Most Southsiders ran back to the dugout or scrambled to the outfield grass to watch. Fowler said he’d kill the guy who took a cheap shot. He held up the razor so sunlight caught the blade. He said he’d be happy to skin that thieving catcher if the thieving catcher wasn’t too chicken. “That’s fine,” Ducky shouted. “I’d like to see you try.”
Only a few players remained on the spot—Fowler and his shortstop, Ducky and his brother. Fowler and the Sutez brothers jawed, but nobody moved. The realization of what they were headed for dropped its weight over them. There was a sort of emptiness. Fowler looked like he wanted to put the razor back but couldn’t. He had to hold out the blade and explain his anger with more anger. He had to hold a razor to a white man’s throat, because that’s what had started.
Karel was out on the grass. He didn’t know why. Just found himself closer and closer to what would happen. He’d gone headlong and there was no reason, standing right next to the Sutez brothers. He peeked around and saw the blade. Fowler noticed him, the boy. Fowler stopped arguing to stare at Karel, to look him straight in the eye. Karel in his Southside uniform. Did they know each other? Was Fowler one of them he’d met at Josh Joseph’s funeral? Josh in his grays inside the coffin. Was Fowler the ballplayer who joked around with the boys?
How should Karel know? Fowler was nobody, out there holding a razor up to a man.
“Are you crazy? Put that thing down!” The Northside manager ran up to Fowler. He snatched the razor away and pushed Fowler and the others to their bench. “Going to get yourself killed! Your teammates too!”
They all came out of it then. The game was over.
Joe Meinhof spotted the boys after. “What were you doing on the field, Karel? Did you get a piece of the action? Is that what you were after?”
The boys laughed. “He’d of liked to,” Jimmy said. “They had it coming.”
“Pulling a razor? What in the world.”
Along with thousands of others they waited outside the park for a streetcar. They’d be stuck awhile in traffic. A barricade had been erected to ease the passage of black spectators and their team back to the Northside, with a police escort the whole way—so why not feel good for a while if you had to wait? Why not shout? Why not taunt those on the other side of the barricade?
Joe Meinhof chatted about the game and other things. He was a captain with the machine now. The delight of his position showed in his posture and how he combed his hair back over his head with a bump of pompadour. He wore an expensive suit, with a green silk tie and handkerchief, with shined dress shoes. A small man, short in height and slight in build, he wasn’t much larger than the boys. “I been trying to spot you guys,” he said. “No use pretending. I got something to tell you.” Karel didn’t pay attention. Meinhof was weird and uneasy. Karel didn’t like him, even if there was something about the man now. Some gravity.
Karel was lonely in that crowd squirming with glee. The scrum didn’t bring him the happiness it should have—not since he’d walked out on the field. People recognized him. Some of them slapped his back and congratulated him for being so brave, facing down that Fowler with his razor. Others despised Karel for being stupid, thinking they knew what was going on, that he’d moved only dumbfounded, following his eyes. But how could anyone know what went on inside Karel? He didn’t know himself. It was embarrassing to have strangers wonder if he was stupid, brave, whatever. Nobody should think about him at all. How the game ended was unfair anyway. Ducky had cheated. Fowler should have been awarded the run and the game resumed. Karel knew that. Nobody except black people seemed to care that the result was fraudulent. This bothered Karel too. He thought about Josh Joseph and the ball Josh gave him and insisted he keep, which was in his back pocket right then. The baseball with shoe polish rubbed in its hide.
“Listen,” Meinhof said. “No trolley is coming, not in this mess. Let’s walk. My place isn’t far. I got something to eat.”
Sure, the boys agreed. They went along. Karel didn’t have anywhere else to go, nothing better to do. He went along.
The walls of Joe Meinhof’s room were plastered with posters he filched from around the Ward. Advertisements for wrestling matches from years ago, menus from places he ate at, ads for women’s athletic clothing, for Norma Talmadge movies, for comic operettas. There were doodles Joe penciled in lunchrooms and Happy Hooligan cartoon strips he tore from the World-Herald. The papers were yellow and curled at the edges, this fossil record of things that caught his eye. Joe layered posters and clippings over each other, three or four deep.
He sat on his cot to appraise the collage, the boys there with him. Karel watched without interrupting, as if Joe was a great artist at work. He spun paste in a cracked ceramic bowl, dropped ashes into the mixture from his cigarette, to affix a poster from the Interrace Game.
“There’s beer,” he said, remembering the boys. They were thirsty. Joe rattled in his cabinets and came back with some crackers and sardines. He put more beers on ice then started talking. It was a hot day. The boys wouldn’t mind listening, would they, not with cold beer and a breeze lifting the drapes? Joe told how he and his half-brother Charlie had to run from their town. They grew up in a religious collective in the central part of the state before Joe got them kicked off the farm. He’d looked at the neighbor’s wife taking a swim in a pond. He snuck up a mulberry tree and watched as her dress dropped. She pinned her hair, waded in, then floated on the surface. There was no mystery why Joe did what he did. “I was nineteen years old. I reached in my trousers. So what? What I didn’t notice was that the neighbor was there too. He saw what I was doing and heaved this stone into the pond to stop me. Splash! I nearly fell out of the tree.” Over the next week the man told half the county about Joe touching himself. It wasn’t the first time Joe got in trouble for something like this. He and Charlie often snuck into town to see girls dance when tent shows came through, on nights they were supposed to stay out with the cattle. The herd could fend for itself as far as they were concerned. When Joe’s mother heard, she packed bags for both Joe and Charlie and locked them out of the house.
“It isn’t so bad here like it was out there, is it, boys?” Joe asked. “If you know the right folks here, you got a chance at least.”
It was pleasant enough in Joe’s room. Outside, people shopped from a merchant who’d set up there. Joe leaned out the window to see. “But I got to say, things are getting worse off than they were before. There’s all sorts of rumors now about what’s going on. As a man who’d know, boys, I’ll tell you it’s true.”
“Sure,” Jimmy agreed. “A guy hardly goes out anymore unless he’s looking for trouble.”
“You can’t trust nobody,” Alfred said. “I hear gunshots all the time. Warning shots.”
“The city commissioners are coming after us, that’s why,” Joe said. He went to the kitchen and took a drink of cloudy liquor from a bottle. “The Morals Squad? Ha! All they do is make people suffer. You boys know. You get around more than most, I bet. Fighting all over at night. In tenements. In Jobbers Canyon. Clandish is a ghost town. You don’t hardly risk going outside. That’s just what those reformers want.”
The boys became drunk.
“Those new cops ain’t got a clue.”
“We had it good before, didn’t we? And didn’t even know it.”
“Sure we did.”
“Something bad’s going to happen,” Karel said.
The others stared at him. He hadn’t said anything since they’d come to Joe’s room. He’d sat quiet in a corner; now that he spoke up it sounded like shouting.
“You’re right,” Joe said. He passed the bottle to Karel. “Something bad’s happening now. There’s the rapes. A few a day, yeah. It’s in the dailies. It’s the Schwarzers that do it. They filled the packing plants during the war and now we can’t get rid of them. I don’t know what the owners wanted blackies for in the first place. Nobody wants scabs around.”
“We know that,” Karel said. He took a d
rink.
“Some of the time they aren’t even blacks that do this, yeah, but some white guy with cork soot rubbed into his skin.” Joe laughed. “I heard about a few guys who did it. If you boys are interested. Rub on a black face and you can put it to a girl. You can really abuse her and get away with it because it’s a blackie they’ll be looking for.”
“That’s a joke, yeah?”
“A guy doesn’t even think twice anymore, boys, not about that kind of stuff.”
“Maybe all those blackies would think twice if the cops did the job like they used to.”
“They’re just strange about it,” Joe lamented. He held the neck of the bottle with both his knobby hands. “If you cower in a room like we are, like cockroaches, the cops might leave you alone with a beer. But they shut down all the Vereine and beer gardens. Even Krug Park is different. There’s nowhere to dance. Nowhere to hear singing while you drink. Nowhere for a whole family to eat on the Ward where they know they’ll be safe. Clandish is a worse place to live, yeah. Maybe that’s their aim. We can’t live like we did. That’s what they wanted.”
They drank into the night before Karel left. It was easy to drink with Joe. He had good stories and didn’t ask for anything in return, like some men did, like a boy always had to fear when a hard-drinking man asked for company in his room. Joe wasn’t like that. He knew jokes boys liked; he talked to them about what plagued their city, like they were men; he didn’t act like he was better than them, or make fun; he didn’t make them drink too fast, like the ballplayers did when Karel went to a speakeasy with the team, and then laugh when he was sick in the alleyway. Joe made sure the boys ate as they drank and sat up straight to let out their belches when the pressure built. Joe even apologized for what happened to Emil Braun at the Santa Philomena, and Alfred appreciated that, said it wasn’t Joe’s fault, so forget it, Alfred heard from everybody how his father had it coming. It would have been easy to drink all night, but Joe didn’t allow that either. He sent them home when it was time to stop.
“Look here,” he said. “Don’t go straight home, okay? Walk around a little. Let the stink blow off you a bit. Trust me.”
Karel wasn’t going home anyway. He didn’t stay at the Eigler house more than a few nights a week. There was a boys’ dormitory he found west of Thirteenth Street, not in the tenements but close to there. The building looked like a barn, maybe it was once, with broad boards painted red and an open loft upstairs. Two rows of beds lined the walls. Union Pacific had built the home for its workers, but the machine, it was said, owned the building now and kept it for street kids. Any boy could find a bed here, and breakfast. There was often work to be had too. Machine lieutenants stopped in around suppertime. Karel recognized some of them, those who’d been buddies with Jake Strauss when Jake was still around. (Sometimes Joe Meinhof was there poking around, although Karel hid under his blanket if he saw Joe. Karel didn’t want to be seen by Joe in the dorming house.) “Want some fun? There’s money in it too,” the lieutenants said. “Sure you do. It’s easy. Do what comes natural to a boy.” They flipped coins to the boys to show they were legit. Karel didn’t know what the work was.
Before the dorming house opened it wasn’t so easy for a kid out on his own. In summertime there were doorways a boy could lean in, or managers of lunch counters who didn’t mind if a kid laid his head on a tabletop so long as he cleared out for the rush. Winter was more complicated. A boy could rent a man’s bed during the day if that man worked a day shift, but that cost money. A boy might even stay home a few days if he forgot why this was his worst option.
Karel stuck to the quiet end of the loft. At the other end boys played cards or threw dice or learned to curse in a dozen languages. All of them smoked corncob pipes, another amenity the house provided. Those boys stayed up all night talking from nicotine. The misfit boys of Clandish. But Karel came here to sleep. At home in the Eigler attic he couldn’t find peace. After Anna was taken away, Miihlstein rehung many of the wire monstrosities she’d made. In the dark Karel could see their silhouettes hang, the jagged legs of a wire elephant, the gaping hole among the cords of a raven’s middle. He couldn’t stand to be haunted.
Karel wished the feeling he had on the ballfield could somehow follow him home, but it couldn’t. There was too much weight in familiar places. The stuff about his mom he didn’t want to believe. What happened with Braun and, not long after, Jake being run out of town in disgrace, a thug, a thief, good riddance. And Anna.
Karel switched on a lamp to take off his shoes and tuck them under the mattress. The light might annoy those around him. They could roll over and grumble for all he cared. They could say, “Oh, you again.” He’d tell them to fuck off.
Karel sat in the lamplight. That was all. The room looked strange to him, the way shadows took hold in corners, under beds, in the airy loft above him where the rafters crossed. The room reminded Karel of when he’d visited Anna at the state home. She too slept in a hall like this one. The two rows of beds. All strangers to one another, which made them compatriots in a way. It was always lonely to fall asleep in a row of beds, particularly if you were bracketed by silent neighbors. If he couldn’t hear his breathing, Karel feared that the boy next to him had died in the night, what he’d feared years before when he shared a bed with Anna, when he fell asleep to her delicate snore but awoke to silence, her snoring stopped. The terror of that.
Karel would stay up late and stare into the rafters. He’d listen to the cardplayers. This night he’d leave the light on.
Something wicked must have come over Tom Dennison after they lost the vote. He always hated losing—he’d gone red-faced and toppled faro tables in Denver as a young man when he lost at cards—and was even worse as he aged. Losing left him speechless. He had no idea what to tell Frank and the others about Jim Dahlman and the whole coalition falling. That this was expected? That there was nothing he could have done to change things? Why people voted like they did wasn’t always something Tom could explain. Maybe it rained too much that spring, or too little. Maybe it was too cold for their liking, or too hot. Maybe they lost a job or found out their wife was cheating or their in-laws wanted to move into the spare room or their boss was a prick. Men had this effective weapon—the vote—but rarely understood how to use it. Tom took advantage of this when he could, but that didn’t mean he could say why people voted one way or another. The only hard fact of the matter was that they did. This was shown in numbers. The reform slate carried six of seven spots on the board. Tom’s Square Seven took only one.
Things would change in Omaha. There would be upheaval in city hall, in the police department, on the bench. Almost every seat of control they had was in disarray.
Frank didn’t say much when Tom saw him on election night. Frank fingered the foil tops of unopened champagne bottles and flipped his class ring from one finger to another. He barely even nodded when Tom said hello, and Tom knew enough not to push against the mood of his benefactor. Frank could look pure evil when mad, in his finely tailored suits, his unamused, aristocratic glower. Tom had clashed with Jay Gould before and could attest that Gould had nothing on Frank.
Of course, it was Billy who broke the silence—“We lost. What’s to say about it?” Frank shrugged. “Isn’t that what we pay you for, Billy? To talk?”
Tom admitted that he couldn’t make heads or tails of losing. “Give me a week,” he said. “I’ll decide what to do.”
He paced the brick drive outside his house that week, thinking. Bullet straight and tree lined, the drive gave the impression of something extraordinary as his house slipped into view. The house was wood framed with finishes of granite at certain edges, the cellar and foundation limestone, highlights of plaster festoons above the front door. Off the second-floor bedrooms were balconies as wide as the patios below, where tiered gardens overlooked the industrial valley. There were pergolas holding grapevines, arbors abloom with creeping red ivy. Everything here was made for looking at, for admiring, like it was u
nreachable, a mirage. Years before, an enemy left a bomb on Tom’s doorstep. An ingenious design, the bomb, a simple wooden crate with six sticks of dynamite and a pistol inside. A string was tacked to the porch and connected to the trigger of the pistol. If someone had lifted the box—Tom’s wife or daughter—the whole house would have been blasted clean off the earth, his wife and daughter too. Frances found the crate. A smart girl, she didn’t touch anything. Tom noticed the trip wire when she brought him to see. He had police dismantle the device. After that Tom closed the grounds. Bodyguards were kept outside around the clock. You had to be a close friend, a known friend, if there was such a thing, or else you couldn’t get close. The bomb changed things. That was when Tom put a machine gun across his lap in the car. That was when everything here, all this bounty he’d won, started being lonely.
He wouldn’t give up what he’d earned. No matter if it was lonely. He wouldn’t go out on a loss. The mere idea drove him nuts. He could only think of one thing: how to get back what was taken from him.
Tom knew it was big trouble when the people elected men like Ed Smith, a self-righteous prick who messed up deals. Ed Smith wanted to clean out the police department and city hall, and that meant firing people. It meant taking benefits away from folks who were used to having them. Jobs, pensions, kickbacks. Arrangements everyone was used to. As far as Tom was concerned, Ed Smith and his cronies were the greedy ones. Greedy for laws. They wanted to take over the River Ward because they didn’t like what happened here—but already there were so many laws that a man was either a lawbreaker or a hypocrite. Tom hated the reformers. Any guy might do bad things, just as all males of the species did, but a real man owned up to his sin. That was the difference.
Almost overnight Mayor Smith had cops enforcing every little law to the extreme. Arresting the jobless for vagrancy, putting people in jail for traffic violations. His idea was to show how much control the police had over all crime in the city, but it didn’t work that way. Folks didn’t trust the police now. Nobody ever trusted them, but this was different. At least with a cop who worked for Tom, a guy knew where he stood. With one of Smith’s cops you had no clue what to expect. And still there was crime. There weren’t enough police west of the Mississippi to close all the speakeasies on the River Ward, because there was demand for them. If one closed, nine more opened before the kegs from the first were axed in the gutter. And there was still rape. Still murder. The stuff that really made folks worry. A cop might clip you for jaywalking and toss you behind bars. It was a little much for jaywalking, but you got caught. Fine. Then you read in the paper how four girls were attacked by blackies the week before and the police had no leads, no arrests had been made. That made folks think. What if the police didn’t worry so much about jaywalkers? What if they didn’t have fifteen men watching traffic and another forty shutting down neighborhood bartenders? Maybe then the cops could catch a rapist.
Kings of Broken Things Page 24
