“Don’t bet your house on it.”

“A few families get slaughtered. The miners dig in for a cold winter. By April, without ever sending in a negotiating team, these Rockefellers get the governor of Colorado to send in the National Guard. You heard me, The National Guard. Against American citizens. That first sunup all unholy hell breaks loose. The Guard sets up their machine guns and go at it. The miners return fire. Women and children dig pits under their tents.” Chick put his hands on his hips. He shook his head and looked out at a stand of spruce down at the edge of the back field. “When the sun went down, the Guard moved in with torches, more shooting. The next day a telephone lineman is picking through the rubble. He goes to where a family tent once stood. He lifts up this scorched iron cot frame and underneath, in a shallow pit, are the burnt bodies of eleven children and two women.” Chick looked at Floyd. “Sixty-six men, women, and kids killed in that strike. The union wasn’t recognized there and not one hired dick or guardsman got charged with a crime. My question to you is why not?”

Nobody said anything for a second or two, then Floyd looked off to the south and said, “’Cause them guys were just following their orders, that’s why.”

“Then why,” Chick said, “wasn’t the governor of Colorado or the Rockefellers indicted?”

Floyd chuckled to himself.

Chick glanced at Leo. Leo shrugged. “No proof?”

“Uh-uh, no power. No clout. This handful of doomed families had no clout. And why didn’t they? Floyd?”

“Because they was outgunned.”

“Exactly. Outgunned. Every laboring man, woman, and child from coast to coast should have dropped everything they were doing in a show of solidarity, like the Wobblies, the International Workers of the World. But the majority of them never heard about it. And why is that? Tom? Any ideas?”

Chick looked next at Leo but spared him the question.

“I’ll tell you why: because the media machine in this fair land is controlled by rich Wonder Bread boys, that’s why. The Hearsts, all those fat cats, they feed at the same silver-lined trough, comprendo?” Chick paused to catch any rebuttals, but Leo didn’t see any coming. Floyd was smiling at nothing in particular. Tom was looking out at the field like he forgot to do something.

“The sad fact of the matter is Karl Marx was right when he said that all human history is the history of class struggle.” Chick put his finger up in the air. “But he also said something even more germane–”

“I put it in a colored jelly roll who called herself Jermaine.” Floyd laughed and winked at Leo.

Chick yelled at Floyd to shut up.

Floyd looked like he was about to say something but then he stared at the grass, not smiling either.

“What Marx said is, ‘The point is not to understand the world, but to change it.’ So remember, a crime against one is a crime against us all.”