With some doing he talked the ballplayers into letting Alfred, Jimmy, and Karel shag balls during batting practice. They rushed the field beaming when he told them, seeing why Braun had hinted that they should bring along their mitts. Karel was going to show off for Anna. She’d see what he was up to all the time after school, why he didn’t come back to her and the attic.
Out in the field Karel sprinted and jumped and snapped the ball from the ether with his leather. He made sense out there. Grown men in wool getups shouted out his talent as he ran down a fly and launched the ball back to the dirt. It was fun. Even the first time he caught a screaming liner, when the ball stung his palm so much—using an infielder’s glove where it wasn’t suited—that he threw the glove down and hopped with his hands between his thighs to make the pain go away. Even in his short pants and the flapping sleeves of a white flannel, he belonged out there. Anna might not understand the rules, but she should understand her brother. She’d see him the way the boys on Clandish saw him. The way he outran his awkward friends. The way his hair shimmered in the breeze, the way his shoulders widened as he caught his breath, or standing back in the grass, legs apart, knees bent, his eyes unblinking toward the backstop waiting for the smack and zip of a batted ball, until one came to him, like it wanted to be caught in his webbing, like it needed to be. And he was still new to the game, which made everything more exciting. If he kept improving, who knew where baseball could take him.
Some players took a liking to Karel. The Sutez brothers, George and Bill, who were captains of the team. They played pepper with him, as a goof, smacking a ball around at close range to see who had quick hands—something Karel had trained at with his friends. He could keep up with the men, and they liked him more once they saw how soft his hands were. Bill Sutez was handsome and well built. He had all his teeth and they were straight, not a minor accomplishment for a guy who liked to brawl like Bill did—although his ears were stretched back more horizontal than what looked normal and were cauliflowered, so not all was right. During batting practice Bill lounged in the dirt near the on-deck circle and dared hitters to foul one off his chin, laughing louder each time a ball missed him. George Sutez was the older brother, the catcher. He perked his lips when in concentration, showing off his front teeth like he was simple. The guys called him Ducky because of the way he waddled behind the plate, more comfortable in a crouch than standing upright.
Karel held his own during pepper. He couldn’t help laughing at what anyone said to him afterwards, he was so happy, with Anna watching up behind the chicken wire in the grandstand. He couldn’t contain himself on the ride home, bouncing from bench to bench on the streetcar. Anna kept telling him to sit down and be quiet. She was ashamed at how he acted, her cheeks red, how she couldn’t look any of the other passengers in the eye. Karel knew something was wrong.
She confined herself to the sofa the whole week after. Sulking, Karel thought. Jealous of what he could do. He bugged Anna to go outside. To meet some girls, nice ones she would get along with, not like some of the mad Irish lasses he tangled with at school. She didn’t feel up to it, she claimed. She was too tired. She had her own plans. Karel believed otherwise, that the idea of enjoying herself was frightening. She’d blossom too if she was free like Karel. The more her arts filled up the attic, he noticed, the sicker she became. Her work evolved into stranger and stranger forms. More abstract, more sinister.
Karel would have to come up with something that would save her.
After he beat the tar out of the Cypriot, Jake asked for an election job and Tom Dennison gave him one. Everybody on Clandish heard about this. A story too good to not repeat. How Jake got in good with the Old Man by taking out the Cypriot, and how Jake owed everything he could give to Dennison from then on. Not only had Jake been shuffled around the police and any charges they might bring, he’d been promoted. With Tom Dennison to thank.
So Jake and his crew worked franticly through winter. They did spoils. They played tricks on reformers and the reformers’ friends. They made speeches and shouted down speechmakers who were against them. It was an election year, 1918. They canvassed every day. Billy Nesselhous (number two in the organization) was their professor. Machine lieutenants ran from job to job, man to man, house to house. They pranked stodgy old men in uptown mansions who opposed the machine ticket. They slurred anyone who disagreed with them. Made false reports and bribed officials. Occupied street corners. Flaunted unrefinement. Jabbered a pitch in the muck of the river flats to convince the drunk and desperate that any new politics would be bad news for dirty habits everywhere. There were plenty of old tricks, like expanding voter rolls with the names of the dead in the Mormon cemetery. They devised their own too, like uprooting the Liberty Gardens of ladies’ club presidents. If Jane Addams or Fighting Bob La Follette came to town, or if the archbishop of the Roman Catholics wanted to obstruct, every lieutenant would be there to jeer when the machine needed him to.