Barker House Page 5

  RAY:

  Where’s Bernie going to go?

  DON:

  Hell if I know. Maybe right back where I got him. I ever tell you about my sister, Maple? Sure, I have. Maple found that dog on her property in Milford. She phoned me and told me I might like him. He was ugly, like me. First I saw him he was roped outside in the rain. I felt for the old guy, how couldn’t I? The way his legs shaked when he pissed. I don’t look it but I can be a big softy, Ray.

  RAY:

  …

  DON:

  Ray?

  Menser / Gen Pop U4

  “Kingdom”

  He is interested in Inmate Jakobens for no other reason than he is bored and Jakobens is in front of him. Jakobens sits at a dayroom table on the left bottom tier near the running showers. He is older, maybe the oldest inmate on the medium security unit. Even with three squares a day, Jakobens is built like a flyweight. His eyes are black under his white brows. He is watching the large flat-screen mounted high on the blue brick wall. Dixon’s genius idea of painting the units soothing colors made the jail into a kiddy camp. Gone were the gray and steel. In came the cameras, the rainbow-colored walls, the pussification of a once feared jail where Menser had been proud to thump bigmouthed inmates. The old man seems to be enjoying the décor. Menser sidles up next to him and watches a few minutes of The Sopranos and laughs when he feels like he should. Jakobens ignores him. Menser plays with his noose knife, the tool he’s used twice to cut down swingers. One died, one lived. He flicks the sharp J-hook open with his thumb, then presses the rounded edge on his thigh and closes it. Flicks it open, closes it. The old man pays him no attention. Menser asks him what he thinks of Tony banging his psychiatrist.

  “You don’t remember me from Max,” says Jakobens. “Do you?”

  “I don’t.”

  “I asked you for a blanket for four days,” Jakobens says as he turns his attention back to the TV. “You kept telling me you’d get me one.” His thin legs are crossed and his hairy hands grip the heel of his resting foot. “I timed out before ever getting one.”

  “Tough luck.” Menser can’t remember the man or the request. Blankets are hard to come by in the winter. Too bad. “Has Big Pussy died yet?”

  “What?” asks Jakobens, turning back to Menser.

  Menser steps away, walks along the top tier, breathes through his mouth so he can’t smell the inmates shitting in their cells, or the bad breath. It seems everyone has bad breath. He tries to show a young Cambodian inmate in the weight area how to do leg presses with the chest machine. Menser gets on his back, positions his boots under the metal bar, but gets stuck. He struggles to get back up.

  “Damn,” the kid says, “I thought cops were the only pigs that ate doughnuts.” The half dozen inmates in the weight area laugh. Menser wants to say it’s not the doughnuts he eats so often, it’s the kid’s mother’s fuck box. But he can’t get it out. Instead he grunts.

  His boots are jammed, his knees pressed against his belly, his large body stuck under the weight of the plates. The blood rushes to his head, the orange jumpsuits beginning to close on him, their laughter wild, and he flails his arms on the cold hard floor. If he can get to his feet, he thinks, he can take all of them, but he knows they won’t fight an officer like him fairly. He wiggles his right boot off and that gives him enough room to roll onto his side. The yelling and laughter must have caught Brenner’s attention, because she arrives and helps him to his feet. He waves her off and goes to his boot.

  “Clear out!” Brenner yells to the inmates on the mezzanine, her voice feminine but surprisingly effective. Menser sticks his foot into his boot. “It’s enough running this unit by myself,” she says. “I don’t know what to do with you.”

  “I don’t need you to do anything with me.”

  Brenner’s black hair is pulled back tightly, showing every inch of skin on her face. She has fat dark freckles that look like holes on a dartboard. Menser wants to criticize her. But Brenner is attractive. He can’t think of what to insult her about. “I’m fine,” he tells her instead.

  Menser decides to find a corner to stand in. He backs himself in near the rec yard door underneath the mezzanine, where he can observe the inmates in the dayroom, a sliver of the come-filled shower stalls, the filing-cabinet officer station Brenner stands at, the sally port, the pay phones, and if he gets ambitious enough to mosey over to the rec yard door, the rec yard. He watches inmates gamble future canteen on cards and air-hump Brenner’s ass as she walks by. He studies the inmates as they hurry by him, gathering cheese-sauce packets and nachos to bring back to their holes. The Puerto Ricans clutter the tables with dominoes. The old-timers watch TV while comfortably drugged, like it’s a goddamn nursing home. The shift passes. He may have dozed off at one point. The inmates circle the unit in a swirl of small movements, handshakes, nods, fingers carefully remembering phone numbers from the real world. They laugh and rap in the shower. Weight stacks crash above. The caged clock ticks the shift away. Menser hates their smiles, their existence. He wants them to be hurting. He is thirty-six, nine years into his own twenty-year sentence, with high blood pressure, unmarried. It occurs to him that there’s a carelessness that comes with the orange jumpsuit. A weight lifted. He decides to make a round and hopes one of the pissants asks how his mom is doing.

  Menser has lived in the same eight-hundred-square-foot single family home in Nashua his whole life. He mows the lawn with a plug-in electric mower that smells like it burns the lawn instead of cuts it. He buys wood for the stove from Marty’s Lumber in Hudson. His father used to cut the wood himself and weed-whack around the mailbox. High grass covers the pole of the mailbox now. Trivial chores his father had the luxury of doing. They pale in comparison with having to supervise Menser’s mother, so he doesn’t care the neighbors are sure to notice his failings in his father’s absence. The same contractor built the dead-end street’s eight homes in the forties, all identical in structure, plain, on ten-thousand-square-foot lots. The happy neighbors have loud children, triangular hydrangeas, basketball hoops, and walkways lined with freakishly large hostas.

  He gets home from his shift that day and his mother, Fay, is asleep in her gray leather chair. Her left arm is slung over the armrest, which is zigzagged with burn holes. Her body is drooped. Menser asked her to comb her hair this morning, but she never does, and he can see the bald spots among the white. The TV is loud, three judges in robes yell at a man holding a poodle. His mother is deaf and watches the TV with the volume on 84. He turns it down.

  He goes to her room and strips her bed to wash the piss out of the sheets. He groans, blows air out of his nostrils as he passes her in her chair, holding the sheets in front of him. The groan goes unnoticed. Sometimes he forgets she is deaf, she is gone. He goes into the basement with the sheets, moves the wet clothes from the washer to the dryer, then fills the washer with the soiled sheets. Back upstairs, his mother is now awake, the volume turned back up to 84.

  “Did you bathe today?” he asks her. He rubs his hair and body like he is rinsing off soap.

  She waves him off. He goes down the hallway to the bathroom. The tub is dry. He sometimes sneaks behind her and smells her but today he’s not in the mood.

  He could never have imagined having to bathe her, fix her meals, make sure she was wiping after she shit. She had been a good mother growing up. He was an only child, and she had treated him like a gift from God. She’d called him that, long ago, one night after a Boy Scouts meeting as he sat at the dinner table, trying to replicate a knot they’d learned with a shoelace. “You bring us such joy,” she’d said, stirring a pot of sauce. “We tried for years. You came to me after Christmas and your father didn’t believe me.” His father had never been an optimist. Menser thought him to be an ordinary father. He’d laughed when reading the paper, yelled at the news on the TV. He always walked with his arms tight by his sides and bent and crouched like he had a bad back, but he didn’t.

  Once, when Menser was tw
elve, maybe thirteen, his father took him to see a Red Sox game. He remembers the park’s stench: peanut shells, steamed hot dogs, stale beer, the sour urine in the trough, his father so close to him in their bleacher seats he could smell him, too. He remembers that aroma, like wood, when he wears his father’s postal uniform windbreaker. He misses the woody scent, but only briefly. It was then his father said something important to Menser, something he thinks about often. Not looking at the boy, his father leaned in after a Sox homer and said, “There are moments when I ask myself, if the world were to end now, would it be okay with me.” That was as sentimental as the old man got.

  This isn’t a moment within which Menser would be okay dying. He stares at the linoleum kitchen floor that’s peeling in a few spots near the radiator and dishwasher. On breezy days like today, a couple of detached vinyl siding panels outside the kitchen and Menser’s bedroom whack against the house. As he microwaves his mother’s dinner, he hears the whacking over the appliance’s humming, pictures his father say in his Camel-unfiltered voice, “Loose J-channel. Nothing a couple of nails won’t fix.” Menser won’t fix the panels. Instead, he walks by them, watches them flap. At night, he falls asleep to the rhythmic sound.

  They eat in the kitchen at a round table kitty-corner in front of the only window in the room. Figurines of blue jays are scattered on shelves, in a glass case above the light switch, magnets of blue jays on the fridge, yellowing, sliding down slowly. Menser takes out the Lean Cuisine from the microwave and opens it in front of her, steaming and salty. He shoves a fork into her permanently clenched right hand and starts her first mouthful, reminding her of what she is doing. Slowly, she chews and some macaroni falls out of her mouth. He watches her face muscles labor. She holds the fork and stares at the jug of stale protein powder atop the fridge.

  “Take another bite,” he says and raps the table. She doesn’t even blink. “I’m not feeding you the whole damn thing.” He raps the table again. He wants to rip the fork from her and stab her cheek straight through her tongue, out the other cheek, kabob her face, make her look him in the eye. He grabs her hand and she jolts but doesn’t pull away. He guides the fork into the warm macaroni. She doesn’t take the bite. He stands.

  “Please eat.” He smooths her hair away from her face, holds it in a bunch behind her head with one hand, and feeds her.

  After dinner, Menser lets his mother work her way back to her chair. He makes her a highball before she points to her glass. Then he puts the bottle of gin and a liter of tonic water on the floor next to her chair. Menser shuffles out before she needs another one and leaves her to smoke half a pack of Misty menthols. He undresses, looks through the pile of clothes on the edge of his bed for sweatpants, a cutoff T-shirt he likes to wear on arm days. He can’t find either. In his boxers, he sits on the bed. Outside, dusk moves in. It is days before Halloween, the New England nighttime impatient, the backyard absent of anything that moves. His room is quiet. His useless phone without messages. He types out a Facebook post: gyming it. pipes day. He leaves the post up for a few minutes, scrolls through his news feed. Everything is fake. He doesn’t like any pictures. He likes a life-hack post claiming vodka tightens your pores. He checks his status. No likes, so he deletes it. He goes over his day, remembering the incident at the weights. He feels bad for not thanking Brenner, but how could he? His mother yells and he runs from his room to find her asleep, making tiny screams. He squishes her cigarette in the ashtray and mutes the TV.

  He watches Brenner prance around and he swears she knows the inmates are wagging their tongues at her. The more he watches her, the more he wants her to get pushed into a cell by a couple of them, teach her not to tease the animals.

  The inmates ignore him. He is tired. He makes a round of the two-tiered unit, up the east stairwell, bangs his boots on the metal stairs. Dominoes clap. He gloves up and slides into an unoccupied cell and sits at the desk stool. The unit’s sounds echo off the bare walls. He treats it like a breakroom. In the cell to the left, there’s these two inmates who argue and joke and tell stories and Menser likes to listen to them. They call each other by their first names and there’s something reassuring about that. Don and Ray. But they’re quiet today. Outside the cell, Inmate Jakobens, with his long white hair tied up in a girlish bun, stands at the top of the stairs and picks a scab on his forehead. He asks Menser for the time.

  “It’s ten twenty,” Menser says, reading off his black plastic wristwatch.

  “The hour of the gods.”

  “What?”

  “The beginning of afternoon. I love the afternoon,” says Jakobens.

  Menser keeps on, but Jakobens catches up. A telephone is slammed onto its receiver below and a fat inmate screams you fucking whore into a dead phone. Brenner heads over. Menser moves across the top tier, peers into cells, while Jakobens mimics his movements.

  Menser says, “Fuck off, inmate.” He stops and looks over the railing to check on his partner, but she has it under control. The fat inmate is seated on a stool at a dayroom table, with Brenner counseling him, standing over him. Poor body language, poor positioning.

  Jakobens stops with him and glares over the railing, his eyes tiny, the whites reddish like chicken eyes. “Some men can’t keep control of their women while they’re away,” he says.

  “What cell is yours?” Menser asks.

  Pointing down to the west bottom tier, where a group of inmates play three-card poker, Jakobens says, “Twenty-three nineteen.”

  “Your cell is down there, but you’re hanging around on the mezzanine.”

  “Perspective.”

  Menser nods and continues his round. “You shouldn’t hang around on the mezzanine.” The word stock and straight from the handbook. Mezzanine. If asked to define, Menser wouldn’t articulate it well. A porch, a landing, a floor above another floor.

  “You’re going through a change,” says Jakobens. “There’s something about this jail that is different than other jails I’ve been in. You guys are clean, tidy, put together. But I can’t figure you out. You look terrible.”

  Menser stops walking. “So do you.” He tucks in his shirt, the texture papery, like a brown bag, the color, too.

  “You’re at the end of something,” Jakobens says and then puts his thin forearms on the top railing and looks out again at the dayroom below. “When people go through a transition, there’s an obvious death then a rebirth, or just a death, but it’s evident there’s a change happening.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  Jakobens’s eyes are close together, his face oddly narrow, disappointed, and he says, “I’ve known you longer than you’ve known me.”

  “You go around telling everyone this? Try to get a rise out of them?”

  “No.” He picks at the scab, an overworked pimple maybe, and it comes off. He looks at the dried blood. “You’re exploding. You’re at the end of the world.”

  He sits at the stool in Jakobens’s cell, scanning through Jakobens’s legal work. From where he sits, to his right is a blue metal bunk bed, both beds covered in worn gray blankets. Underneath are their property boxes, big toilet paper boxes cut horizontally, then filled with snacks, hot sausage, chips, and torn paperbacks. In front of him near the door are the toilet and sink fixture, above bolted into the wall a dented plastic mirror. Attached to the stool where he sits is a desk, with two cubbies, one for each inmate in the cell, which is usually filled with photos, mail, and legal papers, sealed in manila envelopes. Above him, a weak bulb, blurred behind heavy Plexiglas. Miniature figurines rest on the desk: a hot rod, a woman’s legs, and an open book, sculpted from bars of soap. Menser has never seen something like that in the jail. There is artistry to it. He guesses it’s been done with a razor blade, and though probably an infraction, he lets them stay. He goes back to scanning Jakobens’s legal work.

  A list of charges on a docket sheet. Trial date. Sixteen counts of sexual assault on a minor. False imprisonment. Kidnapping. Menser stares at the air vent abo
ve the mirror, listens to the heat pushing through, fighting through the tiny holes not plugged with toilet paper balls. He tucks the legal sheets back into the envelope and in his large hands he squishes the figurines, starting with the woman’s legs, until they become just soap again, and leaves the crumpled remains.

  He moves his attention to the tall stack of letters in the desk. Beginning with the one on top, he reads the handwritten letter, in wild writing, every word a different size, with poor spelling and grammar, hearts above lowercase i’s, words scribbled out, lines of anger and hate then love and longing in succession like different women had written each line. You’re the worst father. She adores you … You won’t be home for Christmas … I told you to sell the car … You always loved that dress on me. I won’t let him fuck me with it on … I told Johnny he owes you and that’s like owing me. The words feel real. Jakobens, a skinner, has love. Hunny when you get out, Cassie is waiting, just like you were her daddy before, you can be again. This is all here still for you. Your kingdom.

  He stands at the tiny cell window overlooking Elm Street outside. He imagines Jakobens’s displeasure at having sight of the St. Peter’s cemetery littered with flowers and mourners. There’s comfort in how painful it is to watch people freely driving by, pulling into the long drive-thru coffee shop line with time to wait, walking their dogs, taking smoke breaks outside the drop-in medical center across Elm. How Jakobens has to watch the snow fall, then melt; the leaves bloom, then die.

  Each day thereafter, he waits until Brenner leaves for change-out details in Booking and returns to Jakobens’s cell. He is so interested in the letters he goes back every shift and gets caught up in the ongoing saga, excited when he fingers through the stacks of envelopes and finds one thick with folded pages of love quarrels and cryptic phrases. She was too young to have a cherry on her sundae. He isn’t so much intrigued by the perversity. What he wants most from them is to learn how a man like Jakobens can find love, tame love, then violate it.