If These Walls Had Ears (30 page)

From Sue’s diary, September 30, 1980:

A ray of hope and joy. Myke has a job offer selling insurance. It sounds fairly good. It will bring in more income than I
make now....

I have seen a bit more of the kids. They are getting used to Daddy caring for them. I do like the excuse of not doing the
daily work of bathing and feeding them.... I guess this experience has taught
us
to work together. Also I need to take charge of my life...

In early October, they went to a football game at the University of Missouri. After the game, they planned to spend the weekend
at Sue’s family farm a couple of hours outside St. Louis. It was a home to her, the place where she had spent so many happy
times as a child.

From Sue’s diary:

I’m going to plant my yellow tulip bulbs there. I don’t want to plant them in Little Rock. I probably won’t be here next spring
to see them.

Myke says he and his business partners had philosophical differences. Eventually, they offered to buy him out, and he accepted.
He used his time that fall to organize a door-to-door campaign for Ronald Reagan. He also worked to defeat Bill Clinton, who
was in an uphill battle for reelection as governor of Arkansas. During the few months Myke was with the recycling company,
he’d been in meetings attended by attorney Hillary Clinton, and he had taken an intense dislike to her. “We were there as
part of opposing interests,” he says. “Even sitting over on the side, she was radiating, I am the governor’s wife, and this
is what I’d really like to see happen. I took great delight in seeing Clinton lose that election.”

Reagan’s success brought Myke an opportunity, he says. “Under Nixon, our chemical capability had gone to pot. Nixon, of course,
was goaded into that by the liberals he had his back against the wall because of Watergate. So when Reagan came in, he said,
We’ve got to fix this pretty fast. So they activated lots of chemical officers.”

Myke recalls that the army “started breathing down my neck in October. Everybody could see that Reagan was coming.” At one
Reserve meeting, a man approached him and several other chemical captains and told them the army was going to start calling
them up. The man said that if they would volunteer, they would at least get to choose their first assignment.

There’s nothing in Sue’s diary about that, but Sue doesn’t believe it happened that way. “I don’t recall any pressure from
the army,” she says. “I recall that he was looking for employment, and this was an opportunity for him.” Myke admits that
the army, his comfort zone, came back into his life at a time when he certainly needed comforting. He decided to go in for
a three-year tour of duty.

So as the air turned crisp and the leaves began to fall, Myke began the process of getting himself back in shape. Countless
times a day he would run up Holly Street toward Woodlawn—up the hill, up the hill, as they say in the army—then come down
and do it all over again. It was hard work, shedding all he’d been carrying. But he was a happy man. Home was on the horizon.

Meanwhile, next door, John and Linda Burnett noticed something they thought was very odd. They remember seeing Sue Landers
out in her driveway a lot that fall, standing alone near the bay window with a trowel in her hand and a tub of strange red
mortar at her feet. She spent hours there, the dead leaves blowing around her, as she knifed that bizarre filling into the
cracks in her house.

From Sue’s diary, October 7, 1980:

This week I tuck-pointed for the first time.... There is so much to do, but I’m getting the hang of it. It does me proud to
teach myself a new skill. I do enjoy being outdoors. I m still not tired of raking up leaves. There are many here.

Myke wants to put this house on the market. I am sad to do that: I do like this house. I did, then I didn’t. Now that we will
lose it (sell it), of course I’ve become more attached to it. Everything becomes dear to me when I have to leave it behind.

And so we come, at last, to the roller-skating transvestite hippies. It strikes me as a particularly cruel joke that their
brief fling here took place during the ownership of Sue and Myke Landers. Sue, who always wanted to be so “normal.”

Myke left for Fort McClellan, in Anniston, Alabama, in early February 1981. Sue and the girls packed up and followed at the
end of March. They put the house on the market and continued to make payments, but they wanted to sell as fast as possible.
No one involved admits renting out the house, but obviously someone did. My guess is that it was the Realtor, Janet ones.
Janet remembers nothing about a rental and says she has no paperwork on it. But she admits it sometimes happens that a Realtor
will rent out a sale house, following the conventional wisdom that prospective buyers can visualize
home
more easily in a house that has people living in it. In theory, the conventional wisdom holds true. I’ll never forget the
lightning-bolt effect of that one red lipstick print the day I first saw this house.

By all accounts, there were plenty of lipstick prints around 501 Holly during the few months of its rental.

I have to confess, right here, that I don’t know the names of the roller-skating transvestite hippies. Owners’ lives are splayed
open like bodies on an operating table, but the renters still glide—giddily, in my mind—down shadowy corridors. a feel them
taunting me. I suppose I should be impressed that this house hasn’t given up all its secrets so readily.

Their time here was just four months, from April through July 1981. If you lived in the neighborhood, you noticed the difference—especially
late at night. John Burnett recalls the first time he heard the red car. Fifteen years ago, throbbing automobile stereos weren’t
as pervasive a fact of life as they are today. Most people listened to their radios or their cassette decks without feeling
the need to share their pleasure with the world. Today, music lovers are more thoughtful.

John was sleeping. Suddenly, his bedroom was invaded by a noise that sounded as if all the drummers in all the rock bands
in all the world had been captured inside a metal container and were trying to beat their way out. But they were pounding
in unison,
boom-boomba-boom-boomba-boom,
keeping it going, steady, endless. John looked at the clock. It was 2:00
A.M.
He went to the window. The car was a Firebird, and it was shaking. The driver, whom he couldn’t see, was sitting there listening
to a song at top volume on the car stereo. John couldn’t hear the music, but the bass notes throbbed down through the metal
and into the molecules of the spring night, pounding the bruised air into the bricks of John’s foundation, from which the
noise vibrated up the wall, passed through his headboard, and rattled his spine. This began to happen every night.

For a long time, I thought I had a suspect. Maribeth, the woman who cleans our house, told me she knew a man who said he’d
once lived here. I’m going to call him Bob. And in fact I
did
call him. He said he had sublet from someone whose name he couldn’t remember. Bob denied having ever roller-skated here,
much less in a dress, but he described the inside of this house with enough accuracy that I wanted to meet with him. His spot
was a water bed in the attic. He told me that another renter, a poet, had slept in a closet across the room—the very closet,
I was guessing, where Beth and I now keep our supplies.

I made a date for Bob to come walk through the house with me. He stood me up. I called again, and again he stood me up. I
called again. Each time, he was maddeningly blase. Something had always come up at the last minute. I tried to get other names
out of him, but he couldn’t remember any. And then, just as I was ready to write him off, he would recall some juicy tidbit—a
woman with the “Rainbow” name of May Apple, who didn’t live at the house but grew opium poppies in planters here. I would
make a date to see him, and he wouldn’t show. This would go on for weeks at a time, and then I would get busy with some other
aspect of the story and put Bob aside until later.

I placed a classified ad in the local paper, asking anybody who’d ever known
anyone
who lived at this address to contact me. The Grimeses’ old paperboy responded. A woman called and said, yes, she had lost
her husband while she lived in this house. I was on the line with another caller at the time, and when I phoned her back,
I found the number she’d given me was that of the local police department. Another woman left a message on the answering machine:
“Call Mary Ann at three-seven-two-HORE.”

One afternoon, I heard from a man who said, “I know some things about that house. Weird things.
Supernatural
things.” “Such as?” I asked. “My former girlfriend lived there for a while,” he said, “and sometimes, even on hot days, you’d
be walking through the living room and suddenly a gust of cold, cold air would hit you. It seemed to conic up through the
floor” The man promised to put me in touch with the old girlfriend, though there was some reason he couldn’t do it at that
precise moment. He was going to call me back. When he didn’t, I called him. He wasn’t at that number.

I could just hear the roller-skating transvestite hippies shrieking with bent delight.

From Sue’s diary, Anniston, June I, 1981, 1:30
A.M.
:

Still financial trouble looms. 2 houses vacant—the situation has to change. We can’t go on like this one more month. We won’t
make it. I don’t trust Myke with money matters at all. It’s been almost disastrous for our marriage.

On that summer night in 1992 when I’d had supper at the Burnetts’ house, they said the person who had actually seen the roller-skating
transvestite hippies
in action
was Judith Long, who lives at the head of the block, where Holly runs into Woodlawn. I called Judith and told her who I was
and what I was doing. Then I asked her about the incident.

“No, it wasn’t me,” she said. “I think it was Toni Cullum.” She gave me the number. The Cullums had lived on Woodlawn for
years but had moved to a bigger house over in the Heights.

I called the Cullums. A woman answered. Yes, this was Toni Cullum. She had a refined Southern accent, soft like gardenias,
and there was caution in her voice. When I mentioned roller-skating hippie males in dresses, there was utter silence on the
other end of the line.

Finally, she said, “I think you must be mistaken.” I apologized and got off the phone as fast as possible. It was dawning
on me that the story that had spawned this entire book might be apocryphal.

But late that afternoon, Beth came upstairs bearing a small, heavy buff envelope. While she’d been on the phone in her office,
a woman had stopped in front of our house and had run up and dropped this note in our mailbox. It was from Toni Cullum. She
hadn’t gotten my name, but she’d called her husband after she’d hung up with me. He remembered the story vividly. It
was
Toni. She’d obviously repressed the memory.

Toni is from Alabama. She’s younger than I am, but she reminds me of Southern belles I knew in college—khaki shorts, Weejuns,
madras. That’s not the way she was dressed when I met her, but that’s the
manner
in which she was dressed. I thought of her as very traditional—which made her encounter with the hippies all the more amusing.

“First of all,” she told me, as we sat in her spacious sunroom, “they weren’t hippies.” She’d asked her husband, Skip, to
come home at lunch to sit in on our meeting. It occurred to me that she considered it improper otherwise.

“Not hippies?” I said.

“No,” she said, her eyebrows lifting slightly and her head moving ever so perceptibly closer to mine. “They were
transvestites.”
I was thrilled. I’d been afraid that part was an embellishment. Like a sorority sister dishing dirt, I asked her to tell
me the story.

“I’d made a cake to welcome the new neighbors,” she said. “In this neighborhood, there were a lot of people who stayed home
at that time. You kind of noticed when people came and went.”

It happened at maybe three o’clock on a weekday afternoon. “I made the cake and took it down and rang the doorbell. And there
I stood with my little cake in my hands. A person answered the door, and it was a very large
—person.
In women’s clothing. With a blonde Barbra Streisand wig, and makeup, and long white fingernails. There was no furniture in
the house, and they were all on roller skates, in fifties dresses. There was music. I think they were making a circle through
the house. I can’t remember how many there were, but there were
quite a few.”

The very thought still has the power to produce a blush.

“Everybody was a little uncomfortable. There was a lot of looking back and forth and that kind of thing. And there they were
in shoe skates on those hardwood floors. I can’t remember any of the conversation or anything, except that I just tried to
stumble through my ‘Welcome to the neighborhood’—you know—’We’re
so glad to have you.’
And I handed the cake over and
left.”

She has a nervous laugh when flustered or embarrassed. I’d bet the Holly Street Streisand heard that very laugh as he shut
the door.

“The thing that stands out most in my mind,” said Toni, looking off into some twilight zone beyond the window, “are those
big-male hands, with those long white artificial nails. It was the last time I ever took a cake to a family.”

At the end of June, the Landerses got word they had an offer on the house. That, as they say, was the good news. The bad news
was that the offer was for only $67,500—five thousand dollars less than the Landerses had paid scarcely a year before. “I
was looking for a house with a lot of possibilities,” Jack Burney says today, “but that I could buy right.” He means at the
right price. At 501, the owners had moved; the house was being abused by renters. It looked like Jack had found the perfect
place.

On the contract, his Realtor had made the following notation: “Offer is further conditional on buyer having the floors inspected
within two weeks and approving the cost of repairs.” Jack says the living room floor was buckled in the center. He shows me,
putting his fingers together into a point the way Billie Murphree did when he had a tough decision to make.