Barker House Read online

  “That’s the only one you get today,” I tell Sanchez.

  He shakes off like a dog and droplets hit my face. I flinch. I can hear Bigsby laughing behind his cell door.

  Sanchez picks up the sopping towel and rubs it on himself. His pink, peeling knuckles show fresh blood. It’s eight o’clock. Outside the walls, the clanging doors, high above the snores and farts and stink of unflushed toilets and body odor, the sky unloads fluffy snow on the roads.

  I tell Sanchez to cut the shit and go back into his cell. His hour of tier time isn’t up yet, but the way his large body mopes around, his numb eyes following me, makes me want to cut his time short. Most inmates would complain about losing tier time but Sanchez never does. I’ve asked myself if he is playing a game, like some inmates do when they plan to plead insanity. But the state of his hands tells me he’s not playing.

  He walks naked into his cell and I key his door locked. He stands at the door, and I know how piercing the frigid water on his skin is. But he doesn’t let me know he feels it.

  Bigsby comes out next. He struts past me to the showers, his face divided, one side smooth, the other furry with gray hair. He stares at the open rec yard door. He grunts and goes behind the beige half-wall, me on the other side. I slam my boot on the stool of a dayroom table, my tan uniform tight, head freshly shaven, and I imagine he sees me as a person with power. He finishes undressing. His skin is white and seems to tighten from the cold.

  “That’s a real prick move to open the door like that,” he says. “That’s some old-school bullshit. I figured you better than that.”

  The door behind me leads to a small bricked-in rec yard with a basketball hoop with no net. We don’t have a basketball to offer the inmates. There’s nothing to do out there but walk around in circles. The walls are high and topped with chicken wire. Some snow has fought through and coated the ground.

  “I wouldn’t have put up with this shit before,” Bigsby says and turns the shower on. He gets under the water and lets it run over his face. His fills his mouth with water and spits it high into the air. Steam runs out from over the half-wall and rises toward the ceiling lights, giving them the look of streetlights in fog.

  When José first came into the hospital, he had nothing. “Indigent” is what we’d call an inmate like that. José had nothing because it’d burnt in a fire. His mother left him alone. He couldn’t find his dog. José lit a candle and slid it under the bed for light. The dog came out from under the bed, and I imagine they played, rolled around like kids do with their pets, the dog licking José’s earlobe. The bed burnt first. Then, three units in the jam-packed downtown apartment building. The only living thing not to make it off the top floor was the dog.

  I went through my closet and drawers and filled a trash bag. Old baseball jerseys, Patriots garb, T-shirts I’d cut the sleeves off of. The only rule of the ward when donating was it had to be anonymous. Only organic relationships. The kids came from places where possessions meant everything, especially because of who they came from. I remember watching José drive toy cars across the carpet, making beeps and vrooms. He was wearing the green Parks and Recreation T-shirt I wore when I worked for the department in high school. I wanted to tell him about that job, how I taught kids to swim. To jump rope, flirt with girls. I knew he wouldn’t have listened to anything I had to say unless I started by telling him he was wearing my shirt.

  The muster room is full of officers chatting about new restaurants and superhero movies, hangovers, who was at the bar last and didn’t make it to work. Six ten-foot tables face the front of the room. Four sergeants are lined up behind the lectern at the helm. The brick walls are bright yellow and littered with inspirational posters. At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212, it boils. With boiling comes steam. And steam can power a locomotive.

  Lt. Hobson reads off the roster, plugs me into RU, then goes over the notes from the previous two shifts. He says Bigsby spent the night throwing fecal matter out of his cell. He refused to stop when directed. Bigsby claimed he wasn’t being treated right, that the jail was screwing with him. Hobson cautions us against walking by Bigsby’s cell. When he’s done reading off the notes, he dismisses the room but tells me to stay back. The muster room begins to clear. Hobson has a blond crew cut, a filled-out chest and shoulders, and reflective insignias in two long rows pinned over his heart. He stays quiet and inattentive until we are the only two left.

  “Bigsby,” he says as he looks at me. “I personally supervised his shave this morning. He claims you left the rec door open during his shower. Cut off his shave halfway through. Don’t give him a platform.”

  I nod. Hobson obviously forgets Sanchez’s incident during shaves.

  “Stop fucking with the rec door,” says Hobson. He squeezes my shoulder as he passes me out of the muster room. “Oh,” he says. He turns around, his hand on the doorframe. “Bigsby told me to tell you he’s waiting for you.”

  Sweaty Officer Josephs is wearing purple nitrile gloves, and he’s tying a red hazardous waste bag, which surely contains Bigsby’s shit, by the inner door to the unit. But there’s no smell of shit, no trace of it. Josephs watches me in the full-dome mirror mounted in the center of the unit. I watch him as he watches me while I write my opening log. It’s clear from his silence that he blames me for his bad night. He tosses the bag near the trash barrel and walks behind me, grabs his log and slides it to me. I sign him off. Once he’s gone I look for Bigsby in the grate of his door, but his face doesn’t come.

  I’m anxious to make my rounds. Whatever I do, I don’t want to cede power to Bigsby. The eight bodies on my unit are asleep.

  I key open Sanchez’s cell for tier time at 0725 hours, kick the bottom side of his metal bed with my boot, and he startles awake. He’s nude. His room smells like wet dog hair. He sits up and walks out of the cell and straight into the showers. He turns a shower on and I open the rec yard door and let the wintry air pour in.

  Bigsby, awake, immediately comes to his window and starts punching and kicking the cell door. Freshly shaven, his face again symmetrical. We look at each other from ten feet away. Bigsby’s banging awakens other inmates. Silently, their faces surface behind their windows.

  Sanchez turns off the shower and shivers. I bring him his towel from the half-wall. Bigsby is still kicking. The other inmates watch and allow Bigsby to have the floor. I hand the towel to Sanchez and he drops it, his fingers crippled, unable to grasp even air. In the full-dome mirror, I see Bigsby’s arm creep out from under his door and throw a handful of shit into the dayroom. I don’t turn or look back. He’s yelling, “Shut the door! Shut the door!” like a protester. I’ve never heard him sound so alive.

  Sanchez stands over his towel, shaking uncontrollably, wild, making faces that remind me of a fish in a net. He starts to cry. I pick up the towel and begin with his shoulder. I dry down his arm and he holds it out as if we’ve done this before. He cries as I dry his chest, his legs. He lets me dry his injured fingers, and then his entire body.

  O’Brien / Max

  “Bubble Time”

  Today his world was not serene, because just before lunch, Menser lost his cuff key.

  A pleasing day for Scott O’Brien would be working on Max with enough Bubble time to end each shift, driving straight to the gym while sipping iced black coffee mixed with chocolate whey protein powder. After that, he’d drink. O’Brien wanted to do all these things alone. He had no problem with running tier time alone, then enjoying the quiet control room on Max, the Bubble. Where boots could be put up, eyes shut behind blackout shades, and there were no cameras.

  He’d let inmates out of their cells in groups of four; a three-to-one inmate-to-officer ratio was the policy on Max. The extra inmate per group would shave two hours off his shift expectation, allowing him to nap after lunch. The risk was worth it; rarely did the inmates act out on his shift. He found he could get more done without his partner, Menser. In his overstuffed uniform, Officer Eric Menser was a cumbersome load. He�
�d mishear names and take out the wrong personal property boxes before tier time. He would nod when O’Brien gave him instructions but then go and do something else, like wipe down dayroom tables or fart into the cracks of inmates’ doors and laugh. “The spray bottles, Menser. Have the inmates clean their cells,” O’Brien would remind him. Without Menser, O’Brien could do these simple tasks by himself, which saved the stress of micromanaging an officer who’d been on the unit since before O’Brien graduated high school.

  O’Brien also enjoyed the relative silence of hearing nothing more than showers running, inmates pleading with baby mamas on the unit phone, and toilets flushing. During routine tier time, O’Brien would watch the clock and prep the next group of inmates to get a head start. Any time, minutes even, he’d take advantage of before lunch. It only made the rest of the shift work in his favor. O’Brien wasn’t obsessive-compulsive; rather, he was strategic in pursuing the things that eased his mind, which were Bubble time, gym, drinking, in that order. His last girlfriend had left him two years ago after he proved to be noncommittal, blowing off a trip to San Diego for her sister’s wedding. He couldn’t afford the vacation time, which he saved for a golf trip that year in Ireland. He never went on the trip, and he settled into this routine. Whenever things got to a certain point with a woman, he’d say to curious friends, “We aren’t really a thing.”

  The day began with Menser choosing to start out on the floor with O’Brien, which put Greenly in the Bubble. O’Brien had been working with Menser for over three years and found ways of delegating chores to him to get him out of the way. He’d watch Menser sweep the already clean top tier, in oblivious fulfillment, and feel slightly bad for the guy, like he’d thrown an invisible ball to a dog. If Menser seemed ambitious, O’Brien would then give him a real chore, and later regret it. The saddest part was watching Menser’s decline in real time, not like some cheesy movie drama montage of despair. His depression became evident quickly: the sudden weight gain, heavy soda drinking, sick-time usage. He would say things like, “One day they’ll shut this place down. Make us all grocery baggers.”

  That day, Menser seemed uncharacteristically excited. While Menser made the first round, O’Brien heard him greeting the inmates at their doors, and he took the lead in drawing out the tier time for the day and getting the right cells cleaned. Instead of feeling good for Menser, O’Brien was knocked off his rhythm and wished Menser had come in sullen, prepared to wipe cell door windows. He decided to keep out of Menser’s way and let him tire himself out. They ran tier time efficiently, and the day was playing out to end with Menser and O’Brien sharing the Bubble, which still beat staying on the floor for the entire shift with the inmates.

  Then Menser told O’Brien they had a problem. Menser didn’t know where he lost his cuff key, or if he had brought it to begin with. O’Brien would normally retrace his steps, but in jail, and with Menser not remembering when or if he had it, the steps had variables. Any of the nine inmates on tier time could have swiped it. They would pat inmates down at the end of tier time, but there were blind spots on the human body. And if he lost it on a round, it would have fallen close enough to the cell doors where an inmate could have reached out from under his door and grabbed it.

  Protocol, for any other unit besides Max, was to call the floor sergeant and inform him of the missing equipment. But there was a standing order for Max: any shit that happens down there goes straight to the lieutenant. Lt. Hobson had a strange affinity for Max because he had helped Operations draft the new security policies after the riots in 1999. It was still his house and little mistakes rode right up his ass. So of course O’Brien would prefer to find the cuff key himself. The problem was the cameras. They’d record the unit officers running around the unit looking for something they’d claim wasn’t missing until Hobson was called. And Hobson would most certainly check the tapes.

  O’Brien gave himself and Menser five minutes to sweep the dayroom, the showers, and the two closets to find it. Five minutes. Officer Greenly searched the Bubble.

  “I honestly don’t think I clipped it on this morning,” Menser said. “I can picture it on my dresser.”

  Any other officer and maybe O’Brien would let it ride, would wait to find out from Menser later if he had in fact left it on his dresser. O’Brien had even lost one himself during his rookie year, and for that reason he kept four identical keys hidden in his locker. But he couldn’t offer one of his replacement keys to Menser. He knew him well enough to work with him, but he couldn’t involve him in a scheme so involved as covering up a missing key. He didn’t trust Menser’s wits. When he told Menser he was calling Hobson down, Menser shook his large domical head bizarrely, and it wobbled as if it had become unbound.

  “I didn’t have it,” he said. “I shouldn’t even have told you. Fucking snitch.”

  Menser’s face was red, not embarrassed-red, more splotchy high-blood-pressure-red. He wouldn’t look at O’Brien. He rubbed his neck with both hands, which seemed to bolt it back on. He collected himself, drank his Mountain Dew, and stood off behind a large blue pole in the center of the dayroom.

  It reminded O’Brien of something his mother once said. He’d told her there was a boy in his class, much larger than all the other kids, who cried all the time, sat out of dodgeball, wept on the bleachers. O’Brien’s mother, a middle school teacher, told him some kids had sensitive minds in big bodies. “It’s like giving a baby a lighter, Scott. Dangerous, but it’ll never figure out how to use it.” O’Brien called Lt. Hobson over the radio.

  Hobson was the kind of lieutenant who projected his feelings onto his subordinates. He was from Nebraska, waylaid by bad knees from a failed football career that brought him north. Hobson was in his forties, had thick traps, shoulders like he still had pads on; his white shirt tight around his chest and shoulders but loose on his midsection. He had a linebacker’s body and a blond crew cut like a Marine, but O’Brien heard he had tried out for the Jaguars as a fullback, and as much as he came off as ex-military, it was all an act. When he read muster notes before shift, he had trouble reading, would sometimes stutter, then stop and apply a shitload of ChapStick, then pick up his place. Once, at lunch, O’Brien watched Hobson with disgust as he ate liver. He just stuck his fork in the gray organ and chewed off a big piece. Officer Markowski told Hobson it was gross, didn’t he know what function the liver played in the body? And Hobson said, “To eat your own.” They all laughed and Markowski was dumb enough to correct him. Hobson, with a piece of liver in his teeth, said, “That’s how we say it from where I’m from.”

  Hobson pulled Menser into the sally port, a darkened passage, the only entrance and exit from the highly secured unit, and let into him. The heavy door prevented O’Brien from perfectly hearing the muffled ass-chewing coming from behind it. He wanted to hear how badly Menser was being berated.

  O’Brien and Menser, supervised by Hobson, began the process of searching the inmates and their cells. O’Brien took the lead, tapped on the door grate, ordered the lone inmate inside to walk to the front of the cell, kneel facing the wall opposite the stainless steel toilet with his hands behind his back, fingers interlocked. Don’t move. O’Brien waved his hand over his head, and Greenly flipped the panel switch from inside the Bubble, then the door slowly opened along a motorized belt. Once the door clanged open, O’Brien and Menser entered the cell, stood the inmate up by his biceps, and extracted him. Hobson patted the inmate down while O’Brien and Menser searched the inside. They would need to do this for all twenty-two isolation cells on Max.

  None of the industrial green plastic mattresses O’Brien patted with his gloved hands, air vents he beamed a flashlight into, or light coverings he unscrewed and took down yielded anything. All that he found underneath the steel bedsteads were dried crusts from bologna sandwiches or apple cores covered in brown ants. It wore on O’Brien; conducting unclothed searches after clearing each cell; visually checking mouths, nostrils, armpits, fat rolls; ordering the inmates to lif
t their balls, in the midst of their own understandable aggravation, turn, bend and spread their cheeks; peering into unclean assholes, already knowing he wouldn’t find the key. He could hear Hobson sighing heavily behind him. Each time O’Brien handed a piece of clothing to Menser, he was handing Menser empty, dispirited waistbands.

  O’Brien knew that the remainder of his day was messed up. Bubble time was gone. They’d have to stay late writing reports. He wouldn’t have time to hit the gym and drink.

  O’Brien lifted weights. He wasn’t huge; he came in at 170 pounds on most days (he weighed himself at the same time, nude, every morning). He believed in building dense muscle. So he lifted heavy weight, quickly, with no rest, like a cardio and strength workout-in-one, because he never wanted to go back to the fatness and double chin that caused him to fail his first physical fitness exam at the jail academy. And he was competitive. He wanted to become a white shirt, a sergeant, then lieutenant, and maybe captain one day. O’Brien was a keen observer of the obvious, and it was obvious that fat officers didn’t get promotions. Captain Dixon was fit and seemed to take pride in standing alongside other fit and presentable white shirts at funerals, parades, and fallen officer 5Ks. Hobson usually ran in front of the House’s crew, jogging in formation, chanting cadence led by Dixon, with Hobson holding their banner high above his head. Once, Officer Tully pulled out of the Race for Healing 5K halfway through. He claimed he had asthma but O’Brien, as he watched from the back of the pack while controlling his breathing, knew Tully’s career had just hit the ceiling.

  Another asshole and no key. The shift was coming to a close, and O’Brien knew he wouldn’t get a workout in. And that would change the way he ate throughout the day. He was on strict calorie control. If he didn’t exercise, he could take in exactly 2100 calories. On days he did work out, he could take in 2600 calories.