Sharks in the Time of Saviours

by Kawai Strong Washburn

  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.

  “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.

  “I’m fucking freezing,” Kaui hollers over the rain, but she’s not saying it to me, she’s yelling it into the yard, into the sky.

  I know Noa’s got neighbors next door, I seen their faces peeking out behind the window curtains when the Sheriff and the repo team was here, but they’re all inside with their warm orange lights on, acting like they don’t know what’s happening out here. I start testing the front windows on Noa’s place with my palm, then reach down for one of the lamps to break the glass, but Kaui sees me and rolls her eyes.

  “What are you, a caveman?” she says. “We break out a front window and everyone will know what’s going on. Cops right away,” she says. “Wait here.” She disappears around the side of the duplex.

  “Don’t,” Khadeja says. Kaui keeps going.

  Few minutes and the front door rattles and clicks open.

  “Come on in,” Kaui says.

  Khadeja looks at each of us. “I just talked that officer out of arresting you and this is the first thing you do?”

  “We’ve got no other choice,” Kaui says.

  “Of course you do,” Khadeja says. “Don’t break in.”

  “And what?” Kaui says. “Let Noa’s things rot? Freeze our asses off in the yard?”

  “There’s a—”

  “We’ve got nothing,” Kaui says. “Nothing.” She shoulders the door open wider. It’s all she’s gotta say.

  “I can’t,” Khadeja says. The rain roars louder. “Even if I wanted to—and I don’t—I can’t be this kind of stupid.”

  “I can,” Kaui says. She looks at me.

  Khadeja doesn’t say nothing when I go.

  Inside’s all dark and empty. Nothing in the living room
but white walls and bare dark carpet. The air’s already gone flat and cottony like the apartment’s been empty for years.

  “Get in here,” Kaui says, and slams the door. She crouches down and peeks over the edge of the front window. “I think the neighbor saw. She definitely maybe saw us.”

  I go to close the curtains, but Kaui says no, that would make it obvious we were inside, since the curtains wasn’t closed when we came in. I see Khadeja running across the street, Afro full of rain. Bends down into her car and shuts the door.

  “Just stay away from the windows,” Kaui says. She ropes her hair tight in her fists and twists until water gushes onto the carpet. She shivers hard, like a horse coming out of a river.

  We open the front door one more time and haul in a few of the things we’d saved. When I look across the street, Khadeja’s gone. From the stuff we saved on the front steps there’s a gym duffel and garbage bag with some clothes I guess he was gonna donate and that box Kaui was dragging before, with photos and albums and like that.

  When we rip the garbage bag and check in the gym duffel there’s almost no chance anything is gonna fit on us but we try anyway. We each take two or three trips back and forth from a bedroom, taking clothes from the bag and duffel and trying ’um on. Kaui ends up with these black dress pants that she’s practically busting out of—they’re Khadeja’s, I guess—and she’s got one of Noa’s sweatshirts on, some no-brand red hoodie. I ask why she didn’t try on more of Khadeja’s clothes and she said nothing could really fit her on top, because of the, like, hooded climber-kind muscles she’s got all up her back. I got the same problem but way worse, there’s a pair of Noa’s sweatpants that’s baggy enough that they get around my waist, even though there’s tons of tearing and popping sounds when I do it. The cuffs hit somewhere on my calves. I get one of Noa’s rain jackets, the thing’s big enough that when I put it on it’s almost like a shirt.