by Ron Suskind
“Let’s get it out,” the coffee woman yells as two grimy men hoist the white couch with the stitched irises. Barbara sits in a dinette chair and tries to get her bearings. She knows too well how the clock, which has been running for three months since the eviction order was first issued, continues to tick until all of the tenants’ worldly goods are moved from the landlord’s property to the closest public area, generally the nearest open spot of sidewalk. Once the removal is complete, the apartment door is locked, sealed—usually with heavy tape and various official, adhesive-backed notices—and the tenant, at that instant, no longer has a lease or any rights to live there. That’s when the ticking stops.
But until that instant, the tenant can avert legal closure by coming up with whatever is owed. No guarantees, of course, that the stuff will be moved back in, but the lease remains in force.
Fifteen minutes pass. Barbara watches as one item after another is carried out the door. Finally, she looks over at Turner, just finishing a conversation with the work crew leader, and approaches him. “Excuse me, sir,” she says meekly. “A minister from my church might be by with enough money to pay everything off.”
He listens, asks her a few questions about who and what, then looks at his watch. “Okay guys, slow it down a little,” he tells the crew as he turns his back on her and explains the scenario to a few guys just coming up the stairs. One of them rolls his eyes.
“It needs to be a cashier’s check or cash, and be all there,” says the coffee woman sharply. The movers slow, but not much. They want the dinette chair, so Barbara rises and begins to pace. A mover snatches the “Nothing Me and My God Can’t Handle” sign as he passes out the door with a coffee table under his arm.
She feels hysteria rising and edges toward the large TV and stereo console cabinet near the hallway, leaning against it for balance.
“They say some minister may be coming with some money,” one workman says skeptically to another as he passes her and enters the short hallway toward Cedric’s room. “Heard that one, plenty.”
“There’s no MAAAAYBE about it. He’s coming!” Barbara turns. It’s Cedric, emerging from his room and blocking the doorway. A wide-bodied workman in a torn black T-shirt steps up close to him. They’re nose to nose.
“Reeeeeally now?”
“All I know is you’re not coming in here,” Cedric says, managing to keep his voice low and steady, his bony, wrecking-ball fist clenched. Cedric’s frame, now six-foot-one and 190 pounds, proves to be a sufficient deterrent. “We’ll be in there eventually,” the mover sneers, turning away to roll up a carpet.
Barbara wanders out onto the patio. If Minister Borden comes, or if someone got Neddy’s message at church, at least then she’ll see him pull up. She holds the railing and looks down. On the sidewalk, the apartment’s contents are piling like hourglass sand. A crowd is gathering. Everyone, soon, will feast on the misfortune. The Jennings family valuables will be carried off, nourishing other houses on the block with end tables and folding chairs, a VCR, a breakfront, her dishes. Turner’s junior partner, a hulking redhead in a white marshall’s uniform, stands by impassively. The grim protocol demands he guard the pile as it grows, so items aren’t simply picked off as they hit the pavement, since Barbara and Cedric are still officially tenants. Once it’s all outside, he and Turner will leave and the plundering will commence.
It’s not that far to the pavement, and she can hear two dozen neighbors on V Street salivate over the inventory. A woman nudges close, looking at the throat of a shadeless lamp. “Hmmmmm,” she says thoughtfully. “Is there a match to this?”
Turner comes out to check on matters. “No one touch or take anything, until the eviction is complete,” he says, holding up his palms in a calming gesture. He looks hard at a cluster of hard-muscled young men assessing the weight of the white couch, and then he turns to his uniformed redhead. “They can run fast, but they can’t outrun this,” he quips, lovingly patting the 9-millimeter pistol on his hip.
Barbara looks away from the sickening scene, lifting her gaze to the lush maple that rises past her balcony. She thinks of the porch on 15th Street, where she stood so many days, hoping for more in this life, and she feels oddly still, past yearning, past giving and sacrifice and worry, like her life is passing through her.
She hears the door slam as Turner returns from the street. She wanders back inside to assure him, again, that the money’s coming, but her heart’s not really in it.
“All right, but even moving forward slowly, this is going to be over pretty soon,” he says before borrowing her wall phone to call the U.S. Marshall’s office and get his next address.
Three workmen are leaning their shoulders against the faux mahogany wall unit, slipping fingers underneath to lift, but someone is pushing through the apartment door.
“Am I in time?” blurts out a breathless man.
It’s Minister Borden, panting, in a gray plaid suit, with a thumbnail-sized “I am a Positive Thinker” pin on his right lapel. “I got it right here.” He thrusts forward a cashier’s check for $2,750, and everyone instantly gathers in close, like they’re huddling around a fire. It’s made out to the U.S. Marshall’s Service. No good, needs to be to Barac Realty, the coffee woman scolds. Borden says there’s a bank around the corner, that he’ll be right back, and he rushes for the door.
Barbara slumps against the wall, lets her head bang back against the painted plaster, and exhales through her closed eyes. Everything slips into reverse. Before racing off to redo the check, Borden talks to the coffee woman, saying he’ll pay the work crew $80 if they move the stuff back in. Several movers snap out of their grim, steady movements and run downstairs to reclaim the furnishings.
Barbara hears shouting from outside and runs to the balcony. Down low, the crowd is crowing, seeing that today they’ll be denied. “Hey, leave that shit,” one man yells at two workmen lifting some chairs. “That ours.”
Turner walks briskly to Cedric’s room, Barbara close behind, asking him to go out and stand with the stuff. Barbara hears him say, “No, I’m not going out there …. I just can’t.” She’s not about to force him, and she runs for the stairs, with Turner following her. Ascending rugs and strewn cushions pass by on her way down. Outside, Neddy arrives and hugs her mother. Barbara, having regained energy, grabs a chair to carry.
Minister Borden’s gold Lincoln Town Car slaloms past two junked tow trucks and some strewn garbage to an open spot in front of the apartment’s sloping front lawn. He has the reconfigured check. Turner looks at it, says, “Forty dollars short,” and the minister ponies up a couple of twenties, sending the marshalls on their way.
But fifteen minutes later, as the last of the possessions are migrating upstairs, it becomes clear that those two twenties were intended for the workmen. Borden sheepishly offers $40—“I’m all tapped out”—and the head workman starts to yell.
“You motherfucker, I’ll fuck you up,” he says, grabbing a ballpeen hammer from the back of the work crew’s Vista Cruiser and whacks a telephone pole near Borden’s head. Neddy quickly offers up the $40, and, after more cursing, the work crew is gone.
The crowd has mostly dispersed. A lady asks Barbara for the cracked twenty-gallon fish tank. “Sure, whatever,” she says. She picks up a pile of fashion magazines and a lone lamp and makes her way back up the crumbly concrete steps. Her apartment is in ruins, but it’s still hers. Debts as big as ever, just that now she owes Minister Borden. Back inside, Neddy says she’ll borrow $2,800 from her federal credit union to pay off the minister. “Together, Ma, you and I can pay off my loan a little at a time,” Neddy says before she goes to talk to Cedric. He won’t leave his room, and he won’t talk to Barbara. He’s frozen, mortified.
Barbara, standing in the hallway, not daring to follow Neddy into the bedroom, hears him say, “I don’t belong here anymore, Neddy.”
Barbara turns and walks out onto the balcony. Three floors below, the baking street looks wavy with heat. She remembe
rs that some man in the mob of furniture rodents said it was the hottest May 20 in eighty-five years. Must be nearing 100, Barbara figures, feeling sweat run down her back. She thinks of the blistering words Cedric just spoke. Boy’s right, of course. Then again, she doesn’t belong here, either. Not that there’s much chance of her ending up anywhere better. No, this is her spot, her street, and her role is to watch Lavar leave this place forever. It’s what she worked so hard for, after all.
Down across the street, a burly fortyish man in an old-fashioned ribbed tank T-shirt emerges from a flat-faced brick apartment with a socket wrench and muscles open the hydrant. Two young boys, barely elementary schoolers, begin dancing in the knee-high cascade, one using his small Nike Air as a bucket, the other a Popeye’s Fried Chicken cup from the gutter. She watches them playing for a moment. Over time, she thinks, they will be bruised, too, for having to pass their life here, seeing things, feeling things, worrying about things, that shouldn’t be part of any kid’s life. And Barbara watches the fresh water flow along V Street, cutting right at the corner toward Good Hope Road, getting hot and dirty.
Cedric stands in the entrance lobby of Lorton Correctional Institution, shoulders back, stretching the block letters of his Brown University T-shirt tight across his chest, and waits to be noticed.
The guard, a bull-necked Latino crew cut reading the Washington Post sports section in his lobby booth, spins the sign-in book on the Formica counter. “Sign,” he says without looking up.
Five minutes later, after a pat-down frisk and four buzzing steel doors, Cedric lands on a green metal folding chair in a hallway. At Lorton, this is called a “special circumstance” visit, meaning a visit that’s not during regular visiting hours. It’s for lawyers mostly, who always book “specials,” and family members of inmates who can manage to get someone in the warden’s office on the phone and talk a good game, which is what Cedric did.
He looks around, pivoting this way and that. He seems to be in a honeycomb of offices and small visitation rooms. A woman appears in the hallway, murmurs something about the rooms being full, and directs Cedric to a folding chair in an empty office marked “Douglas Stimson, Warden.”
“Where is he, the warden?” Cedric asks as she turns to leave. “Retired two weeks ago,” she says from the side of her mouth, not turning. So, Cedric waits and tries to prepare himself. It’s been three days since the near eviction, three days of jumbled emotions in which he hasn’t spoken to his mother. Not a word. “We beefin’,” he told Neddy yesterday on the phone. “‘Cause we ought to be beefin’.”
He’s not sure exactly why he’s so angry at her, and he’d rather not think about it. All he knows is that Monday’s trauma has left him feeling raw but cleansed, like he’s shed a layer of skin. He’s decided that, deep down, he had been feeling guilty for months now about not belonging in Southeast anymore, about leaving everyone behind. But watching through the venetian blinds as the mob picked over the couch he sat on and the table he ate on cured him of that. Burned that guilt right off. It made him angry, sure, but also clear that he needs to find his own way from here on.
The first big thing he decided was to come out here. He and his father haven’t talked since last summer, and Cedric hasn’t seen the old man in more than two years. It’s something that has gnawed at him, that a whole side of his past is dark and indiscernible. Being nearly nineteen, maybe he ought to try to be more forgiving of the man’s flaws, try to develop some sort of relationship. For so long, his father intimidated him. He seemed to toy with Cedric’s exposed yearnings. A phone call or brief encounter would leave Cedric feeling wobbly and eruptive and kind of wild. But nothing seems to knock him reeling like that anymore. Now, it’s different. Now he can finally get a few things off his chest, ask a few questions that have been bugging him, in some cases for years.
He gets up from the chair and noses around the barren office. He sees his reflection in a locked glass case with dusty trophies and starts doing jumping jacks to loosen up. Like he’s preparing to engage an opponent.
When there’s a knock on the white iron door frame, he turns, already standing. A black guard, wide as a Buick, pokes his head in. “Listen, you have twenty minutes with him,” he says, and he steps back as Cedric Gilliam slips past him through the doorway.
Finally, it’s just the two of them. “Well, well, Lavar,” Cedric Sr. says with a head shuck and a “howdyado” wave. He angles across the room toward a smallish couch, avoiding a hug. “Damn, it’s a surprise, you coming,” he says, then sinks into a crease between brown vinyl cushions. “I didn’t expect it. But, you know, it’s real good to see you.” Cedric, smiling broadly at his father, nods and returns to his folding chair.
“So, any girls up there at Brown yet?”
“Couple, maybe,” Cedric says without skipping a beat. “Oh, I knew you’d ask that.”
They both shake their heads and smirk. Gilliam, after all, has long demanded that manhood be proven through sexual conquest, and his son has always resisted, but the exchange, Cedric notices, carries no charge. He’s starting to date now, he knows where he stands, and the challenge seems to bounce off him.
They chat amiably across a shin-high magazine table. His father’s questions and comments carry more insight than he expected, well beyond the must-be-cold-up-there comments he gets from most family members.
“So, you know your grades yet?”
“No. Not yet. A few weeks still.”
“How do you think you’ll do? Good, I bet.”
“Yeah, I think I might do all right this time.”
“They got much grade inflation? I read about that somewhere, being a problem at colleges.”
“Ummm, I guess. Haven’t really thought about it, but, for my sake, I certainly hope so.”
As they both laugh at this, Cedric studies his dad. He’s certainly aged in the past two years. He’s missing a few teeth, his hair is going a little gray. He seems shorter and heavier—got to be 220—and the blue two-piecer splits a little at his gut. He asks more about Cedric’s classes, and then they talk about English and the humanities versus science and math. “That English training, you see, you can use in anything,” Cedric Gilliam says, and goes on to explain how.
Cedric nods along to this, happy for a moment’s cover in the conversation to collect his thoughts. This congenial tone bespeaks a change, no doubt about it. They’re talking like peers, like man to man for the first time.
“Well then, there’s something that I was wondering,” Cedric proceeds, betraying a little hesitancy. “Something I been wanting to ask you.”
“Really? What.”
“Yeah, ummm. Did you love my mother, or was it just a sex thing?”
His father shifts on the split of couch cushions. “Huh? What kind of question’s that?”
“Something I figure I deserve to know. Well, did you? Did you love her?”
Cedric watches his father’s left eye twitch and feels an unexpected surge—power or control, something—that he realizes he can sustain by not dropping his gaze, not looking away from hard things he must know.
“Ummm. Well, Lavar, you see I’m not much for talking about … for saying that sort of thing, using that word and all.”
Cedric leans forward on his chair. “You mean love. The word love.” With that, he pins the man to the couch.
There’s silence. “That’s right,” Gilliam says, trying to muster some balance. “I’m just not the kind of man who can say those things.”
“I suppose the key to being able to say it,” Cedric presses, “is being able to feel it.” He pauses and nods solemnly. “Just a sex thing, then. I guess I got my answer.” Gilliam seems unable to find a place for his eyes and eventually gazes up at the white-cork drop ceiling.
Cedric, feeling smart and a little sad, mops up the mess. “Trouble saying it to me, too.”
All Gilliam can muster is a shrug, still looking up at the white cork like someone underwater, searching for the surface. T
hey sit for a while, not saying anything, while Cedric tries to decide where he’ll fit pity into his mix of feelings about this aging, shrunken man.
After a bit, Gilliam perks up, like something’s just come to him, like he’s forgotten what they were just talking about. “I can’t believe I didn’t say nothing. I’m getting out tomorrow! I just got word last night.”
Cedric smiles, happy for the silence to pass. “That’s great,” he says, and really means it. “Seems like about time you got out of here.”
“I tell you Lavar, it’s been a bad year—the worst. But they found me a spot in a real good drug treatment program.” He talks on eagerly, reviewing how he was switched here to minimum security a few months ago from the miserable, dangerous Occoquan facility and how he’s scheduled to live at least six months at the program’s halfway house near Union Station.
The guard pokes his head back in. They both rise. He leads them through the labyrinth of buzzing doors toward the complex’s entrance foyer and gives them some space for a last moment.
“Hey Lavar, thanks a lot for coming.” His voice is raspy and grasping. Now, standing close, Gilliam looks Cedric up and down. “You got big, happened fast,” his father mutters.
“Yeah, I guess,” Cedric says, a little uncertain. “It’s been good, I think, for us to talk, to, you know, really talk,” he says, and it’s unavoidably clear, there in the foyer’s harsh light, that Cedric is now leading.
Gilliam glances over his shoulder at the guard, then back. “You know, I’ll call you and all,” he says, backpedaling inward and raising a farewell palm. “When I’m out, I’ll call. If that’s okay. I mean, I’d like to. We can get together.”
Cedric, too, is treading backward, toward the exit. “That’d be fine,” he says, chuckling. “Yeah, whatever. See you whenever.”
And with that he backs through the double glass doors, catching a final glimpse of his father disappearing into the gray steel.
