Barker House

by David Moloney

  She didn’t come out and ask about the move and also didn’t hear anything in the rumor mill. She watched him mosey around, avoid confrontation, stick only to friendly inmate interactions, lean against the wall where she wondered if he’d fallen asleep.

  At lunch she asked Officer O’Brien what was going on with Tully’s move. O’Brien didn’t question her interest and told her, rather hushed over his black coffee, that Tully’s marriage had proceeded to an ugly divorce. He’d recently gotten his third DUI, maybe a week or so ago. If O’Brien had to guess, one DUI was a mistake, the second a tragic oversight, the third a career killer. She wanted to un-hear the news. She didn’t see Tully as a drinker. She couldn’t really imagine what he was. She knew as much about him as she did about the inmates on the tier.

  At least Menser wouldn’t put up with catcalls. The staring he didn’t mind. But something about the inmates’ yells and whistles made him red. It was as easy a D-ticket as they come, easy even for him, and they all had to make the monthly quota Hobson had laid down. Brenner kept her 3.1 D-tickets colorful, made sure to get the exact wording. Bitch gives me porn dick. Tully was so checked out, he didn’t write any tickets, and it was hard for Brenner to write up each infraction. But there were more important tasks than a handful of tickets: running the entire unit, chow, cleaning details, nurse call, programs, pat-downs, cell searches. It was starting to be too much for her to handle alone. She would normally call out each asshole, knowing if she let one get away with it, she’d be back to the beginning, back to her blossoming days, back to hiding herself from the eyes of gas pumpers and grocery baggers and her friends’ fathers.

  After making a routine round, poking her head into a few cells, she gloved up and approached Tully and told him she needed assistance searching 2327. He followed her up the metal stairs. The unit was active with dominoes and TV, showers and phones. Inside the cell, they began searching, left to right, top to bottom.

  “I’m losing control of the unit,” she said as she flipped through sheets of paper from the desk cubby. “I need a partner.”

  “There’s nothing in this cell but crispy socks,” he said.

  “I’m not playing around.” She stopped searching. “What, this is punishment?”

  “What did you do that was wrong?”

  Brenner left Tully in the cell. She de-gloved, walked the tier, and it was like she couldn’t hear anything at all.

  The next morning, she ironed one of her older, tighter uniform shirts. She put on a light coat of blush, some eyeliner. In muster, she kept her head down, hoping Hobson wouldn’t call her out. No makeup. No piercings. Jail bun, that’s all. She walked down to the unit with Tully next to her and he didn’t say anything. They hadn’t spoken about what happened in the Property Room since it happened. The silence between them had gone on so long that it was comforting and speaking to each other would be painful. But in this short walk down the east hallway, alone, she could break the silence. If she didn’t then, they’d be on the unit, in front of the inmates, and it’d be another day she’d … She stopped him with her arm.

  “I’m sorry about everything happening to you,” she said.

  Tully took a deep breath. “It’s happening because of me.”

  They were standing outside the unit outer door. The hallway was quiet; the artificial lighting above them faint; the walls bricked and bare.

  “I’m not going to tell you what to do,” she said. “But it can’t be good for you to keep this up.”

  He looked around but not at her, like he was anxious. “What about you? What are you doing?” he asked. “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

  He turned and pushed the door open into the sally port. She followed him.

  After head count, with the doors unsecured, she made her rounds. Inside an empty cell, she dropped her hair down into a ponytail. The inmates let her pass carefully; she didn’t need to turn around to know they turned themselves to watch her walk on. A few seemed unsure. Some of the older ones gave her disapproving looks from their tables. Back at the officer station from her round she saw Tully watching her, crossing and uncrossing his arms with an uncomfortable shifting of shoulders on the wall, couldn’t find a good side to sleep on.

  During noon lockdown and head count, she told Tully to go to lunch break first. They switched off, as all partners on the units did, and she’d gone first the day before. She sat at a table, and instead of going on break, Tully came over and sat with her.

  The unit was quiet except for some toilets flushing, then an occasional laugh from a cell. They were sitting at the table in front of the officer station. The unit smelled terrible after lunch, all the inmates going back to their cells to relieve the food they claimed was laced with laxatives. Tully sat across from her and he laid his hands out on the table.

  “I wouldn’t take back what I did,” he said.

  She nodded.

  He looked away and watched the clock on the far wall. His sadness was enough to make her afraid for him. She couldn’t understand the way he let his face get, close to collapsing into a sob. The silence of the unit was everywhere around them but not between them. She wasn’t against him. If they weren’t on the unit, in a place anywhere but where they were, she’d put her hand out. She imagined doing it, she imagined him putting his hand on hers but never looking at her, never acknowledging it.

  His chin was tucked into his clip-on tie. He still wouldn’t look back at her. She wanted to be back in the Property Room.

  “Did you happen to see Wilkerson fall coming down the stairs?” she asked.

  He laughed, seemed happy to change the subject. “I did. Poor bastard’s leg keeps getting worse.”

  “It’s like his leg stutters.”

  He laughed again and this time looked at her. His mouth finally looked natural again, lips spread out, cheeks heightening. His eyes were squinted and raw, like he’d been in a dark room and someone turned a light on him.

  “Maybe he’s running out of batteries,” he said.

  She checked her watch.

  “You left that bench on my grass,” he said. “My daughter thinks it was the tooth fairy. She’s got it up in her room.”

  “The tooth fairy has it too easy. No work and all the credit.”

  “You should go to break. Wash up.”

  “I’m not done yet.”

  Head count cleared over the intercom and they both stood and walked to the officer station. The inmates opened their doors, came out, sat at dayroom tables for TV watching, some pulled off their shirts and started pulling at the weights, others circled the officer station and control panel, eyeing the partners.

  Brenner unrolled the control panel cover by slowly bending at her waist, grasped the long silver handle with a deliberately tender grip, looked up and smiled toward a group of inmates sitting at a table. A sitcom played on the TV behind her.

  Inmate Robinson, under his breath but certainly loud enough for her to hear, said, “I want a bite of that.”

  Brenner straightened and looked at Tully. He walked out from behind the control panel and stood in front of Robinson, who was sitting on a stool where Tully had just been sitting.

  “A bite of what?” Tully asked.

  “I didn’t say nothin.’ ”

  “Too pussy to say it again?”

  Robinson pretended to watch the TV. Brenner knew where this ended and she wasn’t about to stop it. She saw a life in Tully. She wanted him to have this moment.

  “That’s what I thought. Lock in, inmate,” Tully said.

  Robinson shook his head. “It wasn’t me.”

  “You have two seconds. Lock the fuck in.”

  Robinson sat tilted on the stool, leaning on his elbow on the table. Inmates were hanging over the railing on the top tier; some had come halfway down the stairs. Tully pointed up to the crowd, told them to get the fuck off the stairs. He had his hands out in front of him, his sleeves tight around his biceps, his chest squared on Robinson. Brenner stood still, her hand ove
r the radio mic clipped on her shoulder. She knew Robinson was going to cower to Tully. She knew she wouldn’t need to make a call. But she didn’t want to seem like a bystander.

  Robinson slowly got up and walked up the stairs and stood in the threshold of his cell, 13. Tully walked backward to behind the panel, unrolled the cover without looking away from Robinson, and released cell 13 from its lock. Robinson closed the door in front of him slowly. Tully turned to Brenner and winked at her convincingly like he would have in the safety of his Property Room. He rolled the cover back up and made a round with long strides, the inmates letting him pass with enough space for two of him.

  Big Mike / Willie’s

  “First Shifters”

  The day after Sam Knudsen shot himself, we gathered at the tap house we frequented on occasions like retirements, birthdays, anniversaries, and once, a send-off party when Connelly left for his second tour, but never returned.

  O’Brien was drunk when he walked in, having had the day off. He joined the four of us. We sat there at three in the afternoon after shift and we drank deconstructed Irish car bombs in our white undershirts; all of us except O’Brien were still wearing our brown county-issued slacks and boots. Someone in the bar played a dozen straight Guns N’ Roses songs and I spent most of the next hour searching the other patrons, trying to figure out which asshole would do such a thing. O’Brien recommended we get cross-eyed and tell stories about Sam Knudsen. He said that’s how the Irish mourned. We were fine with it. Greenly drank two beers and two Bushmills to everyone else’s one. He kept asking why Sam Knudsen would kill himself with a bullet to the head. His wife wouldn’t be able to have an open casket at the wake. The more Greenly drank the more we could feel the desperation in his voice. How could he? didn’t feel like a rhetorical question but one in which Greenly yearned for an answer only Sam could give. Cartel didn’t say anything at all.

  After we were all feeling pretty wet, Cartel warmed up. He spun a half-full shot glass in between his forefinger and thumb and told a story about the day he and Sam Knudsen floored a monster of an inmate on U6. He said he’d never gone for the guy with only one other officer but this time he had Knudsen. He didn’t tear up, his voice didn’t crack. Nothing like that. He just talked to the shot glass and we drank and listened and no one interrupted him or asked questions.

  Greenly told us about the day his father died. How Greenly had been cutting the lawn when his wife ran out to him with the news and he’d only got it half done, the uncut portion noticeably longer. He stood there wondering what to do. His father couldn’t use his help; he was gone. The bastard had remarried and ran off to Florida anyway. His wife cried in his arms. It was an otherwise beautiful day. Sun, birds—that kind of shit. Greenly struggled with how wrong it’d look if he sent her inside and finished the lawn. He decided to walk into the house with her and calm her down and when she was good he went back out and finished. We all agreed he wasn’t wrong in doing that. I wanted to tell them about my father and how he died. But it was recent and from painful cancer and there really wasn’t a point to attempting to describe it.

  Cartel got real talkative. He told us about a time, when he was fifteen, he’d found a cat wandering around his house and he took it in. The cat was fine for a few months and his father told him he’d need to care for it or it was gone. It started pulling up pieces of the carpet in the living room and then one day Cartel came home from school and the cushion to the couch was spilled out all over the room. He tried to get all the stuffing back in before his dad came home and his mother even helped him. The pieces were too small, too much of them, and his father walked into the mess and ordered Cartel to take care of the cat. Cartel wrapped the cat in a sheet and brought it out into the yard and dug a hole. He tossed the sheet into the hole and he shot the cat with his hunting rifle. Cartel told us the cat was a fighter. It didn’t die right away. It actually got one paw ripped through the sheet before it stopped moving.

  O’Brien asked why the hell Cartel would tell that story. He looked to be fighting back tears but we all knew this wouldn’t be a place to let them flow. Cartel looked real drunk and all he could say was, “Sorry. It’s the last time I shot a gun.”

  I grew a mustache to honor Sam Knudsen. He’d had this real bushy mustache, brown and soft and even, just a real enviable mustache. I’d never grown one before and the first few days I had to remind myself that my embarrassment was temporary; Sam Knudsen could never grow one again.

  We all grew mustaches; Cartel’s was most like Sam Knudsen’s. O’Brien’s was blond and always looked wet. Greenly’s and mine grew in the slowest and we made a contest out of it to see whose would finally come in first. Menser was the only first shifter who refused. We figured he had his reasons. We didn’t prod him on why and sometimes when we joked about them and poked fun he’d smile and I could tell he’d wished he grew one, too.

  After the services were behind us, Captain Dixon walked into morning muster and told us how much he missed Sam Knudsen. Dixon didn’t have any stories to tell about him because the captain hid in his office most days. His idea of mourning was to have a Wiffle ball game in the gym after shift. We’d call it the Knudsen Classic and make it a yearly thing. There was a soft applause that was more sarcastic than appreciative. Because that’s what the House did after tragedies. Morale boosters through sport.

  We dressed in sweatpants and white T-shirts. All first shifters were there, the librarians and nuns even joined in. Dixon had made the teams himself and we had rules and got real serious about it. O’Brien insisted he pitch; I never would have known he had a wicked knuckler. He sat us down for the first three innings in order and we shagged pop-ups that sometimes got lost in the bright gym lights. Cartel hit a ball so hard it cracked and sputtered in the air, traveled across the large gym, and smacked off the Knudsen Classic banner Dixon had made and strung the length of across the back wall. Cartel ran the bases and everyone yelled. The whole jail seemed to yell.

  I lined a ball down to first where Sister Mae was positioned. The ball hit her in the gut and she doubled over like she’d been shot. I dropped the bat but didn’t run. Afterward, O’Brien told me it knocked the wind out of her. They were afraid she wouldn’t catch her breath. A real heart-stopper, he said. But we’d missed all that; Cartel and Greenly had been tugging at my neck and we used the laughter and commotion to hide the big fat tears in our eyes.

  O’Brien / Special Status Unit 3

  “Broken Unit”

  Field Training Officer O’Brien looked at Officer Candidate Carmichael with acute uneasiness. He wanted to sign him off his leash as soon as possible, get on with his normal work. But he couldn’t let this dipshit free to work in his building. He would have to at some point, but not yet. He looked at Carmichael. His fat cheeks bubbled over his collar; the clip-on tie looked crooked and O’Brien couldn’t understand how that could be so. Carmichael stood over U3’s control panel like it was the controls for nuclear weapons.

  O’Brien rubbed his face with both hands and then tried to pull the skin off his forehead. “What’s the problem?” he asked.

  “When I blink, there’s this orb, it’s like fluorescent green, and it hovers through my field of vision and currently it is taking more than you can imagine for me not to reach out and swat it away,” Carmichael said.

  Carmichael’s hand danced over the button that opened Inmate Moncrieff’s cell. He looked up at the secured unit, then back down at the panel. The kid was on his third FTO and should have been at least break-approved at this point. Carmichael was O’Brien’s third too. The House was always running an academy, so O’Brien was assigned an OC every six weeks. He’d only been an FTO for a few months, after he found a shiv on Max. He had been searching the common areas during downtime and noticed, in the shower, an orange knot tied off inside the drain. The drain was loose, and with a bit of urgency he pulled it up and there, hanging by a string of orange fabric, was a blade shoved into a toothbrush. When he brought it to Lt. Hobson, the
re was no praise. Typical Barker House. Instead, Hobson put O’Brien in for a promotion. It had come too easily, O’Brien had thought. Since FTOs wore brown, same as the officers, same as O’Brien, he always thought of them as honorable representatives of the badge. But having had a few bad candidates, he wondered how any FTO stayed honorable.

  “Open the door,” O’Brien said. He moved behind the panel next to Carmichael, who smelled like a bag of potato chips.

  He turned to O’Brien, his eyes near the side of his face, his pointed ears, his mouth hidden by the cheeks. He looked like a fat-faced rabbit. O’Brien wanted to pick him up by his tail and kick him out of the building.

  “For Christ’s sake,” O’Brien said.

  “I hate when that happens. It’s like you feel like it’s going to rain so you put on a raincoat but then it never rains and the sun’s out and you’re walking around in a stupid raincoat with this smiling astral ball giving you the look.”

  O’Brien tried to calm himself. He was genuinely concerned with Carmichael ever working alone in the jail. O’Brien wasn’t so much worried he would get himself hurt; he wasn’t overly attached to Carmichael personally. O’Brien was actually another what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about comment away from hurting Carmichael himself. The concern was more about Carmichael fucking up and getting another officer hurt. His body positioning, cowardly demeanor, and who-says-this-shit-anyway type of garbage coming from his mouth. He’d be picked over, laughed at, demeaned, until he surrendered to becoming a contraband mule, or, even worse, their friend.