“You’re not solving anything this way,” she says. “Let’s just take what we can.”
“Fuck that,” I say.
Workers don’t figure it out, what I’m doing. The first few rounds of stuff they toss out, I’m getting handfuls and putting ’um back inside, and when Khadeja sees I not even listening she sighs and pinches her nose and steps back down to the sidewalk. Pulls out her phone to make a call. I take a bunch of clothes and some chairs back inside, even while the repo guys is still bringing other stuff out, but then we start bumping into each other. Ends up I’m at the door with desk drawers that I’m bringing back in, one in each hand, and two guys is carrying a futon out, and we meet at the doorway. The one in front has his back to me, but looks over his shoulder to check the clearance and sees me. We both stop.
“Move,” he says, his face red from holding up his side of the load.
“Nah,” I say.
The worker nods past me and tries for smile even while he’s straining. “Looks like someone else has a better idea.”
I turn and Sheriff is coming up the sidewalk, saying, “Now, son, you think about what you’re doing here for a minute.”
That’s when I see something past him, out in the street, that makes me smile. Sheriff thinks I’m smiling at him and he says, “There’s nothing funny about this. I’m not joking.”
But I’m not smiling at him, I’m smiling at what’s behind him—past Sheriff, past Khadeja, out by the street, no joke, it’s Kaui standing on the sidewalk, backpack slouching off her Notorious Ready to Die hoodie.
One of the movers passes by her on his way back from the truck and she says something to him. The mover talks back at Kaui over his shoulder. Khadeja moves toward them, saying, “Everyone needs to calm down before this gets ugly,” but Kaui already dropped her backpack and now she runs past Khadeja and the repo guy, up the sidewalk to the stairs where I am, but she goes past me and right into the one guy in the doorway holding his side of the futon. I see her hands before she uses them on him and the futon falls and booms and so does the guy. I’m still holding the drawers and I don’t remember how I put ’um down to make fists and I’m still trying for remember five minutes later, now, with my wrists pinched in handcuffs in the back of Sheriff’s car.
Kaui’s in here, too. The Sheriff’s car smells like too much Armor All and gun oil. Got some crackled voices going on the radio. Kaui’s to my right and handcuffed just like me, her breaths raging out so hard they snap into fog against the window. The car’s heater is off and the damp-ass winter is leaking in through the doors.
Just now I’m starting for remember what happened, how when the futon fell it was like the bell at a boxing match and everyone was happy for finally do something violent. We just started pounding on each other until the Sheriff waded in and broke it up, hog-chained me and Kaui, and heaved us into the back of the car one at a time. Now he got Khadeja talking to him on the lawn. She’s doing that thing where she’s extra polite and upright and all that, holding her hands together down low like it’s church and the Sheriff’s the preacher.
The movers went back to carrying Noa’s life out the apartment: the milk crates of books they chuck out so that the books flap and scatter on the wet grass, shrink-wrapped bricks of good saimin and bottles of shoyu, picture frames with the pictures still in them, tumbling and rolling and cracked all up on the grass and sidewalk. One of the movers got toilet paper jammed into his nose to stop the bleeding from my punch and another one with his lip getting fat from where Kaui put him down, but they keep working. Soon all the movers is coming out the house empty-handed, and they push and kick all the heaps of Noa’s stuff off the grass and onto the sidewalk. The last guy for leave the apartment stops at the edge of the lawn and looks down. I see him pinch up a sock from the grass like it’s something dead and filthy and drop it on the sidewalk in one of the heaps. There’s a clipboard with a clean bright clip that one of the repo guys talks over for a minute with the Sheriff, then they get back in their moving trucks and drive off.
When the repo guys is gone Sheriff strolls over to us. Pops the driver door in the squad car and talks to us through the wire mesh between the front and back seats. “I could make this very ugly for you,” he says.
Kaui snorts.
“I could get the paperwork started, get statements from the movers, set a court date,” he goes on. “I’d make it so you couldn’t even get back all this”—he points to everything the movers threw out—“no matter how much of it you wanted.”
“Officer,” Khadeja says.
He looks back at her. Some sort of understanding, but like he still going warn her about who’s wearing the gun. “I know,” he says. He turns back to us and gestures at Khadeja. “She told me who he was.”
“Who?” I ask.
“Your brother,” the Sheriff says. “That doesn’t justify any of what just happened,” he says, “but.” He unlocks our doors. “Get out,” he says. We do and he pops off the handcuffs. There’s a rush of happiness in my wrists, just before the ache. He’s all something something something don’t make me regret this. His car door whacks closed, then the chatter and rev of his Challenger engine, and then he’s gone down the street and there’s no more noise. We see what’s in front of us.
“So I forgot to say hello,” Kaui says to me. “How’s Spokane?”
“Total shit,” I say. “How’s San Diego?”
“Warm shit,” she says. “Khadeja, right?” she says to Khadeja.
“Yes,” Khadeja says.
But after the joke we’re still standing there with Noa’s things all over the sidewalk, the rice cooker and the boxes, the Quiksilver shirt and the rainbow of dead books.
“The hell happens now,” I say, “with all this stuff.”
Rain comes as the answer. It’s like a breath letting out, so soft and quiet might as well we never knew a breath was being held in the first place, and the water fizzes down. It cobwebs on Kaui’s and Khadeja’s hair, barely taps my skin. We can’t even hear the sound of it hitting.
Kaui looks up at the sky. Then it just pisses down on us: the rain gets fat and hard and roars on the roofs. Me and Kaui and Khadeja run through the yard, swearing and saying no and clutching at everything we can hold and trying for get ’um all back under the eaves of the apartment and I check the front door but of course it’s locked tight. Kaui’s got a cardboard box she’s trying for drag back to the front steps, the brown lawyer boxes with one handhole on each side. The lid’s come off. I can see the photos and albums getting soaked dark by the rain. Kaui’s all tugging at the lid to get it back on and trying for drag the whole box with one hand, and now one of the bottom corners is running deep into the dirty grass and zippering apart the mud. Khadeja drops some clothes she picked up and starts on the other side of the box. I run into the yard and we get the lid on and haul it back together. I feel the prickle of chicken skin under my jacket, under my shirt, under my bones.
In the yard all Noa’s stuff is just getting destroyed. The gray cushions of the futon, the wrinkled lumps of clothes going shiny wet, a floor-length mirror catching mud splashes from the dirt. We’re done, this is all done.