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.”
Braun spoke with a sharper tooth that day and the days after.
In the packed church he told the boys to stick to the back, to leave pews open for those who must sit. Maybe there weren’t many folks who knew what became of Josh in Cuba, or when he returned from the hospital in Washington, DC, but most everyone of a certain generation remembered Josh Joseph from his prime. How he kicked his front leg shoulder height when he wound up to throw off the mound; how determined he was; how a grin broke across his lips when he busted a hard one in on a batter’s thumbs; that he was such an athlete, the fastest runner, the hardest puncher, the best dancer too, and he could have done anything, played any sport professionally (if that had been possible) and he would have been a star from coast to coast. Even if they didn’t grow up here, as most black people in Omaha didn’t, they knew somehow. They grieved. If not for Josh Joseph, then for someone like him. The prodigy back south they’d never see or hear of again. Karel watched amazed at all the mourners in their suits and dresses and hats—the way the choir swaggered up behind the coffin to sing—and wished he’d dressed better, instead of his high pants, dirty socks, a wrinkled shirt on its second week, one he’d played half-a-dozen school yard games in without washing. He had clean clothes folded in a stack at home but didn’t think to put them on. He’d never really been to a funeral before.
His mother’s was the only other, but he’d been too young to remember much. All he could picture about that day was unhewn dark, damp black, his sisters standing in their raincoats silent, embarrassed by it all, by his bawling. That was what Anna had told him. There were no red roses, no curtain call. Karel couldn’t picture what she’d looked like in the coffin. There was a photograph of his parents they had. Frau reared erect behind an easy chair where Herr sat, sunk into himself. One of Frau’s hands was clenched in a fist on the back of the chair.
That f
uneral would have been different than this one. No shouting and laughing, not in a sunken churchyard in Galizien. Nothing like Josh Joseph’s. Women wailing rounds. What Jimmy said were slave songs. Ballplayers from the Northside team made their way around to joke with people. One of them, a second baseman Karel thought was white at first, but was pale black, if that was a thing, asked what positions the boys played, then laughed when they told him. “If you boys ever come running at me,” he said, “you keep your spikes down.”
The line wrapped around the church, made of black and a few white men, Braun among them, waiting their turn to step up to the bier and pay some due. Many of them squeezed baseballs. A few had mitts they flipped around to stare at the stitching gone stiff, to give over to Josh. Here, my man. My ratty ole mitt. I want you to have it. But so many of them had mementos, the funeral director wouldn’t allow it. What was he going to do with all those relics? Put together a team? Give them away to the kids playing stickball down the street? “Of course! That’s exactly what you should do.” “What do I look like?” “Wouldn’t take much to do it.” “I say. What do I look like?”
Josh clutched a ball already, his hand did, inside the coffin. They’d put him in a uniform, a new set of solid grays donated from the Negro team. Karel felt better about what he was wearing when he saw Josh in uniform. There was no shame in having dirt in your clothes so long as that dirt came from a diamond.
Karel became dark watching: maybe the next funeral would be for Anna. How could he think these things? Did he want to make himself miserable? Did he want to put a bad omen on his sister? Dear Anna. How many people would even come pay respects? Maria, Jake. Only five Miihlsteins lived in Omaha—it would be four without her. Would there be music? Herr Miihlstein’s Parisians, his hurdy-gurdy friends. A client of his father’s might steer by out of duty. It would be nothing like this here at Zion. There wouldn’t be a service at a church but a wake in the parlor at home. Then a procession from the Eigler house, the family in the back of a rented truck with the coffin. Would traffic stop as her body passed?
Sadness closed in on Karel. The color drained from his face. “Karel? What is it?” Alfred asked. “You okay?” They thought he was broken up about the ballplayer and didn’t understand how that was, since he’d only met Josh once, as far as they knew. “Jesus,” Jimmy said. “Who knew you were so sensitive?”
“Listen,” he told Anna that night. “I want to give you something special.”
“What is it?” she asked, sitting up on the sofa where she slept. Her skin had gone dark around her eyes and mouth, her eyes grayish.
“I don’t know. A Kewpie doll. Or a pet to keep you company. A duck.”
“What?”
“I’m teasing. I don’t know. A new coat. Would you like that? A new purple overcoat?”
“Sure,” Anna said. She looked down, under the quilts, surprised that she was wearing her old lavender coat. The elegance had gone out of it. Holes had worn through the crease in the collar. “Can you get one?”
Karel and his friends hung around the Santa Philomena all day a few weeks later. Braun arranged for them to help with a political rally. Josie Washburn was going to speak. If the boys came early to put out benches and folding chairs in the hall, he’d get them half a dollar each for their trouble, and half more if they cleaned up after. Braun assumed they’d want to see the speaker while they were there. He rambled incessantly, broken up about Josh Joseph, and swore upheaval was coming. Karel didn’t know what to think, but there were omens Braun spoke of. Word reached Omaha that week how Manfred von Richthofen—the Red Baron!—had been shot down and killed by a single bullet near the Somme. The death of Germany’s national hero, the ace of its Flying Circus, was a portent of the war’s end and revolution across Germanic domains. The Kaiser’s army was scuffling. A desperate spring offensive had moved their forces within seventy-five miles of Paris, until supply lines dwindled and they were pushed back, and were still being pushed. German cities ran out of bread in the meantime. There had been no meat for over a year. Things were even worse in Austria-Hungary. Rumors spread that the war might end. There would be disorder, disruption, mayhem. After what went down with the Bolsheviks in Russia—the Red Army, the imprisonment of Romanovs, a photo of bejeweled and fleeing tsaritsas in the papers every week—who knew what else would happen? Global revolution? Was it possible?
Here in the States the situation was difficult. The Espionage Act made it easy to convict an agitator of treason. Braun went on about this in the cellar where SOSA met. President Wilson was threatening to have the labor activist Gene Debs locked up for speaking against the war as the Sedition Act rode a rail through Congress, and Emma Goldman was already serving a two-year sentence in a Jefferson City penitentiary for urging young men to shirk the draft. So it was up to Emil to keep going, with Red Emma out of circulation. The threat was the same for all agitators, for Alexander Berkman, for Kate Richards O’Hare. “Most real leftists are locked up already,” Braun said. “Deported. Silenced.” This was why a local street screamer and reformist like Josie Washburn attracted attention. She would still speak out, something rare that spring, and the activists of SOSA weren’t going to miss hearing her.
By evening a carnival had erupted at the Santa Philomena. There was no wind or rain to move people inside, so families staked out patches of grass to eat off a blanket. Italian clans who lived nearby clustered the walkways and lawns. One stood outside with a whetstone to offer his services. Street vendors sifted through to improvise a buck—tobacco and wine kids transplanted from the flats, trays strapped over their shoulders; register girls from bakeries and delis with crates on their hips, selling half loaves of bread and sliced meat, almond cookies and empanadas. A boy from their school came into a watermelon and sold chunks of its sticky guts for two cents each, his shirt doused pink as he carried what remained on his shoulder. Closer to the hall were men of a different cast. Mill workers in greasy black overalls; slackers in felt caps sat along a brick wall with legs stretched out to reveal their shoe bottoms. A delegation of black stockyard workers, dung caked and bloodstained, trying to find something to eat. Whispers trailed them.
Some Russian warehouse workers leaned against the hall. They wore denim jackets and bit at sandwiches wrapped in newspaper, cheese and onion pressed between slices of cottage white. Smears rubbed into the bread. Between their thighs sat tin cups that brimmed over with sudsy heads of beer. Some boy flitted along with a clay jug hugged to his belly. The boy made wisecracks to the Russians. They replied in kind. To Karel, every word from a Russian sounded like an insult. These thick-chest serfs whose mouths closed in satisfaction over their vittles, whose lips curled venomously under bloodshot eyes. They were sizing Karel up, like they knew where he came from, that he was Austrian, Jewish. Even though he was just a boy, they must have pictured what it would be like to punch him in the face, and how little it would take to beat Karel and his friends. Karel hated Russians. When one whispered to another, when they leered at him and laughed in their native cackle, he too dreamed how it would go down in a brawl. He’d be beaten badly, sure—three boys couldn’t rout a dozen cruel Russians—but Karel thought it might be worth the pain to find out for certain. In reality there was nothing he could do except flip up his collar and hope the Russians ignored him.
The boys returned to the Santa Philomena and waited for the door to open so they could find a good spot. The hall couldn’t hold the hundreds wanting to get in, so they had to hurry.
It wasn’t long, waiting, before Karel saw Jake Strauss push his way to the front and order the doors open. The machine men swaggered like they had big guns tucked in their belts. Karel rushed to the front with his friends, but Jake stuck to the side of the hall, looking nervous, like he and his men had something planned. Election men were scattered all over. Karel knew some of them: Joe Meinhof, Ingo, Paul, Heinz.
“Do you see?” Braun asked, sneaking next to the boys. “Tom Dennison’s men all over. I told you this would be
worth watching.”
A Sicilian gentleman popped up to the small stage to make an announcement. Karel hardly understood a word the man said. Nicosia and America, and, at slant, the name of the speaker they waited for. The emcee had an inch-thick walrus mustache that weighed down his face, the kind only a cad from some far-flung principality would wear—like the officials Karel’s father talked about sometimes, the exiled-from-Wien bureaucrats they’d been afflicted with while getting out of Galizien, officials who stole nearly all their money, Miihlstein claimed. The man onstage wore a village getup of inexplicable distinction. A yellow jacket and ruffled shirt. He raised a peculiar coat of arms—headless fish, crossed sabers, a mule. “What the hell is that?” Jimmy asked. Nobody knew.
The crowd quieted when Josie Washburn emerged at the podium, wide-eyed as the emcee helped her up from a back passage she’d been smuggled through. She was announced. Here. Signora Wauzboon. Her hair was dark, a pyramid of curls atop her squarish head. She wore a purple skirt with gold brocade, a metal amulet on a chain. Her complexion was soft, her skin a shade whiter than her blouse, her hazel eyes live and darting. There was a Danish stoutness in her shoulders and jaw, in her heavy clothes and hips. She parted her lips several times as she looked the crowd over but said nothing. She tried to wet her lips with her tongue then flushed so fierce her face turned the same purple of her skirt. Some folks in the crowd became restless in her silence. “What’s this? Why doesn’t she say something?” There was a rumble all over the hall. Dozens questioned her because she left a gap for them to. “Come on,” Joe Meinhof shouted. “We’re here! Let us have it!”
Kings of Broken Things Page 17