Nesbitt - part one
People are mostly just people, no matter what they do for a living. This is a story about people, about the realization that everyone has a life to live. [literary fiction | 4,500 words]
Officer Joel Nesbitt spun in his groaning swivel chair. He spat brown, nicotine-rich spit into a Sam’s Club water bottle he kept on the desk for that purpose, and listened idly as the mundane chatter on the radio competed for oxygen with the hysterical tirade coming from his favorite podcast, playing at full volume through the government-issued computer’s tinny speakers. Normally, he would be enraptured, enraged, blood coursing through his plaque-laden veins—one thing about conservative talk radio now that everything’s online is that they’ve really grown a pair, openly calling for blood in the streets in the manner of all aging white men reasonably certain they wouldn’t be doing any of the bleeding—but today his mind was elsewhere. Comfortably into middle age, Joel aligned with this foam-flecked take on politics; it wouldn’t be his blood, wouldn’t be his street. But it was precisely the goings-on upon his own personal street that occupied his thoughts. A meaty hand absently reached for the phone on his desk—personal calls were discouraged—but he stopped himself just as he dialed ‘9’ for an outside line.
‘Boundaries,’ Nadine had said to him the last time he called to check up on her from the prison camp. It was the title of a vaguely Christian relationship self-help book he had been given—through his wife—by an allegedly well-meaning neighbor, the equine veterinarian and brooding Heathcliffian widower Dr. Henry Mackenroe. The book, Dr. Mackenroe said through Nadine—meaning to Nadine (and when was this exactly?)—totally changed his life.
‘He said it taught him how to love again,’ Nadine had gushed.
Joel didn’t see how. Mrs. Mackenroe died the past spring, while assisting her then-eminent husband in birthing twin foals in their stable, at the top of the Nesbitts’ road.
‘Henry,’ as Joel’s wife called him, rather eagerly recounting the horrific details over supper on one of Joel’s rare nights off, ‘never forgave himself.’ Not, apparently, for leaving his young, almost-painfully attractive wife at the business end of an extremely agitated pregnant mare while he went to retrieve some medieval piece of gigantic gynecological equipment, but because after the kick, after all improvised life-saving measures had been exhausted, after the ambulance rolled away without lights or sirens, at some point before ‘Henry’ hopped in his late-model Ford Super Duty and left to attend to the grim banalities of a sudden, modern death, he had violated his Hippocratic oath. He had dismissed the deputies and been alone at the scene. As the two newborn foals withed about forgotten in the afterbirth, the handsome vet stroked their mother’s mane, calming the horse after a long, difficult labor. His hands trembled. At which point in the story Nadine skipped ahead to the following morning, to the eminent Dr. Mackenroe returning home drunk with grief and Johnny Walker Red to discover that the horse to had somehow lamed itself in the night, and his doing his solemn veterinary duty by promptly euthanizing it.
‘Hey!’ Nesbitt roared over the squelching, too-loud intercom, the feedback all but drowning his voice out. ‘You! Yeah, y’all! Get back to your housing unit!’
A few prisoners were milling about at the property line. This was minimum-security; there was no fence, and it wasn’t like he could shoot them or anything, but it was well after sundown and they had no business being there.
‘Don’t make me come out there!’
The figures scattered, Joel thought, like cockroaches. He sighed and rubbed at his temples, then made a brief entry in the logbook. They were probably picking up cell phones, booze, or any number of more germane everyday creature comforts, which their people had stashed in the woods abutting the prison camp. Joel was once walking the perimeter and found a duffel bag that contained, amongst other things, quinoa. Like six bulk-sized bags of quinoa. Or was it couscous? Joel just remembers it was some ethnic cereal grain, the volume of which spoke, well, volumes, about the free flow of contraband into the camp. It was the quinoa that was Joel’s professional Führerbunker, the moment when he came to accept that whatever the game was, the inmates had won, and their victory was total. Since then he only conducted the minimum required rounds, and only searched the living areas of inmates he didn’t particularly like for one reason or another. Whatever he did find he confiscated off the books. To do otherwise was simply just too much paperwork, all to ultimately not even put a dent in the flow of contraband.
In twelve years on the job, he had seen nearly a dozen bureaucrats come in with a ‘new sheriff in town’ mentality, each and every one of them transferring out just as soon as they were able. Some even resorted to flagrantly misappropriating funds or committing similar misconduct to take advantage of the Bureau’s informal ‘foul up and move up’ policy, in which the agency granted quick transfers and even promotions to problematic staff because it was the fastest and cheapest way to extricate them from their assigned facility. The position of prison camp administrator had become something not unlike that of ‘Defense Against the Dark Arts’ instructor amongst the Hogwarts faculty. Joel liked Harry Potter. He was disappointed that Nadine’s girls weren’t younger when he met her, in which case he would have an excuse to read the books to a captive audience. As it stood, he’d bring them to work, usually disguised in a Vince Flynn or Tom Clancy dust jacket so the other turnkeys wouldn’t make fun of him, which, Joel suspected, they usually did anyways.
‘Henry’ was usually out on his ample acreage when Joel left for work each afternoon. When not on horseback, he would be mucking the stables, or mowing his rolling, verdant fields astride a gleaming, oddly phallic, international red tractor. If Joel himself was a much-gossiped-about, yet apparently still-licensed veterinarian, he certainly would have hired someone to handle the menial farm labor. ‘Henry likes to work with his hands,’ Nadine told him one night when he’d said as much. He’d turned the corner onto their gravel road just as the first lavender hint of dawn threatened the eastern horizon; ‘Henry’ was already up, baling hay by floodlight, his shirt off despite the morning chill, his taut, sculpted muscles glistening under the bright light.
‘He’s a real salt-of-the-earth fella,’ Nadine had gushed.
‘I thought he went to Vanderbilt,’ Joel sulked.
‘ . . . ’
‘ . . . ’
‘It’s a very good school.’
Nadine was, Joel thought, by and large a good woman. Without fail, she would be awake with the dawn and usually in the shower by the time Joel returned home each morning. She would cook his eggs over easy with her hair still wet, and kiss him on the cheek as she brought him his coffee. Joel, somewhat perversely, could not get to sleep without a cup of his wife’s coffee. It was a sort of security blanket, a testament to his wife happily at home and his house in order.
The union, buffeted by chronic understaffing and the corrections industry’s status as one of the worst work environments in all of civil service, ensured that Joel brought home more than enough bacon for the two of them. Joel despised labor unions, except his own; the irony of this was of course lost on him, although not on Nadine, who in college was involved in the sort of student groups in which membership would make it difficult, even years down the line, to, say, get security clearance to work at a penal institution. Joel, fortunately, was already gainfully employed when they met, and so her past remained in the past, save for the occasional hassle at the airport when she’d fly out to Boulder to visit family once every couple years. Joel, who’d amassed a small fortune in paid vacation days, but was perpetually unable to take more than forty-eight hours off in a single stretch, would have to stay behind. Nadine would always gracefully assure him that he wouldn’t like Colorado anyway, that the altitude would and spend their time apart working, and watching satellite television, one eye on the phone, waiting for the call telling him he’d between enjoying the empty house and counting down the hours until his wife came home.
When Joel met Nadine, she was the working mother of two teenage daughters. The girls’ father, incidentally, was doing three hundred months up at Big Sandy for bank robbery. This, too, would have complicated their courtship, even though Joel had been working at the prison for five years already. Fortunately for everyone involved, Big John hadn’t been dependent on Nadine for financial support since the early twenty-teens, having carved out some outlandishly profitable, almost certainly illegal niche in the omnipresent informal economy at his penitentiary.
What did complicate things, however, was the way Nadine’s daughters, apparently old hats at the new dad thing, installed themselves in Joel’s prefabricated house (‘It’s stick-built!’ he parroted to Nadine when she and her brood moved in) the way corporate raiders installed themselves in Winston-Salem following the leveraged buyout of RJR-Nabisco. Having never between them said more than a dozen words to him other than ‘yeah,’ ‘nah,’ and ‘ask me to call you “daddy” again and I’ll call CPS,’ they nevertheless set to undertaking an ‘extreme makeover’ of Joel’s admittedly stuffy (‘Rustic!’ he’d crow in defense of the corduroy sofa, the wicker coffee table, the permanently-reclined taupe La-Z-Boy) home decor. Nadine openly encouraged this project, telling Joel he should be overjoyed that the girls were ‘settling in’ so easily, taking such an interest in their new home. Even once it became clear the girls were hauling away Joel’s worldly possessions and selling them at a rather lucrative flea market stall at the county fairgrounds every Sunday afternoon, Nadine praised their entrepreneurial spirit, and expressed nothing but joy and blind parental admiration for the ‘minimalist’ charm of the mismatched IKEA furnishings they brought home, Joel suspected, from a roll-off dumpster out behind the nearby Goodwill.
After the girls left for college, Joel felt a profound sense of relief. He was, for the first time in three years, at home in his own house, no longer banished to the master bedroom or depressing ‘home office’ the girls carved out of the utility closet. He replaced all the uncomfortable, structurally unsound modern furniture with chintzy, upholstered chairs and sofas. He moved his ancient Gateway desktop computer back into the living room. There was no room for these things—the girls, it turned out, did have a good grasp on the fundamentals of interior design—and the result of Joel’s reconquest was reminiscent of a neglected back room in one of the dozens of Methodist thrift stores that populate small towns in the South, a church basement kind of vibe, as if the only thing needed to complete the decor was a couple dozen folding chairs stacked against the load-bearing wall abutting the kitchen. Nadine, without actually condemning Joel’s coup d’ecor, nonetheless seemed to regard him more distantly, with something approaching distaste. It was as if in her mind he was the Quisling of their little stick-built empty nest, a bowerbird in reverse, hellbent on erasing any trace of her daughters. She saw the redecorating for what it was: a power grab by a man who was, in his own mind, powerless in every facet of his life. It made Nadine sad, not just in the manner of all empty nesters and disillusioned housewives, but with the sort of sadness one gets watching a nature documentary about some lumbering, maladapted animal that has, owing to some cruel twist of evolution or plain bad luck, failed to gather enough food for the long and brutal winter ahead, an animal that will ultimately fail to pass on his own DNA and has thus lost the game of life.