Coming to You Live from the Road Complaints Office
by Robert Long Foreman
When I heard the news this morning on my way to work, that a serial killer has been murdering people in Wheeling for years, and has only just been caught, I was really surprised. Nothing big and important like that ever happens in this town.
That’s right. I said town.
We don’t live in a city, the serial killer and I.
Or, I guess, we officially live in a city.
Wheeling is called, on signs and things, “The City of Wheeling.” But it’s only got 20,000 people in it. That sounds like a town to me.
Serial killers aren’t supposed to live in towns. They’re supposed to live in real cities, places with at least, I don’t know, 50,000 people in them, where they have their pick of victims on streets that throng with promising, young candidates. Or old ones.
Not this serial killer. No way. He shares with us the little town that’s known as Wheeling, West Virginia.
Now. When someone says “West Virginia,” imagery comes to mind: hills, coal mines, streams that run orange, and a man in the woods who wants to rape Academy Award nominee Ned Beatty while playing the banjo.
But it’s nothing like that here. The hills part is accurate—we’re surrounded by them—but Wheeling is a river town in the northern panhandle, wedged between Ohio and Pennsylvania. It looks like Pittsburgh, or Cleveland, and while a lot of people sneer at those places only a little less than they sneer at West Virginia, the point is, there’s nuance where you least expect it, and not every place is what you think it is.
And we’re definitely not supposed to have serial killers.
I mean, sure, yes, Charles Manson did spend part of his childhood in McMechen, just south of Wheeling. And he did petition the justice system to transfer him, from the prison in California where he spent his life sentence, to the West Virginia State Penitentiary in Moundsville, just south of McMechen, so he could live closer to family down there.
But Manson didn’t kill people in Wheeling. He went far away to do that.
And, strictly speaking, he never killed people at all. He got the hottest teens around to do that.
I heard about the new, non-Manson killer on my way to work. They talked about him on the news—the national news.
A woman had come running out of his house with her arms tied to her body. She’d been kept in his basement, but had gotten her legs free. She burst from the house and landed on the neighbor’s porch, screaming for help, saying she’d been tortured for weeks, and that the women who’d been with her were dead.
The killer who did it would have killed her, too, except he forgot to lock the door when he took his cat to the vet’s office. So she got out.
When I got to work, I went in and said hi to Tony.
He and I work together in an office called Road Complaints. It’s housed in an obscure room in the northeastern wing of City Hall. The front desk, right outside our room, is where people come to complain about roads. They tell us things like that US Highway 71 needs to be repaved. They declare to us that Eastman Street, in Warwood, features a pothole that has flattened one of their tires.
We process their complaints, and direct them to the appropriate bodies, like the Department of Transportation.
People can call or email us with their complaints. For some reason, though, they like to voice them in person. They haul ass over here, stand before the clerk at the front desk, and shout and wail—or they speak politely, but they usually shout and wail—about the roads in this town and how bad they are. They draw comparisons to what the roads must be like in Baghdad and Mogadishu, places surely none of them has ever been.
They say, “What kind of country are we living in? What happened to the things that matter? Where are the people who care?”
The clerk transcribes their complaints, and she passes them back to me and Tony, in this backroom.
The complaints arrive here as long strips of paper. They’re like incredibly long fortunes, from fortune cookies, only your fortune is always something like: You will soon call the DoT and tell a civil engineer about the deer that’s lying pulverized in the middle of Route 5 by the abandoned hockey supply store.
Tony and I have the privilege of not having to deal with the public out front. I did that work, day in and day out, taking complaints firsthand for more than a decade. Forty hours a week, I listened as the city’s aging populace griped about how bad things are and how they’re only getting worse.
Not anymore. No way.
I mean, the roads, of course, are bad and getting worse. That hasn’t changed, because public infrastructure is an afterthought at best. It’s a thought that comes after the people in charge have thought long and hard about the boats and cars they want to have. They line their pockets with the people’s money and leave us almost nothing. And so we have roads that peel our tires, and our schools are where children go to have the latest neuroses installed, like updates to Microsoft Word that introduce new features you don’t need but which Microsoft will charge you for, regardless of whether you use them.
After ten years at the front desk, I got promoted. So now I sit back here with Tony, who never had to put in his time out front. His uncle works for the mayor.
I resented that egregious nepotism for a year. Then I got over it, and stopped throwing Tony’s lunches in the dumpster out back on days when his privilege got on my nerves.
I pretended ignorance, when he asked about the lunches. It worked. He believed me.
I’m good at pretending. I’ve been doing it since I was a kid.
Tony developed theories about his lost lunches. One of them involved a marauding band of orphans.
I told Tony, the morning I heard about the serial killer, about how the day before, after work, I got my oil changed at Valvoline, and how, while I was there, they changed my air filter.
The woman showed me the filter when she took it out. It was covered with dust. It looked filthy.
And I know, yes, that everything is filthy, all the time. Nothing has ever been truly clean.
But the way it looked made me want a new air filter. So I bought one. She installed it for me.
It’s what they do at Valvoline. Or it’s one of the things they do.
Tony said, “You let Valvoline change your air filter? You never let them do that at Valvoline. They charge you so much money for an air filter.”
“Hang on,” I said, and pulled the receipt from my pocket. “It was $18.99.”
“It’s too much!” Tony cried.
“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I said. “Drive in filthy air?”
“No, Jim. You buy your own air filter and replace it yourself. It’s not hard. I could have shown you how to do it. An air filter costs, like, fifteen bucks.”
I said, “You know, all my life, people have been telling me what I could have done differently that would have been better, after I’ve done something the wrong way already and it’s too late.
“They never tell me the right way to do a thing in time, and they always tell me what I could have done differently after the fact.
“When I helped my friend paint the apartment above his garage, so he could rent it out to this TaskRabbit he’s friends with, his wife gave me a hard time because of the shorts I wore to paint in. She thought they were nice shorts. She said I shouldn’t have gotten paint on them. She said I should have worn a pair of her old gym shorts. But I didn’t even know she worked out.”
“Does she look good?”
“Yeah. But you know. For some people it’s natural. They don’t have to work out to look good. Unlike me.
“Those two are divorced, now, anyway.”
Tony said, “I don’t know anything about that. I just wish you had more common sense. It’s like nobody ever taught you how to do anything.”
And that, of course, is the salient issue of my life.
No one ever taught me how to do anything. There was no one around, when I was growing up, to do that teaching, because the only things nuns know how to do are pray and complain about how their feet hurt.
I grew up at an orphanage. My parents didn’t want me. And the nuns made sure I understood that was the reason I was at their orphanage.
“Robert is here because his parents both died,” they would tell me. “Karl is here because he’s German. You, Jim, are here because your parents didn’t want to raise you. They begged us to take you, and as reluctant as we were, we agreed to relieve them of their burden. And you are quite a burden.”
It affects everything, when you know a thing like that. When you hear about it every day of your life for so much of your life.
When I brought it up with him, a little later, Tony said he hadn’t heard anything about the serial killer.
“Why,” he asked, “did you tell me about your air filter before you told me about the serial killer?”
I shrugged.
He said, “I think the one thing is more important than the other thing.”
I said, “Tony, I thought you would have already heard about the serial killer. You’re his neighbor.”
“What?”
I surfed over to a news website, where I found in written form the story I’d heard on the radio. They hadn’t identified the torture victim, or the murder victims, but they’d posted a photo of the culprit. I showed Tony.
He said, “Fucking hell! Shit! That guy lives on my fucking street!”
I said, “That’s why I thought you already knew about it. Weren’t the police on your street this morning?”
“I don’t know. He lives way down the street. It’s a long street. I don’t go that way when I come to work.”
“That explains it. Mystery solved.”
For the rest of the morning, we worked, but we also talked about the serial killer.
Tony had one eye on his work, the other on the news.
They were posting updates to the story almost hourly. They work hard, at the news, so that everyone can be informed.
“My god,” Tony sad, “they say he picked his victims up in a van he drove slowly through neighborhoods. I used to see him drive that van in my neighborhood.”
“You mean your neighborhood,” I said. “And I’m using the plural ‘your,’ because it’s both of yours. Yours and the serial killer’s. Mister Stab. Is his van a minivan?”
“No, Jim. My god. Why would he use a minivan? Those have windows!”
I said, “I always wanted to drive a minivan. But I was worried women would think it meant I want kids.”
An hour later, Tony said, “Oh god,” which was only a little different from when he’d said “My god” a couple of times, earlier on.
“This says,” he said, referring to the news, “he may have killed as many as thirty people.”
“How do they know that?” I asked, a little annoyed, because with Tony so distracted by mass death I was having to field more complaints than I really ought to have had to.
“They’re finding so many bones,” he said, “they can’t tell whose are whose.”
“Were whose,” I corrected him, and then said, “Shit,” because the sound of myself saying “Were whose” was going to stick in my head and replay itself all day. Were whose. Were whose. It’s one of those phrases that doesn’t sound like a phrase, it sounds like nonsense, like it’s nothing more than noise. It makes you mindful of how all speech is organized noise.
“There’s a new update,” Tony said later. “He killed somebody’s mom! They said she’s been missing for a year. They found her skull.
“At least now they know where she’s been, I guess.”
I think that was the day Tony lost his innocence. When he was aware, once and for all, that bad things happen all the time, in lots of places, and it’s almost inevitable that one of them will happen near your house.
Even if you live in Wheeling, you’ll be near a mass murder someday.
That, I think, was the real reason Tony couldn’t look away from his computer screen. He wanted to keep up with developments, sure. Everyone is curious. But he was also watching the person he had been until that morning slip away from him.
Prior to that day, Tony was an uncomplicated man. He wasn’t dumb, but he was simple. No-frills, like most of the people in Wheeling. Wheelingites, we call ourselves.
Because we’re close to Pittsburgh, people here root for the Steelers, and maybe the Penguins—and maybe the Pirates, too, if they hate themselves and want to always suffer.
Our people are truly devoted to their teams, and I think something about that must be sort of beautiful. But it’s also hard to get the people to think much about anything.
The serial killer made them think, mostly about human remains.
Tony said the news said the neighbor almost didn’t open her door, when she heard the serial killer’s kidnapping victim out there. She was banging against the door with her head, since her arms were tied. The neighbor checked the door on her Ring app and didn’t see a thing. She could still hear the banging, but the live camera feed from her doorbell said nothing was there. She thought it must be a twisted prank, or a trick to get her to open her door so she could be robbed or worse.
And then the latest complaints came rolling in, about Walnut Avenue. Tony’s street.
A sinkhole had opened, they said, right in the middle of the street. It had swallowed a car.
One of the complainers out in front said it was his car. He couldn’t get his other car out of his driveway, either, because the sinkhole was blocking it.
Someone else who came to the Road Complaints desk said the emergency road crew that came to repair the new sinkhole was blocking her driveway.
I don’t know how all these people reached our office when they couldn’t drive their cars. Public transportation in Wheeling is almost nonexistent, like it is almost everywhere else in America.
It used to be great. There was a trolley. It ran all over town, and could take you anywhere, until the 1950s, when I guess everyone came to hate the trolley. They wanted to have to drive wherever they went.
People love to drive. It’s why they get so upset with us when the roads aren’t perfect.
Anyway.
I was thankful, that day, that I didn’t have to work the front desk. Most of the complaints that reached us in back had exclamation points on them. That meant people were shouting.
Some of the sinkhole complaints mentioned bones. They said the sinkhole had bones.
I thought people must be losing their minds, they were so enraged. That seemed more likely than this being the first sinkhole in history that had a skeleton.
I wondered about that for hours. But then, at the end of the workday, before we left and went home, Tony read on the news site that the sinkhole had opened like that because the killer had dug a tunnel from his basement through the neighborhood and under the street.
He hadn’t filled the tunnel with bones exactly, but he had placed human remains in there. And so when the sinkhole opened, yeah, people looked inside and saw lots of bones. Like on the TV show Bones, I imagine.
The lesson I learned that day, I guess, is that everything really is full of everything.
Streets are full of bones, vans are full of killers. The air in my car is filled with dirt, and houses that look perfectly fine, with new roofs and sturdy foundations, are sites where unimaginable horrors can take place, tortures and murders and things I can’t fathom. They’re happening right here in our little city, and there’s not a place in the world, not even in Wheeling, that’s actually safe.