Kings of Broken Things
Page 23
She didn’t need anything from him. They’d been trained to grow apart. Anna was preserved for posterity in a series of attics; Karel was set free in the city, a boy with wild oats to sow. Isn’t that how it goes? Things had changed so much from how they used to be, when Karel was still a precious little boy, when they were precious together. He used to climb into bed next to Anna and put his ear to her back to hear her breath, because their breathing in chorus allowed him to sleep. When he was four years old, five or six. Not when he was thirteen. More than halfway to being a man. They were born to grow apart, as all siblings were.
Anna chided herself to not worry about it. She’d made so much progress. Had become her own person. In two years she’d leave the state sanitarium, with a diploma to boot. She’d be healthy, Dr. Emmett promised her this, if she kept on with the treatments, if she ate enough and absorbed ample vitamin D and kept her spirits up. A sunken heart could ruin someone’s health as fast as any physical ailment. Anna didn’t need Dr. Emmett to tell her that.
It was then, after her family left, trying to sleep on a humid mid-September night, that Anna noticed the girl in the bunk across the aisle. The new girl, uneasy in her sleep.
She turned with a sigh, the girl, lifted her knees to lie prone. Her blankets fell. That was when Anna noticed the panties she wore, white cotton and lace, no cheap things, and certainly not wool ones like the home issued. This girl was different. She didn’t look sickly like the others. Neither skinny nor fat. But ruddy. A rumor had spread in the bathing room that this girl had been made pregnant by her cousin and that was why she was here. In protective custody.
Anna knew she should roll away and grant the new girl some privacy. The rumors should have been violation enough. But Anna inched her vision from the girl’s knee to a bulb of thigh. And then the white. She stared dead center at the white, at what was there, like she could tell if the girl really was pregnant.
The girl was young, maybe twelve. Anna bet she was pretty. Too bad she ended up here.
She moaned and rolled so one leg fell and the other rose. Anna should have told Methfessel about the new girl moaning, just to shut her up, if nothing else. And there might be something wrong. Anna should say something, but she’d wait to see what was wrong first. A spot appeared on the white. Anna saw. The spot grew a little and showed red. It was blood.
A nurse there suddenly. “Anna!” Methfessel hissed. “Shame.”
Anna turned away and pulled the blanket over herself and curled to the wall. Glanced back to see Nurse Methfessel change the girl’s bandage. How she pulled off the old ones, that cotton gauze with a tract of blood cannoning down the center.
Anna was ashamed. For the both of them, because of what she’d seen. What a strange thing to feel.
It wasn’t so hard for Karel to forget the anarchists after Emil Braun was beaten at the Santa Philomena and confined to his bed. Karel had the ballplayers.
Ballplayers who lined the dugout steps to slander jokes out the sides of their mouths during games. Who talked quiet and laughed loud, shared from the hip bottle one of them doubtlessly had. Who couldn’t wait to hear the mean stories that sprouted anytime they were together. What things the shortstop’s sister, the one from St. Joe, would do with a guy if she got one alone a few minutes. How Claude Nethaway couldn’t play Saturdays because of religious observance. Who it was that shit in that men’s room sink in Hannibal when the roadside cafe ran out of beer, and what maneuvers were required for a guy to perch up there in the first place. And most prominently in July of 1919—this the ballplayers’ most side-splitting chatter—how the bride Dwyer came to find out she’d accidentally married a Negro.
It was in all the papers. The girl sued for an annulment once her scandal was discovered. This man Dwyer, it turned out, was of African lineage. He’d fooled everyone for years before his bride revealed his secret. What a joke it became. Not even the fact that the judge threw out her suit for lack of evidence could slow the players’ mocking. According to judicial decree, she’d have to stay married to him after all, this Negro Dwyer, which is how they all saw him.
That this was the month of the Interrace Game at Rourke Park played no small role in their orneriness. There was always plenty of talk between the lines during this bout of Northside Negroes v. Southside Bohunks. Now the white team wouldn’t let up about bride Dwyer. What a shock it must have been to find out she hadn’t married a man like she thought she had. The ballplayers had laughed about it for a month already and roared louder at the start of the Interrace Game. They’d planned out their barbs weeks in advance and daydreamed how humiliated their black opponents would be.
To their surprise, the Northsiders found the whole thing just as funny as anyone. “Sure enough she took a shock at what she found,” they laughed, slapping their gloves. “That girl lucky she lived to tell the tale. Believe that.” “Why you suppose it took so long to figure it out? Why didn’t she have a clue until her honeymoon night?” The Northsiders howled about how her jaw must have dropped once Dwyer revealed his Negro self. Only on a ballfield would they dare say such things in mixed company. The blacks in their solid grays, the Southsiders in their pinstripes. Both teams with OMAHA across their chests in felt patches of either red or black.
Jap Marceau, the Southside third baseman, didn’t like how the Northsiders teased back, but it didn’t matter. The game went on. The Southsiders shut up about bride Dwyer then and forever. And the less they talked, the louder the black ballplayers from the other dugout became. The game itself was as close as it could get, 2–2 after three frames, but it ate up the hotheads on the Southside how grievously they’d misplayed the shit talking.
Karel and his friends leaned into the rail at the end of the dugout during the game. Rourke Park held seven thousand people when packed. If it wasn’t for Karel’s status with the team they’d have been stuck out in the grass beyond the outfield fences, straining to see each pitch. In the dugout they could see everything. Karel rose to the rail to note the weather, to tilt his cap and check out the clouds, the flags, to decode which way the wind blew, if it swirled, if there was a glare that could conspire against an outfielder. Karel in his pinstriped whites and black-brimmed cap. He went through his routine just for fun, since he was a spectator, the same as the masses beyond the fence and in the grandstands. The Interrace Game always attracted attention, and even more so this year, after the riots in Chicago and Washington, DC, after so many doughboys came back to find their slaughterhouse jobs had been filled by blacks. And nothing had been done about that. Karel checked the grandstands, all white. In the bowl beyond the outfield fence it was a different story, where a section for black spectators took hold from left field alley to right. Beyond that, streetcar lines ran double time to bring in more and more who couldn’t even get into the park, folks who followed the game by trying to decode uprisings in the crowd, from the section the cheering or groaning was coming from. Karel fixated on the crowd. He faced the wrong way when a foul ball lined over his head, spun just in time to see a blur sail by and peg a man in the shoulder. Karel knew better than to not pay attention, but this was his first Interrace Game, his first Fourth of July really, out free in the city.
The rest of his family had gone to the country. His father and sisters, even Maria, to visit Anna. Anna had been gone a long time by then, over a year. Karel had visited only once. The grounds were kept nice enough up there, he remembered, and had been told. Shady and cool. Croquet was played evenings. There was a lobby with fine furniture and books. A sweeping veranda with ceiling fans churning. Five-course meals were served to visiting families on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Even that night there would be a fireworks display, which was why the rest of Karel’s family was there. No matter how pleasant the grounds were, Karel acted sour. His sister ignored him the one time he visited her, wouldn’t hardly say a word to him, only the required courtesies, which was worse than saying nothing. He refused to go again because of the way Anna treated him.
> Karel spent all his time on the ballpark, or tagging along with ballplayers after a game. Since Herr Miihlstein and Frau Eigler visited Anna in the countryside most weekends, Karel was left to spend his time in Southside saloons. He became one of the ballplayers that summer, truly. He was fourteen and had grown into a tall, loping creature. If he wasn’t running, he tripped over his feet, so he tried to be running all the time. The ballplayers commended his hustle. He liked that. Even his friends belonged by then. This was the summer Jimmy Mac spent mornings at a boxing gymnasium to learn what it meant to be River Ward Irish. His hands grew thick from swelling, his shoulders and neck and forearms too. He talked all the time about how Jack Dempsey was going to be the new champ once he got his shot. This was the summer Alfred squared off. His shoulders grew. His hips, mercifully, slimmed. Even though his father couldn’t come to see him—Emil Braun was laid up at home from the beating he took at the Santa Philomena, and might be forever—it gave Alfred more than a bit of pride to man second base for the junior squad, and to do it well. He could move his feet now. He could dance the bag to bring the ball around the horn. All three boys fit at the end of the Southside dugout. They belonged.
As the game moved into the late innings, both teams struggled to take advantage of good fortune. The Southsiders failed to score in the fifth even after the black hurler walked the leadoff man. The Northsiders rapped into a double play with the bases loaded to end the top of the sixth.
The game itself was tight, but that wasn’t the worst of it. The blacks carried on about bride Dwyer. “Didn’t she know her man’s secret before she felt what he was packing?” “Judge shoulda took mercy on the poor woman.” “She’ll never be the same.” Their second baseman worked his mouth relentless. It changed how Karel saw an infielder in the ready position, how the man let his arm dangle crudely between his thighs. Down the Southside dugout, faces lengthened as the ballplayers watched and heard what the Northsiders jibed them with. “No joke she sued. Sore as she’d be, who’d blame her?” That second baseman jawing. Fowler was his name, a small light-skinned man. Karel wished the man would stop talking. Jimmie Collins, a skinny man with jug ears who managed the Southside team, rose to the lip of the dugout and shouted, “Shut up now about that. We’ve heard plenty.” It only made things worse. “What’s that, Jim?” Fowler asked. “Now, she wasn’t your daughter, was she? That’d be an awful shame.”
The Southsiders would have to win the game. That was the only way about it.
They went up swinging for homers. They crashed into second base as hard as they could. They blistered the knuckles of the blacks with inside fastballs. But the blacks could play this game too and give as good as they got. They could blister a white’s knuckles if they wanted, out there afield in Rourke Park, this game their yearly chance to bean a white in the back, or come in sliding with spikes high and get away with the aggression. When Jap went hard into second on a steal attempt and nearly spiked Fowler, Fowler tried to land a punch on Jap, but the ump wouldn’t have it. “That’s the end of it,” the ump warned, a finger up in Fowler’s face. “I’ll call the game off if the rough stuff don’t stop.”
Jap was nearly forty. He’d played a dozen seasons in the minors and was dropping back now, after he’d been cut from a B league team that summer. He was small and had dark, bushy eyebrows, a swollen pug nose that made him look like a fighter. He wouldn’t ease up. The Northsiders wouldn’t either. That’s why everyone prized this tradition the whole year over. It was their one chance. It was sanctioned. Whatever violence came.
It wasn’t until the eighth that the whites broke through. Bill Sutez was on third after a double and an error when Ducky brought him home with a sacrifice fly to left. The score was 3–2 in favor of the Southside going into the final frame. “We’re almost there,” Karel said. They didn’t dare relax as the Southside took the field. They would shut up those boys from the Northside. They’d earned this.
Still, as the first batter struck out on four pitches and the second batter popped to third, you couldn’t blame any of those Southsiders if they eased up in the field. Only that Northside second baseman stood in their way.
Fowler worked his jaw as he stepped in the box left-handed. He was short and scrawny, not much bigger than Alfred, so the Southside outfielders snuck closer to urge on their pitcher, Ralph Snyder. Ralph looked like he should have been working a broom in a sawmill instead of trying to get the last out in a game like this. Unremarkable in his uniform, thin and grubby, his soiled jersey flagged out over his belt in back. Tobacco juice dripped off his chin as he leaned in for the sign Ducky Sutez put down. But Ralph had value—a side-arm lefty who threw junk and wasn’t afraid of anyone. He went right after the Northsider, throwing a fastball for strike one, then a curve for strike two. Even as Fowler took the first two offerings, he still ran his mouth. The next pitch from Ralph was hard, up and in, to knock Fowler off the plate and change his eyes, and was followed by a breaking ball down and away in the dirt. Fowler didn’t flinch. “Don’t waste nothing on me. Bring it here,” he said, pointing to the middle of the plate with his bat. With the count even, Ralph would come back over the plate. Everyone knew this. Fowler didn’t have much power, but he was fast. Walking him was out of the question.
Ralph didn’t exactly look fresh out there on the mound, but he had enough left to pound three more fastballs on the outside half that Fowler could only spoil. All Fowler could do was hold the count even. Out in the bowl beyond the outfield fence, all the black folks cheered him on. He was their only hope, that Fowler. He had to keep the game going. It didn’t look like he had much chance, but he spit into his hands and stepped back in anyway. He choked up on the bat and jumped on the next pitch, a fastball that straightened out on Ralph and stayed up. Fowler got into it. This the only time he stopped talking, stumbling out of the box, head down, just running, not even seeing as the ball rocketed over Bill Sutez into the right field corner. They’d played him to hit the other way, not believing he could pull a fastball, but that was exactly what he did. He cranked it into the corner. He was off to the races.
Karel jumped to the top step of the dugout—they all did—to see the ball skip to the fence and carom into foul ground. Fowler was already around first, chugging to second, running hard, headed for third the whole way. He should stop at third. But the way this guy swaggered, the way he talked, Karel knew the play wouldn’t end until Fowler scored or was put out. And the ball was stuck in the corner. Bill Sutez was botching the play. By the time Bill found the ball he’d overrun it, and then fumbled it, and then launched wildly to the infield. It was all Jap Marceau could do to knock the ball down as Fowler turned third. The ball squiggled from Jap, spinning in the dirt not far away, but far enough. Fowler would tie the game.
Everyone saw what happened next. How Ducky, catcher’s mask at his side, prowled up the line from home plate. There was no throw coming, but Ducky blocked the plate anyway. As Fowler started to strut, knowing he’d score, Ducky put a shoulder into him. Fowler didn’t see it coming. Ducky dropped him to the chalk. The guy’s legs still kicking as he hit the ground. By then Jap had the ball raised to his ear and let fly. Ducky took the honors himself and tagged Fowler, the black, as he still lay there in the dirt.
“Ducky did that on purpose, didn’t he?” Jimmy said. “Jeez. I’d say he did.”
They all looked to the ump for a ruling, the air gone from the field. He took his time giving one, thinking things through as Fowler turned in the dust to see. The umpire squeezed a fist near his chest. Fowler was out. It was over.
It was the wrong call, wasn’t it, but who was to say? The ump, surely, and he said out. Now the ump was running off the field. It was over. The Northside manager chased after to beg a fair ruling, but it was no use. Once the ump crossed outside the foul line, the manager couldn’t grab his arm to slow him down. Once the ump made it to the grandstand, with the other stunned thousands, the manager couldn’t even quarrel, for then the ump was a white man.
“Three outs,” Jap screamed, throwing his glove into the air. “That’s all you get!”
The Northsiders weren’t convinced. “You can’t do that. You can’t knock a guy out like that.”
“Sure can. He did it, didn’t he?” “Would of been an inside-the-parker otherwise. Not our fault your guy don’t look where he’s going.”
Both teams pressed together, one half against the other on the spot where Fowler had been flattened. The ballplayers were all over each other, trying to break up the fight or instigate, Karel couldn’t tell, the crowd on their feet shouting, no longer stunned, louder than they’d been during the game now that there was brawling. Alfred and Jimmy Mac screamed from the dugout too, flinging anything at hand out to the field. Paper cups, gloves, bats, the pine tar rag.
Fowler limped in the direction of his side’s bench, shaking out his legs as he went. There was something strange in how Fowler walked. He was in no hurry. He wasn’t agitated as he went down the steps to grab his mitt from under the bench then spun to the field. He pulled something from his mitt—a razor—and headed back to get Ducky.
“Shit,” the blacks shouted, backing out of the scrum as they saw. “You getting it now.”