, grinning awkwardly, as if Consuelo should have had the decency to stay away a little longer.

A pillow covered Carmen’s face. My first thought was that Mugre had placed it there out of some twisted sense of decency—so Carmen would not have to look into his face—but that was naive of me: he must have smothered her.
The dark closed in around me, and silence drew me in like a sucking undertow. I felt dizzy, unsure of my footing. The world seemed to be sloping away.

I watched Consuelo remove the pillow from Carmen’s face. Then she pulled out her gun and turned to where her brother-in-law lay, the sound of his laughter like water lapping at the holes in a shipwreck’s hull.

The silencer made the shot sound no louder than a sigh.

Carmen’s body had a smell to it that lodged itself in my throat, crabbed and small, and threatened to choke me when I breathed. The smell reminded me of the hunting trip I’d taken with my father when I was small, butchering the doe in the bathtub at home, what it felt like to cut open a body with a knife and plunge your hands into the guts of something that had once been beautiful. The smell of rain falling on the summer dust, the warm stink of the dead foetus inside the deer’s body as we emptied her out: how quickly beauty could be transformed into something else.

Before it got dark, Consuelo had made me go with her as she dragged Mugre’s body up the road, away from the shack. I followed, struggling up a bank, hanging on by the roots of the high, ancient trees, until I stood on a ledge overlooking the swamp. Phallic shoots of plants gave off a
musky, post-coital odour. Consuela pushed his body into the black water. I felt dirty just being there—the kind of dirty you can’t wash away.

On the afternoon of the second day, it began raining, not the misty rain I had grown up with in the Northwest, but a dingy, obscuring rain that dropped straight from the sky. Consuelo stood naked in the rain, a few feet from the door of the shack. She was soaping her breasts, holding them up to the sky, then letting the water slide down off her nipples. I remembered as a child standing in the rain and lifting my face, opening my mouth wide to catch the water that trickled down my hair onto my waiting tongue. I remembered the taste of the rain after it had washed through my hair. I wondered why it had been so long since I’d stood in one place long enough to let the rain soak me through to the skin. All my adult life I’d tried to keep dry, taking shelter whenever it rained, staying inside. Back then, the driving rain had hammered into me a kind of joy; both madness and divinity had been introduced to me by the rain.

By mid-afternoon, the rain had stopped and the sun was a chip of fire in an otherwise colourless sky. Consuelo went inside the shack and poured diesel fuel on Carmen’s body. Then she came out and sat with me.

She had prepared many bodies for death, she said, “ever since the day me and my youngest sister, Magdalena, were selling lottery tickets on the street and the guerrilla heroes came.

“They drove past in a shining red truck like that one parked over there,” she said. “They invited all the kids in
the neighbourhood to join their camps. A lot of us went along, because it was something to do. They promised us a better life—so it didn’t take much to convince me to go with them. I learned how to handle guns, to make explosives, to organize military operations. But then the police raided our camps and there were shoot-outs with the army, and the guerrillas took off to the hills.”

Her brothers started their own self-defence group in the neighbourhood, she told me as she rolled a cigarette, where other gangs had already grown up and were spreading terror. One Saturday, Magdalena, who was pregnant with her first child, was coming home from work, and four
pelados
(kids who at twelve or thirteen are already learning how to assassinate people) wearing black hoods, followed her, dragged her into the middle of the street, raped her and shot her in the face. “They did it because she was my mother’s daughter, because any child of hers would grow up to be more trouble for their gang, and they wanted control of our neighbourhood,” Consuelo said, striking a match, lighting her cigarette. “Where I come from, it is considered more hygienic and effective to kill
guerrilleras
while they are in the womb than in the mountains or the streets.”

Magdalena’s body was taken to the morgue. Consuelo said she spent the next day making her dead sister’s hair look beautiful. Then she organized a wake.

“The whole family and everyone in the
barrio
came to pray for her and offer their condolences. Then around midnight, the
pelados
burst in with their revolvers and made us all kneel in a straight line against a wall. They ripped the flowers and palm branches off the coffin and smashed the
candelabra, started breaking up the furniture in the room. Everyone was screaming. The intruders were still aiming their guns at us; they tipped over the coffin, and my sister fell out on the floor. When my brother tried to straighten the hem of her dress—it had ridden up to her knees—they tied him up, too, and beat him, and then they put two more shots in our sister’s head. All that time fixing her hair—for nothing.”

Consuelo got up, closed the door tight and circled the shack, leaving a trail of diesel behind her as she walked. She lit another match and tossed it into the grass. We climbed into the red pickup as tongues of black smoke licked the air.

She didn’t speak again until we reached the paved road.

“Things like that happened every day in our neighbourhood. You learn not to care about it. You look after your back, because no one else is going to.

“Over the years I’ve watched dozens of people die—friends, relatives. It’s not the same thing when you are the one doing the killing. If I have to kill someone, I don’t think about it. All I think is: too bad for him; he crossed my path. If his back is to me, I tell him to turn around first, to make sure I have the right person. I only pray I don’t kill the wrong person by mistake. If I’m going to kill, there should be a good reason.”

Consuelo had said to me only the dead cannot be judged. I wonder if she believed, too, the dead would not judge her.

There were no other vehicles, not even a road sign to indicate how far we were from the nearest town or highway. We
passed a trickle of a creek where a turkey buzzard fed upon the carcass of a dead cow. On a solitary oak tree, someone had carved a heart and the words “Stella Loves Bill Bob Forever,” with an arrow piercing the heart, and I looked ahead up the empty road, hating my loneliness, the sadness I had come to at the edges of my life.

Years ago, in high school, my boyfriend had climbed to the top of a cliff to paint our names inside a giant heart. When we broke up, six months later, I demanded he climb back up and paint them over, but he wouldn’t. He said whenever I drove by that cliff with a new love, I would look up and see my name—and his; in this small way, I would belong to him forever.

A black man with little clouds of white at his temples stood in the dust at the side of the road and tried to flag us down as we rounded a corner. Consuelo slowed, came to a stop and waved out the window to the man. I watched him approach in the rear-view mirror, sticking his tongue in and out through the gap where his front teeth were missing. He carried a metal washtub with a mop handle protruding from it, which he tossed in the back of the pickup. Then he climbed in beside me.

His name was Junius, and he smelled of the road. His clothes were shabby; he’d lost all the buttons on his shirt but wore it pinned together down the front. He said he was one lucky man to have a couple of beautiful ladies stop for him; he had been overheating at the side of the road all morning; he always appreciated the company of ladies. He told us he had been married once, and that everything about his lady had been beautiful too, even her name—Antoinette. He
told us his stomach had always bothered him. He told us he had thirteen brothers and sisters, and that one of his brothers ran a concession stand at Max Allen’s Reptile Gardens, which we would have seen if we’d ever driven south on Highway 54. I was reminded, again, of the willingness of strangers to divulge their life story to other strangers when thrust together by a common journey, for as long as it lasted.

Consuelo looked bored and restless; she didn’t understand what he was saying. Junius told us he’d planned on having a big family, but that Antoinette had barricaded herself in a room when their first son was born, then smashed the baby’s head against the bedpost and thrown him up to the ceiling, where he hit the fan before starting down. He told me he’d had to wash the blood off everything, including the doorknob. He said he’d never forget how it felt to hold a doorknob wet with his first son’s blood. He said when he turned the doorknob, it had opened up the place inside him where he locked his grief.

I listened to him talk, peering through a window smudged with sunlight and dirt, the live oak trees at the side of the road full of mockingbirds and screeching blue jays. After that incident, Junius continued, his crazy wife took blankets and stuffed them under her skirts, pretending there was another child, as if she could fool him. Every Saturday, she took the blankets out and waded into the flooded cypress trees and stood on one leg like a great blue heron. Then she would beat on the blankets with a stick, until one day she got sick and dried up inside. He took the blankets away and washed them, then rolled her up in them and buried her next to the body of his son.