Maria sat them at the table inside and apologized. “It isn’t your fault,” she said. “I was being a ninny. I hadn’t thought of your mother when I yelled at you.”
Karel hadn’t thought of his mother either, playing the burying game. Maria always wanted to talk about his mother. That made it hard to be in the house too. He could take her doting on him, calling him downstairs to taste her stews or Danish pastries—which was fine, better than fine—or how she sent him on errands to the market for quince or meat, or to a chemist for alum powder. Karel just couldn’t stand it when Maria brought up his mother.
If he was better at baseball, Karel realized, he could leave the house whenever he wanted. If he was an important player on a team, if the other boys saw him as rough and strong and one whose body could defeat other bodies, then Karel could go anywhere he wanted. He wished he knew everything there was to know about baseball. Rainbow throws and hard slides and how to hit too, to hit bombs. He’d know more and play better than all the other boys, he decided. They hadn’t even trusted him with a bat yet, but he’d learn how to swing one. Then he’d have a place to be.
Maria told Karel and Anna they couldn’t chant about baby boys coming alive if they wanted to dig in the yard. “We won’t,” Anna promised.
“Yeah, Frau Eigler. We won’t dig in your garden again.”
She laughed at Karel. “Good. What a domesticated boy.”
Karel stayed late in the school yard those days. He watched boys play ball. Learned the language. Stinger and blooper and daisy cutter. What was meant when one boy urged another to toss the onion or crack the willow.
Older boys hung around the ballfield to check on a little brother or pick up a cohort. The kind who hung around the outdoor market all day, who wore drab clothes like most working class, but wore them stylishly, with derby hats set back on their heads to let loose a flourish of bangs. Karel had seen enough bad things to avoid boys like these, those who fidgeted on their bench all day in class, if they were in class, who couldn’t wait to sneak away downtown. A boy named Ignatz was the toughest of this type at Karel’s school. An alleged Serb, Ignatz was tall and snub-nosed and still attended the lower school even though he was fourteen. Unlike the others, Ignatz didn’t run in a group. He was a crew unto himself. He was terrifying.
Ignatz came over to the ballfield and knocked the cap off Alfred Braun’s head one of those days. “Hey, Freddie,” he said. “Your dad’s bothering folks at my dad’s warehouse again. He’s got no business there. Everyone’s tired of him.”
Alfred snatched his cap from the ground, then smiled, broad and impish. The ballplayers rushed in to see what would happen to Alfred. Karel stayed to the back. Ignatz looked like he’d toss Alfred over the fence. He was angry and mean, his cheeks swollen. He was too ugly to be anything other than tough. That puggish face, the nose smashed up into two fleshy holes.
“Tell him to stay out of the warehouses,” Ignatz said. “They don’t need any organizers down there.”
Karel hid at a corner of the schoolhouse until Ignatz left. A thicket of junipers grew in a way that created a tunnel where branches shied the bricks, where the airy dust off the bark coated his teeth. Mostly it was girls in the hollow. Karel was used to girls. Each cordoned a space where she could set up house, a sitting room, a kitchen, an opening between limbs an anteroom, then tended a stove or shook out sheets or put a baby down or swept dirt with a juniper branch.
“Is that you in there?” Jimmy Mac pushed through the stingers to see inside the hollow. “You’re on our team,” he said. “You don’t got to play with girls.”
Karel returned to the light, facedown as he crouched out. Evergreen needles had worked over the side of his shoes, into his pockets and his hair. He shook his head to dislodge them.
“Come on.” Alfred tossed a ball to himself. “You got work to do.”
They went back to the drills from before. In triangle, rolling the ball to each other, training their hands to anticipate bounces, how the ball played on gravel, on grass, on rubbed-smooth slabs of rock-hard dirt. “Step back,” Alfred ordered. All three did. “Again,” he said after the ball looped a few more turns. With every step back Karel had to slap the ball harder, until he picked the ball up and slammed it on the surface to bounce it over. “Good,” Jimmy said. “You’re getting the hang of it.” Each time a new hop played on Karel, his hands learned what to do. He felt his chest fill and warm. The boys backed ten, fifteen, twenty feet away, until Karel could rear back and glide grounders in return. He caught barehanded and threw before his palm felt the sting. He felt surer in his body. His arm found a slot he could throw from and strike where he aimed without aiming. Alfred and Jimmy tossed just as hard to Karel. He liked that. They didn’t ease up on him. He bounced on his hamstrings in the stance. Got used to the short hop so the ball came to the meat of his hands instead of his wrists. He was getting better and better until the ball turned a rock and came up on him, right to his lips, and got him.
His mouth watered. He breathed in without letting out. Went to his knees to feel what happened. Heard the others gasp, heard them running to see if he was going to bawl about it. But the shock wasn’t so bad. His lip swelled but there wasn’t blood. Karel felt splinters in his mouth, a front tooth chipped. The surface changed as he ran his tongue over his teeth.
“Took a bad hop on you, yeah?” one of the others asked. “Sure it did.”
Karel rubbed the chip with a finger. The rough edges of it, a wedge of tooth gone. He searched the inside of his mouth with his tongue for broken pieces. Grit over his other teeth now, at the back of his throat.
“I need a glove,” he said.
Alfred disagreed. “A glove can’t help if you don’t know how to use it.”
Of course, it was easier for those boys to say so. Both of them had gloves of their own.
“Where you going to get it anyway?” Jimmy asked. “Will your dad buy one?”
“No,” Karel said. “I can’t ask him for something like that.”