Читать книгу Borrow Trouble - Mary Monroe - Страница 11

Before they returned me to my cell, I was ushered down yet another dim hallway into a communal shower, along with two other women. By now my legs felt like rubber. It had been a while since I’d felt my butt. I was surprised that under these extreme circumstances, I was still able to walk and function.

I had seen a lot of large female guards in the compound, but the one who escorted me to the showers, then accosted me with a rubber hose, was the most strapping one I’d seen so far. She was not that much taller than me, but she weighed at least three hundred pounds. A short, severe Afro covered her moon-shaped head like a stocking cap.

Without saying a word, the hefty woman strapped on some kind of a surgical gauze mask and then proceeded to hose me and the other two women down with icy cold water, like cattle. The other two women squealed like injured mice and cursed in Spanish.

“Shaddup! Shaddup you mouths right now! Rápido!” the woman with the hose shrieked, her words slightly muffled by the thin mask covering her mouth and nose.

The cold water caused goose bumps to immediately pop up on my flesh. I felt as if I no longer had a voice, so I couldn’t scream like the other women. Even if I had wanted to.

All of my jewelry and every other thing that belonged to me had been confiscated. They’d even taken my luggage and passport, and the souvenirs I’d bought, from the luxurious hotel room that I had checked into a week ago. One of the first things that they had snatched was the two hundred-dollar bills that Jose had paid me for my “services.” Lord knows, I had earned it. But it was the one thing that I would not retrieve upon my release, even if they offered it back to me on a silver platter.

I had never liked getting my hair permed, so I had always made regular trips to the beauty shop to get my hair pressed. But I owned several hairpieces and wigs, which I wore for convenience. With the weather being as humid as it was in the islands, I knew that a press and curl would not have done much good for my hair. That’s why I had brought a few wigs with me. They had taken all of the wigs that I’d left in the hotel room and then snatched the last one right off my head.

The cold hard water and the harsh soap from the hosing down had reduced my hair to its worst state. I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the dull mirror outside of the shower. My head looked like a cocklebur.

One other indignity that I had expected and feared was a strip search. I was surprised that that had not happened yet. When it did happen, shortly after the brutal shower, in another dismal room with no windows, next door to the shower room, I was not surprised. The rubber-gloved fingers that roughly explored the most intimate parts of my body made my flesh crawl. The grimace on the examiner’s face made me feel like I was contaminated.

After the humiliating strip search, a pair of thick brown hands tossed a drab pea-soup green smock and a pair of woolen footsies on top of my naked body when I was still stretched out on my back on a slab of a cot. The smock had enough room in it for two women my size. The footsies were long and wide enough to fit the huge, flat feet of any one of the enormous female security guards.

“Can’t you at least give me a dress and shoes that fit?” I asked the matronly woman standing over me, removing her rubber gloves. “None of this stuff fits,” I complained.

The matron clucked her thick tongue before she spoke. “This ain’t a catwalk in Paris, Miss Naomi Campbell. You either wear what we give you, or you wear the suit that Mother Nature gave you,” she told me, with a smirk.

On the way back to my cell, I saw the other two women who had been in the shower with me. They were being marched back to their cells, buck naked.

I sat down hard on the side of the lumpy uneven cot and tried to organize my thoughts. That was not so easy to do with all the moans and groans coming from my neighbors in the other cells.

As sorry as I felt for myself, I still managed to have some sympathy and concern for the other women in the cells on my block. I didn’t know their backgrounds, but based upon the harsh way they were being treated—marched around naked—I thought that I was the lucky one. I was not like them. And, in my confused state of mind, I thought that being an American was in my favor, and that that set me apart from the others. The fact that they’d segregated us, lodging me in a cell alone, made me think that I wasn’t the only one who felt I deserved special treatment.

Dinner was a stale cheese sandwich, some flat black beans, and a ball of overcooked rice, which my body refused to digest. I made trips to that portable toilet on the floor, in the corner facing my cot, every ten to fifteen minutes. About two hours after the gruesome meal, a trustee of some sort, pushing a metal cart with squeaky wheels, came by. With a long-handled pole, she removed the scary pots from the cells and replaced them with empty ones. The stench from the body waste throughout the area was so profound, it made my eyes water and my nostrils burn.

The stiff blanket on my cot felt like it was moving across my body. I couldn’t have slept even if I had wanted to that night. I still couldn’t believe what was happening to me. What was even harder to believe was the fact that Leon had turned his back on me. But in all fairness to him, I had to ask myself how I would have reacted if he had been the one who’d been arrested for prostitution. I didn’t have to think about it too long or too hard. Leon was my husband, and despite his flaws, I loved him. If he had been arrested in any city in the world and called me for help, I would have done everything in my power to help him. Whether I’d have stayed with him after the fact was another story. But the bottom line was, I would never have done to Leon what he did to me. I was still sitting on the side of the cot when morning arrived, still wondering how Leon could have turned his back on me.

With the exception of the guards, I wasn’t too clear on who did what. I still didn’t know exactly what Debra Retner’s job was. I had not seen her since she had met with me the morning before. About an hour later, when she did return, escorted by two armed guards, I was glad to see her.

“What happens now?” I asked, stumbling out of my cell. I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until I bumped into her, almost causing us both to fall to the hard floor. Both of the guards drew their weapons and gave me their most threatening looks. My immediate response was to raise my hands high above my head. Debra held up her hand and spoke to the guards in Spanish. I was too muddled to try and interpret, but the guards put their weapons away and fell in behind Debra and me as we made our way down the grim hall.

“I’ve got to get out of this place,” I whimpered, clutching Debra’s arm. “You’ve got to get me out of here. If I have to go to jail, can’t they deport me and send me to a jail in America? Don’t foreign countries do that anymore?”

“Some do,” Debra said in a hopeful whisper.

“I’m going crazy. You’ve got to help me get out of here,” I insisted, wringing my limp hands. Not only had the harsh shower reduced my hair to a frazzle, it had also made my skin so dry and ashy that rashes had already formed on various parts of my body.

“I can’t promise you that, but I can promise that I will do everything in my power to make your experience as painless as possible,” Debra said, giving me an affectionate pat on the back.