Barker House

by David Moloney

  “You’re a perfect soft-ass with the inmates,” he said. “Giving out hugs for all.”

  “I was sick of looking at her scabs.”

  “You doing my job now?” Tully asked and picked up the inmate request form off the counter.

  “I can’t find the forty-five hundreds. You’d think they’d be right after the forty-fours.”

  “It’s like some shitbag taught you how to work the room,” he said.

  He’d shown her the CCN groupings, the specific bags that held certain items: black bags for suits and coats, boxes for shoes and jewelry, trash bags for any other clothing. She felt the system to be crude, mainly the trash bags, but it worked for Tully and there was no reason for him to change it. After a few days, he’d begun to quiz her. He’d call out a CCN and she’d walk to the grouping, find the bag or box, and pull out the item requested. She was excited how easily she picked it up. Though it was not difficult, she didn’t want to look stupid in front of Tully, nor show him up by making it look too easy. She would play dumb, mistakenly grab the wrong bag, or ask him for a hint. But once, he patted her back and she moved away. She paused. He had already moved on to another bag but she could still feel his hand on her back and she couldn’t help but think of her father. Intention. She watched him move about the room deliberately.

  And now she was searching in the wrong spot. She only had one strip-out, and she wanted to linger a bit, to not leave and return to her unit. “Can you help me?”

  “You don’t need to do this anyways,” he said. “But I’ll help. You’re six or seven feet in the wrong direction.”

  Tully walked behind her and went down the line of bags and pointed to where she should have been. “Here,” he said. “Since you insist, I’m going to get lunch.”

  After he left, Brenner wanted to call him back—for what, she didn’t know. She abandoned the search for the right bag and left the Property Room to return to her unit. She walked down the west hallway toward the elevators outside Central Control and listened to the chatter on the radio, officers calling for doors to be opened, Lt. Hobson putting out a call for overtime takers to no response, it being a Saturday. She stayed close to the wall and walked upright, knowing she was being watched by the two officers in Central, most likely making comments about her demeanor or if they would bang her. The male officers were judged by their size: the big ones were dumb; the skinny ones were pussies. Pigs.

  She took the elevator alone, then walked down the second-floor east hallway, through the sliding doors, and then she entered U4’s sally port, a small enclosure surrounded by windows, one magnetized locking door to get in the unit and another to leave. The exit door secured behind her. Through the windows, she could see Menser idling on the mezzanine, watching the inmates lift weights. The inner door wouldn’t unlock until he strolled down to the control panel and let her in. But the door had some give so she ripped at the handle, enough to force the magnet to bang it back shut. Nothing from Menser. An inmate sat inside the door at the first dayroom table and watched her. He had a hairy mole on his chin, tattooed neck, bedhead. She banged the door again. Menser noticed her but wasn’t budging. She returned Mole Face’s stare and, in the air, drew a 3 1. He rubbed his groin. The minute she got on the floor, she thought, Mole Face was getting locked in. But her eyes combed the dayroom and she saw many more men staring. And now she was stuck in the sally port, smothered by the weight of all the stares of men she didn’t know but disliked. Couldn’t write them all up. And it triggered a feeling inside, like she was a model for them, an animated magazine cutout. She’s seen their jerk-off material: Victoria’s Secret catalogs, photos from chubby girlfriends, escort ads from the phone book, newspaper clippings. They could get off to anything, and they did, and they were staring to pack away her body for later. Recently, when she left the Property Room, she had stood outside the door and put her ear to it. After only a few seconds, she heard Tully turn the radio on, listen to sports talk. She could hear long zippers and then boxes tumble, like he was rushing.

  End of October. A month of Brenner’s visits to Property. It was yet another New England fall that could be mistaken for winter, the air damp and cold. Tully had become less talkative. Brenner felt she’d become uninteresting and decided to tell him about her curb shopping. When driving through Nashua and Hudson, she would pull her RAV4 over when she noticed furniture left on someone’s curb that looked like something she could work with: armoires, desks, dressers, pub tables, and stools and chairs, whatever was small enough to cram into the trunk. At home after her shifts, she would undress, change into an old T-shirt and jeans, go into the second bedroom, and continue working on whatever piece of furniture she had started on. The room smelled of wood and paint. The carpeted floor was covered with a tan canvas drop cloth, spattered with a year’s worth of work. Her joy was in the sanding and painting and staining, she told him; repurposing something someone else no longer had any use for, then furnishing her apartment with it. Her coffee table was an antique chest. The two side tables next to her couch were wooden chicken crates. The bookshelf in her bedroom was three coffee tables stacked on each other, stained chestnut. She didn’t tell Tully about her mother’s dolls, how sometimes she asked her dead mother if the finished product looked all right.

  They searched bags and laid out the day’s court transit attire. It was early, and every so often Tully sipped from his coffee cup. He closed his eyes before each sip, like he was afraid of the coffee’s heat. He didn’t say anything about her hobby. His pleated pants were tight on his thighs. He hadn’t shaved in days.

  In the way of Tully’s happiness seemed to be his marriage, but he would never say. It could be as simple as falling out of love with his wife, trying to keep her happy in the aftermath. Or maybe he never loved his wife.

  She looked over her shoulder and watched him. She liked the way he looked, with his arms at his side boyishly, smiling, his hair loose from the part and curled down his forehead. She wondered how she looked to him, if he wished her black hair to be down. And then he turned to her and looked at her as so many of the inmates did, with an intent gaze, as if she were not his equal, as if the inmates were not inferior, and she wanted to leave.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Nothing.” He held his stare.

  “Don’t make this something.”

  “You started it,” he said, and moved back to the bags.

  She had her reasons for not wanting to get involved with Tully. For one thing: he’d stop being a real man. There is no worse person than a man with impudence, who’s received what he’s been aching for. She remembered Dylan from high school, his bony body, his weed-smelling hair, his disregard for the power she had given him. She slept with him on Saturday and Sunday of that weekend in a tiny beach cottage, and his proud casualness made her want the weekend to be over, to forget his spit, the taste of cinnamon liquor, the laughter outside the bedroom door. Dylan disappointed her, not in the usual first-time disappointment. She was new and he was seasoned, had a method during sex that was practiced. And he was rough and adamant on coming on her breasts, her neck, and laughed as he came, then bragged afterward. She could still feel him on her skin days later, the smell of come chemical-like and hazardous like paint thinner.

  She needed to change the subject. “I once found a gun rack, more like a cabinet. It had a glass window in the door and the glass was spidered with a hole the size of a fist,” she said.

  He pulled down a box and slid it across the brown-and-white-checkered floor toward her feet.

  “Farquhar is requesting his silver wedding band,” he said. “It should be in there.”

  Brenner opened the box and began rummaging through the items: a rough-bristled comb, a gold chain, a leather wallet torn on the seam, held together by a safety pin.

  “It’s funny. No, it isn’t. I mean it’s funny that you fix stuff up. Trash. I’ve imagined what you do outside of here but I’d never imagined that.”

  She kept looking
in the box but stopped searching for the ring.

  “I mud wrestle in bars,” she said. “I’m a shopaholic. I go to movies alone, but I buy two tickets so the teller doesn’t think I’m weird.”

  “Not like that,” he said. “I imagine you making coffee in the morning. What TV shows you watch at night. If we’re watching the same thing.” He unzipped a black property bag, then stood still in front of it.

  “I could be guilty of thinking about you.”

  “All the time?” he asked.

  She bent back down and ran her hands through the box. She heard him walk toward her and she kept her back to him. Though she was pretty certain he was going to kiss her, it might still be a gag, and when she turned he would be wearing underwear on his head. But he put his hand on her shoulder and she stood up and he turned her and he kissed her. The turn was forceful, as was the stubble on his chin against her chin. He kept on her like he wanted to get the most out of the kiss before she pushed him off. But she did not push him. She held her eyes shut and he turned his chin over and continued the kiss on the other side of her mouth. His aftershave and deodorant were fragrant, both a cool spicy wintergreen. When she felt his chest against hers, then his excitement against her, she pulled away. He pulled her back and kissed her again and his hand went to her breast, then to her neck. His hands were strong. They un-tucked each other’s shirts and Brenner started to unbutton Tully’s shirt. He pulled himself out and she touched him and he put his hand down her pants and touched her.

  “No,” she said, turning her face.

  He kept rubbing her, kissing her neck.

  “Tully, stop. Please.”

  “I know. I know.”

  He turned from her and fixed his uniform.

  He said, “I’ve never done this before.”

  Brenner didn’t want to allow him the satisfaction. If she was his first cheat, she’d been given a reverence unworthy of anyone before.

  But it was disgraceful, and Brenner didn’t feel that until she left the Property Room, the controlled air in the hallway dry and fake, the lighting in the ceiling bright, all of it produced. She wanted to leave the building and stand outside and breathe.

  Back in her unit Menser seemed annoyed at the length of her absence, all intentional huffs and groans. She feared she smelled like Tully, it clung to her, her sense of smell heightened by awareness, like when she hid her cigarettes from her father. But Menser didn’t look back at her, just bent into the control panel, opened the inner door 4018A, and let himself off the unit for lunch.

  The toothless prostitute stood before her in a ragged pink Juicy Couture shirt, silver-jeweled, ripped Juicy jeans, and high winter boots.

  “Show me your hands. Good. Wiggle your fingers. Now run them through your hair. Mouth. What’s that?”

  “A tongue ring.”

  Brenner had grown tired of the searches, the monotony of ceremony, the stripping down of another woman to nothing. She could make them feel violated inside the inelegant Property Room, calling to order their wrongdoings. There, in their nakedness, Brenner could make them feel any number of ways. Because of this, she may have dreaded the searches more than the inmates.

  “You need to remove the ring,” Brenner said and held out her gloved hand.

  The new admit fumbled with the rod but got it out. After she placed it on Brenner’s hand, a string of saliva hung from the inmate’s fingers to Brenner’s. The inmate shook her hand, disconnecting the two of them, and wiped the saliva on her leg.

  After dismissing the inmate, sending her back to the tank in Booking to await her transport, Brenner waited in the Property Room for Tully.

  He came in and quickly looked away from her. She looked past him at the rows of black bags, the cubbies underneath with boxes of wedding rings and keepsakes, black trash bags of dirty clothes last worn by people losing their freedom.

  The first week in November, Menser’s mother died. Brenner had worked with him for a few months and it was the custom anyway to attend any wakes regardless of how well you knew another officer. The day of, she put on a dress she hadn’t worn in a long time, not since starting at the jail, and she straightened her naturally curly hair.

  But she rushed through the funeral home and the wake, suddenly aware that seeing Tully and his wife was a possibility. Her brevity disconcerted her. Tully had made her feel wrong and not herself. And now, on her short drive home through Nashua, she decided she wouldn’t allow Tully to make her feel that way.

  The late afternoon sun glinted off the cars parked along the sides of roads, lined with houses packed so close they lacked driveways. Brenner glanced at curbside freebies: a lawn mower, a toy kitchen, a mattress leaned against a chain-link fence. At a red light, she noticed a bench with a cracked laundry basket on top filled with paint cans. On the next block she pulled over, and in her black dress and heels, she walked back down the street toward the bench. The wind blew heavily, leaves loose and free twisted past her. She’d forgotten her jacket in the crossover. The traffic at the light was stopped and she tried not to think about the people watching her, their comments or quips to other passengers. She placed the laundry basket on the sidewalk. It was a Santa Fe–style bench but that didn’t matter because she was taking it anyway. She dragged it, walking backward, feeling the vibration of pine on cement. When she reached the trunk of her crossover, as if in her sweatpants and T-shirt, she heaved the bench clumsily inside.

  When Brenner worked on pieces she’d picked up, she took her time. She sanded off the name ABIGAIL in red paint from the yellow pine children’s bench. She could have stopped when the lettering was faint. But with her face mask and work glasses on she drove her shoulder and wrist into the bench along the grain, the bottom of the g giving her the most resistance, each stroke taking off more layers, deeper into wood, away from what it was and who it had been for.

  When she was done sanding and stripping it, the bench now a blank canvas, she decided to paint it a bright red and keep it nameless. It took her two hours for the first coat. While it dried, with a dust mask hanging from her ears, she sat at her computer table, a Chatelet writing desk she’d bought at an estate sale in Salem for eleven dollars. She ran her fingers over the wood. She could make money doing this. She looked over her accent chest, its curved legs, its ginkgo-leaf pulls, the care she’d taken with it. The Biedermeier armchair. The maple dough box end table. That took her most of February. But what kind of career was that? Releasing something you worked so hard on? Carrying Officer Kelley on her back up six flights of stairs during the academy, not quitting, not crying, though she’d wanted to, meant something. Her swollen thighs after hundreds of prisoner squats. Being pepper-sprayed in the showers. Captain Dixon’s face when he pinned the badge on her chest, how she knew he never thought she’d be beside him on the podium.

  She searched Facebook for Joe Tully, and on his profile page she clicked on Married to Kathy Gaudette-Tully. Tully’s wife had a chubby face, brown hair, a profile picture that cropped her out from the neck down.

  The next night, the bench with two proper coats on and dried, was again stuck into the back of the crossover. Brenner drove toward 10 Hanover Road, easily found on BeenVerified, a website she hadn’t known existed. Hanover, a dead-end turnoff from Miles Road, a long road that went all the way back into Massachusetts and north right up to the jail. Brenner found the house and drove past it, spun around the cul-de-sac, looked for any signs of outdoor activity, but it was cold and dark and Tully was probably putting his kids to bed or helping with homework, fumbling over math problems or reading vocabulary sentences. Or maybe the kids were really young, she didn’t even know, and Tully was making love to Kathy while thinking about Brenner. Tully could just be doing dishes, or watching TV with his feet up, biting his fingernails because he couldn’t dip in front of the kids. Or maybe Tully was the kind of father who could dip in front of the kids. A master of his home. Whatever it was he was doing inside the white colonial, with the left side of the house lit up fro
m the inside, Brenner didn’t want to focus on it.

  She pulled along the front lawn, which was lined with a dozen filled leaf bags. The lawn was well kept and evenly cut, the moon in the clear night sky showing off Tully’s husbandry in the dark. Brenner was a hiccup, a reprieve from Tully’s domestic indigestion. She felt again a girl, learning sex with Dylan, embarrassed and anxious to grow to a time when it was all easy. With the car running, she got out and pulled the bench from the trunk, dragged it slowly so as not to make a sound, and abandoned it in the center of Tully’s lawn.

  Brenner kept her distance from Tully for the next couple of weeks. It was difficult. She still saw him every day during her shift but she did the strip search and then left the Property Room and went back to her unit. He did not prod her or hang around the room when she left. Though some days she hoped for it, she’d come out into the Booking hallway and he wouldn’t be right outside the door.

  Then in December, Lt. Hobson approached her before a shift and asked her if she could re-acclimate Officer Tully to unit work.

  “I noticed he taught you the Property Room,” Hobson said.

  Brenner must’ve looked odd because Hobson said, “You signed off on some property request forms.”

  “Sure,” she said. “No problem, sir.”

  On the unit, Brenner took the lead. She took the radio, did the head count, and wrote out the opening log. Tully walked around the unit, peered into the showers, fiddled with a pair of nail clippers that had been broken for some time. He ignored Brenner. He was quiet, nodded to her at times, refused to make eye contact. He alphabetized the inmate ID tags. He channel-flipped for groups of indecisive TV watchers. Outside the Property Room and exposed on the unit, he looked new and unsure, like a freshly booked inmate.

  The unit was easy enough to run by herself. It wasn’t like there were heavy bangers up on U4. And she had also been there for six months, knew every inch of the triangular, two-tiered unit. She could rattle off all of the sixty-eight inmate bunk assignments from memory, started to even remember laundry bag numbers, surprised herself when things she hadn’t tried to memorize began to pop into her head when needed. “Inmate Hanes? Bottom bunk, cell 17. Bad back. Upper bunk restriction. I believe he’s in the shower.”