I jerk on the door handle again, just for feel the door frame shake and hear the force of metal on metal. I pull and pull and the door squeals and flexes hard enough that it curves at the edges. But nothing breaks. I sit down on the front steps, thinking about what I gotta break and who’s going get called when I do it.
There’s a car I never noticed, parked across the street. Small and silver and simple. Driver’s door pops and this lady steps out, unfolds herself to full, thick height. Tight cornrows sweeping up her head, Afro puff ponytail in back. Got on this slouchy black top that slides down one arm so you can see how her shoulder glows. Her shoes clack on the concrete as she comes up the walk.
I know her even if we never talked before. “It’s you,” I say.
Whole time she got her eyes on me, not hiding. I give her that. “Your mother called me,” she says. She stops in front the steps where I’m sitting. “This really happening?”
“She called you for what?” I ask.
“Noa’s,” she says. Points at his door. “Said he was getting evicted. Or, at least”—she frowns—“his things.”
“Yeah, but I mean,” I say, “dunno what she thought you could do that I couldn’t.”
She smiles like I’m some kinda joke. I let it go. “Dean,” I say, giving a hand to shake, which she does.
“I know,” she says. “Khadeja.”
“I know,” I say.
We let go the shake.
“I called the Sheriff’s Department. They said there’s no way out of this unless we paid the forty-five hundred that was due.”
“Shit,” I say. “You figure if I take him on a date maybe he’ll let it go for less?”
She looks me up and down. “Not dressed like that.”
“I give good back rubs, though,” I say.
“I’m surprised how wrong Nainoa was about you,” she says.
“Whatchyou mean?” I ask.
“He said you were supposed to be charming.” And she straight-up laughs at her own joke.
“Come on,” I say. “No be like—”
But now this moving truck creeps around the corner, says Branton’s Hauling on the side. It stops like it’s thinking. Then the truck moves forward again and stops again. It comes right up to Noa’s curb like that. There’s two dark shadows of heads inside the cab. I can hear the power steering shudder and whine, the click of the truck falling into park. Then two guys get out in tight blue jeans and, like, carpenter’s jackets or whatever. Both of ’um haole with haircuts like soldiers and faces like kids and I almost want for be like, Which way to the gay rodeo?
They see us at the doorway and stop, talk to each other for a second, then the one with brown hair and a bent nose walks up, hand out palm-down, like I’m a dog off the leash he gotta make calm.
“What, haole?” I say.
He’s all, “Sorry?”
“I said, what,” I say. I nod at how he’s walking at me. “I’m his brother. I don’t bite.”
He stops walking. Crosses his arms. “We got some stuff we gotta take out of here. All of it, actually.”
There’s another pickup truck of guys that show up and park by the moving truck. Five of ’um. I step down from where I was, out from under the eaves, so everyone can see all six foot five of me. “Go home,” I say.
* * *
“BOYS,” KHADEJA SAYS, “what do you say we talk about this a minute.”
Funny thing is these guys might as well be guys I worked the packing line with back in Spokane, or when I’d do some of the landscaping stuff on the side. I think they figure that out, too, because there’s this moment where we’re all like, I know you, aren’t we on the same side? But then that all goes away.
“Our job is just to start emptying the place out,” the other guy from the moving truck, the one with the lighter hair, says like an apology.
“You got guns or knives?” I ask.
“Dean—” Khadeja says.
“What?” someone says.
“Only way you’re getting in.”
But they got better than guns and knives, because just behind that second truck was the Sheriff, who I didn’t see. Now he’s out on Noa’s natty lawn, Sheriff shaped like a bowling pin, including the white skin and red neck. Arms crossed over his chest with his gun coming off his hip, him all leaning like his dick’s weighing him down. “Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” he says.
What can I do?
I get out of the way. Khadeja walks straight over to the officer and starts talking. Repo guys get busy taking things out. Whole big group of ’um, like this is just another day, following their system, bigger stuff first and one room at a time, marching in and out with a few grunts and words back and forth like I’m not even there, and Sheriff’s drifted back to his car to sit down and jaw on his gum.
I watch the big stuff come out, but then things start happening. They’re tossing clothes onto the sidewalk by the handful, faking jump shots and baseball pitches, mostly I think because they seen how I stood down when the Sheriff came calling.
“Surf’s up!” some prick worker calls out, and one of Noa’s Quiksilver shirts comes out the door like a gut-shot bird, flapping into the muddy ground. I see that shirt and I’m seeing us and beaches and Kalihi, me and my brother, Noa. I’m listening to us on the phone when I still had a chance at the university.
I was saying to him, I’m about to quit this bullshit team.
No way, he said.
I was all, This is like it’s high school all over again. Coach talking about benching me like he’s got extra talent just lying around. Fuck those backups, they can’t ball like me.
Who ran things at the tournament? Who almost went all the way? I was First-Team All C—
I didn’t realize, Noa said, you turned into such a pussy.
I was all, What?
Basketball, he said. You’ve been hunting like a shark for this, your whole life.
I was all, Man, now you’re getting all up in my face like everyone else.
Then give up, he said. Do it. No one’s even going to remember a few years from now.
The hell, Noa, I said. I thought you was my brother.
You weren’t listening, he said.
What?
You ever think about the sharks? he said.
Of course, I said. Every time I see you.
Maybe when the sharks pulled me up, he said, it wasn’t just me they were saving, you understand? Maybe it’s about our whole family.
And I never felt the gods Mom was always talking about, but I did feel something right then when he said that, and for a while after. I got lifted. Stepped out the door after the call was over and everything was bright and mine. You can take the drugs and sex and basketball, just give me that feeling one more time. I had my last good game the next night, playing outside myself like my whole body was new.
That’s my brother, that could do a thing like that, and no one here’s got any idea.
So now. I start carrying his stuff back in from the lawn.
Khadeja comes back over and starts talking like she thinks she can make me stop. Even tells me to stop and think about what I’m doing.