Cargo of Orchids by Susan Musgrave Read Free Book Online

was stashed in the soles. He seemed almost disappointed they were not filled with drugs, and handed me a sheet of yellow paper, the visiting room regulations.
    Bonnie and Little Shit Shit were still in the special room reserved for those who were visiting troublemakers inside. As I waited for the others in front of the electronic grill, the matron appeared.
    “You can get dressed now,” she said, over her shoulder, to Bonnie and the baby. “Have a nice social.”
    We had to walk outside again, up a concrete path to the front door of the prison; I shivered in the cold wind funnelling down from the mountain. Thurma, who’d had to leave her comb in a locker also, said she wasn’t going to be able to face her old man with her hair looking like a tornadoin a steel-wool factory. Carmen said lots of people paid good money to have their hair look like that.
    Another guard, who didn’t get up from the chair he sat in by the entrance, pushed a button to admit us to the visiting room. Here we had to wait for the visitors and correspondence officer to escort us to the gymnasium, where the social was being held.
    Behind a wall of glass adjoining the visiting room, the officer sat, eyeing the clock on the wall and eating Hershey Kisses out of a paper bag. There was nowhere left to sit, so I leaned against the Coke machine (“Use at Own Risk”), reading the list of rules Roll-Over had given me.
A kiss and embrace are permitted at the beginning and at the end of the visiting period. Necking, petting, fondling, embracing, tickling, slapping, pinching or biting is PROHIBITED. No running, shouting, excessive laughing, standing on chairs, swearing, cursing or use of unnecessary language.
    An empty yoghurt container with a note taped to it had been placed on the floor next to the Coke machine. “Cigarette foils, please. Jim’s cat chases them. Thanks.” Whoever Jim was, he had collected quite a few foils. Smoking was one of the few pleasures allowed in this room, and it looked like everyone took advantage of it.
    One of the bikers had given Bonnie his chair. The other, explaining to Thurma how he’d earned the black-and-green wings he wore pinned to his sleeveless Levi’s jacket by going down on a venereally diseased black woman, bounced Little Shit Shit on his knee.
    “Those Latino broads are nice, very nice,” the first biker said to Bonnie, grinning again at Carmen, who pretendednot to understand. “They really turn me on. But you know what the men are like. You fuck with the sister, you also get fucked by a bunch of mafioso assassins.”
    Another baby in the room began to wail.
    “You never hear an Indian baby cry,” said Bonnie, wiping Baby’s sticky face with one of Jim’s foils.
    Little Shit Shit, clutching her empty bottle, had gone to sleep.

chapter four
    The V&C officer wore a black plastic badge with his name, J. Saygrover, in gold lettering; he ushered us into a corridor smelling of turpentine and fresh paint. The walls were an avocado green, the ceiling a chocolate brown and the floor a dirty rust. Whoever wrote “Stone walls do not a prison make/Nor iron bars a cage,” couldn’t have been much of an interior decorator.
    Mr. Saygrover stopped us at an iron-barred gate. He nodded at the younger guard in the control bubble. I watched the heavy steel doors parting on their runners. We passed through five more identical gates before reaching the gymnasium. I wondered what would happen if anyone had to leave this place in a hurry.
    Vernal once told me that prisons exist for one purpose:locking people away from life’s good things, most often
other people’s
good things. Up ahead, behind the last gate, I saw a crowd of men who looked as if they had been locked away from other people’s things for a number of very
good
reasons, each one craning his neck to see us as we approached. On either side of the gate, the air throbbed with expectancy. All of a sudden I missed Vernal, pictured him tacking towards Desolation