Evie acted strange those days. Once Jake got better from the flu, Evie saw herself do plenty of odd things. She was used to lovers who thought they were performers, particularly young men like Jake. While a middle-aged man with middling ambition might be comfortable with what he could and couldn’t do in the sack, a young man never was. Jake aimed for grander feats. Unfavorable body positions. Methods a guy had described to him in a barroom. He never understood that those men were tricking him. Or maybe they were as cruel in the ways they screwed as they were in all other ways. The manner of pinching and poking and tweaking and slapping Jake brought to her rooms. What on earth could he be thinking? And then there was his competitive streak. He wouldn’t let her take control, like she ought to have. She knew how to do things he couldn’t have even dreamt of, if he’d let her. Instead he made sport. He wanted to be on top. He wanted to win. He even said these things to her sometimes in the heat of the moment. “I’m deepest! I’m filling you up!” Evie could deal with his being weird—after all, the sex could be pretty good if he forgot himself long enough to let it happen natural—but she acted peculiar too, she had to admit, and that was the stranger thing. She battled back. She wrestled him under her. Tried to deny him her greater depths. Would come loud and often (sometimes fraudulently) then insist she hadn’t just to tease him. “Eh. I’ve had better.” They were often uncomfortable when finished, somehow not quite spent. They were holding back. Why deny that?
They argued about whether they should go elsewhere or stay in Omaha. And where the money would come from if they left. This was never a problem for Evie before. If the man had no money, no rent, no food for her, then it was clear she should move on. It couldn’t go on like that forever. Evie was bound to change during some year of her life. Fall in love. She was bound to become strange eventually.
She fantasized that Jake wanted to run away with her and, before long, found herself pestering him about it. They could start over in San Francisco. He resisted whenever she brought that up, not understanding why she wanted to leave. “I have a job here. I just started. Why would I want to leave?”
“You’d do interesting things if we left,” Evie insisted. “Pick oranges. Lay on a beach.”
“It’d be awful. The money not so good.”
“Is that so?” she said, a sure sign of trouble. “Then maybe it’s time for me to find work. Get a share of the good money. I know you don’t make enough to pay for my rooms, not on an election worker’s salary.”
She was right, but Jake didn’t care. He chuckled when she brought up money.
“Don’t be stupid,” she said. “If you’re sneaking from Tom and Billy, that’s a bad idea. You’ll get hurt.”
She leaned over to take his hands and put them to her face and kissed the cracks of his knuckles. Jake looked young when she glanced to him. His face soft, his eyes dreamy in the light of a kerosene lamp. He was only twenty-one. She was twenty-seven and had lived a lot more in that time than he had. Evie didn’t know what she could say to convince Jake to leave. The whole original purpose of their relationship was to make him comfortable in her rooms; now she was trying to convince him of the opposite.
“I’m asking for help,” she said. “That’s all. They want references when you answer an ad. I don’t have any. But you could vouch for me. If we can make our own way without having to go to those gamblers for help, we won’t have to keep things from each other.”
“There’s no secrets,” Jake claimed. “We just met. What could we be hiding?”
She smiled, resigned, maudlin. They kissed. Neither wanted to own up to anything that could bring down the party.
So she put it to him. “You’ll figure out how to make this work. If you won’t leave Omaha. If you won’t help me find a job. Then it’s up to you. How are we going to keep going?”
Most of the time Jake didn’t see the point of working for Dennison either. He complained about situations he was forced into. It became tiresome. The jawing with reformers. Nobody would ever change their mind about things they believed in.
Evie was miserable hearing Jake go on about what the gamblers were teaching him to do, how they were initiating him to the underworld. She wanted him to talk about himself—about who his father was, his brother, why it was he ran away from home. But Jake refused. “That’s my secret,” he said. “Maybe you don’t have any secrets. That’s up to you.”
She wanted to tell everything, but this was impossible when he said idiotic things like that.
The day before the vote Jake came to her rooms in the afternoon. He wore his best suit but was otherwise a mess. He hadn’t shaved all week. His shirt was wrinkled and stained with mustard.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“There’s a problem,” he confessed. “The money dried up.”
He crawled to her on his knees and begged forgiveness. “But I know what to do,” he promised. “Don’t you love me?”
He produced a ring. “See what this is? We’ll get married, yeah. That’s what we’ll do.”
The ring scared Evie. Something awful had happened, she knew it.
“Take this,” he said, pushing the ring on her finger. “We’ll leave tonight. We’ll get hitched. I’ll take care of everything. We’ll get out.”
They’d go to California, like she wanted. But first they’d have to lay low in Texas a few weeks, down by the border. His rambling made no sense. Jake said he had a thousand dollars but wouldn’t say how he got it.
Evie knew anyway. There was only one place a guy like him could get that much cash.
“Okay,” she said.
“You’ll come with me?” He lifted her from the chair and carried her around the room. “I knew you would. What else can we do? This is our only chance.”
Evie wasn’t sure she’d go with him. She’d think it over. She had six hours. Jake was going to the meeting at the Santa Philomena and then would come for her. She could always change her mind before Jake returned. There was a chance, a fair probability, she knew, that he wouldn’t make it back at all.
Josh Joseph died that week. Seeing as the boys had met him, Emil Braun insisted they attend the funeral. Josh was the best ballplayer the city had ever seen, for his race. If Karel was any kind of ballplayer, he owed it to the game to pay respects to such a hurler when he had the chance.
Services were at Zion Baptist, up Twenty-Fourth Street all the way. Past the shacks of No Man’s Land, a nice block here or there broken up by weeds, neighborhood folks in their yards watching the four of them, some kids playing ball in an empty lot where the weeds were knocked down by their daily game, an endless match for the kids of this block that was measured over whole summers rather than single innings. “That’s right. A fit thing to see along the way,” Braun said, and the boys agreed. Those black kids kept up the chatter as they waited for the ball. A staccato chorus crying out in tribute.
Braun ranted to the boys as they went. How Josh had died. He’d been shining shoes downtown when he was knocked off the curb in front of a streetcar. Nobody risked their own neck to save him, a man without legs, though if any of those bystanders had acted fast rather than gawking, they could have saved him. If they’d waved their arms and put themselves in danger, the streetcar would have stopped. But the driver couldn’t see Josh arm-limp over the rails. He only stopped when he heard the screams. No way to die for anyone. Particularly not the best ballplayer to ever put on the Negro uniform in the Fourth of July game. “Shame on them. For nobody to help. After he gave his legs to San Juan Hill. Then they watched him killed.”