Folks spoke quietly at first. “I suppose it’s gone.” “Maybe.” Some waited, but the spell broke once they looked down from the sky. Karel and his friends were the last to give up waiting. They waited near the street to get out of the walkway and watched the clouds for another miracle. They moved to the library side to look north, but the biplane didn’t return.
The boys moved on too, down the sidewalk to Eighteenth Street toward home. They permitted themselves to talk about it. To say, finally, “Boy. Did you see that? What a day!”
“Think he’s one of ours?” Karel asked.
“Yeah. Sure he is. Fort Omaha is up that way. There’s a field there.”
“Oh.” Karel had never seen a plane up close and rolling. He didn’t think of it as an enemy plane, as an asset of the Triple Entente against the Central Powers, even though they were adversaries by definition, Karel being an Austrian on his papers.
The boys weren’t paying attention. Just walking. They didn’t see Ignatz running at them. “Did you see?” Ignatz shouted, his shoes slapping the pavement.
“The flyer’s gone,” Karel said.
“You saw?”
“Yeah.”
“It just went by,” Alfred said. “You missed it.”
Ignatz looked like he almost didn’t believe. He paced to the end of the block and back, staring at the sky the whole time. He didn’t watch where he went. He didn’t need to. The clerks and stenos parted out of his way. An angry, puffing bull.
“There was a real flyer,” Karel said. “Leather cap and all.”
“No shit,” Ignatz said. He straightened to catch his breath.
The boys waited to see if they’d get it bad or if they’d be let off. Karel hoped Ignatz would leave them alone. Jake had told him to stand up for himself when he saw the bully, but Karel didn’t want to fight. He hoped there would be words, that they could forget what happened before and be nothing to each other from now on. But it didn’t work that way. A bully needed no reason.
Ignatz shoved Alfred into the bricks of a building. He grabbed Alfred’s collar and was going to slug him. Ignatz felt slighted and was going to take it out on someone. Alfred was going to get it, with nowhere to run. No clerk or steno was going to stop boys from being boys. If Ignatz slapped Alfred around, that was fine to a grown-up.
It wasn’t fine to Karel. He couldn’t stand to see his friend punched, to stand by and wait to see if he’d get punched too. Karel wanted to do something to stop the bully, and he had the dagger.
He pulled the dagger from his belt and posed the tapered end at Ignatz. “Leave Alfred alone,” he shouted. “He didn’t do nothing.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Ignatz said. He released Alfred to grab for the dagger, but he couldn’t get it. “What is that?” he asked. “You take it from the junk shop?”
“It’s an officer’s blade. It will do you good enough.”
Ignatz was too quick, too much older and bigger. The dagger only bought Karel a few seconds before Ignatz slapped it from his hands. The blade rattled to the pavement between their feet. Ignatz grabbed Karel then heaved him off the walkway and pinned him against the bricks.
Karel kicked at Ignatz’s stomach, slapped at his ears as much as he could with his arms held. It didn’t make a difference. Karel looked into Ignatz’s face, the meat of his lips as they smiled wet with the juices that ran out. The grip tight under his arms. Karel hurt everywhere. Felt the grasp closing and winced to blackness. This was it. His turn.
Karel was on the ground as he opened his eyes to light, crumpled on his knees, liquid streaming from his mouth as he gasped. Jake was there, a few others, in clean white clothes. They had Ignatz cornered, took the lids off trash cans and banged them together. They shouted and mocked punches so Ignatz had to cover himself. There were about a dozen men around. Working men, playful and mean. They had a boy who thought he was something tough and they had to prove he wasn’t.
Ignatz’s shoes were shucked off—Jake’s idea—and the men took turns throwing them at the roof of a building. Ignatz chased after but couldn’t outrace the men, the group of them, and had to watch again as his shoes spun up three stories and came tumbling back.
Karel wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. A couple of them helped him up, one who introduced himself as Charlie. Karel said nothing. He watched as Jake chased Ignatz down the street, kicking at the bully’s socked feet until Jake let him go.
“What sort of plan was this?” Jake asked Karel. “Let him pin you to the wall? Get strangled?”
“I got a couple shots in,” Karel said.
“Yeah. You got a shiner too. Bet you didn’t know that, huh?”
Karel felt a knot swell under his eye where Jake poked. The men said that was okay. Ignatz was bigger. What did Karel expect?
“Come on. You boys fought. You come along.”
The men pushed to make room at Mecklenburg’s bar, pulling the boys along with them. Alfred and Jimmy had been in a saloon before, but this was a first for Karel. The men lifted under the boys’ arms, dropped them on stools, then laughed along as Joe Meinhof argued with the bartenders. “What do you mean, how old are they? What’s that matter?”
The saloon wouldn’t serve kids, not with the statewide prohibition of all alcohol sales.
“Near beer?” the men objected, once the bartender suggested it. “What’s that?”
“This one’s got a shiner,” Jake shouted, bucking his arm around Karel, “and you don’t think that deserves a real beer?”
“What rot! You want these boys to eat some near-meat and near-bread too? How about some near-air to breathe, dummy? How’d that suit you?”
Mugs were presented to the boys and they were urged to drink. Joe Meinhof apologized for not being able to get them the real thing. “You get in a real fight, might as well get some real beer for your trouble.”
Near beer was horrible, bitter and effervescent. “You don’t have to drink it,” Jake said, but Karel did anyway. So did Alfred and Jimmy Mac. How couldn’t they? A group of real men were toasting them. The boys clanked mugs together and swigged as they looked up at the rowdies cheering on. They met all the men. Jake Strauss, Karel’s savior, blond and grinning. Joe Meinhof, who crouched when he spoke to the boys so they saw his half-crazed eyes. Charlie Pfister, who was an old man to them, with his big mustache turning gray. There were others too. Ingo and Heinz and Konrad. Dairymen. They smelled like sour milk and sweat, and brought plates of roasted meat to the bar for the boys to feast from. These were superb men. They gloried in life. They yelled, doltish and unabashed, and called each other names. They wrestled to prove their points. They cussed in German and English and Bohemian, worldly men that they were. Karel cursed them in Yiddish and earned a slap on the back for his talent. They were gods.
Karel watched Jake, Joe, and Charlie most of all. He knew they were up to something secret. They dressed like dairymen but didn’t smell like sour milk. When they’d left work, it was the Flatiron they came from, a luxury hotel nowhere near a creamery. It was a mystery.
Somehow it was brought up that the boys had seen the Irish girl’s burning bush that afternoon. Their stools were spun so they faced the men. “A girl your age, with that?!” “She’s got to be older. She is? I knew it.” “Is she still there, you think? Tell me how to find her.” The boys couldn’t stop laughing, seeing the men worked up. It was a big joke. “Fuck off,” Alfred said. His voice hadn’t dropped, so his cursing was hilarious. “Verpisst euch!”
Joe Meinhof set the dagger on the bar in front of Karel. “This yours?” The men took turns jabbing the blade in the air like they skewered a Rebel, or a Yankee, or whichever. “Looks like it’s hardly holding together,” Joe said. They’d all seen Karel drop it. Karel took care to not pierce himself as he took the dagger back and slid it into his belt.
He slid off his stool to find Jake, who leaned into a table off in a corner with some women. When Karel came over Jake waved them off, women with grand curly hair
and cherry lipstick, who glared at Karel as Jake slipped away. Jake led to the sill of the window and motioned to sit. They watched outside as workers rushed home or to another place. There were more than just swillers on Clandish. There were families, a mother dragging her brats to the stairs of a Verein, where it was good to bring kids along, for there was dancing and food and refined attitude in Vereine if you were a member. Karel tried listening to what the mother told her kids as she brushed them along. He couldn’t hear. The barroom was so loud that only a streetcar could dint the noise inside Mecklenburg’s.
Karel noticed how Jake watched the mother get her children inside the club, he too trying to hear. They looked to each other, embarrassed. Karel waited for Jake to say something, to make a joke. Jake licked his lips to think.
When he did speak, Jake explained how, if he stayed late enough, a man met women in saloons. This was not the advice Karel expected after they’d watched that mother rush by with her kids. “I blush when women touch me.” Jake pulled Karel close to confide. “The type you find here falls in love instantly when you blush, so long as you’re good looking. It’s easy. You don’t have to say a thing about love. You hardly have to talk at all.”
If Jake let it play out, he told, soon enough he’d be up in an empty room to screw on the floor. Sometimes the women he went with were professionals. Sometimes they weren’t. He didn’t always know the difference. “They want money, I pay. Why would I care? It’s perfection. Absolute perfection.”
Jake admitted that he didn’t know why he told these things to Karel, but he went on for a long time, said he never licked snatch when the woman asked him to. It was too tart, he explained, like these were fine things for a boy to know.
Karel had to interrupt. He wanted to talk about the fight with Ignatz.
“What if you weren’t there today? What do you think would of happened?”
“Who cares?” Jake said. “I was there. This happened.”
“Yeah. But what if you weren’t?”
“Coincidence rules all, Schatzi. Don’t let it bother you when good things happen. Or bad things, yeah. It’s just things.”
Jake was drunk. His cheeks hot, eyes deep and wet. Karel felt a little strange himself, though he’d only had near beer. Maybe it wasn’t near beer.
Things had gotten out of hand at the bar. Jimmy Mac danced with a woman named Carla, much taller than Jimmy, with bright-red hair curled loosely atop her head. Jimmy had red hair too, but his mother kept his cut short. He was scrawny, like all Irish Karel knew. Skinny legs and arms that were eaten up by hunger, kind of hunched over, if tall, from being bowed double at Catholic mass all the time. Carla looked like a giant over Jimmy. There was no crick in her back. Her chest stuck right out. She wore a yellow dress that filled over itself in layers, a long seashell necklace that slapped Jimmy in the face as they clopped back and forth in front of the bar. Jimmy didn’t seem to notice the shells smacking him. He beamed from ear to ear.
Karel had another glass, Jake next to him, clapping his hands with a dozen others as Jimmy and Carla danced. Karel would have clapped, but he held his glass with both hands near his mouth. He felt like he and his friends were men. If only the bartender would allow them beer beer. If only he felt a real drunk instead of this jolly strangeness. Manhood wasn’t so far off. He would be twelve before long and things would change for him. He knew this. His changing was a fact, something he felt in the air.
It wasn’t long, standing around with his glass, before his father was at the bar to retrieve him. Someone must have seen Karel sitting in the window and sent word up to the Eigler house that the young Miihlstein boy had been roped into some gallivanting spree at a beer saloon. Herr Miihlstein was calm as he grabbed Karel. He merely said it was time to go. Yet as he was so quiet in his manner, it caused a disruption among the people standing by, those who wouldn’t have noticed if he’d screamed. Herr Miihlstein in his boxy European hat and black suit, his delicate wire-framed glasses—the folks in Mecklenburg’s noticed that. The clapping stopped.
Jake apologized to Herr Miihlstein for not asking permission before bringing Karel down this way. Miihlstein said it wasn’t necessary to apologize. “I’m taking care of him,” Jake insisted. “There are no worries here.”
“What about his bruised eye?” Miihlstein asked. “Who gave him that?”
“Well . . .” Jake laughed. “Would you believe a mouse socked him with a brick?”
As they left the festive end of Clandish, Karel tried to explain about near beer.
“You shouldn’t see things like that,” Miihlstein objected. “You don’t belong there. It’s nighttime. Time to be home.”
Karel saw after his father said it. The sky was black. It was late.
Consider Evie Chambers.
The trick for a woman like Evie was how to pass time without getting in trouble. She had a dozen ways to kill an afternoon. She listened to records in the morning. Tipped some wine after lunch while she bathed and perfumed to ready herself. Most of all she worked on her clothes. Her mother had taught her how. Evie believed sewing was such a low thing then—she was right about that—but in time she learned there were lower occupations. Now even something simple like a slip gave her the chance to complicate its design, to make it intricate, perhaps needlessly so. She was glad her mother showed her how to do these things. Life would have been so boring if it wasn’t for designing her own clothes, for her records, and the long walks she took in the mornings when she could get out. The thing with the man was something else.
Consider that Evie was nice looking and fair skinned, that her hair coiled languidly on its own without having to be relaxed. She had thin lips and small teeth, and smiled nice, and moved graceful, like her hips had knowledge in their curves and dimples. They did. Her mother was never pretty, or at least her mother hadn’t been pretty for long, Evie didn’t imagine. Evie was more like her father. Her father had run off too. She remembered these things as she sewed. How she’d told her mother, leaving, that sewing was the only thing Evie got from her. “That’s all that’s worth taking,” she’d said. Running off wasn’t enough for people like Evie, when she was sixteen years old and wanted to dance in the majestic halls of a grand city. Chicago, New York, Paris, Zagreb, Timbuktu. The precise geography of her ambition was cloudy. What Evie knew was that she wanted to wear the most elegant costumes and carry herself with perfect sangfroid—to meet men who were loose with money, so she could get some money for herself. Evie was twenty-six in the spring of 1917. She missed her mother like she never thought possible before those days. Because her mother couldn’t hide what she was, couldn’t escape, not like how Evie and her father did. They were the guilty ones, Evie and her father, with delicate features and soft voice and light skin. Evie’s mother couldn’t hide, couldn’t pass, not like Evie could. Which is why Evie liked living on Capitol Avenue in Omaha, a block that was equal parts elegance and squalor, one where people let irregularities slide. There were places like Capitol Avenue in Topeka, where Evie came from, but too many people knew her in Topeka. Even if life in Omaha wasn’t so great, she was judged here more by what she did than what she was. In a way, at least. What she looked like, not who she looked like. What she was, not who she came from. Even though this was the truth of the matter as she knew it, Evie couldn’t speak this plainness of her desire to her mother. Not when she was growing up and not ever. It had been nearly ten years since they’d spoken. Evie was fairly certain she’d never speak to her mother again.
If Evie had too much wine, she put the tools away to keep from mangling the fabric or slicing open her arms. Those big shears. The razor blade, the sharps. If she was at the table thinking about her mother, then it was time to stopper the wine. Then she bathed, she perfumed. All the things required of a kept girl waiting for her man.
Ugo Daniel would come around seven in the evening. He put money down to keep the rooms. He had a key. Evie kept an eye on the street so his arrival never surprised her. She was ready to gr
eet him, to have a drink poured, a record spinning, a party started and waiting for him. Ugo, always fashionably late. He bought her things—silk stockings, a powder puff, a rabbit fur coat, nothing actually too expensive. She didn’t complain about the shabby presents because he was an easy one to handle. Nervous, glancing, spastic in his way, but too self-involved to give her trouble. He spent more time in front of her mirrors than she did. Dressing and re-dressing, preening himself. He claimed people were after him—he had to look good. If he didn’t bring along dinner, they ordered in from a restaurant down the street (chop suey was her favorite) and then ate at her table. Evie made a habit of finishing only half of what he got her, no matter the portion. When she ate around a man, she had half. It was a rule.
They ate at the same table where Evie sewed during the day, an oak slab gouged and slashed from use. Ugo never asked about the abused table, nor the bolts of fabric she kept, nor the wire dummy in the corner she used to shape her dresses. Maybe he thought these were merely things all women had. Ugo wasn’t so smart. Evie may not have known what he did during the day—whether he had a family on the side in addition to his kept woman—but she knew he’d inherited his money. He’d escaped Europe on a friend’s yacht with the family fortune in the early days of the war. A story he told all the time.
After dinner and wine and coffee and wine, they’d go to bed. There was some theater involved then. A feather boa could be ruined between her legs if he bought her one. That happened more than once. Evie knew she looked good. She had energy, a wonderfully pale complexion, a great supple essing of neck, shoulders, and breasts. She knew how to make herself look like she was in love. Evie felt like a movie star doing things with the boa, more like a Talmadge sister than one of Marnie Chambers’ brats of Topeka, Kansas. She looked like Natalie Talmadge. That’s what she told people to shape how they saw her.
Kings of Broken Things Page 6
