Cargo of Orchids (8 page)

All these methods were devised (surprise! says Rainy) by men. Rainy’s let a childhood of being sodomized, an adolescence of being forced to have sex with dogs and an adulthood of being beaten with wire coat hangers colour her attitude. The only reason she has accepted Christ is because she wants at least one sympathetic male figure in her life.

Here I am getting a touch preachy. My rule is there’s no room for preachiness on the Condemned Row. Frenchy admonishes me. “Rules are for breaking. What else would anyone make them for?”

But don’t get too attached to Frenchy. She doesn’t make it to the end of this book. Hardly even to the middle. She chose the firing-squad. The first time.

The prison chaplain, the guards, your classification officer, your care and treatment counsellor—all work on you to choose the firing-squad, or hanging, so that your organs
won’t be damaged. They distribute all these pamphlets urging you to “Be an Organ Donor.”

When you choose the firing-squad, they tie you to a chair and pin a red tissue-paper heart to your chest. (I guess they must figure the heart doesn’t count as an organ, or that people needing a transplant would rather die than go on living with the heart of a condemned criminal.) The guards stand behind a screen with a slit in it, facing you. If any one (or all) of those five guards likes you, or even feels sorry for you, she’ll aim as far away from the bull’s-eye as she can get without missing you and getting a demotion for gunnery. This could mean four bullet holes in the right side of your chest (one of the rifles has a blank in it) and you bleeding to death, slowly, while everyone reloads.

Gary Mark Gilmore, who helped revive capital punishment, donated his eyes. Something else I know about him—he ordered pizza for his last meal and then couldn’t finish it. (His eyes must have been bigger than his stomach, Rainy says.) I always wondered who got his eyes. When you stop at Pizza Hut for your pepperoni and pineapple two-for-one special, is that pimply faced boy taking your order looking out at you through Gary Gilmore’s eyes?

His last words were “Let’s do it.” No muss, no fuss, no bleeding to death before getting executed properly. When they did it, the four shots overlapped in the centre of the bull’s-eye, like a four-leafed clover, without the luck usually associated with four-leafed clovers.

Rainy’s chosen “legal injection.” She figures it gives her a chance; Rainy’s been a drug user all her life—there’s hardly
a vein in her body that hasn’t dried up or collapsed from the constant barrage of dope. The only usable blood vessel left is under her tongue, she says, and she doubts whether anyone will find it.

Lethal injection is made to look like an everyday medical procedure. They even swab your forearm with a disinfectant before trying the most likely vein, as if you have a medical future. Two people sit in different rooms and each presses a button: one cocktail goes into your vein through an IV drip, the other down a drain. This means the person pushing the button never really knows if she is the one doing the killing. The executioner can always console herself: “Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t.”

That’s how I console myself too. I know I screwed up at the trial by saying I would have done
anything
to save my baby. I didn’t mean it literally.
Anything
didn’t include killing him. I was just telling the truth.

That was another mistake: telling the truth. Hindsight, as Frenchy would say, is 30–30. Frenchy used a .30–30 on her boy in that bank. She should know about hindsight.

Rainy is looking forward to having her execution televised. She hopes it will deter other people from killing their kids. She tells Officer Freedman that she should buy stock in the network doing the televising, that her execution—the instant replays and summer reruns—will make investors a ton of money.

Executions began being televised when the state of California went pro-choice in 1995, five years after I moved to the Row. I figured that in a culture as show-business
oriented as ours, executions, when they wound up being a continuing series, and a repetitive series at that, would lose their appeal and be cancelled for poor ratings. When people could turn on their TV sets any night of the week and see daycare centres being blown apart by bombs, or schoolchildren gunning each other down outside the classroom, I didn’t think they’d be too likely to have a continuing interest in the executions of convicted murderers. I was wrong. “Executions Live!” continues to get better ratings than “Larry King Live” or even the Super Bowl.

Widely reported press conferences are held every day with notorious death-row inmates; every week we see televised images of ambulances bearing away the bodies of executed men and women. The papers flash news photos of mourning friends and relatives outside the prison on the night before the execution, and the local Nazis, or Klansmen, always gets a lot of coverage, with placards saying, “Fry Gay Preverts [
sic
]” and “Gas: A Sure Cure for Black Crime.”

There may be X number of days left until next Christmas, but when you live under a sentence of death, you never know if there will be a next year. Any one of us could be history by then. That’s not soon enough for Officer Freedman. She’d like us to die laughing in the meantime.

She
calls it “having a sense of humour”: who but a moron would think “No noose is good noose” a joke? We call it guard humour. Their jokes harass me more than Frenchy’s train, but I’d never let Frenchy know that.

Another year shot to hell. There’s a
real
joke for you. I can still see my mother standing in Jonesy’s Book and Stationery in East Oyster, trying to find the right greeting card to send her birthday girl on death row.

I admire my mother—she’s got guts. And a sense of humour. A lot of mothers would have nothing more to do with a daughter who did some of the things people say I’ve done.

My mother never knew my baby, but she knows how much I loved him, through the letters I’ve written to her since coming to prison. She knows how much he changed me, insofar as one person is capable of being changed.

Insofar as.
I am starting to sound like Vernal. He sent me a memo for my birthday, and a twenty-dollar bill (Canadian). The memo said he was celebrating fourteen days of sobriety. These weren’t consecutive days, he wrote, but a ballpark figure for the nineties.

Frenchy’s got her “last meal” order in already. She’s requested steak and onions and pie à la mode. “At least I don’t have to worry about it repeating on me,” she says.

After questioning Frenchy at some length, I’d discovered that she thought “à la mode” was a flavour, like lemon meringue or cherry. We heard she finished her last meal, leaving a wedge of pie “for later.”

I moved into an unfurnished apartment in the same building as Carmen. Vernal worked late the day I went back to the house to pack up my life, most of which I decided to leave behind. I didn’t want the memories, or the reminders. I took a few cookbooks, some pots and pans, and—I needed something to sleep on—Brutus’s futon. I figured with me out of the house, Brutus would be moving onto our Beauty Rest anyway. Later that week, Vernal phoned to say two of his Time-Life cookbooks were missing. I sent them back to him in a cab.

In the weeks that followed, I got a series of memos, by courier, signed from Brutus, saying how much he missed me and how he wished I would come home to bake cookies, with the odd P.S. from Vernal saying Brutus’s cognitive therapist was worried about the effect our separation was
having upon him, that dogs from broken homes were more likely to think less highly of themselves than other dogs. The day Vernal fired his secretary and sent me a memo begging me to come with him to Mexico, where we could “relive our honeymoon all over again,” we ended up having another row: I called him and said it was redundant to say “reliving all over again”; it was almost as bad as “old-fashion taste.” He said he didn’t want to sleep with someone who corrected his grammar, and I said, is that what Brutus is doing these days, correcting your grammar?

Carmen, Bonnie, Little Shit Shit and I rode with Thurma out to the prison every Saturday morning most of that spring (I’d sold my car because I couldn’t afford the insurance now), and for two hours we sat, always at the same small square table in a corner of the visiting room, played cards and drank bad coffee from the machine. Once a month, a social would be held in the gymnasium, often with entertainment for the visitors—a movie, a skit put on by the prisoners, music or a comedy routine. I saw little of Mugre, who spent all his time rehearsing. Mugre was going to play a prison guard in a production staged for the Halloween social in November, Angel said.

I became Angel and Gustavo’s unofficial translator, rendering everything from prison regulations and lawyer jokes into English, and translating the guards’ demands into Spanish also.

On the last weekend in June, the Native Brotherhood sponsored a social. Thurma couldn’t find a car, so she and Carmen and I travelled to Agassiz by bus. We were about to
phone for a cab to take us the rest of the way to the prison when a car pulled up at the curb. Bonnie rolled down the window, and I was hit with a cloying pine-forest smell coming from the green Christmas tree dangling from the mirror “Climb in,” she said.

The passenger doors were riddled with bullet holes and rusted shut; Bonnie had meant it literally when she told us to “climb in.” I struggled through the window, across the laps of the women packed in the back. The front of the car was empty except for the driver, a big man with two braids and a beaded headband. He didn’t look at us. “This in Kono, my brother,” Bonnie said. His name meant “a tree squirrel biting through the centre of a pine nut,” she explained.

Little Shit Shit, dressed in the same deerskin jacket and pants she’d worn since the first time I’d met her, lay sprawled on Bonnie’s lap. She snatched my purse and began chewing on the strap.

“She sure likes your bag,” Bonnie said, as the woman next to the window reached over and offered me a toke. I said no thanks, and tried to get my purse back before Little Shit Shit took an interest in my credit cards as well.

Bonnie said she would be sending out her wedding invitations soon. “All we need now is permission from the attorney general,” she said.

Kono began speaking, choosing his words as if measuring each one for its impact. “Why should you ask the attorney general for anything. He is not
our
attorney general.”

I nodded. Best to remain neutral, especially when someone is giving you a ride, though judging by the noises
coming from under the hood, and the smell of the fumes, I was surprised when the car made it as far as the prison. Kono parked, and we piled out into a cloud of blue smoke the same moment as two patrol vehicles drew up on either side of the lot, eyeing us.

The process of signing in, getting scanned and stamped, waiting for Jack Saygrover to lead us from the visiting room to the gymnasium was beginning to feel too familiar—the men standing behind the barrier waiting and waving, and the women approaching, awkwardly, like girls at a junior high sock hop.

Gustavo came over to greet us. The doors to the yard were wide open and I could see a group of Native men, including Treat and Kono, standing in the doorway, holding drums.

I looked around for Angel; he saw me at the same time and waved me over to where he stood talking to Mugre.

“Those drums are giving me a pain,” Mugre said. “It is like being in the jungle, that noise. All night I couldn’t sleep.”

Angel told him he was going to get himself in trouble with the Posse if he didn’t keep his complaints to himself. Mugre made as if to spit on the ground, then glared at the group of Natives.

“That one there, he insulted my brother,” Angel said to me, pointing to Treat. “He said to him, ‘What kind of Indian
are
you, anyway?’ Where we come from, to call someone an Indian is a sign of disrespect. It is like calling him
malparido
—which means ‘born from a really bad place’.”

This time Mugre spat. “
Hijo de la chingada!
”

Angel and I went outside and walked in circles around the big yard. Angel said his brother was starting to talk like a Mexican—“
hijo de la chingada
” was the worst thing one man could call another in Mexico. The Indian women had been raped and carried off by the Spanish invaders, and to this day Mexicans of Spanish descent still refered to
los indios
as “
hijos de las chingadas
”—sons of fucked mothers.

I watched the convicts keep as close to the perimeter fence as they could get without being out of bounds. Angel told me he missed me every time I left, the way he missed the stars at night. In prison, he said, you couldn’t see stars because of the glare from the sodium lights on the yard. “Someday I would like to take you to Tranquilandia—the stars there, they keep you awake with their brightness.”