The Prisoner and the Chaplain Read online

  “You bet you get it,” the Warden says. His voice has gone low. A bit of a growl to it. “Don’t go turning soft on me. Don’t let him get to you.”

  The Chaplain turns and walks away again. He does two laps of the yard, paying close attention to everything around him. To all his senses: touch, taste, smell, sound, sight. He can see the Warden finishing his cigarette, and when he passes close enough by him to hear, he hears the Warden say to himself, “Fuck, refocus? What does that mean?” as he goes back inside the prison walls.

  By being here, doing this, is the Chaplain giving the impression that he believes in the death penalty? That he agrees with this? Because he doesn’t. Believe in it. He wouldn’t want anyone to think that of him. It would be worse than people thinking he committed domestic abuse on a regular basis, which they did think. People. For a while. How, they thought, could someone take even one swing at a woman without ever having done it before? Almost killed her. They thought this before he went into the ministry. Before he gave up his life to serve others. To serve God.

  Gave up his life? What is he thinking?

  The Chaplain rubs at his eyes with the backs of his hands. They feel raw and exposed. The sun coming up blinds him. He needs to stop. He needs to refocus (fuck the Warden) and get back to the Prisoner. The Chaplain has only been gone for twenty minutes maximum, but to him, it feels as if he’s been away from the Prisoner for a lifetime.

  When Tracy was a little girl, she had told him, she would think of her pets’ experiences through their years. Cat years and dog years. For example, when she left her dog for a day, it would be, in dog years, as if she had left him for a month. When her family went on vacation and her dog stayed in the kennel for two weeks, that would be a year out of his life. Or whatever. The Chaplain doesn’t have the math right. But this is what it feels like right now. Every half-hour the Prisoner has left is several years of the life that he might have lived if he hadn’t committed the crime. The faster the Chaplain gets back to him, the better.

  PART TWO

  6:01 a.m.

  When the Chaplain re-enters the cell, the smell of vomit hits him. It is strong and sour and vile. The Prisoner is lying on the cot, facing the wall.

  “Are you okay?”

  “No, yes. No. No.” The Prisoner does not turn to talk to the Chaplain. “I ate too much, I think.”

  “Can I get you anything?”

  “Did you get me the Pepto-Bismol?”

  “Oh no, I forgot. Oh, I forgot. I’m sorry. I can get some now. I’ll get a CO to run for it.”

  “Don’t bother.” The Prisoner rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. His eyes are bloodshot and puffy. He’s been crying. “I think I got everything out anyway. I should feel better in a bit.”

  The Chaplain sits down on the chair, tries to calm his gag reflex, breathes through his nose. He can see specks of vomit around the toilet and stuck within the bowl. Won’t the COs clean up at least? This is inhumane treatment. The Chaplain realizes quickly how strange it is to be thinking this way – inhumane treatment of a man hours before he is to be executed. What is the definition of humane in this scenario? But the vomit. Surely, they could spray some air freshener?

  The Chaplain stands and pounds on the door. The COs open up.

  “Can you get someone to clean up a bit in here? Can he have some air? He’s sick.”

  “We can’t leave our posts.” Then, seeing the Chaplain’s expression. “Listen, I’ll call down to the front and see if they can send up someone to mop or something.”

  “Thank you. That would be appreciated.” He goes back into the room. They seal him in.

  “I knew I asked for you for a reason,” the Prisoner says weakly. He tries to smile. “Here I thought I was going to get Bible messages thrown at me and instead I get a personal assistant.”

  “Yes, well. It’s not fair what they are doing to you.” The Chaplain regrets this as soon as he says it.

  The Prisoner looks at him and then slowly sits up. “You don’t agree with this? With the death penalty? My chaplain thought it was fair.”

  “No, I –”

  “He never said as much, but I knew that he thought I was getting what I deserved. He was always talking about the murders, talking in detail about them. Almost salivating over them or something. He kept talking about the families and about electrocution and everything. He wanted me to die. I’m pretty sure of it.”

  “And you wanted him in here with you at the end?”

  “To be honest,” the Prisoner says, “I was kind of glad when I found out he was sick. To be really honest. I mean, I wanted company – sitting here for twelve hours alone would have been really fucked – and he was all I had.”

  “Honesty is good.”

  “You’re not like him,” he says. “You’re not like him at all. In fact, I wouldn’t know you were a chaplain if they hadn’t told me you were.”

  He thinks, am I a chaplain?

  “I think we should talk more, get our mind off the smell, get back into your story. Don’t you?” The Chaplain leans forward, towards the Prisoner.

  The Prisoner rolls back onto the cot. Weak. “You never told me about the weather. Fuck, you forget the Pepto-Bismol and you forget the weather.”

  “I didn’t forget the weather,” the Chaplain says. “Not at all.” And he goes into a full description – the drying rain, the mounting sun, the bleak nature of the yard, the wideness of the sky. He describes the Warden’s cigarette smoke, the way the air was humid and thick and the smell of dirt was everywhere. The sun was yellow and foggy, waking up, coming alive. A bird or two chirped. The Chaplain could hear cicadas, loud and electrical sounding, as they met the sun. The Prisoner closes his eyes and listens deeply. He breathes slowly. The Chaplain wonders if he’s asleep. Sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, he talks about it all. Paints a picture of the world outside this vomit-covered cell. The Prisoner rests peacefully.

  Until the cell door opens and the cleaning staff arrive to spray bleach on the toilet and floor, to flick around a brush in the water, to wipe disinfectant on the sink, to straighten the bed even (they ask the Prisoner to stand), to spray air freshener into the room. The smell of tropical paradise overpowers the smell of vomit and soon the Chaplain can’t tell which smell is worse, which smell is making him the most nauseous. The Prisoner smiles at him overtop the staff heads as they bustle around, bumping into each other, into the Prisoner and the Chaplain, the room is so small.

  The next minute they’re gone. Whipped in fast and whipped out faster. The Chaplain says, “It’s like those car washes where a line of kids descends on your car, inside and out, each with their own job. They cover your car and then suddenly they are done. Something cartoonish about it.”

  The Prisoner laughs. “Yeah. I see that.” He sits back on the bed, fanning his face. “I’m not sure I like this smell any better.”

  The Chaplain sits again. “Me neither.”

  “Well, you can’t say my last couple hours were boring, can you? They’ve been nothing but a ball of fun. Nothing but excitement. A laugh a minute.”

  The Chaplain smiles. Leans back. Notices suddenly that his back isn’t hurting anymore, that he is, yes, getting used to this. He guesses that a human body can get used to anything eventually.

  “Tell me what happened after you gave Jack his portion of the money. After you found out how your mom died. What did you do then?”

  The Prisoner lies down again, hands behind his head, watching those imaginary clouds on the ceiling, the ones behind his eyes.

  Headaches

  Larry finds that his crime spree is more spread out and less focused. One minute he’s robbing a store, the next minute he’s holding up some guy on the street. He feels a certain anger ever since he saw Jack, ever since he heard about his mother. He sees red now. Walks in a world of deception and pain. His headaches become blinding. He knew his mother had left them, he knew she made a choice – no one forced her to leave them, he knew that – but
Larry didn’t ever believe she did it without clear reason. Deep down, he wanted to believe that she accidentally walked out of the house and merely couldn’t get back in – that she had left her keys, locked herself out, something like that. And he wanted to believe that, maybe, she took Jack by mistake. She meant to take Larry, but she grabbed Jack instead because he was around at the time and Larry wasn’t home. Or she took him by design – she took Jack to save Larry from his violence. Why else would she have taken him? He was a bully and an asshole. She loved Larry the most. He was sure of that.

  Larry’s coffee cans are taking up too much space in his apartment. He is nervous having them around him while he sleeps. And so he doesn’t often sleep. There is too much money in them and too many girls come in and out of his apartment. And so, one day on the way back from holding up a store, he stops his car on the side of Highway 20, a far way out from the city, with the woods on one side of the road and a strip mall on the other, and he rents a storage unit from the immense Storage Mart located there. Self storage. One of those heated/cooled ones, fifty dollars a month. Large and empty. An orange garage door. When he opens the rolling door and looks inside the vacant space, the guy from the front office watching him, he thinks maybe he’ll make it more than just storage. Maybe an office. Set up a desk, a chair, a lamp. Maybe even get a rug for the cold concrete floor. Larry works on this for a while, stacks his coffee cans, buys a laptop. He feels like a man with a job now, even though he doesn’t use his computer for anything other than porn. He doesn’t even know what he would use it for. Accounting? Keeping track of his coffee cans? Emails? Who would he email? Jack? But now he has a place to go to in the morning, a place to sit and contemplate the future or the past or everything in between. And his coffee cans are safe here. Little did he know then that soon enough he would have a place similar in size on death row.

  “What’s wrong with you these days?” Susan stops him on the street. She’s pushing a few toddlers in a stroller – not hers, she’s babysitting for someone else. Larry is pleased to see she’s making her own money again. She quit the diner a while ago and has been lolling around on the couch for months. Even though she looks drugged out, stoned, Larry is glad to see her up and moving. Larry is smoking. He stubs his cigarette out on the brick building he is leaning against.

  “What do you mean, what’s wrong with me? Nothing’s wrong with me.”

  “You never come by the house anymore.”

  “I give you money, don’t I?”

  “I didn’t mean that. I just mean I never see you anymore and when I do see you, you’ve got this weird look on your face like you’re going to kill someone.”

  Larry laughs. “Yeah, right.”

  “No, seriously, are you doing drugs? Man, if you’re doing drugs, I’ll kill you myself.”

  “No drugs.” Larry shakes his head. “I’m not that stupid.”

  Susan looks away – she has been caught doing/selling/growing/snorting drugs herself. She has track marks on both arms and her ankles. The only thing she won’t touch is meth. Says she can’t stand what it does to the jaw. Teeth fall out. Methheads, Susan says, are the ugliest fucks in the world. After seeing what meth did to Samantha, Larry would have to agree.

  “Come over and hang out sometime,” Susan says. “Like old times.”

  “I’m busy, Susan.”

  “Busy? Doing what?”

  Larry marvels at Susan’s inability to figure out what it is he actually does. She seems to think that he made all his money, the money he gives her, the money he lives on, by working in his dad’s store. When they sold that, even though she got one-third of the money and it wasn’t much, she still seems to think that Larry’s better at handling his investments (coffee tins?) than she is, and so it’s only natural to her that he still pays for things for her and her kids. Larry finds it hard to believe, sometimes, that she’s related to him at all. She’s a moron. Must be all the drugs she does. Having babies so early didn’t help either. Larry swears having kids makes your brain go soft. Dwight just got some chick knocked up and he’s all moony now, like some fucking made-for-screen movie on the women’s channel. He floats around, acting so big, touching Darla’s stomach and making cooing noises. It makes Larry sick. Mostly because it’s Dwight, and Dwight used to be so tough, but also because he has no patience for mothers in any form.

  Soon Larry’s storage unit has lights – a string of white Christmas lights – running around the inside top perimeter. It has a fake oriental carpet in the middle, a stand-up lamp, a glass desk he bought online (his laptop has come in handy). The desk has a keyboard drawer even though he has a laptop, so sometimes he leans back in his desk chair with the laptop balanced on the drawer just because he can. Larry spends hours, at first, watching porn. Then he buys a few things online. Then he thinks about asking his computer all kinds of things, he thinks about researching, and he starts to investigate things he never even knew existed. Like what a bubblegoose is. A down jacket in a bubble pattern. He orders one. Or what a diatomic molecule is. A molecule composed of only two atoms. And then what an atom is, because he has to see the whole thing through. Larry spends hours in his office, worrying, thinking, reading, researching. Too many questions, not enough time. He feels, often, as if he’s suddenly gone back to being a child – the child lying on his bed in his solar system room, listening to his mother’s whistle as he thinks of questions to ask her later that she will answer and prove, once again, that she knows more than anyone he’s ever met. She never even faltered, knew exactly what to say to answer whatever question Larry had. What makes an ant so strong? Why did the vacuum break when it sucked up his toy? Why is grape jelly purple?

  Larry forgets to rob places. He forgets to eat sometimes. He doesn’t visit Susan or the brats. He holes himself up in the storage unit, the roll-down garage door locking him in, and he works away on his own little world of knowledge, and he remembers his mother and thinks about Jack. His headaches get better for a while.

  It’s not as if the Internet, his curiosity, stops the adrenalin rush of crime. Larry still craves that like a drug. But having his father’s store money and some time on his hands now, having his coffee cans around him and this little space and this world that is in the laptop, means he doesn’t get out as often as he used to. When he does, he’s all fire and action. Rush in, rob, rush out. Once, he punches some guy who gets in his way, really hard, on the jaw. He crushes the man’s jaw with his fist, hears it pop and crack, watches the blood come out of his mouth. Larry feels nothing. Except the pain in his hand.

  A hundred and fifty dollars here, there. Whenever he needs it. Convenience stores are the easiest. Maybe that’s why they’re called convenient? Sometimes there is no money in the till and he just takes food. Cheetos, pop, chocolate bars, milk. It adds up. He spends the money. Gets more. Besides his father’s watch store, Larry has never held a real job. Unless you call robbery a job. He wouldn’t even know how to put a resume together, although once he researches it on the Internet, he thinks he could do it. There are these great sites that almost do it for you, in fact. If only he could list his crimes. It’d be an impressive resume. Sometimes he wishes he had been caught for something – sometimes he wants people to know what he is capable of, what he can do, who he is. There is a certain talent and charm to being someone who has never been caught. Larry is sure it would look good on a resume.

  But is he this? Is this all he is? Larry isn’t sure. After seeing Jack, seeing the world he comes from, Larry suddenly isn’t as interested in the life of crime he has cultivated. Jack is someone’s lackey, that is obvious. He takes orders from someone. You can tell just by looking at him. The way he looks over his shoulder. His tough-guy attitude. His persona. All swagger. People who work on their own don’t need that kind of swagger, Larry thinks. In fact, the less swagger you have, the better it is for you, the less likely you’ll get caught. And if you have no one to bail you out, you don’t want to get caught.

  Susan and Jack. Larry
wants to rid himself of family. Their parents are gone. What’s the point of this, of having family? But Susan keeps pounding on his apartment door, asking for more money, for more of his time, for more of everything. Jack stays out of the picture, doesn’t see Larry. But he does occasionally ask Susan to ask Larry for money. Larry finds this out quickly – it’s obvious from the way Susan hems and haws when she asks for more. But he hands over the money anyway. Why not? He has a gift, why not share the proceeds. Larry reasons that the more money he gives Jack, the more Jack will stay out of his life. And he is right about this. For now.

  In his storage unit, Larry researches crime. He looks into what the perfect crime would be. What can he get away with? Art theft? Bank heist? Diamonds? Drugs? Murder? What is the crime that would set him up for life without having any consequences? How many convenience stores and little strip mall banks can he rob without getting bored? How many purses on the street, ripping out old lady’s shoulders? Larry knows to stay away from the drug trade – that, he knows, will get him jailed. Look at Dwight. In and out of jail (and a baby on the way). Diamonds? He’d have to travel for that, which is suspicious. And he’d have to know something about diamonds. Same with art theft. A huge bank heist appeals to him – especially on his own. With no partners. Tunnel in, perhaps? Just Larry in and out of the bank with loads of money. He researches this. Computer hacking appeals to Larry, but he has no idea how money is made from it – or what it is, or if money is involved. Larry is smart but not computer smart.

  Larry is at his desk late at night. The rain pours down outside. A fresh spring rain. He’s left the storage-unit door open slightly to let in the breeze, and the worms are coming in under the door. When there is a knock on the door, a “Hello?” from a soft voice with an accent, he jumps a foot in his chair and quickly closes his laptop screen. Shuts the naked women inside.