Kings of Broken Things

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by Theodore Wheeler


  She pulled the straps off her shoulders until they hung over her belly. The chemise she wore spread and collapsed to bare her chest and ribs, the skin ruddy and scratched, specked with insect bites. Jake tried to look away from the woman, but he didn’t want to see the girl either. He didn’t know where to look—the woman’s gnawed-at flesh, her opening legs, or the girl hunching into herself.

  The woman followed his eyes. “Set next to me. Minnie ain’t for sale.”

  “If I give you extra? Can she wait outside?”

  “You paid, bunny. You can have me a little while before you leave, or you can just leave. The girl stays here either way.”

  “I didn’t pay.”

  “You down here, aren’t you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Are you stupid? They took it!”

  It wasn’t until he was out from under the bridge that Jake admitted his money was stolen, that the boy from the saloon had robbed him while pushing him around the flats. Jake slid to a stoop to catch his breath then laid there. He was too trusting. Too stupid. Why had he run off from home in the first place? He took that twenty dollars, most of his father’s savings, and he’d lost it. He couldn’t ever go back.

  A smoky voice came from inside. “Can’t sleep on the stoop. It’s fifty cents for a bed inside.” Jake peered into the shadow of the doorway. It was a flophouse. A sign said this.

  “Fifty cents,” the voice repeated.

  Jake saw the glint off a knife in the shadow.

  So how was he lucky? Penniless in a new city. No relations. No connections. No job.

  He was lucky because he met Tom Dennison the next day. Folks on the street told him where to find the Old Man, what they called Tom Dennison. They told him the Old Man would help.

  Tom Dennison ran things in Omaha those years. For three decades he had a hand in picking who’d be on the winning ticket each election and was on the board of the gas, electric, and water companies. He owned the police force more or less, everyone knew that.

  There was a guard outside the door on the street, outside the tobacco shop where Tom Dennison kept an office those years, where a dark staircase led up to the second floor. The guard was roughly the same height as Jake but thicker through the legs and chest. “You need some help, pal?” the guard asked. “You need to see Mr. Dennison?”

  Jake didn’t move. The guard was Chip Lee. Jake recognized him right away. Chip had been a big deal when Jake was a kid. A prizefighter. All the boys pantomimed his style, the square stance Chip used in his prime, before he was KO’d in three consecutive bouts. There were scars along his jaw, Jake saw, and cloudy discolorations below the lobes of his ears. Chip patted the pockets of Jake’s suit and felt along the belt line, then showed Jake up the staircase and stood behind him in the doorway.

  The upstairs office occupied the entire second floor. File cabinets stacked everywhere like card catalogs in a library. Autographed photos of movie stars on the walls. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish. Ballplayers like Ty Cobb, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Three Finger Mordecai Brown. Pictures of racehorses draped in red roses. Nearly a dozen men lingered under the photos, hands in their pockets. The lights were dim except for one bulb that beamed down over a small pine desk, a desk positioned so close to the entrance that there was just enough space for Jake to slip inside before he was stopped. The lightbulb hung down in his eyes, forcing him to stoop to the desk and squint to see the woman there, her orange hair wispy and pale in the light. At the far end was a larger desk, behind that a rollaway safe. A window let in a wash of sunlight and backlit a man working at the desk. Tom Dennison.

  The woman on the platform tapped her nails on her desk until Jake stopped staring around her. Her face was an unearthly white under the bulb. “What do you need?” she asked.

  “To talk with Tom Dennison. That’s what they told me.”

  The woman pulled out a black ledger and flipped to a tabbed section to consult its pages. The writing was small and packed tightly, but Jake saw some of what it read, references to the Brandeis department store and the Omaha Electric Light and Power Company, to the Paxton and Fontenelle hotels, to grocery stores, steelworks, lumber and coal companies, trucking firms.

  “Tell me where you come from,” the woman said. “You’re a farmer, right?” Her hair was short and curly, held aloft by some chemical element. “There’s something we have going. You’ll like it.” The woman flipped through the ledger again, scratched something down on a page, then stepped around her desk. “Take this to the Flatiron, and they’ll have something for you.”

  She handed Jake a slip of paper and said he could go. But Tom Dennison waved Jake over first. “Jim Dahlman sent you, is that right? He bailed you out?”

  “No, sir. Folks on the street said to come.”

  “You’re not a drunk? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “No, sir. I want to work.”

  Jake stood there while Dennison inspected him. Jake was tall, pads of muscles strained against his clothes. He looked over his shoulder to where Dennison’s bodyguard waited.

  “Is that Chip Lee watching the door?” Jake asked. He lowered his voice so only those around the desk could hear. “We all wanted to punch like him back where I come from.”

  “That so?”

  “We followed him in the papers.” Jake hunkered down to protect his midsection, he put up fists and bobbed on the balls of his feet. It was Chip’s old stance, solid and square. Jake felt his face turn red, seeing Tom smile.

  “Chip was pretty good in his day. He was famous up around your parts?”

  “Yeah. He was.”

  “Where was that? Where you’re from?” Jake didn’t want to say, but he let on, slipped the words Jackson County out the side of his mouth. “Sure. I know the place,” Dennison said. “I lived near there, in St. John’s, when I was a boy. With the Catholics there.”

  “Yeah? Is that a fact?”

  “It is.”

  Jake had Tom Dennison’s interest. This is why Jake was lucky.

  “Did you get in a little trouble up there?” Dennison asked.

  “I did. I hurt a boy in a fight.”

  “Well, that’s fine. That doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. Why would I care if you clipped some guy? So long as the guy deserved it.”

  Jake found the back of the Flatiron that afternoon, the long rounded butt end where the service entry was with its iron doors painted green. Trash cans lined the wall, empty produce crates, stacked milk bottles. A hotel occupied most of the building. This was on St. Mary’s Avenue, where downtown edged against the ethnic neighborhoods. Folks wandered here, passed through from north to south, or back the other way, the block specked with filling stations, printing shops, bail bondsmen. The hotel itself was newly made of tan brick and glazed terra-cotta limestone. The restaurant on its ground floor was elegant and smelled like buttered bread rolls and onion soup through the window. Jake didn’t understand why he was sent here, but the man at the service door was ready for him. “You’re Strauss,” the man said. “I’m the foreman.”

  Inside, the foreman pointed to spigots dripping with water and four large washtubs near the basement office. He tossed a hunk of soap to Jake and said to wash up. Jake hadn’t washed since he left home and didn’t realize how filthy he was until grime streamed off him and settled in the bottom of the washtub. His skin burned raw when he finished, from pumice in the soap. “You ready now?” the foreman asked. He was middle-aged, short and muscular, clean shaven. A certain kind of purpose buoyed his accent. “This is hard work,” he said, “but you get clothes, three squares a day. If you can dig and push a wheelbarrow, you can handle it.”

  “We’re digging?”

  “Of course we’re digging. Making tunnels. It don’t matter where we’re making tunnels to, so never mind that. Do what I tell you—that’s your job.”

  Speed was the first order of business in the tunnels, the foreman made this clear. Wood frames were put up every
few yards to prevent cave-ins. Bare wires hung from timber to light the work. The corridor was just wide enough for two men to sneak by. There was hardly room to stand. Once Jake entered the tunnels, that day and the ones that followed, lucky Jake, he’d spend the whole shift stooped over.

  There were other men Jake was introduced to, the rest of his crew. Reinhold Bock dug out the edge of the corridor with a pick or shovel or hatchet, whatever it took to expand the path. His was the dirtiest job but also the most important. The others depended on his progress to keep busy. “You won’t see him much,” the foreman said. Reinhold burrowed deep into a space only big enough for his body and his tools. Dirt flew out over his dangling legs. The next two cleared away what was picked off by Reinhold, shoveling debris into wheelbarrows, and this was where Jake came in. His job was to make sure the work kept moving. He filled in when necessary, lugged dirt and rock out the tunnel, erected frames to keep the corridor from collapsing, steadied beams with his shoulders while others clamped and hammered them into place. Jake mostly shuttled back and forth along the corridor. What the others removed, he piled outside the office. So much debris by the end of the day that they could hardly pass when it was time to clean at the washtubs. It was cramped down there anyway. Besides the foreman’s framed office there were tools lying around and washtubs stacked up and street clothes waiting on hooks, their clothes and the clothes of the dozen or more men working in other corridors. There was a telephone on the wall. Jake didn’t understand how it worked, but by the next morning the basement would be as clean as ever. Trucks had to back up to the service door overnight to remove the debris. “They load out and dump somewhere,” Reinhold said. “A farm. Or in the river.”

  The shifts were ten hours long, six days a week. It was hard, but Jake liked the work, or at least the idea that he had work. He was lucky to get this job but wouldn’t have minded being in the open air. The weather outside was nice those days. It was spring. Sunny, clear, getting warm. He saw so little sun. Mostly he was bent over a wheelbarrow to go back and forth underground. A job that was easy enough to master so long as he didn’t get lost. The tunnels spindled off in an impossible web, so Jake followed the track he wore into the loose tunnel bottom, tried to line up the raised patterns left where chunks of the iron wheel broke off. He played games like this to do something besides just pushing loads.

  Digging a tunnel under the city wasn’t all that strange, he learned. Tunnels spidered all over: from the bargain basement of the Brandeis department store to banks across the street, from office building to office building. Jake worried the paths might cross and they’d bust into a neighboring tunnel, a legit one, and get caught at whatever they were doing. Reinhold said not to worry. “This isn’t my first job. You dig for a while, turn where they tell you. Before long you pop up in some basement. It’s a hotel. An office that belongs to the boss. Who cares?” Reinhold wore a soft cloth cap to cover his baldness. Its ragged brim edged over his eyes. “I wasn’t the one who told you. But Mr. Dennison’s got tunnels all over town where he holds things. Here and other places. He just don’t want folks to know. It’s his prerogative, yeah. He’s the boss.”

  Jake imagined that maybe Reinhold was the architect of all these tunnels. That he alone knew where to burrow and what the point of it all was.

  Charlie Pfister and Joe Meinhof were the middlemen in the operation. Half-brothers, they argued throughout the day, over the work, over what tools belonged to whom, over anything. Meinhof had a neat fop of hair he kept parted and oiled, with the sides of his head shaved, a style Jake hadn’t seen before. His face was pinched with nervousness. It made Meinhof conspicuous, his eyebrows arching wrinkles into his forehead, a dimple in his chin. Charlie was more at ease. He had a thick mustache and a way of angling his ear when he couldn’t hear what was said.

  At the end of the day their crew and the others packed outside the foreman’s office in the hotel basement to disrobe and scrub off their daily grime, bent double still, this time in a washtub. The foreman set out sponges and paper-wrapped bars of hotel soap, then collected the work clothes in a wicker hamper for the laundry. All the while, Charlie and Joe Meinhof bragged about what went down in social clubs nearby, near fanatical now that the shift was over and they could celebrate. “There’s girls, Jake.” “And beer!” “You have to come.” Once outside the steel door, Meinhof reached up and put his arm around Jake to pull him down Clandish.

  Jake ate at Mecklenburg’s with the other men nearly every night once he was drawing a wage. “I was here before,” he told them, hunched over the bar. “Got tricked out of my last dollar.”

  Which was true. This was the same place from his first night.

  Things had worked out well enough for Jake, but thinking of how he lost the family money made his stomach shrink, and he didn’t want to feel that way.

  The first time Jake saw the Eigler house he worried he had the wrong address. The homes at this far end of Clandish were too nice, the avenue too residential. The street was paved and washed. Houses were made of brick and stucco and occupied by only one family. The foreman wrote this address on a scrap of paper and sent Jake here. Maria Eigler, the landlady, led him upstairs. His room was on the second floor overlooking Clandish, and was oversized, with an armoire. He didn’t have to share with anyone. The only other tenants were a family who lived in the dormer, the Miihlsteins. All but the boy had glasses with mangled steel frames. The girls wore their hair long over the padded shoulders of their dresses. Silke, seventeen, was vibrant and kept her back straight and blushed dolorously when Jake looked at her. Theresa, fifteen, her hair combed off her forehead, was more outgoing. She laughed a lot, a silly kerfuffle that was contagious.

  The Miihlstein boy was square and unexceptional among his sisters, Jake thought. Karel walked around shoeless when Jake moved in—strangely, since they weren’t that poor. Jake didn’t worry. From what Maria said, their mother had apparently died on the boat to America. Karel was allowed to be a little strange then, even though Jake wasn’t sure this story was true. There were rumors about every foreigner that could either be believed or not.

  Some evenings Jake skipped Mecklenburg’s and ate supper at the Eigler house. Maria’s dining room was full of wonders. Wainscoting went around the walls to keep the plaster from denting; bookshelves stuck out to catch the feet of Jake’s chair; the hard-used furniture; a lamp in the corner; charms and oddities she collected; a darkening portrait of her late husband, August Eigler, a railroad man in the railroad’s first days here. Jake thought there was something generous and noble in the way Maria and the Miihlstein kids gabbered to each other and passed food around a crowded table. The dining room warm with steam. Silke and Theresa across from him giggling. Karel squeaking his chair, spilling milk, telling of stray cats he knew. When supper ended, Maria spread a stack of newspapers over the table. She cross-referenced with an atlas to see where positions on the Western Front had switched. Karel asked Silke to point on the map where they’d lived in Galizien, but the girls were weird about it. Each of them selected different spots on the map, within Austria-Hungary and beyond, where each was born, and disputed which village in Galizien they’d lived the last few years. It was confusing. The boy demanded to know where Maria was born too—the custom for those who were countrymen, as all but Jake were Austrian. Maria and the Miihlsteins were of opposite ends of the empire, but all had been to Vienna. Maria urged the Miihlsteins to tell stories about Viennese plätze and the aroma of real coffee as it could only be savored in Wien, and told how she was homesick, Maria interrupting the kids along the way until she realized how much things had changed in a relatively short amount of time, from when she was born and then left, until the others did the same. Anna, the frail one, changed the subject. “Where are you from, Jake?”

  “My town isn’t on this map,” he said, then he pointed out the north-facing bay window. They were perplexed by what they saw. An overgrown cottonwood, an outhouse that had been converted into a toolshed, a tiny
bungalow squeezed in along the alley. “That way, six hours upriver by horse,” he explained. “It’s called Jackson County.”

  Jake pointed to Danzig on the map when he finished joking, because he knew Jackson County wasn’t what Anna meant when she asked him where he was from. “My dad is from around here,” Jake explained. “South a ways from Danzig, in Kreis Schwetz.” The kids were pleased at what Jake showed them. Silke explained. “We’ve never lived with a Prussian before,” she told him.

  “You still haven’t,” Jake insisted. “I’ve never been to Prussia. I was born in Nebraska.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Karel said, but Theresa cut him off.

  “Don’t argue. If he says he isn’t from there, who are you to disagree? He isn’t.”

  Maria mounted a stool in the parlor to watch families promenade home from social clubs. An alcohol lamp hissed beside her as she puffed smoke from a hand-rolled cigarette out the window and gossiped about neighbors. Who worked what job, who the odd ones were, whose faults were well known, which boys were troublemakers. There was something of an old farm woman in Maria that Jake observed. How her hair was pulled tight in a bun and had paled more orange than gray with age, but was thinning, her forehead elongating, her features moving closer to center. It was a sort of skepticism that affected itself in Maria, a weariness in her face.

  She rolled cigarettes to keep her hands busy. Tins of them were all over the house. Jake liked the way sweet Virginia tobacco smelled when she scooped it up with papers, the wood and cherry of it, the robust spirits of dried leaves before they burned.

  “Where’s your dad?” Jake asked the kids.

  “Upstairs,” Silke said, folding the newspaper to put it away.

  Herr Miihlstein must have thought he was alone, bent over his table to perform some delicate task in only his undershirt and shorts. With a small brush he blacked the neck of a violin, pausing every few strokes to sharpen the bristles between his lips. Jake should have left the man alone, but he was fascinated by the attic. Beside Miihlstein’s tools and worktable there were projects of all kinds scattered about. Plaster models. Tangles of copper wire bent and joined to look like flowers. Papier-mâché dolls hung on string from the ceiling. Sheets of corkboard had been installed on the walls of the dormer where they lived, where crosshatched prints from the ladies’ section of the paper were pinned, popular songs and cartoons. Bits of English primers too.

 

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