Barker House Read online

  After backing out of cell 2089, which smelled like a former inmate, a rather savage man who reeked of shit and peanut butter, Hobson puffed his chest and O’Brien wondered if he’d ever work with Menser again on Max. He couldn’t decide whether he was sad or relieved, like when a grandparent died. He concluded he would probably forgo the gym for drinking that night.

  His drinking ritual disrupted his efficient, quiet workdays and also his ability to stay lean, among other things. And it might’ve been less a ritual than a habit, because he was conscious of it. Rituals were illogical, and drinking was not. He drank for the enjoyable process of drinking, and the end game (drunkenness) was hard to predict, but the journey was worth taking. His favorite drink was his third drink. The first was boarding the boat, the second was unknotting the mooring rope, and the third kicked the boat away from the dock.

  After much trial and error with vodka tonics, red wine, and malt liquor, he settled on beer. Liquor and wine made him black out too quickly, missing that all-important state between buzzed and drunk. It was the hardest state to get to and appreciate. Anyone could sip three drinks then quit or get foolishly ambitious and shotgun twelve. It was the place right before drunk and far enough away from buzzed where he was most pleased with himself. So he drank light beer, which was easy to log into his calorie-counting app. Through research he uncovered that he wasn’t alone in his quest, with the many websites dedicated to this endeavor, and he narrowed his choices of highest alcohol by volume to calories per serving to two beers: Natural Light and Michelob Ultra. With these two beers, preferably Natural Light because it was cheaper, he could fully control each stage, the pacing, and the calories. He knew he couldn’t start before six P.M.; because his average pace was three beers an hour, he’d have to call it a night around ten, and that felt too early for him.

  But Menser losing the cuff key, which in turn would make him miss the gym, meant five fewer drinks, unless he skipped his dinner of baked, skinless chicken on dry brown rice, meaning an even earlier end time. And pushing back the start time left idle time in between work and drinking. He could then maybe squeeze in the gym, bringing his calories back up, pushing back his bedtime, but losing his Bubble time already threw everything off and his coffee-protein drink that late in the day would really keep him up, so maybe the idea of pursuing the mind-easing ritual was misguided.

  They didn’t find the cuff key. Menser got a write-up. Hobson slammed the write-up on the muster room desk in front of Menser while he and O’Brien were writing informational reports for the lost equipment. Menser slid it under the report he was writing and didn’t read it, forcing Hobson to leave the muster room without the satisfaction of seeing Menser’s devastation. O’Brien sat close to him at the table and watched his face as he wrote. His reddish-blond eyebrows were hard to see. He had a redhead’s paleness, freckles, light arm hair and facial hair, but he didn’t have red hair. He wrote rapidly, his large fingers wrapped around the pen, the fresh sweat on his neck embellishing the salty white dried sweat on his collar, unwashed from previous days.

  Some part of O’Brien wanted to invite Menser to his apartment, share the drinking process with him. But Menser seemed sad, and not the basic kind of sad. He wouldn’t be able to get a few drinks in Menser and make fun of how Hobson can’t read to cheer him up. To O’Brien, Menser was uncomfortably lost; his energy could take down everyone around him.

  The locker room was empty. It was an hour into second shift and all the first shifters had cleared out. Menser changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants. He pulled the strings tight around his waist and tied a knot.

  “Hitting the gym?” O’Brien asked.

  “I’d like to,” said Menser as he bent over on the bench and tied his shoes. “Solid chance I don’t make it.”

  O’Brien turned to his open locker and hung up his uniform. He looked at the box of pens where he hid his cuff keys. It’d be simple. Hand one to Menser, send him to Hobson, they’d both say they found it in the locker room.

  “Come over to my place later, have a drink.”

  Menser stood and slung his gym bag over his shoulder. “I don’t drink,” he said.

  “Maybe they won’t take you off Max,” O’Brien said. “Guys have done worse.”

  They rode the elevator in silence. Menser had tucked his lips, kept an expression of determined eyes and embarrassed mouth, throughout the shift. O’Brien patted Menser on the shoulder when they got off the elevator.

  “Don’t sweat it, big guy,” he said. “It’s probably on your dresser.”

  Menser nodded and walked ahead of him without looking back. He walked through the parking lot and got into his truck, then drove off.

  Under the bronzed four-light ceiling fan with two working bulbs, as it emitted a tender breeze on the lowest setting, the neighbors arguing over late-night Chinese food, O’Brien stared at his sweaty Natural Light and thought about Menser. He sat at the kitchen table in his apartment and behind him crackled free-range, antibiotic-free chicken nuggets in the toaster oven. As meticulous as he was, there were times when he overshot the sweet spot of drunkenness and ended up eating calories he wouldn’t dare log into his calorie app.

  Those nights were rare, as he was usually able to feel the drunkenness coming when he had difficulty making out an electronic screen clearly with both eyes open (if he closed one eye and the visuals aligned, he knew he’d gone too far). If not that, it was his YouTube video selections (watching prairie dogs explode by .50 cal sniper fire). He left his phone right side up, unusually; he hoped to see Menser’s text telling him the key was in fact on his dresser. And each beer he drank where the text didn’t come, he moved to the fridge for another.

  He ate the chicken nuggets, because he was hungry, but also because he wanted to sober up. When he got like this his self-destructiveness deepened. He’d wanted to put himself into a state where he could truly understand how Menser felt, like a medium channeling his pain, not with candles and incense or a deck of Death cards, but with Natural Lights. This attempt, of course, didn’t work, and he only drank himself onto the cusp of forgetting. He chewed and swallowed, washed each bite down with beer. He had two beers left, maybe three.

  After eating, he opened Paintbrush on his laptop, a program he’d never used before, and with one eye closed he began to draw Menser. Though crude with choppy lines, the final product did look like the guy. It was a profile view, his nose dipped down past his upper lip; his lips were big and bulging like he’d puckered them. O’Brien gave only one shot at the outline of his head and face. He put red dotted pimples on Menser’s neck but they looked like gunshot wounds. He erased them. He drew Menser in uniform, his stomach round, sagging over the pants. The profile view didn’t do Menser’s portrait any favors. O’Brien added a nice detail, he thought, the Barker County seal, on Menser’s right shoulder, a pine tree inside a triangle with the year 1767. The numbers looked like a sloppy lowercase m. Sipping his beer between line strokes, he drew a large lighter next to Menser. Not a fashionable Zippo. Nothing fancy. Just an oversized lighter, too big to hold in his hand. It looked more like a candle.

  Reviewing the drawing gave O’Brien a sense of desperation. He should’ve bailed him out. With one eye closed, he texted Menser, I can rescue you. Then, after another beer, Right or wrong everyone deserves it. And another beer, possibly emptying the fridge, waiting for Menser to text back, Cannot forget what you’re made from.

  Finally, Menser answered, What are you talking about?

  You can redeem yourself. Faith in you buddy.

  Whatever.

  O’Brien felt better having reached out to Menser. At least the guy knew O’Brien wasn’t intentionally out to get him. Hell, he didn’t lose Menser’s cuff key. He looked at the drawing again and decided to text it to Menser. With his phone, he lined up a picture and snapped it. O’Brien couldn’t tell if he was too drunk or the picture quality was too poor. His one-eye trick wasn’t lining the image up. He sent it anyway, then finished the last ha
lf of what he figured to be his last beer. He went down the hallway barefoot to the bathroom. While he pissed, he laughed. Menser would get a kick out of the drawing.

  He went back to the table and with his finger, dabbed at the chicken nugget breadcrumbs, then licked them off. Menser texted him back.

  Is that a computer screen? It’s all wavy and fucked up. Quit sending me shit. I’ll be fine. I found my key.

  O’Brien clapped once, loudly. He hopped up and opened the fridge. He searched behind the carton of almond milk, the bag of green apples, Greek yogurt containers. “Come on,” he said. “One more for the big guy!”

  Leon / Kitchen

  “Our Champion”

  I was having seizures then. I’d get real cold and drop and then I wouldn’t remember much of it. Sometimes I’d bite my tongue. I had my first one on an active unit just after Sandy left. U4. The inmates huddled around me and after twenty seconds of the radio on my hip being tilted past ninety degrees, the body alarm was triggered. “Can’t have you on the units,” my captain said. “Can’t get rid of you, either.” So after sixteen years working the tiers, I was reassigned to the kitchen, where the inmate workers made bologna sandwiches and BBQ rib patties.

  It was dinnertime, and plating was about to begin on the waterlogged yellow food trays. I could already taste the leftovers I’d put aside. Only a few hours were between a silent basement and me. I stood off in the corner in my food-stained white button-down, black-and-white-checkered pants. Barker House’s first cook, long retired, chose the getup. A Vietnam vet who said he wore something similar in a breakfast hall at Da Nang Air Base.

  If I were still upstairs, I’d have the inmates locking down for chow. I always gave them a good fifteen minutes in their cells before dinner. It settled their nerves. Late in the afternoon, as another day off their sentences closed, the inmates could get excited. But down here, I supervised the making of chow. Inmates—men convicted of drunken driving, parole violation, loitering—wore steel mesh gloves and chopped carrots with sharp chef’s knives, the knife handles connected to a ten-inch chain looped to a ring in the countertop.

  Meatloaf was on the menu, seasoned by industrial-sized seasoning packets—sacks, a better word. The salty loaf was not the mixture of seasonings I would have used at home—dried mustard the headliner. I used to cook dinner at home even before Sandy’s big break, as she called it. She was profiled in New Hampshire magazine as a Remarkable Woman of 2007. The top home seller at her agency. A recent Bay State Marathon finisher. But it wasn’t the profile that changed her. It was the attention her photo received. Sandy in a black dress, her hands on her hips, standing victorious in front of a SOLD sign. Her trainer said she looked powerful. Facebook comments from strange men: Gorgeous! Stunner! Me likey likey. Sandy began weighing her food on a scale before she ate it. If she wasn’t at the gym or working, she was running. I didn’t mind cooking. When Joey was really small and Sandy was a stay-at-home mom, her dinners were pre-made or packaged. Hamburger Helper or frozen fried chicken and canned green beans. But I missed her at the table.

  I checked the boiling carrots. The inmate stirring the pots had his mouth open, his eyes fixed on the bubbling water. He was leaning toward the pot, and I was afraid he was going to dunk his face in it. I got close to him and smelled the alcohol, not booze, but chemical, like hand sanitizer. And then I realized the entire kitchen staff seemed different. Along the assembly line they laughed, roughhoused, and some yelled loudly over the hip-hop on the old boom box. I could sometimes trust them too much and forget. I guessed they’d cooked a batch of apple hooch inside a trash bag, stashed underneath dirty uniforms in housekeeping. It’d had to be cooking for a while.

  I found Copley struggling with a stack of food trays.

  “Are you straight?”

  “I’m not gay,” he said without looking up from his duty. Copley’s story as told by Copley: I bought a dirt bike off my boy Rawls for sixty bucks and the thing’s a piece of shit. I stick it under my mom’s porch and forget about it. A month later I enlisted and blah blah blah I do all this shit. You know. I’m over there for whatever. Eight months. The day I come back they’re waiting for me. Arrest me for stolen property. For a dirt bike that don’t even work.

  Copley had told of his plight one night after he’d volunteered to scrub the meat freezer. We’d sat and ate a tub of sun butter and a loaf of bread in the pantry afterward.

  “I mean sober,” I said. “Are you sober?”

  “I’m not a rat,” said Copley. “And I’m not drunk.”

  On one side of the counter were five industrial ovens cooking the meatloaf. Two older inmates at the head of the counter smeared pieces of white bread with a scant amount of golden margarine to round out dinner. The other side of the counter was a caravan of metal food carts, ready to be filled with trays and lids, crates of milk cartons, and sent up the elevator to the units.

  Copley had a shaved head, patches of red whiskers sticking out in no particular pattern on his zit-scarred face. He removed trays from one of the dishwashers and stacked them on the ground. I could feel the warmth of the dishwasher, the moisture rising up between Copley and me.

  I didn’t drink. Never had. Sandy didn’t either. Our leisure activity was going out to eat. A thing of ours was to try chicken wings from different restaurants. I’m not sure how it began, but we ate chicken wings from Northern New Hampshire down to Cape Cod. The best, we agreed, were the tiki-style wings at T-Bones in Hudson. But then the obsessive running began in correlation with the pre-crash competitive housing market. She lost weight and I could see the muscle in the back of her arms. I didn’t like the changes, but Sandy had a way of making me feel like I was making a big deal out of things. “It’s not a big deal,” she said.

  Copley continued to slot the trays but there were only a few left in his stack. I bent at my knees, my fat stomach between my legs, and hoisted a tall, heavy stack of trays off the ground and strained while walking them to the plating station. I left the stack on the station and the inmates who were buttering the bread plated the bread and slid the trays down the line.

  I went back to Copley and he was making another stack. I was out of breath and trying to hide it, slowing my breathing. I was embarrassed about my weight gain. The photo ID clipped to my shirt portrayed a different man, with a chin and neck and cheekbones. A man who could keep a wife, or easily find a new one, if he wanted. I used to shave every day back then. I said, “I know they’re drunk. But what’d they drink?”

  “You look tired, boss,” he said. “Go get yourself a cup of coffee.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.” I feigned being strict, but I wasn’t. “Sorry.” I needed the inmates to have an investment in me. If my brain exploded and I cracked my head, I needed a kind heart to call it in.

  “I’m just saying maybe you go and start a pot of coffee.”

  I counted filled dinner trays on U8 and U9’s rolling food cart. After a tip, you needed to continue your duties. I was good with the inmates, especially since I’d traded my pepper spray for a ladle, but they thought I was an incompetent amateur. Fat-ass cook. They’d say, “Leon, the COs are cocksuckers. You boys with them? Nah, Leon ain’t. He’s on the level.” They hadn’t known me prior to the weight gain, a side effect of Keppra, and Sandy leaving, and the sleepless nights with Joey’s knees jammed in my back. I’d wondered if the seizures were self-punishment. I could beat myself up sometimes and say I deserved them. I welcomed them. When I’d awaken in a spell at home I’d turn the stove on then off, flick the light, open and close the fridge, plate the table then put the plates away, mess with the pans, fill the sink then drain it, look out the window at the empty yard. I’d do this for about twenty minutes until I was done acting normal but in fact was back to normal. When I’d realize Joey hadn’t witnessed it, I was elated.

  “Your brain may be misfiring” was all I got from the neurologist. If he were more comforting and less unaffected by the news, or possible news, I would have told
him about the separation, how the seizures coincided with my wife’s leaving.

  Dinner went smoothly. The inmates kept the radio loud and the banter crude and racist and it only brought on more laughter. Before I instructed them to commence cleanup, I put three untouched trays from U10’s returned food cart inside the pantry. Then I went behind the line of food carts, through the trash receptacle that smelled of meatloaf and soured milk, where the scraps from dinner filled the heap of bags, down the quiet hallway, and into the housekeeping room. Four inmates wearing white T-shirts and tan pants were huddled around the coffeepot in the corner. The large washing machines, six feet high and wide, sloshed netted laundry bags in soapy water. The dryers hummed and rocked loud, muting conversation. They stared at me. I didn’t belong there.

  “Everyone, away from the coffee.”

  I didn’t know their names. They put their heads down and spread out but didn’t stray too far from the coffee maker. The wall opposite the washers and dryers had a metal rack filled with folded uniforms and underneath on the floor were sneakers without laces. The room smelled of mildew and burnt hair. The inmates wouldn’t look my way. I was larger than any of the four, height and weight. My legs had become thick and my arms as well; I didn’t feel any stronger. I approached the coffee maker and the inmates spread out a bit more. One inmate, a black man with a dark birthmark on his face that looked like Florida, began folding clothes near the rack. I put my nose into the reservoir of the coffee maker and got a whiff of mint.

  “What is this?” I asked, holding the coffeepot, a thick, clear liquid covering the bottom.

  No one answered. Another inmate started emptying clothes from a dryer into a basket on wheels.

  “Who wants to lose good time over this?” Again no answer. I turned to the inmate pretending to fold clothes. “What is this?”