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 the 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.
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.”