Evicted (12 page)

Glen was a romantic and a drinker. He and Larraine used to get into tumbling arguments. Sometimes, Glen would come after Larraine and she'd bloody his face with the phone. Once, their landlord evicted them for causing a racket. The morning after a fight, they would kiss softly and apologize. Theirs was a consuming, brutal kind of love.

Larraine still blamed herself for what happened next. Glen had come home from his sister's house, drunk and high and roughed up. He had been in a fight and was in one of his darker moods. Glen could slip into trenches of depression. Sometimes, Larraine remembered, he even heard voices. Glen snatched a container of prescription pills, and Larraine, thinking he might swallow the whole lot, grabbed his arm. They wrestled for the pills and Glen slipped against the refrigerator and crashed to the floor. Blood spilled from a head gash. Panicked, Larraine dialed 911. After the paramedics bandaged his head, the police officers cuffed him. He was sent back to prison for violating his parole by taking narcotics.

The last time Larraine visited Glen in prison, he didn't look right. He was jumpy, and his eyes had a yellowish hue. Uncharacteristically, he asked to cut the visit short because he wasn't feeling well. The next morning, Larraine's phone rang. She remembered a woman's voice telling her: “There's just no way to say it, but Glen died.” Overdose.

In the ensuing years, Larraine would come to believe that Glen had been poisoned by his cellmate. Whatever the case, after sixteen years together, Glen was gone. Larraine dropped the phone and screamed out his name. “I died right then and there,” she said. “My heart fell apart. My body fell apart, my whole being….When he died, it's like my whole life fell into a hole, and I haven't been able to get out ever since.”

The Eagle Moving trucks stopped outside a North Side duplex with cream siding. An older child answered the door: a girl, maybe seventeen with shorn hair, dark-brown skin, and unflinching gray eyes.

Dave and the crew hung back, waiting for John to give the okay. The deputies always went first and absorbed tenants' blowback if there was any. Things often got loud; they rarely got violent. Sheriffs used different diffusion strategies. John preferred meeting aggression with aggression. Once, he called the Sheriff's Office in front of a woman in a bathrobe 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 brother. Plus, asking for help from better-off kin was complicated. Those ties were banked, saved for emergency situations or opportunities to get ahead. People were careful not to overdraw their account because when family members with money grew exhausted by repeated requests, they sometimes withheld support for long periods of time, pegging their relatives' misfortunes to individual failings. This was one reason why family members in the best position to help were often not asked to do so.
6

Larraine thought her best bet was to approach her younger daughter, Jayme. Larraine found a ride to Arby's, where Jayme worked. Before she left, she got dressed up, putting on a pale-blue shirt, clean dark pants, black low-heeled shoes, and lipstick.

“Can Jayme take our order?” Larraine asked another Arby's worker behind the counter.

“Jayme,” the worker called out.

Jayme looked up from a pile of dirty dishes, rolled her eyes at her mother, and came walking to the front, her thick auburn curls tucked beneath an Arby's hat. She was not much taller than Larraine and wore wire glasses and a nun's expression: warm but distant. Staying behind the counter, Jayme whispered, “Mom, you're not supposed to be here.”

“I know,” Larraine said, dropping her smile to look deeply sad. “I know, honey. But I just got a twenty-four-hour eviction notice. They are going to throw me out if I don't pay the rent. And, um, I was wondering if there was any way you could help me?”

A line started to form. Jayme stepped away to take orders. Once Jayme had cleared the line, the manager appeared. A rail-thin white woman with straw hair and acne, she looked like a high school student.

“Mom, this is my
boss
.” Jayme sounded embarrassed. Her manager looked to be ten years her junior.

“Did you come here to visit?” the manager asked.

“To order.”

“Oh, okay.” The manager put an arm around Jayme. “I just love your daughter. She is my very favorite worker.”

Larraine ordered and pulled out her wallet to pay. But with a few snappy punches to the register, the manager cleared the charge. “This one's on me. Because Jayme is such a wonderful worker.”

“Please don't fire her,” Larraine replied.

The boss cocked her head at Larraine and skipped off to the drive-through window.

Alone again with Jayme, Larraine leaned in and whispered across the counter: “So what do you think about—”

“I can't.”

“Okay.”

“I can't.”

Larraine looked at the floor.

Jayme gathered the apple turnovers. “I mean, I don't have anything now. But when I get my check, I can have it mailed to you. If you can get someone to help you out till I get paid. But right now there's nothing I can do. Can you find someone else?”

“I'll try. I'll pay you back. I promise.”

“Mom, I don't
want
you to pay me back.”

Larraine gathered up her food. “Well, okay,” she said, turning to go.

“Mom, wait,” Jayme said. “I want to give you a hug.” She came around the counter, hugged her mom, and kissed her on the cheek.

Jayme didn't choose to work at Arby's. It was her work-release placement. She was in the final months of a two-and-a-half-year sentence. In the evenings, Jayme was transported back to the women's correctional facility on Keefe Avenue. It was her first time in prison, for her first arrest, and she had mainly kept her nose in her Bible. She'd had a baby in a toilet and left it there. No one in the family knew why; she was already a mother of a toddler at the time. Jayme had been a bookish child, with large round glasses and a mature-beyond-her-years way about her.

Now that her prison sentence was coming to an end, Jayme was focused on a single goal: saving enough for an apartment that could accommodate her son, now six, on overnight visits. The boy was staying with his father.

When Jayme went to prison, she gave Larraine her car and $500 to care for it. But not long after that, Larraine sold the car and used the $500 to pay a bill. Larraine had done a similar thing to Megan, her eldest daughter, borrowing money and failing to pay it back. This was the main reason Megan had not spoken to Larraine in years. Jayme couldn't hold that kind of grudge.

In the Arby's parking lot, Larraine stared out the windshield. Office Susie had told her to ask her family for rent. She often heard a similar line at the crisis centers. When the social workers behind the glass asked her, “Well, don't you have family that can help?” Larraine sometimes would reply, “Yes, I have family, and, no, they can't help.”

The movers were standing in an empty kitchen, inspecting an open cupboard. “Old folks,” Dave Brittain guessed by the style of the glassware. The house was nearly abandoned and show-ready. The tenants had mopped the floor on their way out. The crew was now on the South Side, and another pair of sheriff deputies had taken over.

At the next house, a Hispanic woman in her early forties answered the door holding a wooden spoon.

“Can I have until Wednesday?” she asked.

The deputies shook their heads no. She nodded with forced resolve or submission.

Dave stepped onto the porch. “Ma'am,” he said, “we can place your things in our truck or on the curb. Which would you prefer?” She opted for the curb. “Curbside service, baby!” Dave hollered back to the crew.

Dave stepped into the house and tripped over a Dora the Explorer chair. He reached over an older man sitting at the table and flipped on more lights. The house was warm and smelled of garlic and spices. One of the deputies pointed to the built-in cabinets in the kitchen. “This is the kind of shit I like,” he told his partner. “They don't make this stuff anymore. Tight.”

The woman walked in circles, trying to think of where to begin. She told one of the deputies that she knew she was being foreclosed but that she didn't know when they were coming. Her attorney had told her that it could be a day, five days, a week, three weeks; she decided to ride it out. She and her three children had been in the house for five years. The year before, she had been talked into refinancing with a subprime loan. Her payments kept going up, jumping from $920 to $1,250 a month, and her hours at Potawatomi Casino were cut back after her maternity leave.

Hispanic and African American neighborhoods had been targeted by the subprime lending industry: renters were lured into buying bad mortgages, and homeowners were encouraged to refinance under riskier terms. Then it all came crashing down. Between 2007 and 2010, the average white family experienced an 11 percent reduction in wealth, but the average black family lost 31 percent of its wealth. The average Hispanic family lost 44 percent.
7

As the woman rushed away to frantically call people to come over and help, the movers exchanged tired glances and whispered curses. They hated doing a full house toward the end of the day but that was precisely what they had on their hands. A mover started in on a girl's bedroom, painted pink with a sign on the door announcing
THE PRINCESS SLEEPS HERE
. Another took on the disheveled office, packing
Resumes for Dummies
into a box with a chalkboard counting down the remaining days of school. The eldest child, a seventh-grade boy, tried to help by taking out the trash. His younger sister, the princess, held her two-year-old sister's hand on the porch. Upstairs, the movers were trying not to step on the toddler's toys, which when kicked would protest with beeping sounds and flashing lights.