Walking Through Walls Read Free Page A

table with the Duke and Duchess, the Sanfords, the Mays.”
    Unlike Pop’s glamorous clients, we lived in an area forgotten by the tax collector, known as “unincorporated Dade County.” Anything called “unincorporated” told you all you needed to know; the area was more jungle than suburb. Located just a few miles outside of the city proper, our neighborhood was basically raw land filled with miles of poison ivy, saw palmettos, deadly coral snakes, and night-vision possums that slept like bats, hanging upside down in poinciana trees. Wild lime and kumquat trees dotted the landscape, sprouted from seeds dropped by migrating birds. After the summer monsoon rains, rickety old trucks passed through the barely paved streets, spewing acrid smoke filled with DDT, shortening our lives while trying to eradicate the population of skeeters the size of black widow spiders.
    When we first moved there, we had no telephone for the first year, as the phone company just plain forgot to run a line out to our neck of the woods. The water was undrinkable, so that, just like women in Caribbean countries, Mom spent most of her time boiling our drinking water because our well had been polluted by one of several hurricanes passing through, along with the constant decay of the natural sulfur in the rocks.
    There was a homesteading feel to the place. All the houses were on sprawling rural plots of land oriented to catch the tropical breezes, with large open areas protected by metal screens that were annually blown away by the first winds of any hurricane. Everybody, except us, had Florida rooms, a kind of screened-in porch where you sat out the worst of the summer with slightly rusty fans and a pitcher of ice water. We had a curious house built in the shape of a pentagon. All of the rooms opened onto an enormous Japanese garden with a small waterfall, shrimp plants from Hawaii, and a pond stocked with large gold and black koi. The garden, my father’s idea of Bali Hai, was designed by a Mr. Kobyashi, who on Easter Sunday, just a week after completing the garden, was shot in the head during a robbery that netted the thieves all of two dollars. According to the report in the newspaper, “Kobyashi was murdered by three Negro bandits, who, after holding him up in his Northwest section nursery and florist shop, became irate because of the small amount of money they found on him and shot him.”
    Our neighbors, whom we hardly ever saw and made every effort to avoid, were good old rednecks who drove beat-up Ford pickups with gun racks on the back window and Confederate flags fluttering from the antenna. They all had long-drawn southern accents and deeply rooted beliefs as to the God-sanctioned inferiority of Yankees, Jews, and blacks. We fit the first two categories. In our neighborhood, Klan membership outnumbered subscriptions to Life magazine by about twenty to one. Guaranteed, we were that one and only Life subscriber for miles. Given our geographical and religious liabilities, there was no chance in hell that we would ever be invited next door for some deviled eggs or a cool beer out back under the pines. We did not mess with our neighbors, and they didn’t mess with us.
    I’m not sure that the Carters next door could even read. Sometimes at night I saw Mr. Carter leave the house in a shimmering white gown as he headed off to his Klan meeting. His lanky son, Billy, with a perfect blond crewcut, had dropped out of high school and never seemed to do a lick of work. There was a lemon-yellow trailer parked at the rear of the property. Presumably, this was the spaceship that brought these aliens down from Loxahatchee or whatever hick planet they were from. Billy locked himself in there day and night. Young blond cheerleader types came and went with great frequency. I knew something naughty happened in there. Annie, his first-grade sister, would set pinecones on fire and tell me she was “burning the chocolate