Deadeye Dicke by Kenneth M. Kapp

It didn’t happen often; sometimes a decade or more would pass, and it never was in the same location: Cold, clammy winds with a smell of death. If you were there at the time, you could attribute it to dead ale wives on the shore of Lake Michigan, a polluted river with tanneries, sewer overflow, Red Star Yeast, one of the many breweries, or a slaughter house down in the valley. At one time or another, they were all there. You’d walk on thinking it was just a freak wind with a swirly-whirly eddy. “Move right along folks – nothing to see, the smells are already gone.”

~ * ~

Dicke squinted, tentatively brushing the dirt from his sleeve before running his arm gently across his face. He was used to the coarse stitching on his buckskin jacket: three over, looped back one, then out the other side and repeat. It was a pretty pattern and strong, but hell on his face. The last couple of times he woke, there were worse things nesting on the sleeves and he wasn’t old enough to sign on with the 'eat or be eaten' crew. Couple of hundred years sunk in Milwaukee earth was long but not that long.

Dicke had arrived with one of the early English traders in the late 18th Century. He took a fancy to a Native American whose brother didn’t appreciate Dicke’s advances. An arrow found his eye and Dicke, whatever his name was, became known as Deadeye Dicke. The brother felt bad and to make amends, brought him into his Ojibwe Tribe. The sister, however, refused to marry Dicke, said it wasn’t the lack of an eye or that he was ugly, but a matter of smell. “He stinks like fish that have forgotten how to swim,” which is a polite translation of what she said. Nevertheless, Dicke cast his lot with the tribe, settling with them in the fertile Menomonee River Valley.

But his temper only worsened with the Wisconsin winters, and three years later his body was discovered on the east side of the Milwaukee River. The tribes looked at the fecund corpse and the bullet hole that had enlarged Dicke’s dead eye, concluding that his death was the result of a white man’s fight and that Dicke should have a white man’s burial. A hole was dug close to where he was found, and he was buried with no ceremony or stone to mark the spot. Without a proper burial with sprinklings and speechifying, he was doomed to wander, within a mile of his new home with only a minor restriction – he couldn’t cross a body of water. He was stuck in what was to become downtown Milwaukee if not for all eternity, at least for a goodly time.

Dicke was not the worst of men, and he slept at times for decades, surfacing only when he’d had a bad dream or when the vibration from heavy construction literally woke the dead.

Once he'd surfaced in 1932, when seized casks of alcohol from a Prohibition raid were destroyed in his resting place. He was tipsy and didn’t do a long walk-about. But two clerks walking by after the Secret Service vans left complained of the cold and rancid smells, remarking that that whiskey was no loss.

There was mischief in him, in those early years. He took a disliking to Solomon Juneau. Thought he was a smarty-pants just because of his name. He rattled the logs of his cabin back then a couple of times back then, almost provoking a pitched battle involving Byron Kilbourn, Solomon blaming the disturbance on his competitor. Hearing about the cabin replica put up in 1947, he dropped in one night in 1950. He laughed, “Chinks between the logs, drafty as a bitch, and the rain will come straight down that chimney. They don’t build them like they used to.”

Dicke wasn’t much for buildings, but he did take a fancy to the Romanesque Lake Front Depot. He missed its opening in 1890, but returned early in the new century hoping to find a way to derail the traffic. “Must be a hundred trains a day. How’s a guy going to get some rest?” Best he could do was to float up to the top of its clock tower and howl to the winds, moaning, “Ain’t fair, I don’t get spit for any of the giddy gawkers checking their pocket watches against this clock. Gulls will have to do their number for me.”

But he was getting older and wiser. Blaming his old bones or damp chill he’d taken on from a particularly wet spring, Dicke decided life was best left for the living. But he was in a quandary. He knew the story about Snow White and the prince, but his case wasn’t the same. She wanted to wake from her sleep while he just wanted to sleep and never wake.

Once he came back during Milwaukee’s Bastille Days and watched a mime making believe he was going to kiss all the pretty fairgoers only to step back at the last moment. It gave Dicke an idea.

Summerfest on the lakefront was a rowdier affair. On a hot day, attendees would party heartily, working up a good sweat and quenching their thirst with beer after beer. The women would keep up with the men and visit the bathroom as often.

If he were lucky enough to come back during Summerfest, he’d hang around behind the mirror in the women’s facility. Judging by the one time he looked in after hours, it wasn’t rare for someone to leave a drunken kiss on the mirror. He would just hover back and wait for his chance.

It was one summer at the end of June when Deadeye surfaced. Joining the crowds rushing to the Summerfest grounds, he decided on the women’s bathroom closest to the main stage. He didn’t have long to wait. A thoroughly tipsy group of young women rushed in to use the toilets. Then it was time for a lipstick check. They all generously refreshed their bright crimson lips and as soon as the first planted a kiss on the mirror the others followed. Deadeye was behind each in a flash, hoping to go out in glory.

And so it was. At midnight, Deadeye Dicke returned to his unmarked resting place never to rise again. The date: June 27, 2009, and the band: KISS.