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.