Kings of Broken Things

by Theodore Wheeler

  “You knew her?” Jake asked.

  “We weren’t friends. I just heard, that’s all. The lights went out one night. If you lived on this block, you heard how that girl was the reason why. Doreen Jungjohann. How’s a girl walk around carrying a name like that anyhow?”

  Evie asked if Jake had a place to stay. He could head to the Eigler house for the night, he said. Maria would take him. But he didn’t angle that way. Evie and him walked the gloaming instead, to the edge of the tenements, to the top of a Little Sicily bluff to see the river at sunset. They circled back north of Dodge, north of Capitol, to the brownstone where Evie lived, close enough to the arcade to hear an electric piano pound out ragtime, keys falling one on top of another in whimsical rhythm. She’d left the lights on in her rooms. The curtains were closed and glowed yellow from the bulbs. Her ears throbbed trying to hear something from the other rooms, some grunt or sigh, if the girls were busy with clients. What she heard was traffic. Pops of motorcars, rhythmic mill pounding, a train whistle in the distance. The building was quiet.

  She remembered the last time Jake was up in her rooms, fourteen months before, and how she’d told him off. You don’t understand, she’d said. I worked for them too. It was embarrassing how stupid the two of them were those days.

  Evie went up to the bathroom and locked the door. She was crying and didn’t want Jake to see. She didn’t know what he was here for or what she could give him to make him go away. Through her tears she looked down and saw her hands and really cried. Gouges where she’d slipped with a needle. Her nails unpainted. Calluses spread over her fingers like glaciers. She’d moved on, hadn’t she? She was freer to live how she wanted to without worrying what trouble Jake might drag her into. She was doing well. She was making it. Except that she was locked in the bathroom again, and Jake was there outside the door.

  He asked her to let him in after a while but she wouldn’t.

  “Did you miss me?” she asked through the door. “Is that why you came back?” Her voice was soft and halting, her syllables muted because it felt like she was choking.

  “Let me in,” Jake begged. He slipped his fingers under the door. “What did you do with the money? You could of bailed me out. They would of let me stay. I could of kept my job.” He was such a fool. “What did you do with the thousand-dollar bill?”

  He didn’t leave, but he didn’t say more about the money, and that was wise. He was better when he kept his mouth shut.

  She’d quit crying a long time before. She calmed down, all that shameful grief out of the way, and she began to think—if he wasn’t leaving—what it was she wanted from Jake, if anything.

  “Didn’t you wonder about that girl Doreen before? How long did you say? Two years since you saw her last. What did you think happened to a girl without a way to take care of herself?”

  Jake said he wanted Evie to open the door. He wanted to see her face. To end the waiting.

  “Anything you could say would be useless now,” she said. “Don’t you know I take care of myself? I have my business.” Jake said he had no idea. “I make garments for the girls around here. Quite a lot of them too. The girls don’t have to go down to the muck anymore and can have nice things to wear. Didn’t you wonder how I’d manage to keep up the rent? Didn’t you worry if I’d be long gone when you came to knock? Or if some new dick would answer? Or if I’d be out on the street?”

  “That’s great” was all he could muster. “What you’re doing.”

  Evie didn’t need him. She’d figured it out on her own and didn’t need some poor yokel to take care of her.

  She opened the door and was in the kitchen by the time he realized she’d gone by. She checked the icebox, pulled out some milk and poured a glass for Jake. She poured another for herself and took a bite from a plum.

  “Look,” she said. “You can’t stay here. You’re imposing. I don’t like it.”

  He drank the milk in three gulps and set his glass next to the bottle.

  “I’m not asking to stay.”

  “I’m not offering either. Yet you’re still here.”

  Evie shouldn’t have answered his letter. She shouldn’t have let him in, but it was too late to go back on that. He washed the glass in her sink and dried it with a towel. “Look at all this stuff you did around here,” he said. “Must have kept a carpenter busy most of a month. New tables. Doors!” He looked so much older now. With a beard, the way his hair was cut short up the sides. How his shoulders were bent and his arms hung lower. He was tan too, his skin dark and cracked where it bowed around his eyes. His nose sunburned.

  “I’ll be around a few days,” he said. “I want to go to the carnival. On Sunday there’s supper at Maria’s.”

  “I’m not going to Sunday supper,” Evie said.

  He pulled out a near-empty billfold to count his money. He couldn’t stay long.

  The Ak-Sar-Ben carnival was in full swing, its midway congested and loud. Traffic was slowed by meandering farmers on vacation, kids in truck beds, hair full of nits and dust. They wanted to see clowns and have their stomachs drop on a whirl-a-whirl ride, to catch a vaudeville routine and eat caramel apples and laugh at tiki men in grass skirts. They wanted merry-go-rounds, dancing bears, a Ferris wheel. There would be a big parade, theater shows put on nonstop, a coronation ball to crown the new King Ak and his queen. It was a great honor among the hoity-toity to be crowned or have a teenage daughter subjected to the king during the festivities.

  Evie took Jake that Wednesday afternoon. She wouldn’t hear of a bricklayer spending his few dollars on her, so she bought rock candy and apple cider for the both of them as they cruised the midway. In all the time she’d lived on the River Ward, this was the first time she’d been to the carnival. Both sides of King Ak’s Highway were lined with billboards and booths and theaters. A massive dancing pavilion was put up to accommodate those who wanted to try the Skip Fantastic, the latest dance craze, to shimmy and jazz in an unashamed way. Performers worked the crowd for tips. The Byak Headhunter growled at people—a black man with his scalp dyed in blood and a three-inch tuft of hair that stuck up in the middle of his bald head, he pounded the butt of a strange-looking spear to the pavement and took money for the thrill this provided. There were actors dressed up like jesters and clowns, like maidens. Buxom women strolled in bathing suits to promote the show they worked in. There was a man dressed like Bacchus, his cheeks and nose rosy, in leather sandals and what probably doubled as Tarzan’s loincloth another year; a man in a red cape and bull’s horns who answered to Beelzebub; an old woman dressed as a Southern belle; girls in peasant dirndls and flowery aprons; a man made up like a hobo, trousers torn, a hat with the top punched out, rags wrapped around his feet, who might have been a real hobo, Evie thought later; a man in blackface with ballooned drawers, a minstrel player with a tenor sax. Evie and Jake argued about which show looked most interesting. At first Evie wanted to see Mack Sennett’s collection of Bathing Beauties, sportive girls in tank suits and rubber caps, but then she saw a flyer for something called Yankee Doodle Bertha that looked good. They saw neither. Jake argued it was better to stroll the midway and watch oddballs perform for free. There would be more money for food that way. She had enough cash for whatever they wanted to do, but he didn’t like the sound of that. “You’re cheap,” she said. He agreed with a dopey smile, walking with his shoulders back. “Call me old-fashioned. I don’t mind.”

  With two military installations nearby—Forts Crook and Omaha—there were a bunch of soldiers in the crowd. Evie saw them around the year after the Armistice. Doughboys come home. Some loitered along the midway. Husky kids in uniform, long green socks and puffy breeches, like football players lost afield. Some twitched with war neurosis and struggled to keep their eyes open, or shuffled along in painful, halting gaits, like they were slipping on ice. Evie didn’t want to think about what doughboys had seen or had done to them over there to make them this way. Bombardments, nerve gas, horses disemboweled on barbed
wire, the still-twitching charred grist of a man caught by a flamethrower. There were doughboys who’d been buried alive when the man next to them stepped on a landmine, trapped when four tons of earth thrown up by the explosion landed. Girls heard these things and more from doughboys who came back looking for comfort in a woman—and Evie heard when the girls needed a turn of their own to unburden. A flyboy, crazy-eyed, sun dazed, whose timorous hands curled and shook, forever gripped on the controls of his biplane’s yoke and machine-gun trigger. One who skimmed his hands over his face like a preening cat. It was too sad to see them. Most boys cultivated a wish to die in glory rather than become stock clerks or broom boys, and after that, hideous adulthood. Evie had talked to hundreds of them in the dime-a-dance hall she started at and knew how they thought. Boys gave themselves expiration dates too. How many of these suffering doughboys would have gone over if they knew what waited for them was not death in the heat of battle but lost limbs, hand tremors, waking nightmares, begging for buffalo nickels outside a shop where they otherwise might have worked? Those shops where merchants lived mundane lives and were cursed by the young. These same shops that were the envy of old men who knew better.

  A doughboy without legs lay on the pavement, struggling to stay upright as he sold souvenirs from the war. Pith helmets were common now that the fighting was over. Doughboys called them Kaiser hats, black Prussian helmets with the spike on top. They brought back thousands of them to keep and to sell. Jake bought one. It wasn’t much, only two dollars. He bought it just to destroy it. “With a sledgehammer,” he figured. “That would be worth it.”

  That evening she worked at her table as he made spaghetti for dinner. He had no idea what he was doing and cussed from the kitchen in German, something Evie couldn’t help but laugh at, it was so quaint. His German made her think of how he’d asked her to call him old-fashioned at the carnival. It was a strange thing, and amusing, what different people they were now. How it was Jake who suggested they head to Little Sicily, and he who further suggested they stop in at a bakery for pasta and cannoli, and that he cook. “My brother did most of the cooking on the farm,” he said. “But what’s to it?” The noodles were broken and mushy, and there was too much butter (it sopped into Jake’s red beard as he slurped) and too few capers, so he tried to add more, too late. But it was food, and they ate it. There were the cannoli, which couldn’t be ruined so long as he didn’t drop the package. Besides, Jake redeemed the whole thing as they finished dessert. He uncorked a new bottle. He pointed out that they’d never been on an outing before. The carnival was their first.

  “We could have more,” he said. “We don’t have to. But we could.”

  He sipped his wine and waited for her to answer. She just hmm’d to him.

  It was in the dailies the next day—the thing that happened to a girl named Agnes Loebeck in the weeds near Riverview Park. The Bee ran her account of it. A black man stuck a revolver in her sweetheart’s ribs. A black man in a white felt hat robbed the sweetheart, Milton, of his watch and the sixteen dollars he carried, and the rings Agnes wore. They didn’t have time to fight back. He ordered Milton to go ahead fifty feet and sit down. Milton did that. Milton sat on a curb to watch what would happen. The black man dragged Agnes Loebeck into the weeds by her hair. He had his way. She was nineteen years old.

  There was a minor sensation about what happened. That same week President Wilson had collapsed from exhaustion in Colorado and was being rushed back to Washington to recuperate. There was speculation in the papers that the president might die. The Ak-Sar-Ben carnival was nearing its apex, which was big news in Omaha, with all the visitors in town and the high-society ball only days away. But there was this other item in the papers—a blip about what happened to Agnes Loebeck and her friend Milton as they walked home on Scenic Avenue. Her picture was in the Bee. Short black curls barely covered her ears. Square jaw, full cheeks when she smiled, dark eyebrows. She wore lipstick. She was Milton Hoffman’s girl. Milton worked in a Nesselhous crew of runners; most of the boys on Clandish knew him. The article said Milton was a cripple. This was partly true. He fell out a tree when he was a boy, and the broken bone in his leg never healed right. He walked with a cane.

  Milton said the black man stuck a revolver in his ribs and went through his pockets to rob him. Agnes screamed. The black man slapped her with the meat of his hand, knocked her to the ground, covered her mouth. He kept the gun on Milton when he dragged Agnes into a gully. The whole time he kept telling her to shut up. Milton couldn’t wholly see what he did to her. The grass was tall. The weeds were thick and yellow. Stalks bent in the breeze, in Riverview Park, up on the bluffs. The black man stopped and looked at Milton before running off. The black man made no effort to hide his face. Agnes confirmed what happened in the weeds was real bad.

  Some Union Pacific men came up from the roundhouse they worked in down at a sprawling yard by the river, not far from Riverview Park. It wasn’t hard to raise a search party. Not even a week earlier a UP conductor had been murdered out in North Platte in a robbery gone wrong. He was shot dead with a .32 automatic. This was big news in Omaha. The Union Pacific employed over two thousand men here, settled and itinerant, and a similar number across the state. These men took an interest in the murderer being found. It was Leon Darling who murdered the conductor. Darling was a tramp. A black man. His roommates turned him in for the reward. The gun was in his trunk when the railroad detectives found him, a .32 with the same number of bullets missing that had been fired into the conductor. Railroad detectives got a confession out of him. He’d only meant to rob the conductor but lost his nerve in the heat of the moment and fired. The trigger stuck. Three shots fired instead of one. The detectives had Darling up in a jailhouse in Grand Island. A lynching had been planned, if the yard men there could bust in, but it didn’t go off.

  You can bet those railroad men in Omaha thought of this when they looked for whoever robbed and abused Agnes Loebeck. Practically all the shop workers rushed the bluffs when they heard what happened. They carried crowbars and iron pipes and pieces of lumber. Railroad men rushed the Missouri bluffs from their turntable, work abandoned to find the man who’d held a revolver at a cripple and abused a girl. They ran high-kneed through stands of weeds and fell face-first when the yellow loess dirt gave way. They evaded trees and rattled windows they passed. Once word spread of what happened to Agnes Loebeck, the whole Gibson neighborhood was swarmed by railroad men. They knocked down fences and tore up gardens looking for the one who did it. The girl said she could identify her attacker if they got hold of him. He isn’t a large man, he’s short. I think he’s a hunchback. All night they knocked on doors and questioned whoever was inside. Railroad men who kept awls and block tobacco in the sagging bibs of their overalls, who flexed watermelon-sized biceps to carry wrenches, thirty-pound, three-foot wrenches that were their jobs. Some teenage boys from the Southside joined in. The dorming house emptied in a rush, Karel up in front. Once they got over the shock of what the manager was waking them up for, the boys thundered down the stairs and into the streets to Gibson. Once they heard that the baddest men of a Union Pacific rail yard had formed a party, all teenage boys who wanted to be bad were keen to join the search. Boys, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, who’d been too young to fight in the Great War. Some stopped at home to grab Pop’s shotgun.

  Lots of these kids knew Agnes Loebeck and her sister. The family was liked in Gibson. That meant a lot to people there. To the boys. To the men of the Union Pacific.

  The party wandered and shouted and kept Gibson awake. They sloshed liquor. They dipped cloth in coal oil and lit torches. But they didn’t find any black man that night.

  The party reconvened at the Bancroft school late the next morning. Nearly three hundred searchers. It was Friday morning, a workday, a school day, but that didn’t matter. Surely no manager would hold it against one of his men. A bunch from the slaughterhouses showed up, jobbers from the River Ward, concerned parties from all over the county, t
o find the one who did it—a short black man who looked like a hunchback and wore a white cap. Lots of folks had seen a man sneaking around Gibson who looked like that. One guy said he’d been robbed by a black hunchback two weeks before. They got weapons to shoot the black hunchback if he came around again. They waited on the trampled diamond where baseball was played after school, or ducked under crab apple trees to escape the sun, or below the hanging beans of catalpas. Karel was in the outfield near the Bancroft school. He smoked cigarettes with men, shared their flasks, and shook his head in disgust as they traded stories of how these new police couldn’t do the job. They fluffed their shirts away from their backs because it was hot. They told Uncle Remus jokes. Some kicked up dirt practicing their footwork and punching.

  A kid rushed into the crowd in the evening. He shouted the news.

  “The cops got him! He’s up at the Loebeck house now! They got him!”

  Somebody told the police she knew the one who grabbed that girl Agnes on Scenic Avenue. A neighbor. She pointed out the shack where he lived, at Fifth and Cedar, with another black man in a white woman’s house. She called it “the trouble house on our block.” Two black men, one white woman. If something bad happened, this neighbor figured it must have been done by one of those men.

  It was late in the evening. Cicadas were cranking loud. The other two abandoned him once they saw police detectives on their street. They caught sight of the cops and took off. The one the police were looking for was under the bed—that was where they found him. He said he didn’t own a revolver, but they found one in the room. A long-barreled kind, like they were looking for. They grabbed his arms and told him to confess.