Barker House Read online

  Jakobens’s girlfriend, Heather, wrote letters about how much she misses his dick, sprayed the letters with some type of cheap perfume that smells like an energy drink. Menser hates her.

  He gets a creeping feeling he’s been in the cell too long, but he doesn’t want to stop. He gathers up two or three letters he hasn’t read yet, older ones from Heather, folds them tightly, and puts them in his back pocket. He’s not done this before.

  He comes out of the cell and Jakobens sits at the nearest dayroom table and watches him.

  “Hey, CO!” Jakobens yells. A common callout. No one stops, the showers run, and the card games go on. Brenner has her head down, writing on top of a filing cabinet.

  Menser ducks into the next cell. An inmate is pissing. “Cell search,” Menser says. “Screw.”

  The inmate wiggles and flushes and leaves without a word. Menser goes straight to the stool and sits. He’s hot. The folded paper in his back pocket pokes his ass cheek. He misses the distraction the radio traffic brings, tells himself maybe tomorrow he’ll take the unit radio from Brenner.

  Jakobens appears in the threshold of the cell. With his greasy hair long and flat down over his threadbare shoulders, he looks diseased.

  “You destroyed my soap creations,” he says. He puts his hands down near his hips like he is searching for pockets that aren’t there. “That wasn’t nice.”

  “You’re a skinner,” Menser says.

  “Some do say that.”

  “Humans say.” Menser crosses his feet, his boots heavy, the sweaty socks making his feet itch.

  “So judgmental. Tsk-tsk.”

  Menser rubs his face. “Somebody’s going to thump you. Why the fuck aren’t you on the skinner pod?”

  “I’m protected,” Jakobens says. “Pod lawyer. I know important things about things that are important to these boys.”

  “This place has gone soft,” Menser says. “You’re disgusting.”

  “It’s poor form to judge what you don’t understand.”

  He tries to strategize a way he can get Jakobens deeper in the cell, out of camera sight. Nothing comes. There’s a razor on the sink. He could smash Jakobens’s face on the toilet quick, then cut himself to look like it was self-defense. He can’t pull it off. “What do you want from them?”

  “Simple. They pay me in food.”

  “Not the inmates, dummy, the kids. What do you want from the kids?”

  “Oh, them.” Jakobens smiles, his teeth small and coffee-stained. “I want them to feel loved.”

  Menser stares at Jakobens’s slippers. They’re dirty, passed down through the House’s ages, worn by men better than Jakobens, but also worse. There’s no good anywhere. “Come in the cell,” Menser says and stands. He brushes his uniform awkwardly because it isn’t something he’s done before. “Come on.”

  Jakobens turns on his heels like a dancer and with crossed arms he walks out of sight.

  At night, Menser reads the letters in his room. He feels grounded with the letters, Heather’s trust, her almost cultish sacrifice of her young daughter, Cassie, and it makes Menser think of his mother differently, as a tragedy, and he begins treating her with more tenderness. The night before, after reading the line She’s part of me, take all of her, Menser sat with his mother while she watched TV, didn’t complain about her smoking her cigarette down until she burnt her fingers, brushed her hair away when she fell asleep, and kissed her wrinkled cheek.

  He is sure Jakobens knows about the theft, but he still goes into work with empty sheets of lined paper folded in his pocket so he can fill the next envelope with padded deception anyway, the way an escaped inmate would leave pillows under the bedding to conceal his absence.

  Lifting letters isn’t exciting. He feels nauseous each time he does it, shook—will sometimes sidle up to Brenner and feel at the letters and try to talk himself into confessing to her right there in the dayroom. She would scold him good, then turn him in to the lieutenant. He’d get what he deserves, a suspension, maybe get coaxed into an early retirement. Brenner would get a good-soldier notch on her belt. The world would center, everyone in their right place. But he gets sudden moments of relief. He becomes anxious and tries to get the feeling of wrongdoing back.

  Fay dies on the first Thursday in November, just a week after he began taking the letters. She is in her chair, slouched over an ashtray full of cigarette stubs, the sun late in its morning arrival, beginning to crawl up her peach blouse, just under her flabby chin. A preacher on TV is throwing someone’s crutches into a crowd, proclaiming salvation, redemption, healing.

  Menser covers her in her Christmas afghan. He sits with her for a while, in his uniform, long enough for the sun to enter the entire room. Not quite saddened, he says an Our Father, holding her hand. Her highball glass has fingerprints on it. Her feet are curled in the carpet. When Menser turns off the TV, he enjoys a good while of silence.

  The services are exciting. The officers from Barker House enter orderly, like soldiers. He wants to join the line with them, cross by his mother as though he doesn’t know her, just another brother in sequence, honoring a fallen comrade. Brenner shows up and she looks sad to see him. She holds his hand for a moment before Fay’s body, and then hugs him. He can feel her breasts against him and doesn’t feel ashamed at noticing how soft they are.

  He thanks Brenner for coming and doesn’t let go of her hand.

  She smiles, and with her hair down, her body slender in a black dress, there is no question she is beautiful. “I’m so sorry, Eric.”

  The sound of his name startles him. Courage comes over him, or impulsivity he is new to, and he says, “After this, you know, the burial. We should go out. Me and you.”

  Brenner looks at a landscape painting of New England foliage behind him. “I have a lot going on, Eric,” she says and lets go of his hand. A cousin and his wife wait in line behind Brenner. Fay’s body is within arm’s reach.

  “I haven’t been that nice to you. But that’s not me. I’m not bad when you get to know me,” he says.

  “Not now,” Brenner says. “Just not now.”

  The burly cousin hugs him and says his sorrys but Menser watches Brenner kneel for a moment, sign the cross, and leave the funeral home.

  Afterward he undertakes the solitary task of boxing up her clothes, figurines, jays, picking what to keep and what to discard. The folding TV dinner stands. The ashtrays. No one will ever occupy her chair again. He carries it to the curb outside. A neighbor, raking leaves, waves sympathetically.

  He takes two days off from work and sits in his room and reads over the letters. He memorizes lines: I feel but a boy. We can make up the time. He wants back on the tier, inside the cell. For the first time, he tries to picture Heather and Cassie. But he can’t imagine them, can’t attach images to them. He so badly wants to. But he can picture the way his mother held her cigarette, the stains in her blouses, how different she was from years ago, when she kissed his father, spoke to Menser. Her voice was soothing and peaceful, like the moment before sleep.

  Fourteen twelve Athens WAY, Apt. 2, Nashua, NH. A short drive from his home, so short he feels sickened at the thought that things like this happen this close to him. Though he sees offenders each day, there is a strange distance between their crimes, the victims, and his work. Six rows of bricked, connected public housing, some with screen doors that don’t seem to close, some with no screen door at all, run vertical on a large oval of grass and walkways. A few boys ride bikes through the leaves covering the ground, circle a building, then emerge from the other side. Menser watches from his truck as the sun sets behind the first building, between trees, dipping itself into the Merrimack River. He saves a good amount of mint tobacco juice in his mouth before spitting it into a coffee cup. Other than the boys on the bikes, some lights on in windows, the complex looks deserted. He waits for the boys to disappear again and then he gets out of the truck.

  Wearing his uniform with his badge, to a common person he resembles a
ny law enforcer. His boots drag through the thick layer of leaves, his exposed skin cold. The boys come out from behind the building, but his fear of being stopped or confronted is gone. He feels like he is doing something right, just plain old right. He stands in front of the large white numbers, 1412, high on the corner near the street where he came in, the return address on Heather’s letters, and the boys stare. There are four of them. They say something to him but he doesn’t hear.

  He pounds on the door. A TV is on. A woman speaks Spanish loudly with no response, and he guesses she is on the phone. He holds the screen door open with his hip. There is no intruder light, and behind him the sky is almost dark. The door opens slowly to a living room, with one lamp on, and a small girl looks up at him. Her eyes are soft and black. She is wearing mismatched pajamas, the shirt with pink cupcakes on it, and the bottoms lime green with dinosaurs. She is brown and so small. Behind her a chubby woman leans against the hallway wall with her back to him. He is right—on the phone, waving her free hand. The young girl doesn’t smile or move. There is no anticipation in either of them. The boys begin to yell, “What do you want?” “Hey, what’s he want?” Menser is flattered by the girl’s silence. There is a pang of hopefulness. He doesn’t imagine her in the hands of Jakobens then; he hasn’t thought of Jakobens since he left his truck. The TV is loud, playing a cartoon. He holds out his hand, and the boys yell “Hey!” forcefully.

  “Mom!” the girl cries, and her mother turns to Menser in the doorway.

  “What you doing? We ain’t done nothing.” The woman takes the phone from her mouth and hurries to the door. Menser puts a hand up to her.

  “Bullshit,” he says, and is, for the first time, aware he has crossed some line.

  The woman pushes the girl behind her and gets close to Menser. She is large and animated, waving her hands in his face.

  “You ain’t a cop,” she says, looking at his uniform. “What the hell are you?”

  “Your boyfriend, Jakobens. It’s sick. All of it.”

  “That old man? He ain’t my boyfriend. He lives down there. I don’t know him or give a shit.”

  Menser tries to see around the woman. He wants to get a look at the girl’s face. But the woman pushes him, hard, and he falls off the step. She shuts the door and the boys on the bikes stare at him. He runs toward his truck as fast as he can but it feels like he is moving slowly, the wind filling his lungs with air, his legs heavy, his whole body heavy. Cars drive down the street with their headlights on, pointed at him, music thumping from inside, and he is worried people are watching him, making note of a stupid man in uniform running through the projects. It hits him during his escape that the rescue mission was dumb, and he longs to be in the safety of his bedroom, listening to the laugh track of a sitcom from the living room, the crack of the loose siding outside his window, the smell of cigarettes and the fat envelopes in his hand, the unknown contents exciting and tormenting him. He turns to find nobody chasing him. Menser gets inside the truck and shuts the door but the dome light stays on. He smacks the button and the light goes out so now no one can see him.

  Part II

  PROPERTY

  Big Mike / Gen Pop U1

  “House”

  I made a round of the octagon, a single-tiered unit. I liked how the unit was only one floor. Everything was right in front of me: no stairs or blind spots. The four showers were all in use and I knelt to see under the curtains to make sure only one set of legs was in each stall. Some inmates were watching a reality show on TV. The eighty bunks were half filled. U1 was the only female unit in Barker House: a private jail with a tight budget and strict rules. “I better be able to bounce a quarter on your made bed,” I’d say to the inmates. It was an army thing, or something. I wasn’t a veteran but I pretended I was when I said things like that.

  I’d been on U1 for six months and had the unit running smoothly. They’d flirt with me. I didn’t mind the pick-me-up. On visiting days I let them wear eye makeup they’d made from colored pencil shavings. They were the wives and girlfriends I didn’t have, who needed the flirting just as much as they needed the answer no. They demanded my attention as much as the real thing. After punching out each shift, I was drained, like I’d gone a few rounds with a rebellious daughter.

  An inmate, with her legs up near her ears, fucked herself with a pink toothbrush container in her cell. I slowed, hung a glance, but kept walking. When I reached Nina’s cell I stopped and knocked on the cell door. She lived in a corner cell, so you had to push the swinging door in to enter. I’d assigned her a corner cell when I saw her name. Inmates begged me for those cell assignments. Privacy was something I could give.

  I’d dated Nina in eleventh grade. I’d heard she had a kid young but other than that I hadn’t given her much thought. When I saw her on my unit two weeks before, leaving the showers with wet hair and braless in a tank top, I was reminded of how she liked getting kissed behind her ears. Nina was just as skinny as ever even after having a kid. She had nice breasts for a skinny girl, a body with all the answers. I couldn’t see any track marks or bruises.

  We talked during shifts, normal catching-up. She’d gotten into posting crushing ads on Craigslist and had gotten picked up in a prostitution sting at a hotel in Nashua. “Men pay me good money to step on their balls in stilettos,” she’d said. “I don’t fuck them. But that asshole detective said solicitation is solicitation. My lawyer thinks I have a good case.”

  I held the steel door open with my shoulder and stood in the threshold of the cell. Nina was lying under the blanket and I could see her bare shoulders, the top of her bare chest. Her desk was covered in letters and envelopes. There was a sliver of daylight coming in through the rectangular window above the desk. Most female inmates tried to spruce up their cells, taping kids’ coloring sheets to the walls, collages made from magazine cutouts. They’d rub cocoa butter or lotion on the air vents. But Nina’s cell was plain old brick and steel. It smelled like dirty laundry. An officer loudly made a call over the radio, and it echoed through the small cell. I turned my radio off to make certain there wouldn’t be an open mic. Some of these guys sat on their radios and the shit they’d let fly had led to fights in the parking lot.

  “Feeling better today?” I asked. She’d been depressed, enough that I’d think about her when I was at home while trying to watch the Sox. She slid into a county-issued, yellowish-white tank top.

  “Everyone is blind. They walk around smiling. Even you, Mike.” There were a lot of philosophers in Barker House.

  Nina hadn’t been leaving her cell much except to shower. She was trading phone cards for tuna packets and skipping meals.

  “There’s no right or wrong way to act,” I said. “I pretend it’s a boardinghouse and you guys are just visitors, waiting for your ride out.”

  “I wake up and feel sick.”

  “You won’t be here forever.” I’d told myself that. I thought maybe when she got out I could help straighten her life out. I hadn’t been searching for a girlfriend but I wasn’t against having one either. We could date ex-inmates. It was a matter of timing.

  “My lawyer sent me a letter. Trial is set for six months from now.”

  “Six months is cake.”

  “Maybe, I don’t know. I can’t turn my mind off, thinking about everything. The past, present, future, it’s all bouncing around in this box. And Ava. My mother is going to turn on her soon.”

  Ava was Nina’s daughter. Nina fell for a kid who drove a tow truck and always had cash after high school. Eddie or Frankie. She was back at her mom’s, and Eddie or Frankie was long gone.

  “You’ll survive. So will your mother and Ava.”

  “It’s bad enough that I’m here. But seeing you. You must think I’m the worst.” She started to cry. The girls looked occupied with the TV so I went into the cell and sat next to her. I put my arm around her. It was the first time I had embraced an inmate but I didn’t feel wrong about it. I’d embraced Nina before, just in another
life. She gave herself up and her full weight went into me. She was small in my arms and it brought me back to the backseat of my Mercury Topaz, parked behind Blockbuster.

  “You’re going to get out,” I said. “Your bust is small-scale. And Ava is young. She won’t remember all this.” I hugged her harder but kept my nose up away from her hair. I knew if I smelled her hair and I liked the way it smelled then I might put myself in a bad situation. She touched the exposed skin on my head and I felt a flutter in my groin.

  “She’s ten. I remember things from when I was ten. My mother’s boyfriend Gabriel—Gabe, he made me call him—and his stupid gold Cutlass,” Nina said. “God. She’s alone with that bitch. She’ll remember.”

  I wondered if I could remember anything. My first home run. My dad giving me sips of beer after the game while we listened to the Sox on the radio in the backyard. That rusted firepit. Those useless citronella candles my mother swore by. Dad’s hair, full and combed. My dog, Fenway, trying to get my game ball.

  “I don’t remember shit from when I was ten,” I said.

  “I need a favor.” She put her hand on my thigh and she had me; I’d like to think it wasn’t as easy as it seemed.

  I lowered my nose into her hair. “What do you need?”

  The one-story school was in Milford. It was a string of four gray trailers, small windows up near the roof, and metal ramps running up the doors. They looked new. Students hung around outside the first trailer. I pulled up behind a truck and got out. A girl approached my car.

  Ava was taller than I’d expected. I didn’t really know how tall a ten-year-old should be. The kid’s hair was messy and tangled, and she was missing teeth. She wore a shirt that was too small for her, had a huddle of girls drawn on it in neon colors, goofy monsters lurking behind them. Her pink shorts had pen ink on them near the pockets and she wore black Crocs.