Barker House

by David Moloney

  DON:

  What were you thinking?

  RAY:

  Oh, God, a few things. Her legs were squirming. She really wanted it. It was like she’d been there forever, waiting for me.

  DON:

  You gave it to her, didn’t you? You old dog. Now that’s a dream.

  RAY:

  Sure.

  DON:

  So, you in on this or what? Paquin’s waiting and I saw Ingram drooling over the sausages and I don’t want that prick anywhere near this batch.

  RAY:

  Take the cheese from under my bunk. In the box. I’m all worked up now. That dumb fuck probably sold my books on Craigslist. He knows how much they mean to me. It’s out of my hands though, right, Don? Give me some consolation here.

  DON:

  It’s like me giving away Bernie. He was out of my hands. Now cut it out. At least you remember your dreams. I wish I remembered mine the way you do.

  RAY:

  Don, you should’ve seen it. The room was enormous.

  Kelley / Transport Detail

  “Asleep”

  The machines beeped and flashed red and green. The man attached to the wires and tubes was still alive, but more than one nurse had used the term “brain-dead.” Kelley watched the closed eyelids shudder and imagined the man pleading for a glimpse at the light again. Or maybe only the eyes were pleading, as if they were able to detach themselves from their vessel. Kelley’d been staring at him for too long, attempting to find any signs of life, and every so often the inmate’s eyeballs would twitch. The sight before him reminded him of a blindfolded man who had earlier knelt before a firing squad.

  The afternoon nurse came in and Kelley tried to look at the ready for critical action, but he and the nurse both knew his presence was not needed. He was merely there for accountability. Jail policy. She stood over the patient, looked at the monitors, and wrote things down. The man was Inmate Ronald Henderson. He had hung himself thirty-three days into his stay at Barker House of Corrections. He survived, and they called that lucky. Jail aphorism: No one dies in our house. Kelley was reminded of another saying, one that the training coordinator engrained in them as hopeful cadets during the academy: The inmates leave in the same or better condition than when they arrived.

  “You want a drink?” the nurse asked. “Hungry?”

  He told her he was fine, thanks. He smiled. She was overweight, had thick curls in her gray hair. She was nice, smelled like dessert, reminded him of something warm, like apple pie. The comparison made him hungry. He’d last eaten at noon in his apartment, a burnt English muffin that lent itself to being covered in a shitload of grape jelly.

  “He could’ve saved you guys all this trouble,” she said, shaking her head while looking down at Henderson. “This overtime for you?”

  Kelley didn’t know what she meant about trouble. He wondered if she meant it would have been better if Henderson were cold dead when he was found in his cell, or better if he hadn’t decided to tie the sheet around his neck at all. He stared at Henderson and wanted to ask the nurse about the eye twitches.

  “Was hard to pass up,” he told her.

  She bent over and fixed Henderson’s arms, tucked them closer to his body, as if Henderson had moved them. She looked back up at the machines as if they had changed as well.

  “We called his mother. She’s up from Florida. This’ll be her call,” she said. “What’s you guys’ policy on visits? We’ve never had one of your boys get a visit before.”

  Kelley didn’t know the policy. This was his first shift ever as a transport officer. He wasn’t even formally trained as one. He was sent because the jail could pay him normal overtime, he guessed, not double time like the transport team received. Lt. Hobson gave him strict orders not to talk to any reporters. “Suicides at the House make for good stories. Let’s not make this a big thing,” Hobson said. “A lowlife went and offed himself and let’s not make it a headache.” Henderson wasn’t going to get up and try to escape. There was no fear of that.

  As a rookie, taking on the overtime looked good to a man like Lt. Hobson. It showed Kelley was buying in, ponying up. And it definitely didn’t look bad to Rachel. The only reason she minded about tonight was the timing of the shift. Rachel was worried she was pregnant. Worried may have been understating it. When she broke the news to Kelley, she did a rundown of the last dozen times they’d had sex. They both remembered the one time they didn’t use a condom. It was after her friend Holly’s twenty-fifth birthday, a night of strictly margaritas for the girls to honor Holly’s drink of choice, and they were out of condoms. Kelley didn’t protest.

  “Can I use your phone?” he asked.

  The nurse led him to the long counter of computer screens and phones that ran down the entire hallway of the ICU. There were nurses typing, a few talking and eating at the far end, standing around pizza boxes. They looked up at him and he thought about waving but didn’t. He was in his brown county uniform, with a badge on his chest, heavy military boots. And it wasn’t just his attire, it was what his attire and presence meant to the hospital workers and keen-eyed visitors—there was a criminal among them, possibly a dangerous one. He gave them a nod.

  He held the phone and dialed, but each time he hit four digits the other end rang, and he hung up. He didn’t know how to dial out and his friendly nurse had hurried off. He did have his cell phone but wasn’t supposed to. Calling the House on it would be a dumb move. Instead of looking down the counter to the huddled pizza eaters, he held the phone as if he were successful in calling out. He noticed the hallway smelled sanitized and clean, which had the opposite effect on Kelley, making him feel dirty. The overly clean smell meant a heavy-handed janitor was masking what really lurked about on the surfaces. The jail, on the other hand, stunk badly, a natural stink that made Kelley acutely aware of what lurked about, which he preferred.

  A cluster of loud beeps crept out of a room behind him and Kelley turned to watch the crew of nurses parade inside. It was a wild cacophony of bells and alarms signaling a life in the balance. These critical sounds raised Kelley’s stress level, reminding him of the brief episode in his life when he spent noteworthy time in a hospital. His grandfather, blind from meningioma, also from the tumor that was killing him, spoke gibberish for three days while fourteen-year-old Kelley wished to be somewhere else other than that bedside: on soft-lipped Sarah’s futon, or playing Twisted Metal, or even rolling around the ringworm-infested wrestling room. He could remember his mother’s pearl earrings and her breath smelling like ranch dressing when he hugged her. It was in the minute of his grandfather’s passing that he felt the weight of the divorce, the absence of his father, in the heavy, flabby arms of his mother.

  He decided to try dialing 1 first, which didn’t work, then 9, which was how the phones at the House dialed out, and that worked. He was forwarded to Lt. Hobson, who gave clearance for a visit from Gail Henderson. Kelley was instructed to check her ID and her DOB. Kelley was glad he hadn’t needed to ask for assistance with using the phone. The nurses appeared to have enough to deal with.

  In the single-bed hospital room, there were three large windows on the back wall behind Henderson’s head. The shades were pulled to the top. Kelley could see the city outside, the buildings looming in the setting sun, the same buildings that circled the jail that sat in the city’s center. The jail did, in fact, look like other city dwellings. Kelley told people he thought it resembled a bank: bricked and inviting. It was as if the architects had that in mind. There was no barbed wire perimeter, no galvanized fences.

  Surely a doctor could’ve relayed the dire condition to Henderson’s mother and saved her a rushed trip. She might be the religious type and call in the chaplain and there’d be some prayer or blessing. Even worse, they’d ask him to join hands with them and chant. Kelley couldn’t prepare himself to be a part of such a ceremony and he decided once the call was made to turn the machines off, he’d remove the handcuffs and be on his way.

/>   There was also the possibility he’d knocked up Rachel; as unfortunate as she felt that was, he sort of hoped it were true. In one night he could be involved in the end of a life and the beginning of a new one. He checked his phone, half expecting an angry text from Rachel. She could be hotheaded. But there was nothing. She’d said a baby would ruin her body, and at twenty-four she was too young for that. But a weekly box of Chardonnay and late-night lo mein would also ruin a body. Kelley held that quip in. Fatherhood would mean big changes. They’d have to move out of the city, he thought, maybe to Hollis, where they kept their baseball field greens nice and they never made the paper for home invasions. His one-bedroom apartment with the air conditioner fastened in the wall, decent closet space, clean rugs, was enough for him and Rachel. But for a baby, and all the things that a baby needs, the apartment wouldn’t do. What was it a baby needed? He thought about this as he pulled down the shades, wanting to give Henderson and whatever visitors some privacy. He knew crib, high chair, maybe a dresser. His mother would be over-the-top excited; even though he and Rachel weren’t married, she’d exhaust them with drop-in visits.

  He pulled up a visitor chair next to Henderson and sat down. The chair was cushioned and comfortable and he realized he’d been standing for over two hours. He stretched his legs and reached for the remote that was on the bed and attached to a cord. His hand brushed Henderson’s hairy, cold arm. He expected Henderson to flinch or pull the arm back. When he didn’t, Kelley leaned off the chair and inspected Henderson up and down. There was a clear tube coming from his mouth. He was clean, looked nothing more than asleep. Peaceful. His neck was black, almost purple, where the sheet had been tied off. He had a brown mustache and a light beard beginning to sprout around it. His hair was parted to the side, cut short. Kelley thought about how his hair would still grow, still need to be cut. His body would go on: nails needing clipped, bags of urine emptied, the body a siphon, draining feeding bags and filling piss bags, as if unaware of its dire circumstances. The remote was sticky, and Kelley had to press the buttons down hard as he found the five o’clock news.

  “News okay, man?” he said to Henderson. “News it is.”

  The nurse came in on the hour, every hour. She kept the small talk to asking if Kelley was hungry or thirsty. He was, each time he was, but he declined. He didn’t quite know why he did that, why he said no to things he wanted. Maybe it was because he didn’t want to be an inconvenience. But a drink, a dinner menu, that wouldn’t be much. Still, he said no thank you, I’m fine. He kept picturing himself walking through bright grocery aisles at night, looking for the pint of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey that Rachel was craving. He wondered if she would quit her job at Little Minds and stay with the baby, or if the baby would just go to work with her. That’d be convenient.

  At seven thirty, he heard the nurse explaining a patient’s condition, much like Henderson’s, outside the room, and he straightened himself and turned off the TV hastily, tossing the remote onto the bed next to the inmate. He’d been watching a Chronicle story about a father who carried his paraplegic son through marathons. He was torn on how to feel about the father. Heroic was his first thought, trudging through those long races carrying his adult son on his back like a limp, giant toddler. But as Kelley focused more on the son during the clips from races, he saw nothing in the son’s face, no smile, no determination. His face was as expressionless as Henderson’s. Selfish was what it was, not heroic. The father was doing it for himself, possibly began as a self-punishment, but then it became a story, it became about him.

  “In four days his condition has not changed,” the nurse said.

  Kelley stood, feeling he shouldn’t be seated. In walked a thin woman with skin so tanned and wrinkled she looked like it were midsummer in Hell and not November in New Hampshire, where there was a chance of snow in the forecast. Her presence brought on a feeling of hopelessness. Of course, he’d supposed the worst for Henderson. But he was accustomed to the comings and goings of inmates: the head count each day dry-erased and changed, additions, subtractions, inmates a part of his life then gone, maybe back again someday, maybe not, maybe crossing paths in public, a nod of recognition in the mall before averting their eyes in embarrassment to whoever accompanied them. But this woman’s dreadful hunch made him uneasy about his attempt to be apathetic toward Henderson. The nurse closed the door, closed out the hallway sounds, and then it was only the hum and beeps of machines. Kelley picked at a callus on his palm. Not seeming to notice him, the woman began to wilt, her shoulders slowly depressed until she was almost in a bow, then she seemed to catch herself and she inhaled and inflated and regarded Kelley with a muscled smile.

  Kelley introduced himself. He felt apprehensive about asking for her ID but did it anyway. The woman didn’t look away from Henderson, reached into her purse, and handed him a Florida license, confirming she was Gail Henderson. She walked forward slowly, her face contorted, as if they had the wrong patient. She finally looked at Kelley as he handed back her ID. She wore a bright-green down jacket, dark-blue jeans. Other than her tan, Kelley wouldn’t have been able to tell she was a traveler.

  “What did he do this time?”

  Her tone was not what Kelley expected. It was not shaken, but cold, like Henderson’s arm.

  Kelley knew her son was suspected of battery on a woman. Domestic issues. None of his business.

  “I think robbery, I’m not sure though,” he said. “I try not to know.”

  “Keep it simple,” she said. “The less you know.”

  She looked at Kelley, her eyes gray like pavement in the desert of her face. She sat down where Kelley had been sitting and turned herself to the bed.

  Kelley took a few steps back away from the pitiful reunion of mother and son and stood at the end of the bed. She reached out and held Henderson’s hand. He snuck a look at his phone but the home screen was void of messages.

  “He was never a good boy,” she said, stealing Kelley’s attention. “He gave me trouble from the moment he was born. His father wasn’t a good man either. There’s something to be said about that.” She spoke while looking at her son. “You think he can hear me?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” Kelley said, hoping she hadn’t seen him check his phone. He was not sure how involved he should be in the situation. He was not sure really what he was supposed to be doing.

  Gail sighed. She sat quietly for a while looking down at Henderson. Kelley felt intrusive. If he could have excused himself, he would have. The mother showing up on his shift was just his dumb luck. He thought about Lt. Hobson’s directions. “Sit there and observe. If his condition changes, call.”

  He watched the woman hold her son’s hand and he couldn’t tell if she was relieved or desperate. A parent could never know how their child could turn out, he thought. Unless she knew, and this moment had been anticipated, which Kelley concluded maybe it had by Gail’s temperament. She was calm, like Kelley’s mother had been during the final hours of his grandfather’s life. Around noon on the third day, after hours of sobbing, Kelley’s mother snapped out of it and began to eat the chocolate pudding cups she’d been saving for when the old man got his appetite back. She had handed one to Kelley and they didn’t stop until all the cups were spooned clean.

  If he could reply again to the nurse’s statement from earlier, he’d say sure, it would’ve saved everyone the trouble if Henderson was hours old when found. And if Rachel was pregnant, the rest of Kelley’s life would be a series of trials he’d always be surprised at. He could never know anything about the future again.

  Gail sat in silence for a while. She kept running her hand through her short black hair. Her hair would slick back for a moment, then split down the middle and fall back into its original place.

  “How long have you been a jail guard?” she asked over the machines.

  He told her a little over six months. He knew her interest was only to relieve the silence of the room. But he wondered what she saw, how she looked at
him. He stood watch over her son, clean-cut in his pressed uniform, a living example of what being on the right side of the law looked like. He felt righteous and seemed to stand a bit more upright.

  “I was in jail once in Mississippi,” she said. “The guards there were pricks, touchy. That was before I had Ronny. My stay wasn’t long either and I’ve never been back to that wretched state.”

  She looked away from Kelley and he relaxed his posture. She turned her hand over, flipping her son’s hand with it—attached to the bed rail by a handcuff—and she looked at it.

  “Overkill?”

  “It’s policy,” he told her.

  “Institutions are inundated with policy,” she said. “In the last twenty-four hours I’ve had to show my license to four different people in uniforms. Four!” She held up four fingers to Kelley. “Before that I hadn’t taken it out of my purse in God knows. Oh, it don’t matter.”

  She looked up at the screens. The machines continued to run and beep and blink like they still had a job to do.

  “Who knows what all this is for? You think they even know?”

  Kelley shrugged.

  “Honey, you got a baby face,” she said. “The men in jail must give you damn hell.”

  Kelley smiled and nodded, mainly to make her feel like she had been right about something. But he thought about it and she was right. Even though most officers got hell, regardless of baby faces, Kelley seemed to get it more than his partners. He rubbed inmates the wrong way. He’d memorized the inmate handbook.

  “Do you say words?”

  “When I have to, yes.”

  “I’m sitting here trying to get my mind off what my mind’s on,” she said. “You could help by entertaining me.”