and headwrap, saying into the phone, “If she doesn’t shut her mouth and start talking like an adult, I’m going to throw her shit in the street!” The conversation with Gray Eyes was taking longer than usual. Dave watched a white man in a flannel shirt park his truck and approach the door. Landlord, he figured. After a few more minutes, John nodded at Dave, and the crew sprang up.
Inside the house, the movers found five children. Tim recognized one child as the daughter of a man who used to work on the crew. It wasn’t uncommon to evict someone you knew. Most of the movers lived on the North Side and had at some point experienced the awkward moment of packing up someone from their church or block. Tim had evicted his own daughter. But this house felt strange. Dave asked what was going on, and John explained that the name on the eviction order belonged to the mother of several of the children. She had died two months earlier, and the children had simply gone on living in the house, by themselves.
As the movers swept through the rooms, Gray Eyes took charge, giving orders to the other children; the youngest was a boy of about eight or nine. Upstairs, the movers found ratty mattresses on the floor and empty liquor bottles displayed like trophies. In the damp basement, clothes were flung everywhere. The house and the yard were littered with trash. “Disgusting,” Tim said to the roaches scaling the kitchen wall.
As the landlord changed the locks with a power drill and the movers pushed the contents of the house onto the wet curb, the children began to run around and laugh.
When the move was done, the crew gathered by the trucks, instinctively stomping the ground to shake loose any stowaway roaches. Those who smoked reached for their packs. They didn’t know where the children would go, and they didn’t ask.
With this job, you saw things. The guy with 10,000 audiocassette tapes of UFO activity who kept yelling, “Everything is in order! Everything is in order!” The woman with jars full of urine. The guy who lived in the basement while his pack of Chihuahuas overran the house. Just a week earlier, a man had told Sheriff John to give him a minute. Then he shut the door and shot himself in the head.5 But the squalor was what got under your skin; its smells and sights were what you tried to drink away after your shift.
Gray Eyes leaned against the porch rail and took long drags of her own cigarette.
—
Larraine considered asking her brothers and sisters for help. There was her eldest sister, Odessa, who lived a few miles away and spent her days in a nightgown on a corduroy recliner, watching talk shows next to a lampstand crowded with prescription medication containers. She was on SSI, and wouldn’t be able to help even if she were willing, which she wasn’t. Beaker was in worse shape than Odessa. A towering man with loose skin, Beaker was sixty-five and a heavy smoker who relied on a walker. The family, in the midwestern way, liked to poke fun at his failing health. “We’ve got the funeral home on speed dial!” Even if he wasn’t in the hospital, Beaker’s Social Security stipend was even less than Larraine’s. He could afford the rent but little else, living hard in a filthy trailer covered in clothes, cigarette boxes and butts, food-encrusted plates, and stray dog shit.
Susan was better off. She lived with her husband, Lane, in one of the nicer trailers in the park. The couple were trying desperately to adopt their granddaughter, who had been born “glowing like a lightbulb,” as Lane put it. (Their middle daughter—“our heartbreak”—was a heavy cocaine user.) And even if that situation weren’t already demanding their resources and attention, Susan didn’t trust Larraine with money. Susan had once gone weeks without speaking to her sister after learning Larraine had blown a few hundred dollars on a Luminess Air makeup application kit advertised on television.
Then there was Ruben, the blessed child. He was the only one who hadn’t inherited their father’s Croatian nose. And he didn’t live in the trailer park, or even a trailer park, or even in Cudahy, like Odessa. He lived in Oak Creek, in his own home, which was big enough to host everyone for Thanksgiving dinner every year. Larraine could ask Ruben for the rent money, but she wasn’t close with her baby
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