by Gil Reavill
“If I had known it was going to be an open casket,” my coach apologized to parents afterward, “I wouldn’t have brought the team.”
Wisconsin. Home state of two of the most notorious murderers in American history, Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer. Indicating that those who dismiss the place as boring and banal might be missing some darker currents that run beneath the cheesehead surface.
My real introduction to thinking about death came not via Chucky Sipple or Ed Gein, but from a cult text of the sixties underground, Wisconsin Death Trip, by Michael Lesy.
A spooky, chimerical, slippery book, still one of my favorites. I was disappointed to hear from one of my New York editor friends that although Death Trip was always a great critical darling, the book has never really sold that well, it was a loss leader, and the original publisher, Pantheon, kept it on its backlist simply for prestige value. The news somehow made me think less of my fellow humans, like the fact that Ike and Tina’s “River Deep, Mountain High” never climbed past number forty on the pop charts. What’s wrong with you people? Don’t you recognize a classic when you encounter one?
For an adolescent boy growing up in deepest, darkest Dairy-land, Wisconsin Death Trip sounded a thunderclap wake-up call. In the dusty archives of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Michael Lesy had uncovered an astonishing find: over two thousand glass photographic plates, their silver emulsion faithfully rendering life, and in the small-town Midwest, circa 1890, the work of a Black River Falls photographer named Charley Van Schaick.
Lesy matched Van Schaick’s pictures of ordinary rural life with equally quotidian reportage from Frank and George Cooper, a father-and-son team of journalists writing for the Badger State Banner, which was a small-town newspaper in the same area that Van Schaick was a small-town portraitist. Lesy simply chose a selection of Van Schaick’s photos and excerpted newspaper clips from the Coopers, but the effect was electric. It was only text plus image. But somehow one plus one made three, twelve, one million.
As Lesy catalogs his contents: “Ghost stories, epidemics, political careers, suicides, sales, insanities, bankruptcies, fatal abortions, medical testimonials and early deaths….” There were numberless barn-burnings, deaths by ingestion of “Paris green” (an insecticide), and—most intriguing to me—an epidemic of destruction aimed at a newly developed novelty, the plate-glass window. The book presented a bygone world rocked back on its heels by tragedy, depression, and loss, a world of chaos that was light-years away from the bourgeois-fortress universe I inhabited as a teenager.
“Working men at Kenosha,” reads one of Lesy’s news clips, drawing a scene straight out of Aftermath’s job files, “found the body of a man hanging from a rafter. The body was badly decomposed. Nothing was found to identify it.”
In Michael Lesy’s strange artistic calculus, life was portrayed as so inflected by death as to make the two an indivisible entity. To my early 1960s sensibility, accustomed to death being carefully pruned back, sanitized, and apologized for (“If I had known it was going to be an open casket…”), Wisconsin Death Trip was a book from which I would never recover.
Death-haunted. That’s what Lesy’s book managed to make Wisconsin. A pretty neat feat, given the thick-ankled Scandinavian-German vibe of the populace. The stolid landscape of my youth, where I had stood in cornfields during the summer and heard the eerie, rubbery squeals of the corn growing, turned out to have weight, majesty, meaning, after all. Like a southerner reading Faulkner. Oh, it says here that we are not just a species of dumb crackers. We are demigods worthy of a genius’s attention. Those corn-growing sounds now reminded me of the high-pitched “ree-ree-ree” squeals from Hitchcock’s Psycho shower-scene sound-track.
I followed the bouncing orange biohazard sticker on a Wisconsin death trip of my own. We drove past Six Flags amusement park, the inverted-pretzel-shaped loop of its Bolliger & Mabillard Superman Ride of Steel roller coaster (a trip of “more than three minutes” at speeds “approaching 60 mph”) visible from the highway. A pseudo pretend faux death trip for which you had to stand in line.
Vanity, saith the preacher. In my present death-haunted mood the whole concept of amusement seemed pure folly. How can those people laugh and scream when there is human decomposition occurring a mere thirty miles (a half hour via our excellent Interstate highway system) to the north?
I tried not to take myself too seriously, but I couldn’t help it. The whole enterprise seemed impossibly fraught, and I gave myself over to unbridled freaked-outness.
We left I-90 at the suburb of Cudahy, on the southern edge of Milwaukee, along the lake, and drove east on Layton Avenue past General Mitchell International Airport, before plunging into a residential neighborhood. Our destination turned out to be a leafy street lined with houses of the preranch, post-Victorian, all-nondescript period of architecture. The residents, by the looks of their down-at-the-heel yards, clung to the lower ranks of the American middle class. A lot of them liked beige paint.
The quietest, calmest, most ordinary block in the world. Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland lived there, and Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. Summer vacation. Children, toddlers up to preteens, rumbled in small cowlike herds along the southern sidewalk. The northern side of the street was in shade, and deserted. “Keep on the sunny side,” Mother Maybelle sang, “always on the sunny side.” Visible to the east, through a four-block tunnel of maple and elm leaves, a freshwater-blue lozenge of Lake Michigan.
The orange biohazard sticker stopped bouncing in front of a two-story clapboard house, beige accented by white trim, with a redbrick foundation and light-green roof shingles. An enclosed porch, shuttered up tight. And, yes, on the sunny side of the street. Ryan and Dave got out of the truck. I parked the rental down the block in the shade and got out too.
“The sister or I guess the daughter or someone lives across the street,” Ryan said. Balancing on the bumper, he rolled up the back door of the truck. “Dave’s going to go over and have her do some paperwork.”
I didn’t know what to do. Ryan climbed into the interior of the truck. Enameled steel shelves, lockboxes, and tool drawers lined the front wall and ran down the driver’s side. Plates of quarter-inch tread-quilted aluminum covered the floor.
“The first thing you do when you enter the truck—always, always, right away—is glove up,” Ryan said. “We store a lot of biohazardous waste in here, and we keep it clean, but we have to play it safe.”
Ryan O’Shea wore a navy-blue Aftermath T-shirt with white lettering (“Specialist in blood cleanup—call 1-877-TRAGEDY”), size XXL to accommodate his build. He had indeed been All-State middle linebacker in high school in Plano, Illinois, a farming hamlet forty miles to the west of Naperville. He was twenty-three years old, six two, with big squared-off shoulders and a cheerful, open face. His dark blond hair was cropped close and wicked into short spikes, evidently the only acceptable male coiffure of the day, since Dave Creager and all the rest of the techs wore theirs the same way.
Creager was a half-hand shorter, bullet-headed but handsome, with an athletic build. The two had been friends since school. Creager used to approach O’Shea’s house on his dirt bike, popping a wheelie for the whole length of the rural road. In turn Ryan would drive his truck straight across the farm fields to wind up at Dave’s door.
Between football and an eventful leisure-time pursuit of off-roading, O’Shea had managed to break 18 of his body’s 206 bones.
“I’ve broken my collarbone twice, once on each side, eight of my fingers, bones in both my hands, my arm, my jaw, blown out my left knee three times and my right knee once.”
Ryan lowered the back door three quarters of the way down as he stripped to gym shorts. He instructed me to climb into a white level-one hazmat suit made of disposable Tyvek. Following his lead, I tied the suit off at the waist with a strip of yellow-and-black “police line do not cross” tape, effectively turning myself into a crime scene. He also told me to slip clear plastic booties over the suit’s own
built-in gray-soled boots. I appreciated the redundancy.
“This way,” Ryan said, putting his own booties on, and tying them off with crime-scene tape too, “when your feet get mucked up and you’re coming in and out of the scene, you don’t have to take off and dispose of your whole suit. You can just toss the booties and put on new ones.”
Ryan could tell I was anxious. He described what lay ahead. “Basically, on this job, anything that’s contaminated with body fluid, if they died on a recliner or a sofa, that has to be removed.”
First, though, he would enter the place with a heat-powered fogger and coat the whole interior with Thermo-55 disinfectant-deodorant. “The Thermo-55 sticks to everything and it smells like cherries,” he said. “It’s got an insecticide in it that helps kill the flies too.”
If the fogger didn’t do the job, the truck carried a machine that represented another level of response. “If we run the fogger and the smell is still very apparent, then we use the ozone machine,” Ryan said. He slapped his hand on the gleaming metallic unit, stored on one of the truck’s upper shelves. “We’ll set that up and let it run overnight when it’s real bad. It sucks everything out of the air.”
I realized something before we ever made it into the house. They’re not just janitors. I didn’t yet know quite what the Aftermath techs were. I couldn’t exactly grasp what the job entailed, but I knew it was a long way from the janitorial. During my college days, I briefly worked as a janitor on a work-study gig at the Engineering School of the University of Colorado. I never had to strip off plastic booties that were too mucked up with decayed body fluids to wear more than a single time.
Ryan showed me how to fit myself with a pink-and-gray 3M respirator with a clear acrylic visor, pulling it down over my face and then tightening the rubber straps behind my head.
“You’re going to need this,” he said. “It’s going to be bad in there.”
He tapped on my face shield as if to wake me up. “Listen, here’s the first rule: You treat everything contaminated with biomatter as if it was poison.”
I nodded.
“We don’t know who this guy was or how he lived his life. He could have AIDS or hepatitis C. Probably not, but it’s better to be safe. Okay? You got that?”
I nodded again.
Everything is illuminated? No, everything is contaminated.
Dave came back and geared up. We jumped back down onto the sidewalk. Gloved, masked, hazmat-suited and -hooded, we were ominous figures, exotic harbingers of Chernobyl, say, or Marburg in the middle of a mundane suburban landscape. If I looked out my own window and saw us outside, I would start thinking about which family photos I’d take along for the coming evacuation.
My emotions oscillated between the portentous and the pretentious. Everything seemed meaningful. I looked down to gray-pebbled sidewalk, cracked and aged. The children who had been coursing down the block when we pulled up (now removed a wary distance away) had run riot with sidewalk chalk. In addition to flowers, puppies and stick figures, they had traced their own bodies in cherry and lime, so there were chalk body-outlines everywhere, like in a noir movie.
The Milwaukee morning started out hot. I slipped my respirator up off my face, and I smelled the first whiff of decay from the still-closed house. Just a flavor, a faint tang of things to come, sugary and dark. My gorge rose.
“Are you doing all right?” Ryan asked.
I nodded and pulled my respirator back down.
“I’m going in first,” he said. “Check things out, see what all we are going to have to do.”
“I want you to do something,” Dave said. “When we open the door, poke your head in without your respirator, before we fog it with deodorizer.”
“Just to get the full effect,” Ryan said.
We crossed the gaily colored chalk-decorated sidewalk to the front door.
CHAPTER THREE
The Samaritans
Chris and Tim
Which now of these…thinkest thou, was neighbor unto him that fell?
—Luke 10:36
Observe the opportunity.
—Ecclesiasticus 4:2
In spring 1996 Tim Reifsteck and Chris Wilson were making a solid income from their newspaper circulation and sales company, sending out crews of high school students to peddle subscriptions door-to-door. They had both recently graduated with business degrees from regional colleges—Tim from North Central College in Naperville, Chris from Eastern Illinois in Charleston—but they had known each other a lot longer than that, since the second grade in Sterling, Illinois, a blue-collar steel town west of Chicago.
Running the newspaper sales company required fast-and-furious work from about three o’clock in the afternoon until eleven at night. That meant during the day there was a lot of time left over for golf—which was what the two partners were up to that dreary, overcast morning in late April. They met at Tim’s Aurora apartment building, planning on fitting in a quick prenoon nine, but were distracted by a collection of police squad cars and EMS vehicles parked in front of a house across the street. Tim didn’t know these particular neighbors, but he was curious as to what had happened.
They walked over and spoke to a police officer at the scene.
“A kid committed suicide,” the cop said. Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “They can’t find anybody to clean it up.”
“Really?” Tim said. “Did you try the phone book?”
“We already looked—nobody wants to touch anything like this.”
Aurora, Illinois, the home turf of Wayne’s World. The cop was bored, talky. He looked toward the house, a nondescript ranch that contained, somewhere inside, the blood-soaked aftermath of a tragedy. “It’s really kind of a shame, you know? I wouldn’t like to have the family do it. So we’re calling around for someone to help out.”
Tim and Chris exchanged the kind of telepathic look that old friends employ to indicate what they’re thinking.
“Well, we’re going golfing right now,” Chris said to the cop. “But if the family needs our help when we get back, we’d be willing to pitch in.”
All during their nine holes at Settler’s Hill Golf Course that morning, they were distracted.
“Don’t you think the coroner would take care of something like that?” Chris asked. “Clean up the remains?”
Tim said, “The coroner, or I thought maybe the police.”
“Or a funeral home.”
“Can you imagine what that would be like?” Tim said. “Your son kills himself, blows his brains out with a deer rifle, the police come and take away the body, but you have to go in there and make everything right again?”
“Well, they probably found somebody,” Chris said, hitting a chip shot at the seventh-hole green.
“Yeah, they probably found somebody,” Tim repeated.
Even with the distraction, they did okay on the links. Chris shot a 42 through nine, and Tim a 43.
When they returned to Tim’s street the squad car was still parked outside the house, and the cop told them that the family had failed to locate anyone who would clean up the mess.
Had the boys been serious about their offer?
Chris and Tim looked at each other again. Yes, they were serious.
Chris attended church more regularly than Tim, but they both had at least a theoretical allegiance to the concept of the Good Samaritan.
“The Good Samaritan,” said William S. Burroughs, “has probably gotten more people in trouble than any other story in the Bible.”
Despite such rancid sentiments, Tim and Chris genuinely wanted to help a family in need. But they were also motivated by curiosity.
“We were interested to see what it would look like,” Chris recalled. “We had never seen it before. Everyone has a picture of what a crime scene looks like from the movies, but it turns out the movie scenes are really mild compared to the majority of what is out there.”
“You picture that in your head,” Tim said, “and you just want
to kind of know, does it really look like that?”
Neither one of them had any kind of military or EMS experience. But they had hunted and gutted deer. They didn’t think the blood would be a big problem.
There was something else motivating them, too, something that was so far unspoken—but such old friends didn’t need to verbalize something to make it real. They were young but not that young, both pushing thirty, a few years out of school and wondering if selling newspaper subscriptions was all that there was to life. Neither of them was satisfied. They both had their ears cocked for the knock of opportunity—especially if it involved helping out other people.
They canceled work for the rest of the day and went into the house to examine the scene.
The family was absent, out making arrangements for the funeral. The cop directed Tim and Chris down the stairs to the basement den. It was by now late morning, six or seven hours after the teenage boy had placed the muzzle of a .30-06 deer rifle into his mouth and pulled the trigger.
The scene remained fresh. The blood was darkening, but still glistened, wet. The only light in the room was the dim washed-out kind spilling from a pair of window wells. Most of the blood-spatter was contained on the carpet. But the scene gave mute testimony to how the deed had been done, where the boy stood, where the impact of the bullet exploded the blood from his body.
The house was silent. The cop stayed upstairs. The wood-paneled basement den was like a snapshot of tragedy.
“I had a definite idea about what a crime scene looked like from TV,” Chris recalled. “There’s a little pile of blood here, another pile there, and that’s it. Well, a rifle leaves a little more damage than that.”
It is actually not a simple feat, to commit suicide by deer rifle. You have to hold the muzzle steady and at the same time reach down and push—not pull—the trigger. The unnatural maneuver is called a reverse squeeze in forensic parlance, and oftentimes it results in a jerk of the rifle and a missed shot. (Chris and Tim recall one of their jobs was a failed suicide by rifle, where a teenage boy who had only managed to wound himself complained to his father, “See, Dad, I can’t do anything right.”)
