Barker House

by David Moloney

  Bachelorism slowly regained the apartment. The coffee table was covered in Powerade bottles, some a quarter filled with brown dip spit. The apartment smelled minty, but disagreeably so. Dunkin’ Donuts straw wrappers were balled up and tossed on the rug. Kelley had used a pizza box as a trap to catch a mouse. He wasn’t sure if he’d caught it or not. He was afraid to open the box. But he hadn’t seen the mouse around. If he took a shit that left skid marks on the toilet bowl, he didn’t scrub them off. Not immediately, especially if they were faint and he could just pee them away later. He was happy to watch college football all day and eat entire bags of pistachios and stack the shells into a mound.

  While on his day off, he ordered chicken wings online because he couldn’t be bothered with having to call. After he placed the order, his phone rang. It was the wing place confirming his order. Angry at their process, defeating the purpose, he told the young girl, no, he didn’t order. As if Rachel could sense the squandering of his days off, he received a text from her. Call? Please.

  “Is he on your unit?” she asked. “Laura had Holly in preschool. Holly’s mom won’t talk. Like, went mute.”

  “I’m off the units,” he said. He didn’t expect it, but he couldn’t stand the sound of her voice.

  “So you haven’t met him?”

  “Sort of,” he said.

  “Did it bother you to have to look at him?”

  “I didn’t think about it,” he said. “He’s just another inmate.”

  “That can’t be true. Not with what they’re saying on the news.”

  Rachel hadn’t reached out to find out how he was doing. She had a point of contact for what anyone wanted to talk about. People asked about Hundley. Kelley’s mother had called shortly after the murder. “There’s a special spot in Hell for that piece of, well, crap,” she said. “They should castrate him.” Her voice was as angry as she’d allow it, like when he was benched in Little League for the less talented coach’s son. “That man’s a know-nothing. And with that big belly. He’s quite frankly embarrassing,” she had said of the coach.

  A week ago, his cousin Joey texted from Fort Carson. “Made the news out here. Take care of that.”

  How was he supposed to explain Hundley to Rachel? What was it he could say for her to reply: I’m coming to see you. He understood the outcry. Even the old Greek lady cashier at Market Basket was telling the woman in line in front of Kelley Hundley should be shot. “Something wrong with that boy. Like a rabid dog.” She put her wrinkled finger to her head and made a gunshot noise.

  “You missing me?” he asked.

  “I can’t stop thinking about the little girl. She must’ve been so scared.”

  “I know. Not how anyone should die. Especially a child.”

  “Someone should’ve been there to protect her.”

  “Too late now.” An apartment door slammed in the hallway. “Can’t protect everyone.”

  “I’m sorry things got weird,” Rachel said. “I don’t eat much anymore, if that makes you feel better. I started smoking again. My mother and I are at each other’s throats. She doesn’t shut up. Ever.”

  “We beat him,” he said. “The murderer. We beat him so bad his eye almost fell out.”

  “Liar. You wouldn’t do that.”

  “I could do it.”

  “You’re sensitive.”

  Six weeks into the pregnancy, three days after the nursery setup, Rachel told Kelley she had a procedure. She wouldn’t call it anything else. She wouldn’t put up with his yelling, or how he called it an abortion. She hated that word.

  A few nights later, Rachel filled a wine glass to the brim and sat cross-legged on the couch. She’d tied up her brown hair and wore a V-neck with no bra, showing off her tanned neck and chest, and put on a house hunting show. She took a big sip and looked relieved. She even sighed. He couldn’t believe it was nothing to her, how she could not mourn. He’d never seen her cry. She never apologized.

  “She would’ve had a birthmark on her lower back,” he said. “She would’ve liked softball. She would have been ticklish on her feet but not in her armpits.”

  “Who?”

  “The baby you took.”

  “It wasn’t anything yet,” Rachel said. “I can’t have a normal conversation with you? You need to move on. It’s weird that you can’t move on.”

  Kelley was quiet now. He wanted to make her suffer but realized there was no way he could.

  “You still there?” she asked.

  He waited for Rachel to hang up, but she didn’t. He could hear her breathing but she didn’t say anything. After a few seconds of this, he hung up.

  Kelley put on flip-flops and jogged down the hallway of his apartment building. It smelled like curry and boiling pasta. He didn’t know why he was running, or in a hurry, but there was urgency. He’d decided to get drunk. The night was cold but the package store was only half a football field away. He bought a six-pack of tall boys and half a pint of Jim Beam. He didn’t usually drink, sometimes sipped a glass or two of wine alongside Rachel, but felt confident this was a solid packy run. He decided on the walk back, his bare arms freezing, clutching the paper bag in his biceps, snug against his chest, that this would be his cleanse.

  Kelley couldn’t even get through two beers and a swig of the biting Jim Beam before he stopped. He was buzzed and watched the BC Eagles lose to Notre Dame by three touchdowns. After the game, he decided to clean up the apartment, pick himself up. He dumped the dip cups into the toilet and flushed the brown water. He cleaned up the paper plates and iced-coffee cups. He went over to the pizza box but stood over it. He could stomp it and crush the poor mouse. That’d be what Lopez would do, maybe even Rachel. Stomp it to bits. And what Hundley did to that girl. Snipped her apart. How disgusting that was. I can’t even kill a mouse, he thought. He picked up the box and something slid inside. It may have suffocated and died already, which was a relief. He walked the box over to the door and put it into the hallway. He opened the box and stepped back but nothing ran out. Inside was the half-eaten slice of pizza that he’d used as bait.

  All the snow in Barker County melted and Rachel left his life with it. Kelley became OIC of Booking and settled into a routine. He’d read somewhere that routines were perfectly acceptable distractions, if not recommended. One method of this routine became controversial, but when tested, appeared sustainable. He’d decided he would stop calling the inmates by their names, but by their inmate number instead. Initially, identifying a person by a number seemed almost futuristic to him. It felt cold and necessary. He’d thought he’d landed on the perfect balance of making the inmates feel like shit. He wanted them to feel terrible about showing up at his counter. But it was as if they enjoyed returning, coming on the units with their piss-stained bedrolls to high-fives and daps, big appetites for undercooked hard-boiled eggs and stale raisin toast, indigent bags filled with dull razors, a bar of soap, a kid’s toothbrush you couldn’t grip with more than your thumb and forefinger, shitting and wiping in front of a cellmate, the worst burden, Kelley thought. But there was also a law library with no books, bedbug-ridden cots in the gym when the place filled for the winter, six lockdowns a day, barking COs angry at their hangovers or angry they weren’t hungover, AA and NA meeting sign-up sheets posted with no volunteer scheduled to run them. The jail couldn’t do more to discourage the men.

  One shift, while he was booking in Romano, an old man with skin tags on his neck, arrested without his dentures, who’d done half a dozen rounds with Barker House, Romano asked Kelley if he was of German descent. Romano’s empty mouth was disturbing, the absence of something you’d expect to be there but still functional, like a dog with three legs.

  “Does Kelley sound German?”

  “You call me eleven-oh-seven. Eleven-oh-seven. Eleven-oh-seven. Like I have no name.”

  “Officer Tully will change you out, eleven-oh-seven.”

  “Romano. I’m Allen Peter Romano.”

  “You’re eleven-oh-se
ven again. Welcome back to Barker House.”

  “Fuck you, I’m Romano. Romano!”

  It bothered Kelley, the tie-in to Nazis, so he Googled further into the practice. He found, in fact, the old man was onto something. In the Auschwitz camp, prisoners had serial numbers sewn into their uniforms. Only working prisoners were assigned numbers. Ones who were not were gassed. To Kelley, it seemed in the terrible camp, being assigned a number came with a sense of relief. You were given some reassurance that life was extended, however difficult and inhuman that life would be. Even though assigning a number was dehumanizing and stripped an individual of identity, the SS in fact began the practice for identification. Because so many prisoners and soldiers were pouring in, the camps struggled to keep track. By assigning the numbers, the SS was assigning a new identity, not removing one. Also, Dr. House, on the TV show, gave fellowship applicants numbers instead of names. Thirteen was hot. How’d I forget about her? he thought.

  Other than 1107, the inmates’ reactions were muted. Some refused to answer. Some would forget their number and sit in the tank until they were the only one left, thus realizing the last number was their number. The practice quickly deadened any feelings of hope or liveliness from the department. It was as if coming or going, you could cycle through the feelings both would entail.

  Tully handed the court list to Kelley. “You hear about Lopez? He’s coming back, part time. He’s bored at home. Shit, you’ll be his boss this time.”

  “Good,” Kelley said. “I like Lopez.” He checked over his court list and tried not to think about Lopez and stopped at the name Thaddeus Hundley.

  He was penciled in for returning from court on Kelley’s shift. Since Hundley’s intake, he’d had hundreds of hours of media coverage: Thaddeus went by Tad; he collected carts at a grocery store; he didn’t abuse animals; teachers loved him, and students barely knew him. His great-aunt, toothless and smoking, explained in a rough, rural way that Tad always loved kids and he wouldn’t cut the wings off a damn fly. Tad didn’t play sports, he had an unknown father, and a boyhood friend saw him break an arm on a rope swing once. In-house the officers noticed that he requested the pod movie on his tier time no matter the genre, liked the bologna at lunch, and was refusing to shave, even on court days.

  The bus pulled in and, just as Lopez had before, Kelley cleared the Booking floor. Thaddeus Hundley shuffled into the department through door 1001A, shackled at the hands and feet, guided by two Nashua sheriffs. The bruises on his face were gone, and his eyes had sprung back to their normal openness. He was wearing a white shirt and blue tie with khakis. Court attire. The holding tank stood watchful but they weren’t noisy. They were gawking more than contemplating. The shackles were removed, and Kelley walked Tad, Thaddeus, Inmate Hundley, the nephew, the childhood friend, the murderer, Thaddeus Hundley, CCN#56991, to the Property Room by his skinny biceps.

  As if by routine, Hundley undressed to nothing and piled his clothes on top of the counter. He was silent and didn’t make eye contact with Kelley.

  “Those bruises look fresh.”

  Hundley inspected his stomach. “Ask the morning guy,” Hundley said, his voice raw like he hadn’t spoken in a long time.

  “How you treated on RU?”

  “They don’t feed me dinner. But I don’t eat much.” He hid a smile, as if he were fighting off a laugh.

  The boy rinsed in the shower with the curtain open. Hundley stepped out, dried off, and Kelley handed him a clean uniform.

  “This isn’t my uniform.”

  “I switched it out. It smelled,” Kelley said, pushing the orange shirt and pants into Hundley’s chest. “They’re all the same.”

  Hundley looked down at the shirt. “The letters are faded on this one. I liked mine, the one with the dark letters.”

  “You don’t own these. You don’t own anything. Shut up and get dressed.”

  Hundley stepped into the pants and pulled them up to his tiny waist, then looked at Kelley. He looked like he’d been crying, not recently, but like all he’d ever done forever was cry. “You hate me, don’t you?”

  Kelley had to think. He hated what he’d done to the girl. What’d he want him to say? Hundley wanted to be punished. That’s it. He enjoyed this.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “I don’t hate you,” Kelley said.

  Hundley put on his shirt. “You’re lying,” he said. “Everybody hates me.”

  “Stop being you, then.”

  Hundley let out a laugh. “How do I do that?”

  “You were assigned a number when you came in,” Kelley said. “Be the number.”

  Hundley seemed to entertain the idea and looked at his green wristband. He mouthed the numbers without saying them. Kelley gave him time to allow the idea to set in. Outside the heavy door, Kelley could hear the beep of the van, the opening of the garage, leg restraints dragging on the floor, the cough of the fat bondsman, a phone ringing, radio bleeps, laughter, and then someone said, “Nah, nah, nah. Not me.” Hundley wouldn’t look away from his wristband. He might have been waiting for Kelley to sock him, give him a deserved blow. They’d been in the room for enough time for the restraints to be removed and hung up on the wall outside the door. Tully might be out there with his ear pressed to the door, hoping to hear Kelley earn his way. He’d feel some pride for Kelley, for figuring this all out.

  Tony / RU

  “To the Slaughter”

  He looks around his unit, avoiding the book that’s just getting good. He thinks, at night, with all the steel and the ceiling lights off, the darkness lit at eye level by yellow emergency lights only triggered during blackouts or manually by him after lights-out, the unit looks like a slaughterhouse. A perfect place to end a life. The chipped paint and stains on the walls between doors look like scars from hacking tools. Years of old sweat have lacquered the metal beds, cell floors are glossed with urine, scabs and dead skin are embedded in green mattresses, all of which give the unit the decadence of decay. Old, shed animal matter. He hates to think of it this way—a veiled abattoir—but at midnight, without faces in the door windows, the bodies under the wool coverlets could be the bodies of any mammal, the snores could be the snores of fat, resting pigs.

  He makes the midnight round in small strides, trying to increase the steps on his pedometer. He’s not quite sure how the thing knows how many steps he’s taken, or if it’s measuring distance. Maybe it’s distance; he takes a long stride then two quick short ones, but he forgets the number he started at, so he quits the test. It’s old and faulty, so who knows.

  He sits back at the table he’s settled at for tonight’s shift. He picks a different table out of the six each night, so as not to be predictable. During the day, the tables, circled by only nine cells, are excessive. One inmate at a time comes out down here to stretch their legs, forget numbers on the pay phone, wash their balls.

  The lazily plotted detective novel he’s reading sits on the table in front of him. He’s avoided it for the first hour of the shift because Tammy had compiled a package of printouts for his two weeks’ vacation in the summer. She tucked them into the book knowing he wouldn’t forget it. On his way out the door, while Tammy stared at her enormous phone, her face made up in purple hues, eyelashes wet and curled, but her mouth cleaned of pink lipstick, she directed him to “choose a place we can tolerate for seven days.” She said “tolerate” slowly, as if telling him she knew this would be hard for him to do but please, Tony, think this through. Imagine yourself, along with me, your wife, the one who has carefully chosen these four places—Tony, you pick one, it’s not that hard—where we can fill our days with activities, tours, things you want to do, don’t just think of me.

  He makes his rounds clockwise during even hours, counter-clockwise during odd, counting his steps at Tammy’s suggestion. In some queer ritual to the jail gods, he’s done it this way every night since he came to third shift, after his eleventh year on the job, when a bik
er from Mason—wanting to make a name before going upstate—cut Tony’s neck with a shaving razor jammed into a toothbrush.

  Prior to the assault, Tony had been working U4 for a few months, not making enemies, but not making friends either. He coasted, forged D-tickets, searched cells with more interest in what the inmates inside were reading than hiding. Earned a paycheck, kept his head down, and allowed Ashley the privilege of good schooling. He was seated on a stool inside a cell flipping through Gerald’s Game, he remembers, because who can forget that opening scene, the handcuffs and heart attack. Poor Gerald. The large, hairy inmate ran up on Tony. Quickly he sliced Tony’s neck—the efficiency later made Tony think it’d been planned for a while—and then left the cell. The blood scared Tony. There was too much of it. But after his radio call, during the silence that followed, Tony didn’t think of Tammy or Ashley. He thought of the scuff marks on the ceiling, from sneakers, and how they got there.

  Luckily for Tony, the inmate only wanted to assault an officer, not kill one, and the cut wasn’t deep enough to end it all.

  The Josephses were scheduled to vacation at Old Orchard Beach, a trailer rental, with paddleboats and horseshoes. But the injury forced Tammy to cancel the trip. And now it’s January, the month when the officers are expected to hand in their vacation request forms for the year. Most officers choose the same days every year: two weeks in the summer, Thanksgiving, and the week of Christmas and New Year’s. Tony’s eighteen-year seniority ensures his request never gets denied. His first few years on the job he’d slept through Christmas morning because he couldn’t get the eve off. She’d had to wait until lunch to open her presents. Having not done any of the shopping, he was just as surprised as Ashley was opening her gifts, just not as excited. An Easy-Bake oven. A doll that drank from a bottle and even shat itself. He tried to make the best of the situation for Ashley, but she blamed him, of course, because what child could understand responsibility?