Kings of Broken Things Page 2

  Karel and his family were a bit different than the rest of the boys and their families.

  Consider that there were five Miihlsteins altogether. Karel, Anna, the two older sisters, who were off six days a week cleaning streetcars in an immense underground garage, and their father. Herr Miihlstein was a lanky man with short arms and a thin mustache that was often stained by his lunch. Karel didn’t look like his father. He had darker hair and skin, and was broad in the shoulders. His feet were so big he could hardly keep shoes that fit. Sometimes he wore his father’s, which fit just as well, at least when Karel was eleven and hadn’t yet outgrown them.

  Miihlstein worked nearly all day and night in the attic of the Eigler house. He hummed along as he measured string or reinforced the neck of the viola he was charged with reviving. He squeezed the wood to put it under stress, to find the reason it didn’t sing right, then rolled a red felt carpet over the worktable and pulled all the tools from his kit to examine them, to make sure each was still fit. Little cans of lacquer and thinner pressed on the felt. Tools pulled from nooks and leather slots. Waffled metal files, awls and emery cloth, spools of catgut, spare pegs, clamps, chisels, a skinny metal hammer. Wood shavings popped from the block plane as Miihlstein revealed new fingerboard then sanded it round. Notches were filed and awled for strings, the fingerboard painted an ebullient, endless black. Miihlstein’s wire glasses rode down his nose on a bead of sweat. He bit his upper lip, sucked the prickles of his mustache into his mouth to concentrate. He engaged a single instrument a whole week or more to repair it, like this viola, stretching and tuning and playing, humming along as he plucked and bowed, until: “Perfection!”

  The whole rigmarole bored Karel. He hated to be stuck in the attic dormer. There were two beds, a rocking chair, a sofa draped in yellow chintz. He and Anna devised docile and melancholy games to occupy themselves before supper, imaginings that often involved the war. Karel’s favorite was to play army surgeon with Anna’s rag doll. She allowed this. There was great commotion in Karel’s mind as the doll was rushed from an open battlefield—a circular woven rug strewn with sock garter barbwire and newspapers crumpled into craters—to the great bed where the girls slept. Under the bed the real fun began, their legs stuck out opposite ends. Because she was sickly herself, Anna had a nicely dark mind for details. She described a simple shrapnel wound in an arm. But then! Then the ambulance was hit by mortar fire and overturned on the road, the poor souls inside tossed on top of each other. Broken bones now, fractures, splinters of glass and head wounds. “The driver died at once,” Anna hushed. “A tragedy, for he was greatly loved by his wife, as all in his village knew.”

  Once Anna completed her treasury, Karel took over. The poor soul was in real trouble. Only one thing could save him. An amputation. Karel pinned the rag doll to the floorboards and revealed the yellowed cloth skin. He sawed with the edge of his index finger and tucked, as if Anna wouldn’t notice, the doll’s arm into its dress. The dress was back in place, the sleeve folded up. At first the poor soul was saved, lifted from the operating theater and slid under the blankets atop the bed. “You’re in luck,” Anna said to the poor soul. “Nothing but raspberry torte for a year.” Then things took a turn for the worse. The poor soul couldn’t be saved after all. They enclosed the corpse in a white paperboard box—the rag doll corpse-like already, as they saw it—and took the box out back of the Eigler house to bury it in the garden.

  Karel worried his new friends from school would find out how he played with Anna. It was shameful, of course. A boy shouldn’t enjoy carrying on like that with a doll, not a boy who was nearly twelve. He resolved to end his childishness. Soon, anyway.

  Maybe Karel was too old to play such girlish games—but it was how he and Anna spent time together. By age eleven Karel was aware of how Anna was different than other kids. How she didn’t mature the way she should, because she was stuck at home with her illness, at Herr Miihlstein’s insistence. So she remained the same age, played the same games over and over, obsessed over the same old gossip, the same books of Viennese poems. Anna liked playing with Karel, with her dolls, and that was fine with him. Karel loved his sister—all three of his sisters really, but Anna the most—and he didn’t know how else to spend time with her.

  Anna always wore a white straw hat when outside. It was dented, the brim slightly twisted, but she kept it clean and a purple ribbon was attached and neatly tied. She believed the hat made her beautiful. She was right. She wore a matching lavender overcoat, and the way she smiled, black hair swept around her face, her overbite and pointy nose and dark eyes, how she sat in the grass to weave wildflower stems together for the dead—the boys on Clandish would never forget her. The times they caught a glimpse of Anna on a chair by the doorway as they walked by the Eigler house, Anna sitting in the front window, Anna planting flowers by the lattice skirt under the front porch. She spent most of her time doing craftwork up in the attic dormer where the Miihlsteins lived, so it was rare for a boy to even catch a glimpse of her, a boy stopped on the walkway to stare up into a window of that grand Victorian house where Frau Eigler took in roomers during the late years of her life.

  After the box was buried, a prayer sung, Anna and Karel retrieved the doll from the damp spring soil. Anna didn’t have so many dolls, even rag dolls, to leave them interred. “He’s alive!” the two of them chanted, pulling the rag doll from its now-muddy box. “He’s alive! The boy’s alive!”

  Maria Eigler must have seen the two of them burrow in her daffodils. “Stop it!” she snapped, surprising them as she rushed out the back door. “You shouldn’t do that. The woman across the alley lost two babies these years. Both of them she buried in little white boxes, yeah.”

  Maria hushed at them, a hissing, cutting kind of inflection old women perfected, those years especially, the war years. Each reproach made Karel feel miserable and small. He covered himself with his arms. Anna was shrinking too. She clutched the doll to her chest.

  “Leave her alone,” Karel shouted. “Can’t you see she’s crying?”

  He popped off his knees to shield Anna, rallied up his fists, trembling. It was instinct to dig his heels in once he saw his sister frightened. She was as delicate as a doll, her skin porcelain white, her hair limp in pigtails. When she pulled off her glasses to dry the lenses, sores bloomed on the bridge of her nose.

  “What’s wrong, Karel?” Maria released her skirts and patted the wrinkles she’d made in clutching. “I don’t know why you act this way.”

  “We didn’t do anything!”

  Anna stood and secured the hooks of her glasses behind her ears. “Stop that,” she said to Karel. “You know Frau Eigler doesn’t mean it.”

  Karel was ashamed already and couldn’t take Anna scolding him. Once he dropped his fists, Maria swooped in to hug the both of them. He let her.

  He wouldn’t have liked to admit this, but Karel felt better squeezed to Frau Eigler’s soft hips, her body padded by layers of skirts and underskirts, her own well-buttered girth below that. Her body bounced into his as she walked them to the back door. He felt lighter being jostled.

  Maria sat them at the table inside and apologized. “It isn’t your fault,” she said. “I was being a ninny. I hadn’t thought of your mother when I yelled at you.”

  Karel hadn’t thought of his mother either, playing the burying game. Maria always wanted to talk about his mother. That made it hard to be in the house too. He could take her doting on him, calling him downstairs to taste her stews or Danish pastries—which was fine, better than fine—or how she sent him on errands to the market for quince or meat, or to a chemist for alum powder. Karel just couldn’t stand it when Maria brought up his mother.

  If he was better at baseball, Karel realized, he could leave the house whenever he wanted. If he was an important player on a team, if the other boys saw him as rough and strong and one whose body could defeat other bodies, then Karel could go anywhere he wanted. He wished he knew everything there was to know a
bout baseball. Rainbow throws and hard slides and how to hit too, to hit bombs. He’d know more and play better than all the other boys, he decided. They hadn’t even trusted him with a bat yet, but he’d learn how to swing one. Then he’d have a place to be.

  Maria told Karel and Anna they couldn’t chant about baby boys coming alive if they wanted to dig in the yard. “We won’t,” Anna promised.

  “Yeah, Frau Eigler. We won’t dig in your garden again.”

  She laughed at Karel. “Good. What a domesticated boy.”

  Karel stayed late in the school yard those days. He watched boys play ball. Learned the language. Stinger and blooper and daisy cutter. What was meant when one boy urged another to toss the onion or crack the willow.

  Older boys hung around the ballfield to check on a little brother or pick up a cohort. The kind who hung around the outdoor market all day, who wore drab clothes like most working class, but wore them stylishly, with derby hats set back on their heads to let loose a flourish of bangs. Karel had seen enough bad things to avoid boys like these, those who fidgeted on their bench all day in class, if they were in class, who couldn’t wait to sneak away downtown. A boy named Ignatz was the toughest of this type at Karel’s school. An alleged Serb, Ignatz was tall and snub-nosed and still attended the lower school even though he was fourteen. Unlike the others, Ignatz didn’t run in a group. He was a crew unto himself. He was terrifying.

  Ignatz came over to the ballfield and knocked the cap off Alfred Braun’s head one of those days. “Hey, Freddie,” he said. “Your dad’s bothering folks at my dad’s warehouse again. He’s got no business there. Everyone’s tired of him.”

  Alfred snatched his cap from the ground, then smiled, broad and impish. The ballplayers rushed in to see what would happen to Alfred. Karel stayed to the back. Ignatz looked like he’d toss Alfred over the fence. He was angry and mean, his cheeks swollen. He was too ugly to be anything other than tough. That puggish face, the nose smashed up into two fleshy holes.

  “Tell him to stay out of the warehouses,” Ignatz said. “They don’t need any organizers down there.”

  Karel hid at a corner of the schoolhouse until Ignatz left. A thicket of junipers grew in a way that created a tunnel where branches shied the bricks, where the airy dust off the bark coated his teeth. Mostly it was girls in the hollow. Karel was used to girls. Each cordoned a space where she could set up house, a sitting room, a kitchen, an opening between limbs an anteroom, then tended a stove or shook out sheets or put a baby down or swept dirt with a juniper branch.

  “Is that you in there?” Jimmy Mac pushed through the stingers to see inside the hollow. “You’re on our team,” he said. “You don’t got to play with girls.”

  Karel returned to the light, facedown as he crouched out. Evergreen needles had worked over the side of his shoes, into his pockets and his hair. He shook his head to dislodge them.

  “Come on.” Alfred tossed a ball to himself. “You got work to do.”

  They went back to the drills from before. In triangle, rolling the ball to each other, training their hands to anticipate bounces, how the ball played on gravel, on grass, on rubbed-smooth slabs of rock-hard dirt. “Step back,” Alfred ordered. All three did. “Again,” he said after the ball looped a few more turns. With every step back Karel had to slap the ball harder, until he picked the ball up and slammed it on the surface to bounce it over. “Good,” Jimmy said. “You’re getting the hang of it.” Each time a new hop played on Karel, his hands learned what to do. He felt his chest fill and warm. The boys backed ten, fifteen, twenty feet away, until Karel could rear back and glide grounders in return. He caught barehanded and threw before his palm felt the sting. He felt surer in his body. His arm found a slot he could throw from and strike where he aimed without aiming. Alfred and Jimmy tossed just as hard to Karel. He liked that. They didn’t ease up on him. He bounced on his hamstrings in the stance. Got used to the short hop so the ball came to the meat of his hands instead of his wrists. He was getting better and better until the ball turned a rock and came up on him, right to his lips, and got him.

  His mouth watered. He breathed in without letting out. Went to his knees to feel what happened. Heard the others gasp, heard them running to see if he was going to bawl about it. But the shock wasn’t so bad. His lip swelled but there wasn’t blood. Karel felt splinters in his mouth, a front tooth chipped. The surface changed as he ran his tongue over his teeth.

  “Took a bad hop on you, yeah?” one of the others asked. “Sure it did.”

  Karel rubbed the chip with a finger. The rough edges of it, a wedge of tooth gone. He searched the inside of his mouth with his tongue for broken pieces. Grit over his other teeth now, at the back of his throat.

  “I need a glove,” he said.

  Alfred disagreed. “A glove can’t help if you don’t know how to use it.”

  Of course, it was easier for those boys to say so. Both of them had gloves of their own.

  “Where you going to get it anyway?” Jimmy asked. “Will your dad buy one?”

  “No,” Karel said. “I can’t ask him for something like that.”

  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.