Last night, after dark but not terribly late, someone knocked on the front door. Loudly. Repeatedly. Not crazily — not like pounding on the door, or anything — but definitely very decisively. Like maybe six or seven hard knocks, not a gentle two or three taps. I was sitting on my bed, already in my pajamas, but Jamie answered the door and began interacting with the person who had knocked. I mildly eavesdropped, and then began more seriously eavesdropping, because Jamie was being… well, overly helpful.

The person at the door was looking for the guy who lived in my room before me, who, therefore, moved out well over a year ago. It seemed to me that the right answer to that was a simple, “Oh, he’s been gone for a long time, and no, I don’t know how to get in touch with him,” and then you close the door, right? (The guy did not leave a forwarding address of any sort, so I spent a solid few months writing, “Moved, no forwarding address” on his mail. Dude is gone.) Instead, Jamie was offering to call the landlord, to see if she knew his new address, and to look in his phone, to see if he still had the guy’s number. Sophie, meanwhile, was being a good girl (aka no barking) — but a bit of an active girl — running back and forth between the front door and my room, seeming unsure of herself.

Eventually I got curious enough to get up and look, as much to reassure Sophie and calm her down as anything else. The guy at the door was in uniform. A green uniform. Um…

I could tell from the tone in Jamie’s voice that this was not, say, a sanitation worker uniform, or an air-conditioning repair uniform, but I couldn’t actually tell what kind of uniform it was from my quick glance. Meanwhile, the guy at the door was saying, “Do you mind if we come in and look around, just to, you know, say we’ve done our jobs?”

I was already moving toward the front door (yes, in my pajamas!), as Jamie was saying, “Uh, let me just check with my –” to say, “Yeah, of course, come on in.” And automatically as the three (3!) sheriff’s deputies started entering the house, I added, “This is Sophie, she’s friendly.”

Two of the deputies stayed pretty close to the door, while one did a quick pass through of the house, checking out the bedroom at the back and then glancing into all the rest of the rooms. I asked one of them if we were allowed to know why they were looking for the former housemate, and he told me a moderately confusing story about his car leaving the scene of an accident and winding up in a ditch, and them wanting to know who was driving the car and what had happened. I felt like he was being interestingly careful not to allege that the former housemate had committed a crime, but I don’t know whether that was because he thought I might immediately call said former housemate to tell him the police were looking for him, or what.

Anyway, the searching deputy was almost finished when he noticed a closed door. Oops. The landlord keeps a room in the house and it’s locked. We don’t have access. Fortunately, I think, for all purposes, we’ve also blocked off that door with a shoe rack on which clutter accumulates and which can probably be seen pretty clearly from the front door. It made it sort of obvious that no one was using that door regularly. It also would have been almost impossible to have blocked it off while they were at the door,  so the idea that former housemate had been quickly hidden was improbable, I think.

Meanwhile, the oldest and most serious of the deputies had looked at Sophie, no touching, but the youngest hadn’t been able to resist her cuteness, and the searcher — while contemplating the locked door — also had to bend down and rub her ears and say, “Good girl, Sophie.” She was facing the dilemma of which stranger she most wanted to make friends with, and sort of bouncing back and forth between them, inviting them to give her pets. Obviously curious, but also just such a love. 

At any rate, I’m not sure which of them made the decision — I feel like there was sort of a mutual shrug between Searching Deputy and Oldest Deputy — but they left without needing to go into the locked room, and all went back to normal.

And it was only then — only after they were gone! — that it occurred to me that ICE is doing immigration raids in Florida right now and that I would absolutely not have wanted to assist ICE, not even to the extent of letting them look in my house without a search warrant. I’m not exactly mad at myself — in the grand scheme of things, I think letting sheriff’s deputies glance through the house to make sure a hit-and-run driver wasn’t hiding out is fine — but I’m a little mad at myself. It was instinct to let them in. No one here had done anything wrong, we had no reason to make the deputies’ lives more difficult, so why drag out an encounter and turn it into something hostile when it could be quickly over? It was a reasonable choice. But I wish I had asked why they were looking for him and made sure it was not an immigration issue before being helpful.

Many, many years ago, but post 2001, when I was living in Santa Cruz and we were at war in Iraq, (back when I went to demonstrations for peace and donated money to anti-war organizations), my phone would often make weird clicking noises and then sound echo-y, sort of like it was on speaker. One day, on a call with my brother, we were speculating about whether it was bugged, and whether the government was listening to my calls, and I said something like, “I wouldn’t really care if it was. What is anyone going to hear? Well, I guess I would care a little, because it would mean that they were wasting time on me when there are actually real threats out there.” I would think nothing about this, except that soon after that conversation, my phone stopped making weird noises. Maybe the phone company fixed the line. But I have wondered over the years whether the government was actually listening to my calls. It isn’t a thought that makes me angry, it just makes me think that I might lack proper wariness about obtrusive government.

Anyway, in a first time for everything, the police searched my house last night and I was glad that my dog was cute and charming and completely non-threatening to them. But if it ever happens again, I hope I’ll ask my questions before I let them in.