Vultures from the City Hell
by W.H. Hackel
There’s four bottles scattered on the floor, but Christ it’d be better if there was four more. Because it’s never about the drinking, but the numbing. And the numbing lasts for nothing, because I haven’t yet drowned out the memories. On the first day of every month it rains. Even when it’s beautiful, it’ll rain. Rain so much you won’t see your shoes.
On the rainy days the other eviction men and I load into the back of a truck. Nobody says anything, there’s fuck all to say to other vultures. You don’t want to be friends with eviction men. You don’t want to be friends with yourself. There’s the ugliest bastard in the world looking at you in the mirror when you get out to work.
So we’re there silently moving through the city. Our driver’s right because he’s never been wrong. And sitting beside him is the landlord who hired us out. Finding us at the docks and just out of the fence. Easy work he promised us. Didn’t ask for papers. He’d just seen our broad shoulders. He knew our make and model.
He’s right though, evictions is easy work. Once the truck arrived we knocked on a door until it slammed down on a kitchen floor. There’s three of them, a man, woman, and child. The man yelled, and the landlord called for a cop. Every officer in the city is itching to kill. You don’t have to give a pig much of a reason to eat. The man didn’t try to fight. His hands were straight up. But the cop shoots, and now there’s one more thing we have to get out of the apartment as the man thuds on the ground.
The landlord shakes the officer’s hand and slides him a bill. The calendar on the wall says it’s the first because it always is. It’s our job to bring the rain. Woman and child stand in the
corner huddled together as we go for the furniture. Chairs soar out windows and rugs roll down stairs. But you might get a buck out of the wardrobes, take those down easy. I take the man over my shoulder and bury him in the pile of broken furniture outside.
Then it’s the small items. Plates shatter on the concrete and the gathering homeless fight for the clothes raining down. The woman tried to protest when one of the men gets to the jewelry box in the bedroom. The evictions man slaps her across the face and hands the box to the landlord. Every lord has friends in auctions and estates who know the melt value, the makes and marks, the conditions. Good thing they never met butchers, because then they might think of flaying a man for his meat.
We take everything that isn’t nailed or bolted into a wall. The picture frames shatter, and the curtain rods bend. The girl had a stuffed animal in her hands. A blue dog. By the time we got downstairs, the landlord’s looking over his pile. These men with sticky fingers sift through the mess with a meticulous eye. An eye that sees what you and I ignore and another man adored. He took bids from the gathering crowd for the TV and soundsystem. He sold the cat’s climbing toy. He didn’t recognize the names on the signed albums so they go for cheap. The landlord and his buyers weren’t bothered with the blood staining the concrete. Somebody else will be around to cart the dead man away.
And soon he sold the wood from furniture for dollars and cents. It’s never about making that rent up. It’s about moving a tenant out. A man’s in there locked in on the rent he’s got, but you can sell this room to some well-to-do kid from the middle of the country for two and three times the rent the current man has. The landlords are the sick fucks who’d mourn the loss of a penny before the loss of a life.
As the sales wind down I trudged back upstairs. The girl rubs the woman’s back, but neither look up at me. The girl kept holding that blue dog. The stuffed animal looks up at me with questions I can’t answer. There’s a six-pack in the fridge. The cleaners usually deal with food, but I beat them to the drinks every time.
I bring the beers down to the street and pass them around to the other eviction men. It took an hour for us to make it rain. The churchgoers aren’t even out of their sermons yet. We sip our beers as the ambulance takes the dead man away.
Landlords always pay in cash. Most of the time the same cash they made from short selling the items from the house. Two hundred dollars for your work and to help ease your mind. Nothing can, though. Nothing can make it right.
Then you load back into the truck and the landlord tells the driver a new address. We’ve got to make it rain on some other street.
It’ll be my turn one day.
When the evictions men come for me they’ll break their ankles slipping on the bottles. They’ll cut their hands on the broken glass. They’ll need to bring out the police to get me out of there. Four shots I reckon it’ll take to put me down. I’ll fall on the floor with a thud. The vultures will take me down and throw me on the curb for an ambulance to steal away. My landlord will look at my room and shake his head with how much work he has to do. But he’ll flip my apartment, and some other poor fuck will take my room. They won’t tell the newcomer that I died in there, but he’ll hear my ghost breaking into his fridge to steal his beer.
W.H. Hackel is a third-grade teacher in Brooklyn, NY. He has published short stories in Dark Recesses Press, The Roaring Economist, and Oh Reader. You can find more of his work at https://whhackel.squarespace.com/.
Picture Credit: Adelaide Steinfeld
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