“Let’s,” he grinned, settling into his seat. “Beginnings are the best, don’t you agree, cousin?”

“I do,” I nodded, feeling ready for something new, in business or otherwise. “You optimistic fucker.”

“I have so much to feel good about now, thanks to you,” Maks complimented. “Robin Hood.”

“You’re hardly poor,” I admonished.

“Yet,” he added. “According to Ig, I’m one dollar away from despair.”

“According to Ig, we all are, and guess what …”

“What?”

“We’ll be doing fine,” I promised, patting my cousin’s leg.

“What about the Cubs? Do you think they’ll be fine too?” Maks asked as Clyde Beck swung for his third strike.

“I think you should ask me in a few months,” I replied, not wanting to put a hex on my team.

“Today is a lucky day,” Maks decided. “Anything discussed today will be golden.”

I let out a heavy sigh to show Maks I thought he was full of shit and sat back in my seat to watch the rest of the game.

The Cubs lost.

5

July 1930

Freedom. It was a theory more than a promise, yet on the Fourth of July, the citizens of America celebrated theirs, somehow believing they truly possessed it. Having violently emancipated themselves from England, they were convinced they had fought for liberties they would not have otherwise, while functioning and floundering under the rule of the greatest tyrant—capitalism. With their noses to the grindstone, Americans worked hard, slaves to a system that would let them down, a system they revered while it crumbled around them.

I was led by money as well, though I’d found a way to earn it outside of the press of convention, a fact that had me wondering if perhaps I was inching closer to independence than those gaily lighting sparklers at Burnham Park. They were happy, though, and maybe their joy naturally made them freer than me. What I considered my ability to be pragmatic and realistic, others, such as my cousin, saw as pessimism. Perhaps it was my commonsensical qualities that tied shackles around my wrists and bound me down. Regardless, I preferred to be weighted by reason rather than floating on dreams. The fall was much farther from the sky.

Though patriotism was alien to me, news out of The Soviet Union had me wondering if the farce of freedom in America was somehow still superior to the corrupt communism continuing to crop up in the country of my bedeviled birth. Between forced collectivization and political repression, Stalin was saturating the blood stains Lenin left on Russia, making me wonder if my father wasn’t running only from his demons when he brought us to America but theirs as well. While the two countries were disparate in their ideologies, they proved to me that there wasn’t just one way for a government to fuck its citizens and had me wondering if I would be an anarchist if I wasn’t painfully uninspired.