Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  He startled awake with a gasp, then saw it was me. “Girl.” He reached an arm out. “Just sleep awhile.” So I leaned against him and tried, I did. But it didn’t work.

  “I think we have to go help that guy,” I whispered.

  He just groaned and rolled over to face the wall, all flaky with mold. So I scratched his back the way he likes, first through his T-shirt, then under it. This calmed him down, so I said, “I’m serious. That guy’s gonna haunt me.”

  “I don’t even know what you think you saw,” JJ said.

  “I saw a guy, cuffed and gagged. Hardly any clothes on.”

  “Leather?” he said.

  I shrugged. “So?”

  JJ rolled back to face me and smiled. “Little Lucy, you found yourself a gimp.”

  I twisted my face up. “I’ve seen the movie. I don’t think that was it.”

  “You know,” he said, “some people do bad shit because they like it. Rich fuckers get bored. They play weird games in those houses. You know.”

  “It was the garage,” I replied, a dumb clarification. “It wasn’t even heated.”

  JJ patted my hair. “He’s gonna be just fine, girl. You don’t have to worry one bit about that guy.” Then he closed his eyes and was gone; there was no more reaching him.

  Outside, it looked like it was going to rain all day, so I went to school.

  * * *

  In government class, Mrs. W said, “Nice of you to join us,” so I gave her my wounded, sad-sack look, and she seemed to regret it. She asked us to turn in our Call to Action letters, but mine was of course not done, as this was the first I heard of the assignment. We could pick the mayor, the governor, or the president—all tools.

  I decided to pick you, Mayor Barrett, because in your picture your face looks like somebody’s kindly, barely-there grandpa. I sat down and wrote to you about the giant sinkhole that opened up in the street outside my Aunt Tina’s house last spring, because a) that freaked me out, and b) what kind of city is it if the streets can just open up and take you? Plus, c) Aunt Tina said that wasn’t even the first time. Apparently, a few years back, North Avenue cracked open after a long rain and swallowed a whole SUV that was just driving down the street. It’s the stuff of nightmares, Mr. Mayor, I hope you know. JJ says Milwaukee’s built on swampland, with rivers running under it, and that the system keeping the wet away from the dry is always breaking down. I don’t know about that, but it sure feels true.

  In the seat next to me, Lexi Hunter flipped her yellow hair through the airwaves and whispered, “You smell like ass.”

  So I slid my cruddy boots over to touch her backpack on the floor, and told her, “Thank you.”

  I brought my Call to Action up to Mrs. W, and she read through it, clenching and unclenching the muscles around her eyes. Then she flipped it over, looking for the rest of it. “A good strong complaint,” she said, “is not the same as a Call to Action.” She handed it back to me. “To be a citizen means not just to complain but to think of solutions, and then to plan and act and get others to act with you. A Call to Action. We went over this.”

  Oh God. Plus, what am I supposed to ask for, seriously? The sinkhole’s already been filled. Mr. Mayor, could you maybe up and move this whole city to some more stable terrain? And stop the water falling from the sky?

  “And I need you to type it,” Mrs. W said. “Can you type it?”

  The bell rang, so I nodded and fumed off through the crowded halls toward the library, dragging Lexi’s insult behind me like a lame dog. I was almost positive I smelled okay, after that shower, but my whole way through the halls kids seemed to step back and clear a path for me, and suddenly all I could smell was shit and rot. But there, in the dim back corner of the library, I saw Diego in his bulky brown coat hunched over a desk, a giant turd sleeping. Ms. Himler let us rest there if we were quiet and no teachers could see us. I went over and touched his red hat to wake him. “We gotta get out of here,” I said. One look at me and he knew not to ask why.

  Outside, the rain had stopped. Diego fished a pack of Nutty Bars out of his coat pocket and gave me one. We walked without talking for a long time, and I led him toward the alley behind the hookah café, which is where we started out the night before. He slowed his steps, and when I squatted on top of the manhole cover to untie and retie my shoelaces, he stepped away from me and said, “We’re not going down without JJ.”

  “I know.” Anyway, through the finger holes of the manhole cover I could see the water flowing fast down there. Every trickle of rain on the street is just one of a hundred thousand sources draining down to these pipelines, even the defunct ones. And there’s a ton of dead ends down there, locked grates and sudden drop-offs—a million ways for the city to swallow you.

  “I mean, it’s like JJ’s territory,” Diego said.

  “I know,” I said. “I would never burn him. Or you.”

  “What is it about this guy you saw, anyway?” he asked.

  I sighed. “I was just thinking if we started from here, we could figure out where we went last night. We could find that guy’s garage from aboveground.” I told Diego about the chicken coop thing on the top of the garage, the little upraised section of the roofline with its tiny windows.

  “Yeah, but find the garage and do what exactly, in broad daylight?”

  “Just leave if you’re not gonna help me.”

  He turned away, looked up and down the alley, and I braced myself for that feeling you get when somebody gives up on you. But then he started moving a finger along his palm, and I could see he was charting out the neighborhood, trying to diagram the pipeline below our feet.

  “It had to be east of Downer,” I said. “The garages over here are too small.”

  “Yeah. But you’re gonna get tangled up in this for a stranger?”

  Diego has one of those big flat faces that holds you like a mirror, and he’s known me longer than anyone I trust. He was just trying to help me, I know. But I turned and headed east down Locust, toward the lake. That area between Downer and Lake Park is really only a few blocks wide. I could probably cover all of it before dark, on my own.

  Diego caught up and fell into step next to me, and we walked down Locust a few blocks without talking. When the red light stopped us at Downer, he put his hand on my arm and said, “I’m just trying to say—that guy, in the cage? You know nothing like that is going to happen to you again, right? You know that.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know.”

  Mr. Mayor, I’m not going to drag you through some long sob story about my past. It’s a conversation stopper. Anyway, I’m sure it’s all in a file somewhere if you really want to know. So look it up.

  A few years ago I told Diego my story, and he said, “Well, then the rest of your life is gonna be easy. It’s like you got the bad part over with.” He’s sweet that way; his imagination only goes so far. And I know that’s a good thing, a thing you have to protect.

  When we crossed Downer, the houses went from rentals to single-family, and they got big fast. Brick and stone, with steep slate roofs and green copper gutters, they’re the kind of houses the word stately was invented for. The streets were wide and empty, lined with big craggy trees that looked down on you like security guards. There were no more alleys, just straight, skinny driveways cut through the narrow space between houses, so the garages were tucked way at the back, almost out of sight. We had to slow down as we passed to get a good look at them. It was hard not to feel suspicious. But when we walked past an old man being dragged by two wiener dogs, it was like he didn’t even see us at all. We were just too far outside his picture of this place.

  The rain started up again, harder now, and I could feel Diego getting tired beside me, though he would never say so. He’s got issues with his lungs, and I could hear these little shrieks escaping his throat with each breath.

  “You okay?” I stopped.

  “Sure thing.”

  The thing you learn in this kind of life is that you ha
ve to pay your way all the time, pay ahead if you can, so when it comes down to the really low, dark times, you have somebody still willing to help you, someplace you can go. So I said, “I can finish this myself. You should go warm up someplace, get out of the rain.” I fished in my pocket for coins. “I can meet you in the laundromat. Go dry your coat.” I could feel the rain seeping through my sleeves.

  He shook his head and kept walking. His knit Badgers hat was deflating under the weight of the rainwater. And then behind him, behind this house, I saw it—the chicken coop in the sky. “There it is,” I said, turning Diego around.

  He squinted at it. “You think?”

  “I know.”

  He studied the house in front of the garage, a pale stone monster of a house with eight huge black windows, symmetrical across its face. The wide flat roof had a cement banister all around it, like you could put snipers up there. A hundred years ago somebody built this place, thinking he’d rule the world from it. And back behind it, a wide, tall carriage house, with three fancy wooden garage doors, and there at the top of the roof, the chicken coop.

  I tugged Diego down the driveway before he could bail.

  “You kids need something?” A lady came out of the house next door, pulling her long gray cardigan across her chest in a hurry.

  Diego froze, like a kid who thinks it’ll make him invisible.

  I said, “I lost my cat. We’re out looking for her. A little black cat named Tina.”

  The woman peered up at the rain. I could see her face film over with regret at coming outside. She did not want to get tangled up, she did not want to help us in this weather. And she did not want to be the kind of lady who sees kids like us and feels suspicious instead of helpful.

  “You live around here?” she asked, holding a hand over her hair.

  I nodded and pointed vaguely back toward Downer. “I saw her run this way. You mind if we just take a quick look, and then we’ll get out of here? She has leukemia, she needs her—”

  The woman waved us on and went back inside. I had to tug Diego into motion. I crouched down, saying, “Tina? Kitty, kitty, kitty. Tina?”

  We got back near the carriage house, and I crept around the side of it. There were a few empty planters and a wheelbarrow turned upside down against the side of the building. “Are you in there?” I called. “It’s okay. It’s me, Lucy. We’re gonna help you.”

  I reached up and tapped on a window. I wanted to make some noise that he could hear. Diego and I jumped up and down, trying to get a look in the window, but we saw nothing. We went around the back of the garage, though it was all scrub and rotting firewood—we could hardly pick our way through it—but finally, around on the other side of the building, we saw a black door, so I tried the handle.

  That’s when the alarm went off. The door was locked, anyway; the handle wouldn’t turn. Diego took off. I’m sure he wasn’t trying to abandon me. He probably assumed I’d be right behind him. But in that minute, with the noise of the alarm so strong, I figured, What the hell, we’re already in trouble, and I probably have a minute or two before the cops get here. So I stepped back and kicked at that door, I kicked and kicked. I got into it, it felt good. And then when I heard the siren approaching, I kicked even harder. I figured the only way to explain myself would be to show them what was inside this garage. And if I didn’t open it myself, I just knew no cop was going to.

  In the movies, strong men kick through doors like this on the first try. They do, it’s so easy. But me, I was still there kicking and kicking, bruises on the bottom of my foot, and I didn’t even dent that door. I barely even scuffed it. I can’t even claim any kind of lasting damage.

  When the cops got there, it was a guy I already knew, a guy who used to date a foster mom I once had. That was a bit of luck, really, ’cause God knows how they might’ve treated me otherwise.

  So I’m writing this now, Mr. Mayor, from inside your system, where they have me again. The cops did not believe me, big surprise. We sat in the squad car in the rain out front of that monster house, waiting till it was dark, while the cops knocked on all the doors and called all the phone numbers they could find for the owner. They weren’t going to break into anybody’s garage on the say of a girl like me. And so we drove off.

  So my Call to Action, Mr. Mayor, if you ever even get this, is I’m asking you, I’m asking you just to send somebody over to that house. The address must be in my file. You can look it up. Just have a peek in the garage, in the back corner. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it was a sick game. But even if it was, maybe it went bad along the way. You know, sometimes your imagination fails you, you can’t see as far ahead as the person you’re with, you can’t picture the foul fantasies that might come to them midstream. And so you find yourself trapped somewhere bad, even though you know it was your leg that stepped into that trap. I’m asking you to consider this, Mr. Mayor.

  I knew a girl once, back in a group home, who told me that when she was little she lived for a while in a house where the dad got a fighting spirit some nights, and when her mom saw that spirit coming she would take the girl and hide her in the cupboard under the stairs. She meant well, that mom, when she turned the lock on those cupboards and hid the key, she meant well. Obviously, she meant well.

  3rd STREET WALTZ

  by Matthew J. Prigge

  Westown

  The roar of the industrial vacuum cleaner tore through my bottom shelf–whiskey stupor like a chainsaw into a rotting pumpkin. I pulled myself upright in the wooden theater seat as the light and noise and movement of the morning revealed itself. The house lights shone full force, and the messy din of the cleaning crew’s once-a-week visit echoed through the auditorium. I leaned forward over the balcony rail. Four figures dressed all in blue moved about the aisles and rows, tidying the frayed carpets and beaten-down seats.

  I had, once again, passed out during the late show.

  One of the figures noticed me. “You the manager, right?”

  I croaked that I was.

  “Mr. Bradlee said you got the check for this week.”

  I went into a coughing fit and felt a dry heave—I hoped—coming up on me. I put my head into my hands and tried to maintain.

  “You okay?”

  I pulled myself up, knock-kneed and cotton-headed. “Yeah,” I said as loudly as I could. “Cash all right?” I didn’t even hear the reply as I dragged myself up the few stairs to the exit and down a cold hallway to the theater’s office. I took three ten-dollar bills from the petty cash box and folded them into an envelope. It was mid-April 1973. I was the manager of the Princess Theater, Milwaukee’s dead-end stop for adult entertainment. About a week earlier, word had come down from on high that the theater was closing at the end of the month. The checking account was empty. Debts were to be settled from the safe.

  I left the cash on the glass candy counter as I made my labored way to the front doors. The white glow of the morning sun stung my eyes, and I squinted hard as I stepped out onto 3rd Street and lit a cigarette. A few doors down from the theater, a beat cop roused a bum from the sidewalk and told him to move along. Across the street, a pair of hookers sat slumped at the lunch counter of the Royal Diner, their wigs sitting in the chair between them. A few civilians dotted the sidewalks, busily making their way to wherever they were headed. My eyes finally focused on a red shape in the gutter. I kneeled and picked it up. It was a metal letter L, coated in chipped paint. I looked over my shoulder at the marquee and raised a hand to shield my eyes from the wicked sun. DOUBLE FEATURE / RATED X, it blared. COUNTRY LOVE & COME ONE, COME AL.

  The early show that afternoon was at 12:30, the “businessman’s special” that we held every weekday to cater to the downtown pencil-pushers with vacationing supervisors or the stray prairie-bred conventioneer looking for something they couldn’t get at home. The 5:30 show was mostly for the bachelor set, the hip-flask crowd looking for a charge before heading out to cruise the bars. The 10:30 show was strictly dead end—johns, drunk
s, and jerkers. I was still stiff from my overnight in the balcony when the customers began to trickle in.

  There wasn’t much sense in breaking the news to the staff as a whole. We had about a dozen people on and off the payroll at any given time. Most were transients who drifted over from one of the legit Bradlee hotels: janitors who couldn’t stay sober, housekeepers who were pilfering wallets, hotel desk men who’d been caught skimming. A stretch at the Princess was a punishment, an attempt to reform a person through humiliation. They usually stayed just as drunk and crooked under my watch but went back to the honest world with a bit more perspective.

  The Bradlees had once owned a swath of Westown so mighty you could damn near walk from the river to 10th Street without leaving the shadow of one of their properties. Hotels, theaters, steak houses—they played to travelers and locals both, and you’d be hard-pressed to have any kind of honest fun downtown without passing them at least a few dollars. But those days were long gone. George Bradlee, who was gifted his first hotel by his father at age twenty-two, had dropped dead on Christmas Day, 1949. Beverly, his widow, took over the business and managed to steer the sinking ship until 1960, when Dick, their only son, took over.

  Dick put me in charge of the Princess a few months later, plucking me from the management staff of the last Bradlee neighborhood theater to go dark. Over the next decade, with Mother Bradlee slipping into a haze of dementia, he ran a dozen or more Bradlee properties into the ground, bleeding them until they couldn’t turn a dime and then leaving them to rot. When Beverly was still lucid enough to leave the mansion, she’d ask questions like, “Dickie, why is the marquee empty at the Empire Room? Why aren’t you watching after our Empire Room?” He’d pat her leg and tell her that Pop had never owned the Empire Room. He’d do the same when she asked indignantly about the filth shown at the Princess.

  The only other regular left at the place was Earl, a union projectionist who had been on 3rd Street even longer than me. He had been around since the first nudist camp grinders showed up in the city in the mid-1950s. When a house was forced to go blue and chased away the old staff, Earl got the call. Through the sixties, when the city censor board was cracking down hard, keeping any hint of tits, ass, or bush from the screen, Earl became a smut picture surgeon, snipping out offending material before the board even knew what to be offended by. And when the board was satisfied and had lost interest in the picture, he’d slip the skin back in for a few nights of big business before the print was hustled out of the town and the censors came sniffing for whatever picture was scheduled next.