Little Lion

When I was a kid, Ma always held my hand whenever we walked to the market. At five or six, it was just something I did natural, but as I got older, you know, eleven, twelve years old, I started to pull my hand away whenever she reached for it. Just like I did the morning the Trinity building burned down.
“What, you’re too good for your mother?” she asked. “You used to hold my hand like a polar bear.”
My face burned red, and she ruffled my hair, and I pulled away again.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Walk by yourself for all I care.”
“Why I gotta come with you to the market?” I asked. “You always go by yourself.”
“Maybe I want to spend some time with my son. Is that so wrong?”
“Ah, ma.”
“Don’t you ‘ah, ma’ me. Before you know it, you’ll be out in the world. You’ll forget all about your ma and the way you used to hug her and kiss her on the cheek and hold her hand when you walked down the street. And then I’ll be dead, and how will that make you feel?”
“Okay, okay,” I said, and I reached up and held her hand.
Ma smiled and squeezed it a couple of times. I made it a grand total of half a block before we passed a stoop with a bunch of deadbeats sprawled out on the steps, smoking cigars and jawing like hyenas. 
“Hey there! Look’a the good boy!” one yelled. “Hold your mother tight, good boy. Make your mother happy.”
I dropped my hand like it was filled with lead, and the hyenas on the stoop let up a great whooping laugh, and my face burned red again, and Ma picked up the pace, maybe because them jerks made her feel uncomfortable, maybe out of empathy for me.
The thing I remember most about living in the city was the smoke. Coal smoke. Wood smoke. Smoke from the steel smelts. Smoke from the rendering plants. Smoke from the funeral homes. Cooking smoke. Heating smoke. Smoking smoke. Smoke, smoke, smoke. It clouded the air all day long, all night long, blocking out the sun in the summer, turning the snow black in the winter. 
I noticed the difference in the usual smoke when we was about a block from the market. It was heavier, stronger, not the trickle of the cooking fires or the coal heat that plumed outta the stacks all day long, but a great black cloud hanging under the gray. Sure enough, when we turned the corner onto Market Street, the first thing I seen was flames gushing out of the windows of Scheinbaum’s Trinity building on the corner. The crowd that gathered on the other side of the street was filled with plonkers from all sorts’a life, from the slum grannies in their rags and kerchiefs to the uptown schmoes in their dandies and top hats, all of them ooh’in and ahh’in like they’d never seen a fire before.
“It’s a fire, Ma!” I cried and scurried over to join them.
An explosion blew out the top windows, drowning out Ma's cry as she yelled after me. The crowd screamed and took a great collective step back, and some schmuck spun and ran, knocking me into the path of an oncoming horse-drawn fire engine. Hooves pounded on the cobbles, the wheels clattered. I closed my eyes tight, two seconds away from getting my head stove in. Then Ma ran up from behind and snatched me off the street and whisked me to the other side.
“Watch where you go!” she yelled.
“Keep yer kid on a leash, lady!” the driver yelled back. 
He pulled the engine around the crowd and pushed through, ringing his bell like it was a boxing match. The crowd parted, however begrudgingly, and the firefighters in their flat-billed hats and brass-buttoned jackets popped off the side and started unfurling hoses and hooking ‘em up to the hydrants.
Ma always seemed invincible to me back then, and scenes like that one didn’t put the kibosh on that perception. Now I can see how hard that must of been, playing Superman to my Jimmy all the time. That kind of stuff ages people hard. But I was just a kid, and I didn’t know squat about nothing, so after she checked my face and patted me down, searching for any signs of wear and tear, I squirmed outta her grip so I could watch, dazzled, as the firefighters sprayed water into the upper levels, the horses snorting and nickering as smoke continued to pour out the windows.
“Raisa!” someone cried. 
A lady with scarecrow arms and wearing a kerchief on her head sidled up to Ma. Or should I say Raisa? I knew Ma’s name was Raisa, but it always took me sideways to hear someone call her that. Ma was Ma, not Raisa. But she was Raisa, too. Raisa was Raisa, not Ma. What a paradox!
“Oh, Avi,” Ma replied. She embraced her friend and held her at arm’s length. “I was so worried you were in there.”
“No, not yet,” Avi said. “He hasn’t unlocked the doors.”
Ma cast a glance up at the burning building.
“Always with the locks. I’m surprised this hasn’t happened before.”
“It’s not just the locks. It’s Miriam, too, sneaking smokes.”
As they spoke, I heard kid laughter from the other side of the street, so I craned my neck around to see who it was. There, hanging around an apple cart, stood the most motley assortment of schmucks, schmoes, and schlemiels I’d never seen in my life. Five of ‘em in all: two regular-sized kids (one wearing an eyepatch, one with hands like a gorilla), a kid what looked like Avi’s scarecrowier offspring, a kid built like a rhino, and next to him, his polar opposite. When they seen me looking, they all burst out laughing and started slapping each other on the shoulders, so I turned back around.
“Someone should report him,” Ma was saying.
“Report a man like Sheinbaum,” Avi said. “To who?”
“Somebody’s gotta do something. They can’t treat us like this.”
“Careful, Raisa. They’ll be calling you a sotsyalist. Then it’ll be just like before.”
“They can call me anything they want. We’ve got to stand together.”
“Stand together. Stand together. Makes it easier to get us all at once.”
I turned back around to see what them kids was doing. They’d crossed the street and spread out along the back of the crowd. I watched the skinny kid bump into an old plonker with extravagant mustaches.
“Watch where you’re going, cur!” Mustache snapped.
“Sorry, Mister,” Skinny bleated.
The old man raised his walking stick and yelled, “Scat!”
Meanwhile, Eyepatch’d already reached into the dandy’s side coat pocket and relieved him of his watch. He ducked into the crowd and popped out again a short bop later. I turned my head to the other side. Rhino and his sidekick was doing the same thing. Bump. “Watch where you’re going!” “Sorry, mister!” Pocket picked.
“You know those boys?”
It was Ma. Avi’d split, giving Ma the opportunity to pay me more mind.
“Nah,” I replied.
Ma swatted me upside the head.
“Proper speaking!” she said.
Another dandy cursed one of the pickpockets, and Ma’s head snapped up just in time to catch Skinny and Eyepatch working their scam.
“They’re little gonifs, that’s for sure.” She studied me. “You think I don’t like what they do?”
“Don’t seem like you would.”
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t. Remember last winter? I thought my ribs would spring right out of my skin.”
I nodded. Between the hunger pains, the boiled stews, and the caskets piled up on the street, last winter wasn’t something I chose to remember on purpose.
“It’s not even winter yet,” Ma continued, raising her chin at ‘em. “And those boys? They’re just as hungry as we were.”
I studied Rhino and Tiny as they wound through the crowd, searching for marks. Top hats craned back to watch the flames lick the sky. Jets of water from the firehoses. Ooh! Ahh! Pick, pocket.
“Even the big one’s jacket’s hanging off him,” I said.
“I’m going to tell you something Moshe,” Ma said. “Something important. Are you listening?”
“Yea—yes!”
“That there is only good and only bad, I don’t believe. These boys, I don’t begrudge them nothing. But now, in the face of this,” she gestured at the fire. “Everybody do bad. Everybody. You included. But when you have to do bad, make sure you choose your reason good.”
Her arm struck out behind her like a snake, snatching Eyepatch by the wrist. 
“Leggo!” he squealed, twisting like a torque engine. But Eyepatch didn’t know my Ma. She had a grip harder’n steel. She hauled him up, his legs pinwheeling, and set him down on the outside of the crowd.
“Lemme go lady!”
“Empty your palm,” she said.
“Alfred! Help!”
“We can do this easy, or we can do this hard.”
Eyepatch threw a punch with his free arm, and Ma blocked it, and before he could throw another, she cocked back and slapped him so hard across the face that his head rocked.
“I SAID EMPTY YOUR PALM.”
“I didn’t do nothing!”
The kid tried to break free again, but it wasn’t no use. Ma dug into his palm and prised his fingers apart, and a little coin purse fell out and chinked on the sidewalk. She released him all dramatic, splaying her fingers so he knew it was a choice, and Eyepatch twisted and stumbled, scraping his knee. He jumped to his feet and scampered away, but not before shooting me the nastiest look I ever seen.
I bent over and scooped the purse off the street.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said, tugging on the sleeve of a top hat standing at the edge of the crowd. 
He turned around, half-offended, half-curious. I handed him the purse. 
“You dropped this.”

The next morning, I awoke to the familiar smells and sounds of the tenement: b.o. and boiled cabbage, creaking floors and slamming doors, with an undercurrent of garbage and despair. Oh, and Ma and Pop arguing about money again.
“I work two jobs six days a week, Raisa and still we’re behind on everything,” Pop complained. “I need at least one day.”
“For what? To drink with your friends?”
“I might pray.”
“Pray? Felix. Darling. Sweetness. You haven’t prayed since the ten plagues.”
“How dare you question my beliefs? I am a religious man!”
“Oh, sure. And I’m Queen Esther.”
“Queen who?”
“Never mind.”
Back then, I never put much currency into their arguments. They argued like I breathed.
I stirred in the nest of blankets and old scraps of clothes I called a bed and peeked out through a slit in the sheets that marked off my area of the apartment. Pop was standing at the window. We was lucky enough to have one, a window, that is. I’d been in Mrs. Schmoll’s room on the other side of the hall before, and it didn’t have no windows. Just four walls and a cracked iron stove.
But just because we had a window don’t mean it worked right. That window was Pop’s nemesis. Forget all them jobs. The real fight of Pop’s life was that busted frame. He pulled on the handle, the wood cracked, and the window got caught not even a half inch up. He beat it with his fists, trying to shake it loose, and tried again. Nothing. Finally, he spread his hands on the panes and pushed, but all that achieved was his breath fogging the glass.
“It’s stuck,” Ma said.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Maybe just go outside.”
“We pay for the room with a window, I’m gonna use the window!”
“Not if it’s stuck you’re not.”
Pop launched himself into the effort. He pressed and he shimmied and he beat and he pulled, but the window didn’t budge.
“NOTHING WORKS IN THIS PLACE!” he cried.
Our upstairs neighbor, Mr. Samuels, stomped on the floor.
“Shut up down there!” he yelled.
“You shut up!” Pop yelled back. 
He marched across the room and grabbed his hat off the nail next to the door.
“I’m gonna be late,” he said.
Then he ripped the door open and left, making sure to slam it behind him.
“Have a nice day at work, darling,” Ma said.
When I was sure he wasn’t coming back, I pushed through the sheets. Ma stood at the stove, stirring a pot. Stewed fruit, from the smell of it.
“Pop okay?” I asked.
“Ah! Good morning, bubbeleh,” Ma said. 
She came over and put her hands on my cheeks. They was rough and cool, but it still felt nice. I tried to duck the kiss on my head I knew was coming, but Ma was too fast.
“Get the bowl,” she said, returning to the stove. “I pour your frishtick.”
I did what she said, and she poured the mess for me. Gave me a spoon.
“Eat. You’re late for school.”
“I don’t wanna go to school.”
“Don’t you talk back to me, Moshe. I go to work, you go to school.”
“Ah, ma.”
I stirred my fruit, my stomach clenching up just thinking about putting the spoon in my mouth.
“I can work, too, you know,” I said.
“No.”
“But we need money. I heard you and Pop arguing. Pop said—”
“Don’t you worry about what you papa said. You learn. Be smart. One day you be the mayor.”
“But if I make enough, Pop can have the day he needs to… what’s he need a day for?”
“You’re a sweet boy, Moshe,” Ma said. “But your papa don’t need a thing from you. We can manage.” She nodded at the bowl. “Now eat and off you go.”

I wasn’t going to no school. There wasn’t nothing in old Kirkland-Gary Normal that couldn’t tell me what I already knew. I could read. I could write. I could number. Besides, at my age, we was starting the transition from elementary to this new high school schmegegge where they had me learning carpentry and metal work half the day, and the other half they had me running around playing sports. Kickball and baseball and basketball—crazy stuff like that. What good was sports gonna do me? Or woodwork or metalwork? I'd seen what that kinda job did to my Pop. He was thirty-nine going on sixty, with a bald head and a cough and a hunched-over sadness to match it all. 
Nah.
If I was gonna get my education anywhere, I’d get it where I wanted to get it.
I still hadda look like I was gonna go though, ‘cause Ma’d be leaning out the window watching for me. Even though we lived on the tenth floor, I knew she’d be able to clock me heading in the wrong direction, so after I skipped down the stairs of our building and out onto the bustling sidewalk, I joined the stream of kids floating toward school, all of them wearing their white shirts or white dresses like mini sailors with collars. My dull duds stuck out like a frog in a snake pit. I couldn’t see her face, but I turned and waved anyway , making as grand a display as I could. But the second we hit the first corner, I peeled away and headed off in the opposite direction. 
It took me an hour to make the walk, but it was an hour’s walk well-spent. I snatched an apple off a cart a few neighborhoods over and a plum off another a few neighborhoods over from that. Lunch acquired, I dodged through the streets, ducking into alleys whenever I seen a cop, reemerging a block up. 
The cityscape didn’t alter much as I plodded along. One tenement after another; sweatshop after sweatshop. When the streets wasn’t packed with vendors, they was packed with people, and when they wasn’t packed with people, they was packed with horses and carriages, and then it was back to the top of the rotation. 
I managed not to take a bite outta either the apple or the plum the whole walk there, even though my stomach gurgled and gargled, but I clenched it tight and clenched it tighter, so by the time I finally made it to the front steps of my hallowed institution of higher learning, I wasn’t feeling nothing but the buzz of the perpetually starving, a high that don’t compare to no grog, gin, or gut-rot, a sharpness of the senses, a keenness of the intellect, fueled by the feeling that any moment my head might suddenly blow up with helium, my vision go white, and thirty seconds later I’d wake up on my back, my legs tucked up under me, a bunch’a goyim hovering over my face.
“You okay, little boy?” they’d ask, all care and concern.
At least until I spoke. Then it’d be all wrinkled noses and muttered denunciations, like they smelled rotting borscht on my breath, noticing, as if for the first time, my habit, which was that of the gutter crawling bottom feeder.
But nothing of the sort happened that morning. I pumped leg up the modest stone steps (the one uptown had steps made of marble), through the heavy oak entry (the one uptown had a grand column vestibule and three sets of revolving doors), and into the dark, comfortable confines of The Chappell-Fine Metropolitan Library.
Sal, the security guard, tipped his hat at me when I arrived.
“Hey, Moshe,” he said. “Off to college?”
“You bet!”
Mrs. Friedkin, the front desk librarian, was not as pleased to see me. At least she didn’t seem like it. She sat behind the checkout counter, a pile of notebooks at her elbow, working on a ledger. 
Without looking up, she said, “Shouldn’t you be in school, young man?”
I made a grand display of checking out my surroundings, a look of ironic wonder plastered all over my mug.
“What’s this place s’posed to be?”
“Very funny, wise guy.” She finally put her pen down and tore her attention from the ledger. “Okay,” she sighed. “Let’s hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“What’s on the menu today? Roman Empire? Black Plague? Mongol Hordes?”
“I think I’ll read more about that Schopenhauer fella you told me about last week.” 
“Hmm. Now that I think about it, Schopenhauer might be a little much for you.”
She reached down under the counter and pulled out a book (like I expected anything else).
“What’s that?” I asked, squinting at the title. “Republic?”
“Plato,” Mrs. Friedkin said. “He’s a little more your speed.”
She tossed it down on the counter. I pulled it over, inspected the cover, flipped through the pages.
“Read the first part of Book IV,” Ms. Friedkin said. She took a notebook off the pile and a pencil outt’a a pencil holder and slid them across to me. “Let me know what you think.”
I eyeballed the office supplies.
“Jeez, lady. I came here to get away from school.”
Mrs. Friedkin shrugged.
“Oh, Moshe,” she said. “We both know that’s not true.”

Took me an hour to get through the first part of Book IV, but I think I got the gist of it. Most of it. Some of it. According to Plato, the key to a happy life was understanding the nature of virtue, and the only way to understand virtue was to work or be smart, and the only way to work or be smart was to master a trade or learn stuff. So basically he was telling me to know my place. If you was poor, you should work just enough to remain poor, and if you was rich, you should earn just enough not to get too rich. See? Virtue.
And boy howdy did twelve-year-old me have something to say about that.
Poverty was virtue? Work was virtue? Tell that to Ma and Pop. Ma’s fingertips was scabbed over with so many needle holes from piecework that I didn’t think she could even feel ‘em no more. And Pop… well, Pop was Pop. Angry, irritated, exhausted. Neither of them seemed to be very happy, and according to Plato, they was the most virtuous people in the building.
I filled up three pages of Mrs. Friedkin’s notebook with my thoughts, and when I was done, I moved on to the real reason I went to the library in the first place, a book I’d seen the last time I was there called The Heist.
I ain’t gonna go too deep into it fear I’ll bore ya to death, but the general plot was this: A poor schmuck what’d been wronged by everybody gets a job as a janitor at the Louvre, scopes out the ins and the outs, steals a bunch of art, and sells it. The heist itself don’t cause him no problems, but what happens after he gets rich does. 
When I was done with all that, I scooped up my books and brought ‘em to the checkout, hoping to give Mrs. Friedkin an earful about Plato, but she wasn’t there, so I left everything on the counter and headed back out into the city.