Barker House

by David Moloney

  “My mom said to look out for a red Corolla,” she said. She circled my car and inspected it like a worried mechanic.

  “You don’t like my wheels?” After I said “wheels” I felt old. I wouldn’t normally say “wheels.” “I’m Mike.”

  “I figured.”

  She climbed into the backseat. She acted familiar with being picked up from school by a stranger.

  “Nobody asked me for ID. There wasn’t a teacher. Aren’t they supposed to check who picks you up?”

  Ava crossed her arms. “The teachers don’t give a care here.”

  “I used to take the bus,” I said into the rearview mirror. She looked small with the seat belt high up near her neck. “I loved the bus.”

  “You can only take it if someone is there to get you off.”

  “I see.”

  Nina had asked me to pick up Ava and watch her for a few hours until her grandmother finished her shift at Big Lots. It was two o’clock and hot. I didn’t know anything about occupying a kid.

  I could have been trying to win Nina over. I always liked being thanked by women.

  I drove through the city aimlessly for fifteen minutes and watched as Ava looked out the window, trying to figure out where we were going. Maybe I could feed her. I pulled in to the McDonald’s on Bridge Street, with the big slide and ball pit. Ava walked next to me but I kept looking at her to make sure she was still there.

  “What are you in the mood for?” I asked. “Double cheese? Chicken nuggets?”

  “Oreo McFlurry,” she said. She walked away from me and I thought I should stop her. But the dining area only had a few people eating and Ava seemed like she could hold her own.

  I ordered our food and brought it to the table. Her eyes were hazel, definitely not Nina’s black ones. She licked her spoon and looked uninterested, staring off toward no attractions.

  “You can go off in the playground thing,” I said. No other kids were in there.

  “And get herpes? Um, no.”

  I ate my burger and tried not to stare. She kept her face turned away, watching a homeless man nodding off in the corner.

  “So, your school. What’s up with the trailers? They don’t have brick schools anymore or buildings?”

  “It’s a special school,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of students.” After another bite of her McFlurry she said, “Modular.”

  “What?”

  “They’re modular buildings. Not trailers.”

  “Oh.”

  “Can I have a dollar?” she asked.

  “Still hungry?”

  She pointed. “It’s for that man.”

  I handed her a dollar and she jumped up and walked over to him, tapped him on the shoulder. He picked his head up slowly. She held the dollar out and he took it. They didn’t say a word. She walked back.

  “That was nice of you, Ava.”

  She nodded and scraped the bottom of the cup with her spoon. I wanted to comb her hair.

  “How do you know Nina?” she asked, wiggling the spoon between her fingers.

  “We dated in high school.”

  “And now?”

  “Your mom reached out to me. She needed help and trusts me.”

  “How come I never heard of you?”

  I didn’t answer her. I smiled and looked around the restaurant. An elderly couple sat behind Ava and shared a large fry. Another man sat alone and read the newspaper and drank from a huge cup.

  “Is your mom dating anyone?”

  “She dates lots of people—guys, girls. She trusts you but you don’t even know that about her?”

  “Can you give me one name in particular?”

  “No. Forget it,” Ava said. “Why does she trust you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. I couldn’t tell her that in desperation we could talk ourselves into trusting almost anyone. “We know a lot about each other,” I said. “When you know someone for so long you build trust.”

  “Tell me something Nina doesn’t know about you. Anything.”

  “Why?”

  “So when I tell her about you I can say something she doesn’t know.” Her McFlurry was finished and her hands were clasped before her on the table. She leaned in.

  I thought for a second. “Here’s one: I can’t pee into a urinal if there’s already pee in it.”

  “Weird.” She crunched up her face. “Don’t they flush on their own?”

  “Some urinals do. Not all.”

  “That’ll freak her out. But, something else.”

  “That wasn’t enough?”

  “Nope.” Her sharp eyes commanded my attention.

  “Okay. My dad has cancer.”

  “Oh. Do I say sorry?” she asked. She had one dimple on her left cheek that was visible even without a smile. I thought dimples came in pairs. She looked concerned, as if the question were genuine.

  “You can,” I said. “Cancer seems to confuse everyone.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “Sure, I’m sad.”

  “Grammy has cancer. In her lungs,” Ava said. “I don’t feel sorry for her. But I think I feel sorry for your dad.”

  “Thanks.”

  “How come you haven’t told Nina about your dad?” she asked.

  “It hasn’t come up.”

  “Are you embarrassed?”

  “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  From the parking lot, Barker House of Corrections, with the dawn sky red and menacing behind it, looked pleasant. Sometimes I’d sit in my car and watch the other officers walk in finishing cigarettes, cursing, tucking in their shirts. The worst part of our day.

  My phone rang. It was my father. I had seven minutes before punch-in.

  “Three A.M. hits and what do you know, I’m up for the day,” he said. It was the chemo.

  “Reading puts me to sleep,” I said.

  “I can’t read, too much on my mind. At work yet?”

  I told him I was. I watched Officer Tully come out of the building and light a cigarette by the flagpole. He owed us a grand this week. He was betting Canadian football. All the guys had the itch. My dad and I were middlemen for a guy who ran a gambling website. My dad took the job after he retired from the post office. Some bookie from the old days, a big shot he’d run into again when he started spending his afternoons at the VFW Post on Carver Street, offered him 33 percent of losses. You can’t say no to a cut like that. “A sweetheart deal for my former muscle,” the bookie told him. My dad wouldn’t tell me his name.

  A long silence, as if he’d hung up or got cut off, then a snap of spit. I hated when he dipped on the phone.

  “Good. Work is good. I think my body decided to kill me because I stopped working,” he said. “Not something you want to hear but I’m going to say it. Your mother won’t even let me say ‘cancer.’ She hears a radio ad for those cancer centers and she changes the station. I got no hair and a port in my chest but I can’t say ‘cancer.’ ”

  When someone tells you they have cancer, or they’re dying, you think back to the genesis. Oh, he worked with asbestos in the sixties. Agent Orange, I bet that did it. She used to swim in that pond near the plant. I did the guesswork with my dad. Stage four esophageal cancer. No surgery possible. Too embedded. I say it was beer and chewing tobacco. But he believed it was contaminated water from when he was stationed at Peterson Air Force Base. A friend of a friend at the VFW informed him of a class action lawsuit.

  “She’s worried, that’s all,” I said. I watched Tully and hoped my dad would let me go so I could catch him outside. Collecting was a hassle. The weekly visits were, too. I didn’t need the money. With his pension and my mother still working, he didn’t either. He wanted to go back in time, crack open the old ledger and probably some skulls.

  Working the book with my dad gave him some happiness, and in his final months I couldn’t take that away from him. He’d been a good father. A vet. A blue-collar worker, six days a week for thirty years. One wife. One home. Whateve
r inconvenience to me—the chase-downs, the hush-hush where people were locked up for doing what we were doing—I’d go along with. I had an obligation.

  “I’m looking over last week’s numbers. O’Brien,” my dad said. “What’s he doing betting women’s tennis?”

  “He’s single, Dad. He’s got Saturdays off.”

  “You’re single and you don’t bet tennis,” he said. I heard him spit, then click his computer mouse more times than he should have. “Get him this week. Do I even need to say that? These Dana Farber trips. Boston and back at those hours. ‘Be here for eight. You’ll be out by two.’ It’s a friggin’ shift. They should be paying me. Now that I’m pulled away sometimes I got to put more on you. Square up every week. That’s how guys get in trouble. No matter how small, you get even before the next week begins.”

  “I’ll get it all by Thursday,” I said.

  “Cancer! I have cancer!” he yelled into the phone. He coughed. “Don’t worry, she’s already off to work.”

  “Right,” I said. “I’m going to catch up with someone. I’ll see you Friday.”

  “We’re up there in the black again. We keep it high enough you’ll be all set,” he said. “When I’m gone.” He spat again.

  “You’re not going anywhere,” I said.

  Tully was a problem. He was much older than me—forty or so. He worked his ass off, twenty hours a week in overtime. He ran the Property Room, had the pleasure of conducting sixty strip-outs a day. It took a special type of officer to run Property. Off the tier, no partner, shut out in that room that smelled like someone shit in an old sock. Shriveled dicks and crusty brown-eyes all day. He had young kids, a couple of them; I didn’t know their gender or age but you could tell the fathers from the bachelors. They put in early for holidays off, had Tupperware lunches, and raked in OT.

  I found Tully alone in the locker room, standing at the sink. “Tough beat on the Alouettes,” I told him.

  “Got me on the wiggle,” he said. His hair was messy. He wet it with sink water and combed it with his hands. He was thick, and I couldn’t tell whether he was pudgy or muscular. Our uniforms could make you look great or terrible, no in-between. Whatever time of day it was, or night, Tully looked like he could fall asleep right there.

  I could see he wanted to tell me about the loss. My father taught me, no matter how much you don’t give a shit, to listen to a degenerate’s bad beat. “What they want is to tell the story behind the loss,” he’d said. “Losing is lonely.”

  “Thirty seconds to go and the kicker missed a chip shot,” Tully said as he dried his hands on his pants.

  “Shit,” I said. It was quiet and I wondered if Tully even thought about owing me money, as if the loss was just some exercise and there wasn’t a consequence. I was tired of chasing him down. I wanted him to go away. He was unimportant to me. He went to his locker and I went to mine. There were three slits in the top of my locker and that was where the officers slid in their envelopes. Inside were six of them. There was only one winner last week and I took two hundred out of an envelope to give to Hernandez on U7. I was usually discreet but I did it in the open, deliberately, so Tully would see me. He did but continued to shine his boots.

  “You owe us a grand,” I said.

  He looked up, his face at ease; his hand gripped the shine brush. He said, “I can’t swing it this week.”

  “You have to.”

  “I can’t grow money, Piccard. I’ll get it when I get it. What are you nagging me for?”

  “Tomorrow,” I said.

  “Unlikely,” he said, and kept looking at his boots.

  “You don’t bet what you can’t pay.”

  I didn’t give him time to say anything to that. I punched my locker, hard enough for effect. My dad would’ve told me to punch Tully, but I’d have to explain to my dad it wasn’t the old days. I’d texted Tully his weekly numbers. He could rat. Plus, I couldn’t hit him at the jail. I left the locker room not feeling better.

  Another week went by. I’d picked up Ava a couple more times from school. We went to McDonald’s each time, and neither of us seemed to mind. I think she liked seeing me. And Tully was still avoiding me. I tried not to think about it but my father kept texting, Where’s your boy? and How’d you make out with your boy? And then as I’d pulled in to work, another text: Did you know county employee records are public?

  An inmate walked by me with her hair up in a bun held together by a pencil, and I told her to take it out. She did but looked at me like I’d called her ugly. It’s against the rules, I told her.

  The radio was busy that day. An officer on U9 made a medical emergency call and it took a few minutes before the lieutenant cleared it. Maybe a hanging, or some form of improvised suicide. But it was probably just a seizure, nothing to get excited about.

  The unit feel was upbeat. It was Inmate Santoro’s birthday and the girls made her a cake out of Ding Dongs, Ho Hos, and red M&M’s. It was supposed to look like a baseball but looked more like a football, being brown and all. Santoro was a local celebrity. She’d gotten into it with a Yankees fan outside a bar and run him over. Sometimes at breakfast, I gave her an extra milk carton.

  Nina came out and joined the girls when they cut the cake. She didn’t look happy. I couldn’t tell if it was an act. We hadn’t been talking as much. I liked what I had with Ava, but the more I watched Nina from a distance, with a newer lens, I realized I knew nothing about her. There is winning a girl and then there is being fooled. I couldn’t lose a job over the latter. If she was already taken, I needed to proceed with care. They sat around after singing “Happy Birthday” and watched a Kardashian yell at her husband on TV. I didn’t have a piece. There wasn’t enough to go around as it was.

  When Nina went back into her cell I made a round and stood at the door. She told me to come in and when I did she kissed me. Her mouth was soft and I could taste the sugary cake. I stopped her before we could get going.

  “We can’t here,” I said.

  Nina sat on her bed. “I know. When I get out I’m giving you the best blow job of your life.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said. I remembered her ferocity during blow jobs, like my dick was a threat to her well-being and needed to be snuffed out. In a good way. It might not have been a great idea to accept one if I thought she wouldn’t stick around for more. I didn’t know if I was ready to bring one of the girls home, but Nina could be different. “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “You don’t get to ask that.”

  “That’s a bit unfair.”

  “I took a deal,” she said. “Ninety days. The judge said if the jail lets me I could do work release. Maybe at the grocery store or something. You could bring Ava by to see me.”

  “I told you this case was nothing,” I said. I couldn’t tell if she was happy about the deal. “Ava is a good kid.”

  “She told me how great you are to her.”

  “I look forward to our little dates,” I said, smiling. I meant that. Ava had given me a distraction from Tully, my dad, my empty apartment.

  “Don’t spoil her too much. I can’t keep that up when I get home.”

  It was Thursday, which was my work Friday. Lt. Hobson was reading the notes from the previous two shifts to the muster room full of officers. Tully wrote things down and looked attentive but wouldn’t look my way. I hadn’t told my dad that Tully had put me in a tough spot.

  I flanked him in the west hallway as he was heading to Property. “Is this going to become a thing?” I asked.

  “Listen, I have marital shit going on,” he said. “I’m strapped. I messed up.”

  “Everyone has stuff going on. This is a thing now.”

  “What would Hobson think of your side business?” he asked.

  “You would rat?” I said. “Think before you do. I’m not the only one in this place involved.”

  Tully dropped his hands. “Just give me time and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

  The next day, I
drove up the steep street my parents lived on. From a few houses away I could see my dad in the backyard, his pale skin, the sheen on his bald head, standing on the side of the aboveground pool, leaning over the water, and holding the old, unwieldy pool vacuum handle. He was wearing brown wool winter gloves with no shirt. He’d opened the pool a few weeks ago, always the weekend after Memorial Day. But that summer it wouldn’t get much use. His chemo treatment had a side effect where if he drank anything cold he’d feel like he was suffocating. Touching anything just below room temperature, like a metal spoon from a drawer, was like an electrocution. I didn’t know what would happen if he fell into the pool. My mother was at work at the courthouse. They made her wear men’s pants.

  “Jesus, Dad,” I said as I hopped the chain-link fence like I was twelve.

  “Three bats in the filter already,” he said, almost losing his balance. “Talk about a bad omen.”

  “Get down,” I said and climbed the stairs of the deck. It was hot out. Behind my parents’ house were thick wetlands bordered by high pine trees, giving the yard and half the pool some shade. But the heavy, humid air settled everywhere, immune to cover.

  “Someone’s got to do it,” he said.

  “I will. I brought my suit. If you fall in it’ll be like sticking your dick in an outlet.”

  He looked up in agreement and laid the long vacuum stem on the side of the pool. I leaned off the deck and held my arm out and he shimmied off the side and onto the deck.

  “Hand me a beer,” he said. Six Bud Lights were lined up on the deck railing.

  “One of these?” When I grabbed one it burnt me, and I realized why he’d put them there in the sunlight.

  Still wearing the wool gloves, he drank a beer while I vacuumed the oval pool. He asked me how collection was going. I told him not to expect the grand from Tully but didn’t tell him Tully might rat on us, ending the operation and maybe my career at the House.