A Hope in the Unseen (53 page)

Everything halts. After a few seconds, he steps from the kitchen area into the well of the living room and glares at her. Barbara cannot meet his eye. Her own son, and she can’t look at him. She looks down at her wrinkled hands.

“Put out?!” He seems disoriented, but a moment later he’s clearly not. “So, how much?” Cedric says icily, in what sounds like someone else’s voice. “How much is it … this time?”

“$2,790.”

“Good God,” he whispers. “How’s that possible?” Barbara watches, standing there stunned. She gets up and calls Neddy at work. Neddy says she’s calling the church, hangs up, and then calls back to tell Barbara that she’d just left a panicked message on the Scripture Cathedral answering machine.

“What happened, Ma?” Neddy starts in, and with each barbed question she unearths another corner of the debacle—the six months of back rent, the court hearing, the desperate attempts to cobble together a huge payment—as Cedric stomps in a circle nearby, picking up every syllable. Barbara finally tells Neddy about her conversation a few minutes ago with Minister Borden.

“He said he could do it all quietly. Thing is, I didn’t want to call Bishop Long, call the church and have it all over church I was being put out,” Barbara says, but now, with the hammer coming down in less than two hours, such concerns suddenly seem vain and foolish.

“Ma, me even calling the church now won’t do no good. In any event, there’s not enough time,” Neddy says. She says she’ll try to leave work. “I’ll be over as soon as I can.” Barbara hangs up, her hand shaking as she replaces the receiver.

“This is
really
the sin of pride,” Cedric says, measuring each word.
“Too proud to tell you got a problem. Why didn’t you tell anyone? I might have been able to help. Could have called Dr. Korb or something. Or taken from my $200 a month, or SOMETHIN’! Here I’m buying CDs and … oh my God, we are getting PUT OUT!”

“I didn’t want to burden you with this,” she says. “You had work to do.”

“You don’t tell me and Neddy nothing and then it blows up on ALL OF US!”

He sits on a dinette chair, head in his hands, and the yelling stops. As the minutes tick, both of them slip into hushed contemplation of their shared fate.

The silence is unbearable for Barbara, and she tries to reach out with something she wasn’t going to tell him. “This has been terrible for me, Lavar, the stress,” she says haltingly, and she describes how chest pains overcame her in the office last Thursday and half her body went numb. It’s better that he knows. They sent her to the Agriculture Department medical office, where a doctor suggested she see a cardiologist. Cedric listens to this and nods, almost sorrowfully, then rises and slowly walks to his room. Barbara hears the lopsided double bed wheeze under his weight. Then she hears sniffling and wonders if she ever felt so low.

At 12:40
P.M.
, there’s a knock on the door of Apartment 307. She answers it.

“Barbara Jennings?”

“Yes, that’s me.” A short, bald man with thick, freckled arms dangling from white cotton short sleeves is standing in the hallway. His tie knot is the size of a fist.

“Ma’am, my name is Steve Turner from the U.S. Marshall’s Service and I’m here to evict you from these premises. You understand how this works?” He holds out a gold badge in a leather case, chest high, so she can’t miss it.

Barbara swings herself back with the opening door as Turner leads in a procession of eight poorly dressed black men and a heavy woman about Barbara’s age in an “I Love Coffee” T-shirt—the landlord’s moving crew—all of whom pass inches from her without a glance. She
feels outside of her body, underwater and moving in slow motion, but noticing every detail—the gun on Turner’s hip, the cartoon of a steaming coffee cup on the woman’s shirt, the dirty hands of the workmen, hands that are already being laid on all she owns.

“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 remembers 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.

C
edric 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.”