Borrow Trouble. Mary Monroe

out of this mess, anyway? A woman in your position must have a lot of friends. Can you borrow from them? I have a five-year-old daughter that I need to get home to. School starts in a couple of weeks.” I stopped when I realized it was doing me no good to ramble. Despite his flaws, Leon was a good father to our daughter, Cheryl. And both our mothers doted on that child. My daughter was the last thing I needed to be worrying about.

      “I am afraid I can’t get you out of this,” Debra reluctantly admitted, her eyes unable to meet mine.

      “Then what the hell are you here for?” I asked, rising again.

      Debra motioned for me to sit back down. “I can’t get you out of this, but I can make things a little easier for you. You’re not the first American I’ve come to assist, and I doubt you’ll be the last. Here is what I can do for you.” She paused and sucked in a long, loud breath. Her gray eyes were flat and beady. Like the eyes on a dead fish. “I can speak to the court on your behalf.”

      “Like a lawyer?”

      “If you can afford a lawyer, I can help you find one.”

      “If I had money, I could pay my fine. I wouldn’t need a lawyer. They told me that if I paid ten thousand dollars, they would release me.”

      “True. But you don’t have ten thousand dollars. And that’s why I am here.”

      “What happens if I plead guilty?”

      “As grim as it sounds, that would be my recommendation. In your case, as you’ve already been advised, the penalty would be three-months confinement.”

      “I see,” I muttered, looking at the floor. I started talking out of the side of my mouth again. “Why did this have to happen to me?”

      “Don’t beat yourself up, Renee. It won’t help you at all. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Twelve other women were arrested for the same crime within hours of you; most had been tailed from that same bar. And, by the way, that nice local man who’d been so interested in your tale of woe, he works for the police. Several local women are now serving time because of Jose Garcia, and other men like him.”

      Jose. The very name sounded obscene to me now. I saw red in more ways than one: his red hair, his red shirt, my red-hot anger. One of the more sympathetic officers had already told me Jose’s story. Jose, and other men like him, made money by helping the cops identify prostitutes and get them off the streets. It showed the world that this tiny island was doing its part to fight crime. After the disappearance in nearby Aruba of that pretty White schoolgirl from Alabama, and the shabby investigation, all eyes around the world were on the Caribbean. Some island officials had decided to flex what little muscle they had by making as many arrests for as many different crimes as possible. And I was part of the crime wave.

      “That motherfucker. Jose’s the one who should be in jail. He had sex with me. I thought that all undercover vice cops were supposed to do was get you to quote a price. They are not supposed to actually fuck you!” I shouted.

      “Let me remind you again, Mrs. Webb, you are not in the United States. You are on foreign soil, and I am sorry, but you just might be here longer than you want to be.”

      CHAPTER 5

      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