Once school started, Karel and Jimmy Mac came along to the warehouses too, early mornings before the tardy bell rang. There were fields of warehouses that backed to the river, block after block, their brick walls stenciled with the names of owners. Wholesalers and creameries were housed here, hoarders, manufacturers, middle men. “Butter, tools, furniture, grain, meat, nails,” Braun shouted. “Anything that can be shipped and purchased elsewhere, you’ll find it here.” Rubber tires flew from window to window across an alley, four stories up. The pavement was laced with spur rails, from one loading dock to another, but the real action took place in the alleyways. That’s what Braun showed the boys—outside a warehouse on 6? Street, where jobbers felt out soft spots along the hiring line. Many jobbers were German, or Germanic at least. Karel could tell from the tones of voices, the varieties of cadence, the burly shapes of bodies. Once Braun and the boys fell in with these men, it was impossible to escape their halting mass. Interlocked at the elbows and hips, all crushing forward, acting on a rumor of who was hiring that morning and for what. At a certain time a green slat door rolled open and a manager emerged, buttressed on each arm by a thug. Karel climbed a drainpipe to see. The manager was short and fat and wore a coat that went to his feet. He held a clipboard, to which was fastened the list of jobs. He looked between list and crowd. Those nearby stood taller when the manager’s gaze moved over, chests puffing, backs lengthening. He spoke English first. Shouted the rules of how this company did business: what they paid, what work was to be done, what kind of worker was wanted, whether lunch was served. When he finished, the manager repeated the instructions in German, then Italian, then Lithuanian. His hired muscle joked the whole time, aping the instructions in Irish accents for a group of micks near the dock. Some workers were picked right away. Regulars with the company who climbed the concrete ledge of the loading dock, slipped past the muscle, and pooled together inside the building. They smoked cigarettes and waited for the other elect. All of them dressed in white denim overalls and hats with black bills, a few women with hair pinned under their caps.
Alfred pointed out that Ignatz was one of these regulars now. He’d graduated in. His mother and father—it was incredible to Karel to think about that ogre having parents who could boss him around, bullies even bigger than Ignatz—made him stand to be judged in the jobber market after he’d come home without his shoes that time the tunnelers took revenge on him. His parents weren’t as forgiving as Herr Miihlstein. Ignatz’s hair was short and greased to one side of his head. He looked better that way. His body had changed too. He was solid, in the face and the way his shoulders and neck were one bulging quantity now. His work had taken him over, Braun explained. “The boy is his job.” Ignatz didn’t care about dominating the block like he had before. He was plugged in, picked out right away and given a deal he found acceptable. Young, healthy, uninjured. What did he have to care about? They gave him money.
Dozens of jobbers pled with the manager, those who didn’t get work. “My son’s sick,” one shouted over and over. Another confessed that his wife would leave him if he came home empty-handed again. Desperate for a position, these men said nasty things to each other. “Out of the way, cripple. You’re not wanted here.” Spitting the words. “Move on!” They shoved in front of each other, elbowed stomachs and pinched sides to make a rival look hunchbacked or crazy.
Once the spots were filled, the manager promised to call the cops if the leftovers didn’t move on. The doors slammed shut.
“You think you’re men, yeah?” Braun asked the boys. “This is men.”
All autumn and winter Karel followed Emil Braun around the River Ward. To meetings at a Southside saloon that flew the black flag of anarchy, where both the bar and the cellar below were filled with stockyard workers and smelled like the manure on their boots. To a church luncheon in Florence, where Braun lectured on white slavery—a topic he knew about, since his niece was kidnapped some years before, when she was fourteen, and later found in a brothel in Salinas, California. If the infield was dry and the north gale let up a few hours, Braun took the boys to the ballfield at Rourke Park to toss a ball around. Karel was still a little clumsy in his game, but he’d hit a growth spurt and was now the biggest among the boys his age. Three inches taller, a good deal stouter in his shoulders and legs. He felt less like a neat little boy. Less precious. He felt tough and ugly. His hair cut short, slobbily, by Alfred, so his ears stuck off his head. He learned to throw from one of those ears like an infielder, as Braun had when he was a second baseman for the Southsiders. There was simplicity on the diamond when Braun and the three boys staked out the four points to whip a ball around the horn. Crisp baseball was the only thing that could awe Braun into silence. Then he let the boys chatter. Put some mustard on it! Out of the dirt! No rainbows! Let me hear ya! Keep up the pace! The faster they moved the warmer they got. The warmer they got, the less dumb they felt playing baseball in December.
Karel took to the game that winter, in the cold. He found a mitt in the junk store and Maria bought it for a Christmas gift. Old and greasy, perfect, an undersized infielder’s glove like what Braun had. Each night Karel groomed his mitt. He oiled and cared for the leather, flossed grime out its seams with his father’s tools. Karel toiled over his glove at the worktable, touching elbows with his father on the red felt, tonguing the chip in his front tooth, the war wound from his first days playing. Over and over he popped his fist into the leather to understand where the ball would stick. Miihlstein hated that and asked if Karel absolutely had to make that sound. “Sure I do. That’s how I know it’s perfect. Don’t you like that sound? Don’t it sound perfect?”
Anna tried to talk Karel into sticking around afternoons, but it was no use. He’d never do crafts in the attic if he could run around a ballfield instead. He’d never fiddle with instruments like their father did. She must have seen that Karel was an animal of a different breed.
But maybe he couldn’t see Anna clearly those days either. How she hadn’t grown over the summer and autumn and was shorter than he was now. How she hadn’t changed at all since they’d left Europe. Sickly and small, her face framed by dark hair where her nose, eyes, and chin came jutting out. She wore the same few dresses for years, like a doll. Even more peculiar was that she didn’t have her hair cut anymore. She didn’t need to. Over the course of February everything appeared normal. Then it hit him. How Anna didn’t come downstairs to eat all week. How the skin was mucus yellow under her eyes. How she woke in the middle of the night coughing. How her pleading stopped. No more Come home, no more I miss you, because Karel didn’t have time to waste now that he was free.
On one of the warmer days in March, Karel persuaded Anna to accompany him on the streetcar to Rourke Park. He had a surprise for her. Anna wrapped her wrists and neck in rags and kerchiefs. She wore double socks and topped it off with her favorite lavender overcoat, cinched tight around her narrow waist, like it might blizzard. Karel laughed as she bundled. He was going to show her. The local ball club was having a tryout, and the boys were going to watch.
Every year on the Fourth of July, he explained, a team of whites from the Southside played a team of Northside blacks in Rourke Park, with its big green grandstands and outfield fences and perfect lines of turf and chalk. Come summer, even the dirt would be immaculate. This was the highlight of the year for most warehouse workers, for stockyard and slaughterhouse veterans, almost every postman. Anybody who held steady in an integrated profession lived and died with the Interrace Game. The teams traveled some in the summer months, a weekend exhibition here or there, but Independence Day was the pinnacle of glory on their schedule.
Emil Braun was at the tryout, on the field side of the fence. He waddled out to pester the players who knew him, to remind them that he was one of the founding members of the Omaha Baseball Club. The ballplayers teased about how, once he quit playing, a mudder like Braun went from short-but-quick to short-and-fat all at once. Braun took the ribbing. He didn’t mind so much, and it was true—he was stubby legged in his brown pants and suspenders, his flop of hair trailing off the wrong way. As long as he could pester, they could tease. It was an even trade.