Bandit

by Molly Brodak

  “Eh, hello,” a man said uncomfortably as soon as the door opened. He was on a ladder, messing with wiring that led to a set of light switches. “Just looking around,” I said, and smiled, and he turned back to his work with some annoyance. I walked through a set of open plain glass doors into the body of the church, above which hung the inscription Dom mój jest domem modlitwy: My house is a house of prayer.

  The ribbed vaulted ceiling was vivid pale blue, painted with gold stars and small murals, in near-pristine condition. The carpet down the center aisle was bright red and thick. The colors of the paint and stained glass were primary, carnivalesque, full of intense detail: the heavy red and white of Poland’s flag, the Polish eagle. Polish and Latin inscriptions anchored the windows and portals. The space had been well maintained by the Polish American Historic Site Association, whose name was made clear on donation boxes, pamphlets, and plaques.

  A table covered in red cloth to the left was laid with framed photos of the church, or pictures of priests and popes. Before the pews were more tables, covered with bricks engraved with donors’ names; nowhere for them to go yet, I guessed. Tapestry flags with saints’ faces dotted the spaces below the stained glass windows. Gaudy patches of red and blue stripes surrounded the stained glass windows. I moved down the aisle, past rows of heavy, plain pews, to an old nativity scene that had been set up for Christmas. The painted plaster figures knelt on old Astroturf, huddled into a barn diorama laid with pine boughs and a spiky white star atop the roof. A dusty bank of candles faced a life-sized Mary wearing an enormous gold crown. Clutters of images and sculptures of saints, popes, angels, and crucifixes activated every space. The altar and the baroque detail of the apse were covered in gold. Królowo Polski wstaw się za nami, it said: Queen of Poland, remain with us.

  I had to stop and sit on the edge of a pew. The dense ornamentation of the space, how it hovered over my small body, felt cruel with its richness. This was my family’s singular haven: their beacon of love and protection after years of horror. But I felt guilty for being here. Unlike at the abandoned school, rotting and dark, I felt unwelcome here, in my heart, a trespasser. I was not expecting this. But maybe a nonbeliever always feels like a fraud in church. I stood and turned back toward the entrance, the high polished marble columns shining, the enormous silver pipes of the organ way up on the balcony above the doors, the gleam and pull of the rich colors dense around me—an environment the opposite of the dark neglect of the school, its invisible fullness. There was fear here too, but made solid and showy. I didn’t feel surrounded here, but drained in a way I didn’t expect. I had to go.

  63

  A few weeks after the visit I wrote Dad to tell him that I saw the church, but I didn’t tell him I went in. A letter came about a week later that opened with “You got to see St. Albertus Church!” The rest of the four-page letter described it to me, and the neighborhood, in more detail. He seemed surprised I was interested. His letters never say enough for me, never feel thoroughly human, just factual, but this one was at least excited in tone.

  The first detail he tells me about is the black wrought-iron fence around the church. “One year I helped paint that fence and I grew tired of the paintbrush. I dipped my hands into the paint cans and applied the black stuff like that, because it was faster.” Insane, I thought. I wondered if he was lying. It didn’t matter. I loved this detail, even as a lie, for showing his devotion to St. Albertus.

  He told me about his first job, selling early editions of the Sunday Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News after mass. He recounted the red wagon he used to haul the papers, the twenty-cent price of them, and the amount of money he’d make per day. He remembered specific details about his job, the wagon, and the neighborhood too, where the hardware store, the grocery store, the gas station, the specific shoe store, and clothing store on Chene were. He seemed proud, happy in his recollections, and he described work as if he loved it. He sounded not at all like a criminal.

  I can’t imagine being able to remember details like this about my own childhood neighborhoods, even though I am much younger. But certainly the neighborhoods were bigger, and there were more of them. All in all I moved six times before high school, changing schools each year of elementary school. Probably I am different, too. I don’t like remembering these places: the friendlessness, isolation, and shame.

  At the end of the letter I felt a pang. He wrote, “Thanks for the email. You got me thinking about the old school and church. Someday I’ll drive you down there and show you all the places that were part of my past.”

  I couldn’t place this emotion. It was sweet, of course, that he wanted to do this with me, nice to think of him showing me his neighborhood, how happy he’d be to do that. How alien it would be to him now, though. The sadness of the idea pained me. And to realize that he will get out of prison again. Not too long, really, just a few years left now, if he showed good behavior. This is his life. I pictured me driving him to Old Poletown, him pointing out the window to the empty spaces and describing what was there.

  I felt a kind of rage, anger at my own stupid selfishness, but there it was: the feeling I had before, when he was getting out the last time. I wanted him to leave me for good. To just die or go away forever, stop coming back like this.

  64

  A giraffe is nuzzling against a second giraffe. It sees me in my bright running clothes and looks, and I feel like I’ve won a prize in its regarding me. It is about midway through my morning run in Grant Park, on the backside of Zoo Atlanta, where there is a person-sized tear in the black fabric laid over the chain-link fence behind the giraffe/ostrich/wart-hog enclosure. Sometimes the giraffes cannot be seen, just a dull ostrich. Sometimes there is a khaki zookeeper rinsing a concrete platform with a hose; sometimes there’s nothing but the grassy manure smell. Today I am lucky. I’m lucky every day, even if it is just the manure smell. I live in a house very near to these giraffes.

  The houses I have lived in felt more like boats than houses.

  That a house is stable and rooted firmly in the earth is not just one fact of its matter—it’s the key fact of its matter. Or so it goes. Homes operate as shelter and bastion, ward and moral statement. But they are always headed somewhere, it seems to me. The precariousness of the stretches of normalcy in my life left me with the feeling of movement: I was always headed away from wherever I was.

  I suppose I’m talking about entropy. Entropy, even to me, a cold realist, seems sad. But it shouldn’t be—after all, it is the way of everything to fall apart. It is the key fact; it’s just the slowness and smallness of our timescale that obscures entropy’s chewing.

  Bodies are temporary, homes are temporary. They resist gravity as long as they can.

  I thought about these things while house shopping with my boyfriend in Atlanta. We’d been living in separate apartments for three years and that was enough. I liked the very first one we saw: it was at the end of a dead-end street, had beat-up wood floors and a calm yellowy light. It was perfect.

  But we were dragged off to the next one and I loved it. The second one was perfect. The third one! This is how it went, for months. It was too easy for me to fit myself into anything we saw. Maybe even especially the dingy ones, and most of them in our price range were dingy.

  Yes, the dingy ones especially, because I don’t like nice places.

  Growing up around Detroit some people get this kind of fierce defensiveness toward ruins. I know it looks from the outside pretty ridiculous—who in their right mind wouldn’t want the ruins torn down and replaced with nice condos and yuppie markets?

  It’s hard to explain. It’s not as if I like damage exactly, it’s more that damaged things seem truer. The good maintenance of a new or cared-for thing or building is an artifice I want to see past. This isn’t about death. Death is pretty clean, a clicking shut; it’s life rot belongs to, it’s survivors who see and smell the decay—this is living. It’s a radical thing to accept.

  Finally, anyway, we d
id land in an unkempt but up-and-coming corner of East Atlanta, in a brick ranch built in 1930 with a chicken coop and three chickens in the huge backyard, tire swing in the pecan tree. The real thing. Nicer than any house I’ve ever lived in.

  Atlanta has just enough rot in this part of town to make me feel comfortable, but still, you know, has working streetlights and regular trash pickup. Almost every day I get to run around Grant Park and stop to see the giraffes through the hole in the fence, which is too nice for me, but I’m working on it.

  Atlanta, risen from the ashes like a phoenix, exactly what my city couldn’t do, and what I can do too if I just let ashes be ashes. Honest job, boyfriend, house, friends, all real and true: I have it all. Out of nothing.

  65

  The sky, solid and gray and quiet, how it stays in the North. Pulling up to the prison’s entrance I had a feeling that I had seen this particular slope in a dream, this sign, these colors. The complex sat atop a treeless hill, one small intake building with enormous mirror-polished doors and the other buildings set farther back, in neat lawns, sidewalks, and activity fields. We walked up to the black mirror doors, watching ourselves approach, watching our watching silently.

  My boyfriend and I got there at the beginning of visiting hours. Everyone else knew how to do this complicated process, for which there were no instructions, and were happy enough to explain them as I accidentally cut in line. Forms and ID were presented, a debit card for the vending machines inside, and everything else we brought was stored in a locker. Our names were called, hands stamped with something invisible, and we passed through a metal detector, joining a clump of visitors now on the far end of the building. We waited again, inspecting the photos on the wall of previous wardens and other prison officials, sort of joking about their names quietly, attentive and antsy. A man’s arm poked through a small door and we presented our hands to a purple light it held that made the invisible stamp glow, then we lined up at the exit door.

  Waiting at the exit, I stood next to a window that met the edge of the razor wire border and I could see that the razors were actually sharp on the wire, silly billows of it, clean and perfectly silver. As we neared the next building, there was a gate to the yard, where men in khaki were milling around on pathways. On the way out there were starlings perched in the razor wire, squeaking cheerily.

  It was cold in the visiting room and we waited for him to come out. A tall square cinderblock room with bolted-down rows of molded chairs, a large blue wrestling mat for children to play on, an alcove of vending machines, and a raised station of guards—it was clean, noisy, full, and bright. I was nervous, at all points of this approach, but especially now. I felt myself resisting. When we left the hotel I did not want to drive to the prison. When we arrived at the prison I did not want to go in. When we were sitting waiting for him to come in I silently prayed that he would not come in.

  But he did, and was shorter than I remember, with all white hair and deep wrinkles. I did not recognize him at first. I stood to approach him and he raised his palm to me and motioned to sit down while he went to the desk to check in with the guards. He hugged me hard when he came over, and kissed my cheek. I could tell he was honestly happy to see us both.

  Here I was, visiting my dad in prison again, just like I did when I was fifteen, now more than twice as old. What was I looking for? What was I really expecting from him?

  Most of what we talked about during the visit was food. He was not allowed to go to the vending machines, so he had to tell us what he wanted and we would go purchase it from the machines with the prepaid debit card we bought. He wanted pizza, and then when he finished the pizza he wanted another pizza. I felt terrible that he’d be the only one eating, so I bought a chicken sandwich just to eat with him. It came in a paper tray and was just foamy chicken on bread that after microwaving in the bag was wet and sort of warm, but still frozen in the middle. I ate half, and when I put it down he ate the rest of it. He asked for a Dr Pepper and Funyuns but they did not have Funyuns. I bought him jalapeño cheese curls instead, figuring those were the closest in texture to the Funyuns, but he did not much like them. While talking, he took a napkin to one curl and tried to wipe off the bright green particles that were making the curls spicy. On the next curl he seemed too embarrassed to use the napkin again, so he shyly scraped the curl against the edge of the bag to try to remove the flavor dust. I sort of watched him do that, and hoped it worked, though it probably didn’t. He talked about the kind of foods he eats for dinner, and what was available in the commissary store. He said he buys ice cream once a week and sometimes tortilla wraps and tuna, which he fixes himself if he doesn’t like the dinner offered. The bandit chewed his snacks. He spoke calmly.

  The parts of prison life he seemed most pleased with were the activities and freedoms he enjoyed in minimum, boasting how there were two softball fields here instead of just one at the last place. At times he seemed downright happy about prison life, and it really didn’t seem like an act. It’s sort of easy there, with its stability, isolation from real-world problems, and petty freedoms—most of all the petty freedoms. His choices are limited, obviously—this seems to be in fact the philosophy behind incarceration—but not so limited that he feels he has no choices. He can apply for different jobs (his current job was rolling silverware into a napkin from ten in the morning until one in the afternoon, Monday through Friday, for which he is paid twelve cents an hour), play softball, basketball, or bocce ball, email or write to family, talk on the phone, read, or sit by the bocce ball courts and eat ice cream.

  He explained how there were three different TV rooms—”one for whites, one for blacks, and one for Mexicans.” It was not segregation, he insisted, just practical—it prevented arguments over which station to watch. In the room with mostly whites he watched the Discovery Channel, AMC, baseball when it was on, and football of course. The false dream of peaceful segregation that never worked in Detroit came to life in prison.

  He was taking a World Geography class on Saturdays, although he told me he would have preferred the Home Wiring or Real Estate classes, but they were full. He can apply for other prisons if he wants. In fact he is applying to be moved to Milan, Michigan—where he had been incarcerated before—because they have some “religious program” there he described that if he can complete will knock a year off of his sentence. “There’s also a drug one,” he said, “but I don’t qualify for that.” It didn’t matter; it seemed to be just a way to cut a corner.

  He seemed like a gentle old man. He talked about his brothers and sister, and asked me about family members who don’t want to talk to him anymore, like my sister. I tried to stay vague, as she would want. She’d told me never to talk about her to him, and I respected that. She didn’t want him to know where she lived now, or where she worked. I saw a hardened hurt in his eyes, even during the soft talk, smiling, and casual jokes, a steady hardness. There was a pointed anger. Maybe it was shame. Or maybe just cultivated for his surroundings. Maybe it was not there at all and I just was looking for it.

  Visiting hours were until nine at night, and I could tell the other visitors were settling in for the entire stay—staking small seating areas, loading up on food and drinks, setting out toys and books with their children. Most of the young children seemed happy and excited, some running up to the inmate as soon as he appeared in the room, many spread out on foam mats with their dads, toys everywhere, pleasant and good. Older kids, though, seemed different. One chubby preteen Mexican boy was crying, arms folded across his chest protectively, while his inmate dad talked close to his face intensely. Some girlfriends or wives seemed unhappy. I probably seemed a little unhappy, or nervous, squeezing my hands together and hunching forward in my chair. I tried very hard, though, not to seem unhappy.

  Dad sat with his arm wide across the chair next to him, leaning back, not unhappy. Tranquil with us, as if we were visiting him at his private summer home.

  Dad had purchased three photos in anticipation of our
visit. We walked over to an inmate sitting at a table with a nice Nikon camera and a clipboard. “One of you guys, one of me and Molly, and one of Molly by herself,” he said, having clearly planned this out in advance. My boyfriend and I stood with our backs to a solid blue backdrop painted on the cinderblock wall. I smiled. Dad stood by the cameraman and smiled. He switched with my boyfriend and put his arm around me and I smiled. He left me and I stood against the wall alone, feeling the space around me, the weird look of the cameraman on me, and my boyfriend and Dad smiling at me, and I tried to smile best of all. The inmate turned the camera around to show me the pictures. They were heartbreaking. I looked scared and small and too old to be anybody’s daughter. I smiled. “Cool, they look great,” I said.

  It had been almost two hours and I felt like there was nothing left to say. I hadn’t broached any real or remotely important topic, despite how much I wanted to ask him about the robberies. I told him we should be getting back soon. He seemed robotic in his reaction to this, switching away from us quickly, without hesitation or longing for us to stay. I looked at him a little more steadily now that we were leaving. He looked blank.

  He hugged us, patted our backs, and turned to go without looking back, the way in which I also tend to leave. I hate to look back because it makes me sad to see departure too closely, but his reason seemed different. The small upbeat man with the comically huge ring of keys who led us in now led us out. He showed us a deck of ID cards and sorted through them slowly so we could pick ourselves out. It seemed as if we were the first visitors to leave. Outside the sky was still gray and solid with clouds.