Kings of Broken Things

by Theodore Wheeler

  When school began in the fall, Karel finally escaped the attic. He worried that the other boys might have forgot about him, but he shouldn’t have. Alfred Braun and Jimmy Mac were dying to hear what happened to Karel that night they took initiation in Mecklenburg’s.

  “Jesus Christ!” Alfred said. “You get locked up or something?”

  “Missus Maria told us you got in big trouble about what happened down there, yeah.”

  Explanations were tendered once the boys had a chance, after school the first day of fifth grade. How Jimmy Mac’s mother was magically ignorant of what happened. Jimmy stank like beer when he came home late, red-faced and aquiver from dancing with a painted woman. But his mother said nothing. She let him go off to bed and even sleep in late the next morning. If his father had been around—if Mr. McHenry wasn’t out even later himself—then Jimmy might have earned some blows. As it was, he was left to wonder why he got away with carrying on in sin. Jimmy contemplated this mystery a full month before he carried his troubles to a kneeler one Sunday. Looking up at the Savior on a crucifix, Jimmy realized that the Lord saw all and remembered all. He promised to never do something like that again—not till he was older.

  As for Alfred, there was no doubt Emil Braun would hear about his youngest boy being in a beer saloon. He did. But Braun didn’t punish Alfred, didn’t lock him up, didn’t leave him to come to terms with a mass of guilt on his own—the penance his friends faced. No. If Alfred found himself at a bar, then Braun figured the boy was old enough to see certain other things too. Thereafter he took Alfred to the Jobbers Canyon labor market twice a week to show what it really meant to be a workingman. That which wasn’t revelry. To face down a hiring manager, to make yourself appear useful, or else.

  Once school started, Karel and Jimmy Mac came along to the warehouses too, early mornings before the tardy bell rang. There were fields of warehouses that backed to the river, block after block, their brick walls stenciled with the names of owners. Wholesalers and creameries were housed here, hoarders, manufacturers, middle men. “Butter, tools, furniture, grain, meat, nails,” Braun shouted. “Anything that can be shipped and purchased elsewhere, you’ll find it here.” Rubber tires flew from window to window across an alley, four stories up. The pavement was laced with spur rails, from one loading dock to another, but the real action took place in the alleyways. That’s what Braun showed the boys—outside a warehouse on 6½ Street, where jobbers felt out soft spots along the hiring line. Many jobbers were German, or Germanic at least. Karel could tell from the tones of voices, the varieties of cadence, the burly shapes of bodies. Once Braun and the boys fell in with these men, it was impossible to escape their halting mass. Interlocked at the elbows and hips, all crushing forward, acting on a rumor of who was hiring that morning and for what. At a certain time a green slat door rolled open and a manager emerged, buttressed on each arm by a thug. Karel climbed a drainpipe to see. The manager was short and fat and wore a coat that went to his feet. He held a clipboard, to which was fastened the list of jobs. He looked between list and crowd. Those nearby stood taller when the manager’s gaze moved over, chests puffing, backs lengthening. He spoke English first. Shouted the rules of how this company did business: what they paid, what work was to be done, what kind of worker was wanted, whether lunch was served. When he finished, the manager repeated the instructions in German, then Italian, then Lithuanian. His hired muscle joked the whole time, aping the instructions in Irish accents for a group of micks near the dock. Some workers were picked right away. Regulars with the company who climbed the concrete ledge of the loading dock, slipped past the muscle, and pooled together inside the building. They smoked cigarettes and waited for the other elect. All of them dressed in white denim overalls and hats with black bills, a few women with hair pinned under their caps.

  Alfred pointed out that Ignatz was one of these regulars now. He’d graduated in. His mother and father—it was incredible to Karel to think about that ogre having parents who could boss him around, bullies even bigger than Ignatz—made him stand to be judged in the jobber market after he’d come home without his shoes that time the tunnelers took revenge on him. His parents weren’t as forgiving as Herr Miihlstein. Ignatz’s hair was short and greased to one side of his head. He looked better that way. His body had changed too. He was solid, in the face and the way his shoulders and neck were one bulging quantity now. His work had taken him over, Braun explained. “The boy is his job.” Ignatz didn’t care about dominating the block like he had before. He was plugged in, picked out right away and given a deal he found acceptable. Young, healthy, uninjured. What did he have to care about? They gave him money.

  Dozens of jobbers pled with the manager, those who didn’t get work. “My son’s sick,” one shouted over and over. Another confessed that his wife would leave him if he came home empty-handed again. Desperate for a position, these men said nasty things to each other. “Out of the way, cripple. You’re not wanted here.” Spitting the words. “Move on!” They shoved in front of each other, elbowed stomachs and pinched sides to make a rival look hunchbacked or crazy.

  Once the spots were filled, the manager promised to call the cops if the leftovers didn’t move on. The doors slammed shut.

  “You think you’re men, yeah?” Braun asked the boys. “This is men.”

  All autumn and winter Karel followed Emil Braun around the River Ward. To meetings at a Southside saloon that flew the black flag of anarchy, where both the bar and the cellar below were filled with stockyard workers and smelled like the manure on their boots. To a church luncheon in Florence, where Braun lectured on white slavery—a topic he knew about, since his niece was kidnapped some years before, when she was fourteen, and later found in a brothel in Salinas, California. If the infield was dry and the north gale let up a few hours, Braun took the boys to the ballfield at Rourke Park to toss a ball around. Karel was still a little clumsy in his game, but he’d hit a growth spurt and was now the biggest among the boys his age. Three inches taller, a good deal stouter in his shoulders and legs. He felt less like a neat little boy. Less precious. He felt tough and ugly. His hair cut short, slobbily, by Alfred, so his ears stuck off his head. He learned to throw from one of those ears like an infielder, as Braun had when he was a second baseman for the Southsiders. There was simplicity on the diamond when Braun and the three boys staked out the four points to whip a ball around the horn. Crisp baseball was the only thing that could awe Braun into silence. Then he let the boys chatter. Put some mustard on it! Out of the dirt! No rainbows! Let me hear ya! Keep up the pace! The faster they moved the warmer they got. The warmer they got, the less dumb they felt playing baseball in December.

  Karel took to the game that winter, in the cold. He found a mitt in the junk store and Maria bought it for a Christmas gift. Old and greasy, perfect, an undersized infielder’s glove like what Braun had. Each night Karel groomed his mitt. He oiled and cared for the leather, flossed grime out its seams with his father’s tools. Karel toiled over his glove at the worktable, touching elbows with his father on the red felt, tonguing the chip in his front tooth, the war wound from his first days playing. Over and over he popped his fist into the leather to understand where the ball would stick. Miihlstein hated that and asked if Karel absolutely had to make that sound. “Sure I do. That’s how I know it’s perfect. Don’t you like that sound? Don’t it sound perfect?”

  Anna tried to talk Karel into sticking around afternoons, but it was no use. He’d never do crafts in the attic if he could run around a ballfield instead. He’d never fiddle with instruments like their father did. She must have seen that Karel was an animal of a different breed.

  But maybe he couldn’t see Anna clearly those days either. How she hadn’t grown over the summer and autumn and was shorter than he was now. How she hadn’t changed at all since they’d left Europe. Sickly and small, her face framed by dark hair where her nose, eyes, and chin came jutting out. She wore the same few dresses for years, like a doll. Even
more peculiar was that she didn’t have her hair cut anymore. She didn’t need to. Over the course of February everything appeared normal. Then it hit him. How Anna didn’t come downstairs to eat all week. How the skin was mucus yellow under her eyes. How she woke in the middle of the night coughing. How her pleading stopped. No more Come home, no more I miss you, because Karel didn’t have time to waste now that he was free.

  On one of the warmer days in March, Karel persuaded Anna to accompany him on the streetcar to Rourke Park. He had a surprise for her. Anna wrapped her wrists and neck in rags and kerchiefs. She wore double socks and topped it off with her favorite lavender overcoat, cinched tight around her narrow waist, like it might blizzard. Karel laughed as she bundled. He was going to show her. The local ball club was having a tryout, and the boys were going to watch.

  Every year on the Fourth of July, he explained, a team of whites from the Southside played a team of Northside blacks in Rourke Park, with its big green grandstands and outfield fences and perfect lines of turf and chalk. Come summer, even the dirt would be immaculate. This was the highlight of the year for most warehouse workers, for stockyard and slaughterhouse veterans, almost every postman. Anybody who held steady in an integrated profession lived and died with the Interrace Game. The teams traveled some in the summer months, a weekend exhibition here or there, but Independence Day was the pinnacle of glory on their schedule.

  Emil Braun was at the tryout, on the field side of the fence. He waddled out to pester the players who knew him, to remind them that he was one of the founding members of the Omaha Baseball Club. The ballplayers teased about how, once he quit playing, a mudder like Braun went from short-but-quick to short-and-fat all at once. Braun took the ribbing. He didn’t mind so much, and it was true—he was stubby legged in his brown pants and suspenders, his flop of hair trailing off the wrong way. As long as he could pester, they could tease. It was an even trade.

  With some doing he talked the ballplayers into letting Alfred, Jimmy, and Karel shag balls during batting practice. They rushed the field beaming when he told them, seeing why Braun had hinted that they should bring along their mitts. Karel was going to show off for Anna. She’d see what he was up to all the time after school, why he didn’t come back to her and the attic.

  Out in the field Karel sprinted and jumped and snapped the ball from the ether with his leather. He made sense out there. Grown men in wool getups shouted out his talent as he ran down a fly and launched the ball back to the dirt. It was fun. Even the first time he caught a screaming liner, when the ball stung his palm so much—using an infielder’s glove where it wasn’t suited—that he threw the glove down and hopped with his hands between his thighs to make the pain go away. Even in his short pants and the flapping sleeves of a white flannel, he belonged out there. Anna might not understand the rules, but she should understand her brother. She’d see him the way the boys on Clandish saw him. The way he outran his awkward friends. The way his hair shimmered in the breeze, the way his shoulders widened as he caught his breath, or standing back in the grass, legs apart, knees bent, his eyes unblinking toward the backstop waiting for the smack and zip of a batted ball, until one came to him, like it wanted to be caught in his webbing, like it needed to be. And he was still new to the game, which made everything more exciting. If he kept improving, who knew where baseball could take him.

  Some players took a liking to Karel. The Sutez brothers, George and Bill, who were captains of the team. They played pepper with him, as a goof, smacking a ball around at close range to see who had quick hands—something Karel had trained at with his friends. He could keep up with the men, and they liked him more once they saw how soft his hands were. Bill Sutez was handsome and well built. He had all his teeth and they were straight, not a minor accomplishment for a guy who liked to brawl like Bill did—although his ears were stretched back more horizontal than what looked normal and were cauliflowered, so not all was right. During batting practice Bill lounged in the dirt near the on-deck circle and dared hitters to foul one off his chin, laughing louder each time a ball missed him. George Sutez was the older brother, the catcher. He perked his lips when in concentration, showing off his front teeth like he was simple. The guys called him Ducky because of the way he waddled behind the plate, more comfortable in a crouch than standing upright.

  Karel held his own during pepper. He couldn’t help laughing at what anyone said to him afterwards, he was so happy, with Anna watching up behind the chicken wire in the grandstand. He couldn’t contain himself on the ride home, bouncing from bench to bench on the streetcar. Anna kept telling him to sit down and be quiet. She was ashamed at how he acted, her cheeks red, how she couldn’t look any of the other passengers in the eye. Karel knew something was wrong.

  She confined herself to the sofa the whole week after. Sulking, Karel thought. Jealous of what he could do. He bugged Anna to go outside. To meet some girls, nice ones she would get along with, not like some of the mad Irish lasses he tangled with at school. She didn’t feel up to it, she claimed. She was too tired. She had her own plans. Karel believed otherwise, that the idea of enjoying herself was frightening. She’d blossom too if she was free like Karel. The more her arts filled up the attic, he noticed, the sicker she became. Her work evolved into stranger and stranger forms. More abstract, more sinister.

  Karel would have to come up with something that would save her.

  After he beat the tar out of the Cypriot, Jake asked for an election job and Tom Dennison gave him one. Everybody on Clandish heard about this. A story too good to not repeat. How Jake got in good with the Old Man by taking out the Cypriot, and how Jake owed everything he could give to Dennison from then on. Not only had Jake been shuffled around the police and any charges they might bring, he’d been promoted. With Tom Dennison to thank.

  So Jake and his crew worked franticly through winter. They did spoils. They played tricks on reformers and the reformers’ friends. They made speeches and shouted down speechmakers who were against them. It was an election year, 1918. They canvassed every day. Billy Nesselhous (number two in the organization) was their professor. Machine lieutenants ran from job to job, man to man, house to house. They pranked stodgy old men in uptown mansions who opposed the machine ticket. They slurred anyone who disagreed with them. Made false reports and bribed officials. Occupied street corners. Flaunted unrefinement. Jabbered a pitch in the muck of the river flats to convince the drunk and desperate that any new politics would be bad news for dirty habits everywhere. There were plenty of old tricks, like expanding voter rolls with the names of the dead in the Mormon cemetery. They devised their own too, like uprooting the Liberty Gardens of ladies’ club presidents. If Jane Addams or Fighting Bob La Follette came to town, or if the archbishop of the Roman Catholics wanted to obstruct, every lieutenant would be there to jeer when the machine needed him to.

  The election men Jake worked with made the most of their nastiness. That was part of the job—making sure people out in the suburbs were afraid to mess with a machine man from the city. Foreigners made boundaries obvious; members of a ladies’ club would avoid the River Ward if they thought it was full of the Hun. Who cared if society ladies hated them? It didn’t matter. On the Ward, where things did in fact matter, there was some stature in being one of Tom Dennison’s men. Foremen let them alone in Jobbers Canyon. They had friends on the police force. Joe Potash, the detective in charge of organizing raids on saloons and brothels, was a Dennison man through and through. Same with Harry Buford, who drove Dennison’s car as part of his police duties, not to mention the police chief himself, Gentleman Jack Pszanowski. Election workers did what they wanted on the Ward. Cops winked complicit no matter what. It was an astonishing identity for a young man to take on, especially if he was the wrong kind of person. Ingo Kleinhardt, as a case, had a dark complexion and divots around his eyes. A long scar veined his jaw, something he got during a disagreement with a tenement deacon. Ingo was in disagreement a lot, with people he shouldn’t
have been. He had four young kids but didn’t mind getting hurt so long as he got to hurt the other guy too. Ingo was never going to be what anyone considered the cream of the cream in decent society, but men like him were the bread and butter of a political organization. Hard-drinking, chain-smoking, whore-mongering men who’d landed where they belonged.

  There were a dozen of them in their election crew. Dennison gave the job to Jake and let him bring his friends along. Joe Meinhof took to the work right away, but Reinhold begged out after a week, preferring life as a tunneler. Charlie turned Jake down flat. He enlisted in the army because he was tired of being called both a slacker and a Hun. He didn’t want to listen to it anymore and would be on a battlefield in Flanders by the spring of 1918. Others were happy to join up with the machine. Konrad, Paul, Rudi, and Albert left their jobs as dairymen. From the warehouses came Ingo and Heinz. It didn’t take long for a daylighter in Jobbers Canyon to figure his fortunes would be brighter working nights for Tom Dennison than pleading with a hiring manager each morning. If you worked hard for Tom, he’d at least be loyal. That was a hell of a lot more than any other job promised.

  Jake didn’t even try to argue with the logic. Those days the machine was perfect.

  He sifted in waves of daylighters late that February. It was a cool morning. Men scattered along Tenth Street in a broken single file toward the mills. Jake took aim on them, set his shoulders wide so they couldn’t slip by. These were repairmen for the Union Pacific. The world’s largest welding yard was close by. Its workers wore patched overalls, denim jackets, floppy felt hats made heavy by oil and soot. They stared at Jake through tired eyes, annoyed because he strode headlong against their current, a footstool in his arms. He liked facing workers alone. There was a thrill in their menacing looks when they turned to see why Jake, square jawed and blond, had made himself vulnerable.