“If we want to see real progress in action, we got to knock Tom Dennison and his stooges out. What we got now’s a government that’s protector for corporate and monopoly interests only. Along with that comes a toilsome life, poor health, broken families, hunger, disease. Trust me. All government will be shown to be useless in the end, and only we can do the showing.”
Karel tried following what Braun said, he did, but watching the amassed coalition of immigrants at a meeting was more interesting to him—being an immigrant himself. The kind of folks Karel met on the boat over and in the Bowery. Undesirables compelled to move on down the line again and again. From Rīga to Warszawa, from Danzig to Leipzig, from Wiesbaden to Le Havre, to the Lower East Side, to Montréal, to Chicago, to smaller cities in the Midwest if they couldn’t afford to ride all the way to San Francisco. Foreignness showed in the denim jacket a tenement hopper wore, in the sickly sparse mustache he grew, in the military hat he filched off a dead soldier somewhere along the way in Europe. Most people didn’t want these types around. They caused trouble. There was trouble enough already. But Karel paid attention to them. How they sang “The Internationale” and quoted Proudhon and wore red shirts to honor Garibaldi. How they fought sometimes in the alleyway after meetings and spread rumors about who among them was plotting to kill a politician. They sounded insane. That was why Karel liked them. They weren’t afraid of doing something drastic.
Meetings were crowded those months. The approaching municipal election had everyone worked up. It wasn’t always clear to Karel how a vote in Omaha had anything to do with massacres in Serbia or the liberty of sand-whipped Bedouins in Arabia, but he went along with an idea when he saw Emil Braun do the same. What did it bother Karel to sing an anthem, to raise fists and stamp feet? “Yeah! We’ll show them what’s what!” What did it bother him to shout, to hooray and hurrah, his mouth full of frankfurters and sauerkraut? Emil showed him hospitality, after all. Emil was the guy who introduced him to baseball players. Karel owed him this much at least.
When he wasn’t in school or at a meeting, Karel was down at Rourke Park to help out the Omaha Baseball Club as a shag boy, running down balls in the outfield afternoons before supper. He liked to stretch his legs after sitting in a school desk all day. To get in the sun and feel his hair lighten. Karel felt important, catching fly balls during batting practice. This was different than when he played with boys his own age. The baseball spinning high in the air. A grown man hit that ball and Karel caught it. His ears were trained to diagnose how hard a ball was struck and how far it would fly, so he moved quickly to the spot it would land, knowing instantly if he should rush in or lope back, and whether a fly would hook or slice away, as if the most natural thing in the world, into the cradle of his glove stretched open.
Karel kept the ball Josh Joseph had given him in his back pocket, even during practice with the men’s club. Some of the players asked Karel why he carried it, seeing the orb bulge his pocket, but Karel wouldn’t tell why the ball was important to him. These men were rivals with the ball club from the Northside. They wouldn’t like how Karel carried around a baseball gifted by a Negro hurler, even if Josh Joseph was the greatest Omaha had ever seen and was remembered on both Northside and Southside. Josh was seen either as hero or villain—depending on where the person doing the remembering had grown up. And, of course, anybody in Omaha who cared a whit about baseball knew what happened to Josh Joseph after he shipped off to Cuba during the Spanish-American War. How he lost both legs, how he became a shoeshine boy, scuttling along the walkways outside downtown banks—how all his athletic talent was blown away in a single mortar blast. Josh Joseph was more famous for what he didn’t become than for what he did.
Most of the time the ballplayers didn’t care what Karel had to say. They weren’t there to find out what he knew. He was there to listen to them, how it should be, as they joked and discussed points of anatomy, a woman’s or their own. The ballplayers told stories about nasty acts they’d pulled as boys and even nastier ones pulled as men. Bill and Ducky Sutez. Jap Marceau, the third bagger. Ralph Snyder, the pitcher. Jimmie Collins, who managed and played some first base when he felt like it. They were fine men.
Karel earned an invitation to join them at a saloon one evening after practice, a notorious little dive over on the other side of Deer Park, up in Gibson, where stockyard workers drank. A saloon where factions from rival political machines held bare-knuckle boxing matches on Saturday nights, out back, where creosote-soaked ropes were squared into the dust to make a ring. Karel knew he shouldn’t go with the ballplayers to the Purple Pig, not after his father had caught him in a saloon once already. Things were fine between him and Herr Miihlstein then, they left each other alone, and Karel wanted to keep it that way. Coming home with beer on his breath might mean he couldn’t play ball anymore, and that wouldn’t be worth it. Karel had a remarkable talent on his hands. That was why fortune brought him to Omaha. He knew this.
He went along anyway. The ballplayers hooked his arms and pulled him in that direction. They said he had to come. That it wouldn’t be the same without him. So he walked with them to the Purple Pig, a few blocks down Thirteenth, along the park. It wasn’t all that far, not in a group, leather equipment bags strapped over their backs. Not in how they talked loud and joked and laughed, and how people in Deer Park smiled when they recognized them, the Southsiders, because people in that neighborhood were proud of their team. This showed in how the ballplayers took over the bar. The guys who’d taken up residence on the bar stools didn’t mind making way for these guys. Why, they were probably thirsty, working up a lather out in the sun, getting ready to play. The ballplayers were well known all over this neighborhood. A few of them had played in the B leagues before having to quit and find real jobs. Of course, certain benefits came along with playing for the local team. Maybe Ralph didn’t have to work so hard at the quarry job team organizers found him, or at the stockyard job where Jap mostly sat in a shaded warehouse all day, resting up for a game, or had a catch with the owner’s boy, sure. The ballplayers got to throw a little weight around in neighborhood saloons, at least in season. “Go on,” a rummy might say. “Take my seat. I was only keeping it warm.” And the men did. They bellied up and ordered draught beer. First round on the house. Karel along with them. Just a boy, thirteen, but Karel wouldn’t be a boy much longer. He sat at the bar and took his freebie and drank the top off. He listened to the men boast in this dark low-ceilinged saloon, a little shack in Gibson with congested gaslights that gave off more smoke than light.