Alfred came up with a plan the next week. If Karel wouldn’t ask Herr Miihlstein to buy him a mitt, then Alfred would get one from his own father. Emil Braun talked more baseball than anyone and had connections on the Southside team. “Come with me,” Alfred said. “My pop will know what to do.”
The Brauns lived in a gray, rotted tenement building near the rail yards, a German cluster on a hill south of Clandish, closer to Poppleton and Fourteenth, where freight rails cut through and sidings bunched out in clovers, and the rumpled brown bluffs of Iowa were visible over the trees, the steel girders and granite blocks of the UP railroad bridge where it spanned the river. They dodged the soapy drips of linen that hung heavy on lines attached to the eaves of splintery lean-tos. Younger kids turned gymnastics on a wagon in the alleyway, near a rut of muddy water, shirts falling over their faces as they walked on their hands or sprung over the side of the wagon. They danced in spasms when Karel looked at them, to impress him in some way, the logic of a show-off five-year-old.
Alfred’s father opened the door when he heard them in the hallway.
“What are you doing here? I’m busy today.”
Alfred ignored his father. He ushered Jimmy and Karel into the room past Braun. The man wore only trousers and suspenders, with one foot bare and the other in a red sock. A few scraps of clothing were scattered here and there that Alfred rifled through. There were no books, no newspapers. No window, no air stream. Bedsprings sang through the wall from next door. It was a rotten place. Karel felt lucky to have a whole attic loft for his family, up top where a window caught the breeze. Six people here crammed in a room a sixth the size of Maria Eigler’s attic.
“Where is it?” Alfred asked. “Just saw it this morning.”
“Where’s what?”
“The mitt. The ball glove.”
To stay out of the way, Jimmy and Karel sat on the bed. On the far side of the mattress lay some saltines and the greasy end of a summer sausage. A carving knife was on a table nearby, next to a canister of snuff.
Braun took Alfred under an arm and swayed to the corner. “Don’t you see I’m busy?”
“No. With what?” There was moaning from next door. Braun pounded on the wall and told them to shut up, but it made no difference.
“It’s Karel,” Alfred explained. “He wants to play ball but doesn’t know a thing about it.”
“What do you mean? That boy?”
Alfred wrenched his arm free to dig under the bed. “Don’t you got a glove for him?”
Braun smoothed the skin of his forehead as he stared at Karel. He was a short man with narrow shoulders and a gelatinous middle, and was bald on top. He took two steps across the room to lift Karel’s wrists and feel for muscle.
“Okay, okay,” Braun said gaily, mocking like he was impressed by Karel, or possibly was actually impressed. “Let me think a minute. This isn’t the first boy I ever seen in this condition. It isn’t always fatal.”
The bedposts squelched against the floor from Alfred scuttling underneath. “Here’s mine,” he said. “Ain’t we got another?”
Braun didn’t answer. He reached across for a saltine to crunch while he deliberated.
“Stop digging, Alfred. Come with me. This will be better luck. There’s someone the boy must meet. If he wants to be a ballplayer, then he’ll do this. Trust me.”
Karel looked to Jimmy, but Jimmy didn’t have an answer either.
Emil Braun was a curious man. The way he squawked instead of speaking, some in German intonation, some Midwestern.
Meeting Braun changed something in Karel, freed him, but he wasn’t sure why. He knew his own father wouldn’t approve of him being here. Herr Miihlstein wasn’t a wealthy man, but he had a reserve about him, his mechanical good manners, the dignity to which he clung. The whole family had squeezed into four seats on the train passage to Omaha rather than splitting up and risk getting stuck next to some scoundrel. Miihlstein refused to allow a baggageman to check his tools either. He held the black leather valise on his lap the whole trip, over two days, until every con man in the compartment suspected he carried something of greater value than he actually did.
Karel didn’t care for manners. He liked Emil Braun, even though the man was strange. Maybe because of this. When Braun stood to grab a shirt and ratty overcoat off the back of a chair, Karel stood too.
He followed as Braun navigated odd-angled tenement rows then rushed across Clandish into downtown. Braun moved with busy purpose, even though he didn’t have a job like most fathers. He didn’t even associate with musicians, like Karel’s father, but held several posts for which he was remunerated in different ways. Deacon of their tenement; attendant for the streetcar workers’ union; secretary of a political group that met in the basement room of a tavern, SOSA, the South Omaha Social Anarchists. Braun was not hired muscle, as he claimed to Karel that day. But he could talk—he never stopped talking—and there were opportunities for men like him, even if most folks down on the River Ward didn’t consider what he did to be legitimate work.
It was meteorological phenomena Braun talked as he led the boys north. “It’s the big guns in France that make the wind gust so much this spring,” he claimed, circling his arms in the damp air. “Mortars make the wind strong. It’s changed weather across the globe. More the cannons fire, more the wind blows. It’s proven. The generals will ruin everything.”
When they crossed Cuming Street, it was clear where Braun was taking them. This was the big thing that spring, heading up to the Northside. Boys on Clandish dared each other to sneak through this black neighborhood, all the way to Lake Street, to prove they weren’t chicken. They called it No Man’s Land, where black folks lived. There weren’t big houses up there, not where they went, but shacks and four-family homes set back from the road at odd intervals. Some had glass windows, some didn’t. Some were sided by tar paper or cedar shakes. Men walked out shirtless. They crouched and squinted at the white kids rushing down the block.
Braun dragged the three boys to a shack set back in the weeds of an otherwise empty lot. The door pitched open halfway when he knocked, its latch broken. A smell of rendering pork leached out. Jimmy Mac whispered that they should get out of there, but Karel didn’t move. None of the boys moved. They huddled behind Braun, peeked around as a woman with a red kerchief over her mouth came to the door and asked who it was.
“It’s Emil. Tell Josh.”
They went inside when beckoned. A man sat on the floor in the room that wasn’t the kitchen, a shoeshine kit open in front of him as he wiped grime from his brushes with a rag. He was skinny and missing teeth. The bony points of his shoulders tented the wool shirt he wore; his long arms snaked around the room when he reached for something to pull from his kit. He didn’t have legs, Karel saw. Both pant legs were pinned up to stumps.