It was Ignatz, from the school yard. He rose from the stoop of a house and hopped down to the walkway. Karel barely went up to his chest.
“You shouldn’t be friends with a Braun. They’re bad people,” Ignatz said. “Freddie’s not so bad, but the others are rotten. You meet the father?”
“He’s nice,” Karel said.
“You’re new here, I know that. You don’t know nothing.”
Karel reached to where the baseball was. He could feel it in his back pocket even without touching, but his hands moved in a nervous twitch to double-check, which was a stupid thing to do. Ignatz would want to see what Karel was hiding.
“See that house two down? That’s mine.” Karel looked to Ignatz’s house, how it sunk into a depression where the alley ran, small and wood sided and cream colored, split into apartments with doors on either side of the porch. It had none of the elegance of Maria Eigler’s house. “I’m not trying to make you mad, but tell your sisters. Yeah? The older ones. Shit, the little one too. I won’t hurt her. If they want some company, some late night, that’s where I live. You tell them that I said they’re invited.”
Ignatz put a hand on Karel’s chest.
“If they knock on the window, I’ll let them in. All three at once if they want.”
Karel pushed Ignatz. Punched his hands as hard as he could to knock down the bully. But Ignatz didn’t move. Strong and fat, Ignatz absorbed the blow. Only his clothes were dented.
“What’s wrong with you? Don’t do that.”
Karel pushed again, this time knocking Ignatz off his stride. Karel pulled his arm back like he was going to swing, but Ignatz was quicker. Karel went down in the mud.
Ignatz came at him, so Karel kicked. He felt the ball in his pocket, on his back hip. He bicycled his legs to keep Ignatz away. He wouldn’t give up the baseball.
Ignatz grabbed one of Karel’s shoes to stop the kicking. The shoe popped off in his hand. “Okay,” he laughed. Grabbed for the other shoe, took that one too. “Listen,” he said. Ignatz tied the shoelaces together, yanked them tight, swung them around, and tossed them in a whimsical, jerking arc so they snagged over the electrical wire that hung above the street.
“Steer clear of the Brauns. That’s all I’m saying.”
Karel slipped into the alley after Ignatz got him, near Maria’s daffodils. The soil felt damp through his socks as he huddled along the garden. His clothes were dirty.
Maria was in the back window, where the kitchen was. Light shone out from the glass onto the lawn. Supper was almost ready. She twisted and reached, bent and stirred. Whenever she lifted the lid off a pot the glass steamed and changed the light. After a while Maria disappeared. They were eating. Karel still watched the window, saw nothing but the back wall. He’d have to go in before long and say what happened. His father, his three clucking sisters, they’d all understand how he was pushed down and slugged in the gut. How an older boy took his shoes and tossed them over a wire. His sisters would coo over him when they heard. They didn’t expect him to defend himself. His father would congratulate him for coming through the ordeal without a shiner. Maria, he knew, would pour a tall glass of milk and serve cake for dessert. He’d rather be whipped for losing his shoes—that was the truth.
Consider Jake Strauss. Things were pretty good for Jake in 1917, the year he turned twenty. Where he came from wasn’t such a great place, up north along the Missouri River, in Jackson County. He’d had a lot of trouble there. Something with a guy Jake had roughed up—a guy his age who’d spread malicious rumors about how Jake’s mother caught the crab louse from a Chinese rail worker—and the people in town didn’t appreciate how Jake took revenge by smacking that boy twice with a pick handle. (Once for his mother, once for his baby sister—both of whom died a few years before, up there in Jackson County.) Jake’s father was a German pastor, which only made the situation worse, so Jake ran off in the middle of the night before that other boy tried to rebalance the scales by inflicting fresh calamity on the Strauss family. Jake grabbed twenty dollars from the drawer in the kitchen, saddled his horse, and rode to Omaha. That’s when his luck changed.
He tied his horse to a drainpipe in an alleyway on the northern outskirts of downtown Omaha and took the twenty dollars to a saloon called Mecklenburg’s, where he joined the food line then stuffed his mouth with angry bites of rye bread and fatty meat at the bar. Everything in Mecklenburg’s tempted him. Kippered herring, sardines, onions, radishes, pumpernickel, smoked Schwarzw?lder ham. He gorged because nobody stopped him. He ate seconds and thirds. Had beer after beer and let the foam dry on his lips, then arched back tall on his stool when he was done to watch others hustle for food. He liked it here on the River Ward, on Clandish, everything so German and open to those who’d ask for it, which was different from where he came from, a small town where they shut up anyone whose voice even hinted at the Germanic. Jake should have looked for work or a room, but beer made him feel better. It was good beer. Cold and uncomplicated. He set his hands on his stomach to feel his guts swell with suds.
Later on he found himself standing in a row of tents along the muddy banks of the Missouri, a dozen or less of the tents pitched from the southern tip of the pig iron mills under the Douglas Street Bridge to the northern edge of the warehouses. Some kid from the saloon brought him there and told him he’d have a good time.
As Jake stumbled along, he felt a bawdy heat radiate from the flats, from open fires and juiced-up men, from rosy-cheeked women who circulated the crowd, from kids with trays tethered over their shoulders who sold tobacco and a drink they called mulberry wine. Heat from his own body too, jacked up on booze and the desire to live like a young man wanted to live, without consequences. From the mud itself. From the burning solder soot that pumped from mill chimneys and rose above the industrial dusk of the valley. The odor was overwhelming. Jake didn’t understand how a river so big, that moved so fast, could smell so bad. He smoked to mask the stench, but the cheap tobacco sold here only made things worse. Jake had to laugh at it all. Even after all the beers, he was a little embarrassed at how drunks dipped forward on shaky legs and relieved themselves where they stood. Or how others slopped happily to a tent flap and peeked in at a naked woman. If a man liked what he saw, he entered. The spectacle got Jake going, desire at war with shame. The rude caterwauling inside the tents. Pinned to the front were hand-painted flyers advertising some exotic fantasy—Mother Russia, Queen of Siam, Country Schoolteacher, the Nun—but inside the women more or less looked the same. This wasn’t a high-class joint with women of alien color or a traveling lady like Calamity Jane. This was rutting. These women were desperate.