Mallory just stares at him. She’s simultaneously pale and glowing.
“Promise me,” Arik whines. “Let me download you some new shit.”
“I like her voice,” Mallory says, and kisses the head of one of her dogs. “I’ll turn it down.”
“Google it,” Nick says. “Manson girls.”
“I’ll do that.”
Arik’s close-cropped blond hair almost makes him look like a skinhead, though he wears a black Bloc Party T-shirt and long green board shorts and leather bracelets and necklaces.
“God, I’m old,” Nick says.
According to Arik, they all have to move out, and Mallory wants a place with two of her girlfriends. Nick knows this: An unfurnished four-bedroom lies vacant half a mile from campus, a mile from where they are now. It was abandoned weeks ago and, according to Boss, belongs to Bank of America and is a low-priority property. They trashed it out last week. It could sit idle for months. Mallory could be in there as soon as Nick changes the locks. Glancing at her flawless skin and the navel ring, he thinks he wouldn’t mind helping her out.
• •
Arik follows Nick outside and into hot, gusting winds. A woman shrieks. A man chases his trucker cap across the parking lot. Arik curses. Nick looks back and shields his eyes as he tries for one last glimpse of Mallory, but she’s gone. Arik is texting someone as he gets in the car and says, “Take the 10,” even though Nick knows this; he put the address in Google Maps before he left the house.
Arik laughs at something he’s reading, sends another text. “ ’Shrooms from Eureka. Down with that?” he asks.
Nick waves him off, distracted by the prospect of houses, renters, changing locks, painting and cleaning, listing. And collecting: deposits, first/last, monthly or bimonthly rent. Keys and addresses. And a time line: How long has a house been empty, and how long will it stay that way? How much risk is there, and is it worth it?
“Check it.” Arik is shoving his handheld in Nick’s face: a predictable image of Mallory making out with their other roommate, another long-haired girl, both in body paint. “Mardi Gras, dude.”
Inhaling the scent of Arik’s body spray and the winds rocking the car and the Chromatics track drifting from the speakers, Nick sees Mallory again, in his mind, bending over. Nick is seeing the girl’s pale breasts and wondering what she smells like in the morning under the sheets.
“Tomorrow’s Tarzana, right? Or Friday?” Arik looks up from his iPhone.
“Friday.”
“Nice properties in Tarzana. Unlike tonight. Rialto’s so ghetto.”
But the houses aren’t a concern to Nick. He accelerates, changes lanes. Images of Mallory flash across his mind. The surge of adrenaline he feels is from details that converge: three or four vacant houses, collecting first and last from renters, expanding from there. Arik is turning up “Miss Murder” by AFI and Nick returns to Mallory: Maybe he’ll put her in that house.
The thriving business of trashing out foreclosed homes sends Nick and the crew through dry canyons and out along barren freeways past endless brown walls and wilted palms and bright yellow Union Pacific cars and weed-choked rail yards until they’re in the middle of another neighborhood. AFI is pounding and the windows are down and he changes lanes without signaling and tall shadowy palms bend. The hillside recedes into the blackness of another night, and in his mind an overhead camera tracks them, zooms out, and it’s just this dirty white Subaru moving no faster than the rest of the traffic. But he knows better.
Arik mentions yet again an idea he and Sean, an older member of the EMGo! crew, have been discussing for weeks. Arik wants Nick because they need a third and the deal is lucrative enough to split three ways. But Sean is a madman, forty and brooding with five kids, restraining orders still active.
“Sean wants to move on it next week,” Arik says.
Nick laughs. “Good luck with that.”
“I’m not going without you.”
“You’re better off.”
“This house is loaded.”
“I’m being recruited to stage a home invasion by a twenty-two-year-old I didn’t know a month ago. And Phoebe worries about my trajectory,” Nick says, addressing no one.
Arik looks at him blankly for a beat, continues tapping out a message on his handheld. “Have you been to Desert Blaze?”
Nick shakes his head.
“Like Coachella but hotter. Want to go? Mallory’s asking.”
Nick’s counting houses and doing sloppy math. Shadowy palms and softly glowing hillsides loom over them.
“And it’s not a home invasion, dude,” Arik says. “More like a collection.”
“Tell Mallory to text me,” Nick says.
“Next right,” Arik says.
Nick knows where to go. And he knows Boss respects and trusts him. He knows that’s a way forward for now.
• •
“You’re out of uniform, soldier,” Nick says to Greg, and leans over the driver’s-side door of the black Maxima.
“Boo!” Arik slams the hood of the car.
Greg is from Baldwin Hills, grew up in Long Beach. He doesn’t scare easily. In the glow from his iPhone, Greg’s white tank top shows off his brown skin and tats and the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity brand on his right shoulder.
“Give me a brand, bro,” Arik calls out, pounds his chest. “We should all go in on it. EMGo! across the chest.”
“You first, bro.” Greg glares at Arik, who grins.
“Fire it up, bitch.”
Greg’s the only one here not wearing his EMGo! long-sleeve T-shirt or polo. He’s smoking a cigarette and texting his wife. He and Nick exchange a fist bump. Nick hands him a Red Bull. They’re the same age. Greg works at Enterprise, played some football in college. His wife’s a model, bartender, and caterer and wants to do interior design or fashion, but that’s not working out, so now she wants to move back to Chicago to be closer to family, and Greg’s running out of reasons for saying no. This job, he says, is not helping his case.
“How big?” Nick looks at the house.
“At least forty,” Greg answers.
“So all night, then,” Nick says mostly to himself. Any house with a volume of abandoned items that’s more than thirty cubic yards takes at least five or six hours with a crew of four. They’ll have five tonight but more volume, so this won’t be quick.
Greg has his engine running and headlights on. “Lights just went out,” he says. “Whole street’s out.”
“Good times.”
It was Nick who jumped in the pool last month, freed Greg’s foot from the drain when everyone else just kind of stood there, dumbstruck. The water was neck-high, green and thick, and maybe that was what kept the others from helping. Either way, now Nick’s got this reputation among the crew and the Boss as someone to be counted on, someone who mans up. So now he manages three crews. He likes the way it feels and tries to focus on that image of himself and not the one in which he’s a married father standing on some strip of asphalt in Rialto waiting to haul trash left behind by strangers out of a house they couldn’t afford.
A huge gust sends a garbage can lid sliding across the asphalt, sets off a car alarm, and agitates dogs. A loud cracking sound makes them all flinch.
“Good Lord,” Greg says. “They do not pay us enough.” But he’s laughing and shaking his head and sipping his Red Bull, still texting. Orange sparks crackle in the distance. A transformer.
“Fires,” Nick says, a half-thought about wildfires and this wind.
“Should burn this place down,” Greg says.
“Whole block.”
“Don’t stop there,” Arik says, looking up from his iPhone.
Nick approaches the house. A police helicopter thunders past, too low. The wind gusts. Why is the garage door open? He looks back at Greg. “Did you open that?” Greg s
hakes his head, his cell at his ear, watching. Nick takes a few cautious steps. That’s when it hits him: the stench from inside.
Most jobs they move right in. Boss will be there with the keys, get them inside, set the Dumpster in the middle of the driveway. Music will be on in the house. Someone always brings music. Lately it’s been Jay Z, White Stripes, the Offspring. Anything loud, fast, hard. Boss doesn’t care. Whatever moves the houses. Boss stumbled into it when a friend needed his help in a pinch. He got his contracting crew together, hauled out everything in under three hours. Now he’s got major clients: Banks need their houses back from those who came up short. Clean ’em and green ’em, Boss says. Boss recently bought a new boat so he and his wife can take their kids fishing up at Lake Arrowhead. He drives a new Lexus and a fully restored metallic-blue Firebird convertible. He’s got laminated maps, red and green circles marking new targets. He’s on to something. He’s just getting started. That much, he and Nick have in common.
Boss needs and trusts Nick because, unlike the Hondurans, he’s college-educated and can speak fluent English, and unlike Arik and Sean, he’s mature. Greg has Boss’s trust, but Greg is leaving because Greg has somewhere to go. That’s why Nick has the keys to the Rialto house tonight. EverythingMustGo! needed more sane white guys, Boss said. Nick didn’t ask for clarification. There was an advantage to play, so he played it. Trashing out foreclosed houses gets him twenty-two dollars an hour plus anything of value they claim.
Nick and Arik set up the generator in the garage for the spotlights that will be trained on the exterior of the house. The more light, the less likely it is that anyone will bother to call the police, which slows them down. They set up two spotlights inside the house as well, making the house glow. A green Honda slows to a stop with the windows down. Jorge and Jaime are brothers from Honduras, work jobs like this, landscaping, painting, mostly in silence. They speak to each other in Spanish or respond to Boss when he addresses them in his broken Spanish. The brothers stay in their Honda, like they always do until Boss shows up or comes out of the house.
A red Kawasaki Ninja explodes onto the hushed street. It’s Sean. He rides without a helmet, stops abruptly next to the Hondurans. Sean’s always late because he says he’s “putting some fear into my boy.” (His fifteen-year-old son beat an Iranian kid unconscious at school and now has court dates and legal fees.) Aside from the trash-outs, Sean sells and rents Jet Skis at a surf shop in Huntington Beach, but with his son’s issues and the attorney’s fees and business down, he made a call and joined their crew. He has narrow bloodshot eyes and long brown hair; he squints and likes to deliver quick, hard jabs to Arik’s chest or shoulders when they’re on the job. He punches Arik as though they’re brothers or cousins, but Arik isn’t in on the joke, is not all that comfortable with the punches. Yet Arik tolerates it because, he tells Nick, the guy’s a lunatic.
Everyone except the Hondurans is passing around the joint Arik rolled. They’re all gathered around Nick’s Subaru. The only time Sean isn’t punching or manhandling Arik is when he’s sharing his weed. There’s an expression on Sean’s face that registers with Nick. After Nick takes a hit from the joint, he sends a text to Arik: I think he likes you ;)
“Walk up the driveway and breathe in,” Nick tells the group, exhaling.
Sean goes first.
Arik’s response to Nick’s message is immediate: No shit. He keeps asking me to go camping.
Nick doesn’t respond.
Arik tries again: So are you in? It’s a sweet gig. I need you on this bro!
I’m sure
Some dude owes Boss. So we’re going to go pick it up.
Good luck with that.
All you do is drive and help us over the wall.
Have fun camping ;) Keep your tent zipped.
• •
Nick sends a message to Phoebe:
I’m being recruited.
For what?
A job.
And? Tell me.
Couple guys need me to help collect some debt. Good times.
There’s a long pause. Phoebe finally responds: When is the last time you even bothered to check Monster.com?
Sweet dreams
• •
Boss approaches, his pink polo shirt pulled up over his nose. He’s heavy, sunburned, and bald. Now he looks pale, hacks up something, and spits. No one asks. They just wait. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He’s wiping spit from his nose and chin. “Something’s dead in there,” he says. “Find it.” Another helicopter passes, and the eucalyptus and wilting palms are shaking from the wind drowning out the steady hum from the generator. In the darkness, no one moves. Sean eyes Nick and then Arik and then Nick again.
“Fifty to whoever finds it. Cincuenta dólares.”
Inside, Nick kicks a couple of dead rats, avoids what seems to be human feces in the same room, with white walls covered in graffiti tags. He could direct guys like Boss does, dividing up the labor, sending pairs of men to certain parts of the house. But they don’t need to be told. So Nick just starts working. He drags three mattresses to the driveway, scoops up children’s underwear and stuffed animals and mayonnaise jars and vacuum cleaners, two hard drives and three cardboard boxes filled with old cell phones. In a bedroom he finds soccer and T-ball trophies. A child’s journal filled with stick-figure drawings and shaky writing lies on the floor. Inside an open closet, wrapped in a soiled sheet, Nick finds the source of the stench. Holding his breath, he picks it up, unravels it, and what tumbles out lands hard on the floor. It’s a dog. The carcass has no eyes and very little fur, and the bones are visible or push through the skin. No collar or tags. Nick’s face crumples from the stench. He texts Arik, eyes watery, squinting: Guess I get the 50
The men, filthy and sweating, gather in the bedroom around the dog. Sean pokes at it with the end of a pool cue. Some little girl’s pet. The same little girl whose Dora the Explorer diary Nick found in the lavender bedroom with lavender curtains. No one moves. Arik stuffs money in Nick’s back pocket. Sean sees this and punches Arik in the ass and calls him a twink. There’s some laughter and the room clears. It’s Nick and the rotting dog. He’s talking to himself. “How many Emerson College media production majors does it take to remove a rotting dog from a bedroom closet?” He squats and reaches for a corner of the stained sheet and drapes it across the carcass. He does this with each corner until he’s got the animal completely wrapped. When he drives his hands under the body, he does so with too much force, wanting to get it over with, and his fingers slip through a seam or tear in the fabric and the matted fur gives way, probably because the maggots and blow flies have worked through the flesh, and Nick recoils and wipes his hands spastically along the hard carpet.
The animal’s front leg has slipped loose. And Nick is holding it.
• •
Another transformer pops. Orange sparks shower the street. The wind carries a hint of smoke. Nick leans against his Forester, queasy. The Dumpster is half-full; the dog’s remains lie wrapped in the sheet next to it. Another police helicopter passes overhead, another spotlight, another criminal on the run. It’s the end of the world. But Nick stares at the uninspiring ranch house they just gutted. In a week or less, the house will shine; the bank will hire contractors (work Boss is bidding for), drain the West Nile water from the pool, paint the lawn green, hang new light fixtures, fill the holes kicked through in the bedroom and living room walls, two coats of white matte semigloss on the crown molding. Nick opens a new memo, calls it Rentals:
1.Initial assessment, get info on property
2.Monitor until they’re renovated (Boss can do it??)
3.Week or 10 days, change locks, post on CL, put up signs with disposable cell #
Nick as landlord. He hasn’t slept, and the headache he thought would fade with caffeine hasn’t, and is, if anything, worse. Through the haze in his mind, a n
otion burns through: Maybe there is something approaching salvation to be found in all these dead houses.
11
The hose outside still works and Nick rinses himself off in the front yard. They all take turns. It’s almost six. They’ve been here for eight hours. A silver lowrider filled with young men approaches, slows as it passes the house. Arik and Nick are shirtless, dripping, staring it down. Sean walks into the street like he’s ready to start something. The car keeps moving. Nick feels a surge of adrenaline. The car is gone. Sean returns to the group, and whatever danger they may have been in seems to have passed, and despite Sean taking a piss on the lawn Nick realizes that he loves these guys, wants to hang out. He’ll get Greg’s cell. They can go out, watch the Pacquiao fight. Arik can bring Mallory and some of her friends.
Everyone wants to get home. Boss has cold Coronas for them. The stench from inside is stuck to the lining of Nick’s nostrils, reaching down the back of his throat. It’s six A.M. and the men are drinking beer on an ugly street in Rialto.
The Hondurans make off with a leaf blower and an armful of clothes. Boss is standing in the middle of the lawn, making notes on his handheld. He’s got a couple of properties farther inland for Nick to assess. Boss needs a minute of his time.
“I need you on Angel Duty.” He keeps making notes on his handheld and, without looking up, continues, “Have a couple of nights coming up. I’ll shoot you the addresses, get you the keys.”
What this means is Nick will spend a night or two alone in a refurbished house to discourage anyone from trying to break in. The Guardian Angel keeps the lights on and the house secure so the bank can hand it off to the new owner without squatters pissing on freshly painted walls or cooking meth in the kitchen. Nick will do it because the pay is double. Though Angel Duty means he’ll spend the night alone in an empty property, there’s not much Nick will say no to these days.
Arik’s watching Nick and Boss and inching closer. Sean sits on the porch, wearing a floppy safari hat he found inside and finishing his beer; he chucks the bottle toward the Dumpster and it shatters and Nick turns to him and he’s leering at Nick. Arik moves closer to Nick and Boss, stands inches behind them. Sean walks past and says something to Arik that Nick can’t make out, then mounts his motorcycle and revs the engine. They all watch as Sean glances over his shoulder, spits, then peels out, pulling the front wheel up off the street as he goes.
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