Borrow Trouble. Mary Monroe

      “Because the fight that I had with Inez was about you. Hello?” All I could hear now was a loud and hollow dial tone. Without thinking, or asking permission from the officers, I dialed the operator again. Miraculously, she was able to get a connection immediately. Leon answered on the second ring. “Baby, we got…cut off,” I started, the words tiptoeing across my trembling lips.

      “We didn’t get cut off! I hung up!” Leon screeched. His voice was so loud and angry, it sounded like he was in the same room with me.

      “Leon, please don’t do this to me. You have to help me,” I said desperately.

      “I don’t have to do anything except pay taxes and die. Being my wife didn’t mean that much to you when you jumped into a strange man’s bed!”

      “You are not going to help me?” I wailed. Leon didn’t bother answering my question. He hung up on me again.

      I blinked at the telephone in my hand for a few moments before I placed it back in its cradle. I was in a scary place. A hot, musty, dimly lit room with no windows and with metal furniture. There was a huge, noisy fan hanging from the low ceiling, but it didn’t seem to be doing much good. It was hotter in the room than it was outside, where the deadly sun was toasting the rest of the island.

      The two male officers stood by the door, with their arms folded, like they were daring me to give them a reason to brutalize me. And the same hostile, hairy-chinned, husky female officer who’d been breathing down my neck like a rapist from the minute I’d been brought to the police headquarters was standing a few feet away from me now.

      “My husband is not coming to get me,” I announced, directing my attention toward the female. I don’t know how I managed to form a smile on my face. I had nothing to be smiling about. But I thought that if I tried to be nice and friendly to these people, they would be nice and friendly with me. I was wrong.

      “Brrrrr! I don’t blame him much, m’dear. Muck should be left among the muckers,” the grim-looking female officer said, folding her thick arms across her lumpy bosom. Like a lot of the women on the island, she was a combination of Spanish and African. She had jet-black hair that was bone straight, and her skin was almost as black as the telephone that I’d just held in my hands. She looked like so many of the sisters I knew back home in Ohio.

      “Sister, you don’t have to talk to me like that. You don’t know me,” I wailed.

      “Ow!” she yelled, screwing up her face and rubbing her arm like I’d pinched her. “And I don’t want to know you,” she continued, wagging a thick, gnarled finger in my face.

      I couldn’t remember the last time somebody had looked at me with such contempt. In addition to everything else that I had to worry about, now I was concerned about this woman, or one of the other guards, getting violent with me. I promptly removed the smile from my face and replaced it with a look of fear.

      The big woman cleared her throat, reared back on her ashy legs, and then slapped her hands on her hips. She moved closer to me, her nose almost touching mine. Her sour breath almost made me choke on my own breath. I flinched as the words spewed out of her mouth like bile. “You American women think too highly of yourselves, anyway! Always did and always will. Sister? How dare you call me sister! You are no sister of mine. I wouldn’t claim you if you came gift wrapped,” she yelled, waving her arms. With a grunt that sounded like it came from her bowels, the woman snatched a pair of handcuffs from a wide leather belt hanging from her massive waistline. “Hands back behind your back. Now!”

      After she’d cuffed me and spun me around by my shoulders to face her, she smiled for the first time.

      CHAPTER 3

      I was back in the same cell where I’d spent part of the night before, and most of this morning, staring at the concrete floor. Suspended from one wall by a chain at each end was a narrow cot with a mattress that felt like a slab of cement. A stiff gray blanket was on the cot, but there was no pillow. A large iron pot to piss in sat in a corner, on the floor. There was no lid for the pot and no toilet paper. But there was a roll of brown paper next to the pot, like the kind that butchers used to wrap raw meat. The paper was stiff enough for me to make a lid to cover the pot. There was no window, no sink, and no fan.

      I was in the third of four side-by-side cells. In one was a woman who had been moaning and groaning in Spanish the night before. She was silent now. In the other cell next to me was another woman, another foreigner, who was just as dazed as I was. From what I’d picked up from the guards, she was British and had been caught trying to smuggle drugs out of the country. I didn’t know what kinds of drugs or how she had tried to get them out of the country. But I felt sorry for her. One thing I did know was that getting caught with drugs could get you executed in some countries.

      I didn’t know how harsh the foreign laws were when it came to prostitution. I could barely bring myself to think the word, let alone say it. Saying it to my husband had been the most difficult thing I’d ever said to him.

      The only reason I was not climbing the walls in my cell was because I truly believed that when Leon cooled off, he’d get one of his lawyer friends, do whatever he had to do, and bring me home.

      I was so deep in thought that I didn’t hear the door to my dreary cell open. I looked up into the last face I wanted to see: another scowling, husky female officer, jiggling like a float made of jelly. Her humongous breasts looked like torpedoes.

      “Come with me!” she barked, snapping her fingers.

      I didn’t have time to say or do anything. She clamped my shoulder with one of her massive hands and marched me from the musty corridor that contained the four cells into another musty corridor.

      We went through several doors and down a darkened hallway before we entered a room that contained a bamboo desk and two metal folding chairs.

      “Sit! Sit down now!” the guard ordered nastily, helping me into one of the seats, with a shove so strong, the chair almost rocked over.

      “What happens now?” I asked in the same meek voice that I’d been using since my arrest.

      “You wait here!” was all the surly woman said before she left the room, locking it from the outside.

      Before I could have myself a good cry, another big, husky woman joined me in the depressing little room. She was a hard-looking woman in her forties, but she didn’t look like a local. Her skin was a chalky white, and her thick blond hair, twisted into a loosely braided knot on top of her head, was streaked with gray. She had a briefcase in her hand, and she wore a drab gray dress, similar to the uniforms that the officers wore. I was pleased to see that this woman did not have a weapon or a pair of handcuffs hanging off her hip, too.

      “Renee Webb?” she asked, with a smile. I was able to relax when she extended her hand to shake mine. “I’m Debra Retner.” I let out a sigh of relief when I realized she had an American accent.

      “Yes, ma’am,” I mumbled, my limp hand still in hers. “Are you from the American Embassy, or something like that?”

      “Something like that,” the Debra woman drawled, plopping down in the other chair so hard that the tail of her voluminous dress fluttered like a flag on a pole. She let out a loud breath as she flipped open the briefcase, pulling out a few sheets of paper. “Let’s see…hmmm….” She paused, a disturbing frown on her face. Debra pursed her thin lips and looked at me with pity. Then she fished a pair of glasses from her breast pocket and held them up to her eyes. She looked at the papers again, shaking her head. She let out an ominous groan, blinking rapidly and hard.

      “Hmmm,” Debra started, scratching her horseshoe-shaped chin. “Looks like you’ve gotten yourself into a fine mess, huh?” she said, with a chuckle. She parted her thin lips with a grin so wide, it almost divided her face in two. The fact that this woman was able to make light of my situation gave me hope.

      “Uh, so they tell me. It’s all a big misunderstanding, though. I am not a prostitute,” I insisted,