Milwaukee Noir

by Tim Hennessy

  When he didn’t have clients, he walked the two miles to the movie theater. It was hard to believe he walked more than he had in New York, but his Fitbit told the truth. Everything he wanted was close enough, no need for taxi, subway, or bus. He’d pull a granny cart behind him up to the Whole Foods. He’d walk farther on to the bookstore. His barber was a few blocks away, a real artist, he said, a woman named Shaza Palooka. We said, “You made that up!” It was with indignation that he replied, “I did no such thing. That is her given name.”

  Shaza Palooka was twenty-nine years old, four foot eight, with two black buns at her temples, and who, for some reason, was already stooped. At every appointment, she spent a full hour cutting his short hair with her little tiny scissors. Together they had a Milwaukee love fest, discussing all the advantages of the city, Shaza puttering around his head and face. Shaza, who would step back to examine her progress, coming back to him, pressing the pads of her fingers to his skull, fluffing her work, saying, “Hair, oh hair, Edwin! You just have to cajole it, don’t you? Edwin, you have to befriend it.”

  What, then, was the dark side of such a life? What is the darker side of a Midwestern city, beyond its particular history of oppression, beyond urban blight, crime, and poverty? The worst thing that happened in the Abbots’ first year was the theft of a neighbor’s kayak, gone from the back shed. We wondered about a cultural vacuum, we wondered about loneliness. It’s possible that Shaza Palooka was the only adult, besides Sally John and his clients, to whom Edwin spoke at length, Edwin in a trance while his hair, strand by strand, floated to the floor. We wondered if it was during the haircut that the idea of Sally John’s bike trip occurred to him.

  Maybe he’d become obsessed with the notion of perfection, something he could not possibly achieve with big messy Sally John fucking her brains out with an anesthesiologist from Whitefish Bay. Would life be better without Sally John hauling her purse the size of a duffel bag into the kitchen after a day’s work, Edwin setting out a good supper with a full-bodied wine? She’d collapse on the sofa afterward up in the library, somewhat drunk, pointing the remote at the TV, soon fast asleep. Maybe he considered how it would be, if, when his daughters came to visit, Sally John wasn’t grilling them, doing her best to micromanage those young women’s lives. Sally John had the habit of finding fault with their boyfriends, the daughters early on learning to keep their lovers away. We all want to murder our spouses, and even if, in the heat of the moment, we mean it, we of course don’t actually mean it. Did Edwin, of all people, mean the thing he would never have said as a joke?

  We’d always wondered why he hadn’t divorced her. How many affairs had she had? We’d lost track. In New York we’d perpetually felt sorry for him, having to accompany her to hospital galas, a great number of people in the room aware of Sally John’s infidelities. Edwin, head up, noble chin, talking by the bar with one of the husbands about his bicycle. Did he stick with her because, you know, he loved her deeply? Whatever that means! We no longer knew what love was, or how to think about it, if the word was adequate, if it could mean inertia, affection, hatred, and habit all at once. Maybe he’d listened to enough couples in therapy to know that even if he divorced Sally John, he was stuck with her.

  We could understand his wishing she might disappear. The relief of that erasure. The solace of such loneliness, the comfort of missing her. Edwin with an even lighter step walking up Farwell to the Oriental Theater. The pleasure of coming home to a dog; he’d get a small brown mutt, a loyal creature his patients would like to pet. He could sink into the problems of his clients, their misery something he could appreciate even if he no longer shared it. When he finished for the day he’d put the dog in his pannier, its sweet little head meeting the wind as he rode out into the late afternoon. On the weekends, after his bike ride, he’d construct bridges and new towns in the basement, the train country expanding from the table to the floor and into the laundry room. He would glue lakes and streams, fields and forests, to fabric that served as earth. Oh, his dominion! The daughters would visit more frequently, they’d make him dinner, and their boyfriends would show up too, everyone talking, no one silent or shy. Could it be that a vision so simple, a vision of ordinary life, with a specific quality of quietness, was Edwin’s guiding principle? A vision that seemed possible in Milwaukee, one that he came to want with a longing that is usually reserved for illicit love.

  * * *

  We didn’t learn that the bike trip had been Edwin’s idea until the first night in France. The eight campers were seated at the table in the chateau that was our base, the four of us old friends, and four others, strangers from Britain, in addition to Coach Martin and his wife, the cook. Sally John was telling the group that she was now living in Milwaukee, in Wisconsin, a city and state that, in truth, she said, she was having trouble thinking of as home. A tear sparkled in her lash. She got everyone shaking their heads over the alarming homicide rate, the drive-by shootings, the culture of poverty that was hardened in the African American community. As she was speaking about the dire eviction problem, she was so winning, dismissing her knowledge even as she clearly understood the crisis and was offering solutions. When she mentioned that her husband had suggested the Pyrenees trip, it was as if Edwin would have done anything to spare Sally John, if only for a week, the pressures of a city riddled with crime.

  “Edwin suggested the trip?” we said.

  “I told you that, girls!” We still called each other girls.

  We didn’t dare look at each other, didn’t know what our bewilderment might say. Maybe after a minute we laughed to ourselves, thinking of Edwin at that moment on his morning ride, returning to a kitchen free of Sally John’s breakfast dishes.

  The next day she was freshly distraught. We had before us a fifty-mile ride, a 3,000-foot change in elevation, some or other terrible grade to climb for our warm-up. She said, “Edwin told me I could do this. He was sure.”

  We did not have much of an understanding of her training regime—a few excursions down the lake path, as far as we could tell.

  “He encouraged me to make this trip but I—I’m scared shitless, girls.”

  “We are too,” we assured her.

  She said, “I’m just going to speak to Martin. I’m going to the bike room to have a chat with him.”

  When she was gone, we said, as if Edwin was right there with us, “What the fuck, Edwin Hale?”

  One of us said, “He wants her to die.”

  “He wants us all to die.”

  We laughed.

  There was a puzzling detail that stuck with us: she did not own a pair of clip-in biking shoes. Edwin had not advised her that on a trip of this difficulty no one would be wearing tennis shoes, every biker equipped with proper shoes and pedals. He didn’t say that not having such basic equipment would be like showing up for the steeplechase without a horse. The rest of us had brought our own pedals and knew enough to secure them to the bikes Coach Martin was providing.

  We could not understand Edwin’s lapse in judgment, his disregard for his wife. On that first morning, he was no doubt asleep alone on the great plains of that row house bed. Maybe for the sheer hell of it, he’d left his model train running downstairs, his own world humming. Coal cars circulating. Lumber passing by towns that did not require wood. He’d sent Sally John abroad without shoes, knowledge, or strength, having enlisted her to our care. He hadn’t asked us, hadn’t pointed out to us in a private e-mail that this would be the case. He no doubt understood our love for her and took it for granted that with us she would be safe. Maybe, we mused, as soon as he woke up in five or six hours, he’d go directly to the dog pound to get his new true friend.

  On our way to the mountaintop that first day, we rode through a forest and up to a plateau where great woolly brown cows strolled, the bells around their necks clanking as they went from tuft to tuft. How strong Coach Martin was, and of what good cheer, riding very close to Sally John, one hand on his own bike, the other on her back,
pushing her up the narrow road. We could hear her laughter from down below, Martin apparently telling her stories to pass the time.

  While we waited for them at the summit, we wondered with more seriousness if, say, Edwin in fact had a plan, sending Sally John to France with us. We’d begun to wonder if actually, he didn’t want her to die. Not one of us laughed at the idea the second time. Or maybe he thought she’d survive, of course she would, but he’d have the satisfaction of her failure; he would secretly, lavishly, enjoy her humiliation. He knew that we, the friends, would be fine because we had trained in spin class and up in Vermont on the weekends.

  Or maybe, we thought, he hated us too.

  As Coach Martin and Sally John got closer (her laughter louder), we wondered if Edwin didn’t know his wife at all, if he’d underestimated her, if he hadn’t envisioned the alpha male taking up the great cause of getting Mrs. Abbot to the summit. When the Siamese biker twins finally came into view, at the last hairpin turn, our fellow riders, younger than we were, began to cheer, calling Sally John’s name, shouting Champ! and Trooper! and Winner!

  We laughed bitterly then. That thing she did, she was doing it! And they were rewarding her, calling her brave for completing an exercise for which she hadn’t bothered to prepare. We knew, even if they did not, that Martin was going to have to push her up every climb for the next six days. We wanted to call Edwin, to tell him to take the goddamn dog back to the pound, to inform him we were sending his wife home before she got into bed with Martin. We were thinking to say, We know you now. We understand how much you loathe her.

  Sally John throwing her arms around Martin and the other fellows did make us feel for Edwin more fervently than we ever had before.

  As the days passed, it was funny that although we were in France, and enjoying our rides, savoring our own hard-earned strength, and the remarkable countryside, and the meals at the chateau, we most often were thinking of Edwin. We naturally especially had him in mind after the accident, after Sally John’s fall. A crash most logically would have happened on a long descent, but Sally John tumbled coming up to a roundabout in a busy town we had to pass through to get to our home base. The tragedy took place on day five. Martin, that morning, had ridden with Sally John to the bike shop, had put her in clip-in shoes and the requisite pedals. She’d been scared to death of course, but she’d done very well until the late afternoon, when, with the roundabout in view, she got flustered. A car coming on struck her.

  For a few days, there seemed little hope that she would live. Such little hope, in fact, that we discouraged Edwin from getting on a plane—what was the point? She’d be dead by the time he arrived. And, in the weeks after, when she was improving, when she had stabilized, the three of us taking turns at the hospital, we reiterated that he would have the care of her for quite some time to come, and that he should spend his energy getting the house ready for a patient who would be confined to her bed, and who, while breathing on her own, and seeming to understand the conversation around her, had lost the power of speech.

  * * *

  Of course, Edwin’s life changed. And ours did too. We became far more acquainted with Milwaukee than we’d ever imagined we could, the three of us rotating in and out of duty at Ogden Avenue. We came to appreciate what we thought of not as the philistinism of the city, but rather its gentleness, its humility. The lake’s fresh water seemed an innocent cousin to our ocean, and the hip young people looking as they do the world over, those kids on Brady Street drinking their coffee and gazing at their tablets, seemed content, seemed not to care that they weren’t in Brooklyn. The city, to our way of thinking, was glad to be under the radar, confident in its beauties, trying in meaningful ways to correct what was brutal. We came to think the di Suvero industrial spareness was just right, the sculpture like a sunburst, announcing the glorious, improbable swan on the lake. It seemed to us, in sum, that Milwaukee was a place of possibility and surprise.

  Sally John’s money was of real use, funding our travel, and also our retirement. In addition, it paid for the home care angel who arrived in the mornings to bathe our girl in the library-turned-bedroom, to make her just as gorgeous as ever, that great silky hair still expensively streaked, a moisturizing foundation smoothing away her age, her enormous eyes opening and closing as we read magazine articles and the books of her youth out loud to her. And sang, we often sang. Also, on the hour we paraded the ninety-pound chocolate Lab, Moto, in and out of the room. Sally John could squeeze our hands in answer to our questions, and she seemed to enjoy the food we spoon-fed into her lovely big mouth.

  You might have thought that our attention to our friend, the coordination of activities required, as well as scheduling the visits, would have strengthened our already strong bonds. We, the three of us, did, as always, work effectively as far as the details went. Furthermore, we really were not competitive in our caretaking capacities. And yet, a curious thing happened. Gradually, without our realizing, we began to be closed to one another. Not that we acknowledged this, not that we weren’t, as always, in constant communication. We expressed our love, as always, in our e-mails and texts and in person, signing off with love—no name attached, only love. And in person always saying, “Love you!”

  It was through Shaza Palooka of course, of course it was the hairdresser, all of us becoming her clients—so cheap, those hour-long cuts—the woman so close to our faces, her soft hands moving through our scalps, that we learned—or thought we were learning—the secrets of our circumstances. We knew what we did not wish to know, that one of us, and maybe another, also, had started to share that enormous bed with Edwin Hale Abbot. Shaza didn’t say so directly, but when she mentioned that one of us enjoyed the linen sheets made especially in Italy for the custom-made bed, when she remarked that the other wished the shower was slightly larger to accommodate two, when she paused midcut, the scissors stopping, to marvel at Edwin’s strength—we knew what she was speaking of, we knew what confessional Edwin had chosen, what priestess was his own.

  Edwin Hale, the dark horse, and ourselves too, we supposed; we ourselves were surprising. But on the whole we thought of him, of Edwin, who we came to believe had orchestrated all of the events, the near-death, followed by the friends visiting, one after the next after the next, way out into the future, each of us with our particular charms. Only in Milwaukee, we’d say to Sally John, Sally John the person we talked to now, Sally John the friend who knew everything.

  TRANSIT COMPLAINT BOX

  by Frank Wheeler Jr.

  Midtown

  Monday, 1232 hrs: 5621 / 0922 / 151 / N-23

  “There’s a new definition for the word racist,” I said. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A racist is now defined as any Republican who wins an argument with a Democrat.”

  “Ha-ha. Very funny. I’m a Democrat.”

  “I was too till I started working in Milwaukee,” I said. “And you’ll think that joke is hilarious by the end of the shift.”

  My probie and I walked to the bus stop on North 17th, just at the edge of the Transit System property. He was fidgeting with his belt. Wasn’t used to wearing the gear yet. Expanding baton, pepper spray, cuffs, radio—they were all still foreign.

  “I’m just saying,” I told him, “they’re gonna call you a racist.”

  “Who’s they?”

  “The shitbirds. The troublemakers we see every day on the bus.”

  “But I’m not one. I’m not a racist.”

  “That’s a non sequitur.”

  “A what?”

  “It means it doesn’t follow. Whether or not you are a racist has nothing to do with them calling you a racist. That’s where we are with this now. It’s just a strategy they use to make you shut up and back off. It can be used for anything, and any word that is used to describe anything by definition has no meaning.”

  “Sure, I get it. So what am I supposed to do with that?”

  “Do your job. Just know they’ll try to hurt you with whatever they can no
matter what you do.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Simple answer is you’re white, and they’re bored.”

  * * *

  “Write this down,” I said as the bus pulled up to the shelter. “Four sets of digits, just like dispatch says it. Bus number, operator number, run, route. Leave a blank for the operator. Bus fifty-six twenty-one. Run one fifty one. Northbound twenty-three.” The doors opened, and we waited while several people alighted. Then Probie and I got on the bus.

  “What’s happening, professor?” the driver said, smiling at me. He was a middle-aged black man, fat and bald, wearing the Transit sweater vest.

  “Good to see you, Rory,” I said. “Got that operator number?”

  “Badge nine two two,” he said. I nodded to Probie, and he wrote that in his notebook too. It was packed. Every seat taken, people standing in the aisle all the way to the back.

  “Okay,” I said, “so we both take the front post. Normally, one of us would go to the back, but it’s too crowded.”

  “Ten four,” Probie said. We stood on opposite sides of the aisle just behind the yellow line with my back to the driver.

  “How was your vacation?” I asked the driver over my shoulder, still looking at Probie.