The Prisoner and the Chaplain

by Michelle Berry

  “Fuck.”

  The boys rush past. Back and forth. Laughing.

  Larry wants to reach out and grab them. Smash their heads together. Instead, he stands in front of them and they come to a screeching halt on their scooters, Bennie skidding slightly.

  “Hey,” Larry says.

  The boys stare up at him. Mouths open.

  “Listen, I was wondering. Have you seen anyone going into my office?”

  The boys giggle. They look at each other.

  “Bennie. Frankie.” Mona is there. She comes down the steps of the office and begins a fast walk towards the three of them. When she reaches Larry, she glares at him. “I told you not to talk to my children.”

  “I’m just asking them if they’ve seen anyone in my place. Jesus, someone broke into my place.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Things were moved.”

  Mona looks around Larry into his storage unit. “Was anything stolen?”

  “No. Just moved.”

  “Maybe,” Mona says, pushing her boys away from Larry, “maybe an animal got in and moved things? A mouse? A rat? An animal that likes coffee? No one can go in your room. No one has a key. And I don’t see any damage on the door. Unless you didn’t lock it, of course.”

  “I locked it.”

  “A mouse then?” Mona begins to walk away. “We do have mice. I’ve seen them.” Larry watches her. She is lovely. Her hair flows down her back. Larry is entranced. He is only half-listening to her words. Focusing instead on her mouth, on the small lines around her lips.

  “A mouse,” he says.

  She turns back to him. “No talking to my boys. I told you that already.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “I will ask you to leave, Mr. Gallo, if you talk to my boys. I will evict you and your belongings.”

  Larry nods. Pretends to zip his lips shut. The boys giggle and scurry along in front of their shuffling mother, dragging their scooters behind.

  “Into the office,” she says. “Come on, you two.”

  And off they go.

  Larry enters his unit again. He pulls the door down, leaving a gap at the bottom for air. He turns on his laptop. He looks at his cans, at where they were and where they moved to. He wonders. Maybe he’ll get a mousetrap. It wouldn’t hurt to know for sure.

  Mona’s hair and her legs, her strong ass as she walked away from him. Holding each boy, her arms long and dark and toned. When she is angry, her eyebrows knit together until they are almost touching. A little vein throbs on her temple. Larry sees everything about her, except who she really is.

  In the next several days, Larry notices someone following him. He pulls over in the parking lot of the strip mall across from the storage company. The car goes by him quickly, speeds up. He looks at it, doesn’t recognize it. A dark sedan, windows tinted. Nothing special. Larry turns his car around and drives home. No use having someone following him to the money, to his office. No one knows where Larry goes – not Dwight or Susan or Jack or Dwight’s pregnant girlfriend. No one. Larry likes it that way.

  A pretty good bank heist. Larry is in and out in six minutes. With over two thousand dollars. The key, Larry knows, is not to get everything, not to be greedy. Take what you can and get out. Quickly. Don’t hurt anyone. He learned his lesson the hard way. Larry targets the small banks, the ones with only a few tellers, one back office, a bank machine. Sometimes he hits the money exchange offices, but then he ends up with all kinds of foreign currency he can’t spend. The cheque-cashing places are pretty good too, although they don’t have as much in the drawer as the banks.

  All of this is starting to bore Larry. He’s too good at it. It’s not that exciting anymore. And he’s running out of places to hit that are close enough to home for a one-day trip but far enough away that no one will recognize him later. Wearing a mask, disguises, is fine, but Larry knows that the way he walks, the way he holds his hands, the way he turns – all of this will give him away eventually. You can’t completely disguise who you are any more than you can be invisible. Cameras are catching him – he’s seen himself on the screen.

  Back in the storage unit. It is late at night.

  Footsteps. Larry can hear a shuffling gait. It’s subtle, but he is always hyper-aware at night. His door is shut. No one should be here, but Larry hears the footsteps and someone opening a door. The long rolling sound of a storage door as it comes up. Larry thinks the sound is coming from one aisle over, but sound carries here at night and so he can’t be sure it’s not just next door. He freezes over his keyboard and listens, every sense awake. In the months he’s been here, he’s seen only four people come to their storage units and that was always in the daytime, never at night. Hauling out old refrigerators and furniture, knick-knacks they’ve stored for no reason.

  He worries about his car, parked outside.

  The door rolls down. He can hear it click shut. The footsteps again. Disappearing. Larry has the urge to open his door slightly and peer out, but it’s impossible to peer out inconspicuously from a rolling garage door. He really needs an eyehole or something.

  These sounds come back over and over in the next several weeks. Someone is making deliveries to their storage unit at night. Larry thinks drugs. Or money. Whichever it is, it has piqued his interest. He isn’t the only one taking advantage of these rooms. He wonders if Mona knows what kind of people she rents to or if it’s just the young guy at the front desk handing out contracts and keys.

  There’s the question of Mona – who is she? Why does she own a place like this and is she alone with two children? Or is there someone in her life whom she goes home to? Where does she live? Although she has shown no interest in Larry, he knows there is something there. A spark. Anger. And when there is anger, there is also attraction. You can’t be angry at someone you don’t care about, can you? Larry suddenly remembers his mother saying something about this, about the fact that even though he said he hated Jack over and over, especially after another concussion, Larry really loved him.

  How is it possible to love someone who breaks your head open as often as he can, who escapes with your mother, a woman who leaves you in the clutches of your incapable father, who then comes back and demands attention and money?

  Mona, though. She just doesn’t know him yet. Whenever he looks at her, his headaches disappear. Whenever he is near her, he can smell her scent. Like an animal, his senses are hyper-alert.

  Daytime. Bennie and Frankie are there. Standing in front of his door when he pulls up in the car. He’s hungover. Larry rarely drinks, but last night he tied it on with two women from the bar down the street from his apartment. They insisted he drink sweet drinks with umbrellas and foam, bright in colour, and now he feels sick. He gets out of his car and stretches, tries not to catch the twins’ eyes. But they are standing there, staring at him. He looks towards the office but doesn’t see Mona.

  “What’s up?” he whispers. “I’m not supposed to talk to you.”

  One boy says, “Someone was here looking at your door.”

  Larry stops short. Moves back from opening his roll-up door. Stares at the boys.

  “What?”

  “A guy. He knocked.”

  “What kind of guy? What did he look like?” Larry wonders if Dwight has found out where he’s going. Wants to borrow money with the baby here and all. But Dwight doesn’t know about this place. No one knows about this place.

  The sedan with the darkened windows. Someone following him.

  “He was taller than you. He had a beard.”

  “Red,” the other boy shouts. “A red beard, like a pirate.”

  Larry looks again at the office. Mona will kick him out if she sees him talking to these two. And then he’d have to store his money somewhere else. More importantly, then he wouldn’t see Mona anymore.

  “What was he wearing?”

  “He was smoking. So he was bad. Smoking is really bad.”

  Larry says, “I smoke.”
>
  “Boots,” the other boy says. “Big boots. Right?” The boys nod at each other. Confirming.

  “Jack.” Larry ducks into his room and slams down the door. He can hear the boys outside for a bit. They are throwing pebbles against the storage doors and the sound agitates Larry. But soon they get bored and move away.

  Jack has found him here. In his space. Larry wonders what he wants. Why is Jack following him? Was he the one following in the sedan with tinted windows? What’s Jack up to?

  “I don’t know,” Susan says. “Honestly, he hasn’t been back for a while. I gave him some money and he took off. I haven’t seen him in weeks.”

  “Weeks?”

  “Well, at least a week.”

  “Why, Susan?”

  “Why what?” Susan stubs out her cigarette in the sink. The kitchen is a disaster, dishes piled everywhere. She’s out of control. On drugs. Her eyes are glossy and strange. The pupils dilated. Larry looks away.

  “Why do you give him your money?”

  She laughs. “Because he gives me things I need.”

  “Drugs.”

  “Yeah, fuck you. You’re so high and mighty, Larry. Just because you don’t do drugs. You don’t get it. You don’t know what I’ve been through. You just. . . Fuck off.” Susan sits down. Her hair is thinning at the part – too many dye jobs or maybe lack of nutrition. Larry suddenly feels sorry for her. He forgets that she, too, was left motherless. She, too, has suffered. But that doesn’t make her drug use acceptable. After all, he stayed away from them, why didn’t she?

  “He’s following me,” he says. “I’m not sure why.”

  She barks out a laugh, a cough, and begins to hack. Her lungs are shot. A kid – one of his nephews, Larry assumes – walks past the room and glares at both of them. “Why? Because you have money, asshole. Because he wants your money. He knows where I get it. The money. He knows it comes from you.”

  “I don’t have money.”

  Another laugh. Another coughing fit. Larry waits. The boy passes by the kitchen again as if he’s waiting for them to get out of it and let him in.

  “I just give you a bit to help you get by. I’m not rich.”

  “Get your own dinner, Danny,” Susan suddenly shouts. “I fucking have no time to make you dinner so stop staring.”

  “I don’t have any money,” Larry says. “You know that.”

  “Of course you don’t.” Susan winks.

  “Just enough for me to get by, enough to give you for the kids,” he repeats.

  Susan looks around her as if she doesn’t know where she is. “Well, he wants that, then. Anything.”

  “Tell him to leave me alone, okay? Can you remember that, Susan? Next time he comes, tell him to stay the fuck away from me. Tell him to stop following me, stop bothering me. He’s nothing to me.”

  “He’s your brother.”

  Now it’s Larry’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, right. My brother.”

  “You got any money?” Susan shouts as Larry leaves the house. “I need some money.”

  8:01 a.m.

  “Who was it in the other storage unit?” the Chaplain asks. “If someone else was there, maybe –”

  “Maybe I didn’t do anything? Is that what you’re going to say? Maybe I didn’t kill –”

  “No, that’s not what I was going to say. I was going to say that maybe someone saw something differently from how you remember. You know you blacked out that night, your memory isn’t perfect. You were stressed, concussed. You were –”

  “I never said I didn’t do it,” the Prisoner says quietly. “I did it. They have proof. I confessed. I was convicted. I will be put to death soon. What don’t you get about that?”

  The Chaplain leans back on his chair. He had been hunched forward, listening intently. Twice the Prisoner stood and paced the width of the room as he talked. Mostly he lay there on the cot staring at the ceiling, watching the words come out of his mouth and float on the air. Whenever he mentioned Mona, the Chaplain could see his lips tighten into a straight line.

  “Your sister? What happened to her?”

  “She was like that the last time I saw her,” the Prisoner says. “Even worse. Drugs. A lot of drugs. Jack had her on some pretty bad stuff.”

  “What about the nieces and nephews? What about this Danny guy?”

  “They’re old enough now. Or social services has a few of them. I don’t know. They were all brats. They want nothing to do with me. I want nothing to do with them.” The Prisoner sits up and looks at the clock. “Holy shit, eight a.m. It’s eight o’clock. Four hours left.” His teeth are bared in an unnatural smile, like a dog about to growl.

  “I guess I’m trying to help you,” the Chaplain says. “I guess I just want to help you.”

  “Yeah, well, there’s nothing you can do.”

  “But your sister? Shouldn’t she be here?”

  “Listen, think about it. Just think about it. She comes down here in four hours, watches me burn, brings her brats, they watch me burn. What good does that do? I won’t even see them with my hood on.”

  “But you will know they are here.”

  “You don’t understand.” The Prisoner’s jaw is tight. He is grinding his teeth. “It doesn’t matter anymore. None of this matters. Family doesn’t matter. It never has.”

  “I wonder if he has family coming. If I were on death row,” he asks Miranda at dinner that last Sunday night, “wouldn’t you come to be with me?”

  “Jim, you don’t get it. If you were on death row, you would have done something horrible like this guy did. Something so bad that I don’t think I could even forgive you for it. I would come, maybe. I guess I would come. But I wouldn’t forgive you. I wouldn’t be there to support you. I would just come. Or maybe not. I don’t know.” Miranda tidies up the dishes. She is well into her fifth glass of red wine. Every time Richard leaves on another long haul, Miranda has too much to drink. As if the hangover the next morning is the appropriate body response for when your husband is gone.

  “No, you would come. I know you would. You are my family. I’m your brother. Of course you’d be there to support me.”

  Miranda waves him off. “I’m not sure supporting is what the family does. Watching, more like.”

  Richard comes down from upstairs, then; the kids are finally asleep. He takes Miranda by the waist from behind and squeezes her. “You two,” he says. “Don’t you ever have anything nice to talk about?”

  The siblings look at each other. They are combative. They always have been. As children, they would debate across the dining room table, their parents raising their eyebrows at each other, silent communication, on each end. Sometimes they took opposite sides just to make dinner more interesting, not because they really believed in what they were arguing.

  “I’d come and watch for you, Jim,” Richard says. Then, “If only to see how they do it.”

  Miranda swats him with a dishtowel and that is enough of that conversation. They move on to the latest news and the kids and Richard’s truck and how he can’t stand to sleep in the cab but he does anyway to save money, and they talk about the weather and how hot the world has become. They talk about the Chaplain and his work and what they might do this summer, whether their friend Beatrice will invite them up to her cabin. They talk about all of this without touching again on the Prisoner. And then the Chaplain, thinking of Beatrice’s cabin in the woods, tells them about his recurring dream, about the seagull with the arrow.

  “God,” Miranda says. “How many times have you had this dream?”

  “Every night since they told me he asked for me to be on death row with him.”

  “You know what it means, don’t you?”

  The Chaplain raises his eyebrows. He hasn’t thought about what it all means. Not really. He’s been disturbed by it and doesn’t really want to think about it all. “What?”

  “Some guy shooting a seagull with an arrow and not killing it. It kind of suggests wanton killing, or maybe the strug
gle to survive. The idea of fate. Of having a limited time to live. It’s a symbol, sort of, for what you keep trying to tell me about death row. The gull with the arrow straight through it. He keeps flying, doesn’t he? Even though he’s going to die eventually. Like your prisoner. You’re dreaming your life, Jim.”

  Richard is silent and looks impressed.

  The Chaplain laughs. “Your courses in psychology really stuck, didn’t they?”

  “Piss off,” Miranda says. She swats him. “It’s true. Think about it.”

  He leaves that night and goes home to his own apartment, to his night of the crying gull winging over the trees and the kids down by the river or ocean or lake, holding sticks and playing. Even though he now knows what it means, he still dreams it.

  “Do you want anything? Need anything?” The Chaplain stands and looks out at the COs. His stomach aches. It could be hunger, of course – he’s only had one cookie all night – but he feels sick more than anything. As if catching something or having eaten something rotten. “I think I’ll just step out for a minute. Would that be okay with you?”

  The Prisoner nods. “Yeah, sure. Grab me more cookies.”

  The Chaplain nods, knocks on the window. The COs unlock the door and let him out. He breathes. Deeply. Again, the air is fresher in the room with the COs even though it’s the same pumped-in air conditioning.

  “How’s it going in there?” The COs all look at him, expectantly.

  “The way you’d expect, I guess. I need to use the washroom.” The Chaplain is directed down the corridor and out the door to the visiting area. He goes through three checks before he finds the bathroom. It is empty. He takes a stall, locks it, takes his pants down and then it’s as if not only the contents of his bowels but his bowels as well collapse into the toilet. He empties himself. He feels as if his insides are being torn out. Water and crap and a burning sensation. It is as if the bile that is in his stomach, the acid coming up his throat every time he thinks of the next four hours, every time he thinks of the last minutes, that acid is coming out his ass. Burning him.