Vacations were a front, a way for Tammy to pretend they were a family. Since Tony had worked second shift for the majority of Ashley’s childhood, he rarely saw them. She’d go to St. Anne’s on Farragut Street in Hudson, now a crumbling brick building with high, waving flags, military housing for disabled vets. Then he’d sleep. He’d be off to the jail before she got out of school and he wouldn’t see her or Tammy. Pre-cell-phone, check-ins were notes left by Tammy for him to read when he woke up in the late afternoon. Ashley lost another tooth or The movie rentals are due today. His two-week vacation was his time to be a parent to Ashley. First, in her early years while at the deplorably majestic Magic Kingdom, as Daddy. Then, in the preteen years, traversing the Franconia Range, burning his calves on the rugged trails, not concerned with fun but completion, he was Dad. He can’t remember when he became just Tony to Ashley. Maybe it was after Montreal, where he snuck out buzzed one poorly planned night, down cold St. Catherine’s Street in a T-shirt. While Tammy and Ashley slept, he stumbled under neon French signs, boring English signs. The smell of seared gyro meat on street corners tempted him. He climbed two flights of dark stairs and perched at the stage, let strippers pull dollar coins from his teeth with their ass cheeks. He returned to the hotel as the sun rose and slept the entire last day away while the girls toured. Anyway, it happened, and the only one to fight her on using his given name was Tammy.
Tammy is clinging to some old ideas, family time, and she is misguided. Tony doesn’t look at the vacation package. He reads forty-something pages of the paperback and logs 641 steps on his pedometer. Reading began as an escape. It started after high school, all those years ago, in a rebellion against his father’s pleadings for him to join the service. Tony attended a community college where he intended to study nothing, just continue his life as he knew it: chasing tail and reading about narrators chasing tail. Wanderers on the road were heroes. Sal and Dean. But he became enamored with a literature professor, a short, astute man, who always had crust on the corners of his mouth, who pegged Tony as exactly who he was. The teacher impressed other writings on Tony, classics; Tony fell in love with the Wife of Bath and Lord Walter’s wife, women who treated men like women. He wanted a woman who could strangle his soul. He lurked about the feminist circles; they were big then, the circles, raw and real, not like now. It seems to Tony that the feminist circles are hiding now. It’s a shame, because they were good places to find women. It was there he found Tammy. Some time ago, he stumbled across that professor in a smut shop, thumbing through a titty mag, but the man didn’t recognize him.
Tony’s lunch break is at 0130 hours. Mitchell relieved him from RU and he is now fishing through the tremendous amount of Tupperware in the large staff lounge refrigerator. He finds it where he definitely didn’t leave it. Nielsen and Jeffries sit together at a round table, and Nielsen is reading a stapled printout. The Barker House Gazette. For the past few years an unknown third shifter—Tony presumes third shift but because the author is unknown he can’t say for certain, though it always appears on third shift—has created a monthly issue of the newspaper. The first Monday of every month, the paper is scattered around the locker room, muster room, and staff lounge and can be read until about nine o’clock when the captain comes in and rounds up all the copies and shreds them. It is filled with insults and jokes, some fictional, some based in fact. The author doesn’t shy from anyone, which is why the captain is red-assed about it. Tony wishes he had the gall to produce such a thing. But he always makes his rounds, shines a light on the numbered bodies, punches out when his paperwork is cleared. Besides, who has the time?
Nielsen laughs and Jeffries eats the last lumps of flesh from an apple. They’re the only other two on break and usually eat together each night, the three of them being the only second-floor officers. Tammy packed his lunch: turkey meatballs on a bed of spaghetti squash. We can’t have your heart going again, Tony. You’ll never know the difference with the squash. Christ, Tony, if you have to, close your damn eyes when you eat it.
Tony suspects Jeffries is the producer of the gazette. He rarely appears interested in the paper or laughs at some of the outlandish front pages. Tony has never made the acclaimed front page, him not having risen to the well-known status most front-pagers have. He wonders if the gazette had been around when he had his neck slit if he would’ve made the front page then.
Jeffries gets up and walks over to the candy machine. Jeffries cuts his own hair, brags about the money he saves, but he never seems to get his clipper far enough into the roll of fat on the back of his head, so the hair is longer there, and darker. This bothers Tony but he doesn’t point it out to Jeffries.
Jeffries comes back with a Whatchamacallit and Nielsen cracks a hard-boiled egg on a napkin and starts to peel off the shell. He nods at Tony, his eyes wide behind his thin glasses.
“What the hell are you eating?” Nielsen asks. His neck is lined with red pimples where it rubs against the collar.
“Meatballs and fake spaghetti,” Tony says and cuts a meatball with the side of his spork. “The wife.”
“Rough,” Jeffries says as he opens the candy bar wrapper with his teeth. “I’m never getting married. I don’t see the appeal.”
Tony can’t agree more. In fact, he tells Jeffries that, who then tilts his candy bar at Tony.
“Why’d you get hitched?” Jeffries asks, chocolate smeared on his front teeth.
“I got suckered in,” Tony says.
Which is true. Tony never intended to get married. It happened from working with older guys. Before the jail, he detailed boats in Winnipesaukee, enjoyed the banter, the sun, the way he could hang off a bowrider with one hand and work the heavy buffer with the other, the drinks cool in his worn hand after hard labor while the sun went into the lake. The crew were all married, with Little League games and wrestling meets. Tony romanticized this future. He never went back to school after community college. Instead he buffed enough boats to pay rent on their place so Tammy could finish school. They always agreed he’d go back, but then she got pregnant with Ashley. Tammy let him down. She abandoned a sexy social cause for a safe job on campus. It was all short hair and padded bras after that. Before Ashley, they used to shower together, mess around. They talked about books. She cared about her figure and drank Slimfasts. She let him drink his Sundays away during football season. After Ashley’s birth, none of that. There’s no point in kicking himself, he thinks. Everything he ever imagines to be in the future is different when he gets there. It won’t be any different for Jeffries, whatever path he thinks best.
A cartoon of two officers having sex with a woman is on the back page of the gazette. Tony eats a meatball and stares at it. The officer in her mouth is disheveled, his hair messy, his stomach fat. The officer in the rear wears a cowboy hat, and the two men are double-high-fiving above the woman. Nielsen sees Tony looking at the cartoon and folds the paper back to see what he’s looking at.
“That’s called an Eiffel Tower,” Nielsen says.
Goddamn cartoons now. Tony thinks about what goes into publishing the paper, the lengths the author goes to. He—maybe it’s a she; he hasn’t considered that—puts a good deal of work into the gazette and for zero notoriety. A present-day Thomas Paine minus the need for an overthrow or a sense of urgency. He feels his comparison is a bit inadequate or rushed and then thinks the gazette is more Modest Proposal with the Common Sense anonymity. Too archaic to share. Too elitist. You’re a dirty guard, Tony; don’t go pretending you’re not. Plus, that doesn’t work because the headline he sees in front of him, “Nude photos surface proving Karl’s dick is a black mamba,” is more parody than satire and he begins to question his comparisons. It hits him. It’s like MAD Magazine. That was right in front of your face, Tony.
“You guys ever do an Eiffel Tower?” Tony asks.
“I was in a frat,” Nielsen says.
Nielsen picks the paper back up. Ice cubes drop and clunk in the ice machine behind Tony. Jeffries chews
the candy bar with his mouth open, probably intentionally, not because of a cold. Outside, it is frigid and dark, the city surrounding the jail awake and mischievous, hookers pulling in johns to pay for heroin, junkies breaking into homes for valuables to pawn at King’s in the morning, only to have the transactions and receipts handed over to police soon after. Those awake this time of night, half lit on God knows what, would all make a trip through the House sooner or later. Tony knows all this without needing a window.
This is why he reads those dumb paperbacks he buys at CVS when he picks up his anticoagulants. He gets in a mood where all things are shitty. Henna—yes, Henna—his perky thirty-two-year-old psychologist, with her tight bun, the incense-smelling office on the third floor where the floors squeak oddly loud, suggested he tone down his reading material. Reading about Attila the Hun’s death march or rereading Crime and Punishment for the third time because he remembers a part where Dostoyevsky reveals himself in the text as the narrator—he can’t remember where or how but he knows he saw it once—he told Henna all this and then some, and she calmly told Tony maybe to not read those books, especially during work hours (he told her about the slaughterhouse feel of the unit, too). After the heart attack, which Tammy attributed to stress, mainly from Ashley bolting—because your diet is impeccable, Tony, unless you’re not eating what I send with you, but that fatty jail food, and I know you’re not eating that, are you, Tony?—she insisted Tony needed to work through things. Hence, Henna. Now he misses his books, the hidden enrichment. He misses when things mattered at all.
“The thing about Eiffel Towers,” Nielsen begins, “is that the formation is only a snapshot of what is going on. It’s a quick high-five. You know, you don’t actually stay that way.”
Nielsen is the youngest of the three, big-chested, but with a delicate face. He’s on third shift because he watches his kid while his wife works during the day. It’s sad to watch a guy turn nocturnal for a baby. Actually, maybe it isn’t, Tony thinks. Maybe if he’d spent more time with Ashley as a baby, she wouldn’t have turned out the way she did. Don’t go second-guessing yourself, Tony. It’s not in your makeup. But Henna might piggyback that idea, so he mentally notes it for their next session.
He doesn’t tell his wife he didn’t even so much as glance at her vacation package. She leaves for work at the school when he walks in the house at seven thirty. She works in financial aid, has for twenty years, marked last year by a plaque the university gave her that she hung above the kitchen table like it was a trophy. Big fucking deal. Thanks for doing the basic task we ask of you: show up. He earns colored ribbons from accolades unknown to Tammy; she doesn’t even pretend to care and he’s never found reason to boast. He wears them every day. What if he had pointed them out to Ashley when she was younger? “The yellow one is for the time I blew life into someone who didn’t want it anymore.” Would that have kept her? Was he even why she left, or was she always going to leave? Were they all going to be where they are now, no matter what? If that lowlife had actually died that sweaty afternoon, if Tony’s breath had proved unsuccessful—his chest pumps, his silent pleadings for the man he didn’t know—would it all be the same? Tammy kisses him on the cheek—she hates his mustache—and goes out the door smiling, smelling like blueberry streusel.
Once she’s backed out and is down the street a bit, he walks out to his car in his slippers, his feet cold and crunching the week-old snow, and grabs the grocery bag from the trunk. He empties the contents—he does this every work morning—onto the counter: a thirteen-ounce Delmonico steak, pre-packaged potato salad, and two Budweisers. Tammy would be surprised to see him cook, to see him work the smoking pan, season the meat with equal parts sea salt, pepper, and garlic powder, lay the meat down for a two-minute sear, then slather a spoonful of butter on after a turn and kick it into the oven to finish it off. Perfectly pink. It’s nothing special. Maybe he’d show her one day, as if he’s learned simple guitar chords in secret and is going to surprise her with “Love Me Do.”
After he’s full, he smokes a Parliament while sitting on the toilet, blowing smoke out of the bathroom window. The cool air comes in and collides with the hot steam from the shower and the cigarette smoke. This is the best part of his day. The clandestine silence and solitude. He drops the cigarette between his legs and he sits there for a while. He thinks of Ashley and it ruins his mood. He concludes she is a runner. Henna has been on him to call her. Call her, he thinks, to find out what he already knows. Ashley is twenty-one and moved to San Diego when she turned eighteen. Not married but has a son, contemporary arrangements. She’s a barista, minimum wage plus tips. His only grandchild—grandson even—has hair longer than a girl’s. He’s three, his name is Ethan, and in the only photo he has of Ethan the boy is wearing a Nirvana T-shirt, some yellow smiley face. It’s a band, Tammy says. Remember Kurt Cobain? No, he doesn’t. What three-year-old knows what bands he likes? Ashley wouldn’t talk to him anyway even if he did call. I get too upset, she says. You don’t listen. You’re too uptight. And maybe he is. If she did try to reach out to him she would see he’s much better now. The heart attack put things in perspective. He’s much more civil with Tammy. They’re planning a vacation. He suspects Ashley calls her mother during the day. They talk about him and enjoy their complicity.
He won’t call. He showers and sleeps heavily all day.
Working third shift, he enjoys three dinners a day. He’s fine with that. He was never a fan of breakfast food. But his wife makes him quinoa and buckwheat now since his heart attack. He understands her reasoning and he doesn’t have the energy to fight her on it. It hasn’t helped her avocado frame. He wakes up at five twenty and they eat chicken hot dogs and bean salad and he doesn’t hate it. She wears a red Mickey Mouse T-shirt, white-and-black-checkered pajama pants, thick ashy eye makeup, her around-the-house attire. She cuts her hot dog into tiny pieces, slivers, and then chews them like a monster. He eats quickly. They talk some; his wife asks him how he feels, if he’s tired, he should take it easy, but he couldn’t take it much easier. She waits until he’s almost done eating and she asks about the vacation, you know, Tony, where is it you think you’re leaning toward, and he says the resort, most likely, and he’s pleased with himself because she’s leaning that way too.
In the book he’s reading, the detective’s daughter is trying to sabotage the investigation. Obviously this makes him think of Ashley again. If only she knew how much he thought of her. It may be because this chapter of his life is currently being dissected by Henna, but he wouldn’t tell Ashley that if they got to talking. He’s aggravated he has to reread the last few pages, having been sidetracked. The detective, the hero, knows what his daughter is doing but allows her to continue—this is something she needs—while trying to solve the case. He looks for the author picture but the book doesn’t have one. The narrative doesn’t hold a spine to the mere description of a typhoon attacking the Pequod, or Benjy’s squeal at soiled drawers, or even an inventive portrait of Anna.
He makes an even round. All the inmates are asleep and snoring. It’s early in the shift and Tony is well rested, but he gets tired watching them sleep. The inmates look comfortable, dreaming, and for the eight to ten hours of sleep they are playing with their kids, catching footballs, snorting coke, and licking women. To Tony, the inmates during third shift are not the same during the day shifts. He doesn’t hate them or feel sorry for them at night.
Tony sits back down and handwrites the round onto his log: 2330 Round Made. The pedometer is stuck on 999. He flips the lever and it resets, settles back at 999. He pockets it. The vacation package is underneath the clipboard. He eyes it for a moment. He knows he’ll have to soon but he’s tired. He gives up on the novel and thumbs through the gazette he’d swiped from the lounge, figures he could use a laugh. But he finds himself fixated on the cartoon of the two officers in uniform tag-teaming who he decides to be Tully’s wife, a first shifter who, rumor has it, works overtime so his wife can screw around with som
e cowboy from Texas, hence the cowboy hat. Tony doesn’t get involved with rumors but he lets himself on this one, giving context to the cartoon, adding much-needed layers. The gazette artist doesn’t draw as well as he writes.
Tony gets hard, not intentionally, just one of those times when something unknown takes the controls. He can feel his heart thumping and it worries him. Tony, relax. Remember what Dr. Almonte said, Tony, your heart can’t play like it used to. Take some deep breaths and act like you care when you do it. He folds up the gazette and hides it along with the vacation papers and then picks the paperback up and reads.
He thinks about the last time Tammy felt real. He settles on the day after Ashley left, leaving only an Internet message. Tammy blamed him. She stood over her laptop, in a loose brown blouse and orange slacks that hid her rounding ass, and she read over and over I’m gone. I’m never coming back to Tony. And Tony leaned against the kitchen counter, his hands in his pockets, the coffee maker spitting the last drops from the reservoir, and stared at the free calendar from their car insurance company on the wall, the slick teal Jaguar for June, and wanted to call Ashley’s bluff for the hundredth time but it felt genuine this time, the pregnancy, the bomb. When Tony wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t take his eyes off that beautiful car, Tammy pulled his hair and screamed and it took him two weeks to speak to her but maybe he never really spoke to her again.
He’s still hard and he rubs himself. He wants to de-fat Tammy, to strip her of domesticity and care and elongate her shriveled, graying hair. He imagines her ball-gagged, in a wedding dress, crawling around their living room rug on a leash. One breast is hanging out of the dress, flopping around. She is slim and young, like when they met. She wears bright makeup and black lipstick. Holding the end of the leash is a naked man. Another man stands behind his wife, stroking his dick. Tony is there, too, but in his uniform sitting on the couch. He wants to watch. The two men are Nielsen and Jeffries. The one with his back to Tony, stroking his dick, is Jeffries because of the back of his head. Maybe Tony’s part in the scenario is jamming clippers into the roll and evening it out finally. Nielsen tugs at the leash and barks like a dog. Soon, the wedding dress is pulled off and the ball gag taken out and it’s as if no one knows or cares he is there. The two men and his wife fuck on the floor.
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