And then their mother got sick. Breast cancer. A year of radiation and chemotherapy didn’t work. She died. The Chaplain was fourteen years old, in grade nine; Miranda was sixteen and in grade eleven. Just getting her driver’s licence. Dating the boy next door. Going to school dances. Braces came off a year earlier. It devastated her, their mother’s death. Miranda was never the same. Formed a shell around herself, never to be hurt again, no one could touch her.
Until Richard, of course.
When their mother died, Miranda began seeing the world in black and white, right or wrong. No other shades. No grey.
The therapist told the Chaplain that when his mother died, he kept his anger about being deserted by her deep inside, so deep that it didn’t come out until he hit Tracy.
“Bullshit,” he had said to her. “That’s ridiculous. My mother didn’t desert me. She died.”
After all, his relationship with his sister had become stronger after their mother died – he wasn’t a woman-hater. He would never hit a woman, he thought. He loved women and respected them. In fact, his sister was his best friend – his only friend – no matter how much they argued. He had never hit anyone before, male or female. There was nothing inside of the Chaplain, no anger, that had to come out on Tracy. It just happened. You can’t explain it easily, he thinks, and that’s what makes it so hard to understand or accept or admit.
The Chaplain eats his cookie and notices the Prisoner staring at the other one in his hand. He gives it over – “You take it, I’m not really that hungry.” The Prisoner eats it quickly, as if he’s starving to death. The Chaplain imagines that facing death, he probably wouldn’t be hungry, but some people deal with tragedy and anxiety by eating a lot. He’s not one of those people. In fact, he’d probably vomit if he ate nine hours before he was going to be electrocuted. The thought of this actually makes the cookie come up in his throat, a bit of wet bile. He coughs. Swallows.
“You’d think they could have given us cookies like this here.” The Prisoner motions his head back down the hall, towards where they came from, where they walked when the sound of the other prisoners shouting was all around them. “Why didn’t we ever get cookies like this? We got those stale ones that are hard. Oatmeal. No chocolate chips. These are way better. I could eat a million of these ones. They remind me of my mom’s cookies. They’re even a little chewy.” The Prisoner goes quiet.
Time is moving towards the Prisoner fast. He eats his cookies. Tells his tale. Lies on the cot. Wouldn’t the Chaplain pace the floor anxiously? Wouldn’t he pray? Wouldn’t he cry? Wring his hands? What would he be doing? He knows his heartbeat would be elevated, his hands would shake.
The Chaplain sighs.
“Bored?”
“No, sorry. Tired, I guess. It’s odd how a human body gets used to sleeping at specific times. I took a nap before I got here. I shouldn’t be tired.”
“I’m not really tired. I’m not really anything. I don’t feel anything.” The Prisoner stares at the ceiling. The Chaplain stares at the tattoos on the Prisoner’s arms, really looks at them. “Except a weight. On my shoulders. Ever since I knew the date, I’ve felt this heavy weight right here.” He rubs his shoulders. “They tell me I’m clinically depressed but that’s bullshit. I feel fine. Just empty. Empty and a weight. Here. On my shoulders.”
“You have the right to be depressed,” the Chaplain says. “I would be, I think.”
“Yeah, I guess. It’s more a lack of energy, really. Not depression. I’m not sad. I’m tired. I sleep all the time.”
The Chaplain focuses on the Prisoner’s tattoos. A blurred mess of lines. The Prisoner has a thin line of barbed wire tattooed around his neck and a large cross tattooed on the inside of one ankle, which the Chaplain can see because his pants have ridden up and his socks are short.
“Tell me about your tattoos.”
“What’s to tell?”
“What do they mean? Do they mean anything? When did you get them? Why did you get them?”
“Aren’t you full of questions today.”
The Chaplain sees the name Samantha etched into the Prisoner’s bicep. He also sees Becky and Mayve. And Susan. There is a Susan there on his arm. His sister? This means something.
“They don’t mean anything. Just bored.”
“You got tattoos because you were bored?” The Chaplain smiles. “I watch my screen or do puzzles.”
“You should try getting tattoos. Much more fun.” The Prisoner laughs.
Miranda has a tattoo on her back. Up by her left shoulder, on what she calls her wing. It says Veritas. Truth in Latin. Something the Chaplain supposes he is trying to get at here – the truth. The odd thing is, Miranda doesn’t want the truth, really, if you think about it. She condemned this man without ever even meeting him, without knowing anything about him. She knows his crime (everyone knows his crime) but will not forgive. She does not seek the truth.
How rapidly Miranda accepted the death penalty.
The Chaplain will have to remember to tell Miranda at dinner about how her tattoo is reflective of what he’s doing, not what she’s doing. Getting at the truth. It’s a good angle and he might just win their recent death-penalty arguments. No one, in his opinion, deserves to be executed. But no one especially deserves to be executed alone, without the ability to talk to a man of God before they die. He’s in a Catch-22. He’s here for the man, but he’s also working for the government that will soon kill him. The Chaplain can’t win. But he can win something small from Miranda. Veritas. Truth.
It occurs to him suddenly that maybe that’s what the Prisoner is trying to do. He is attempting to speak the truth. Or his version of the truth. If he lays it all out before the Chaplain, before God, before himself, maybe the Prisoner will understand the answers to his own questions. Maybe he will figure it all out. So, even though his recitation isn’t really believable as a confession, it is, in a sense, a baring of his soul. He is reciting his life for the Chaplain to hear, for someone to understand him, for someone to take away the truth about it all.
Maybe?
The Chaplain’s not sure. It still seems odd that the Prisoner is speaking as if what he says, in these last hours, doesn’t really matter, isn’t going to change things. He doesn’t seem to be making the connections or even placing any blame. He isn’t confessing and he isn’t asking for forgiveness. It’s merely, “This is my life. Listen. Then you can kill me.”
Clinical depression makes sense. Emotionless. Vacant. Nothing.
This experience, so far, isn’t anything like what the Chaplain imagined. He imagined thrown furniture, screaming, crying, begging, pleading, anger, remorse, fear. He imagined telephone calls to loved ones, last-minute appeals, rooms full of people rushing about. He imagined high emotion, not the story of a life and cookies and quiet talk.
“Tattoos are pretty easy, actually,” the Prisoner says, admiring his arms. He traces his fingers up and down some of the lines. “They use this drill thing, it sounds like a dentist’s drill, and it moves a needle up and down really fast. Depending on where you go. Some places have faster needles than others.” He traces a tattoo that was obviously not from a professional. It is jagged, wobbly, the lines uneven. “And in prison, it’s different, of course.” The image on this tattoo isn’t even clear. “But most of these I got on the outside.”
“The ink is in the needle, right?”
“Yeah. The needle presses the ink into your skin with each puncture. But I’m talking really fast puncture marks – like fifty or maybe even a thousand punctures a minute. I don’t know. Maybe even more. Depends on the machine, I guess, and the quality of the shop. Like I said. Doesn’t go deep. But it spreads out.”
The Chaplain says, “Any you regret?”
“Fuck, man,” the Prisoner looks at him. “There are always tattoos you regret. Always. I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t regret at least one tattoo.”
“Becky? Mayve? Samantha?”
The Prisoner looks at thos
e names. He touches them. Covers them up with his hand.
“Weird to think they’ll still be there, in my skin, when I’m dead. Until my skin rots off. Do tattoos burn quicker? Does the ink burn?”
“During cremation?”
“Whatever. I don’t know. Rot. Burn. I don’t know.”
“Shouldn’t you know what you want done? Don’t you want to know now? Shouldn’t we talk about this?”
“I don’t know, man. I don’t want to talk about it. What does it matter to me? I’ll be dead.”
The Chaplain takes note of the Prisoner’s position. He is sitting up, tracing the lines on his arms, covering some with his hands, tracing again, every muscle in his body tense, as if he’s going to run. His neck bulges muscle. Because he is lean, every vein and ligament is stretched and visible. If the Prisoner doesn’t tell the Chaplain what he wants done with his body, the prison will cremate him and bury the urn in the plot out back. If no one claims him, he will be placed with the other unclaimed souls.
The Prisoner stands quickly and stretches. The Chaplain sits up straight in his chair.
“Don’t fuck with me,” the Prisoner says, looking at the Chaplain. His voice is low. Quiet. “I didn’t ask you to be here to fuck with me. If I don’t want to talk about some things, you got to respect that.”
“Yes, sure. It’s just that one of my jobs is to find out what your wishes are.”
The Prisoner laughs. “My wishes? My wishes? Jesus, man.”
“What to do with –”
“I know what the fuck you mean, Chaplain.” This is a growl. “I just don’t know what I want.”
The Chaplain feels shaky. His back aches from sitting straight up like this, his legs are tensed to run towards the door. The air is thick in here.
“It’s just,” the Prisoner paces in front of him. Two guards look into the room through the window in the door. “If I think about it, then I can’t breathe.”
The Chaplain says nothing.
“Every time my mind goes anywhere near the next bit, anywhere near what will happen, if I think of any detail of it, I stop breathing.”
Panic attack, the Chaplain thinks. The room is right next door. Right there. Beside them. Five, ten, fifteen steps away.
“I want to go to my punishment, to my death, breathing.” The Prisoner barks out a laugh. “Breathing.”
“I can understand that,” the Chaplain says quietly. “I understand.”
“And I want,” the Prisoner stops pacing and looks straight at him. His eyes are sad and red, his skin sallow, his cheeks thin. “I want to tell you how I got to where I am now. Is that too much to ask? That you listen to that and you take it with you after everything is done?”
“It’s not. Not too much. No.” The Chaplain is ashamed. He looks away from the Prisoner and down to the dirty floor. “I’m –”
“Sorry, yes, I know. I heard you before.”
The Prisoner sits back down on the bed. “I fucked up, I guess,” he says. He runs his fingers through his hair. “I really fucked up. But at the time, when I was in it, when I was doing the things I did, it felt like the right thing to do.”
“The murders?”
“No, fuck, no.” The Prisoner glares at him. “Not the fucking murders, but the B and Es, the robberies, the money. I felt like I was doing something I was good at, you know?”
The Chaplain has never been particularly good at anything. Adequate, he guesses. And he tries. He isn’t even very good at being a chaplain. He was a crummy, boring boyfriend, a half-assed student – he tends not to pay attention when studying, thinks about things that have nothing to do with what is at hand. Wonders what the point of all of it is. He wasn’t a very good son – when did he ever play catch with his father? – or isn’t even a very good brother or uncle now. He eats dinner every Sunday at Miranda and Richard’s place, and he has never once offered to bring anything or put the kids to bed for them or do the dishes. Every day he wakes up in his rented apartment and he drives his car to the convenience store and he buys a coffee. He never tips the guy behind the counter. Every day he drives into the prison with intention, good intention, and every day he leaves thinking he has accomplished nothing. The men talk to him. They confess and cry and feel better for having seen him, but, in the long run, what good did the Chaplain ever really do? Did he make them better people? No. Did he find out the truth about them? No. And, even more, does doing this even help him find out his own truth? Something he would love to know. Who he is and what he is good at.
The point of religion for the Chaplain was to make a difference. Has he done that?
Miranda would say he’s good at listening. “Jesus, Jim, I talk and talk and you smile at me there, lazy-like, and say nothing. Don’t you have anything to say? Sometimes I think that you might not be listening. Like it’s all an act. Maybe you’ve been fooling me. I don’t know.”
His faith is sometimes lacking. In small ways. Because the Chaplain doesn’t believe in himself, it puts weight on his faith. If you can’t believe in yourself as a man, how can you believe in God? Each man has his own God and that God is fashioned after each man – but if the man does not like himself, does not have faith in himself, then what kind of God has he fashioned? One that questions everything? One that lacks conviction?
But, no, that’s not right. The Chaplain does believe in his God. It happens, though, that his God is very different from the God others see and hear and feel. His God. Who is his God, and what is he doing here in this cell with this man who committed such horrific crimes against those people? This man who isn’t showing much remorse and merely wants to talk and talk and talk – about himself, narcissistic – until he dies. In a building where there are people who are willingly going to kill this man, something the Chaplain is wholly, completely against.
The room spins and he watches it spin, and he crosses his arms across his chest and leans back in his chair and tells himself to listen, to pay attention. His job here, what he needs to do, is to listen. That’s it. Nothing more. Listen.
Stop, the Chaplain thinks, stop trying to figure yourself out.
Asthma
Dwight is in the hospital. Car accident, drugged up, split head and sore neck. Samantha was in the car with Dwight but is unharmed.
“Where were you going?” Larry asks, leaning back on the mattress in the apartment. Samantha’s hair is tangled over the pillow, dirty and sour-smelling. Her drug problem is getting worse, and Larry feels as out of control around her as she must feel doing the drugs. She hasn’t washed or eaten in days. He wants to be with her, to fuck her, but can’t stand that vacant look in her eyes anymore, can’t stand the dirtiness, the stench of her body. She is beginning to disgust him. That look reminds him, oddly, of his mother. When she whistled and hummed as she did the laundry or dishes, he would catch her eyes, try to get her attention, and those eyes would be empty. No soul. Larry had forgotten about that until now. It hadn’t occurred to him that his mother was unhappy when he was a child. Children never notice adults in that way. But he had noticed her eyes, he had waved his arms in front of her face, said, “Mom, Mom, are you listening?” He had known deep in his young mind that she wasn’t all there. She was gone already. Before she even left.
Samantha sits up, track marks up and down her naked arms, her breasts hanging flat against her chest. Larry is twenty years old now and Samantha looks older than her twenty-three years. Three years together and Larry thinks that, yes, it’s time this was over. They aren’t doing each other any favours.
“Dwight’s an asshole,” Samantha says. “We were buying drugs. He crashed before we got them. He was so high. You got any drugs?”
Larry shakes his head.
“He left me with nothing. I got nothing.” Samantha starts to cry.
Larry leaves her in the apartment, crying, and never goes back. All she wanted him for was the drug money anyway. Larry anticipates the withdrawal she will have until Dwight gets out of the hospital to get her more drugs
. He wants no part of this withdrawal, he wants no part of her anymore, and so he leaves. He thought he loved her once, when he was seventeen and feeling good about getting out of the house, but now she’s only a burden. She’s a mess. She, like Dwight, stops Larry from going forward, moving ahead, getting on with life. Larry takes his coffee cans of money and leaves her everything else – the card table, the mattress on the floor, the rent to pay. He finds an apartment eight blocks over and moves in the same day he signs the lease. He pays with money from the coffee tins. It is clean and freshly painted. It has two rooms: a living room/kitchen area and a bedroom. The bathroom has a tub and a shower. There are no more bugs. Larry feels as if he’s made it. He’s come up in the world. He’s a new man.
Larry meets Becky through Susan. She is Susan’s hairdresser and comes to the house – his father’s house – once in awhile to do Susan’s hair when she can’t get a sitter for the brats. Under-the-table pay. Becky doesn’t have to share this money with the salon she works for. They drink and smoke as Becky highlights Susan’s hair, and the kids scream and shout and push each other around the house. Larry’s father has taken to his room. Every so often he comes down the stairs and heads out of the house to check on the store, but Larry is in control of everything now and opens when he wants, closes when he wants. Never normal hours. He’s losing customers but he doesn’t care anymore. At the beginning, when he wants, Larry advertises a bit on the radio, and once he buys billboard space, but his half-assed attempts to keep the business going don’t work. The store gradually loses all of its customers and stays closed now more than it stays open. So his father disappears to his bedroom more and more, and Larry finds other ways to make money. In the kitchen one night, Becky doing Susan’s hair, Larry there, drinking beer, swatting kids who run by, watching Becky move, her hips sway, her breasts full:
“So how’s the shop?” Susan asks.
The Prisoner and the Chaplain Page 9