Cargo of Orchids by Susan Musgrave Read Free Book Online Page A

Sound, the
Manchester Guardian
open on his lap, a bottle of near-beer in one hand and a Gitane burning in the other.
    The gymnasium had been decorated with red balloons and white streamers, which were affixed from corner to corner and had lost their elasticity. A giant heart, made of papier mâché, encased in barbed wire, had been inscribed with the words “For Life.”
    I stayed close to Carmen, who told me that every social was sponsored by a different inmate group. This one was being hosted by the Lifer’s Committee, which meant it would be done properly, the implication being they had the most time on their hands. We worked our way through the riot of bodies, across the room to a banquet-sized table laden with bottles of soft drinks and plates of food—sandwiches, fruit, cookies, a heart-shaped cake that had been hacked into pieces—where her husband and his brothers sat in a cloud of cigarette smoke under a Thank You for Not Smoking sign.
    The men rose to shake hands with me, and when it was Angel’s turn, I couldn’t meet his eyes and my face began to burn. Far away up the valley I heard the whistle of a train, and deeper inside, the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of machine-gun fire in my heart.
    Mugre, who looked even thinner than I remembered him from court, addressed me (or more accurately, undressed me) in rapid-fire Spanish.
    “Pay no attention to him,” said Gustavo. “He is very ill-mannered. We have all been to the same reform schools, but Mugre has never graduated.”
    Carmen said her husband was making a joke. The three of them had spent most of their life in prison, but that was no excuse for bad manners.
    The coffee machine percolating at the back of the room sounded like someone vomiting. Mugre got up from the table and went to join a group of men who looked as if they had ridden down from the hills with Emiliano Zapata and gone on a shopping spree at K-Mart.
    “Our crew,” said Angel, nodding at the group of Mexicans.
“Campesinos. Indios.”
He shook his head sadly. “My brother Mugre belongs with them. We get a visitor, and what does he do? He runs away.” He looked at me again; I felt my heart knocking on the back of my front teeth as he pulled out a chair for me. I sat, hoping I didn’t tip over in my nervousness.
    Carmen took an orange and an oatmeal cookie from a platter and broke the cookie in half. Gustavo took the other half from her hands; I watched it shrink under his moustache. I wondered if it was proper prison etiquette to help oneself to the food, and was just going to ask Angel, when I felt someone tap my shoulder. I turned and saw Thurma, standing behind a man wearing jeans, a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and bright yellow headphones, sitting in a wheelchair.
    “This here is Chandler,” Thurma said. “The one I told you about?” The boyfriend she was determined to keep out of trouble had a grin that turned his mouth into an accordion being played by a drunken acrobat.
    I tried to shake his hand.
    “He’s got no control over himself,” said Thurma. “That’s why I worry; he’s got no control over
nothing
no more.”
    When Thurma had wheeled him away, Carmen said Chandler’s face hadn’t always been that way. “His mouth is the only part on him that moves any more, and
still
she doesn’t trust him.” Carmen said Thurma’s biggest worry was whether her boyfriend would be faithful to her for the duration of his life sentence, and whether he would continue being faithful to her if he ever got out.
    Angel said he knew one way to tell if a person was faithful, and asked to see my hand. With his middle finger, he began tracing one of the lines on my palm to where it disappeared at the base of my ring finger, then he turned my wedding ring until the gold heart, clasped in a pair of hands, faced up at him. He nodded, then smiled, as if he now knew some dark secret about me.
    “My brother sees that you are a married woman, and I know him, I know what he thinks,” said Gustavo,