Barker House

by David Moloney

  “Pussy,” she said. She drew it to her mouth and took a long sip, coughed, then handed the bottle back to me. She shook her head and her small hands retreated into the sleeves of her hooded sweatshirt like a hermit crab.

  “I didn’t really like the job anyways,” I said. “I was always distracted from getting real productive work done.”

  She laughed. “It’s funny where we end up, isn’t it?” she said while looking out into the black ocean. With the moon high above us, the water mixed with the sky smoothly like they were one. If it weren’t for the sound of waves, we wouldn’t know the water was there. “When I was a girl I wanted to be a doctor, like my father.”

  I’d never heard her sound regretful before. She was always sure of her decisions, however bad they were. I swallowed my swig, the liquor tasting like soured banana bread. Rosa’s hands slithered out of the sleeves and welcomed the bottle again. She took another sip.

  “What stopped you?”

  “Tito got me hooked on H. I bet you didn’t know that,” she said and didn’t pass the bottle back to me. “He gets all the girls hooked on shit.”

  I got quiet. I thought about my father, all the things I never asked him. What I wondered most about him was how he was with women. I knew the story of him landing my mother but I also knew the ending to that story. What I wanted to know most was his failings, the ones who got away, the ones he mistreated. I wanted to know my father outside of what was traditionally passed down from father to son. It was tough to learn about love from a success story.

  “What happened with your thing?” she asked. She looked down to my crotch with a nod.

  “It’s under review,” I said.

  “I hope you’re okay,” Rosa said and single-arm hugged me around my waist.

  Sure, I was okay, but my being okay was illusory, a misguided affirmation my world wasn’t plunging toward abyss. I didn’t say that to Rosa. I didn’t want to ruin our noble escape.

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “It’s Georgia I’m worried about. And you.” I took out my phone and while Rosa watched me, perplexed, I called 911. I reported the overdose, where it happened, in plain, concise English, like I was writing a report at the jail. Just the facts.

  Rosa looked up at me and I wanted to kiss her but didn’t. We kept passing the bottle, trading sips, and we talked. I let her talk mostly. If she weren’t a stripper, she’d be a normal twenty-two-year-old woman who enjoyed cocaine and sex and not sleeping. She worked days at Merrimack College for the food service company Sodexo. She made breakfast sandwiches for hungover undergrads. She didn’t call them undergrads, she called them rich dickbags. She was allergic to fish. She was in love once, but he didn’t know it.

  “I wanted to be a cop. Statey, maybe. I settled for a dirty jail guard,” I said. “How long does it take for an ambulance out here?” I could stay on that beach forever.

  “You’re my hero,” Rosa said with a hint of mockery. She passed the bottle and sat on the sand. She took her ponytail out and the wind blew her hair in wild swirls. I sat down next to her. My stomach wasn’t enjoying the banana schnapps, and I couldn’t imagine Rosa was enjoying it either. We were exercising some ritual as old as the beach sand. We wanted to comfort each other, share a taste of some familiar indulgence, find something of value like a beachcomber, something worth keeping, even if only for a short while.

  “The H didn’t stop me from doing anything but being a good dancer,” she said. She drew something in the sand with her finger and looked at me, her fake eyes like blue half shells washed ashore. “I saw my father’s struggles here. For a long time I didn’t believe his stories about his old life.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I should have told her what I’d been thinking about, my own problems and follies, but I enjoyed the sound of Rosa’s voice in between the crashing waves. We sat quiet for a few minutes and drank from the bottle. It was almost empty and I was waiting for the buzz to hit me. Rosa didn’t look at me. She just stared out toward the water. I was cold.

  “He mixes paint cans at Walmart,” she said. “Maybe settling is worse than failing.”

  I thought she might cry so I set the bottle down in the sand and kissed her. Her mouth was tiny and wet, her tongue dabbing like a minnow on your toes. We lay back together in the cool sand and I wouldn’t have minded if the water came to us in a freak wave and pulled us in.

  Kelley / Booking Department

  “Assigning Numbers”

  The current Booking officer, Lopez, was retiring. Twenty-two years was enough, he’d told Kelley, plus the five years of military time he bought out. Smart fucking kid I was, he’d said. His son was breaking all the rushing records at a prep school up north. He spoke about his son often, some of the only times Kelley saw him smile. Kelley was going to be Lopez’s replacement. He studied Lopez’s movements, the way he talked, the new jargon, how he dealt with outside agencies. There was more consequence in Booking, like control of a door leading to the sidewalk, for one. Sitting high behind that counter gave him new perspective. He could see the inmates’ alleged crimes, the disgusted faces on the transporting officers who charged them, their grungy street clothes. Lopez owned that perspective.

  When Rachel ghosted him, Kelley took over the lease and removed everything from the walls—pictures of the two of them in friends’ wedding photo booths, Dr. Seuss hats and all; a metal crescent moon hung by a screw from the hallway’s popcorn ceiling; a chalkboard Rachel used as a dinner menu; a sunflower painting from her girlfriends’ wine-and-paint night—and put it all in a box in the bedroom closet. The pregnancy was unfortunate. Losing the baby wasn’t.

  Lopez was down to his last few days. Kelley felt confident he could slide right into Lopez’s chair and snobby demeanor. In Booking, they had a duty to set the tone for a newcomer, or bestow a lasting reminder on one leaving. You don’t want to see this mug again.

  At three P.M., right before the senior citizen sheriffs pulled the court vans in, they got a call that a teenage murderer was en route. They’d figured. He had already allegedly confessed when in custody, was getting heavy airtime as all the networks and radio stations broke into programming to detail the brutality of the murder, the upscale town of Milford where it occurred, and the profile of the victim, a six-year-old blonde girl named Holly, entrusted to the murderer’s care. Hobson gave a stay-in-place order over the radio. Kelley corralled inmates into the large holding tank, their faces pressed against the glass. The inmates were curious, asking what was up and “Yo, am I still gonna get out today? My girl’s coming.” Lopez was amped up, cracked his knuckles. One last go. Tully slid on his leather gloves, the ones he wore to avoid needle pricks during intake pat-downs. They swept the floor, making sure no one was left unsecured.

  “I’m going to miss shit like this,” Lopez said.

  Two young Milford cops handed the new arrival off at the carport door to Tully and Lopez. Though it was December and icy out, the kid wore a hospital johnny, his clothes likely made into evidence. Kelley watched the cops slide their guns into the weapon lockers in the carport. After a pat search, Lopez and Tully dragged the kid across the floor to the safety cell, the one with the Lexan door, and left the kid in there on the floor. The inmates in the large holding cell watched and banged on the glass. Lopez banged back and told them to fuck off.

  Then it was quiet.

  “Go stand there and watch him,” Lopez said. Kelley stood outside the glass. The kid squirmed on the floor, the weak light hid his face. He’d been beaten, definitely.

  “Notify Medical,” Lopez told Tully as he typed on a computer behind the counter. Lopez exchanged paperwork with the cops. The procedure seemed routine, but the cops were hyped up, as was Lopez, running on autopilot as he rolled the chair along the counter, stapled paperwork, and then hurried back to typing. A one-man assembly line.

  “Nurse Jen says to flag him,” Tully said. “She saw the news.”

  “It was a fucking massacre,” one cop said. He looked back at th
e door and leaned down to see inside. “He cut off all of her toes and fingers. Jesus—”

  “Joe,” the other cop said.

  Lopez didn’t stop typing. Tully shook his head. The kid’s eye was busted and purple. There was a laceration that began at his eyebrow—dark and wet with blood—and curved around his eye. Kelley figured the cops used their cuffs as brass knuckles. Not advised. Kelley had seen his co-workers stick to places hidden by clothing. A karate chop to the nutsack during a pat search could drop just about anyone and make a solid point. Underneath that johnny, Kelley bet, were the beginnings of bruises. If asked, the boy would say he was having trouble breathing. His stomach hurt worse than his face, he’d say. His mother would hate to look at him.

  This made Kelley think of the only time he’d abused an inmate. A kid on U3 flooded his cell and they made him choke down a good amount of it. Kelley had driven home in silence that night, thought about working in the new Amazon warehouse.

  “He resisted arrest?” Kelley asked the cops.

  “He did,” they said together.

  “We found him walking down the street all bloody,” one cop said. “Cool as shit.”

  “When he saw the lights he ran,” the one named Joe said. “Luckily we got him in the woods behind a house. Squirmy fucker.”

  Kelley wanted to call bullshit but didn’t. It wouldn’t have accomplished anything. The COs and cops had a tense relationship and it wasn’t the typical stepping-on-each-other’s-toes type of thing. Mainly, it came from jealousy on the COs’ end. Kelley had tested at a few PDs. But without a connected father or uncle or military time, one’s law enforcement career was whittled down to a few choices, mall cop and CO being the top options. COs were envious of the good pay, the work details, carrying a gun. As glamorous as it was walking the shit-stunk tiers, serving hard-boiled eggs to skinners, searching come-covered shower stalls, it’d been a dream for many screws to be a cop, Kelley included.

  The new admit groaned and tried to stand, but just crawled across the closet of a cell, then lay on the metal bench. The two cops took the papers they needed. Joe gave the small holding cell the finger on his way out.

  Kelley stood watch while Lopez cleared the large tank. None of the inmates inside were dressed for the cold outside. The ones coming in might welcome the stuffiness, for a time. “Copley!” Lopez called, and a small cheer for inmate Copley came from the tank.

  Lopez came out from behind the counter and stood next to Kelley, smelling like bad vodka. He’d been noticeably hungover all shift, but what was new. “Shit turd. Scum. He needs to be fingerprinted.”

  “I know.”

  Lopez coughed into his hand, a wet cough, checked his hand to see if he’d left anything, and then re-tucked his brown shirt into his pants in the front. “I know you know.”

  Kelley and Tully handcuffed the kid without a struggle. His face was puffy. Kelley couldn’t make out the color of his eyes. They carried him by his biceps just off the ground, down the hallway, past the bondsmen’s window and the Property Room and then into the Fingerprint Room. There was a camera mounted on the wall, one of six in the Booking department alone. Eyes all around and they knew it.

  Kelley un-cuffed the right hand while Tully kept control of the other. The kid had long, thin fingers. His skin was smooth and untarnished. Lopez stood close to him, observing Kelley, and they could all smell Lopez’s breath. Kelley rolled the thumb on the fingerprint pad, and then pressed the thumb to the print sheet. Thaddeus Hundley. Eighteen years old. Five ten. Hundred and twenty pounds. Caucasian. Thirty-One Davis Road, Milford, NH. No prior record.

  They sat him in the plastic chair bolted to the wall. Lopez asked Thaddeus some intake questions and filled in the answers on the form. Gang affiliation—none. Suicidal—no. Afraid for your safety—no, sir. Hurting a child put him in protective custody no matter what the answers were.

  Lopez held up a small digital camera. Smile, he told Thaddeus. Once the nightly news got ahold of that mug shot, Kelley thought, Milford PD would have some explaining to do.

  The Property Room was camera-dark. Other than the Bubble, it was the only place in the jail that wasn’t recorded. The inmates needed privacy during strip-outs, but that left the room a good place to lay a beating. Lopez and Tully stood in front of the naked Thaddeus. He looked like a Thaddeus, Kelley thought. He had swollen, young eyes, wet with tears. He was a skeleton rolled in cheap cigarette paper. His hair was curly and bright red and glowed like blood on a tissue. He had a tattoo on his left forearm: Unfollow me.

  “You tough because you can cut up a little girl?” Lopez asked, his nose against Thaddeus’s cheek.

  “I want to see how tough he is,” said Tully, still wearing the leather gloves. He scratched his upper lip.

  Thaddeus’s hands cupped his penis and he shivered. They’d just seen inside all of his holes. He’d rinsed in the shower beside them. He was now suitable for his stay at Barker House.

  Kelley hurried into the uniform closet in the back of the Property Room, behind the racks of black bags filled with inmates’ belongings: shoes, court clothes, and intake clothes. Kelley couldn’t find a small uniform. The tops and bottoms were thrown all over the floor; he picked out a faded orange top and a newer-looking pair of pants. He guessed a size nine for shoes. Kelley decided that when Lopez was gone and he took over Booking, he’d find time to match all the shirts and pants together, neaten the place up. He rushed back to the front of the Property Room but he was too late. Thaddeus was on the floor.

  “If you were a pigeon,” Lopez asked, “and I stepped on you, would you know how you sounded?”

  The term “fetal position” was loosely used in incident reports when inmates were found overdosed or beaten, but Thaddeus was in the actual fetal position, like he’d crawled back up into the womb. He was chewing his knees.

  Lopez lifted his black boot and stomped Thaddeus’s face, right on his cheek, just below his already destroyed eye. Kelley doubted Thaddeus had taken Lopez’s question seriously. Even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have known how it sounded.

  Lopez knelt on his neck. Tully put his bootheel to Thaddeus’s face and dug in.

  “Enough,” Kelley said. His chest tightened and he felt like he’d just been in a fight.

  The room was quiet and they all looked at him, even the kid on the floor. Thaddeus wasn’t making a sound.

  In the vacant sergeant’s office, the Booking officers filled out informational reports, corroborating each other’s report by reading and writing them together at Lopez’s lead.

  “Injuries observed upon arrival,” Lopez dictated, “left eye contusion, two-inch cut on chin, swollen cheeks, cut on right eyebrow … what else?”

  “A boot mark on the right side of his face,” said Kelley. He waited for Lopez to look up at him, but he didn’t.

  “We can’t write that,” Tully said.

  “No shit,” said Lopez. He was sitting on the sergeant’s padded desk chair, hunched over his report. Tully and Kelley sat across the desk on flimsy chairs and wrote on clipboards. The blinds in the windows were open. The Booking department, at 2015 hours, was empty, the lights dimmed. The Bruins were losing 2–1 to the Islanders on the sergeant’s clock radio. Yesterday’s vodka permeated from Lopez.

  “You know you can’t write stuff like that in these reports, right?” Tully asked Kelley.

  Without looking up again, Lopez said, “He knows that.”

  “That little prick cut off her toes,” Tully said, focusing back on his report. “Imagine being her father.”

  Kelley could try. Just the night before, Kelley had laid on the soft carpet of the nursery in his apartment, staring up at the wobbly big-box-store crib and dresser. He’d hung up a stitch-by-number his mother had made when she was pregnant with Kelley, a goofy cartoon depiction of Noah’s Ark, with big-headed lions and short-legged giraffes. The nursery was a good place to make him feel empty. He’d watched the night-light project fluffy sheep on the ceiling to the tune o
f “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” It would’ve been nice, he thought, as he did most nights while alone, to be a father. But he couldn’t imagine being the dead girl’s father.

  “I’d call him a pigeon and stomp his face,” Kelley said. Lopez’s five o’clock shadow was thick. His cheeks had a rosy tint.

  “Kelley seems to take issue with how shithead was handled.”

  “We barely did anything,” said Tully. “Milford did all the work.”

  “You’re right. He looked fine on his way upstairs,” said Kelley.

  The Bruins tied it up on a power play goal and Lopez put his ear to the small radio. “Booking—in all its glory—is a machine, a mini jail. You can start off a saint. But you won’t stay one,” he said.

  “I can’t hit someone who can’t hit back.”

  “You’re being funny, right?” Tully asked.

  “No, he has a right to feel this way. I did—for a time.”

  “And now you’re okay?” Kelley asked.

  “I pretend they are all the same,” Lopez said. “That every inmate is the same inmate. I don’t want to keep doing the animal comparisons, but hell, it’s the easiest way to explain it. It’s like every squirrel you’ve ever met or seen or run over is like every other squirrel. There’s nothing that makes them different from the last one you came across.”

  “It’s that easy,” Kelley said.

  “I can’t fucking believe this guy.”

  “I totally get it,” said Lopez. “This place will change you. If it doesn’t, you won’t be a part of it.”

  Kelley took that more as challenge than threat. “You know policies, procedures, what we were trained to do, I’ll stick to that.”

  “Oh, grow up,” Tully said.

  Lopez shook his head. “This is the system.”

  There were things that bothered him about Rachel when they lived together. She used to wait until they went to bed to run the dishwasher. The rattle of plates, water spraying from a hose, the old dishwasher banging and humming. He hated that she did that but now he missed it, the quiet while he tried to sleep was worse than the dishwasher. Sometimes he wished he lived next to a skate park, or the commuter rail. But he realized he was capable of running the dishwasher unsuitably at night.