The Prisoner and the Chaplain

by Michelle Berry

  “Are you okay?” the Chaplain asks.

  The Prisoner shakes his head. Then nods his head. Shrugs. He isn’t sure. “I’m walking, aren’t I? Walking forward. Am I walking?”

  The Chaplain looks down at the ground. Sees all the feet moving towards the death chamber. The COs’, the Prisoner’s, his own.

  “Yes, I guess you are.”

  Larry went back to his car and reached into the trunk, put his head down for a minute to get his tire iron, planning to knock Jack out, and then he collapsed. For only a minute. But that must have been when Jack took off. When Larry wasn’t looking. Because Jack wasn’t in the storage unit when he finally got there. Larry forgot the tire iron and went back unarmed.

  The scene that met him. He couldn’t have anticipated it. There was nothing that prepared him for it. Not the 24-Hour Variety guy or the bank manager or the dead teller.

  He was always so afraid of his brother. But this, this was why. Look what he did. Look what he was capable of.

  Larry had no excuse. He was covered in blood. He had blacked out at the scene. So groggy he couldn’t talk. Memory loss. He didn’t remember anything – he didn’t fully remember Jack being there, his figure in the darkness, until a few days ago. The police built up a good case. And as he got better, as his brain cleared over the years, he realized that even though he has never thought he was capable of doing this, this was just payment for his life of crime. Because if Mona was dead, if his mother was dead, Larry had nothing left to live for. And only days ago, when he finally remembered fully what happened that night, it was far too late to change his fate. He was ready to be executed for his other crimes. He was ready to pay and let Jack be free.

  But now? Is he sure of this now? Is he ready to pay?

  11:31 a.m. The COs stop in front of the door to the execution chamber. The Prisoner begins to shake. His whole body is shaking, he can’t stop it. Every organ in his body seems to shrink, his eyes tear over.

  “Oh God, oh God,” he cries.

  “Be strong,” the Chaplain says. The Prisoner looks at him, his companion, this man he has spent almost twelve hours with – he looks at him through his tears. The Chaplain looks at the Prisoner. There are tears in his eyes too. His hand is shaking; the Bible he carries rustles softly, all those little prayers from other religions wave in the wind created.

  The door is opened and the chair stands in the middle of the room. A bright room. Empty but for the chair. Green walls. Green trim. In one wall, a window, open curtains, and the Prisoner sees people out there. Figures. Many people. They are there to watch him die. He loses control of his body and urinates. He can feel the stream of warmth carry down his legs. The Prisoner shuffles in, pulled slightly by the guards, who quietly and considerately avoid stepping in his puddle, avoid drawing attention to it. The Chaplain is right behind him. The Prisoner can hear him breathing heavily, choking slightly and silently on his breath. As if he can’t catch it. As if he has run a million miles, not walked next door.

  Besides his mother, Mona was the only person the Prisoner had ever loved and he wasn’t sure why. He wasn’t sure why he loved either of them. The two women who had the most effect on his whole life. Neither treated him particularly well. He wasn’t even sure they loved him back. And then he was covered in their blood. Mona was brutally murdered by his brother and so was his mother, in a sense. Murdered by neglect, perhaps.

  At the Prisoner’s early trials, brain injury statistics were brought into play. Intense anger. Football players killing their wives. Documented evidence. After all, Mona was calling the police. The Prisoner was running with his money. It seemed to make sense at first. The Prisoner didn’t know what to believe. The Prisoner didn’t know what he was capable of. Before his memory came back.

  The Prisoner turns to the Chaplain. His eyes move wildly in his head. The lump on his forehead pulses. The people out there. They look in at him. The COs sit him on the chair. The Prisoner can’t bend his knees to sit, he can’t seem to do it, and CO1 physically bends his knees for him and straps him in. Tight straps. They take his breath away. The COs move quickly, efficiently, giving him no time to struggle or escape. They have been trained well. There is no hesitation. They are kind and gentle as they apply the straps. Tough but fair.

  Blacked out. Taken to the hospital. His memory was gone for such a long time. He must have killed Mona and the kids. They all told him he did it, didn’t they? They had proof. Fingerprints, blood, money in coffee tins, and the Prisoner was battered up as if she had tried to fight him off. There were the marks around her wrist where he had twisted her arm, trying to take her cellphone away. There were her hairs on his rug, his sperm, her vaginal juices. It all added up.

  And then it was too late. The blood. His vomit. His storage unit. The coffee cans. His confession – of course, his confession. What more could he do? For some time, the Prisoner couldn’t remember any of it. And then he remembered a little bit and a little bit more. But a couple days ago, by the time he remembered Jack, the figure disappearing into the storage unit, it was too late. He was sure no one would listen to him. Of course he would blame someone else, they would have said, he got the death penalty. Anything to avoid execution.

  The Prisoner realized that this penalty, this death, was what he deserved anyway. For all his other crimes. For loving Mona. For loving his mother. For his father. Susan. Her kids. For the bank murders, the 24-Hour Variety man, the B and Es. Atoning for all of his sins. Every single one of them.

  11:45 a.m.

  When the Prisoner looks up again, after they have strapped him in, after the electrodes are placed on his arms and legs and chest and temples, when he looks up and tries to catch the eye of the Chaplain, tries to focus on this man who actually believes in him, the Chaplain is looking away. He is looking out the window, to all the people out there. The Prisoner follows his gaze.

  There is the Warden. There is a politician or two.

  And there is Jack.

  Hulking, larger even than the Prisoner remembers. He has come to watch. All these years, Jack has never been in touch, never visited him in prison, never seen him, and now he’s here to watch his brother die for the crimes he himself committed. Susan sits beside him, crying. She is thin, a meth-head, her mouth caved in, her eyes like marbles in her skeletal sockets, her hair limp and lifeless. Susan’s hands move as she twists and twists a Kleenex. She avoids looking at the Prisoner and, instead, her head moves back and forth, watching everyone else in the room. Jack, though, is looking straight at him, right into his eyes, and the Prisoner’s mind goes blank. He tries to feel something, anything, but there is nothing inside of him anymore as he waits, strapped to the chair. Just animal fear. Accelerated heart rate. He can feel his pulse in his neck.

  “Larry,” the Chaplain says. “Is there any last thing you’d like to say to me?” He is leaning in close, his breath twelve-hours foul upon the Prisoner’s face.

  This is the first time the Chaplain has used his name, and the feeling he gets when he hears it is close to ecstasy. He is Larry Gallo. He is not the Prisoner.

  “Say it again,” Larry says. “Say my name.”

  “Larry. You are Larry Gallo.”

  “Thank you,” whispers Larry. “For listening to me.”

  “Is that it? That’s all you want to say?” The Chaplain is looking panicked.

  Larry looks out again at the people watching him. He scans the room. “Fucking vultures,” he says under his breath. “What good will sorry do?” he whispers to the Chaplain.

  “Are you sorry?”

  Larry smiles. And then he sees someone he doesn’t recognize. A figure in the back row, a man. He seems familiar and Larry tries to remember. A fellow prisoner, maybe? Someone from his drug days? But then it comes to him. The same eyes as Frankie and Bennie. The same mouth. The way he tilts his head as the twins did when they looked at Larry – as if curious, but really only tilting to hear better, to focus the world their own way. Mona’s ex-husband. Father of the
boys. Sitting directly behind Jack.

  Larry looks back and forth between Jack and the twins’ father. Back and forth, trying to figure it out.

  Mona’s ex never came to court. He never appeared at any of the appeals or in any of the papers. Disappeared, they said, divorced from Mona and not necessarily involved. A history of domestic abuse and so only had supervised visits with his kids and a social worker. Didn’t want anything to do with her death, or his children’s death. Wanted to be left alone to mourn. Larry had practically forgotten him.

  A small smile. The man smiles at Larry. Slightly. Lopsided. Crazed. A smile. As if he knows something Larry does not. He is staring straight into Larry’s eyes.

  Larry struggles at the straps. Mona’s ex-husband stands and turns and walks down an aisle and towards an open door. Away from him. Away from his death. Larry watches him go. The final insult. The man turns and walks away. Turns his back on Larry. He has a slight limp, an uneven gait. A mourning father. An angry ex-husband on the phone berating Mona. Making her cry and scream. A man with a noticeable limp. One foot heavier than the other. The left heavier than the right.

  Footprints in the snow. In front of the storage unit one aisle over. Groaning, crying, sighing.

  11:58 a.m.

  The hood is placed on his head. The lights go out for Larry. He cries and moans.

  “Stay still,” the COs say. And they begin to leave the room.

  “You can’t stay in here,” they tell the Chaplain.

  “I was told I can stay with him –”

  “No, you must wait with the others. No one can stay in here.”

  “I’m sorry, Larry,” the Chaplain says. He touches Larry’s arm, then the top of his head. The last human touch Larry will feel. The only touch his mother ever gave – the top of his head. She would ruffle his hair with her long fingers. “I’m so sorry, Larry. I will be right outside. I will not take my eyes off of you. Remember that. Know that.” And he leaves the room. He forgets to bless Larry. He forgets to say a prayer.

  Larry can’t say anything. Frozen in fear. The hood over his face, suffocating him. The electric current will start soon. It will course through his body, killing him. He can’t stop shaking. Every part of his body shakes and twitches. If he weren’t strapped down, he would shake across the room.

  The footsteps leave the room. The door closes. Under the black hood, Larry relives the night of the murders. He relives turning towards the storage unit, his arms full of coffee tins full of money, his head aching, his eyes clouded with pain, his vision foggy, and seeing the figure go from the dark of the aisle into the light of the room with the twin boys racing in behind him, running quickly as if they knew whomever it was. The figure going from dark into light.

  Limping slightly. The left foot heavier than the right.

  12:01 p.m.

  The Dream

  December 12, six months after the execution. It’s freezing outside, and yet, I still wake from the dream drenched in sweat. I can’t rid myself of it. The damned seagull with the arrow through its body, crying wildly over the trees. The father heads into the cabin to refill his drink, and the crying sound gets louder and everyone pauses after the gull flies past. Every night.

  Now I’m hearing the seagull in the daytime, wherever I go. Miranda thinks I should see someone.

  “A chaplain, perhaps?”

  “I’m thinking a therapist,” Miranda sneers. “Not funny.”

  “I don’t need to see anyone.”

  Miranda sits on the blue sofa in my new apartment above a convenience store on Main at Bleeker. Every time I go down to Mr. Lee’s Variety to get a carton of milk, a bag of apples, a chocolate bar, I think about Larry. I can imagine Mr. Lee himself being robbed – late dark nights, winter here, Mr. Lee perched at his counter watching the screen above the cigarette rack. Not really paying attention to who comes and goes from his store. I sometimes want to warn him, shout, “Watch out, someone will rob you,” but instead I buy milk, chocolate, say goodnight and head back up to my one-bedroom apartment above. Mr. Lee can take care of himself. I have too much going on in my own life now to worry about things I can’t control.

  “It’s not a scary dream, it’s just annoying at this point.”

  “It started right before the execution, Jim, there’s got to be more to it than you think. I thought it would disappear once everything was over, but it hasn’t. Sometimes talking to someone –”

  “You’re telling me this?”

  Miranda smiles. “I guess you know what you’re doing.”

  “Sometimes, sister, talking to someone doesn’t help. Did you ever consider that? Maybe, sometimes, we should all just shut up.”

  “That’s the spirit,” Miranda says. She smirks.

  “Talking doesn’t help, Miranda. Why do you think I gave up?”

  “You didn’t give up on talking, believe me,” Miranda says. “I’d know if you had. Blah blah blah.” She laughs.

  “Religion isn’t about talking, though, is it? It’s about listening. I wasn’t a good listener.”

  “Oh, God, Jim. You’re the best listener.” Miranda stands and walks over to the window. “Do you know what I think? I think that you listened too deeply and you listened as Jim, not as a chaplain. I think you went in there with religious feeling but came out of it with something greater. I think that some people are religious in the way that it’s organized and orderly and taught. In a way that makes sense to them. But you, you’re not like that. You’re religious in your own philosophical way. You’re kind of a religious empathic.” She laughs, delighted at what she’s said. “You are a man of empathy, not of God.”

  “I don’t even know what you are talking about.”

  Miranda sits again. “Think about it this way. When the Prisoner was about to die, what were you thinking?”

  “I –”

  “You weren’t thinking about heaven and shit, were you?”

  “No, not shit.”

  “You were thinking about being in his position. You were thinking about how you would feel if you were in his position. You were thinking about his life and how it turned out this way. You were feeling his pain viscerally. Right? Empathically? Maybe even thinking about Tracy? You weren’t thinking, at that moment, about God.”

  “But that doesn’t mean He wasn’t there with me.”

  “And now He’s gone? No.” Miranda sighs. “He’s always with you. He’s just different from what you thought He was. You became religious as a penance, not as a calling.”

  “When did you get to be so smart?”

  Miranda grins. “You lose your brain for a bit when you have kids, you know,” she says. “But then, suddenly, it comes back to you. Suddenly you can think again. Besides, I was always the smartest in the family.”

  I stand to look out the window at the light dusting of snow on the ground. It will clear up by the time I leave for work this afternoon.

  Miranda stands and walks over to me. She puts her arm around me. Squeezes lightly. “Jim,” she says. “You okay?”

  “Sure, yes. I’m okay.”

  “You could go back, Jim, give it another try. It’s not like you’d have to do another death row thing, right? That was just a fluke because the other chaplain was sick, right? You could go back to counselling the other prisoners? If you really still want to.”

  I turn and look at her face. Her kind face, so open and beautiful. “No, I’m fine, really. That wasn’t for me. You are right. I’m a religious empathic. I’m happy now, doing what I’m doing.”

  “Bagging groceries at the Fresh Market Store? You can do more than that.”

  “I’m making a salary, I have lots of hours. The exercise is good for me. I get to take home stuff that’s day-old. I don’t have to watch people get killed.”

  Miranda and I watch the snow blow in the wind.

  “Good God,” Miranda laughs. “You’re eating stale bread, living above a convenience store and working at a kid’s job. You’re forty-two years
old. You have a university education. You’ve been trained to be a chaplain. Be a chaplain if you want.”

  “Now you want me to be a chaplain? Now? Make up your mind, sister. Besides, the training doesn’t matter. You have to have it inside of you. You are right. I just don’t have it in me and I think you are also right that I don’t know if I ever did.”

  “Well,” Miranda says, looking around, “at least you get day-old bread. And,” she claps, “you said I was right. You’ve never said that I was right before. I won.”

  I can’t help but smile. I listen to Miranda’s footsteps on the stairs and then start to get ready for work.

  How can there be a God? Larry’s body bucked in the restraints. I felt I could smell burning, but I was in the other room, so how was that possible? The lights flickered. The body bucked again, tensed to the point of breaking. The body. The Prisoner. Larry.

  There was a silence in the observation room that was almost deafening – as if my ears had popped. Not a sound. Nothing. Blankness. I watched a man be put to death. A youngish, healthy man. It was as if everyone in the room had stopped breathing.

  The doctor came in after a bit and felt his pulse. He was dead.

  I reach down for the coffee cups and carry them to my kitchen, wash them in the sink, put them in the drying rack. A noon-to-six shift today. Enough to keep my mind occupied for a time. I would rather work twelve hours a day if I could, but they don’t need me that much at the Fresh Market Store. After six p.m., the kids from high school come and work until midnight.