“Here we go.” The boy who’d brought Jake pushed to an open tent. “She’s just your speed—the Old Gray Mare!”
Inside was a woman, as promised, curled to the back of her cot, the arcs of her body hidden among puffs of yellowed linens. Jake smelled her body before he saw her. The saline tang of sweat and semen was thick.
“She’ll check you,” the woman said. She flapped an arm to a child at the dark end of the stall. Jake hadn’t noticed the girl, maybe six or seven years old, in a shabby orange dress, her face smeared with mud. A washbasin and some balled soap were on a nightstand.
“Open your trousers,” the woman ordered. The girl approached. “She twists your thing in case there’s the drip. She washes everybody. That’s the rule.”
Jake wouldn’t move. The girl made a grab for his belt, but he swatted her away. Her face lit red as she stared up to him. “I got to.”
“Go,” he whispered. “Leave me alone.”
It wasn’t long before the woman leaned over to see what was keeping him. Her jaw square, her nose broad and flattened.
“Set down, Minnie,” she said. The girl took her spot next to the nightstand. A sneer mirrored in both their faces. “Come on. You don’t got to wash either. Just hurry.”
Jake wouldn’t move. He didn’t understand what was wrong with this woman, with all these people down here on the flats. He felt like a boy, stubborn, inexperienced, because that’s exactly what he was—a country boy, he realized.
“Why’s a little girl here?” he asked.
“You’re with the Episcopals?”
“No. I need a place to sleep. I want the girl to leave.”
“You can’t flop here.”
“I got to sit down.”
“Somebody’d grab her if I set her out there alone. She’s only safe if she’s with me.”
The woman patted the cot, but Jake didn’t move. Something came over him. The grease and vinegar of the saloon food, the pilsener, the woman’s sour smell, and the girl.
“You’ll get us in trouble. If the mack comes by . . .” The woman looked at the girl.
She pulled the straps off her shoulders until they hung over her belly. The chemise she wore spread and collapsed to bare her chest and ribs, the skin ruddy and scratched, specked with insect bites. Jake tried to look away from the woman, but he didn’t want to see the girl either. He didn’t know where to look—the woman’s gnawed-at flesh, her opening legs, or the girl hunching into herself.
The woman followed his eyes. “Set next to me. Minnie ain’t for sale.”
“If I give you extra? Can she wait outside?”
“You paid, bunny. You can have me a little while before you leave, or you can just leave. The girl stays here either way.”
“I didn’t pay.”
“You down here, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you stupid? They took it!”
It wasn’t until he was out from under the bridge that Jake admitted his money was stolen, that the boy from the saloon had robbed him while pushing him around the flats. Jake slid to a stoop to catch his breath then laid there. He was too trusting. Too stupid. Why had he run off from home in the first place? He took that twenty dollars, most of his father’s savings, and he’d lost it. He couldn’t ever go back.
A smoky voice came from inside. “Can’t sleep on the stoop. It’s fifty cents for a bed inside.” Jake peered into the shadow of the doorway. It was a flophouse. A sign said this.
“Fifty cents,” the voice repeated.
Jake saw the glint off a knife in the shadow.
So how was he lucky? Penniless in a new city. No relations. No connections. No job.
He was lucky because he met Tom Dennison the next day. Folks on the street told him where to find the Old Man, what they called Tom Dennison. They told him the Old Man would help.
Tom Dennison ran things in Omaha those years. For three decades he had a hand in picking who’d be on the winning ticket each election and was on the board of the gas, electric, and water companies. He owned the police force more or less, everyone knew that.
There was a guard outside the door on the street, outside the tobacco shop where Tom Dennison kept an office those years, where a dark staircase led up to the second floor. The guard was roughly the same height as Jake but thicker through the legs and chest. “You need some help, pal?” the guard asked. “You need to see Mr. Dennison?”
Jake didn’t move. The guard was Chip Lee. Jake recognized him right away. Chip had been a big deal when Jake was a kid. A prizefighter. All the boys pantomimed his style, the square stance Chip used in his prime, before he was KO’d in three consecutive bouts. There were scars along his jaw, Jake saw, and cloudy discolorations below the lobes of his ears. Chip patted the pockets of Jake’s suit and felt along the belt line, then showed Jake up the staircase and stood behind him in the doorway.
The upstairs office occupied the entire second floor. File cabinets stacked everywhere like card catalogs in a library. Autographed photos of movie stars on the walls. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Lillian Gish. Ballplayers like Ty Cobb, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Three Finger Mordecai Brown. Pictures of racehorses draped in red roses. Nearly a dozen men lingered under the photos, hands in their pockets. The lights were dim except for one bulb that beamed down over a small pine desk, a desk positioned so close to the entrance that there was just enough space for Jake to slip inside before he was stopped. The lightbulb hung down in his eyes, forcing him to stoop to the desk and squint to see the woman there, her orange hair wispy and pale in the light. At the far end was a larger desk, behind that a rollaway safe. A window let in a wash of sunlight and backlit a man working at the desk. Tom Dennison.
The woman on the platform tapped her nails on her desk until Jake stopped staring around her. Her face was an unearthly white under the bulb. “What do you need?” she asked.
“To talk with Tom Dennison. That’s what they told me.”
The woman pulled out a black ledger and flipped to a tabbed section to consult its pages. The writing was small and packed tightly, but Jake saw some of what it read, references to the Brandeis department store and the Omaha Electric Light and Power Company, to the Paxton and Fontenelle hotels, to grocery stores, steelworks, lumber and coal companies, trucking firms.
“Tell me where you come from,” the woman said. “You’re a farmer, right?” Her hair was short and curly, held aloft by some chemical element. “There’s something we have going. You’ll like it.” The woman flipped through the ledger again, scratched something down on a page, then stepped around her desk. “Take this to the Flatiron, and they’ll have something for you.”
She handed Jake a slip of paper and said he could go. But Tom Dennison waved Jake over first. “Jim Dahlman sent you, is that right? He bailed you out?”
“No, sir. Folks on the street said to come.”
“You’re not a drunk? Is that what you’re saying?”
“No, sir. I want to work.”