Kings of Broken Things

by Theodore Wheeler

  The noise stopped him in his tracks. It didn’t register what was happening. Some arguing a few blocks back on Clandish. Shouting between young men then a pistol shot. Jake heard. He headed back to see. Back into the people who ran up the long hill of Clandish. Women in summer dresses, hats flying off their heads. Men sprinting away. “A kid started trouble,” one of the fleeing said to another. “Some paddy cop tried to nab him.” A woman knocked into them. “It’s the Cypriot!” she shouted, arms crossed over her breast. “It’s him!”

  Something whizzed by Jake’s head into a storefront. The muscles in his neck and under his arms gripped into him at a shattering that grew louder, faster, as the storefront window cleaved from its frame, its fantastic dissolution against the pavement. Jake tucked his chin to his chest to shrink his face into the mass of his torso. He turned to look, and the window was gone. A man rushed inside, to the hardware store, then tossed out hoes, shovels, an ax, to who’d take one. He slapped a pick handle into Jake’s hand and shouted, “Tear them up!” He meant the cops, who were running by with batons. Jake turned the pick in his hands to examine the grains and cracks of its wood handle. The memory of how to swing was locked in his arms—like when he’d whipped that boy back home. He let the pick fall to the ground. He didn’t want to use it. He’d stay out of trouble.

  They ran with weapons and tools, the folks on Clandish Street, ready to find the Cypriot and take him apart after that woman shouted the name. But the man was hard to find. There were so many rumors about what the Cypriot looked like. How could anyone recognize him? In the meantime guys grabbed merchandise from knocked-in storefronts. Drunks broke things because they could. Most men on the Ward had been drinking since morning to celebrate the holiday, and now they had this to celebrate. Something free for the taking. Street kids made a terrible racket when the cops tried to carry them off, but more boys pushed through all the time. The cops couldn’t keep up. Even little kids leaned out windows to fire roman candles and taunt a cop. Flares and shining orange sparks rained down. The whole thing that much better with a rocket’s red glare. Who could disagree? Most of the boys on Clandish were involved in some way. Shouting out windows and stealing candy and catching hell from a man who knew their parents and ducking around the sidewalks, trying to keep from getting slugged. A melee like this was somewhat common, every couple summers when the heat got to people. A melee was a great thing in the way a street kid saw the world: all the yelling and violence. The desecration of buildings that appeared indestructible. What did it matter to break a window? What did it matter to take a knife and gash the wood of a door? The world, this city, it all seemed permanent. Nothing, the boys believed, would ever change Omaha. They wanted to leave a mark, even if that mark was vandalism. The boys felt it was a fundamental right to slur cops. They were entitled to toss a brick down the street without concern for where it landed. Most of the men on Clandish felt the same way. Why should a boy have felt any different?

  As Jake snuck through the melee, a woman ran up the back of his legs. She screamed, “My boy! Where’s my boy!” She found her boy cracking a man with a baseball bat. Jake rubbed the tendons behind his knees as the woman ran off. He was still unscathed by that point. Many weren’t so lucky. A guy collapsed by the door of the Potsdamer, laughing to himself. His mustache thick with blood that dripped on his shirt and vest. His nose struck flat against his face. “Good shot, Paddy,” he laughed. “Sehr gut, sehr gut.” “You okay, buddy?” Jake asked, leaning in as blood erupted from the guy’s nose, spraying him with red. The guy laughed louder, even as he choked and sputtered. And Jake wiping blood from his lips, spitting, disgusted. It was impossible to just wipe the blood away.

  Some still were drinking inside at the Potsdamer, but the show was over. Performers waited at the door to see if kids would come back through to cause trouble. It was strange to see them from the street. Burlesque next to bassoonist, lithe vocalist hugging the arm of stout gymnast.

  Jake’s friends were on the balcony. Meinhof, Reinhold, Charlie, a few others from the tunnels. “Are you still here?” Charlie asked, swaying, a glass of green wine in each hand. Charlie rubbed the splatters on Jake’s shirt, somewhat amused when his fingers came back sticky with blood.

  They moved to the bathroom to watch from a window.

  Rumors of a bounty on the Cypriot’s head went around. Tom Dennison was the one offering. In his drunk, Meinhof bragged that he was going to spot the Cypriot and run down to beat the tar from his bones, then carry him up to Dennison for the money. Jake pretended to ignore Meinhof, but he didn’t back away either. He scanned the faces below and dreamed of the reward. He knew only that the Cypriot had a beard and was foreign—from Cyprus, whatever that meant—and that there was some deformity in the shape of his eyes. A lot of men on the street looked a little like that. How was Jake supposed to pick?

  It was close to midnight before the melee petered out and Jake could tread over the debris to get home. Broken glass, trampled hats, splintered wood, casings of rockets and firecrackers, shotgun shells. Most people on the street now had been caught in the fighting and finally had a chance to walk home, shirttail untucked, hat in hand. Jake saw fireworks burst not so far away. Big shows were starting in Field Club and on the Gold Coast, in the moneyed wards. Jake saw the explosions, distant above rooftops like flowers, but was too far away to hear them go off.

  On his street, things were changed. The lunchroom Charlie ate at on Sundays, a chair stuck through its door where the glass used to be. The shop where Jake bought chocolates, looted of its confections. Bakeries and canned goods stores, their shelves emptied and toppled. The sign for Mecklenburg’s Saloon swung by a single chain above the sidewalk, but at least its windows were intact. A line of bouncers stood guard outside with maplewood paddles.

  It was like Jake had never been on Clandish before, the neighborhood misshaped like it was. He noticed flagpoles atop the Vereine. None of them flew flags during the war, so he hadn’t noticed the poles. He’d never seen the trees that grew behind Mecklenburg’s, or that they were sycamores. Clandish felt small. He heard bands play exuberant foreign anthems in Little Sicily. He saw fireworks explode in jubilee uptown, in a different place altogether.

  There was music when Jake got to the Flatiron near 4 a.m. He was in early for work. A band inched through a final set of slow and melancholy improvisation in the basement club. The cornet on a hazy, unending solo, the drummer patting a snare half-asleep because his hands couldn’t stop moving, a punctuating tweet from a clarinet now and then. Jake wanted to get through the service entry fast and start digging, he came early because he couldn’t sleep, but two teenagers leaned near the door, a boy and a girl.

  He sometimes saw kids like these jiggle the handle of the locked club door in the afternoon, or stumble up the steps broke in the morning. The Flatiron was irresistible to thrill-seeking children. Not the kind of person who lived and grew up on Clandish, but rich kids who’d developed a taste for what they called jungle music, who snuck around more or less constantly to find a way in where they weren’t wanted.

  The boy at the service door pulled a flask from his jacket and handed it to the girl. She was smart looking. A girl nearly of age, in rings, pins, and furs, a dress cut so a man’s gaze drew to the sateen that clung to her taut virgin bump. This girl shouldn’t have been on the Ward, a girl from a nice family who had a lot to lose. Jake got aroused at the sight of a rich girl. But that guy was with her too. There was always a guy. This one older, a college boy in a bow-tie costume, white gloves and patent leather shoes. It ruined the fantasy to see the kind of guy a girl like that hung on. Cocky ones with new speedsters and roadsters of bright yellow and red. Warren or Scotty or Tim racing off in ivory suits and skimmer hats to a surfside jazz club hidden in a clump of cottonwoods along the river, an all-night juke joint where they could find illicit goods like fried catfish and cold beer. Boys who bought gifts for their girls with money made clerking part-time at Daddy’s office. And the girls.
Prim and pretty with powdered faces, lips rubbed red with jelly bean guts. Lillian, Maud, Bernadette, Carol. Girls who kept Mother’s flask of brandy in a fluff of goldenrod dress, who caused a scandal when they came home hammered and crashed into the maid’s room by mistake.

  The dandy sneered at Jake as he tipped his flask. He said something under his breath about the way foreigners dressed. Jake hadn’t changed his clothes. He’d forgot about the blood that speckled his shirt. The dandy muttered to the girl again. He whispered “Hun” so Jake could hear.

  Jake wanted to say something in return. With a heavy accent. Like a Katzenjammer Kid comic strip. Vot’s der bich idea? he’d say. Chust vait! Efery dog vill got his day! But he stayed silent. They would have laughed at him if he talked that way. He intimidated boys like the dandy, he didn’t need to say anything. He muscled his shoulders back, his chest out, and the boy and girl looked at their feet then cleared the doorway. They swigged from the flask, walked away. Jake went to work. He’d forget them once he was in the tunnel, scraping out the end of the apse.

  He was alone with the sound of his shovel cutting dirt. The clink of metal chucking rock. The flame sizzle of a lantern with condensation on its wick. There was constant vibration from above, something nearly silent, an inner-earth rumble he didn’t notice if others were there. He liked to inhabit this noise when he was alone, to estimate how many thousand vibrations from around the city merged to make one growl. He’d worked a couple hours. The others would be there before long, hungover but ready to go. He tried to get as much done as he could first. Fixed a rhythm with the pick, sliced its blade into deposits of clay. Took his shirt off when he got going. Leveraged rocks loose with an iron rod and relied on the work to calm his mind. The cadence of digging, the feel of metal and wood tools—they reminded him of home. He’d be farming now if he hadn’t run off, so it was a comfort to imagine piloting a mule plow and turning over furrows, the sun not yet full over the horizon. Jake missed his animals, his trees. He pictured rolling green hills, his stomach muscles tight, and a horse at full gallop climbing the angles of a pasture. There was the mound of sod where the old dugout had been. The corn up past his knee now that it was July. He recalled picking beetle bugs off potato leaves to drop in the kerosene can and fishing milkweed out of the soil with the tip of a spade. He just about felt light strike his skin at sunrise, a warm embrace around his shoulders and neck. Nothing could make him forget his connection to the land, the farm and his family, the woods and streams he played in as a boy. He’d have given anything to keep the kind of peace he experienced in the woods as a child, his mother near him, before he lost her. He’d felt extraordinarily alive. Connected to the world as he knew it then. That peace was lost to him now. How he’d planted a line of bur oak along the road one summer. Grew them from acorns. How there was rhubarb and artichoke in the forest. Wild strawberries. He owned these things. They owned him too. The bur oak, the rhubarb, the woods, the hills. They all laid claim on Jake.

  He almost felt like he was back there, the sun on his neck, when he heard a noise behind him in the tunnel.

  A man was groping along the wall in the dim glow of the lanterns. Jake heard feet shuffle over the rocky floor, something dropped to a plank, and pebbles scattered. He tipped the beam of his lantern, angling its housing with the spade he held to see a stranger turn into the apse. “Nobody’s supposed to be down here,” Jake said. His voice was quiet and shaky, he was embarrassed that he’d been caught dreaming. He let the lantern swing from its hook. The flame flickered as a man came into the light, a man who leaned close and squinted to see who was there.

  “If that is true,” the man replied, “then why are you here?”

  Jake held the spade crossed over his chest, showed it to the man to answer. The man’s eyes changed shapes as he tried to see, half-blind without his glasses.

  It came together in a flash. That this was the Cypriot. He’d hid in the tunnels, a bounty on his head. It didn’t occur to Jake that he might be wrong. This was the Cypriot.

  The man was in bad shape, his fine costume torn and muddy from scrabbling in the tunnels. Bruises marred his jaw, only partly hidden by his beard. He wasn’t as big as the rumors said he was. His body was soft and round. He looked prissy, the way he lowered gingerly to his knees to feel along the tunnel floor.

  Jake saw the glint of a lens further down, but he didn’t move to pick up the glasses. He backed into the apse and gripped tighter the spade in his hands. His breath stuck in his throat. He wanted to leave but would have to cross the Cypriot to reach the open end of the tunnel.

  “They were crazed up there,” the man said, back on his haunches. There was liquor on his breath. “Is it all finished? The fighting?” He looked for his glasses again, edged the wrong way, closer to Jake and the tools. “Is there a way out of here?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Jake said. “These tunnels aren’t open.”

  “I slipped down a window. A stroke of luck, getting away. At least till I got lost.”

  The man scrabbled on his hands and knees to search for his glasses. He skimmed over the handles of shovels, picks, axes, each one strapped tight in a bundle.

  Jake wrung his palms over the shovel he held. He wouldn’t cross the man. “Why were they after you? Did you do something to start all that?”

  The man bent forward to grope the wood handles. He loosened the strap.

  Jake wanted out of there. His legs weak. A streetcar rumbling above them, its vibrations coming, making the lights flicker. The man lunged as Jake blinked with the lights, and Jake was hit, struck across his forearm. His air escaped. The man swung again, but too high. The handle he swung scraped the tunnel ceiling and stuck a second, so Jake pushed the man back.

  It felt like Jake’s arm was broken. But he wasn’t blind in agony. He felt the pain-thrill rise in his heart. When the man came back he dodged the slashing handle. He drove into the man again with his spade and this time shoved him over the bundle of tools.

  The Cypriot opened his mouth to speak but Jake swung and connected on the ribs. An echoless thump forced air out. He got the man good.

  Nine more times Jake did this. Spade levered across his hip. He felt ribs disconnect from meat. The Cypriot grasping a tool handle between strikes. Then the Cypriot, the Cypriot’s grasping hand, released without grabbing.

  Jake thought he’d killed the man. He’d felt the body give even on the first blow. But he touched the man’s throat and felt blood pump. He turned the body over. The eyes gazed out with animal fright, like the body would rise up and run down the tunnel. The body didn’t move. The eyes followed Jake as he dropped to his elbows.

  “He’s dead,” Jake said to no one. He watched the body rise and flounder. There was gurgling from the mouth. The head tried to rise but then sunk. Jake saw his own bloody hands. He cupped dirt from the apse and rubbed until there was mud.

  The others arrived. They turned pale when they saw the man on his stomach. His mouth bubbled blood. Jake sitting there with the spade over his knees.

  “There was an accident,” he said.

  They didn’t accuse Jake of anything. They carried the body to the foreman’s office, where a telephone hung on the wall. Tom Dennison would need to know.

  A BRAND FROM THE BURNING

  Winter 1918

  Karel was sore the morning after his father found him at Mecklenburg’s. Sore from his fight with Ignatz, in his face and ribs, and in other ways. His head hurt. His stomach was upset. Silke and Theresa explained it to him. Karel smiled, a sick smirk he felt twist on his face. “I’m not joking,” Silke said. “You were drunk.”

  “It was only near beer,” Karel said. “Don’t be a fool.”

  Karel hoped his father would forget the whole thing as soon as the shiner went away, but it didn’t work like that. The bruise faded in a week; Karel was locked in the attic all summer. None of the boys from school would see him for months as he worked with Miihlstein in the attic, handed over tools when aske
d for them, learned how to apply lacquer and screw-down clamps without crushing the often flimsy wood. Karel didn’t really enjoy the work, but it was something to do. Otherwise, he would have gone half-crazed cooped up like that. Even Miihlstein himself, the old hermit, got out more than Karel did. On weekends Miihlstein met some Paris bohemians to play for tips outside Continental restaurants. Miihlstein on a hurdy-gurdy of the Hungarian style he’d picked up in Galizien, cranking out a buzzing noise for the Frenchies to paint a melody on. He gave Karel a chance to come along if the boy learned to play. He even offered to make a new hurdy-gurdy from a violin that would be Karel’s own. Karel didn’t go for that.

  On days he was lucky, Maria sent Karel to the coal cellar to unearth some old dress or a sachet of papers, a bottle of sherry she’d deprived herself of on an unfortunate, moralistic whim. Karel didn’t care what he was supposed to retrieve. If it meant rooting in antiquities, that was good enough. He could fill a whole day down where it was cooler. He’d tried to help Anna with her crafts the first few weeks, but the way she worked frustrated him, how she scribbled with a nub of pencil or bent strands of wire this way then that. “What’s that you’re making?” Karel had bugged her. Anna turned her back to ignore him, and eventually her scribbles took shape. An octopus drawn in the overlaps of the repeating loops of her cursive a. A hare kinked out of wire. When Anna finished, she turned to show Karel. Almost always it was a discernible something, and looked first-rate, he had to admit, most of the time. Karel wasn’t artistic at all, even when he worked a project through in his mind first and tried his hardest—like when he bungled the repairs Miihlstein was making on an instrument. Karel limited himself to handing over tools instead. Any idiot, once he learned its name, could select the right gauge awl for the man requesting it.