As Jake snuck through the melee, a woman ran up the back of his legs. She screamed, “My boy! Where’s my boy!” She found her boy cracking a man with a baseball bat. Jake rubbed the tendons behind his knees as the woman ran off. He was still unscathed by that point. Many weren’t so lucky. A guy collapsed by the door of the Potsdamer, laughing to himself. His mustache thick with blood that dripped on his shirt and vest. His nose struck flat against his face. “Good shot, Paddy,” he laughed. “Sehr gut, sehr gut.” “You okay, buddy?” Jake asked, leaning in as blood erupted from the guy’s nose, spraying him with red. The guy laughed louder, even as he choked and sputtered. And Jake wiping blood from his lips, spitting, disgusted. It was impossible to just wipe the blood away.
Some still were drinking inside at the Potsdamer, but the show was over. Performers waited at the door to see if kids would come back through to cause trouble. It was strange to see them from the street. Burlesque next to bassoonist, lithe vocalist hugging the arm of stout gymnast.
Jake’s friends were on the balcony. Meinhof, Reinhold, Charlie, a few others from the tunnels. “Are you still here?” Charlie asked, swaying, a glass of green wine in each hand. Charlie rubbed the splatters on Jake’s shirt, somewhat amused when his fingers came back sticky with blood.
They moved to the bathroom to watch from a window.
Rumors of a bounty on the Cypriot’s head went around. Tom Dennison was the one offering. In his drunk, Meinhof bragged that he was going to spot the Cypriot and run down to beat the tar from his bones, then carry him up to Dennison for the money. Jake pretended to ignore Meinhof, but he didn’t back away either. He scanned the faces below and dreamed of the reward. He knew only that the Cypriot had a beard and was foreign—from Cyprus, whatever that meant—and that there was some deformity in the shape of his eyes. A lot of men on the street looked a little like that. How was Jake supposed to pick?
It was close to midnight before the melee petered out and Jake could tread over the debris to get home. Broken glass, trampled hats, splintered wood, casings of rockets and firecrackers, shotgun shells. Most people on the street now had been caught in the fighting and finally had a chance to walk home, shirttail untucked, hat in hand. Jake saw fireworks burst not so far away. Big shows were starting in Field Club and on the Gold Coast, in the moneyed wards. Jake saw the explosions, distant above rooftops like flowers, but was too far away to hear them go off.
On his street, things were changed. The lunchroom Charlie ate at on Sundays, a chair stuck through its door where the glass used to be. The shop where Jake bought chocolates, looted of its confections. Bakeries and canned goods stores, their shelves emptied and toppled. The sign for Mecklenburg’s Saloon swung by a single chain above the sidewalk, but at least its windows were intact. A line of bouncers stood guard outside with maplewood paddles.
It was like Jake had never been on Clandish before, the neighborhood misshaped like it was. He noticed flagpoles atop the Vereine. None of them flew flags during the war, so he hadn’t noticed the poles. He’d never seen the trees that grew behind Mecklenburg’s, or that they were sycamores. Clandish felt small. He heard bands play exuberant foreign anthems in Little Sicily. He saw fireworks explode in jubilee uptown, in a different place altogether.
There was music when Jake got to the Flatiron near 4 a.m. He was in early for work. A band inched through a final set of slow and melancholy improvisation in the basement club. The cornet on a hazy, unending solo, the drummer patting a snare half-asleep because his hands couldn’t stop moving, a punctuating tweet from a clarinet now and then. Jake wanted to get through the service entry fast and start digging, he came early because he couldn’t sleep, but two teenagers leaned near the door, a boy and a girl.
He sometimes saw kids like these jiggle the handle of the locked club door in the afternoon, or stumble up the steps broke in the morning. The Flatiron was irresistible to thrill-seeking children. Not the kind of person who lived and grew up on Clandish, but rich kids who’d developed a taste for what they called jungle music, who snuck around more or less constantly to find a way in where they weren’t wanted.
The boy at the service door pulled a flask from his jacket and handed it to the girl. She was smart looking. A girl nearly of age, in rings, pins, and furs, a dress cut so a man’s gaze drew to the sateen that clung to her taut virgin bump. This girl shouldn’t have been on the Ward, a girl from a nice family who had a lot to lose. Jake got aroused at the sight of a rich girl. But that guy was with her too. There was always a guy. This one older, a college boy in a bow-tie costume, white gloves and patent leather shoes. It ruined the fantasy to see the kind of guy a girl like that hung on. Cocky ones with new speedsters and roadsters of bright yellow and red. Warren or Scotty or Tim racing off in ivory suits and skimmer hats to a surfside jazz club hidden in a clump of cottonwoods along the river, an all-night juke joint where they could find illicit goods like fried catfish and cold beer. Boys who bought gifts for their girls with money made clerking part-time at Daddy’s office. And the girls. Prim and pretty with powdered faces, lips rubbed red with jelly bean guts. Lillian, Maud, Bernadette, Carol. Girls who kept Mother’s flask of brandy in a fluff of goldenrod dress, who caused a scandal when they came home hammered and crashed into the maid’s room by mistake.
The dandy sneered at Jake as he tipped his flask. He said something under his breath about the way foreigners dressed. Jake hadn’t changed his clothes. He’d forgot about the blood that speckled his shirt. The dandy muttered to the girl again. He whispered “Hun” so Jake could hear.
Jake wanted to say something in return. With a heavy accent. Like a Katzenjammer Kid comic strip. Vot’s der bich idea? he’d say. Chust vait! Efery dog vill got his day! But he stayed silent. They would have laughed at him if he talked that way. He intimidated boys like the dandy, he didn’t need to say anything. He muscled his shoulders back, his chest out, and the boy and girl looked at their feet then cleared the doorway. They swigged from the flask, walked away. Jake went to work. He’d forget them once he was in the tunnel, scraping out the end of the apse.