Free Cargo of Orchids by Susan Musgrave Page B

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.”
    To some extent I had always romanticized South America—the last frontier! And when Angel spoke to me the way he did, I conjured up images of afternoon sex under slow-moving fans in the shade of jagged bluish mountains swept by light breezes from the Central Cordilleras. Of evening sex, and morning sex, too. I looked at him and saw, in the gleam of his shadowy eyes, a depth of wanting that promised heaven.
    Months later, I realized the desire must have been my own reflected back, that the promise I thought I saw had been nothing more than the neglected spirit of my own lust.
    My life took another twisted turn the day Carmen called to say Angel’s wife would be coming in the fall to visit him.
    I was curious to learn as much as I could about Consuelo de Corazón, the wife Angel had said he worried about at night; but from what Carmen told me, he had nothing to worry about except his own mortality. Angel was Consuelo’s third husband.
    Nothing had stopped Consuelo since the time she picked her first pocket, Carmen said. She graduated to stealing tombstones from cemeteries, chipping off the names of the deceased and selling them back to their families. By thirteen she had become a courier, sewing drugs into the ribs of a line of underwear she’d designed herself, making weekly runs to Miami and Los Angeles. When she met her first husband, Don Mario, he wanted a more traditional stay-at-home wife, and so he set her up in a new business, Hits for Hire, which meant she didn’t have to travel. Because the city was crawling with “confidence tricksters”—gangs of teenaged boys posing as
sicarios
, assassins—it was acceptable for customers to require a
muerto de prueba
, a test killing, which could be of anybody, for as little