Unlocked

Johnny and I got going on the eviction list early Saturday morning. By the first stop, we were already off to a depressing start.

A woman answered the knock–probably in her late twenties, looking haggard enough in the cold winter light to be her own grandma. Faded pink streaks dyed into her bleach-blonde hair; front teeth halfway to being completely fucked up by meth. The apartment was a black cave behind her, a screen flickering with cartoons in the depths, three or four different kids’ voices whining for their breakfast.

Meth Mom looked at us and didn’t say anything, probably remembering the advice of one of the many lawyers she’d had in the past. Next to me, Johnny jumped in to bridge the chasm of her silence.

“You Courtney Franklin?”

“Yeah.”

“City marshals. We got an eviction order for you, ma’am. Fourteen days to pay or vacate.” He handed the paper to Courtney, who stared at it like it was written in hieroglyphics. “That’s the fifteenth of December.”

“I see when it is,” Courtney said. Her eyes shifted away from Johnny’s and locked in on mine–no tears, just a sort of angry fatigue. “How am I supposed to find a new place in two weeks with no money and all these goddamned kids? At Christmas?”

People always look to me at these moments, thinking a woman will be more sympathetic, but it’s Johnny who’s the real soft touch, despite all his years on this job. He whipped out one of the cards he carries around in a little leather wallet--all his own idea; I've never met another marshal who does it--and gave Courtney his spiel about the places she could go for help. Somewhere in the shadows of the apartment, one of the invisible kids yelped, or maybe it was a dog. This didn’t seem like a place where the slumlord stopped by often to check for unauthorized pets, or to make repairs for that matter.

He wanted his rent money, though. They always do.

“Good luck,” Johnny said at the end of the conversation–optimistically, I thought, since Courtney looked like she'd never experienced a single piece of good luck in her life. He handed her the card, and she mumbled something and retreated into her cave.

"Did she call us pigs?" I asked as we started down from the stoop, picking our way around broken toys, crispy brown plants, and the carcass of a dead electric dryer.

"Might've been 'thanks.'"

"You think?"

"Probably not," Johnny said.

-----

At the second address, just a few blocks away, I did the knock: a hard, sharp, rap-rap-rap to make sure anyone still sleeping off their Friday night knew we were there on business. We’d climbed six flights to get to the top floor of this building, and it reeked like piss and cheap beer up here, plus fifty years worth of trapped garbage fumes from the chute at the end of the hall.

No response. I knocked again. Johnny and I swapped glances, wondering if this was one of those times when we could just post the notice and dip.

While we were considering it, we heard heavy footsteps, and then the door flew inward so aggressively that the knob bounced off an inner wall. In the gap hulked an enormous white man with a fierce buzz cut, looking like the sheer width of him might rip the door frame to pieces.

I'd seen plenty of big guys in the wild--cops, firefighters, bouncers, enforcers--but this one dwarfed them all. He was six foot eight if he was an inch, wearing nothing but a pair of black boxer briefs and a grimace that promised a violent fate for whoever had disturbed him.

Both of us took a large step back, as if we were playing Mother-May-I in reverse. Mother, may I take one giant step away from this scary man? Johnny, who was the one of us licensed to carry a firearm, put a hand near the unbuttoned front of his coat and barked out “City marshals!”

This stopped our target in his tracks. He looked at Johnny, then looked at the notice I was holding. A wave of understanding broke across his face: he was big, but not dumb.

“Ah shit,” he said.

“Vincent Russo, Jr.?” I asked, to be sure we were serving the right half-naked giant.

“Yeah, yeah. Christ, I told that fuckin’ guy I was gonna pay him.”

“You’ve got fourteen days–” was as far as I got before Vincent Russo, Jr. snatched the paper and slammed the door in our faces.

Showers of toxic-looking plaster dust spilled down either side of the frame, joining piles of the stuff already on the floor from previous slammings. From an apartment down the hall, someone bellowed for all of us to shut the fuck up.

---

On the way out of the building, Johnny and I got the giggles, half because Russo had been so huge that his head looked comically too small for his body, and half with relief, because we’d both thought he might be about to kill us. For a few minutes, we sat in my double-parked SUV, with the heater running to keep warm, trying to pull ourselves together and failing.

“It’s not funny,” I told Johnny, between snickers. “He could’ve been armed.”

“I thought he was.” Johnny took off his glasses and wiped his eyes on his arm.

“Oh yeah? Where’d you think he was hiding a weapon?”

“Down the back of his underpants,” Johnny said. We both fell apart again. Other drivers were starting to get pissed about my parking job, honking as they swerved around us down the one-way street, but we couldn't stop.

Finally I held up both hands, begging for calm. “No more, no more. We gotta get going. The next place is way the hell out out in Jamaica, and we've got four others after that. Not to mention all the paperwork back at the office.”

“Paperwork can wait until Monday, Kath.”

Johnny was starting to sober up too, still chuckling a little as he cleaned his glasses with the edge of his sleeve before putting them back on. His hair's turned mostly grey over the last few years, and between that and the specs, he's starting to look more like he ought to be teaching philosophy courses to rich kids than enforcing evictions and auctioning off seized property. He knows it, too.

“That attitude is why you’re always behind on your expense reports,” I said, and put the car in gear.

---

At the third apartment on our list, no one was home–or if they were, they weren't letting on–so we tacked the notice to the door and called it good. At the fourth, a couple of college-age boys shrugged, took the paper, and said they were leaving after their classes ended on the fifteenth anyway. From the part of their living room I could see, they didn't own anything but a big plasma TV and two recliners, which promised an easy move-out for them, as well as for us if we had to come back when the fourteen days were up.

I hoped we didn't. The worst part of this job, hands down, is when someone doesn't leave before the eviction date. That's when we show up to enforce the order, along with two or three guys who remove all their stuff from the unit and put it out on the lawn if there is one, or the sidewalk if there isn't. Neither of us enjoys that, but someone has to do it. It's why Johnny carries those cards around: to help prevent that ugly scene from happening, and to atone for the times it happens anyway.

Johnny does a lot of atoning. I wouldn't be here if he didn't.

The sky was starting to cloud over as we left the college kids' place, the kind of dull leaden blanket that meant snow was on the way. Johnny bought two coffees and a cherry cheese danish from a cart on the corner, and I noted the cost to add to the report later.

"You're wasting away. Here." He held the danish up to my face so I could take a bite without getting crumbs stuck on my knit gloves. "Where's the next one?"

"Back in the city. Probably forty-five minutes to get there. You wanna drive?"

"Through the midtown tunnel? It's all you, kid."

---

By the time we got to the next address on the list, the first snowflakes were drifting down, catching on the grey wool of Johnny's coat and the slick black waterproof material of mine. This building had an elevator, but it was out of service, leaving us to tackle the stairs again.

"You wanna do it?" Johnny asked at the top.

"You do look pretty winded, Grandpa."

He gave me the finger. I grinned and knocked. Rap-rap-rap.

Footsteps approached the door, light ones that gave me hope we weren't about to meet another angry colossus. They were followed by a tiny scrape of metal that puzzled me at first, until I realized that this apartment must have one of those door viewer boxes. We'd heard the sound of the lever being moved to open the peephole.

A moment passed, while the person on the other side of the door seemed to consider whether they should open it or not. Then the lock clicked, the door swung open, and we came face to face with a young girl.

Courtney Franklin had been old before her time. This kid was the opposite: probably thirteen or fourteen, but looking like a wary eleven as her dark eyes scanned us up and down. Behind her, a smaller kid, around kindergarten age, was busy running a Hot Wheels car along the back of the busted-out couch like it was a racetrack. I'd have bet another cherry cheese danish that Big Sis had been left to mind Little Bro while their parents were away, a situation I knew all too well.

Big Sis clearly viewed herself as being in charge. She planted a hand on her hip and gave us a stare.

"Are you cops?"

"City marshals, hon," Johnny told her. The gentle tone of his voice made me shiver with a half-suppressed memory. "Not the same as cops. Is your mom's name Mayra? Is she at home?"

Big Sis was still eyeing us with rightful suspicion. "She's out. That paper for her?" She reached for it. "I'll give it to her."

"Well, I'd let you," Johnny said, "but the rules say I got to either hand it to a responsible adult or post it on the door. And I'm guessing you ain't eighteen, so the door it is. Sorry about that."

The girl scowled and stuffed her hands into the kangaroo pocket of her green Adidas hoodie, too faded and pilled to have come to her any way but secondhand. A faint smell of food wafted through the door: Spaghetti-os, or beef stew, or whatever other canned goods the food pantry was giving out this week for big sisters to heat up for lunch.

"I'm responsible," she said.

"I can tell you are," Johnny said. He took a roll of tape out of his coat pocket and stuck the paper to the door, below the peephole. "But the rules are the rules."

"How do you know I'm not just gonna take it down as soon as you leave?"

"That's up to you. It's our job to deliver the notice, that's all. But make sure Mom sees it, because it's important." He put the tape away and pulled one of the cards out of his leather case. "This, I'm allowed to give you. Show it to her when she gets home and reads the paper."

Big Sis's eyes slid away from Johnny's and met mine, the way Courtney's had earlier. Instead of anger, they held a deep, burning shame, and I knew why.

"Can she read?" I asked.

"Some."

"You help her?"

"Yeah." The hoodie pocket was getting the workout of its life, stretched and twisted by Big Sis's restless fingers.

"Good girl," Johnny said. He held out the card, and she freed one hand to take it. "You help her with this too, okay?"

"Okay." She was still looking at me, not at Johnny. On her face I saw a searching expression, as if she was trying to divine things about me that she had no business knowing. It made me want to set myself on fire.

---

Johnny touched my shoulder as we walked back to the car.

"You alright, Kath?"

"Yeah, why wouldn't I be?"

"I mean...that kid, you know?"

I knew. But I didn't want to talk about it.

Talking about it would mean talking about a knock at the door of another shithole apartment years ago, when I was the scared, sullen girl in charge of her little siblings, and Johnny was the man with the paper in his hand, turning our already precarious existence upside down. A younger Johnny without the silver hair and glasses, handing me one of those damned cards for my mother, with phone numbers printed on it back then instead of website addresses.

Johnny had let me train under him when I turned up at his office later with a hard-won GED and not much else...except the card I'd kept safe through all the moves, from motel room to shelter to another junky apartment and back again. Safe with me, because my mother would have lost it or thrown it away or spilled a bottle of Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill over it, if she had read it in the first place.

Why would you wanna do this job, Kathleen? he’d asked me then, looking genuinely bewildered. After what happened–

I’d just shrugged. They said at the career counseling center to ask people you know for work, and you’re someone I know…so, can I?

Well, Johnny had said, I guess we can give it a try.

It wasn't the whole truth, of course. The truth is that in this life, you can be the person who waits inside for the knock, the bad news arriving, the world falling apart–or you can be the person on the other side of the door.

Johnny was paying for his position there with his offers of help. I'd paid for mine with my childhood, and no one was going to make me feel bad about it. Not even a girl in a faded green hoodie, a girl who reminded us both of me.

"I'm fine," I told him. "No sweat."

"Gimme the keys." He took them out of my hand. "How about if you stay in the car at the next one, take a few minutes to yourself?"

"What if you get shot?"

"I'm not gonna get shot."

I thought of Big Sis and how she was reading the notice right now, wondering what would happen and where they would go, planning how to explain it when her mother came home–drunk, high, raging, with a new boyfriend, or just worn out from a long day of work, who knew?

"Kath?"

"Hang on a sec," I said.

---

Rap-rap-rap.

I didn't think she'd open up again. I wouldn't have at thirteen, maybe not at thirty-five either, but she did. Eyes full of real terror this time, like I was going to throw her and her brother out into the street and slap a padlock on the door right this minute.

"What's your name?" I couldn't add a convincing "hon" or "mija" on there like Johnny could have, but I was doing my best.

"Gabby."

"Gabby...I just want to tell you you're gonna be okay. This happened to me too, when I was your age, and it was hard for a while - it totally sucked, if you want to know - but in the end I was alright."

She stared at me. In the background, I saw a flicker of movement: the little brother, peering over the back of the couch to see what was happening.

"You got kicked out of your place? When you were my age?"

"I did. Me and my mom and my two little sisters. My mom was a -- well, she had problems. Maybe you know what that's like."

Gabby's lip curled up in disbelief. "This happened to you...and now you do it to other people?"

"Yes, but I--"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" Her voice broke on "wrong," a raw, ragged sound. The little brother started to whimper. "Leave us alone! You left your paper, now get out of here!"

The door slammed in my face. Second time that day. Still not a record.

---

"You do what you went up there to do?" Johnny hadn't started the car or turned on the heat while I was away, and it was frigid inside. Warm clouds of breath rolled from his mouth as he spoke.

"Yeah."

"Did it go the way you wanted it to?"

"No."

A long pause. "So I'll just drive, then."

"Thanks, Johnny."

The window was a sheet of ice, a frozen glacier against my cheek. I leaned into it and closed my eyes. Maybe, I thought, it was time I got some cards of my own.