“Okay.” Meinhof smiled, an amused lilt to his voice. “Not all blacks are rotten. There’s some bad eggs. I don’t like to have to repeat this. But the rapes. Those poor girls. That’s the kind of thing that’s going to happen more and more until a blackie’s held to task.”
Jake wished they’d shut up. He hated talking politics, and how angry some of them got, himself included to be honest, thinking about a girl being taken advantage of by a black man. He’d think about Charlie’s question for a long time after, following the logic that it could somehow help those in power to have a girl raped.
Jake was tired of his friends. How their faces drooped longer and their lips wavered open to preach some injustice or another until the debate spiraled to the irrelevant. Jake didn’t want to hear what his friends said. They were just as hateful as anybody. That didn’t make things better. Jake stepped outside to have a smoke. Once he breathed different air, he decided to head home.
It was late evening. The sun labored to set in the July lethargy, stopped at its vanishing point to smolder, its light turned red in wisps of smoke. Hundreds of folks congregated on Clandish. They packed walkways to light off ladyfingers and roman candles. It was too hot to sit inside, a southern wind gusting furnace air and silt. Jake wandered the boulevard. He watched families outside their homes and smiled at those he knew, friends of Maria. Almost all houses on Clandish were wood framed. Newer, smaller homes crouched in under the eaves of big ones like Maria’s two-and-a-half-story Victorian down the block, so narrow that alleys between houses became shallow ditches and truncated backyards overflowed with native trees—ancient black walnut, bur oak, and cottonwood. Fragrance seeped from these trees now like it did at no other time of year. Jake caught his breath in the familiar bouquet of a mature tree’s leaves. He picked the aroma out from urban odors and remembered what it was like to stroll in the forests and orchards at home, the walkway dimpled with the remains of cherries.
Jake loved the trees back on the homestead in Jackson County. He’d felt safe in them. Lindens, ash, hickory, plum, and one plane tree he could make out from half a mile away, tall and white and ancient. Its ashy limbs glowed incandescent in morning and evening light, somehow brighter when everything around was darker. Holy in the way it shined in the gloaming of a summer evening, and that it lived at a parsonage. The tree looked like it had a halo, like it was God himself.
Jake imagined what Maria and the Miihlstein kids had devised to savor the evening that Fourth of July. He was miserable, ambling alone in Omaha. What he saw on Clandish reminded him of the way folks back home used to talk outside church on Sundays when the weather was nice. He remembered how they sang hymns inside the sanctuary. Afterwards there would be a picnic under the trees of the parsonage, or they would go to a neighbor’s house to eat in the shade of a vine-heavy pergola. Every Sunday was a holiday. They sang out in church because there wouldn’t have been music if they didn’t. There were so few of them it didn’t matter who had a nice voice or who had trouble staying on key. There was no one else, nowhere outside of them, the body they made together back home in Jackson County.
The noise stopped him in his tracks. It didn’t register what was happening. Some arguing a few blocks back on Clandish. Shouting between young men then a pistol shot. Jake heard. He headed back to see. Back into the people who ran up the long hill of Clandish. Women in summer dresses, hats flying off their heads. Men sprinting away. “A kid started trouble,” one of the fleeing said to another. “Some paddy cop tried to nab him.” A woman knocked into them. “It’s the Cypriot!” she shouted, arms crossed over her breast. “It’s him!”
Something whizzed by Jake’s head into a storefront. The muscles in his neck and under his arms gripped into him at a shattering that grew louder, faster, as the storefront window cleaved from its frame, its fantastic dissolution against the pavement. Jake tucked his chin to his chest to shrink his face into the mass of his torso. He turned to look, and the window was gone. A man rushed inside, to the hardware store, then tossed out hoes, shovels, an ax, to who’d take one. He slapped a pick handle into Jake’s hand and shouted, “Tear them up!” He meant the cops, who were running by with batons. Jake turned the pick in his hands to examine the grains and cracks of its wood handle. The memory of how to swing was locked in his arms—like when he’d whipped that boy back home. He let the pick fall to the ground. He didn’t want to use it. He’d stay out of trouble.
They ran with weapons and tools, the folks on Clandish Street, ready to find the Cypriot and take him apart after that woman shouted the name. But the man was hard to find. There were so many rumors about what the Cypriot looked like. How could anyone recognize him? In the meantime guys grabbed merchandise from knocked-in storefronts. Drunks broke things because they could. Most men on the Ward had been drinking since morning to celebrate the holiday, and now they had this to celebrate. Something free for the taking. Street kids made a terrible racket when the cops tried to carry them off, but more boys pushed through all the time. The cops couldn’t keep up. Even little kids leaned out windows to fire roman candles and taunt a cop. Flares and shining orange sparks rained down. The whole thing that much better with a rocket’s red glare. Who could disagree? Most of the boys on Clandish were involved in some way. Shouting out windows and stealing candy and catching hell from a man who knew their parents and ducking around the sidewalks, trying to keep from getting slugged. A melee like this was somewhat common, every couple summers when the heat got to people. A melee was a great thing in the way a street kid saw the world: all the yelling and violence. The desecration of buildings that appeared indestructible. What did it matter to break a window? What did it matter to take a knife and gash the wood of a door? The world, this city, it all seemed permanent. Nothing, the boys believed, would ever change Omaha. They wanted to leave a mark, even if that mark was vandalism. The boys felt it was a fundamental right to slur cops. They were entitled to toss a brick down the street without concern for where it landed. Most of the men on Clandish felt the same way. Why should a boy have felt any different?