The Prisoner and the Chaplain Read online

Larry shrugs.

  Becky says, “You own a shop? Right on.”

  “No, I –” but then Larry thinks yes, I do own a shop. “Yeah, well, it’s going out of business.”

  Susan looks over, the smoke from her cigarette getting in her eyes. “What the fuck? What are you talking about?”

  “No one replaces batteries or gets watches fixed these days. Watches are so cheap you can just buy another. And grandfather clocks? No one even knows what they are. Ours hasn’t worked for a long time.” Larry motions towards the grandfather clock in the hallway. Susan looks over at it as if she’s just noticed that it hasn’t made a sound in years.

  “What am I going to do for money?” Susan stubs out her cigarette and pats at a drip of bleach sliding down her temple. Becky uses a stained towel to wipe her hands. She takes a drag of her cigarette. “Did you think about that? If you go out of business, who’s going to pay for me and the kids? And Dad? Who’s going to take care of him? He needs some money, you know.”

  “I got it,” Larry says. “Don’t worry. I can handle it.”

  Susan doesn’t worry because Larry does take care of it. And he takes care of Becky in the front seat of her car when she offers to drive him home. He pushes into her in the front seat, pushes as far into her as he can get, the seat tilted back as far as it can go. His knees feel broken by the small space, and she groans and her heels smack down again and again and again on the dashboard. The car steams up.

  It’s a series of girls after that – women – some older than him, some younger. Samantha, Becky, Mayve, Ruth, Mali, Dakota, Lee-Ann. Larry makes no connection with any of them. After Samantha, he feels nothing. Just sex and company. Occasionally someone to buy something for – because Larry likes to spoil the girls he’s with. He likes to share. Later, in prison, when he has their names carved on his skin, he does so only to keep track of his history. Not for any feelings towards them.

  It’s a series of crimes after that too. Proud of what he’s getting away with. Because he does get away with it. Never gets caught.

  Larry is twenty-four years old. His sister, Susan, is twenty-eight.

  “It’s my smarts,” he tells Susan one day, tapping his temple with one finger. “I should’ve stayed in school. Maybe I would have graduated.”

  Susan snorts. “Yeah, you and me both.”

  “Do you ever,” Larry says, sitting back at the kitchen table, Susan beside him, stirring her coffee, looking haggard and old having just been to the police station to pick up her child who was caught driving underage and drunk, “Do you ever wonder where Mom is? If they’re out there, Mom and Jack, and they know what we’re doing and who we are and what has happened in our lives, but they are maybe too afraid to come say hi?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?” Susan takes a sip of her coffee. A slurp. It’s a horrible sound and makes Larry angry. Like she’s doing it to mock him. She slurps again. “Mom and Jack together. Nope. And sorry? Give me a break. I think they are both dead. Jack probably killed Mom. Or, hey, what about this,” Susan uses her hands to punctuate her points. “What about Mom’s remarried and has new kids and she dumped Jack off right after she left us, dumped him somewhere and he was found and someone else raised him. That would serve him right. He was always such an asshole.”

  “He was nine, Susan, when they left. I think he knew his address and his name. Besides, the police would have brought him home. Or something.” Larry pauses. Thinks. “You are right, though, he was an asshole.”

  Larry and Susan turn then towards a sound they hear behind them. Their father, leaning against the kitchen door-frame, a bottle of vodka dangling from his hand. “She’s dead,” he says. “Your mother is dead. Don’t you know that?”

  Larry never finds out the details from his father because after his father says this, his face collapses and he falls to the ground. He collapses on the floor, smashing the vodka bottle and his head. After a few minutes staring at him, Susan calls an ambulance.

  “How would we know that?” Susan asks. “He never told us anything.”

  A stroke. Permanent brain damage. Liver damage. He is fed by tubes, kept alive by machines; there is nothing behind his eyes. Left to die, slowly and alone. Susan and Larry visit once or twice. Susan cries a little, but Larry can tell she doesn’t mean it. She keeps checking her cellphone. It’s not as if he was a good father in any sense of the word. He barely provided for them, gave no moral or emotional support. Did not love them in any way. “Don’t touch me,” he always shouted. Susan shrugs. Larry clears his throat. The last time Larry visits, he goes alone. He is wildly drunk and he stumbles over and pulls the plugs out of the wall and listens to all the machines that are attached to his father stop before he runs out of the room. Trying to help? Trying to end it all? He staggers down the hall of the hospital suddenly feeling calm and good and when the nurses and doctors whip past him, rushing into his father’s room to re-plug the machines, Larry smiles a little to himself and keeps on walking.

  Plugged back in, his father lasts one more month and then dies. With no one beside him. A washed-up, alcoholic man. Father of three. Grandfather of three. Husband to no one.

  Larry must find their mother, or at least prove that she is dead. Otherwise, Susan and Larry get nothing. Their father’s will states that their mother gets everything, and the lawyers tell the siblings that this means the store, the house, any savings their father had (which is none, only debts that their mother must pay). Without a death certificate, the lawyer says, they get nothing.

  On the road, driving for two days, Larry follows the lead. The lawyer’s fee, the detective’s fee, the gas for the car, the hotels – Larry is fed up with it all. He uses his gun on the gas station attendant eight hours out. He doesn’t harm him, but the fear in the man’s eyes when Larry threatens to shoot up the gas tanks if the guy calls the police – waves his arms around like a gangster – stays with him as he drives off down the highway. That fear keeps him going, keeps his headache at bay, as he continues on towards his mother’s grave.

  She was two days from them. All this time. Larry pulls up to the gates of the cemetery. He knows nothing about her life after she left them, but he knows she died recently, and she had taken a new name. Larry gets out of the car. The heat and dust of the day threaten to choke him. He walks through the gates and follows the map the detective gave him until he comes upon her grave. A simple stone, her name, her dates, separated only by a dash. Nothing else. No In loving memory or Cherished by her family or Beautiful mother or anything. Just her name and her dates. As if she died loved by no one. This satisfies Larry but also makes him extremely sad and angry and frustrated and mean. He wants to kill her himself. He wants to dig her up and spread her bones around, destroy her. He wants to hold her. To hug her.

  He would have loved her.

  He would have cherished her.

  He would have mourned her.

  Larry kneels in front of her stone and leans his forehead on it. It is cold and hard. Nothing like the mother he remembers. But what does he remember? Glow-in-the-dark stars. Blonde hair in a bun or loose around her face. The fear on her face when his father got home. He was so young. So naïve. So innocent. And she left him alone.

  Larry walks back to his car, drives to the closest bar and begins twenty hours of binge drinking until he finds himself face down in his own vomit, somehow on the sidewalk back at his father’s house. He doesn’t know how he got there. A day later, he is with Susan and the lawyer. Their mother is dead. It is proven. So the lawyer divides the proceeds of their father’s will, after debts have been paid, between Susan, Larry and Jack.

  “Jack?” Susan asks. “What the fuck.” She stands up and looks down at Larry, at the lawyer. They are seated at the desk in the lawyer’s office. All dark wood and red leather. In a storefront office of a strip mall, the sun beating in on them through the large windows to the street.

  “Jack,” Larry says. “Of course.”

  Six months later, Larry is holding u
p another bank.

  “Put the money here,” he shouts. “Stop staring.” He is wearing a mask and a hood. He is fast and serious. The teller is panicking, he can see her breathing become raspy and uncontrolled. “Look,” he says calmly, “do as I say and you won’t get hurt.”

  “I can’t –” she stops breathing. Her eyes go wide and she holds her hands to her throat. “I can’t,” she mouths. Larry can read her lips.

  “Fuck.” He grabs over the counter at the till but can only reach a few bills. “Calm down.”

  Her face is turning chalky white, her eyes are wider than he’s ever seen eyes go before, her lips are blue.

  “She has asthma, help her,” the bank manager says. He is standing off to the side, his arms in the air. “Help her.”

  Larry looks around at all the people in the bank – two older women; a security guard on his stomach on the floor in front of him, arms outstretched; a small boy clutching his mother’s hand; the teller, not breathing; the bank manager. He looks at them all for a second too long. He does nothing. Just looks at them. He can feel the tension in the air, the electric current moving through them all. The two old women begin to cry. The teller collapses behind the counter.

  “Jesus Christ,” Larry screams. “Get up, get up.”

  The bank manager moves towards her, just slightly, a small movement, but Larry’s nerves are strung tight, his finger on the trigger. His head begins to pound, and he shoots. He means to only stop the man, not kill him, but the man moves quickly and the bullet hits the man’s chest instead of his shoulder, and Larry knows it’s fatal as soon as he sees the expression in the man’s eyes. Larry sees the light go out. The man crumples to the floor and the stain of blood moves in a sudden pattern, pulsing, out of his shirt. The smell of blood – fishy and metallic – fills the air.

  The two old women scream.

  “I didn’t mean to do that,” Larry shouts. “I didn’t mean to shoot.”

  “You killed him,” the boy says, cowering into his mother’s skirt. “You killed him.”

  “Shhh,” she cautions, holding him tight. “Shhh.”

  The security guard lifts his head from the floor and stares straight into Larry’s sunglassed eyes, as if trying to memorize exactly what shade they are behind the frames, inside the mask.

  Larry looks down over the counter and sees that the bank teller is still. She isn’t clutching at her throat anymore, she isn’t turning blue, she is completely still. Dead.

  Two dead. Five hundred dollars in small bills.

  “God damn,” Larry says. And leaves the bank.

  He drives four cars (all stolen – take one, leave one, keep going) until he is back in town with his small amount of money, his gun, and images behind his eyes that won’t go away no matter how many times he tries to justify them. I didn’t mean to shoot. I meant to shoot his shoulder. He moved. If he’d just stayed still. It was his fault. I tried to calm her down. I didn’t know she had asthma. It was her fault. Not mine. The boy in his mother’s skirt, staring up at him. “You killed him.” The screaming women. The security guard’s stare. “Shhhh. Shhh . . .”

  4:01 a.m.

  “But I don’t understand.” The Chaplain is standing now. He’s been pacing for half an hour, listening. “I don’t understand. You aren’t here because of that. I didn’t even know about that. It’s not in your file. That, the bank, has nothing to do with what they found in the storage unit, the murders –”

  “You need to listen, man,” the Prisoner says. “Stop talking and listen. Stop trying to figure everything out the way you want it to be figured out.”

  “But you almost killed your father and you killed a bank manager and a bank teller. You were there when a convenience store clerk was shot –”

  “I didn’t kill them. I mean that I didn’t intend to kill them. It was their fault. Seriously, man, shut up.” The Prisoner stands up quickly, really close to the Chaplain, stops the Chaplain’s pacing with his body and says, “You need to listen and stop talking, stop saying anything, stop trying to figure it out and fit it into your own little fucking file. After I’m gone you can say what you want. You can think what you want. Right now, you need to just listen. Got it?”

  “Everything okay in here?” The corrections officers are there, suddenly, all five of them, inside the cell. The Chaplain realizes again how small this place really is. They are all almost touching. Every time someone comes into this space, the room’s claustrophobic feeling becomes forefront. He feels like he can’t breathe. The COs use their large bulk to push between the Chaplain and the Prisoner and a baton comes out quickly and is held in one of the CO’s meaty hands.

  “He won’t shut up,” the Prisoner shouts at the Chaplain over the COs. “He asks too many fucking questions.”

  “Isn’t that his job, asshole?” CO7 responds.

  “His job is to listen. To listen,” the Prisoner shouts.

  The Prisoner has suddenly changed after these short four hours of talk. The calm that was present only minutes ago has now completely disappeared, and there is a frantic look in his eyes. This couldn’t have happened so quickly. Why hadn’t the Chaplain seen this before? Why does it take five huge COs in the room for him to see this? The Prisoner’s voice had been calm as he was telling his story, but his body was telling the Chaplain everything he needed to know. The Prisoner is beginning to panic. He’s as tight as a rubber band right now. Ready to snap.

  “Calm down,” a CO says. “Just take it easy.”

  “He won’t shut up,” the Prisoner says, quietly now. “He won’t shut up. He doesn’t understand.”

  The COs look at the Chaplain. He shrugs. What can he say? He doesn’t understand. The Prisoner is absolutely right.

  “Let’s go.” The COs lead the Chaplain out of the cell. “Take a break.”

  “No. There isn’t enough time.”

  “Just a break. Take a break, Chaplain. Come on. There’s still time.”

  The Prisoner watches the Chaplain being lead out of the room. He wraps his tattooed arms around his chest and holds on tight, as if hugging himself, comforting himself. He looks down at the floor and the Chaplain sees the slump of his shoulders, the sag of his back. The man is in emotional turmoil, pain, and he is running out of time quickly. Guilt. For the bank murders. For the final murders. He’s done so much, this man, to harm the world. Of course he feels he deserves to die.

  “I need to stay in there,” the Chaplain says.

  “I want you to take a few minutes,” CO7 says. “Take a few minutes and breathe. This is shit work, man. Sorry, I didn’t mean to swear. It’s bad work, and you need to take a minute to decompress.”

  “Take a look at this, Seven.” Another CO points towards the door they’ve just closed upon the Prisoner. The COs all pile together to look in. The Chaplain stands back, waiting his turn. He is shaking slightly, agitated.

  “I need to go back in there. You don’t understand. We were making progress. I need to be with him.”

  “He okay?”

  “Not sure.”

  “Should we go back in?”

  “How can you be so stupid?” the Chaplain shouts, suddenly, like a kid, leaping behind them. “Let me go back in.”

  The COs all turn towards him. CO7 shrugs. The Chaplain walks up to the door and looks in at the Prisoner. He is hunched over on the floor, holding himself, rocking back and forth, crying. He is crying. A broken man.

  “Open the door.”

  CO7 opens the door and the Chaplain enters and goes straight to the Prisoner, kneels down in front of him. He reaches out, tentatively, and touches the Prisoner’s shoulder. A hand shoots up, and for a minute, the Chaplain thinks the Prisoner is going to knock him out, but then the Prisoner grabs the Chaplain’s hand on his shoulder and he holds it tight. Squeezes it. Human touch.

  “I have no one,” the Prisoner says, so quietly the Chaplain can barely hear him. “I have no one but you.”

  They stay like this, together, touching by
hand, shoulder, the Chaplain on his creaking knees, the Prisoner rocking back and forth. They stay like this for a bit. The next time the Chaplain looks at the clock it is 4:23 a.m.

  When he was out in the hall, something was different. The Chaplain couldn’t put his finger on it. It isn’t until he sees the clock, the time, 4:23 a.m., that he knows what it was. The light. It is coming upon dawn. The light is changing. The window in the COs’ hallway will soon be awash with sunlight. It will be light instead of dark. Day instead of night. Morning is coming. And with it, the day. And with that, the Prisoner’s execution. The last seven and a half hours of life. He wonders when the rain stopped. He remembers the storm only a few hours ago, how soaked he got getting his coffee. He remembers the smell in the air of the wet pavement steaming. The heat of the summer washing off. The feel of sunshine upon his face. He thinks of rain. Or snow. The Prisoner will have none of this ever again. So the Chaplain holds the Prisoner’s hand as he rocks and tries not to think of the pain in his knees as he kneels there on the cold, hard floor of the cell.

  Later, they are back up in their positions – the Prisoner on the bed, the Chaplain on his chair. They have been quiet for some time; minutes have passed. The Chaplain is afraid to say anything that will set the Prisoner off again, that will upset him, that will cause emotion. Although he wants to force emotion, he isn’t sure if this is the way to do it. He wants the emotion to come from within the Prisoner, not from something the Chaplain says to make him angry.

  The Chaplain thinks of Miranda and how, if he were on death row, she would be there for him. His sister. When their parents died, they came together closer than before. They had no one else. It was the natural thing to do. When he was first charged with assault, Miranda was there. When Tracy dropped the charges, Miranda was there. When he was ordained, Miranda attended the ceremony (albeit with a frown on her face, rolling her eyes, making faces at him, pretending to pray to make him laugh). He saw her children when they were newborns, he held them just after Richard did, and he stood for Richard as best man at their wedding ceremony. He also walked Miranda down the aisle – two jobs on the one day. Stood in for their father. If the Chaplain were strapped to a chair, ready to be electrocuted, he knows for certain that he would look out the window into the waiting crowd of lawyers, lawmakers, wardens, and he would see his sister, Miranda. Even though, while speculating, she claimed she wouldn’t come, he knows she would be there. He would see Richard too. Just before the hood came down.