Michael Chabon - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"Woher kommen Sie?" he asked a man he met buying a pound of steak at the butcher on Eighth Avenue, around the corner from Palooka Studios. "Schwabenland?"

The man nodded warily. " Stuttgart," he said.

"How is everything back there?" He could feel the note of intimidation creeping into his voice, of menacing innuendo. "Is everybody all right?"

The man shrugged, blushing, and made a mute appeal to the butcher with a raised eyebrow.

"Is there a problem?" the butcher asked Joe. Joe said that indeed there was not. But when he walked out of the butcher shop with his lamb chops, he felt strangely pleased with himself for having discomfited the man. He supposed that he ought to be ashamed of this feeling. He believed that on some level he was. But he could not seem to keep himself from remembering with pleasure the furtive look and the flushed cheeks when he had addressed the man in his own language.

The following day, a Saturday-this was about a week after Joe had learned of his father's death-Sammy took him to see a Brooklyn Dodgers football game. The idea was to get Joe out into the air and cheer him up a little. Sammy was partial to football, and seemed to have a particular fondness for the Dodgers' star back, Ace Parker. Joe had seen English rugby played in Prague, and once he decided there was no great difference between it and American football, he gave up trying to pay attention to the game and just sat smoking and drinking beer in the sharp raw breeze. Ebbets Field had a faintly ramshackle air that reminded him of a drawing in a comic strip- Popeye or Toonerville Trolley. Pigeons wheeled in the dark spaces of the grandstands. There was a smell of hair oil and beer and a fainter one of whiskey. The men in the crowd passed flasks and muttered comically violent sentiments.

After a while, Joe realized two things. The first was that he was quite drunk. The second was that, two rows behind him and up a little to his left, there sat a pair of German men. They were drinking beer from big paper cups, grinning, fair, stolid-looking men, brothers perhaps. They kept up an excited commentary and, on the whole, seemed to be enjoying the game, though they did not seem to understand it any better than Joe. They cheered whenever a fumble was recovered, regardless of who recovered it.

"Just ignore them," Sammy warned him, chary of his cousin's aggressive good luck in turning up Germans.

"They are looking at me," Joe said, fairly certain that this was so.

"They are not."

"They are looking over here."

"Joe."

Joe kept glancing back over his shoulder, forcing himself into their consciousness, their experience of the game-practically into their laps. Presently, even in their drunken state, they became aware of his attention. A certain amount of scowling and leering ensued. One of the brothers-they had to be brothers-had a crooked nose and a scarred ear indicating that he was not unfamiliar with the use of his fists. At last, toward the end of the third quarter, Joe overheard what he was quite certain was an anti-Semitic remark pass from the man who looked like a boxer to his brother or chum. It sounded to Joe as if the man had said, "Jew bastard." Joe stood up. He clambered over the back of his seat. The row behind him was full, and in the course of clearing it, he elbowed one of his neighbors in the ear. He tumbled into the Germans' row, nearly losing his balance. The Germans laughed, and the arm of a seat jabbed Joe in the side sharply, but he scrambled to his feet and, without a word, knocked the boxer's hat off his head. It fell into a clotted puddle of spilled beer and a rubble of peanuts at the other man's feet. The man with the cauliflower ear looked very surprised, and then astonished when Joe grabbed hold of his shirt collar. Joe yanked so hard that three buttons popped loose and shot off in all directions with audible whizzing sounds. But the man had a long reach, and he managed to get a hand around the back of Joe's neck. He pulled Joe to him and, at the same time, with the other hand connected his fist to the side of Joe's skull. While Joe was thus held, bent over the seat with his nose smashed against the man's left knee, the brother pummeled Joe's back over and over as if he were driving nails into a plank with two hammers. Before Sammy and some of the men sitting in the seats around them could pull the two Germans off, they had closed Joe's right eye for him, chipped a tooth, bruised his rib cage, and ruined a new suit. Then an usher came and threw Joe and Sammy out of Ebbets Field. They went quietly, Joe holding a paper cup of ice to the tender orbit of his eye. The pain was keen. There was an odor of urinals along the ramp leading down to the gates of the ballpark, a masculine smell, bitter and bracing.

"What are you doing?" Sammy asked him. "Are you crazy?"

"I'm sorry," Joe said. "I thought he said something."

"Why are you smiling, god damn it?"

"I don't know."

That night, when he and Sammy went to dinner at Ethel Klayman's, he bent down to pick up the napkin he had dropped, and when he sat up again, there was a bright exclamation mark of blood on his cheek.

"You need sutures," said his aunt in her most inarguable tone.

Joe protested. He had given out to his friends that he was afraid of needles and doctors, but the truth was that he felt edified by the wound to his head. It was not that he felt he deserved the pain so much as that it suited him. No matter how well he cleaned the cut, how tightly he compressed it, how thick the bandage he applied, within an hour or so, the first telltale freckle of red would have reappeared. It was like the memory of home, a tribute to his father's stoical denial of illness, injury, or pain.

"It's going to be fine," he said.

His aunt took hold of his elbow with her five-pronged iron grapple and sat him down on the lid of the toilet in the bathroom. She had Sammy fetch a bottle of slivovitz that had been left behind by a friend of her late husband in 1935 and not touched since. Then she crooked his head under her left arm and sewed him up. The thread was dark blue, exactly the color of the Escapist's uniform.

"Don't go looking for trouble," she begged him as she worked the long thin needle into his skin. "You'll be getting plenty of trouble soon enough."

After that, Joe went looking for trouble. For no good reason, he started going up, every day, to Yorkville, where there were numerous German beer halls, German restaurants, German social clubs, and German-Americans. Most of the time, he merely skulked around for a while and returned home from these forays without incident, but sometimes one thing led to another. The ethnic neighborhoods of New York have always been alert to the incursions of intemperate strangers. He got himself punched in the stomach yet again, on East Ninetieth Street, waiting for a bus, by a man who did not take kindly to the sneer that Joe armed himself with whenever he ventured uptown. Hanging around a candy store one afternoon, Joe attracted the attention of some little neighborhood boys, one of whom, for reasons having nothing to do with politics or racial theories, shot him in the back of the head with a big wet oyster of a spitball. These boys were all regular readers of the Escapist, and admirers of Joe Kavalier's work. If they had known who it was, they would probably have felt very sorry for peashooting him. But they just didn't like the way Joe looked. They had observed, with the ruthless acuity of boys, that there was something funny about Joe Kavalier, about his rumpled suit, his air of banked and smoldering testiness, the curly strands standing up from his imperfectly slicked-back hair like an exploded clockworks. He looked like a patsy for pranksters and practical jokers. He looked like a man who was looking for trouble.