(Note: This is the first installment of Mike Magnuson's series, "The Falls," an OnMilwaukee.com fiction exclusive. Please note that the series may contain adult language and situations.)


1) Telling It to the Dead Man


Rejoice!

Tom's life took a turn for the better, finally, when he least expected it would, when he was deep into feeling sorry for himself one January Monday morning in Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, not long before daybreak, earlier than Tom had been awake to begin the day for at least twenty-five years, and colder, too: Jesus God, the temperature was five degrees below zero. That was so cold the air burned Tom's lungs and made him feel like hiding in bed, under thick blankets, for the rest of his life. Oh, Poor Tom: forty-three years old, separated from his wife and so broken-hearted about it that he sold his restaurant in Asheville, North Carolina, and left his wife there living with her Pilates-instructor boyfriend and moved halfway across the country back to this place, the Falls, his hometown, to try and pull himself back together. Three weeks he'd been home, and the best-case scenario, in his estimation: he was not back together; he was freezing his ass off.

But he did give himself credit. He was trying as best he could to move on. He had gotten up early this morning and started his 2005 Volvo wagon at his townhouse apartment -- last townhouse in the row behind the True Value -- and driven down Menomonee Avenue to the YMCA, where the plan was to get the new week off to a cracking start with a vigorous two-hour, forget-all-about-the-wife workout. So far, so good. The wife was front and center in his mind, true -- Marissa, North Carolina mountain hippy girl from way back turned over the years into a middle class, middle-aged woman with an appreciation, she told him not long ago, for the flexibility and the strength, and not just physically, that her new life in Pilates gave her -- but Tom had persevered through the mental misery and the cold this morning and made it to the YMCA and parked his car in the lot. Now all he had to do was leave the heated comfort of the car's interior and step outside.

He hated the intense cold, especially after all those years he'd been gone from it, living in the southeast, where a brutally cold night would be twenty-five degrees above zero, but he didn't hate the cold enough because, hey, he was living in Wisconsin now. If a person wanted to live in Wisconsin, a person could not hate the cold; otherwise, a person would have to kill oneself.

This was certainly true: Tom needed to start accepting a lot of things.

He twisted the keys in the ignition to off and grabbed his gym bag from the passenger seat and opened the door and stepped into the raw air over the snow-dusted lot. He flexed his upper body muscles and his arms to try warming himself and only succeeded in tweaking a little muscle in his neck. The muscle stung as if an unseen force had poked a thumbtack in it.

"This sucks," Tom said. "What am I doing here?"

He looked around the lot to see if anybody had heard him and would voice agreement with him or tell him to shut the fuck up, but nobody was there. He could hear, close by, his warm car engine creaking in the bitter cold and, in the distance, vehicles driving hither and yon. He thought he heard a bird, too, but decided no way, what would a bird have to sing about in temperatures like this?

He was so cold he felt like running but he couldn't. He was afraid of slipping and falling and breaking himself, so he walked toward the YMCA building in shivering, shuffling steps, his shoes squeaking in the snow, and when he reached the end of the row of cars where he'd parked, he looked in between two minivans and saw a man who was dead.

Tom knew the man was dead, not an observation based on any professional expertise in differentiating those living from those were not but because in this cold, if a person were breathing, Tom would see steam escaping, wouldn't he? But emerging from this guy's mouth and nose: nothing. The dead man was thick-faced, a broad Polish nose and heavy cheeks covered with a graying, trimmed beard that clearly had the opposite effect the man intended; the beard made his face appear even fatter. In Tom's opinion, the dead man was a classic standard-issue middle-aged white fat Cheesehead: cheap green parka, a Packers hat, black full-fingered gloves, jeans, and dirty white tennis shoes. Tom could see streaks in the dusting of snow on the ground where the man's tennis shoes had apparently slipped, looked like both feet simultaneously out from underneath him. He must have flipped backward and whacked his head on the hard ground, but the daylight at the moment wasn't strong enough for Tom to tell if blood was behind the man's head. Blood behind the head would be proof -- and this had held true since the dawn of civilization -- that life had moved in the wrong direction.

What was the guy's name?

Tom recognized him. He'd seen him late Friday afternoon in the Y's locker room, the guy milling around near the Jacuzzi with a towel stretched around his waist, telling a friend of his: "I don't feel like eating too heavy tonight. I'll just go to the Trysting Place for fish." Tom had watched the guy laugh and say something about how, for crying out loud, a few beers just have to help wash down your five-piece batter-fried haddock.

You betcha.

Tom didn't believe the guy had exercised on Friday afternoon. Probably the guy just came in after a day on the job and sat in the sauna and took a Jacuzzi, basically coming to the gym, as so many people coming to gyms did, to get cleaned up on the outside and not on the inside. Tom remembered thinking he looked a lot like that guy, except maybe seventy-five pounds lighter, and that something about the guy's voice had sounded familiar. Tom wondered, like he did when he saw anybody in the Falls, if he knew him back in the old days. Tom had grown up here, graduated from high school here, from North, when there used to be a North and an East high, and he moved away when he was eighteen and never returned, except for the occasional Christmases when his parents were still alive, which they hadn't been for nearly ten years now: killed in a car wreck, believe it or not, on the way home from Saturday night Mass at St. Mary's. Sad, sad, sad. Still, when he moved back to the Falls three weeks ago, he thought he might recognize almost everyone in town and that people would wave and say, "There's Tom," and he would have nice pleasant conversations with his fellow native Cheeseheads. But he hadn't recognized anyone. He had been looking for seventeen- or eighteen-year-old faces he might recognize, and listening for the seventeen- or eighteen-year-old things they might say, but each of those people, like Tom, well, look at the dead guy: all Tom could recognize in him was that he was dead.

Tom said to the guy, "You're probably better off. Life's a lot easier the way you've got it now."

The time was probably 6:30 a.m. Tom supposed that the parking lot this time of the week at the YMCA would be bustle-bustle, people showing up in droves to start their new weeks in their new years in the properly regimented way, but nobody was there, only a couple dozen newer-model cars and the faintest tinkling of snow meandering past the parking-lot lights on the way to the ground. The sky was a mix of night-orange from the streetlights along Menomonee Avenue together with the pinker, more desolate light of dawn spreading across Lake Michigan and over Milwaukee and into the Falls.

Tom wondered why, of all places to run after his wife left him, he hadn't decided to run to Miami?

The dead man, as dead men will, remained in his repose -- comfortable-looking in his green parka -- and the longer Tom looked at him the more he was sure of it: this guy went to high school with Tom.

What was the guy's name?
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