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.