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.”