Barker House Read online

  Praise for Barker House

  “HERE is a voice to listen to! Moloney’s voice is as true as a voice can be. Concise, with the right details rendered perfectly, these sentences come to the reader with marvelous straightforwardness, clean as a bone. And they deliver.” —Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge and Olive, Again

  “Without romanticizing, demonizing, or candy-coating the work of his corrections officers, this novel-in-stories offers an experienced insider’s view of their lives, in stainless-steely prose that easily matches the best of Raymond Carver and John Fante.” —Tony Tulathimutte, Whiting Award–winning author of Private Citizens

  “Barker House does not remotely read like a debut but more as the seasoned work of a writer with enormous gifts. With a keen eye for essential detail and a playwright’s ear for dialogue, Moloney lays bare the inner workings of a county jail with a writerly passion utterly devoid of sentimentality or artifice of any kind. The result is a deeply satisfying work that will reach into the hearts and minds of many, many readers.” —Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

  “Barker House aims its razor-sharp gaze at the machinery of mass incarceration—and the men and women at its controls. Moloney’s frank and humanizing depiction is lush with regret, longing, cruelty, and hope.” —Robin Wasserman, author of Girls on Fire

  “When it comes to the American penal system, David Moloney shows us that there are many insides. The interiors of the heart. The secret depths of the soul. The imprisoned, the imprisoners, their children, their spouses and partners, the strangers whose lives they’ve touched with violence, grace, or accident. They’re all there inside the prison, and they’re all here inside this book. Moloney is the best kind of writer, both powerful and graceful, and Barker House is an unforgettable book.” —Wiley Cash, New York Times bestselling author of The Last Ballad and A Land More Kind Than Home

  “Welcome to America, where the neglect of human beings has become a celebrated business model. Barker House is a novel as important as Ted Conover’s groundbreaking nonfictional Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing when it comes to this country’s increasing inequities of class and mass incarceration. Moloney is compassionate and authoritative and hugely moving in his portraits of those left behind by the heartless for-profit systems we set into motion and then ignore.” —Jim Shepard, author of The World to Come

  “How fortunate we are that a brilliant and honest storyteller was embedded in the American prison system as a corrections officer for years. Moloney went to the underworld and came back. The setting in Barker House has the unmistakable aspect of a real place, the dialogue the unmistakable ring of real speech. I loved my visits to this terrible kingdom.” —Benjamin Nugent, winner of the Paris Review’s 2019 Terry Southern Prize

  “A deeply felt novel about the soul-sucking grind of life at the margins of the labor force. The men and women whose interwoven stories comprise this unforgettable debut aren’t the prisoners, they’re the guards, and yet their lives are hardly less violent, precarious, and desperate than the lives of the people under their authority.” —Justin Taylor, author of Flings

  “A ‘slaughterhouse,’ writes David Moloney in his striking debut novel, Barker House, describing the decaying state of America’s jails, the depths of that hell, and the lonely lot of jailers who are as trapped in their lives as the prisoners. Moloney’s spare prose and painful tales grab the reader by the throat and won’t let go.” —Jean Trounstine, activist and author of Boy With a Knife: A Story of Murder, Remorse, and a Prisoner’s Fight for Justice

  For May and Cal

  CONTENTS

  Part I: Kingdom

  Part II: Property

  Part III: Numbers

  Part IV: Underhand

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  If you really want to know someone, work with them.

  —DAD

  Part I

  KINGDOM

  Mankins / RU

  “Counsel”

  I work alone on the Restricted Unit in the Barker County Correctional Facility in New Hampshire. It’s a semi-circular room, the curved wall lined with nine cells. Most of the day, the inmates press their faces to scuffed windows, silent. There are no bars. The architects went with rosewood steel doors. Rosewood: the color of merlot.

  On Tuesday and Saturday mornings I supervise inmates while they shave in their cells. We don’t leave them alone with razors. I try to talk with them, like we’re just in a locker room, hanging out while one of us shaves. Some don’t talk. I imagine that, cutting their whiskers before a scratched plastic mirror, they think of the other mirrors they’ve shaved in front of, the rooms those mirrors were in, and maybe that keeps them silent.

  Tuesday. Inmate Bigsby is shaving. He’s talkative. Not crazy crazy, but it’s always tough to tell.

  “This scar, right here,” says Bigsby as a stroke down his cheek reveals a cambered wound, “was when I broke from the sheriffs.” The single blade on Bigsby’s flimsy disposable couldn’t shave a teenage girl’s happy trail but the inmates make do and pull at their skin.

  There is a common perception—you see it in movies—that inmates don’t want to talk about their crimes. But they do. They depend on their pasts, their scars, to prove they were something else. In what standing, that doesn’t matter.

  “I’m not familiar with the sheriff story.” I press my fingertips together. My feet are in a boxer’s stance. Even though Bigsby has never been violent in Barker House, that could change. Shaving cream drips into his mouth and he spits into the metal sink. Behind him are a single metal bed, a tiny window above it, and a yellow glow-light dimmed by heavy Plexiglas.

  “It was on all the news,” Bigsby says with a smile. His rough voice sounds practiced. He’s been on RU for two months. His arms are tattooed in old-school ink, the black turned green and smeared. He’s lived in halfway houses, shelters, jails, prisons. He says he’s even squatted in people’s basements for weeks at a time, the homeowners never the wiser.

  One cell over, Inmate Sanchez punches the wall. The meat of his fat hand smacks with each blow. He groans, slows, stops, begins again. Bigsby looks over his shoulder as if to see through the wall, as if his concern could stop the dim-witted Hispanic man from harming himself. He shakes his head.

  “His extension was denied,” Bigsby explains. “Trial starts Monday.”

  I lean outside the cell’s threshold with my eyes still on Bigsby and tell Sanchez to cut the shit. He doesn’t. To pass the time, I ask Bigsby to tell me his story.

  “It was back when I was facing weapons charges. I was a ‘three strikes’ guy with none left to give.” He runs the blade over the curve of his ear. “Leaving court, they got two old-timer sheriffs on me. Guys could barely put the leg shackles on. I kicked one over and ran, more like skipped. And when I saw the Nashua, I jumped in.”

  “That’s hardcore.”

  “I floated for a while. It was quiet and I tried not to move much,” he says. “I thought I got away. Then I heard the dogs barking. Those fuckers can swim.”

  The punching continues.

  “You want to go in the Chair again, Sanchez?” He’s been in it once after he tried to drown himself in his toilet. He keeps punching.

  Bigsby stops shaving. “You can’t leave me with half a face of hair,” he says to me. “Sanchez, chill, amigo.”

  I wave my hand at Bigsby out of view of Sanchez: I’m not serious. Bigsby continues his shave. I am serious, though. If Sanchez breaks his hand it’ll be my ass in a cast. The punches come slower but harder. Bigsby’s mirror wiggles. He stops shaving and taps the head of the razor on the sink, half his face still slathered in shaving cream.

  “Imagine he knocked his gi
rl around like that.”

  I put my hand out. “Give me the razor,” I say. “I got to deal with this asshole.”

  Bigsby pauses. “I’m not done, CO. I look like a sideshow freak.” He looks afraid because he knows the outcome here. Half-shaven until Saturday. A hard punch hits the wall and Bigsby flinches. I motion again and he hands me the razor. I pull his cell door shut and lock it; he shouts through the clear window how fucked up it is to leave him like that. Bigsby thinks we’re boys because I let him talk and sometimes I talk back. But now I’m just another asshole cop, he says. He kicks his door and Sanchez decides to take a break from punching his wall to punch his door, which makes more noise. If they were bars, I wonder if the two men would take to striking them, if they would strike any partition.

  I radio my sergeant. Over the open airwaves, I’m sure he and every other screw with a two-way can hear, in between the bangings of fists on metal doors, pleas for me to go fuck myself.

  I drive through a light dusting of snow with the radio off, focused on the rhythmic screech of the windshield wipers. The roads are guarded by curved snowbanks, their whiteness soiled by blown exhausts and salt and sand. Even though my DUI charges were dropped because the Statey misplaced my Breathalyzer sample, my captain still required me to attend counseling. I was reluctant. I’d gotten the drinking under control on my own.

  I meet Jerry on Wednesday afternoons in Nashua. It turned out to be sort of interesting, therapy. I like to pre-game what I’m going to say to Jerry, to keep him on task. He’s a rambler. He gets paid by the hour. His practice shares a duplex with a children’s dentist. Sometimes kids and their parents pass me on the stairs, the kids’ eyes puffy, holding bags with toothbrush heads sticking out the tops, rewards for sitting still in the chair. When I knock on Jerry’s door, I can hear the sounds of the waiting room on the floor above: toys being pounded against the carpet, and the woodwinds of cartoons.

  This is my third Wednesday. Last week, for homework, Jerry asked me to watch some bullshit Sandra Bullock movie about rehab. I didn’t. He won’t follow up.

  Jerry starts off on his favorite subject: the injustices perpetrated in my place of employment. The House is for-profit, so we spend as little money as possible on the food, and we share a doctor with two other counties. He talks about that, instead of my drinking, or my arrest.

  I don’t bite. He sighs and hoists his sneaker up onto his thigh. He’s big and fat and his black shirt is half-tucked into jeans. His clerical collar is cockeyed. As a certified counselor, he says, he’s offended by the abuse and neglect of prisoners as a business model.

  “I used to be a counselor,” I say.

  This works. “Drugs?” He wiggles in his chair, interest piqued.

  “Kids. At the old mental hospital in Raymond,” I say and Jerry lets his leg fall back to the floor. “I left two years ago.”

  “People say terrible things about that place,” he says like I don’t know. “June. You remember, my daughter.” He turns the picture frame on his desk toward me. “She’s going to BU for psychology. She wants to help kids, too.”

  “I mainly wrestled with them on dirty rugs,” I say, “during restraints. I’d do eight to ten restraints a shift, sometimes more. To help them.”

  “June is tender,” he says and turns the picture back out of my sight. “I see her being more on the clinical side.”

  “We hated the clinicians. The kids did, too.”

  Jerry nods. “When she was ten, she helped a boy home after a bicycle wreck. The kid hit a tree, got all cut up,” he tells me. “I picture her doing things along those lines.”

  “These kids don’t have bike accidents. They hurt themselves on purpose.”

  Jerry takes a butterscotch from a jar on his desk, unwraps it, puts it in his mouth.

  “And if we hurt them or got rough,” I say, “that meant we cared.”

  Jerry puts a finger under his nose and slurps at the hard candy. Behind his cluttered desk, which is covered in newspaper and Styrofoam coffee cups, a clock on the wall ticks through the silence. The room is just a tad bigger than an inmate’s cell. All I can smell is butterscotch and coffee.

  He probably expected this to be another sixty minutes of story time, two Irish guys talking about drinking, fighting, love. He told me on our first week he quit drinking twenty-two years ago. He said cops back then didn’t give DUIs. They’d throw your keys in the snow and give you a ride home. He wished they’d given him one, saved him decades.

  “You got rough with the kids?” he finally asks.

  Our time is almost up. I want to tell Jerry about José but there isn’t time. I wouldn’t be able to explain him: a twelve-year-old son of a prostitute, a boy who liked starting fires, hurting dogs, playing with Legos. He wore a fanny pack he found in the trash and hid marbles, bouncy balls, broken Nintendo DS games in it. He cursed like a john. He was wiry and strong, which turned out to be a problem.

  The night he died, José chose to wait until lights-out to ask to do his laundry. He’d get stuck on a task and, until it was completed, would struggle for days before he could move on. Christine didn’t want to press the issue and walked José to the laundry room down the hall. Only a minute later, she yelled for staff, and I left my post outside the boys’ bedrooms and ran to find José grappling with her. Christine was petite but strong, bragged about her CrossFit PRs.

  I secured one of José’s wrists and twisted it clockwise until he was rendered facedown on the floor. Christine got hold of his other wrist. As we were trained, the two of us proned José out. He feigned defeat—he always did—then attempted to free himself. Christine and I shifted into the next stage of the restraint and sat against José’s armpits, pressed our backs against one another’s. We pulled his arms taut against our abdomens. It was methodical, practiced, by the book. But José wouldn’t concede. And then Christine told me he wasn’t struggling on her end and asked me if he was struggling on mine.

  I turn to the photo of June. “She’s pretty,” I say. “The kids liked the pretty clinicians.”

  I watch TV. Infomercials are the only things worth watching. Power washers. Root shovels. An indoor-garden kit. No one wants to hear it. There’s Jerry, but he’s too responsive. I don’t call my parents. My friends are gone. If Christine and I had anything it was dissolved that night in October at ten minutes to eleven. My father took José’s death well. He brags about my new pension. I can’t tell him about the heaviness that crawls up my chest when I sleep. It’ll disturb his current positive opinion of me. My mother took José’s death well. She went to all the services, cut out his obituary from the newspaper. She looks at me like I worked at an abortion clinic.

  On the back of a magazine on my coffee table, the ad on the page for a spray deodorant has a good deal of white space. I’ve filled it with the names of products and the phone numbers you call to order them. Showtime Rotisserie. Snuggie. Acne something? I don’t have acne and must’ve been buzzed when I watched that infomercial.

  A man cuts through a soda can with a knife. He also promises a fifty-year warranty. Fighting the urge to make a purchase, I down another Luksusowa and orange soda water and get out of the apartment.

  I pull into the gravel parking lot, the tires crunching frozen snow. I stand outside my car and stare into the cold night sky, try to get my head right. The Blue Moon is the size of a diner. Surrounded by dense wetlands, without neon or a flashy exterior, it can pass for one.

  I don’t make eye contact with the bald bouncer. He looks like an ex-inmate and I don’t want to get into that kind of conversation. He checks my ID and doesn’t ask any questions. I skip getting a drink and head toward the solo dance area behind a maroon curtain. For twenty dollars, you get a private dance in a stall, its door similar to a bathroom stall’s. There are lines of stalls with other men and slightly attractive women inside of them. I find Michelle. She told me once her brother is autistic. She doesn’t mind my stories. Even though she encourages me, I don’t touch her.
r />   “You don’t seem like the type of woman that enjoys wearing bras,” I say. Michelle has decent-sized breasts and they look real, having a slight swing to them as she moves. Her brown skin is clear of blemishes. Her breath smells like Fireball.

  “No,” she says, “too uncomfortable. I like being free.”

  “You might enjoy the AHH Bra,” I say. “No hooks or wires.”

  “Never heard of it.” She sits on my lap. “I don’t excite you?”

  “You do,” I say. “I wrote down the number, in case you’re interested.”

  She stands and puts her hands on my cheeks. “I bet you have a great smile.”

  “Don’t tease me.”

  “I want to see it,” she says. “Good! I made Tommy smile.”

  Bigsby had an active night. He was able to get a few other inmates to rock the unit. They rolled up spitballs, slid them out through the four-inch space under their doors. The dayroom floor was covered with them when I arrived for my shift. The officer I relieved, Josephs, was sitting in the middle of them, reading a fat paperback with his flashlight. He likes to call the unit “a well-oiled machine.”

  “He’s hot about his face,” says Josephs, of Bigsby. “I called him Two-Face once and he ruined my shift.” He indicates the spitballs.

  Josephs leaves the unit. I don’t make any unexpected moves, at first—just gather up the spitballs in my palm, brush them off my gloved hands into the trash. No one says anything; I hear the occasional giggle. When it’s time for showers, I begin with Sanchez, as usual, and wait until he is comfortable under his cone of steam and hot water, face downturned. Then I unlock the recreation yard door and kick it open. It’s January. The icy breeze cuts through my uniform.

  There’s cursing and shouting. But Sanchez showers nonetheless. When he’s done, I hand him a towel, and he brings it to his face, but then it falls, his kinked fingers incapable of gripping it. The towel sits in a puddle on the concrete shower floor, with the cold wind blowing over it. Sanchez’s curly hair drips water over his eyes, and his pubic hair is thick and hides almost all of his penis.