from VIRGINIA QUARTERLY REVIEW
When Sammy knocks, when she says, “Sheriffs office,” she stands to the side of the apartment door. No one has tried to shoot her, not yet. But you never know. The peephole darkens. She waits for the door to rattle open, and when it doesn’t, she knocks again. “I know you’re in there,” she says, and the apartment manager, a man with bony arms and shoe-polish black hair, leans close to her and says, “I know he’s in there.”
This is the River Side Apartment Complex, and Sammy is a deputy with the civil division of the Deschutes County sheriff’s office. Every day people are falling behind—every day there is a taller stack of evictions, small claims notices, repossessions of property, wage garnishments for unpaid debts—and every day there is another address to visit, a door to knock on, sometimes to kick down.
The carpet is a burnt orange. The walls are pine-paneled. The fluorescent light above them buzzes on and off. She hates her job, hates that she spends most of her day trudging through dumps like this, delivering subpoenas, hurrying people out their doors and down staircases with garbage bags full of clothes, cardboard boxes spilling over with frozen food. In the three years she has worked in the civil division, only once has someone been happy to see her—and she was serving him divorce papers. She seized her baton as he hugged her.
She knocks again, this time using the side of her fist, booming at the door. “Hello,” a voice, a man’s voice, says. “Okay. I’m opening.”
She supposes she feels bad for people. When they ciy or beg or point to their grubby children and say, you’re doing this to them. Maybe pities them, maybe that’s a better way of putting it. But then a dog will come padding out of a back room or she 11 spot a video game console, a pool table, a cappuccino machine. And she 11 decide from their caielessness that they’re getting what they deserve. She’ll want to say, “How much you spend on dog food a month? or How much you think you could have sold that Xbox for?” But she won’t. Instead, when people show their teeth or kick over chairs or get dpwn on their knees and take her hand and beg, she simply says, “I’m no judge, no jury,” so that people contain their anger and sadness, bottle it up for someone else.
Every one of these addresses is like a hole—the same hole, manychambered—and sometimes, when she thinks back on all the addi esses she’s visited, she feels as though she is falling through them, thiough their living rooms and kitchens, seeing hundreds, thousands of faces all twisted in an upset expression directed at her.
At her hip she carries handcuffs, a telescoping baton, a .40 caliber Glock. She keeps her hair short—ever since, seven years ago, when she was working patrol, a drunk yanked her ponytail, grated her cheek against the asphalt—and she knows her square face, her broad shoulders make her look a little like a man. People blink a few times when they first meet her, trying to make sense of her.
That’s the case now, when the door clicks open and she moves into the dim light of the apartment and faces an old man, mid-seventies, wearing pale blue jeans and a ribbed white tank top. His head is bald except for a horseshoe of white hair. His feet are bare—their skin spotted and knotted with veins, the toenails a chalky yellow.
“Frank Ridgeway?”
“Yeah.” His square-framed glasses take up most of his face. He peers at her through them and they are thick enough that she can’t distinguish the color of his eyes.
“I have a court order,” she says and holds out the paper, folded twice as if to better contain the secret. “Notice of eviction.”
She steels herself, ready for him to plead his case—like all the others—to smack his fist into an open palm, shout so loudly spittle flies from his lips. To say that he has rights, that this is an illegal eviction. To say that he’s been cheated, that the landlord has been cashing his checks all long.
But he doesn’t. “Okay,” he says and waves both hands as if to clear a bad smell from the air. “Okay. All right.”
They are standing in his kitchen. The counter is bare except for a brown mug and a plate dirtied with crumbs. The smell of old coffee and cigarette smoke. Beyond the kitchen, the living room. Same pinepaneled walls and orange carpeting as the hallway. Dirty light seeping in through the tan curtains. A wooden box of a television playing Fox News with the sound off. She wonders if he has children, even grandchildi en, who could help. She doesn’t see any photos magneted to the fridge, hanging on the walls. Everything is bare.
Frank still hasn’t taken the paper. She shakes it at him and he snatches it from her and says, “Fine.” He unfolds it and folds it up again without reading, drops it on the counter. “I suppose you want me to leave?” “Now.”
“How long do I have?”
“Now.”
“Fine.” He departs her, walking toward a blackened doorway that must lead to his bedroom, where he pauses. “While you wait, don’t suppose you want a glass of water? Or some milk?”
No one has ever asked her this before, so it takes a moment to reply: “No. Thank you.”
111 only be a minute.” He coughs, his cough sounding like pennies rattling at the bottom of a paper cup. “I got to warn you, though. I die sometimes. I been dying all day.”
“Excuse me?”
He taps his chest. My heart stops beating. My lungs stop breathing.
I die. Not officially but it’s death all the same. Then I wake up. I’m telling you this because I feel a spell coming on. Wouldn’t want to alarm you.” His smile is damp and pink—he hasn’t put in his teeth yet—but she doesn’t sense a joke.
She looks to the manager for help, but he is in the hall, muttering into his cell phone, chewing his thumbnail. “What should I do?” she says to Frank. “If you die? Do you want me to call an ambulance?”
“Don’t do nothing. Give me a couple minutes—I’ll come back.” He picks at a splinter in the doorframe. “Doctor calls it a heart condition.
I call it a Korean condition.” His chest hair is as white as dandelion fluff. He reaches into it, under his tank top, and withdraws his dog tags, and rattles them at her.
Normally she doesn’t talk to tenants during repos or evictions except to say, “Hurry,” or “I don’t care.” But Frank is old. And alone. And though she is used to dealing with people who have made the wrong choices, they are, almost all of them, young and furious and seemingly
capable of rectifying whatever ruin has come to them. He is different. A lone cloud coming apart in gray filaments, a few drops of rain. She feels, no other word for it, sad.
She calls to him, “Frank?” just as he clicks on the light in his room. His eyes are thin black slits behind his glasses. You don t mind me asking, what does it feel like? When you die?”
He considers this a moment before answering. “You feel like you’re falling,” he says. “You feel like you’re falling down a very deep hole.” His hand makes a falling motion. “Every time I keep expecting to hit bottom. But so far, no bottom.”
2 .
John peels up the duck-patterned Linoleum in the bathroom and lays down tile. He rips away the aquamarine carpet in the guest room and pliers out the hundreds of tacks and staples to reveal the hardwood gleaming beneath. He scores the floral wallpaper in the kitchen and sprays it with DIF and scrapes off damp shreds of it and gouges the drywall so that he must mud and texture before splashing the walls over with paint. He unscrews the light fixtures—all white orbs with brass collars—and replaces them with wrought iron. He hangs new gutters. He trades out the appliances for stainless steel. He installs new hardware on all the cabinets. He removes the cracked and yellowed switches and outlets and screws in white plates.
Now the house looks like the house he imagined when, five years ago, he walked through it and laid his hands on its walls and said, “I can see the potential.” Five years and he hasn’t flipped open his toolbox until now—now that he has to move. His marriage is falling apart. His daughter is starting to bring home college brochures. His boss at the biodiesel company where he works ordered a thirty-day furlough for all employees. So he spends his evenings and weekends alone—his wife has moved in with her parents and his daughter spends all her time in her room—restoring the house, his house, which he has come to hate, to think of as a kind of grave, for someone else to enjoy.
The back porch overlooks a hillside crowded with big pines. For the decorative posts—staggered every ten feet along the railing, squared and beveled, as tall as a rifle and as thick as a thigh—the builder didn’t use the treated fir or cedar he should have, and diy rot set in. When John pulls off the old sheathing, tearing into it with a hammer and a
short crowbar, he reveals their hollow core, and in it, the skeletons of lour birds along with their rotten wig of a nest.
John uses the crowbar to claw them from the post, for ten years their tomb. Bones and branches and broken bits of shell scatter at his feet. He toes at a skull and it crumbles into a white powder. He guesses the birds were nesting when the house was being framed, maybe up in the rafters, and the builder climbed a ladder and cradled the nest in his hands and cooed and whistled at the baby birds and then tossed them inside the post before hammering on its cap and whispering goodbye.