Don't Worry About the Kids Read Online Free PDF Page B

his way through the crowd so that he would be first off.

Workers to Attention Please
    H E WAS A SMALL MAN standing on a large box. One percent of the population owned forty-five percent of the nation’s wealth, he cried. I held my father’s hand and we moved forward through the falling snow. Did we know about the six hundred families? The six hundred families controlled everything that controlled us: railroads, coal, gas, electrical power, movies, newspapers, radio, banks.
    Below us subway trains thundered through warm tunnels. In the Soviet Union, the man proclaimed, a new world was dawning, where men and women were not wage slaves—where men and women worked side by side and owned the means of production! The man’s hands moved through the snow as if he were already dismembered—as if pieces of him were flying here and there like clumsy pigeons.
    I have seen the future, my father said, and it is bloody. Come, darling. We moved closer, to the outer edge of the circle of listeners.
    Evening to you, Mr. Krinsky, Officer Kelly said.
    Good evening, Mike, my father said, and he tipped his hat.
    My father lifted me onto his shoulders. I could see the sign for S. Klein on the Square blinking faintly through the snow.
    The man turned to the side and I saw half his face, his eye glowing blue like the pilot light on our gas stove at home. The workers of America had to be educated to the fact that their true enemy lived in Washington! I thought of trains rumbling high above us in the heavens, knocking loose huge pieces of snow from the sky as if they were chunks of ceiling plaster. The man looked directly at me and spoke about children of nine and ten years old who worked in subhuman conditions at subhuman pay—in coal mines and paper mills, in factories and sweatshops right here in New York City.
    My father set me down and kissed me. Watch this, he said.
    Even though he walked through snow, below the level of the man’s box, my father was taller than the man. My father was taller than everyone, including Officer Kelly. My father was so large he could carry small pianos on his back. Six days a week he worked for the Santini Brothers Moving and Storage Company. On the Sabbath he rested. When I visited him, after school and on holidays, to watch him load trucks and move furniture in and out of storage, the Italians bragged that my father was the strongest man in New York.
    Sir, my father said.
    The man stopped talking.
    Your Mr. Stalin is a gangster worse than Mussolini. Your Mr. Stalin cleans out Hitler’s ass with the undergarments of poor Jews like you and me.
    The man gaped. My father smiled. Officer Kelly moved forward, slapping his billy club against his black-gloved hand. I moved with him. We had seen my father like this before. The man reached to one side and grabbed a pole that held the American flag. He lifted the flag high above his head, but the flag did not stop the terror in his eyes. My father took the pole from the man’s hand, and set it upright. Then my father drove his fist into the middle of the man’s face so that blood spurted and spread, like a rose flowering in snow.
    My father turned, lifted me in his arms. Come, son.
    The man screamed for help, but people moved away quickly. The man shouted for Officer Kelly to arrest my father, to do something. He had a right to give speeches! He had a right not to be abused by capitalist thugs.
    Yes, my father said. Because this is a free country. But since you don’t like it here I want to help you. Since it is better in Russia, I want to help you to get there. I want to help you fly.
    My father set me down and lifted the man bodily, one hand between the man’s legs, the other around the man’s chest. The man thrashed in the air like a small boy trying to swim.
    That’s enough for now, don’t you think, Mr. Krinsky?
    My father threw the man forward as if tossing a log into a fire. The man’s head cracked against