Consider Tom Dennison: most people couldn’t tell a thing was wrong in 1918, but things weren’t going so well for him. It was an election year. The coalition Tom put together had been in charge over twenty years by then. He ran everything in town. The board of commissioners, the utilities board, the police force. He had the mayor on his side, of course. To a guy on the street the Dennison machine looked rock solid. But Tom would have known the inside workings of everything and how fragile his organization actually was. It all depended on the vote. Any single election year could topple what he’d built. He wouldn’t have been able to rest, thinking about that.
To top it off, the opposition paper was making him out to be a crook again. They did it to annoy him. Tom had never stolen anything a guy wasn’t willing to give of his own free will, through carelessness or greed. Tom was a gambler. This was the profession he claimed—not boss, as the opposition paper called him, not crook or embezzler or racketeer or anything else. Being a gambler was an honorable thing, as far as Tom knew. A gambler didn’t steal. He won.
This time he’d done nothing. A traveler’s wife had some jewelry stolen from their room. The hotel manager said to go and ask Tom if he knew who took it. Tom could have left them in the wind. He didn’t know who took the jewelry, a diamond necklace and ring, not offhand. But Tom was a decent man. He found out. Some grifter came through on his way to Kansas City and somehow talked the woman out of her possessions. These things happened. How this woman ended up alone in a hotel room with a man she just met, that was her business. Tom didn’t care. He tracked the thief down to KC and made sure the woman’s things were expressed back with apologies. Nothing was lost in the deal by anyone. Everyone was happy, save the grifter. But then the World-Herald had to run a note on it, a paragraph or so, with a quote from the woman. She blabbed Tom’s name. It wouldn’t have been a big deal at all if it wasn’t for the name Dennison being mentioned next to the name Pendergast. If Tom was connected to Pendergast, who was known for running a crooked machine down in KC, then a bunch of people in Omaha were connected to Pendergast too. The inference wouldn’t sit well. Tom knew how important it was to run things clean. It wasn’t enough to just do right.
That was why he was going to Frank’s house for lunch. To square things with the benefactors. Frank spoke for the benefactors. He was important. He paid for things. So there would have to be an explanation for the article. Tom and Frank alone. A sit-down in the wallpapered front room of Frank’s house, some ham sandwiches and beer. Tom wouldn’t even take the beer. He didn’t bother with spirits. That was the truth. People might not believe it, but that’s how it was. Tom asked for a glass of milk, and the maid went to get it.
“I hope it isn’t your stomach,” Frank said. He laughed and Tom laughed too. “A grown man drinking milk.”
Frank was tall, good looking, his dark hair combed back, charming in his way. Rich, connected, unperverted. He came from a good family and married into a better one. Tom considered him a man. That was important. Frank was somebody Tom could talk to. He was younger than Tom—Tom turned fifty-nine that October—but that was okay, most people were younger than him those days. They’d figure things out, and then Tom could tell the boys what to do. They’d keep things up and running in this town just as long as they could.
Tom felt fine during lunch. The ham was all right. Ribbons of fat gelled cold through the meat, there was Dijon mustard and paper-thin slices of onion. Frank wasn’t even mad about the thing in the newspaper. “I want to talk about the vote,” he said. There was a city election in three months—it had been twenty years since the slate Tom backed lost an election. “Oh. Nothing to worry about there,” Tom said, naming off what good news there was to tell. The sound health of candidates on their ticket. The stifling of scandal. How they even got the Germans on Clandish over to their side this last year, because Wilson promised to keep the country out of the war and it got him elected. Sure, Wilson backtracked on that, but Tom didn’t think most voters would hold a grudge.
“You got it under control is what you’re saying.” Frank sat back and dabbed his mouth with a napkin. He’d put too much mustard on his sandwich and the overspill kept him occupied.
Tom didn’t say much—he rarely did—but the thought of the vote wore him out. He had a bad feeling this time. Leaning back into the fine sofa, full from the milk and ham, he murmured something about this maybe being the last time he ran an election, and how it bothered him that the odds might go against them.
“What do you mean by that?” Frank leaned in to stir his coffee. His mouth turned down, his face still and smooth as ivory. “We’re going to lose? That’s what you mean?”
“No,” Tom said. “I don’t mean that. It’s just a feeling. Something strange.”
“Jeez. Is that what you actually think? What are we paying you for?” Frank stood to look out the curtains. “Think you can still handle the job?” he asked. “Think you’re up for another election? Think it’s time to quit? Let somebody else take a hand at the trigger?”
“Sure,” Tom said. “Sure, I’m fine.”
Tom told Harry to drive the Olds 45 up north of the city. He wanted to see some countryside. His doctor said he needed rest, that he should avoid the office for a while, get as much fresh air as he could. It was what doctors always said: fresh air, clean water. Tom was inclined to believe them, he just didn’t know how to implement such advice. He could head home early, surprise Ada. He could skip out to his kennel. There were some new fox terrier pups, he could see how their training was going. Or the stables. Tom owned the fastest palomino pony in the world.
Tom didn’t do any of these things. He had Harry drive in the country. A long drive would give him time to come around to what Frank had said.
He didn’t feel at all well. Headaches, heartburn, he couldn’t breathe sometimes. That’s why he had milk at lunch. Why he chewed mint leaves in the car.
Tom let the Olds do its work. A car was splendid magic. Man’s greatest invention, this Olds 45. There was dark-green paint encased in wax, prime oak in varnish for the wheel spokes and dash, chrome mirrors and light cans that shined brighter than anything. Its tires roared some incantation when they hit gravel. Tom loved that car. He could take in the view, hills of grass, streams and ponds, a deer buck confounded at the Olds’s cantankerous passing by. Tom was tired of going station to station. Breakfast table to office, office to Frank’s house, back to office, to lunch, to office, to home, to supper table. He spent a lot of time in that Olds too, from point to point, but at least the scenery changed. He leaned back where the vinyl roof curved down, where nobody saw him hiding. Tom had a good life, but he couldn’t take seeing the same old mugs at the office all the time, not for the whole day, not anymore. He needed something else.
It was no small matter that Harry told good stories at the wheel. In addition to being Tom’s driver, Harry Buford was a cop, so he kept a treasury of dirty jokes. Jokes about priests and nuns. About schoolteachers and students. The confessions of deranged citizens. Funny stuff, and most of it true, if you believed what anyone told a cop or what cops told each other. In the car Tom could laugh as much as he wanted. He wasn’t giving anything away if it was just him and Harry. So they drove. He spent too much time in the office, cooped up in a dark room. It bugged Tom that he didn’t know how it would all end. Would he sit in his office and wait for a stroke to take him? To wipe out that great analyzing mind of his? Would the end come in the backseat of his car, the car gliding along? Would Harry even notice if the big one took Tom away? Would Harry just keep on driving? Maybe Tom was already dead. Maybe it didn’t matter if they won the vote next time or not.
He should be so lucky.
Tom spotted Jake Strauss when they were back downtown. He had Harry roll the Olds up behind and lowered the window. “You got a minute?” he asked.
A Thompson submachine gun lay on the back bench next to Tom, half-hidden under a plaid blanket with a pistol clip jutting from its housing. The kid d
idn’t see the gun until he was settled. He nearly jumped out of his skin when he did see it—a gun like that, what doughboys used to mow down German shock troops in the trenches of Flanders. Tom reclined behind the black canvas roof and drummed the stock of his gun. He never rode without it. The blanket that covered the gun draped over his legs in such a way that he had a clear path to the trigger.
Those days they took more and more of these trips around the city. Tom saw how Jake was comfortable in the dark-green touring car, the two of them in the back, even though he’d never been in a luxury car before. “I rode on a flatbed truck,” the kid admitted, “but that was back home.” In Omaha, in the first months of 1918, the kid shared the backseat of a smooth-running Olds with Tom Dennison. How exhilarating it must have been for him.
Tom had picked the kid out. Some of the older guys didn’t like it, but Tom didn’t care what they thought. Maybe he saw something they didn’t. Some potential. Some dumb ambition. Some glint of himself as a young man. Tom didn’t have a son. Everyone knew this. Two boys had been conceived a long time ago. One was miscarried. The other died as an infant.
This wasn’t about that. The kid impressed Tom, that was all. Jake was good. He believed in the method Tom taught. Was eager to learn. Was strong and confident in his faith. He spread the gospel. Violence didn’t freeze him. Sure, the kid didn’t say much about himself or why he’d come to Omaha in the first place, but Tom admired that too. Why should a man uncloud his past? All the kid talked about was the weather up where he came from, the crops they grew, how his father ran a little church business out of the farmhouse. It was a bland life out there on a farm, and a guy like him wanted adventure. But then, why didn’t Jake find a recruiting station and enlist? All the adventure anyone could ask for was free for the taking in France just then. The American Expeditionary Forces would have been happy to have him. But Jake wasn’t like that. He hated guns. He told Tom once that he’d bought a revolver—in case it was needed, you never knew—but he didn’t like holding a gun. Didn’t like the smell of guns. He hid the revolver under his mattress and hadn’t fired the thing once, hadn’t even let it see the light of day. How do you figure a guy like that? Timid a lot of the time. But he did bad things to people. The foreigner in the tunnels, that Cypriot. Jake would beat a man near to death—it was in his eyes—but only in the right situation. Whatever that meant to him. Then ask him to flash a pistol to set some crooks straight, he’d shake his head. “I’d rather not,” he’d say. “Get Meinhof to do it.”
This bothered Billy. Billy Nesselhous was Tom’s right-hand man, so Billy did some checking on Jake. Some things about the kid’s mother turned up, quite a lot about his father, who got into trouble when he was young. There was an incident with a pick handle where Jake came from, how he struck down some boy and hurt him bad. This didn’t bother Tom the least bit. Tom did things like that himself as a young man, back when he was a rambler, in Leadville, Colorado, in Salt Lake City, in Montana boomtowns that came and went before they even made it to a map. If you won, people were going to resent you. That’s how it went.
Billy even had the kid followed. Weekly reports were compiled from the start. It was suspicious to Billy the way Jake came in after he took out the Cypriot and asked for a job connected to the vote, like the kid had ambitions contrary to Tom’s. So they heard about Jake Strauss walking Clandish Street and Jobbers Canyon. They heard about him skirting the slag fields by the iron mills. He handed out cards for jobbers to bring to the polling room so nobody forgot the names of the candidates. “Tell them Cowboy Jim sent you,” he’d say, just like he was supposed to. “Say Tom Dennison wants you to work. The foreman will know what to do.” The kid jabbered until his voice gave out, spouting off about what Mayor Dahlman meant to the River Ward. He staked out saloons, hospitals, barbershops, bakeries. He talked to anyone who was good-natured or stupid enough to listen to an election man. This was all on the up-and-up. So Tom arranged some bigger game to see how the kid would handle it. A grocery truck was to be lost in the tenements. The kid was instructed to point the truck onto a dirt path where nobody from a main street could see. He rode the runners to toss off sacks of flour and rice, kegs of lard, tins of canola oil. War rations ate through most of the food poor folks had access to, so Tom commandeered a fruit truck to mete out apples and tomatoes, then watched a ways back as Jake carried off the plan. Kids swarmed out from every cranny as soon as the truck splashed into the muddy yard, tipped off by curiosity, boredom, hunger. They shimmied out on the bare limbs of trees to see in the back of the truck.
These jobs were like feeding the masses, but it was no miracle. The arrangement went off smooth because Tom had an edge over the underlying interests. The fruit company happened to be the same that was awarded a contract to supply the city fire company with produce. They were willing to lose a little if it meant business ran as usual. Once the truck was empty, Jake told its driver to cross into Iowa and report a highway robbery to the sheriff of a small county, one disinterested in big-city politics. An insurance company would share the loss if the produce was reported stolen. If the insurance man complained, Tom reminded him of what he too owed. The whole operation ran smooth. The kid played his part to a T. Even Billy had to admit that.
The Olds drove up north to where the roads were a mix of crushed red brick and mud. They saw mangled bodies here. This was what Tom wanted to show Jake. People struggled with legs bent the wrong way. Sleeves hung empty below a stump. Pant legs dangled or were pinned. Kids in barren yards watched the Olds swerve chuckholes. They twisted their feet in tufts of calf-high grass. Some had hands tucked into sleeves of greasy leather, facing the one who wagged a broomstick over his shoulder at the end of the block. Women dunked laundry in washtubs under the eaves of single-story shacks. There was the husk of a burned-out house, a stripped-down Model A sunk in mud to its fenders. A steam engine puffed behind the buildings, dredging sewer sludge north to a canal that went to the Missouri. Old and not-so-old men loafed outside a yellow building. None of them spoke when they saw the car. They stared silent as it moved along.
When Harry went to turn around, a man crossed in front of the Olds. He was middle-aged and bent toward the road as he stumbled. A rheumatic. Tom leaned forward to see what the holdup was. And he saw this man, fingers bent broken, unable to close, limbs joined at odd angles. No part of his body could flex straight. Scars covered his face.
Men twisted in chairs along the storefronts, the hard labor of their lives fixed to their bodies. Tom explained how thousands of them were coming north to fill stockyard positions as locals enlisted in the war. These neighborhoods were overflowing. Every morning, trucks owned by stockyards rumbled in to trade night for day workers, then returned in the evening to reverse the exchange. Most of them were scabs. It was better than sharecropping. Even if they might end up with a broken leg splinted by a nearly straight elm branch. Or lying on the planks of a walkway with nowhere to go. Or missing chunks of their ears from the cutting apparatus. Or knocked stupid by a stampeding bull, jabbering and drooling, face swarmed with flies.
Tom asked Jake if he’d ever seen a black person before coming to Omaha. He hadn’t. Stories about the blackies of North Omaha were common where he came from, he said. So-and-so’s cousin got raped because she lived alone in an apartment. A guy’s sweetheart groped by blacks because she wanted to sit in an air-conditioned theater to watch a movie. But no. There weren’t people of color there. No Greeks or Turks or Italians either. He’d heard of buffalo soldiers camped at Fort Robinson and Negro sodbusters—Moses Speece and his brothers near Broken Bow—but he’d never seen a black person before coming to Omaha.
Tom had come from the same area as Jake—one county over, in fact—and he knew how it was up there in the northeast part of the state.
The car was stopped, so Tom decided to call a boy to him. The boy was on the corner with two girls who must have been his sisters. Hair stuck out from their heads like it was pulled that way. Tom asked about the
boy’s family when he was close enough to hear, how many kids there were. Was the boy born in Omaha? Did the boy’s folks plan to stay? He asked, “Do you know who I am?” The boy shook his head. Tom smoothed his thumb along the stock of his machine gun. “You don’t recognize me?” The boy turned his bare feet in the road, looked to his sisters, his skin ashy from the dust. “I’m Tom. Tom Dennison. You think you can remember that?”
“Yessir. You Tom Dennison.”
“Good.” Tom slid a roll of cash from his pocket. He counted out thirty dollars with his gun hand and handed the money to the boy. The boy’s jaw nearly dropped to the road. Tom told Harry to drive on.
“You understand why we do these things, don’t you, Jake? If that boy sticks around, or even if he don’t, as long as he survives to be a man, he’ll never forget me. He’ll tell his kids and grandkids about the time this fellow named Tom Dennison made him rich a few days. If they’ve never heard of Tom Dennison, then he’ll tell all about my generosity. That’s why we do these things. So that boy remembers.”
There was a banquet that night at a warehouse cleaned out for the purpose. Mayor Dahlman would be there. Frank would be there. The city commissioners. Billy set it all up. A regular thing in an election year. There would be a big spread. Rotisserie chicken and roast duck with apricot jam, mashed potatoes still steaming they were so hot, canned carrots and peas and tomatoes, white bread with butter and orange marmalade. There would be wine and rye whiskey and a keg of Storz Triumph that had been held over for the occasion.
Tom didn’t feel well, but these kinds of things were necessary from time to time. He’d rather be at home with his feet up by the fire, his daughter Frances beside him, Ada bringing broth. The doctor said Tom should have shook off what was bothering him by now. It had been months. Still some illness dragged on him, a little bit more each week. Walking pneumonia, the doctor guessed. Tom’s breathing was bad. Ada said he’d had an apoplexy. “Wouldn’t that explain it all,” he mocked her. “My brain broke.” He felt bad about his repartee later, but setting his wife straight was a necessary thing. Ada couldn’t keep going on about it like that, not with an election to win, not with Frank and the benefactors showing doubt. Tom had his hands full enough without worrying about water filling his lungs or his wife thinking he’d had a stroke.
Kings of Broken Things Page 11
