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.