Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  Never did find out where he vanished, though Helmut once took Ev to Berlin in a vacation sort of way, hoping to bump into him on Unter den Linden or near the Bundestag, places August Sr. had mentioned. If he’d found the man, he would have asked, Did you not fear us? And then killed him, probably. Though not in front of Ev.

  August Jr. never cared about finding his father. Soon as Mother died, he left for Las Vegas. Kept calling, telling Ev some mobster was going to break his legs, so she’d send him a check. Helmut never believed him till it happened.

  The black kid could break Helmut’s legs. He strikes backward into the dark with the cane.

  Nothing. No one.

  No breathing.

  “Hey!” he shouts. It’s a squeak of bravado. “I see you!”

  But he doesn’t. Above him, the clouds have blended into indigo.

  All he has to do is make it to his car. If the black guy wants to come after him . . . well then, it’s time.

  August Jr.’s time came after they broke his legs. He called and said it was because Helmut had refused to send him money. But that was just August Jr. making more excuses. Helmut told Ev to tell him so—it was easier than talking to him. Ev wasn’t talking to August anyway. She was talking to August’s latest lady friend. The one in his Christmas photo. With the red leather skirt. The one with the zinc-white teeth and a horse laugh you could hear clear across the whole United States whenever Ev asked how things were going.

  He’s moving past the Riverside Theater now, crossing the street. And another crossing at a right angle to that one. Crossing over.

  The lines on the black asphalt look like a referee’s shirt. There should be referees on every corner blowing their whistles on grown-up kids getting their kicks out of destroying.

  Dirty rotten kid, August Jr. called him in that last call. Helmut couldn’t remember what August Sr. sounded like by then, but he imagined his voice like August’s. No joking, though they were brothers. Said his brother was a dirty rotten kid like he meant it. No joking, though Helmut had loaned him money several times by then.

  Maybe he was right, he thinks, folding himself into his silver-gray Chevy.

  No, he was not. One of the two dirty rotten kids could paint his teacher nude when he was ten. And only one dirty rotten kid painted a picture of Ev reaching for his hand at the train station as if that really happened. That award-winning painting that still hangs outside the teacher’s office at Bayview High School.

  That painting must be how the hell Ev ever fell in love with a dirty rotten kid. It helped her imagine his big mitt enclosing her hand, then her enclosing him. Yin-yang.

  If he ever sees the dark guy again, he’ll tell him: Don’t ever let anyone call you a dirty rotten kid. Because there is something in you that someone like Ev will see one day. Something that let this old artist go, put his cane into his car, and drive past the ferry, down Superior Street.

  He should have stopped and talked to the kid. Maybe learned him a thing or two. Too late now, as he’s pulling into his garage, hauling himself out of the car a leg at a time. Whole legs, even if they don’t work so good.

  A private eye called from Vegas after August died and asked if Helmut wanted him to investigate his brother’s death, because those broken legs sure weren’t natural. And Helmut told him nothing about August was natural, and he wasn’t going to spend another dime on that son of a bitch, not even two cents.

  Was August Jr. ever afraid of crossing over? Did he ever wonder what’s on the other side? Was he in hell before, or after, or—what? There’s no way he can be peaceful.

  Helmut enters through the side door, calling for Ev. She’s usually standing in the bay window, watching for him.

  Silence. Unmoving, hollow.

  He calls out again, hanging up his cane.

  He switches on the tree lights. They begin winking, colorful as memories.

  Helmut’s heart falls ten stories, banging below his ribs till he can barely breathe.

  In the bedroom, her side of the bed is unused. In the bathroom, her toilet articles are neatly arranged. Her sparkly scarves scratch his cheeks as he opens one closet. Her sixty-

  shoe rack bulges from the other. Her cream gloves are still in their satin-lined box. Her collection of music boxes is dusty.

  Ev wouldn’t leave him. No matter how bad the dirty rotten kid is, Ev would never leave him.

  He stands in the living room till her tree lights begin doubling and blurring. He gazes out of the bay window. Snow is settling on the Noel sign, the one he painted for Ev.

  The weight of the coming year presses down with the snow.

  Maybe he should be glad she’s no longer here. Together they’d outlive their savings and the little that comes in via Social Security—which he wouldn’t have but for Ev talking him up, sending samples of his work to ad agencies, and invoicing his clients. Ev won’t have to deal with the new guy acting like August Jr.: Loud on loving America, proud of never learning anything but how to cut people down. Destroying the hard work of all the folks Helmut fought for.

  Helmut stands there a long time.

  Please, Ev, tell me you’re okay.

  He turns the lights on at the top of the stairs and holds onto the railing. He descends, a step at a time, into the smell of linseed oil and Gamsol.

  Yup, he still has a few primed canvases in his studio. He sets one on his easel, stares into its blankness.

  He will dress her in viridian-green velvet. This time Ev’s hand, freckled and wrinkled as he remembers it, will be reaching for his.

  PART III

  What Made Milwaukee Famous

  NIGHT CLERK

  by Larry Watson

  Yankee Hill

  Every goddamn night. Two or three o’clock the elevator doors open, and there he is. And for the next three or four hours, he sits in the lobby like it’s his fucking job.

  Only it’s not his job. It’s mine. I’m the night clerk at the Whitcomb.

  You’ve wondered about that? Yeah, the Whitcomb is a hotel, but it’s nothing like the Hilton and sure as hell nothing like one of those get-your-ashes-hauled-here motels out on the edge of the city or a here-today-gone-in-an-hour drug dorm in the inner city where gunshots might interfere with your sleep. The Whitcomb is a residential hotel. People live here. Oh, we get a few guests who stay a night or two, go to the conference, get drunk or laid or both, and then go home. But mostly our people are here long term, like for months, as they try to get the books straightened out at United Widget or get the website up and running for Acme Industrial. And some people here are permanent, like year round. Oldsters whose kids don’t want Mom or Dad in a nursing home but want someone to keep an eye on them. Or single workingwomen who come home after dark and want to walk into a well-lit lobby with someone at the desk to see that they’re safe and sound. And if it’s after midnight and before seven a.m., that someone is me.

  I don’t even do much checking in or checking out. Hell, by the time I come on duty most of our residents are tucked in for the night. And nobody just walks in off the street. We’re in a quiet neighborhood on Milwaukee’s East Side, where there are more churches than bars. The Whitcomb. Like I say, where people live.

  Except for the guy who comes down in the elevator every night. He’s temporary. He came here to die.

  But not at first. Initially, he came to live. To undergo a series of cancer treatments at our world-fucking-famous cancer hospital. But about a quarter of the way in, the doctors told him, Sorry, no go. Not working. Might as well go home. Get your affairs in order.

  But he didn’t go home, wherever home is or was. He stayed put. At the Whitcomb.

  Where, from the wee small hours of the morning to the first blush of light in the east, he sits in the lobby in one of those creaky old green leather wing chairs. He doesn’t read. He doesn’t listen to podcasts. He doesn’t play Angry Birds. He doesn’t try to chat up the desk clerk like a couple of our resident insomniacs. He just fucking sits. Oh, and he smokes
. Every half hour or so he goes out the front door, paces back and forth under the Whitcomb’s awning, and puffs his way through one heater after another. Yeah. Cancer. And he smokes. What the fuck. Maybe if you got a death sentence, you’d light up too.

  It goes on like this for weeks. He and I are practically the only ones up and moving in the Whitcomb at this time, but we don’t say a word to each other.

  How do I know so much of his story? Luther, the head of maintenance, fills me in. He was fixing the dude’s radiator one day, and he sees a bottle of pills on the coffee table. And Luther, who’s never afraid to enter where angels fear to tread, says, “Hey, my grandpa takes those. How are they working for you?”

  The guy gives Luther the story. The special hospital, the special doctor, the special treatment. The failure. The future. Which he has practically none of.

  “He’s an interesting guy,” Luther tells me. “You ought to talk to him. Bet you’d get along. Both of you got that same fucking look of doom.”

  “But I’m not dying anytime soon.”

  “Whatever you say, man.”

  Thank you, Luther. Remind me to feature you in my next novel. Except there won’t be a next one.

  Summer turns to fall, but this guy’s wardrobe doesn’t change. Cargo shorts, T-shirt, fleece vest, and flip-flops. And as the calendar pages fall, I can’t help wondering, How much longer for this guy? Yet there he is, every night.

  And that finally gets to me.

  So, one night I come out from behind my counter and walk over to him. I’m standing there for a good minute before he glances up. Does he look like a dying man? Not really. He looks like maybe he was a linebacker thirty or forty years ago in high school or college. But still pretty damn fit. Big cask of a chest. Legs like tree trunks. A weightlifter’s arms. A head so damn big and round you think it ought to bear Jerry West’s silhouette. A week’s worth of stubble, but what the hell does he need to shave for? His gray hair is cut close and sticks out from his skull like iron filings stuck to a magnet. But his skin looks as gray as a cloudy day. Or like a man who only comes out at night. And his eyes are sunk so deep you wonder if anyone’s in there.

  “Hey,” I say. “You know what? You make me nervous sitting here.”

  “Yeah?” He gets up and moves six feet over to the other wing chair. “Better?”

  “Not really. See, I’m wondering when you’re going to finally fucking die.”

  If this pisses him off, he doesn’t show it. He gives this sort of understanding nod and asks, “Why? What date do you have in the lottery?”

  “No, man. Just my own curiosity. You’re down here every night. I’m wondering if I need to be ready to do CPR or some shit. Like I say, I’m nervous.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I’m giving you my own personal DNR. There. You’re under no obligation. Better?”

  “Yeah. Much.” I turn and walk back to the desk, and when I sit down again, he’s gone. Time for a smoke.

  But then, two nights later, when he gets up from his chair he doesn’t go outside. He walks up to the desk. He leans on the counter. I know he’s there, but I keep staring at the computer monitor like I have work that needs my immediate attention.

  He just waits. For a man who’s on the clock, he’s patient.

  When I finally look up, I give him the standard front-desk greeting: “May I help you?”

  “Who do you want to see dead?”

  “Good question.” Actually, great question. Right away, I decide I’m going to use it in the very near future. Maybe my new pickup line. “I want to say my stepfather, but he’s so full of shit he’ll probably keel over just from the weight of it any day now. So not him.”

  “It’s not like three wishes,” he says, his voice low and growly. Is that the cigarettes or the cancer? Or both? “Just give me a name.”

  “All right. How about Jenny Landry?”

  “How about her?”

  “Dumped me for a guy I introduced her to. So, yeah, Jenny Landry. I’d like to see Jenny dead.”

  He braces his hairy arms on the counter, stands up a little straighter, and says, “Jenny Landry. Okay. Let’s make it happen.”

  I think I understand what he just said, but in this matter, you want to be sure. “What are you saying?”

  He points a finger at me. “It’s what you’re saying, man. Jenny Landry, right?” He turns his head for a coughing fit that finally ends with him spitting a little American Spirit chunk of lung into his hand. But the coughing brings a little color to his cheeks. “What have I got to lose? I might as well try to do someone a favor before I check out. So, give me Jenny Landry’s itinerary, and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” I say, “you’re serious.”

  “As a heart attack,” he says. He’s got this wide mouth, so his smile makes me think of a wolf. He points to the Whitcomb notepad on the desk. “Write down what I need to know. Where do I find her? When is she there? That kind of shit. And what she looks like. Unless you want to come along on the expedition. You can point her out.”

  “Fuck, man. You’re crazy.”

  He shrugs. “Just trying to find something to fill the hours.” He pulls a pack of smokes out of his vest pocket and backs away. “Let me know when you’re ready. But don’t take too long.” He flashes that wolfish smile again. “Jenny Landry, right?”

  As soon as he’s out the front door, I whip out my phone and bring up my photos of Jenny. Especially the one she sent me for my birthday. Sweet Jesus, I’ve never had a better present.

  When she was moving out, I said to her, “Walk out that door, and your body will be all over the Internet inside of five minutes. Within an hour about ten thousand men will be whacking off to that picture.”

  Jenny didn’t miss a beat. “Go ahead,” she said. “Get it out there. I’ll never look better. Might as well preserve the historical record.”

  I couldn’t do it. Not to Jenny. Not to that body.

  By this time, Dying Man is back in his chair. I approach him, and before I can utter a word, he says, “Let me guess. You changed your mind.”

  I nod. “It’s a big step,” I say.

  “The biggest.” He shuts his eyes, and they’re closed for so long I wonder if he’s fallen asleep. Then he grimaces, and I can see pain must be scraping its way through him.

  He opens his eyes, and for some fucked-up reason I don’t understand, I say, “Sorry.” Like he’ll be hurt because he won’t get to murder Jenny Landry.

  “No worries,” he says. “But maybe you’ve got a second choice? Give it some thought. But like I say, don’t wait too long.”

  “Am I supposed to pay you for this? Because not only am I mostly broke, but I owe a fucking bundle in student loans. What do you want?”

  He laughs. At least I think it’s a laugh. It ends in another

  one of those wheezing, coughing jags. “What do I want? What do I want? Fuck, man. Figure it out. Nothing you can give me.”

  I don’t need this dude mocking me, so I head back to the desk. I’ve only taken a couple steps, however, before it comes to me. I turn around and say, “J.G. Burch. Burch with a u. Professor J.G. Burch.”

  “Write it down,” he says, and makes that writing gesture in the air that assholes make when they’re calling for the check. “Give me everything I need to know.”

  I’m tempted just to write the word prick and let him take it from there.

  That wouldn’t be enough, of course. But Jesus Christ, I could fill a couple of these pads with all the reasons someone should take out J.G. Burch.

  First of all, he’s the reason I’m here, behind the desk of the Whitcomb, so fucking far off the path I was on that I can’t even see the way back.

  I was going to be a writer of books, a novelist who turned out work that would make Stephen King’s oeuvre look like fucking kiddie lit. Novels that would be a kind of thriller-

  horror-porno-literary hybrid, books that would need a warning on the jacket: Beware, All Y
e Who Enter Here. The prose would dazzle the shit out of readers while it was turning their stomachs and turning them on. Cross genres? Fuck yes, it would cross genres. Bookstores would need to invent a new section to shelve these bastards.

  And I was moving right along toward that goal. Toward that life. I was in an MFA program, not a top one, but what the hell. I just needed a few initials to put behind my name. It was the work that’d matter.

  In the first couple workshops, my fiction got the reaction I could have predicted. Most of the dudes ate it up with a spoon. A few of the chicks didn’t get it, but most of them put my work through their feminist filters and acted all offended. Not Jenny, though. Jenny said, “It’s disgusting. I love it.” Then after the first time we fucked, she said, “Well, that was vanilla. I thought from your fiction it would be, you know, filthier. Weirder.”

  Then the second year the shit hit the fan. J.G. Burch taught the workshop, and I was a fucking goner.

  Burch wasn’t someone they just pulled in off the street. He was the director of the MFA program, and its star, all because of this dainty little novel he published about a million years ago. It’s a love story between a sailor and an old Chinese woman, all rendered in this poetic prose that’s dense as a brick and understandable by about four critics. But apparently it was the right four because it’s been right up there on the masterpiece shelf since it was published. (By the way, the sailor and the old woman? They never even fuck, as far as I can tell.)

  Right from the get-go, Burch didn’t like me. He called me the rough-hewn Mr. Veller, and the first time I had a story before the workshop he gave me the full treatment, complete with props and a reenactment.

  In the story, sort of a Blade Runner homage but with more human-replicant sex and a desert chase on flying motorcycles, one of the humans gets his throat cut, and as he’s dying he blood-gargles his farewell to Fie. (Fie’s the replicant he’s in love with, though in the story they’re not replicants but cryptos.)