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 didn’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.”