Kings of Broken Things

by Theodore Wheeler

  Billy Nesselhous stopped by Tom’s house before the banquet to talk things over. Billy was the only one Tom was honest with about being sick. They’d known each other a long time. Billy had been a rangy street kid himself once but was short and fat now, almost all his hair gone, his nose swelled up like a red balloon. Tom figured he had no room to judge. He probably looked worse. Two old gamblers. Partners of the famed, now-defunct Budweiser Saloon. It was Billy who helped Tom set up his first policy wheel and gambling room when he came to Omaha. Billy was from here and knew the lay of the land, and they had mutual friends in Denver. That was enough in those days.

  Tom was in the kitchen when Billy arrived. He’d changed into his tuxedo and was having broth to warm up. Ada offered Billy some, but he’d had whiskey on the ride over and the broth wouldn’t mix well.

  Billy wanted to compare notes on the election to make sure he was up to speed. It was his feeling that they’d pull it out again, easy, and he tried to convince Tom to share his optimism. Cowboy Jim Dahlman, their incumbent mayor, took first in the open primary a couple months before, which had surprised Tom. Maybe it surprised nobody else, but that didn’t matter. Primaries were bullshit. Particularly when nobody was eliminated. Billy was persistent, though. He said Tom read too much into the threat of reform. Tom got to feeling down and unnerved himself, and maybe even Frank, talking about losing. “You spooked yourself.” Billy fiddled with the silverware. He didn’t like having to be the wise one. “You feel bad, that’s it. What was it the doc said? Wandering pneumonia?”

  “Walking.”

  “Sure. That’s it. But you got to keep your chin up. Tonight especially. We don’t win without these men. Keep the money flowing. That will make you feel better. If we take this election, you’ll be tip-top in no time.”

  Maybe Billy was right. Tom felt bad, and that was what made him think they’d lose. That was all. He’d feel better when they won. Winning always did that. If they held on through the municipal vote two months down the road, he’d collect from who owed him. It would be summer. He’d head out with Ada to San Diego like she wanted. If they took the municipal, he’d feel fine.

  “I think you’re onto something,” he told Billy. “I feel better already.”

  “Sure you do. You just need some cheering up. That’s what I’m here for.”

  They went through it again and Tom did feel better. The fear of losing had dragged him down, that was all. He never could stand somebody getting the better of him.

  Maybe it seems peculiar that Evie and Jake fell in love so quickly. But it was a common occurrence at the time. People fell in love over the course of an afternoon, in a moment out on the walkway if it was a nice day, and were married by the nearest justice of the peace if it felt right. It happened that way for most people on Clandish. If two people loved each other, they loved each other. Why shouldn’t they be together?

  They weren’t married, so maybe it wasn’t love, but Evie got Jake to herself evenings in her rooms, and she made the most of what time they had together. She was content to cloister away with him, to listen to Irving Berlin and eat soft green apples, to read aloud from the clothbound Ovid he bought, one that reminded him of the library his father kept back home, he said. She cooked in sloppy, eclectic styles. Sautéed catfish with onions and peas. Hot potato salad. Buttered noodles, vegetable chop suey with wild artichokes. He ate quickly then finished what morsels Evie ignored on her plate, the half she left untouched. Jake was such a country boy. He sometimes drank a whole quart of buttermilk with dinner. He came to her pretty much every night as winter turned to spring, his arms full of presents he’d bought for her—more records, new bottles of roseate perfumes. It was nice to have him up in her place. The gamblers Evie worked for had let her keep the room, even after Ugo vanished, and said they’d get back to her when they needed something. Whatever you want, she’d said. She didn’t want to lose the room, even if that meant she owed the gamblers. Of course, she didn’t tell Jake about the deal she’d made. He had his secrets, Evie figured, his little sneaking from his boss, and she had hers.

  She and Jake told stories from when they were kids. Games they’d played; people they recalled randomly, for often tawdry reasons. That made them merry. They talked about what they read in the Metamorphoses and listened to hot jazz on the phonograph. She said dopey things to him, like “Don’t fall in love with me,” and, “If you were smart, you wouldn’t be here,” and he acted like she was teasing. She prepared baths. Mineral-rich, nourishing baths she concocted with great care. He stopped by to warm and wash, to lay in the water with his woman.

  Usually there was an errand Jake’s boss required that would take him away. But some nights, like this one, Jake was free. By the time he made it through the door she was up on her tiptoes to kiss him and remove his jacket and toss it over the wire dummy. When she veered to the bathroom he followed, his eyes on the short gauzy skirt she wore, the green and white stockings. He said it was amusing how she made her own clothes. The mere idea of Evie set to a chore, her face busy in concentration, her idle hands made tense and precise. His amusement bothered Evie when she remembered all the garments she lost during the eviction. Clothes she’d made herself, gone because Jake didn’t speak up sooner. But how could he have known all that?

  Evie held out awhile after the first time, when she’d rubbed off on his leg because he wouldn’t go inside her. His discretion threw her off. It was strange compared to how things usually happened on her block. The next time, when he tried to move his hand more liberally up her thigh, she twisted away. She kissed him these early days, let him do with his hands everywhere but between her legs. Evie didn’t understand where this fresh modesty came from. New barriers were erected. Ones she’d never had before. Chastity had never been her thing, not even as a girl. Now she’d gone virgin somehow. This wasn’t something Evie understood, but she was game if Jake was. When she resisted, it was his turn to say dopey things. “I was wrong about you. You’re a nice girl, aren’t you? Stuck in the wrong part of town.” What was she supposed to say to that? Nobody had ever talked so dirty to her. “Whatever you want,” she said, then slapped his hands away. This made him even hotter. She could feel the way he boiled. His face red. His blushing.

  Above her, bathtub bottles lined the window, varicolored salts and powders inside the clear glass of apothecary jars. Evie mixed potions in the water then turned to undress Jake. She was pleased undoing his buttons, in whisking away his pants before they pooled on the damp tile. She led him to water and held his hand until he was submerged. She undressed herself then, sat on the stool to cleave the stockings from her legs. She turned away to pull the blouse over her head, crossed her breasts with an arm, and stepped into the water to nestle between his legs. The water was scalding, but Evie didn’t care. She liked it best when the water burnt. Their bodies turned red where they were wet. She rolled over after a while to kiss him, to let his hand skate along her jaw to her shoulders, down her back to the rise of hips, back and forth, until she finally let him inside. She gasped when he slipped the threshold at last, because a man always liked the sound of air escaping her lips at the moment he pushed inside.

  There was conflict in the way they made love. Like neither of them had ever done this before. Jake never came, for one thing. They did it long, hard, slow, fast, in various modulations and strengths. They tried different things. Sometimes the water went tepid, but they didn’t care, moving slow, barely going, because the discipline this took made his eyes roll back in his head. Still he didn’t come. It wasn’t bad that he didn’t. It was just peculiar to leave off unfinished. His member red and raw, still apt, if agitated, vibrating.

  Evie didn’t mind what she looked like below, even if her parts were as much of a mess as they felt. She’d earned that.

  She posed naked in the parlor mirror to put her hair up, arms and elbows raised as she wrangled wet curls. There were shadows in the hollows of her armpits where soft hair grew. She turned her hips from side t
o side to examine her body—the neat puff of hair on her pubis, the way her nipples pointed cockeyed as she swayed. Jake came up from behind, fully dressed, to put his hands over her breasts.

  “The nipple on that one always was wrong,” she said, her mouth turned.

  “This guy?” he asked, squeezing the left one.

  “No. The other.”

  He turned her around to have a look, but she walked away before he could see the defect. She put on her robe and sat by the window to cool off. The night was going fast.

  “You think I’m a fool, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” he laughed. “They’re tits, yeah? They’re good.”

  Evie played like she was angry. She wouldn’t talk. She looked out the window at some man rushing up the avenue. The street was always busy after suppertime. A perfectly legitimate man, normally good for something, would have a few drinks at dinner, and that indiscretion, before long, would lead up the steps to a madam’s parlor. The guy would be lost to a wicked imagination the rest of the night. It was no secret how that happened.

  The way things went between a girl and guy was a funny thing to Evie all of sudden—secure in her rooms with Jake—but she didn’t let on her good humor. For Evie, playing sad was part of the game.

  To raise her spirits, Jake told a joke about a pastor’s wife who ate only lamb meat. “Don’t you get it? Lamb meat!” A grin broke through. She let him hug her from behind, his arms over her shoulders to reach inside the fold of her kimono. She wasn’t really mad at him.

  Evie turned her face up to his. “Are you okay? You’re all red. You’re sweating.”

  Jake’s cheeks were red. His neck and chest too, something more than blushing. His hair hadn’t dried after the bath because he sweat.

  “You made me this way.” He laughed in a dull sort of way.

  “Shouldn’t you go? If you’re coming down with something?”

  Jake looked ill—and he must have felt miserable from the way he tried to keep her from examining him—but he acted like his condition was a joke. He wanted to stay, he said. Workers in the machine didn’t get many nights off during an election. If he spent this one sick in bed, he’d never get it back.

  “But maybe you’re right,” he said. “I’ll get some wine. We’ve got to keep up our strength.”

  In the kitchen, after he put the corkscrew to a bottle, Jake rifled in paper sacks on the floor that were half-filled with tins of canned meat. There was deviled ham, beef au jus. What remained of the food he sent over.

  “What’s the big idea? Don’t you like canned meat?”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” Evie said. “But I don’t eat the stuff. I’m a vegetarian.”

  This seemed to strike Jake dumb as he stood there with the wine. How many wisecracks about eating meat were spinning gleefully in his brain? He didn’t let slip even the first of them. The corner of his mouth turned up as he drank. “I didn’t know you had principles.”

  In fact, Evie hadn’t eaten meat in years. She’d been to a lecture once that extolled the virtues of purity and temperance, back when she was new in town and worked nights in dance halls. Prudish old women in heavy wool skirts and plain white blouses lectured on various topics to young women who lived on the River Ward and gave out free doughnuts and coffee to those who would spend a morning seated quietly on a bench and be berated in good faith. Why vegetarianism should stick in Evie’s mind and not a bit of the rest about chastity and restraint was a funny thing to her. Evie thought she was being cute, refusing to consume meat in a city known best for stockyards and slaughterhouses, and the habit stuck because she felt better only eating fruits and vegetables. She was a little insulted that night with Jake, that he hadn’t yet noticed this about her, even though they’d been seeing each other for months. Evie never served meat, and only rarely fish, when they ate in her rooms. Young men had always been and would always be self-involved, she figured. It shouldn’t surprise her if Jake couldn’t see past the end of his nose.

  They sat up and had wine by the window. After a while a pair of bottles sat empty on the floor next to them. Jake looked worse. His stomach made curious, loud noises. He refused a soporific when she offered one, even when she insisted. “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ve got a good heart. It will take more than a fever to slow me down.” He wanted to stay next to her. It was something Evie couldn’t argue against, the street busier than before. Stray men reeled drunk along the curbstone, either leaving a palace or looking for one that would take them in. Girls worked the walkway now that it was getting late. Cheap girls. Desperate biddies, or older ones too staggered by Chinese opium to keep a room in a respectable joint. A man might have too much shame to snatch a girl off the street early on, but that changed after midnight if he was too broke or too drunk to take his satisfaction indoors. If he was looking after midnight, a man took what he could get, in an alley, in the back of a car. Jake and Evie watched these characters couple off. It was fascinating how a cake eater talked to a girl, both discreet and pantomime, and how she drew him in. It was better than any melodrama the theaters put on.

  Evie explained how false the whole performance was, but that it could be pleasant sometimes. “If he’s genteel” was how she put it. “Like you.” She’d worked in dime-a-dance halls when she came to Omaha, even though it turned out she wasn’t much of a dancer. She met a lot of weird men that way, a few nice ones. Jake looked uneasy when she talked like that but didn’t make her stop. It was true, anyway, that there was something charming about Jake, even if it wasn’t gentility. How he stared off blankly, mislaid in the world; how he grimaced in silence when at a loss for words, his mind grinding; how his hair flopped over his forehead, how a cowlick spiked up in back, Jake unaware until his woman was there to tamp it down; how he wore mud grained in the creases of his palms; how he dressed, not quite sloppy, but with mere deference to neatness. It usually wasn’t this easy with a man, but Evie liked taking care of Jake.

  His feet were on the windowsill, Evie under a blanket next to him in the wide seat of the high-backed chair. Outside, a white woman walked arm in arm with a black man. An umbrella dipped intermittently over their faces, but you couldn’t mistake them. The two were married, Evie explained. “Not legally. They just live like they are.” This neighborhood was integrated, which was something that drew Evie here even though it made her worry sometimes that she might be labeled as high yellow by the black folks here. If black folks didn’t see her as white, that would change how everyone else saw her too. She worried constantly that somebody might call her out for pretending to be something she wasn’t—but, really, what was the difference? Either way she was a kept woman living in a notorious part of town. To what lower station could they consign her? Even when a person did inspect Evie closely, if they seemed to gaze into her on the street—making her wonder if something was wrong with her fingernails, the palms of her hands, the shape of her ears or teeth, which was why she never ate in a restaurant, on the off chance that an inquisitor might trap her at a table—even then the person doing the inspecting always mistook her for an Italian, Albanian, or Gypsy, assuming they saw anything at all to question.

  It was distressing to see a couple like the one out for a walk in the misting rain, the avenue disrupted because of them, and the peculiar intimacy of two people sharing an umbrella. Evie watched, drawn to this affection between different tribes, as if there was a halo of light around them. The couple budged down the walkway, not looking up at any of the windows to see who saw them.

  For a long time after they passed, Jake watched the walkway where the couple had been. Evie stared into his reddened face, his wine-purpled lips, his blank eyes. What was he thinking? He said he felt the cold from the window in his feet. She curled around his middle and asked again if he’d lie down. He shook his head in a perturbed way.

  “Do you know,” he said, “when I first saw you, I thought you looked familiar? You weren’t, though, yeah. I didn’t know you. I hadn’t ever know
n anyone like you. What are you, Evie? What makes you so new?”

  She didn’t want to hear him talk like that and spoke over him to get him to shut up. She told how her mother was a seamstress and that she didn’t really know her father. After four children the man ran off to Nevada to find gold and silver and never returned. Evie had some schooling where she came from in Topeka, but only enough to meet a few boys, and she regretted she hadn’t had more. It was her brother who supported the family when she was young.

  “He wasn’t any good.” Evie opened another bottle of wine and turned the radiator full open. A rusty, damp smell filled the room as the heat banged on. “Ben found work when he was sober. He was a house painter, which isn’t bad money, you know, provided you’ll work when the boss says to.” Ben died when Evie was little. He fell asleep on some railroad tracks one night, drunk, and was run over by a train. That was the end of him. Evie shrugged as she told about his dying, as if nothing could have stopped it from happening. “His body was sliced into segments. They had some trouble burying him like that because Mama bought a coffin with a glass front on it. When the pallbearers moved the coffin, the different parts of him slid around inside his suit. It was pitiful. Poor, dumb, Ben. His corpse wanted to roll up in a ball.”

  The undertaker couldn’t talk Evie’s mother out of buying that nice coffin. Ben was the only fool in the cemetery for their part of town with a glass-front coffin. Nobody understood why a seamstress with three kids left to care for wanted to be uppity about the one who died.