The Prisoner and the Chaplain

by Michelle Berry

  In the hours before he was to join the Prisoner, the Chaplain had felt a sense of foreboding. Not the usual foreboding that comes with unfamiliar work, but a general uneasiness, something intangible that came, perhaps, from his seagull dream. He’s been dreaming it since he heard. Since they called him and told him he would be spending twelve hours with a murderer. The exact same thing every night. The cabin and the gull. And the arrow. Shot clean through.

  The Chaplain figured this was his subconscious. A contemplation of what was to come, of what was unknown. But every morning – and as he came into the prison tonight – it felt as if there was a weight on his chest he couldn’t move.

  Even now, listening to the Prisoner speak, he can’t stop thinking about the seagull, about how helpless he felt watching it fly over the trees. The horror of it. The feeling it gave him. As if he, himself, had an arrow through his body.

  The Chaplain woke up from his quick nap, before coming to the prison, chilled even though the temperature was high and the humidity was thick and full. A stormy summer. Wildfires burning uncontrollably. Heat and tornados. The world is slowly melting, overheating. They used to call it global warming and now they just call it the weather. He woke wrapped tightly in his simple sheet. He pulled the comforter up to his neck until his body recovered some warmth. All the way to the prison, he couldn’t shake this chill. He drove with his windows down and the hot, thick, smoggy air around him, everyone else sealed up in their permanently air-conditioned cars. The rain poured down. Sheets of it. Lightning flashed in the distance. Then in the Warden’s air-conditioned office, and then in the cold reality of death row, the Chaplain still shivered to keep warm.

  “Just be careful, Chaplain,” the Warden had said in a deep, low voice. Almost a whisper. “You never know what tricks these guys have up their sleeves. He’s a murderer, remember. A violent man. He’s not just some thief. We wouldn’t be executing him if he were just some thief. This is serious stuff. You never know how much this kind of stuff can fuck with you.” The Warden rolled his finger through the air around his temple. His eyes widened. “Cuckoo. Cuckoo.”

  Larry

  Larry faces the dark blue wall of his bedroom and then turns and faces the open room. The solar system – Mars, Jupiter, Earth, Venus, etc. – is above his head, dangling from the ceiling by fishing wire, soft Styrofoam balls. When he turns the light out at night, his ceiling shines with glow-in-the-dark stars and planets. His mother is walking back and forth past his open door, carrying laundry to and from the four bedrooms of their house – his sister’s, his brother’s, his parents’, his. She brings the laundry in, fresh-smelling and folded, and places it on his bed where he can reach it.

  “You’re old enough to put it away by yourself now, Lawrence,” she says, and leaves the room. Always moving, his mother, always doing chores. They’ve got a housekeeper, but his mother never sits still. She has long blonde hair that is down during the day but she puts up during the evening when she goes out with his father, or when they watch the screen together in the living room. In the day, with her hair down, she is loose and free and his smiling mother. At night, when his father is around, her hair is tight like her face, nothing out of place, nothing untoward. Untoward is a word his father uses often, and Larry now uses it because it sounds old and funny. How can you move toward something and then undo that? It makes no sense.

  The front door bangs open, catches the hallway wall.

  “Careful,” his mother shouts down the stairs. “You’ll put a dent in that wall.”

  Larry’s brother and sister rush in towards the kitchen, throwing hats and coats and scarves and mittens on the hall bench.

  “I did not,” Susan says. “You always say I did.”

  “Did too.” Even though Larry can’t see them, he can tell by the way Jack is speaking that he has been at Susan all the way home. Larry can see in his head the expression on Jack’s face – contempt, anger, bitterness. Like their father. His mother says his brother and his father are so alike they are almost twins.

  Larry goes downstairs and joins them in the kitchen.

  It is sandwiches on white bread – cheese slice, mayonnaise, bologna, pickles, sweet and salty, sliced thin – and fruit salad. It is cold milk (Jack gets chocolate milk because he complains the loudest and, Larry thinks, because he is the meanest) and, later, after they go back to school, a cookie if he’s good and quiet and plays in his room.

  Jack says, “Mother.” He says Mother when he’s ready to cause chaos, Mom when he’s pretending to be friendly. “Mother, Susan says she didn’t steal my bike lock.”

  “I didn’t,” Susan says, her eyes welling. She is nine years old to Jack’s seven, but even so, she’s afraid of him. She takes a bite of her sandwich and forces it down her throat. “I didn’t. I don’t know where it is. I’ve never seen it.”

  “Never?”

  “Well, not since yesterday. Not since we got back from school yesterday.”

  “It’s a special bike lock.”

  Susan rolls her eyes. “It’s a bike lock. It’s not special.”

  “Yes, but it’s mine and you stole it because you’ve always wanted it because it’s special. Because it’s green and has a key.”

  “I don’t care about a key. I have my own bike lock. It has a key.”

  “Because it’s green.”

  “Mom,” Susan says. “Mom, he’s wrong. I didn’t steal his bike lock.”

  “You did.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Stop it,” their mother says. “Stop arguing. We’ll find it later, Jack. I’m sure Susan –”

  “You always take her side. She steals things and you don’t punish her.”

  “I don’t steal things. What do you mean I steal things?”

  “Jack –”

  “Wait until Father hears. Wait until I tell him,” Jack says, and their mother’s face blanches slightly, enough to notice. There is a change in the air. But then the colour comes back into her cheeks and she sighs and opens her mouth to say something.

  “The bike lock is in the garage on the floor,” Larry says quietly. “I saw it there this morning.” And Larry doesn’t tell Jack that he stole the bike lock from Jack’s bike yesterday evening and took it into his room and played with the key – in and out – and marveled at the shiny greenness of it until he tired of it, and then Larry took it back out to the garage this morning and placed it on the floor to wait for Jack’s return from school.

  Jack reaches out, quickly, so quickly that Larry doesn’t have time to react, and pushes him off his chair onto the floor. He pushes the chair too. The chair comes down upon Larry and his head hits hard on the linoleum, cracks back, and his mouth takes a chair leg and there is blood suddenly on his lips, in his mouth. Larry opens his mouth to cry but no sound comes out. He feels like he’s choking on his blood. He spits. Eyes wild. He wants to say, “I’m only five years old,” but nothing comes out of his mouth, no sound.

  “Oh, you split your lip,” his mother says. “Oh dear.” She rushes to the sink and wrings out a rag and comes over and places it on Larry’s mouth, muffles the sounds he wants to make. “It’ll be okay, Lawrence. It’s only a split lip. They bleed a lot but it’ll be okay.”

  “You pushed him,” Susan says. She glares at Jack. “You pushed him right over. On purpose.”

  “I’m sure it was an accident,” his mother says, crouching by him. “Lawrence was squirming on his chair. He fell.”

  Jack smiles. “He was squirming,” he says. “It just happened.”

  “You pushed him and you’re mean,” Susan shouts. “You’re a psychopath.”

  “Susan.”

  “He is. He’s always hurting Larry and he beats up the kids at school and he’s just mean.” She takes her sandwich and walks out of the kitchen and puts her coat on and leaves the house.

  “Don’t be late after school, Susan,” Mother calls out. “I want to take you to buy new boots.”

  “Really, Mother,” Ja
ck says. “Sometimes I wonder about you. It’s like there’s nothing up there,” Jack sidles up to where Mother is beside Larry and taps her on the temple. “Nothing in your head.”

  “Jack, I –”

  His mother kneels there, holding the rag to Larry’s mouth, and looks up at her son. Larry watches her eyes and he doesn’t know what to make of it all. He doesn’t know where it’s all going or where it has been. He doesn’t know what he can do about it. All he knows is that it seems untoward, this day, this accident, this Jack, it seems as if it’s going towards something but not quite – it’s un. Undone. Not toward. But back. Larry’s head hurts more than his mouth and later, when he plays in his room by himself, he will vomit and then he will fall asleep and he will not wake up and his mother will take him to the hospital and the doctor will say that he has a concussion. The first of many concussions because of Jack. All the concussions happening before Larry turns seven. A crack on the linoleum floor. A hockey stick to the head. A rock thrown at him. A push off the neighbour’s trampoline. His father will rail about the cost of the medicines, the doctor’s appointments, for such a simple thing. “He was obviously pretending to sleep,” his father will shout. “You could have woken him up without taking him to the hospital. Those doctors don’t know anything.”

  When Susan and Jack are gone the house is quiet again, and Larry’s mother continues to put laundry away, to tidy up, to do the lunch dishes. Her hair is still down, for a few more hours, and she whistles, so quietly that Larry, before he falls asleep, can barely hear her, as she moves around the living room and dining room and kitchen. He sits in his room looking at his blue walls, his solar system, his stars. His head aches. He sees white lights. There is a ringing in his ears. He vomits. And then he lies down on his bed and slips into that deep, dark sleep. Like falling into a well. It’s black and Larry can’t see anything and falls quickly and hard with no escape.

  This is how Larry remembers his mother. Before he is seven and she takes Jack and disappears. He remembers her crouching near him holding a rag full of his blood to his mouth. He remembers that look in her eyes when she peers up at Jack – part fear, part pride, part anger. Confusion. He remembers her hair falling into her face while she looks down at him on the floor. It snakes around her head like a veil. She is kind, his mother, and careful. She is quiet and simple. She can whistle for hours and Larry remembers her singing occasionally, or humming while she cooked. His mother paints his room dark blue and helps him make the solar system. She sticks the glow-in-the-dark stars to the ceiling and every night she turns off the lights and she and Larry pause for a moment – him between day and night and sleep, her between day and night and her husband – and they look up at the stars together, and Larry knows that they both marvel at the beauty and simplicity of it all. When he closes his eyes, back when his mother is still around, Larry sees the outline of the stars on his lids, and he falls asleep quickly and solidly.

  Most of Larry’s childhood after his mother leaves is a blur. Larry’s father is never around and no one ever explains to Larry where Jack has gone. One day he is there, torturing Larry, knocking him around, smashing his head on something, and the next day he is gone. And their mother is gone too, and so Larry assumes they went somewhere together. Larry makes up stories – when he is seven and nine and twelve – stories about where they went. At first they are on a trip, then they have gone to jail, and then they are dead. It is easier that way.

  Susan says they went to Florida. She says she has always wanted to go to Florida.

  “They didn’t go to Florida,” Larry says. “They went to jail.”

  “For what?”

  “Robbery. Murder. Extortion.”

  Larry knows that Susan doesn’t know what extortion means but doesn’t want to ask. She is always telling Larry that his vocabulary is bigger than his head. He knows she feels stupid around him. And it isn’t that Larry is any smarter than anyone else, it is just that he isn’t afraid to try words. To use words he doesn’t know. Words he’s only heard on the screen. So far, no one has caught him at it. No one who knows the words is listening, and those who listen know nothing.

  “I doubt,” Susan says, “that Jack murdered anyone. Or Mom. Can you imagine?”

  “But where did they go then?”

  Susan shrugs. “I don’t really care, do you?”

  Larry goes to school. Comes home. Goes to school. His life seems endless sometimes. Kids at school bully him. And so does his father.

  “You’re a wimp.”

  “Idiot.”

  “You’re such a baby.”

  “Clean up the house,” his father says. “Lazy bastard.”

  They are in the living room and his father has stumbled in after work, reeking of booze. Larry moves away from him on the couch, turns up the screen. His father kicks him in the shins. “Clean up the fucking house.” Always a drinker, his father has hit the bottle hard since his mother left.

  Larry stands in order to get away from the kicks, and his father loses his balance and crashes into Larry until they are doing a slow dance, holding onto each other tightly.

  “Don’t touch me,” his father shouts. “Don’t touch me.” As if Larry is poison.

  Larry drops his father, who falls to the floor.

  Larry is nine years old. A black eye from the schoolyard. Homework he hasn’t done for weeks piled up on the kitchen table. Watching the screen to get a break from thinking about everything. Where is his mother? Where is Jack? Susan, thirteen, off dating yet another boy. His father drunk. Always drunk. Hates his life. Hates his job. Hates his house. Hates his kids. Hates his wife.

  The weird thing is, Larry’s father never wonders aloud where his wife and son went. He never says, “I wonder where they are,” or even “Do you know where they are?” It’s as if he knows exactly where they are but doesn’t want to tell anyone. Susan has asked him over and over until he screams at her and slaps her. Larry is afraid to ask. Afraid of the punches, yes, but also afraid that his father might tell him the truth, might tell him where they are, and afraid that wherever they are is not the place Larry imagines them. Mostly, he really believes they are alive and well somewhere. Perhaps that’s not the case? Larry doesn’t want to find out. But then he does want to find out. So he goes back and forth between wanting to ask and shying away from it, and his father comes home each day, drunk and drunker, and takes out his frustrations on Larry and the house and Susan and the housekeeper. She will quit soon, the housekeeper, and then they’ll really be in trouble. Susan keeps reminding their father of this, but he doesn’t listen. Instead he yells.

  “Clean the fucking house,” his father says from where he has fallen on the floor.

  “How do you work drunk?” Larry whispers, but his father doesn’t hear him. He really wants to know. How is it possible to be a businessman, to run his own small business, drunk? All the time.

  The housekeeper has been there. She has cleaned. But Larry putters around with a damp cloth and wipes things anyway. He winds the grandfather clock in the hallway as his father lies face down on the living room floor. Larry moves around him, sweeping and dusting. He takes out the vacuum from the cupboard and runs it around his father, wanting to run it over him, to suck him into the bag. Wouldn’t that be great, Larry thinks, a vacuum bag full of his father. Like a snake slowly digesting.

  There are days that are fine, that are normal. That are quiet. His father comes home directly after work. His sister is cooking. They eat together and talk about their day. Larry even has a friend at school for one year. The only year he ever has a friend. Blake.

  Blake meets him at the park after dinner and they swing and kick the ball around and talk about nothing much. For the year that he has Blake, Larry thinks life might actually be good. But then Blake moves and no one else wants to be his friend because he has no mom and his dad is a drunk, because Larry gets mad quickly and easily and he punches people and trips people and steals people’s things. Larry can’t help himself.
He sees something nice and he wants it. He gets headaches and feels angry and he lashes out. Sometimes, Larry thinks that maybe he is Jack. Maybe Jack didn’t really leave, maybe Jack didn’t even exist. Because when Larry punches and hits and kicks, when he steals, he feels like he’s Jack. He is his brother.

  Larry’s father, Rick Gallo, owns a clock and watch repair shop: Gallo’s Precision Repair. Over on Kingdom Street. When he is ten years old, Larry works there after school. His father drinks out of a mug, filling from a bottle under the counter, and Larry sweeps the floor and winds the clocks and polishes the front window. Larry flips the sign from Open to Closed and helps his father down the front steps, makes sure the door is locked behind them, and maneuvers him home down the darkening winter streets.

  “Don’t touch me,” his father always says, stumbling. “Get your hands off me.”

  The days his father isn’t angry he is wildly sad. The days he is crying in the store, Larry sits, ashamed, at the counter and watches. When he is older, Larry takes his father into the back room and locks him in. Deals with the customers himself. Learns to fix watches, repair clocks, stop time. Start it again. Move it fast or slow. But when he is ten, he merely sits on the stool and the customers come in, see Rick Gallo ranting or crying or shouting or laughing just a little too loudly, and they turn and leave the store.

  Later, Larry blames his father’s drunkenness for what he becomes, who he becomes, what happens to him. And he blames his mother’s absence. His violent brother, Jack. He blames his sister. He blames everything on everyone else. It’s not his fault, he had no chance, he had no choice, he had nothing.

  Susan is pregnant by fourteen. Larry is ten. Their father is forty-three with yellowing eyes and a swollen liver.