It was meteorological phenomena Braun talked as he led the boys north. “It’s the big guns in France that make the wind gust so much this spring,” he claimed, circling his arms in the damp air. “Mortars make the wind strong. It’s changed weather across the globe. More the cannons fire, more the wind blows. It’s proven. The generals will ruin everything.”
When they crossed Cuming Street, it was clear where Braun was taking them. This was the big thing that spring, heading up to the Northside. Boys on Clandish dared each other to sneak through this black neighborhood, all the way to Lake Street, to prove they weren’t chicken. They called it No Man’s Land, where black folks lived. There weren’t big houses up there, not where they went, but shacks and four-family homes set back from the road at odd intervals. Some had glass windows, some didn’t. Some were sided by tar paper or cedar shakes. Men walked out shirtless. They crouched and squinted at the white kids rushing down the block.
Braun dragged the three boys to a shack set back in the weeds of an otherwise empty lot. The door pitched open halfway when he knocked, its latch broken. A smell of rendering pork leached out. Jimmy Mac whispered that they should get out of there, but Karel didn’t move. None of the boys moved. They huddled behind Braun, peeked around as a woman with a red kerchief over her mouth came to the door and asked who it was.
“It’s Emil. Tell Josh.”
They went inside when beckoned. A man sat on the floor in the room that wasn’t the kitchen, a shoeshine kit open in front of him as he wiped grime from his brushes with a rag. He was skinny and missing teeth. The bony points of his shoulders tented the wool shirt he wore; his long arms snaked around the room when he reached for something to pull from his kit. He didn’t have legs, Karel saw. Both pant legs were pinned up to stumps.
“This is Josh,” Braun said. “He was once the finest ballplayer anyone knew in North or South Omaha.” The boys clustered by the door now that Braun moved inside. “Tell them,” Braun said. “They don’t believe me.”
The man, Josh, laughed to himself, then snapped a rag at the boys. “Don’t listen to Emil. He’s a bullshitter. A certified bullshitter.”
Braun crouched to joke with the man. They shook hands so Braun could pass along some coins in charity to Josh, just Josh, who once ruled the Whites-versus-Negroes series they played in Rourke Park on the Fourth of July, a cripple now who used to sweet-talk a screwball and blister Braun’s thumbs when they both still played. Josh was a big deal here in his neighborhood. Everyone on the Northside came to talk to and honor Josh with their respects; to hear how things used to be and argue if they were better off ten, fifteen years ago, than they were now; to learn how Josh gripped a baseball to throw a two-seam sinker or a forkball or his famous screwball. He’d show any boy the grip if the boy said he dreamed of being a great pitcher, though few had hands large enough to palm the ball the way Josh could. Emil Braun came up here to pay his respects too, to talk to a man he considered a friend, even though Braun didn’t exactly belong up here on the Northside.
“I was a Southsider,” Braun told the boys, “a second bagger. You believe that? I was good.”
“No, he was not,” the man laughed. “He was not good.”
“Eh,” Braun said. “Easy for you to say.”
Karel tried to listen, but he couldn’t follow. Instead he crept near a doorway to look in on the woman. She mixed sand-like spices in a bowl, aromatic and strong, spices that burned his nose, which was maybe why the woman wore the kerchief over her mouth. Karel didn’t want to think what might be under the kerchief. A meat cleaver stuck from a wooden block within her reach, blood-heavy around the blade. “What are you doing to the meat?” Karel asked. She didn’t answer.
Braun pulled Karel back. “This one never played baseball. He’s fresh off the boat.”
“Is that right?”
“Yeah. Tell him something, Josh. I brought him to meet you. He should meet the best.”
Karel didn’t know what to say as Braun nudged him close to Josh. He’d never seen a black person up close and wasn’t so sure he wanted to, there in the dark of the shack. The smell of shoe polish, the rendering from the stove room. Karel leaned in. He felt he couldn’t help leaning, the others heavy behind him. Josh stared back, his eyes brown and orange.
“You were a ballplayer?”
“Hurler, kid. I was the hurler.”
Josh pulled a baseball from his leather kit, one of a few there, and tossed it in the air to distract himself, higher each time, until it skimmed the ceiling.
Karel glanced to where the man’s legs were missing and wondered how that happened. Was it an accident during a game, like Karel’s chipped tooth? But much, much worse? Was he sucked into some slaughterhouse apparatus? Did he fall from a boxcar? The ends of his pants were damp where the stumps were, spotted with blood and yellow.
“Yes, kid. I was the best there was.”
Josh’s hands clawed over the baseball’s skin. He roughed up the thread. The ball spun and spun, stopping only when he changed grips. Two fingers uncoiled to fork over the red seams, then together in salute along one. His thumb dealt back and forth to spin the bottom. His palm over the whole ball. Massive hands with pink insides and nails where they weren’t blacked with Shinola. “You want to be a ballplayer?” he asked. “Maybe a hurler like I was.”
“Yeah.”
“Take this.” Josh arched the ball across the room, soft, so Karel, sucking his lips to protect his mouth, could trap it against his belly. “You want to be a ballplayer, carry a ball with you. Toss it. Get a feel. Squeeze the thing if you want to. Just know about it.”
Karel took the baseball with both hands to glance it over. The cover browned, a fingerprint here and there in polish. The seams were rough and scuffed his thumb. This was his ball. He’d carry it in his back pocket like Josh told him to.
Braun put his hand on Karel’s shoulder then crouched down to look at the ball. “You want to know about Josh? Should I tell you? Do you want to know where his legs went?”
“Shit,” Josh objected. “Don’t start in, Emil. This has got nothing to do with that. I’m trying to help this boy, like you asked me to.”
“Josh enlisted. He volunteered! Was a buffalo soldier. You know what that means, boys? He left his legs on San Juan Hill, that’s what. Gave both legs for Cuba’s freedom. A fine thing to do, yeah? I won’t quibble with a man who gives up the prime of his own life for others to be free. But what did he get out of the deal? Where did he end up?”
“Don’t insult me. Don’t come here and bring up bad things.”
“I’m not! My friend. It isn’t your fault. It’s Teddy Roosevelt’s fault. A sick game aristocrats play, one designed to destroy good men like you. Woodrow Wilson does it too, now that he’s been reelected. He’s found a new war. Every ruler craves war to destroy the lives of common men.”
“Don’t put me down. Not in front of your boys. Why’d you bring them anyway?”
“I’m not! You don’t understand.”
“Go on, boys. Get on out of here so I can talk to Emil. Okay? Go on.”
Braun put an arm across the doorway. “You boys know I love him, yeah? You can see?”
“Go on,” Josh repeated. He slid around on his backside to wave Braun away. “This is my house.”
Braun stayed to plead his case as Karel and the boys rushed to the main avenue, where a streetcar line ran. The rails and electric wires led the safest route to downtown.
The boys hurried, but not as fast as they might have the days before this one. If someone stopped them, asked what they were doing up here where they didn’t belong, they had an answer. They’d been with a friend, Josh Whatshisname, the greatest Negro ballplayer there ever was. Karel had a baseball to prove it. Josh’s thumbprint right there on the cowhide.
Once they reached Clandish, Karel slipped off to Maria Eigler’s for supper. He wasn’t the only one. All along Clandish front doors opened and slammed, folks headed in for the evening, home from wo
rk, home from school, just home, no explanation needed. Smoke curled from chimneys. Light leached from windows to color walkways gold. Even though the sun was nearly set and the wet wind blew hard from Europe, Karel wasn’t cold. The excitement of having friends kept him warm. These weren’t the musicians his father knew, they weren’t his sisters. They were boys. Troublemakers. At supper he wouldn’t tell what he’d been up to all day. That he’d been to the Northside wasn’t something his family needed to know, or that he’d been inside a tenement, or where he got this baseball from. He wouldn’t have to tell these things to stop his sisters from teasing him. They’d see on his face that he’d been running with the boys.
He was capable of trouble too.
He wasn’t far from home when the bully spotted him.
“Hey! You’re friends with the Braun kid, yeah?”
It was Ignatz, from the school yard. He rose from the stoop of a house and hopped down to the walkway. Karel barely went up to his chest.
“You shouldn’t be friends with a Braun. They’re bad people,” Ignatz said. “Freddie’s not so bad, but the others are rotten. You meet the father?”
“He’s nice,” Karel said.
“You’re new here, I know that. You don’t know nothing.”
Karel reached to where the baseball was. He could feel it in his back pocket even without touching, but his hands moved in a nervous twitch to double-check, which was a stupid thing to do. Ignatz would want to see what Karel was hiding.
“See that house two down? That’s mine.” Karel looked to Ignatz’s house, how it sunk into a depression where the alley ran, small and wood sided and cream colored, split into apartments with doors on either side of the porch. It had none of the elegance of Maria Eigler’s house. “I’m not trying to make you mad, but tell your sisters. Yeah? The older ones. Shit, the little one too. I won’t hurt her. If they want some company, some late night, that’s where I live. You tell them that I said they’re invited.”
Ignatz put a hand on Karel’s chest.
“If they knock on the window, I’ll let them in. All three at once if they want.”
Karel pushed Ignatz. Punched his hands as hard as he could to knock down the bully. But Ignatz didn’t move. Strong and fat, Ignatz absorbed the blow. Only his clothes were dented.
“What’s wrong with you? Don’t do that.”
Karel pushed again, this time knocking Ignatz off his stride. Karel pulled his arm back like he was going to swing, but Ignatz was quicker. Karel went down in the mud.
Ignatz came at him, so Karel kicked. He felt the ball in his pocket, on his back hip. He bicycled his legs to keep Ignatz away. He wouldn’t give up the baseball.
Ignatz grabbed one of Karel’s shoes to stop the kicking. The shoe popped off in his hand. “Okay,” he laughed. Grabbed for the other shoe, took that one too. “Listen,” he said. Ignatz tied the shoelaces together, yanked them tight, swung them around, and tossed them in a whimsical, jerking arc so they snagged over the electrical wire that hung above the street.
“Steer clear of the Brauns. That’s all I’m saying.”
Karel slipped into the alley after Ignatz got him, near Maria’s daffodils. The soil felt damp through his socks as he huddled along the garden. His clothes were dirty.
Maria was in the back window, where the kitchen was. Light shone out from the glass onto the lawn. Supper was almost ready. She twisted and reached, bent and stirred. Whenever she lifted the lid off a pot the glass steamed and changed the light. After a while Maria disappeared. They were eating. Karel still watched the window, saw nothing but the back wall. He’d have to go in before long and say what happened. His father, his three clucking sisters, they’d all understand how he was pushed down and slugged in the gut. How an older boy took his shoes and tossed them over a wire. His sisters would coo over him when they heard. They didn’t expect him to defend himself. His father would congratulate him for coming through the ordeal without a shiner. Maria, he knew, would pour a tall glass of milk and serve cake for dessert. He’d rather be whipped for losing his shoes—that was the truth.
Consider Jake Strauss. Things were pretty good for Jake in 1917, the year he turned twenty. Where he came from wasn’t such a great place, up north along the Missouri River, in Jackson County. He’d had a lot of trouble there. Something with a guy Jake had roughed up—a guy his age who’d spread malicious rumors about how Jake’s mother caught the crab louse from a Chinese rail worker—and the people in town didn’t appreciate how Jake took revenge by smacking that boy twice with a pick handle. (Once for his mother, once for his baby sister—both of whom died a few years before, up there in Jackson County.) Jake’s father was a German pastor, which only made the situation worse, so Jake ran off in the middle of the night before that other boy tried to rebalance the scales by inflicting fresh calamity on the Strauss family. Jake grabbed twenty dollars from the drawer in the kitchen, saddled his horse, and rode to Omaha. That’s when his luck changed.
He tied his horse to a drainpipe in an alleyway on the northern outskirts of downtown Omaha and took the twenty dollars to a saloon called Mecklenburg’s, where he joined the food line then stuffed his mouth with angry bites of rye bread and fatty meat at the bar. Everything in Mecklenburg’s tempted him. Kippered herring, sardines, onions, radishes, pumpernickel, smoked Schwarzwälder ham. He gorged because nobody stopped him. He ate seconds and thirds. Had beer after beer and let the foam dry on his lips, then arched back tall on his stool when he was done to watch others hustle for food. He liked it here on the River Ward, on Clandish, everything so German and open to those who’d ask for it, which was different from where he came from, a small town where they shut up anyone whose voice even hinted at the Germanic. Jake should have looked for work or a room, but beer made him feel better. It was good beer. Cold and uncomplicated. He set his hands on his stomach to feel his guts swell with suds.
Later on he found himself standing in a row of tents along the muddy banks of the Missouri, a dozen or less of the tents pitched from the southern tip of the pig iron mills under the Douglas Street Bridge to the northern edge of the warehouses. Some kid from the saloon brought him there and told him he’d have a good time.
As Jake stumbled along, he felt a bawdy heat radiate from the flats, from open fires and juiced-up men, from rosy-cheeked women who circulated the crowd, from kids with trays tethered over their shoulders who sold tobacco and a drink they called mulberry wine. Heat from his own body too, jacked up on booze and the desire to live like a young man wanted to live, without consequences. From the mud itself. From the burning solder soot that pumped from mill chimneys and rose above the industrial dusk of the valley. The odor was overwhelming. Jake didn’t understand how a river so big, that moved so fast, could smell so bad. He smoked to mask the stench, but the cheap tobacco sold here only made things worse. Jake had to laugh at it all. Even after all the beers, he was a little embarrassed at how drunks dipped forward on shaky legs and relieved themselves where they stood. Or how others slopped happily to a tent flap and peeked in at a naked woman. If a man liked what he saw, he entered. The spectacle got Jake going, desire at war with shame. The rude caterwauling inside the tents. Pinned to the front were hand-painted flyers advertising some exotic fantasy—Mother Russia, Queen of Siam, Country Schoolteacher, the Nun—but inside the women more or less looked the same. This wasn’t a high-class joint with women of alien color or a traveling lady like Calamity Jane. This was rutting. These women were desperate.
“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.
Kings of Broken Things Page 3
