He sat on his cot to appraise the collage, the boys there with him. Karel watched without interrupting, as if Joe was a great artist at work. He spun paste in a cracked ceramic bowl, dropped ashes into the mixture from his cigarette, to affix a poster from the Interrace Game.
“There’s beer,” he said, remembering the boys. They were thirsty. Joe rattled in his cabinets and came back with some crackers and sardines. He put more beers on ice then started talking. It was a hot day. The boys wouldn’t mind listening, would they, not with cold beer and a breeze lifting the drapes? Joe told how he and his half-brother Charlie had to run from their town. They grew up in a religious collective in the central part of the state before Joe got them kicked off the farm. He’d looked at the neighbor’s wife taking a swim in a pond. He snuck up a mulberry tree and watched as her dress dropped. She pinned her hair, waded in, then floated on the surface. There was no mystery why Joe did what he did. “I was nineteen years old. I reached in my trousers. So what? What I didn’t notice was that the neighbor was there too. He saw what I was doing and heaved this stone into the pond to stop me. Splash! I nearly fell out of the tree.” Over the next week the man told half the county about Joe touching himself. It wasn’t the first time Joe got in trouble for something like this. He and Charlie often snuck into town to see girls dance when tent shows came through, on nights they were supposed to stay out with the cattle. The herd could fend for itself as far as they were concerned. When Joe’s mother heard, she packed bags for both Joe and Charlie and locked them out of the house.
“It isn’t so bad here like it was out there, is it, boys?” Joe asked. “If you know the right folks here, you got a chance at least.”
It was pleasant enough in Joe’s room. Outside, people shopped from a merchant who’d set up there. Joe leaned out the window to see. “But I got to say, things are getting worse off than they were before. There’s all sorts of rumors now about what’s going on. As a man who’d know, boys, I’ll tell you it’s true.”
“Sure,” Jimmy agreed. “A guy hardly goes out anymore unless he’s looking for trouble.”
“You can’t trust nobody,” Alfred said. “I hear gunshots all the time. Warning shots.”
“The city commissioners are coming after us, that’s why,” Joe said. He went to the kitchen and took a drink of cloudy liquor from a bottle. “The Morals Squad? Ha! All they do is make people suffer. You boys know. You get around more than most, I bet. Fighting all over at night. In tenements. In Jobbers Canyon. Clandish is a ghost town. You don’t hardly risk going outside. That’s just what those reformers want.”
The boys became drunk.
“Those new cops ain’t got a clue.”
“We had it good before, didn’t we? And didn’t even know it.”
“Sure we did.”
“Something bad’s going to happen,” Karel said.
The others stared at him. He hadn’t said anything since they’d come to Joe’s room. He’d sat quiet in a corner; now that he spoke up it sounded like shouting.
“You’re right,” Joe said. He passed the bottle to Karel. “Something bad’s happening now. There’s the rapes. A few a day, yeah. It’s in the dailies. It’s the Schwarzers that do it. They filled the packing plants during the war and now we can’t get rid of them. I don’t know what the owners wanted blackies for in the first place. Nobody wants scabs around.”
“We know that,” Karel said. He took a drink.
“Some of the time they aren’t even blacks that do this, yeah, but some white guy with cork soot rubbed into his skin.” Joe laughed. “I heard about a few guys who did it. If you boys are interested. Rub on a black face and you can put it to a girl. You can really abuse her and get away with it because it’s a blackie they’ll be looking for.”
“That’s a joke, yeah?”
“A guy doesn’t even think twice anymore, boys, not about that kind of stuff.”
“Maybe all those blackies would think twice if the cops did the job like they used to.”
“They’re just strange about it,” Joe lamented. He held the neck of the bottle with both his knobby hands. “If you cower in a room like we are, like cockroaches, the cops might leave you alone with a beer. But they shut down all the Vereine and beer gardens. Even Krug Park is different. There’s nowhere to dance. Nowhere to hear singing while you drink. Nowhere for a whole family to eat on the Ward where they know they’ll be safe. Clandish is a worse place to live, yeah. Maybe that’s their aim. We can’t live like we did. That’s what they wanted.”
They drank into the night before Karel left. It was easy to drink with Joe. He had good stories and didn’t ask for anything in return, like some men did, like a boy always had to fear when a hard-drinking man asked for company in his room. Joe wasn’t like that. He knew jokes boys liked; he talked to them about what plagued their city, like they were men; he didn’t act like he was better than them, or make fun; he didn’t make them drink too fast, like the ballplayers did when Karel went to a speakeasy with the team, and then laugh when he was sick in the alleyway. Joe made sure the boys ate as they drank and sat up straight to let out their belches when the pressure built. Joe even apologized for what happened to Emil Braun at the Santa Philomena, and Alfred appreciated that, said it wasn’t Joe’s fault, so forget it, Alfred heard from everybody how his father had it coming. It would have been easy to drink all night, but Joe didn’t allow that either. He sent them home when it was time to stop.
“Look here,” he said. “Don’t go straight home, okay? Walk around a little. Let the stink blow off you a bit. Trust me.”
Karel wasn’t going home anyway. He didn’t stay at the Eigler house more than a few nights a week. There was a boys’ dormitory he found west of Thirteenth Street, not in the tenements but close to there. The building looked like a barn, maybe it was once, with broad boards painted red and an open loft upstairs. Two rows of beds lined the walls. Union Pacific had built the home for its workers, but the machine, it was said, owned the building now and kept it for street kids. Any boy could find a bed here, and breakfast. There was often work to be had too. Machine lieutenants stopped in around suppertime. Karel recognized some of them, those who’d been buddies with Jake Strauss when Jake was still around. (Sometimes Joe Meinhof was there poking around, although Karel hid under his blanket if he saw Joe. Karel didn’t want to be seen by Joe in the dorming house.) “Want some fun? There’s money in it too,” the lieutenants said. “Sure you do. It’s easy. Do what comes natural to a boy.” They flipped coins to the boys to show they were legit. Karel didn’t know what the work was.