Braun said he knew what they’d been up to, the three he used to call his boys.
“Why couldn’t you stick with me?” He smacked the door frame. “This wouldn’t of happened. Boys out rioting, destroying government, but for nothing. Less than nothing. To ruin another man. To ruin a working man.”
Karel didn’t argue. He only asked that they open the door a foot more so he could squeeze in out of the hallway before a real rat got him. Braun said, sadly, that letting him in would be impossible.
“This is your friend’s fault, isn’t it? That Jakob Strauss who took aim on Emil Braun.” Braun pressed his face to the opening. “Was it a lynching, Karel? Did you lynch a man?”
“Jake left a long time ago,” Karel explained.
“Oh, don’t believe it for a second. That Prussian. He’s got something to do with it. He’s at the heart of this evil. I promise you.”
Karel remembered then. He’d seen Jake outside the courthouse.
“Leave us alone, son. Leave us in peace. I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do for you. I tried. You know I tried. But now it’s too late. There’s no room here for your struggle.”
There was nowhere else to go. If he wouldn’t go to the Eigler house, if he wouldn’t turn himself in to the police, then nowhere. Karel hopped the fence at Rourke Park and laid flat in the outfield grass. Rain fell in his eyes, which was just as well. The turf had wilted in the heat and needed rain. Down there on the Southside, not far from where the boys’ mob started to march. Doughboys made patrols. They shined truck lights into yards and parks looking for hooligans. The curfew must be enforced. The lights played over Karel. If he moved, they’d see him.
He didn’t care. They could take him away. They could send him back to Europe if that’s what they’d do. It felt better to give himself up, even just dreaming, because he was young and alone and didn’t understand why he did the things he did, why he’d been a part of what happened, and if maybe he’d be better off locked up somewhere. Karel didn’t want to think about having to run from the police or hiding from soldiers. The whiskey he drank hours before had worn off and he felt sick to his stomach. Karel wondered if they’d hold him responsible for what happened. A man was killed. He didn’t know if there would be trouble for that, if any one person out of all of them would be accountable. Why shouldn’t it be him? he wondered.
He felt the weight of Will Brown’s body on his hands. Will Brown had still been alive then, for another minute. Karel had never felt the weight of a man. He’d believed he could put his hands up and pass off the black like it was nothing. But the man was heavy, more than Karel could hold. The others took over to do what they all said they were going to do. Karel ran the other way. He didn’t scream, he didn’t cry right away either. Oh, he said to himself. That was all. The animal fury drained from him all at once, like his heart lost its rhythm, having the man, that Will Brown, crash into him. He crawled out to the ledge and waited for others to join him. Nobody did. They all went down the back stairs, and by the time Karel regained his senses enough to look in, the way was blocked, the offices in flames.
Karel stood to heave his baseball as hard as he could into the dark. He didn’t deserve to keep a baseball once owned by Josh Joseph. He threw and stumbled forward from the effort. No sound returned for a long time, then tunk as the ball hit the wood of the backstop on the fly. The report echoed off the houses around there. Standing, Karel waited for a searchlight to find him, a headlight, even a porch light from one of the houses to turn on. No eyes peeked out window shades, though. The noise was gone.
He laid down, the grass wet underneath him. He dreamed about the first time he hit a home run. How his bat crushed into the ball and sent it sailing. What he remembered, the feeling, was how his hands echoed back after he made contact. When he watched a teammate hit, the swing looked like a smooth motion, an uninterrupted arc. But it wasn’t really. There was a moment when the hitter’s clout was questioned, the bat knocked faintly off path by the ball. This isn’t something that can be seen. You can only feel the vibration when it’s you up there hitting. The slight knocking back. Like the skip of a heartbeat.
Once the ball was off in the air, his heart came back to its rhythm. He had to run, didn’t he? That was how the game was played.
Herr Miihlstein found Karel at the field. Karel never would have guessed it would be his father who snuck over the fence into the grandstand then crawled down to a dugout. Whispering around, tripping over himself in unfamiliar terrain. “Karel,” he called. “Where are you?” Karel could stay in the outfield on his belly and his father wouldn’t find him. He could observe the man bumble and claim no relation, not even proximity. Herr Miihlstein was about to give up, to search elsewhere or be arrested, perhaps, an obvious foreigner flouting the curfew. But then he bent to the ground near the pitching mound. Miihlstein picked up something and held it into the bleeding light of a streetlamp across the block. The ball Karel had thrown. His father found it.
Once Karel’s shoes hit the clay and sand of the infield, Miihlstein turned to see what the noise was. When he saw, he rushed to clutch his son by the arms.
It surprised Karel how his father was still larger than he was.
“It’s you,” Miihlstein said. “I promised your sisters you would be here, my Karel. I’m so happy you are. What a lucky man I am.”
“How did you find the field?” Karel asked. His father laughed. Of course he knew how to find Rourke Park.
“Come, come. Let me rest here in this shelter. It’s raining, you know.”
They went to the dugout.
“I owe you,” Miihlstein said, sighing as he sat on the bench. “Was it last year I promised to tell you about her? Or longer than that? Your mother. You were upset about her.”
“Don’t,” Karel said.
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”
Miihlstein was baffled and came to stand by Karel at the screen. “This is yours,” he said. He handed the baseball to Karel.
Karel took the ball—Josh’s ball. Scuff marks on it, grass stains. The ball smelled like smoke, like the fire inside the courthouse.
Miihlstein pulled Karel along by his arms toward home. Soldiers stopped them three times along the way to ask where they’d been and where they were going. Each time Miihlstein explained how they were lost and just trying to get back to the house where they lived. Each time the soldier struggled with Miihlstein’s accent but finally said, “Fine. You’re okay. Go home.”
Epilogue