Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  I smiled at that because he didn’t strike me as a flower kind of guy. But hey, you never know, right? I’d almost forgotten the little bouquets were there. I hardly ever sold any, but Myron liked the flowers. The world can be an ugly place, he once confided in me. Flowers bring a little beauty to it.

  “Six bucks,” I told the customer.

  “For those crappy flowers? Fucking cheap kike Jew motherfucker who owns this place,” he said without a hint of self-

  consciousness. “I should fucking burn it down with him in it.”

  He saw the look in my eyes, but instead of apologizing or explaining—as if there was an alternative explanation besides anti-Semitism—he smiled. It was a cold, cruel smile, the droop going right out of his mouth.

  I didn’t say a word. I didn’t do anything except ring him up, bag his stuff, and take his money. After the guy left, I went into the back storeroom and punched the walk-in freezer door. I spent the rest of the shift in the ER at Columbia Hospital. The hand wasn’t broken, but it was banged up pretty bad. The pain and the bruising would eventually go away. The self-recrimination would not. My inaction ate at me. I blamed it on being tired. On being in a strange place. On my trauma over Lisa. It was all of those and none of those and a million other things. In the end, it didn’t matter. I hadn’t done anything. I’d stood there and taken it. I felt something people in the twenty-first century don’t understand—shame.

  With my hand the way it was, I couldn’t work. But I could drink and drink and drink. Mixing the booze with the stuff the doctor at the ER had given me for the pain, with the self-loathing, changed me. John noticed and made it a point to stay away from me. Lisa noticed too. No, we weren’t living together anymore, but we were still seeing each other. I guess it was sort of like when doctors do all those tests to make sure someone’s dead before they make it official. Lisa and I were just doing our due diligence. We knew in our hearts that whatever we’d had or thought we’d had was gone. We just needed to make sure.

  “Robby, are you all right?” she asked, placing her hand around my wrist. It was the next-to-last time I would ever see her and the last time we touched. “You know I still care about you.”

  “I’m fine,” I lied.

  It was only fair since she had lied first. All she really cared about was when I was going to leave for Brooklyn. I didn’t blame her. In her shoes, I would have wanted me gone as well.

  That night, after I dropped Lisa off for the last time at Century Hall, I went to Kalt’s on Oakland Avenue, across the street from the Emporium. Frankie, a waiter who’d taken care of me and a lot of the crew at the Emporium, lit up at the sight of me. Frankie was gay, pretty openly too. In 1977, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, that was a pretty brave thing to be. His bravery increased the intensity of my shame, but I was almost as happy to see him as he was to see me.

  “Hey, Robby, I heard you were hurt,” he said, patting my bandaged hand. “Want me to kiss it and make it better?”

  “I’m not your type, Frankie.”

  “I don’t have a type.”

  “I’m straight.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  We both had a laugh at that.

  “Yukon Jack on the rocks with a Blatz chaser?” he asked, knowing the answer. “I’ll be right back with that.”

  Then I heard it, a voice I’d heard only once before. It came out of the shadows at a corner table across the restaurant. It was a loud, boozy voice full of nastiness and preening discontent.

  “Come over here, Frankie. I got something long and hard waiting for you.”

  “Cut it out, Karl,” another voice said, coming out of those same shadows.

  “Fuck you, Tim,” Karl said. “Frankie and I go way back. After all, he’s the queer that made Milwaukee famous. Ain’t that right, faggot?”

  Karl, so that’s your name. It was Karl, the anti-Semitic fuckface who’d wanted to buy the flowers at the end of my register. Apparently, he was liberal with his hate and cast a wide net with it that included not only Jews but gays as well. And in that moment, I decided Karl and I would get well-

  acquainted. At least, I would get well-acquainted with him. I hurriedly drank my Yukon Jack, skipped the beer, and left too much money as a tip for Frankie.

  I parked my beat-up ’69 Tempest a few spots down from Kalt’s doorway and waited. Fifteen minutes later, Karl came staggering out of Kalt’s with someone I assumed was Tim. Tim tried to help Karl stay upright, but Karl wasn’t having it. He kept slapping Tim’s arms away. I rolled down my window so I could hear their conversation.

  “Leave me the fuck alone, you donkey motherfucker.”

  Tim had had enough. “Fine, asshole. Suit yourself.” He walked off, leaving Karl to lean against a stucco wall.

  I watched as Karl collected what was left of himself. Five minutes later, he took a few deep breaths and managed to cross Oakland without getting run down. The only thing open on that side of the street was Axel’s. Of course, Eastside Emporium was across Oakland as well, but it was still relatively early, and he would have had to cross Locust too, to get there. I didn’t think old Karl had it in him to make it across two streets without collapsing. I was pretty sure he had his sights set on more drinks. And Axel’s was the kind of place where the beer was cheap and the scrutiny was nearly nonexistent. My guess was right. Axel’s it was.

  I didn’t follow Karl in. I waited on him. He closed the place and sat down on the sidewalk as the lights went dark inside the bar. Eventually, a cab came and took Karl away. I tailed the vehicle, keeping my distance. I wasn’t sure why I bothered. Karl was too drunk to notice, and the cabbie certainly wouldn’t have cared. The cab came to a stop on South 5th Street in front of a beige brick building that housed a machine shop. Karl rolled out of the backseat like a human blob. He lay there in the gutter for several minutes until it began snowing. That got him stirring, and I watched him go through a big metal door that, I guessed, led to an apartment above the machine shop. My guess proved correct when I saw a light pop on a minute later in a clouded glass window on the second floor above the shop.

  * * *

  I showed up at the machine shop at five thirty the following morning and waited for Karl. At seven, he appeared. He went across the street to a parking lot, emerging a few minutes later behind the wheel of an old Chevy pickup. He drove the pickup a little less than a mile to a salvage yard in the Menomonee Valley just by the freeway. There, sitting outside the fence, I watched him work the forklift, moving the hulks of squashed cars from the crusher to an area where he stacked them like cordwood. He left work at seven p.m.

  What I realized after following Karl for a week was that there was an awful, unremitting sameness to his days. We were twins in that way. He would end his days with a cheap meal and a cab ride to Kalt’s and/or Axel’s. Then a cab ride home. In the meantime, I let my beard grow in, and I quit my job. I had a new job, and his name was Karl. Myron said he was sad to see me go, but wasn’t blind. He stuffed a hundred-dollar bill in my pocket and patted me on my now-furry cheek.

  “Go home, tatellah. This place isn’t for you.”

  “You’re right about that, boss. It was a pleasure.” We shook hands.

  Later that week, I stopped following Karl and began insinuating myself into his life, such as it was. I avoided Kalt’s because I couldn’t risk Frankie blowing my cover, nor did I want to risk Frankie’s disapproval. But I was all about Axel’s, and that extra hundred bucks Myron had given me went a long way to helping my mission. I didn’t figure Karl would’ve recognized me from our one previous encounter, but the beard made it a certainty. And Karl was easy enough to befriend. I told him my name was Tommy. He wouldn’t have cared if my name was Tinker Bell. All you had to do was buy him a few beers, a shot or two, and bitch about how the world was shit. You commiserated with him about how the niggers, spics, Jews, and A-rab fucks were taking over, and you were a friend for life. Nor did it hurt that I drove him home and saved him cab fare.

&
nbsp; Here’s the thing, though. I didn’t really have a plan. Oh, believe me when I tell you I had any number of murderous fantasies about him. I thought about going back to the Emporium to visit one of the guys and stealing a deli knife with which to cut Karl open. I dreamed about feeding his guts to him as he bled to death. I thought about running him down as he drunkenly crossed Oakland Avenue in the dark. The cops would be unlikely to charge me. I thought of a hundred ways to end his worthless life, but in the end I decided I wasn’t going to risk my entire future on him. That was until the night Lisa and two of her friends from work came into Axel’s. Karl and I were at the far end of the bar as Lisa, Mary, and Toni settled in at the opposite end.

  “Lookee here,” Karl said, spotting Lisa and her friends. “Three pieces of meat for the taking.”

  Karl, as I’d learned, was a big talker, but not much of a doer. So I was willing to dismiss his grossness and chauvinism as just more bullshit. Then he sealed his fate.

  “See that one?” He pointed down the bar. “Name’s Lisa. I’ve had my eye on her for a while. Bitch works at Century Hall and lives around the corner on Locust. She’s gonna be mine . . . one way or the other.” He smiled that same smile he’d shown me that night at the Emporium. “Truth be told, I hope she turns me down, because I’ll enjoy it that much more when I shove it down her throat. I’m tellin’ you, Tommy, my man, I’m gonna enjoy hurtin’ her. She’s gonna bleed and then beg for more.”

  I kept Karl there until closing, an hour after Lisa and her friends had gone. I’d had to hide my head a few times as first Mary, then Toni, and finally Lisa, passed me on the way to the bathroom, but they never spotted me. That was the last time I would ever see Lisa. Later, I found out that she married soon after I left town and that she was pregnant within the year. Then, a few years ago out of the blue, I got an e-mail from her sister Karen. The e-mail consisted of a phone number and a request for me to call.

  “Lisa’s dead, Robby,” Karen said. “Cervical cancer.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.” And I was. Hearing it felt like getting whacked across the ribs by a two-by-four. “But why—”

  “She wanted me to call and say she was sorry for how things worked out between you guys. That she really did love you intensely and that she never wanted to feel that kind of love again. She said it just hurt too damned much.”

  Truer words had never been spoken. It just hurt too damned much.

  Anyway, I drove Karl back to South 5th Street that night as I had every night for seven days running. Only this time I helped him into the shop instead of up to his apartment. He didn’t put up a fight, because I had slipped a few of my ground-up pain pills into his last two beers. His dead weight was tough to handle, but it was worth it. He didn’t protest when I placed his head under the hydraulic metal press machine, the kind they used to stamp wide steel sheets into various shapes. I would have liked to have killed him slowly so that I could have savored the sound of his skull cracking. So that I could have watched the blood and brains squeezing out of his eyeholes. But it was over in a flash, his limp body dangling from the stamp plate.

  * * *

  I stayed in Milwaukee for a few more weeks, half expecting the cops to knock on the door of John’s old shitbox. The knock never came. The papers said they thought it was suicide or maybe an industrial accident. What it was was a mercy killing. Mercy for Frankie, and me, and for Lisa, the pretty girl with the cat-green eyes who should have been more careful in the line buying beer at Summerfest.

  COUSINS

  by Jennifer Morales

  Silver City

  Carlisa came back from the army changed. A hitch in Afghanistan would change anyone, but it was maybe more extreme for my cousin. Carlisa came back and asked us all to start calling her Carlos. Call him Carlos. He chose my niece’s fourth birthday party to deliver that request to the extended family, a month after he returned.

  The news didn’t land easy on my tía. “Better they should’ve killed her there, the Taliban or whoever,” she said to the guests assembled at Candela’s banquet hall, “since she’s dead to me anyway.” Tía Consuelo kissed the birthday girl on the head, grabbed her purse, and made for the door.

  Tío Enrique took it about the same, it seemed. No comments about the Taliban, just a disbelieving grunt and a slow suck on his beer before he plunked it down on the pink tablecloth. The party fell apart after that.

  I followed my cousin out. “Lisa—sorry, Carlos,” I called after her—him. “Carlos, wait up.”

  Carlos had always been handsome, and the edges laid on by military service in the rugged mountains of the Hindu Kush didn’t hurt. His sharp jaw and high forehead gave him the fierce, alert look of a panther. An emerging black mane just growing out of the GI crew cut added to the catlike appearance. Tía Consuelo’s kids got the looks. My siblings and I got the—well, I don’t know that we got anything special. Stubbornness, maybe. Or a lack of caution.

  “I don’t need any more hassle, Marta.” The streetlight caught the tears in his dark eyes.

  “I’m not following you to hassle you.” I put a hand on his forearm. Under his thin cotton shirt, I felt the muscles tense.

  “Lisa!” Our cousin Pamela leaned out the door of the party hall. “Tía says get your stuff outta her house. You can’t stay there no more.”

  I turned back toward the open door. “Fuck you, Pamela.”

  “Watch your mouth, Marta. I’m just the messenger.”

  “If delivering messages was all you were doing, you’d deliver them to the right person.” I reached an arm around Carlos’s neck. “This here is our primo Carlos. ¿No lo conozcas?”

  Pamela scowled and slammed the heavy door shut behind her.

  I loved pissing off self-righteous Pamela, and if I could do it while defending my favorite cousin, so much the better. Perfect fucking Pamela.

  “Thanks,” Carlos said, wiping the tears from his eyes. “Come back with me to the house?”

  Packing up his things took less than fifteen minutes. Most of his clothes and personal items were already—or still—in his army bag. He tossed in a couple of photos from the shelf above his bed and grabbed his watch from his desk drawer, zipped up the bag, and said, “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  He stayed with me in the upper flat I shared with my ex, Brenda, for a couple of days, then cleared out one afternoon while I was at work. I found a note on the kitchen table, a bottle of Tapatío holding it down against the June breeze pouring in through the window over the sink.

  Getting a room at the Wayfarer. I’ll see you around.

  The Wayfarer was one of several rooming houses in Silver City, the neighborhood where we grew up and still lived, on the near South Side. This one catered to new hires at the mining equipment factory, ones whose first checks hadn’t come in yet or who spent them on the bottle instead of building up a security deposit for a more permanent residence. Still, among its run-down, miserable peers, the Wayfarer was the least run-down. No less miserable, though.

  I went to see Carlos a few days after he settled in. His room was on the third floor, up a narrow set of stairs drenched in a dubious mélange of smells. The thin walls leaked the noise of a dozen televisions and radios.

  “What are you doing here, Li—Carlos?”

  He was sitting cross-legged and wedged into a corner on the twin bed that took up most of the room. A book, facedown, a yellow legal pad with his gawky handwriting, and an open laptop fanned out around his knees.

  “Just living.” He shrugged.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. Carlisa and I had been close once—sleepover cousins, keep-a-secret-from-our-parents cousins. Sitting on his bed had been something I did reflexively, but I felt my cousin stiffen at my invasion of the narrow space.

  “What’s got into you?”

  “I don’t know.” He closed the laptop and then the book, covering them both with the notepad. He drew his knees up to his chest and crossed his arms over them. “I just feel weird in
my body right now. I’m not sure I want anybody to touch me.”

  The screenless window was cracked open to the summer air. The sound of a car crash rattled the glass, though Carlos didn’t get up to look. I did. A navy-blue sedan was in the intersection, its bumper snapped off and the driver’s door open. A woman emerged from a green SUV with its front lights smashed. The other driver, a bulky man in a Bucks cap, was yelling at her. I kept my eye on the situation as we talked. I didn’t have much of a plan in mind if the man went after her, but I’d go down there in a second if something went foul. I didn’t appreciate people giving our neighborhood a bad reputation.

  “It’s like, I don’t even want to have a body right now—not this body, anyway.” He shoved his fingers into his hair, a frustrated move I remembered from our eighth grade algebra study sessions.

  “You talk to your mom?”

  Carlos peeked around his tented hands and sneered. “What do you think?”

  Word along the family grapevine was that Tía Consuelo had banned Carlos’s name from being spoken in her house and that Consuelo, Enrique, and our abuela had gone in for a consultation with the priest at St. Vincent’s. Something was brewing, though I didn’t know what.

  The cousins were divided—some saying live and let live, others keeping their opinions to themselves for now, maybe hoping the whole thing would just blow over. And then there was Pamela and her husband Ronnie Junior, Pentecostal converts who took this family crisis on as their personal mission for Christ. Pamela gave me a few messages that I would never pass on to Carlos, stuff about submission to God.

  “Yeah, it’s probably best to just lay low for a while.” Three floors below, the sedan driver stopped yelling and hunched over his car hood to write something down. The woman stood far away from him, talking on her cell phone, her shoulders shuddering like she was crying. “It’s maybe too much to ask, you know? For people to come around overnight?”

  “I didn’t ask them to come around overnight, Marta. I just wanted to let them know what’s going on with me.” He unfolded his legs, scooted against the wall, and patted the edge of the bed. “You can sit down.”