It was Anna, Miihlstein’s third daughter, who dipped into these arts to decorate the scrupulous attic. She was too sick to go to school. This is what she did instead.
Jake leaned further up the stairs and caused a riser to squeak. Miihlstein noticed him then. “Come and see,” Miihlstein said, smiling as he set down his work. He waved Jake to a sofa. On the table a portable burner was heating a teakettle.
“It’s hot,” Miihlstein said.
Jake regretted coming up. It was warm outside. Spring came too late, then burned off too soon, and it was near sweltering in the dormer. He’d wanted to invite the father out to the porch to enjoy the evening and a beer, but now was stuck as Miihlstein poured tea from the kettle.
Miihlstein was peculiarly formal about serving, his elbows held high, still in his underclothes. “There’s no cream,” he apologized, pouring his own tea. He reclined then, crossed one leg over the other, and nodded to drink. His glasses kept fogging over. Jake was embarrassed for the man, but he took the tea and sat back to watch it steam. His hands were sore from pushing the wheelbarrow. He had to palm the dainty cup from the bottom.
When Jake asked Miihlstein if he liked it here in Omaha, Miihlstein said it was suitable. Although it troubled him that he couldn’t find an opera house. “There isn’t an opera house,” Jake explained. “Just small theaters. The big ones you see downtown, those are movie palaces.”
“No? When I agreed to come, they told me there was an opera house.”
“There used to be something, a prairie one, but it burned up. They rebuilt it,” Jake said with some hope, “but now they’re going to tear that down too because it’s old-fashioned. I’m sure that’s what they were talking about, whoever told you that.”
Miihlstein asked if Jake was from Omaha. Jake said where he was from. “But still Nebraska, yeah?” Miihlstein asked. “That’s close to here?”
“A day away, depending.”
A drunk feeling covered Jake’s mind, so he set his cup back on the table.
“Is that brandy in the tea?” he asked.
“Wine.”
Both of them laughed.
“I don’t know you,” Jake said.
“No. We aren’t acquainted.”
“I don’t even know your given name, Herr Miihlstein. Yeah? Where are your trousers? I’d like to know.”
“It’s hot. I can’t take the tea otherways.”
Miihlstein glanced away, apparently more annoyed than embarrassed. Jake waited for him to say something more about it, but he didn’t, just bounced his foot. His legs furred over with hair.
“Where exactly are you from?” Jake asked. “I heard it different ways from your kids just now. Vienna? Lviv? Warsaw?”
“We’re getting serious now,” Miihlstein laughed.
He coached his kids to be coy like this too, Jake realized, as a way to protect themselves.
“We were in New York,” Miihlstein said. “Before that, Europe.”
“Yeah? Was your wife with you then?”
“She wasn’t in New York. Is that it you’re asking? She died before.”
Jake said he was sorry to hear that. He asked if the kids got into trouble much, not having their mother around. Something Jake knew about, of course, his own mother having died when he was a boy. Lucky Jake.
Miihlstein sat back and looked to the rafters. “Ah. It’s complicated. There are many ways to think about the feelings on the children’s mother. There’s what science has to say. What Freud said of mothers. Jung and the collective memory. Symphonies in the key of D minor.”
“It isn’t everything,” Jake interrupted. “Not having a mother.”
Jake and Miihlstein sat back to watch each other. It was only when Jake lifted his teacup from the table to drink that he remembered Miihlstein was in shorts and undershirt, and how this made his glasses and mustache look funny.
“Tell me about your mother,” Miihlstein said.
Jake took his time to remember her. “She pushed me off her lap to fluff her skirts when it was hot. There was a hook-shaped scar on her knee. She’d cut it on a broken soap dish. She wrote all the time. In diaries, journals, on whatever was handy. Her hair turned blond in the summer. I was there when she died. A little older than Karel, but not by much. I don’t know what else to tell. Twelve years isn’t very long to have your mother.”
It surprised Jake to say all that. He hadn’t said more than fifty words on the subject since she’d died, and he hadn’t mentioned her at all after he pummeled that boy who defamed her.
“Can I trust you?” Miihlstein asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you a liar? Is that the right word I’m saying? You’re a liar?”
“I’m not.”
Miihlstein frowned. He uncrossed his legs and leaned forward. “Would you keep track of my boy?”
“Karel? How do you mean?”
“Keep him out of trouble. Do you understand? There’s these lousy boys he runs with from his school. Your mother died. So you understand.”
“You can trust me,” Jake said. He knew he was making a mistake. “I’ll take care of Karel.”
“Good.” Miihlstein refilled their cups. He sat back to sip, recrossed his legs. “I feel better. You are a good person, Jakob. A decent one, is that right? This is something, I feel, people must say to you often. Yeah?”
Karel’s shoes were still up the wire. He could see them from the dormer window. “Let Maria buy you new ones,” Anna pleaded with him. But Karel didn’t want new shoes, he wanted his current ones to not be hanging above the street. His sisters teased him for being a stubborn brat, but he’d have rather walked barefoot than have an old woman bail him out of trouble. “There’s nothing spoiled about bare feet,” he said. Maria agreed. If Karel wanted to ruin his feet, that was up to him.
His feet suffered from his preference. The soles cut by rocks and broken glass. The skin blistered, black and dry, the nails of his big toes gone ingrown. On the porch in the evening, his feet looked even worse than Jake’s.
Karel spent a lot of time with that big farm kid in the weeks after he moved in, watching him stretch out to erase the crick in his back. Young, tall, and daring, an athlete with light hair and strong jaw. Maybe Jake Strauss wasn’t the quickest wit, but he wasn’t pretentious either. Jake talked American. Karel wanted to sound like him and watched his every move. How Jake unwrapped his swollen feet and dipped them in the steaming water of a zinc tub. How he swirled his toes to dissolve Epsom salts. “You too.” He pointed to Karel. “Those Tarzan feet need some work.” Maria dragged out a chair so Karel could partake. Both boys with pants rolled to the knee, Jake’s socks draped over the handrail to freshen. It stung as the potion seeped in Karel’s sores and cuts, but he wouldn’t complain, because Jake didn’t.
Jake was enormous. He worked some secret job. Had money in his pocket and stayed out late sometimes to meet women, surely to meet women. When he asked why Karel didn’t wear shoes, Anna burst out with the truth. Some bully stole them off Karel’s feet and tossed them over the wire. Jake stood in the zinc tub to inspect the hanging shoes as they turned with the breeze. “Those yours?” Karel wouldn’t say. “Why didn’t you say something?” Jake asked, stepping out from the water. “Jesus! To just go barefoot when it’s easy enough to snag them.”
He went to the house next door, where a painter lived, and asked after a stepladder and a pole. Barefoot himself, a wooden pole in one hand and a beer in the other, Jake fished the shoes off the wire as traffic swerved around him. He returned the ladder and pole, tossed the shoes up to the porch, and sat back with his feet in the tub next to Karel’s.
“Not too much worse for wear,” Anna said after an inspection.
Jake laughed and gulped the rest of his beer. “I wish that bully was here now,” he said. “We’d show him something.”
“He doesn’t live around here,” Karel lied. He felt his face burn, could feel himself becoming as small and as young as he really
was. “He won’t come back.”
“Better think again,” Jake warned. “You’re going to see him. It’s going to happen. Don’t think it won’t.” Karel couldn’t look at Jake. “What are you going to do when you see him? That’s what you have to ask. Prepare. Plan it out, yeah. Stand up for yourself.”
Karel took his feet out of the Epsom water. “Do you want more?” he asked, pointing to Jake’s empty glass.
Karel hid in the back of the cellar for a while, getting the beer, beyond where potatoes and beetroots banked against a wall, beyond a twisted mass of flower stems hung upside down, where the booze was stored. Maria had socked in a lot of booze. She bought half the store from Hiller’s Groceries at a close-out sale because the state prohibition was coming. Maria had kept tabs on the liquor market like a ticker-tape reader on Wall Street tracked the price of wheat or steel. She picked up a case of Lewis Hunter Rye for $9.75, one of Cedar Brook Bourbon for $10.50. She’d packed in a lot of beer too, with Karel’s help loading down the steps, into a compartment near the coal chute, the ceiling low. He felt safe, alone under the floorboards. The tip of his nose damp with the raw air. Cool and damp. Buried like a cagey old mole. The longer he waited in the cellar, the more he could see in the dark. He found framed pictures and held them to what slivers of light there were. Painted portraits, an old one of two girls clutching small white dogs to their laps. Dozens of crates stacked in the back holding who knows what. The wood of the crates like raw clay, brown and sagging. When he lifted one it fell apart in his hands and crashed to the floor. Karel waited a moment, crouched and still, his hands in filth. Surely Maria would have heard. She’d come for him, wondering what took so long. Nobody clambered the stairs. Nobody called through the floor. Karel smelled the must of what fell out. Union Army uniforms, blue flannel and wool, two or three once-intricate medals that disassembled to components when he touched them. A saber guard and scabbard, the blade missing. Maria’s husband had been in the war. These were his things.
Under the uniforms and scabbard Karel found an instrument case. Inside was a violin and bow. There were no strings, the fingerboard was loose. If Karel squeezed its body the violin would crumble. Maria never mentioned a violin. Maybe she’d forgotten about it. Maybe the violin was her husband’s, that August Eigler, dead long before Karel was born.
Inside the case he found a dagger with a wooden handle. He put the dagger aside, pressed the crate together as best he could, and packed the army clothes inside, shoved the crate back where he found it, then examined the dagger. The blade was tarnished and dull, glazed by black gum here and there. The handle was loose but it held together. The dagger would stab.
Karel wrapped the blade in a handkerchief and secured it in his belt line.
He washed at the kitchen sink upstairs. “Did you find what you were looking for?” Maria asked. She was making lemonade in a glass pitcher. “I don’t mind if you have a look around. There’s lots of treasures there.”
Jake was ready for the beer. A plate of anchovies and crackers was on his lap.
Karel wouldn’t tell what he saw in the coal cellar, certainly not the dagger. It was a nice thing to sit and breathe and drink from a glass in quiet. He let the lemonade pucker his face.
“This will be a fine summer,” Jake said. He drank the top off his beer, held out a swaying finger to touch the breeze. “Don’t you believe me? I’m a farmer. The good weather is coming. Sunshine, I expect. And we have plenty of booze stored in.”
It was liberating to sit on the stoop early in the evening in those middle-spring hours when it was warm enough for Karel to roll up his shirtsleeves, like Jake told him to, and let the air hit his skin. This was the main promise of spring. There would be more of these to come. Barefoot (by choice) and comfortable, reclined in a sturdy chair. No mosquitoes yet, no bearing-down evening swelter. There were twin cherry trees in Maria’s yard, in full bloom at that moment. One’s limbs curved over the crest of the other’s crown, where evening light dipped over the ridge of the house to illuminate its stark white petals. The whole world was green in those hours, breezy and clear.
“I shouldn’t like to sit so much,” Jake said. “That’s not the way it’s done where I come from. You’re supposed to keep busy. Dawn till dusk and all that, yeah.”
“This isn’t a farm,” Maria pointed out.
“You’re right. I should be lighthearted.”
Karel would remember what Jake was like those first months he came to Omaha. He was alive. He was free and strong. Karel wanted more than anything to know what it felt like to be Jake Strauss on those spring evenings as they watched the gloaming peter out over Clandish. To sweep blond hair behind his ears and flex muscles with every move. To gulp beer and mug witty about its quality. To have people dote on you. To be comfortable in this. There was no need to sneak off those nights.
Jimmy Mac had news. He’d heard from his brothers about an Irish girl a few blocks over who, for a penny, let a boy see but not touch the orange hair that grew among the freckles of her pubis. “You won’t believe it,” Jimmy said. “No joke. A real burning bush!”
All the boys had heard about this girl. She lived south of the train stations in a mansion cut six ways into apartments and had set up shop under the porch. Stairs zigzagged up both sides to reach the second and third floors of the house. Where the porch wrapped around, there was a loose confederacy of belongings. Washtubs, fishing poles, two chairs with the seats missing, a doctor’s cabinet fished out of hospital rubbish, a pile of old coats where calico kittens made a nest. Boys in bunches of fives or sixes made their way to the under-the-house girl once word spread. On the day Karel and his friends went, a few others were sneaking out around the porch.
“She’s working,” one of them said, “but better hurry. She might get shut down soon.”
Karel followed where the boys pointed. On the porch near the kittens was an old woman. “That’s her grandma,” one of them said. The woman was dark and ancient, Russian looking, so maybe not the girl’s relation. She moved only slightly in her chair, like the breeze rocked her, and stared out at nothing, dead except for her eyes.
“Does she tell?”
“Not yet.”
“Maybe she’s dumb and can’t, old as she is.”
“Maybe. Maybe she doesn’t care.”
“I think she’s dead,” Alfred said.
The boys gazed with audacity for a moment, thinking what a story it would be if they found a dead grandma. She didn’t flinch, some vulgar boys all but daring her to, until she leaned back to clack her chair into the siding of the house.
“Jesus,” Karel shouted, standing firm with the dagger inside his belt. “She’s a witch!”
The other boys left laughing. Karel felt fine with the way he handled himself. Omaha wasn’t such a big place, the River Ward surely wasn’t. He knew they’d remember he was the one who called the old woman a witch then snuck under a porch to gander up her granddaughter’s dress. He was no sissy. Whatever he had to prove to the others he was proving.
The air was damp under there. Some bricks were strewn about to gather moss where the girl waited. She was older, maybe fourteen or so. She sat on a stool, as silent as her grandma, except the girl smoked a cigarette. Bars of light stroked in the smoke where it came through the lattice. The girl didn’t say a word when the boys advanced. Alfred held out a penny and she took it. “Two more,” she said. “Price has gone up.” He handed over what she asked for. Then she lifted her dress and they saw the orange between her thighs. They dropped to their knees. The puff of orange, the fold of skin like she’d been sliced there. How bizarre an invention was this girl. Jimmy Mac moved close, reached a hand out to touch there, but she snapped closed.
The boys stayed a moment longer, snickering. Jimmy apologized and asked if she’d lift her dress again. She wouldn’t, not for less than a nickel each now. They still gaped at her, at her lap, knowing what it looked like under her clothes.
The boys wandered the Ward t
he rest of the afternoon, to an alleyway junk shop in the market to look at greasy postcards and tattered ball gloves and brass bedposts and odd parts from dilapidated machines and houses. The guy who ran the shop cleaned out the rooms of the dead if no family or church did it first. In a glass case near the cash drawer, he had a collection of medals from the Civil War. These weren’t for sale, but he showed them off to the boys, crosses and stars of brass and gold. “Looky here,” the man said. “A Confederate.” And it was, tarnished and tattered, the bluish ribbon torn. Karel thought to show the man the one in his belt—a Union officer’s dagger—but he worried the man would take it for his collection. They left, went up Pacific to the railroad tracks and over into the tenements, standing tall as they wandered. Karel could die happy, seeing what he’d seen, the burning bush. He walked without aim. Whatever good there was in the city would come to him.
By the courthouse, around the block from the YMCA and the night school, Jimmy Mac went to stare up at the busts and engravings carved on the facade of the library. Sophocles. Goethe. Shakespeare. Curly haired, wigged, chinless men sometimes. Sometimes fiery eyed and crazed. They were poets or something. The boys guessed what those masks meant, death masks, the shadow of the library stretching over the street by then. City and county offices had let out, and lots of people were around to crank over car engines or hop a streetcar. The boys floated in the mass as they stared up at the masks on the library. Schiller, Wordsworth, Homer.
Staring up like that, they were the first to see. An airplane flew over, a hundred feet in the air, no more. White canvas wings and wire struts, its blurring, roaring propeller. The boys shouted “Look!” and all the grown-ups froze to do so. A biplane. Karel saw its machine gun. He saw the pilot’s leather head and goggles, the rest of the man enwombed in the plane’s fluttering thorax. The pilot did a turn over the courthouse and returned flying upside down. He rolled the biplane twice again until it was headed north and then was gone. Like that. They heard the propeller racket slip across the Ward then waited in silence in case the plane circled back.
Kings of Broken Things Page 5
