front row and taken notes throughout the day.
“What is the answer?” Karen asked the room.
“Yes,” came the reply from several fellow landlords.
Karen nodded and looked back at the woman. “Okay, say this with me: This is my property.”
“This is my property,” the woman responded.
“This is my property.” Karen said it louder and raised her hands, inviting the room to echo.
“This is my property,” the landlords answered.
“This is myyy property!” Karen boomed, her finger pointing to the land below.
The voices in the room went up in unison, a proud and powerful chorus: “This is my property! Myyyyy property!”
—
After receiving the eviction notice, it took Teddy a couple days to decide it was time to go home to Tennessee. He called one of his sisters, who told him that she’d be sending her husband up with the van. Teddy sent her a $500 money order. “I don’t want to go to them broke,” he told Scott, which also told him his money was gone.
Scott saw that he needed a plan. So he rang up Pito, an old Narcotics Anonymous buddy, and asked if he had any work. Pito connected Scott with Mira, a take-no-shit lesbian from Puerto Rico, who offered him a job cleaning out foreclosed homes. Mira paid Scott and the other crewmen in cash. The amounts varied widely; Scott didn’t understand or ask why. They gave scrappers the metal and sold some valuables here and there, hauling the rest to the dump.
Scott was stunned by what people left behind. Sofas, computers, stainless-steel ranges. Children’s clothes with the tags on them, tricycles, holiday decorations in basement bins, frozen pork chops, cans of green beans. Sheeted mattresses, file cabinets, framed posters and prayers and inspirational verses, curtains, blouses on hangers, lawn mowers, pictures. Sometimes the houses were humble and squat with cracked windows and grease on the ceiling. Sometimes they were cavernous, with thick carpet, master bathrooms, and back decks. To Scott, it felt like the whole city was being tossed out.
“Sometimes you walk into a house, and it’s like, they just walk out with the clothes on their back,” Scott was saying over another breakfast beer with Teddy. It had been roughly a week since they had received their eviction notice. “There’s some profundity in it that I don’t understand yet.”
“I wish I could work,” Teddy answered. “I wish I could be outside and work. But the shape that I’m in.”
Scott wasn’t interested in the work but the wreckage. “I can’t figure out what happened to the people,” he continued. “It’s really—” He let the word float.
“Scott,” Teddy said, slowly turning toward him. “You’re just like my family. I hate to leave you, but I’m headed back home.”
“I don’t even like you,” Scott responded with a grin.
“I know that’s just a lie. I know you don’t want to see me go. But I know you know it’s got to be done.”
Around sunrise Saturday morning, a white van pulled up to the trailer. Scott placed a bag of Teddy’s clothes and his fishing gear in the back and helped his old friend into the passenger seat. Teddy’s bendless arm raised in a quiet goodbye, as if by string, as the van pulled away under a Harley-Davidson–orange sky.
The following evening around dusk, while Scott was out with Mira’s crew, people started raiding his trailer. Teddy was gone, and everyone in the trailer park knew that Scott would soon be too. They started small, taking shirts, movies, jackets, a backpack. Then they went for the larger items, carrying out the table, the couch, the crucifixion painting.
Larraine’s brother-in-law, Lane, a skinny man with dark hair and a gold necklace, watched from his daisy-yellow trailer. “Buzzards,” he said, shaking his head. “You’d better close your mouth when you sleep, or these people will steal the gold right out of your teeth.”
When Scott got home that night and realized what had happened, he rushed to check if the plastic container in his room—the one stuffed with photographs, diplomas, and memories, hard evidence that he had once been someone else—was still there. It was. They had taken the bed but left the box. It felt like a gift. Scott then walked slowly from room to room, noticing what had been snatched and what was unwanted even by the desperate. No one took the books or the Polaroid camera, but they had collected the empty beer cans to recycle. Scott fingered the remainders like he sometimes did in the foreclosed homes, studying them as if they were dug-up artifacts