Barker House

by David Moloney

  “I got her,” Tully says, and O’Brien starts the drill. The hone screeches inside Pierce. The sound reminds O’Brien of the trade high school, the hallway of shops in the old building.

  Tully holds the bat and watches the barrel for any bubble spots. He knows what they are doing is wrong, but there is no way they can win the tournament, not with the squad they have. They are annual one-and-dones. Cheating at men’s softball.

  “I thought, when I was a kid, being an adult would be all motorboating and baking cakes,” Tully says over the grinding metal.

  “Strange sentiment.”

  “I remember it. The day I had that thought. A snow day, and my brother was watching squiggle porn on the TV. I thought all I’d ever do was put my mouth in between giant boobs and buy cake mix and frosting and just live. Kiss boobs. All day.”

  “And bake cakes.”

  “Every kind of cake I could get my hands on.”

  Over the grinding metal, O’Brien says, “You ever think about Menser?”

  “I guess. Once in a while.”

  “I sometimes wonder what the last thing he thought was.”

  “He never got all mushy with me. I knew the kid had problems, but to eat his gun. Shit.”

  “Maybe if he didn’t bottle it all up and got mushy once in a while he wouldn’t have made the decision he did.”

  “He made a dumb decision to leave this world.”

  “There’s an argument in defense of leaving.”

  “I don’t agree with that,” Tully says. “I’ve been through some shit. Much worse than Menser. It’s a bitch move.”

  “There’s courage in pulling the trigger.”

  Tully’s grip loosens.

  “Hold it steady,” O’Brien says. Last year, the House lost to a team of public defenders. The year before, they got so drunk, Pelham PD mercy-ruled them in the fourth inning. But this year they are playing for the big guy. Bring home the trophy so the superintendent can display it in his office. O’Brien stares at the spinning drill and can smell the grinding metal. He thinks he’d shaved enough of the inner barrel, but keeps the drill running in hopes of bubbling the exterior, making the bat unusable. He can be a silent hero in this moment. He even congratulates himself for coming up with the idea on the fly. But Tully intervenes.

  “Cut her off,” Tully says. “Do it now!”

  O’Brien turns the drill off and slides out the hone. Tully turns the bat over, checking the barrel, and then both men peer again inside.

  “I think we have a chance this year,” Tully says. He hands Pierce to O’Brien, then goes and sits down on Erin’s bike. He picks his beer off the shelf. He imagines hitting a ball over the left field fence and slowly trotting around the bases. He smiles at the image of himself stomping on home plate and high-fiving his old workmates. He wonders if Brenner will come watch this year. He hasn’t seen her since his last shift. She wouldn’t talk to him. He’d been advised to resign by the superintendent on account of his vehicular misdeeds, so there was no cake or balloons. He just punched out, dropped his two sets of uniforms off to Hobson, and left the House for the last time. He’d stood in the parking lot and drunk beers with Lopez and Kelley, told jokes from the House, particular inmates who were wronged in humorous ways. The skinner they used to feed toilet bowl sandwiches. The Indian guy they had convinced that he had just awoken from a years-long coma. That stuff could make the job fun.

  She lays out her uniform and the butterflies start. She’d heard Lt. Hobson say a few ex-screws were coming back to play, ones that had worked closely with Menser. Everyone at the House is close, tough not to be, with all the shit you go through together. But when you partner up with someone for months, there’s an intimate relationship, you know their mood without asking, know if something’s going on at home, can tell if they are wearing the same uniform as they had yesterday by the pattern of sweat stains. And many of the old-timers had that relationship with Menser, though mostly fraught; he was still capable of eliciting the rare feeling of sympathy. He was abrasive and a crap officer, overweight, took care of his aphasic mother who suffered a stroke after her husband died suddenly. Whenever he was mandated to stay another shift, he’d throw a tantrum, punch lockers; once he ripped up his ID card. There was a rumor he brought in a doctor’s note to the lieutenant saying he couldn’t work overtime. Brenner thinks she was easy on him but can’t remember. She was, at the time, having a quasi-affair with Tully, the Property officer. But she didn’t know he was married. Or did she? Yes, she did.

  When she heard of the tournament, no one invited her or any other women officers to play. The only other women officers are Goggin and Pratt, second shifters, both of who are heavyset lesbians who married last year. They plan on buying an alpaca farm in Marlboro with their retirement.

  A week before the day of the tourney, in the tiny muster room before shift, which smelled like aftershave and protein powder farts, Captain Dixon stood at the podium to address the shift and announce the tournament would be named for Eric Menser this year. There came that arousal—what was it? sympathy? She threw her hand in the air.

  “How do we sign up?” she asked. She’d never raised her hand in muster before.

  “It’s open to anyone with a glove and the day off,” he said and someone in the back of the muster room groaned. The groan didn’t bother her; it fired her competitive boil, something she hadn’t felt in a long time.

  In the heart of her senior year, Brenner tossed twenty-six consecutive scoreless innings. It was a Merrimack Valley Conference record. She hadn’t ever gone back to check and see if it’d been broken. But she doubted it had. During the streak, Brenner ate the exact same meals each day: her mother’s paprika-dusted ham and egg scramble, a sweaty bologna sub (plastic-like yellow cheese removed) from the school cafeteria, and white spaghetti with watery sauce. She was pitching every other day and ended up throwing all but one of her high school team’s innings that year. She’d eaten a lot of those meals that season and sometimes missed the diet consistency, but not the food itself. She was in the local paper constantly; the refrigerator at home was covered in black-and-white clippings. They always seemed to use a photo of her grimacing, the ball clenched at her hip, her body torquing in an unappealing manner in her maroon uniform. Her father used to sneak out of work and she’d see his National Grid bucket truck parked beyond the right field foul pole, his arm hanging out the window holding a cigarette. She knew once they got a lead, any lead, he’d be gone next time she turned off the rubber and pretended to fix the mound dirt.

  She fishes through her old jerseys in a box in her apartment closet. In search of her glove, she is brought back to the long days of school, then homework, then out in the backyard where her father had erected a pitching screen with PVC piping and a batting net. Her father had taught her the basics: backswing, downswing, rotation, and grip. But he wasn’t versed on the intricacies of the mound because he’d never dedicated an embarrassing amount of time on the craft as she had. She learned on her own to stay tall, keep her body stiff, even her head. She’d stay out there until the mosquitoes roused and signaled the practice’s end. And then later, there were practices all winter, one on one with Coach Sullivan, at the loud cages on Tanner Street that were wedged between rival junkyards. She would sometimes synchronize her windup with an adjacent pitching machine that was being fed yellow balls by a fat beer league player, and she’d race the machine, wait for a nod from the man on the other side of the net.

  Then when the snow began to melt, she met Sullivan at the field and she threw sessions in the thawing parking lot. People on Rogers Street would slow down or sit in traffic and she’d pound Sullivan’s mitt in hopes the passengers could hear the pop of leather, maybe recognize her as the star slinger in the newspaper. No one from the House ever mentioned her athletic achievements, though, probably because she’d attended high school fifty miles south of Barker County, and she’d never bragged about them either. But softball had been her entire persona, and tho
ugh it was consuming—she didn’t go to a dance until her prom, or spend nights at the mall, or date until college—she still wouldn’t give it back. When she pitched, coming slowly off the mound to retrieve the catcher’s throwback, she knew there was no one better than her on the field, that when a batter got in the box they feared her; she could see them with their weight on their heels. Neither her father nor Sullivan knew what that level of dominance felt like, no one she knew did. It was lonely on the mound; everyone watching you, but no one could change how the ball came out of your hand. She remembers thinking it was the type of loneliness pilots must feel. But the loneliness of the mound merely fostered an incredible ascendancy when the final strike on the outside black was signaled by the umpire’s baritone cry, enough so the solitary dominance outweighed any moments of aloneness.

  She retrieves her glove from the back of the bedroom closet and the first thing she does is stick her hand inside and shove her face into the webbing and take a deep whiff. It smells like dirt and sweat and glove oil, exactly as she remembers.

  At the House, they were issued shirts for training that they are required to wear with BDUs. It is a navy-blue shirt with a badge over the heart and B.C.D.O.C. in gold letters across the shoulder blades. She puts this on along with gray sweatpants. In the kitchen, she attempts to replicate her mother’s breakfast scramble. It isn’t hard; she tears honey ham lunchmeat into a hot pan and cracks a few eggs over the browning bits of meat, scrambles it all with the head of a spatula. The extra-early morning rise and hot breakfast make her think of her childhood home, the roar of a coffee maker basin draining, her father’s cigarette smoke, the thrill of game days.

  “Don’t let Sullivan warm you up too much,” he’d say. “No one knows your arm like you do.” Sullivan had played softball, modified pitch, in the air force. He was up there in age but he was the only person Brenner had ever met who could throw harder than her, but not as accurately.

  Her father implored her not to work at the House; the job was meant for boneheaded retards, sons of cops too dumb to be cops, not a job for college graduates.

  And she eats her scramble and wonders if he was right. She’s been there two years and works the tiers and every day has started to become the same. She’d had a career setback when she let Tully toy around with her. So naïve. But maybe it wasn’t Tully’s fault, but hers, that her father was right and she’ll waste her life writing D-tickets and doing so much overtime she can’t possibly date. She’ll find in the end that her need to prove her father wrong won’t give her what she thinks she needs.

  It is cool and fall and the trees in southern New Hampshire are at peak foliage, enough so the leaf peepers will only have another week before they miss out. She parks her crossover along the tree line, far enough away from the field for her windshield to be safe from foul balls. The gravel lot is filling; she spots Pelham PD in their baby blue shirts, huddled around a cooler already drinking cans of beer. The pink-shirted clerks from District Court sit on the spectator bleachers behind the backstop and Brenner feels sorry for them but also hopes the House will pull them for their first game. Brenner sips her coffee and notices a few guys from the House on the third base line. Hobson is doing lunges down the length of the field. Sanchez tosses a ball in the air with one hand and picks at his crotch with the other, fanning himself with his loose shorts. And then she sees O’Brien and Tully, it is Tully for sure but he looks a bit thicker, in a good way, mingling with the guys in the dugout, shaking hands. Tully approaches the fence with a smile and says something to the clerks and they laugh. Brenner turns up the radio, a Top 40 pop song she doesn’t care for. She ties up her hair in a tight ponytail, puts on her shades, grabs her glove, and gets out of the car.

  O’Brien shields his eyes from the bright and painful mid-morning sun. He’s forgotten his hat. Well, he didn’t forget anything. The night before, Tully and O’Brien threw more than a few back after successfully doctoring Pierce. O’Brien slept on Tully’s sofa, at Tully’s insistence. “Dewies aren’t cheap, you know,” he’d said. O’Brien is slowly piecing back together the night while trying not to focus on the pain in his toes. He’s wearing Tully’s son Gabe’s too-small cleats, is going to attempt to play right field with Gabe’s too-small glove. And then he sees a woman wearing the House uniform come through the swinging field gate. It’s Brenner, and at the sight of her he spits into the dirt and thinks about his stupidity from the night before, the conversations he and Tully had and how they led down the Brenner path, and also his Keely admission. Instead of warning Tully that Brenner is there, he swipes his phone from the paint-chipped green bench. He opens Facebook for the tenth time this morning: a friend request to Keely Hankerson, which had been accepted. A private message to her as well: U up?

  “Let’s stretch out,” Tully says as he sits down on the bench and tightens his cleat laces. He glances at O’Brien’s phone. “Oh, yeah. That was some balls on you last night.”

  “No,” O’Brien says. He wants to smash his phone with Pierce but knows that won’t solve anything. “How do you delete a sent message? Can you? Can you delete a message?” Brenner enters the dugout and O’Brien keeps at his phone. He holds his finger on the message until it highlights, but it won’t go away. Tully messes with his cleats and doesn’t offer a greeting to Brenner.

  “Hi, boys,” she says. There is a ping of a metal bat hitting a ball into the outfield, the Salem team shagging flies. In the air, it smells like fresh-cut grass and the breakfast sausages Leon, the House cook, is grilling behind the dugout. He has on his whole getup, striped shirt and checkered pants, and is sweating heavily over the grill, patting his head with a dish towel. The House is hosting this year and Captain went all out.

  “I can’t believe I did that,” O’Brien says and tosses his phone into the dirt behind the bench. “Holy fuck.”

  “Are you our ringer?” asks Tully while still inspecting his cleats.

  “I can’t play a lick,” Brenner says and grabs Pierce from its lean on the fence. She grips it and takes a light, half cut. She holds it like she’s done it before. She has a Red Sox hat on, her ponytail pulled through the back.

  Teams are arriving and gathering in pockets outside the field’s fence. Hollister PD huddles around the grill in their neon-yellow jerseys, some sipping cans of beer and rifling down Leon’s sausage, egg and biscuit sandwiches. The clerks and POs from District chat loudly behind the backstop, drinking from Styrofoam coffee cups most likely filled with Bloody Marys. Someone tests the loudspeaker with a “hello, hello” on the mic. Brenner moves outside the dugout and takes a hack with Pierce. She studies the barrel, runs her hand along the fattest part where they’d shaved it down. Tully pops off the bench.

  “Her name is Pierce,” he says and reaches out for the bat.

  Brenner hands it over. “It isn’t a boat.”

  Finally, after almost a year of prodding, Tully confessed he hadn’t screwed Brenner in the Property Room like the rumor suggested. A rumor, O’Brien thought, Tully had started. She’d cut him off in the heat of it, he said. The way he worked her was systematic. He sweet-talked her, flirted, pulled back, and then acted juvenilely infatuated. But she found out he was married, which came as a surprise because all along he thought she’d known and that was part of his allure. Which he reasoned was the miscalculation that squashed the whole thing. He talked over an Amstel Light that rested on his chest and he was laid out on the garage floor. He spoke to the silver Fasade ceiling. Tully said after she made it clear she wasn’t going to play along, Brenner was all he could think about.

  Tully said, “I had this premonition. No. That’s not it. What’s what I’m trying to say?” He tapped the rim of the bottle.

  “A change of heart?”

  “Yeah, but like spiritual. It came from somewhere else.”

  “Epiphany.”

  Tully snapped his fingers and gave thumbs up in the air above him. He continued. “I always feel empty. And Brenner made me feel emptier, but in a way I
needed. Do you know the dread that comes with realizing you overshot your life? I mean, not your entire life, just the meat of it.” All through the next few months, he could feel her hand on his pecker, his words, could feel her soft muff hair.

  “You only felt each other up and she broke you?”

  “She broke me because we only grabbed at each other.” He said he realized he wasn’t gaming her. He had become enamored. And at home, Kathy sensed a change; this wasn’t like previous affairs; he moped around the house, and one night he’d gotten drunk and left Brenner’s photos open on Facebook on the laptop. When questioned in the morning, he told Kathy everything in hopes of sabotaging his current life.

  “I just wanted to fucking bomb it,” he said. He was beginning to sound too emotional for O’Brien’s liking and O’Brien wished he’d left four beers ago. “Parking lot it.”

  “And what about the kids?”

  “Exactly.”

  O’Brien grabs his glove and a ball and heads out to the first base foul line, which is freshly chalked, the powdered limestone wet with morning dew. Tully lines up near the bag and they exchange easy throws. O’Brien feels his hangover lift as he gets his body moving. Brenner sits in the grass beyond Tully, stretches with her feet pressed together. He knows Tully is anxious seeing her. Tully’s throws become harder and O’Brien backs up a few feet. The outfield is peppered with other teams stretching out, jogging across the outfield grass. Two maintenance workers from the House climb the backstop and hang a banner: FALLEN OFFICERS 2014 IN MEMORY OF ERIC MENSER #64. The House’s dugout is filling up: Lt. Hobson wears sporty sunglasses, Dixon smokes a cigarette, and Sanchez wraps chaw in a stretched piece of gum.

  “I’m good,” O’Brien yells and windmills his throwing arm in the cool air to signal he is warmed up.

  “I need a few,” Brenner says and jogs toward O’Brien’s spot. He watches how she receives the ball from Tully. It isn’t awkward. She takes it clean in the webbing. Then she holds the ball in the glove at her waist, steps back with her left leg as if starting a pitcher’s motion, strides forward with the same leg, brings the ball high above her head, glove pointed at Tully, and swings her hand down through her hip in a perfect circle and uncorks a pea toward him. He shields his face with the glove and turns his chin from the throw, and the ball smacks the outside of the glove and falls to the ground in front of him.