Gangway: The Space between Two Houses

When the Porters moved onto our block in South Holland, Illinois, my older siblings and their friends picketed their house with “No Hillbillies Allowed” signs. They employed science-project materials: shiny poster board from the dime store, permanent black and red Magic Markers with the whiff of poison, and bent wire hangers plastered with masking tape.

Our house: three levels, four bedrooms, two-and-a-half baths, family room, living room, full basement with pool table, formal dining room, foyer, fireplace, credenzas full of books. One TV. Crab grass, sparse tulips, lilac bushes, and peonies.

Their house: one level, three bedrooms, one bathroom, living room, scary basement. Fish tanks, snake tanks, three cats, birds in cages. A forty-foot birdhouse in the yard. Flourishing vegetable garden. Hound dogs.

George Porter left his farm in Arkansas to find work in the Eastside steel mills. He was six foot four, with a nose like a steak tomato and dark, greased-back hair.

I heard the kitchen door creak open at ten on a summer night, and I ran up from the family room to see. I arrived just in time to see the sole of a tennis shoe catch in the screen door. At the window I saw George Junior tuck a bottle of Fifty-Fifty into his armpit and run like a linebacker across our dark yard. His best friend was a bleached-blonde boy we called the Whitehead Kid, and in the darkness, I saw the Whitehead Kid’s gleaming hair, as they laughed and hopped the fence into Lillian’s yard. Outlaws! I thought, both appalled and thrilled. That fall, the Whitehair Kid set his house on fire with a renegade M-80.

Their first dog was Susie. A beagley mutt, she stuck her nose through the cyclone fence and Lillian and I hand-fed her grass, pretending she was a cow or a horse. Later, she’d hack up a green ball in the corner of the yard.

I call them the Porters: George, Cheryl, etc., but, of course, those are pseudonyms, aliases, false identities. Lillian is real.

One evening the shouts and screams from the Porters’ house interrupted our blockwide game of Fifty-Two Scatter. Cheryl ran from her house and dashed across our lawn. My mom called us in, so we went upstairs and kneeled on the beds, watching out the window as two South Holland cops hauled George away in cuffs. The next time, he tore the phone off the wall.

My dad did their taxes for free.

Cheryl was Bertha’s daughter from a previous marriage. George Junior was Bertha and George’s only son. Cheryl stayed married long enough to a man named Booker to have three kids. He did a tour in Vietnam, and when he returned, he didn’t stay long. One day Booker took off in his green Nova, and was last seen in the Kim’s drugstore, buying a case of Schlitz.

As a toddler, Cheryl’s oldest son Ray barked more often than he talked. Down on all fours next to Susie, he begged for grass from us. Lillian and I pulled up the overgrown stalks along the cyclone fence that the lawn mower never caught. We dangled them over his wagging pink tongue.

Lillian and I loitered in the gangway, listening to George’s drunken cursing, trying to learn new words, but it all ran together in an unintelligible rant: gawdamnmotherfuckingbugaboo! Then we looked at the bedroom window: a grinning George Junior pointed a gun at us.

Cheryl stood in the foyer trembling (dressed in a housecoat and terrycloth slippers), weeping into my mother’s handkerchief and peeking out the curtains as the police tucked George into the squad car. Again.

Bertha died young and I don’t know how. The funeral parlor was in an industrial part of Harvey. I remember the bump of the many railroad tracks we crossed to get there. George wore a baggy blue suit and held Bertha’s dead hand as she lay in the pink, satin-lined coffin.

After he moved out, George Junior sometimes came back to visit in his slouching flared Levis. He drove a white Chevy van (a “fuck truck,” as we called it) lined with orange shag carpet he’d stolen from an under-construction house around the corner. He carried his boy, Little George, in one arm, and a leashed racoon in the other.

When I was twenty, at school in Scotland, my mother wrote to tell me George Junior had died of a heroin overdose. I leaned against my life-sized poster of Prince. “Thank God,” I said out loud, as the letter dropped to the floor.

One summer, Cheryl found God, and a green church van filled with scrubbed children—girls with braids too tight and boys in short-sleeved dress shirts—arrived on Sundays and took her and the kids away.

George wore overalls without a shirt when he worked in his enormous garden. He grew cucumbers, green beans, several species of gourds and squash, corn, tomatoes, and he always shared his crop with my parents. I felt nervous around him and perplexed by his mannerly nod hello as he moved between the cornrows. How to match that abundant, sunny garden with the dark sounds of night—the kids crying, the crashing furniture?

The summer I was ten, I babysat Cheryl’s three kids while she bagged groceries at the Jewel (a job my father helped her to land). Sitting in their house gave me the willies. Giant black ants scrambled around the couches. I made P & J sandwiches for the kids and tried to teach them to read. All three had beautiful, blond hair and huge blue eyes. I showed the girls how to do back walkovers and round-offs. I made five dollars for five hours.

Lillian had a crush on George Junior. We were six, he was thirteen. Shaggy brown hair hung over his dark eyes, and he had long, angular limbs. He knew all about hunting knives, fishing, and lures. I didn’t get the attraction, but Lillian called his name in a singsong voice. She nagged him to take her fishing, and one day he finally promised to, but first she had to go down to the basement with him.

One night in my teens, my brother and I listened to George slapping the little kids around. Voyeurs, we were, but always guilt-stricken for it. We’d ask ourselves what could we do, and always came up with nothing.

The Porters’ gold, green, and orange squash hung from vines that dipped into our yard. Misshapen, bumpy with warts, or smooth bulbs with long gentle noses—they were irresistible to Lillian and me. We made baskets of our T-shirts and carried away a small family, then hopped over the red wooden fence into her backyard. With crayons we drew eyes and mouths, long purple hair, black ears, and held lengthy tête-á-têtes between the squash. When her mother discovered our thievery, she insisted we go apologize. We couldn’t hop the fence, but had to walk around the block with our gourd family, who suddenly looked sloppy and disrespectful.

We worried that the Porters would scream at us, but Bertha opened the door, said, “All right then, if you’re sorry,” and, without a smile, took back all the gourds.

Seventh grade: Buck-naked George looking for the paper on a fall afternoon. (He’d been laid off from the mill.)  Michael the paperboy, my big crush, having just hurled The Star at the front door, saw him. I was both embarrassed and thrilled when he retold the story at school.

Lillian’s mother loved walks in the forest preserves. Glass cases full of rocks, framed butterflies, endangered species posters decorated her house. When a possum wandered into her yard, she ran for her Canon, but then the critter crawled over to George’s garden, and he gave it a quick smash with his shovel. “Possum pie!” we’d all yell, every time we told the story.

Their two mangy black mutts, Dolly and Ginger, hopped the cyclone fence and stood on their hind legs, paws on the window ledge, watching our TV. “Dolly and Ginger are here!” we’d say, our eyes glued to the Cubs or All My Children.

One late November afternoon in fourth grade, Lillian sat on her front step, huddled against the cold. Neither of us wanted to go home for dinner yet.  You know that day I went down to the basement with George Junior? He pulled down my pants and put his thing in me. I asked her if she told her mother. She either said No or I tried to.

Neighbors for twenty-nine years.

I was twenty-eight the day George died. Paramedics wheeled him out on a stretcher, and I watched from the upstairs window, the same place I’d watched the cops haul him away years before. He wore a white tank undershirt, baggy pajamas, and his shock of still black hair fell away from his head. From the pallor of his usually ruddy cheeks, I knew he was gone. Lillian is not her real name.  But she told me forty-some years later, that the day George Junior pointed the gun out the window at us, it was really a message to her. Not to speak.

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