Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (15 page)

For five
hours now the tear gas had been falling. The streets swarmed with smoke and John Henry coughed and chanted and grimaced behind his bandanna, watching the cops as they stalked and fired.

For five hours now they had been going at it. They hit people in the face. They smashed hands and wrists, left purple-yellow bruises on shoulders and ribs and backs like odd constellations of pain to be examined by worried friends in the days to come. This was how badly the cops wanted to clear the streets and take their city back.

They tore away bandannas and gas masks, sprayed pepper spray into people's naked mouths. Unarmed peaceful protesters chanting in the street—the police dragged them away by their hair. Five hours of physical misery in all its varied forms, a torturing so intense the hours seemed like days. They were hungry and soaking and cold down to their bones. The gas was sticking to their clothes and skin. Everything burned.

For five hours now they had been assaulted by tear gas, been hit by pepper spray and clubs, and still they remained.

And still they would not leave.

They would not stop until they had accomplished what their hearts had demanded they do and John Henry knew they were going to win no matter what it took.

They had stayed and controlled the intersection. Despite the police's best efforts, no more than a handful of delegates had made it to the convention center. The opening ceremonies had been canceled. The news passed from mouth to mouth, but he didn't need the human chain to know. No, John Henry could tell from the tilt of the cop's heads as they paraded back and forth, the way they huddled in small groups hurriedly talking, the way they strode through the crowd, the anger with which they struck. Every gesture and motion signaled their desperation and frustration. They had never encountered it before, either in the streets or in their dreams of the street: people that would not submit. People unafraid of their violence. Brave people who would not leave.

John Henry was speechless with glad-hearted joy. They had stayed. They had stayed and they were winning. He felt his heart swell with pride as he said, “Victor, how you doing, son?”

No reply from Victor. Pure human pride in the flock and nobody more deserving than Victor. Nobody for whom John Henry felt more pride and admiration than Victor. Look at him there. His hair which had been in two tight braids was now frayed and loose. His back rigid. It was as though he was absorbing the horrors of the day through the medium of his seated body. Flaked white spit had gathered at the edges of Victor's mouth. And his eyes, man. John Henry saw something building in the kid's eyes and he could not have been prouder of this young man right here than if he were the boy's own father. He hadn't been trained a lick, had entered through no gate save his courage. Knew not the power of sitting. Knew not how the rage which became a sorrow can become a kind of joy.

John Henry said, “How you doing, son?”

Victor didn't respond.

“Victor?”

And John Henry couldn't have been prouder of him than if he was his own son, but had the boy's fear turned to anger? Was he strong enough to allow the anger to become a sorrow which had the power to transform? Could he open himself to it—the suffering which redeemed?

King materialized out of the fog. To John Henry, she was radiant. The events of the day seemed to have spun her quick through her many selves until they had become fused and polished and whole. Her hair was atop her head and knotted. She shook it loose as she peeled off her gas mask. Her brown dreadlocks, her green eyes bright. Blood streaked her simple shirt, splattered against the white. She was alive and frantic and tired and talking, her hands everywhere on him, checking was he good, was he hurt, and the tiredness was in her eyes and the life was in her face and the frantic was in her voice and John Henry thought he had never seen a woman more beautiful than at this very moment. She knelt before him and touched his face.

“King,” he said, “where have you been?”

She touched his shoulders. His chest. His sides. Back to his face. Squeezed both his shoulders, ran her hand along his face, adjusted his glasses on his nose.

“John Henry, please. We need to go.”

John Henry saying, “We're not going anywhere. We're winning.”

King speaking so quiet John Henry could barely hear her. “Do you really believe that? That we're winning?”

“King,” he said, “we are talking here of the human reservoir that has struggled for five hundred years to achieve the impossible. The rights of all people to live in simple dignity, neither oppressed nor anesthetized. What are our personal concerns compared to this? We're not going anywhere.”

“Did you see what happened to Edie?” she said.

He nodded.

“They're targeting medics,” she said.

He nodded again and she gathered her hands between her knees as if she didn't know quite where to put them.

“John Henry, I can't get arrested.”

She sounded panicky, voice trembling, completely unlike herself. King was one of the most levelheaded women he had ever met—she played fast and loose with plans, sure, subverted their process sometimes, but she was brilliant and brave. She had a quick temper, sure, and he had been burned more than once in the five years he had known her, but in the chaos of a street battle she was stone-cold ice. This was a woman he would trust with his life.

“Tell me why.”

She just shook her head. “I can't.”

“King, are we talking about Vail? Again?”

She said nothing and John Henry imagined he could see into her lovely bile-filled interiors, her internal spaces, the places where she went alone to dream. John Henry saw it as an abandoned church—a cathedral, really, graffitied and high broken windows with pigeons sliding in and out, pigeons cooing in the archways, pigeons moving through shafts of light and shadow in the vestibule, a loose-timbered space, high-vaulted and desolate, and King lying on the floor passed out. King lying on the floor in John Henry's ruined church, head resting on his piled books, staring into the high dusty air, looking into the unreachable depths eighty feet up. There she was lonely and discontented and gazing. Content, perhaps, in the upper distances with the words rolling through her mind. Lying there, passed out drunk and waiting for what exactly to come flapping through her life?

“No, John Henry,” she said, so quietly he could barely hear her, “we are not talking about Vail.”

“What then? Tell me.”

“John Henry.” So quietly was he sure she was even speaking? “I shouldn't be here, John Henry.” She was almost crying. Her green eyes filling with fear. “I can't get arrested, John Henry. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. But I can't get arrested.”

She was shaking. The calmest woman he knew, yes, but one who had a temper like a tornado. And now she was near panic. He had never seen her like this. What had changed? What had happened? He wanted to ask and then stopped. Stopped and stopped and stopped.

If she couldn't get arrested, she really meant it. Fuck, he knew that much. He didn't argue much with King when she got going, and if she couldn't get arrested, John Henry didn't want to think about what that might mean.

What else she might have done.

“John Henry, please trust me.”

He nodded, thinking he really did
not
want to know.

“I'm staying,” he said.

The way
King was kneeling and looking at John Henry, Victor felt a certain pause in his life. A moment which opened and seemed large enough between heartbeats to contain every moment in his life up until that moment and Victor had what could only be called an insight. One of those sudden flashes of knowledge about a person that arrives wholly formed and is so surprising, whimming up from what unconscious antennae, that you know without asking that it must be true.

King was scared.

Maybe not on the surface, surrounded as she was by her brothers and sisters fifty thousand strong, her cadre of companions committed to the struggle. But no, he heard it in her voice. She knelt in front of John Henry and spoke and despite her demeanor what was it in her voice? What was it that made him think at the eye of the slowly turning hurricane that was her self, she was near panic? On the deepest level, this woman was terrified.

“You think we're going to lose,” Victor said.

King turned to him. She made her mouth into a smile and rested a hand on his shoulder.

“I don't think we're going to lose, Victor.”

“Yes, you do. And you're afraid.”

“Listen,” she said gently, and what was it in her voice that made him feel like he was the biggest fool the world had ever known. “Listen, Victor, nobody expects you to do this untrained. Everybody here will understand if you want out. You just need to tell us because we would have to replace you. Are you scared? Do you need out?”

“No, no, no. I'm good. I want to be here with you guys. I mean I get it now. I think I know why we're here.”

“Fine,” she said, and started to stand up. “Good.”

“But listen,” he said. King knelt back down in front of them. Looked at him with eyes so green he understood how you could drown in someone and never want to come back. And why did he say it? Because he wanted to prove to her he wasn't a fool? Because he wanted her to stay? Because he wanted her to kneel here forever and touch his face the way she had knelt and touched John Henry?

“It's all right,” he said. “It's not wrong to be afraid.”

She smiled. “Victor. I'm not afraid. I'm committed. This is what committed looks like.”

“No, you're afraid,” Victor said. “I get it. I understand. I was afraid, too. But now I'm not. Watching Edie I knew. We have to stay. We have to win. And if they beat us, I understand that now, too. And I accept that. We're going to win.”

She smiled again, but there was something cold in her eyes that he didn't like at all. An ice in her voice as she said, “I know, Victor.”

“You don't have to be ashamed to be afraid, King. You just have to own it.”

She paused and he thought for a second she was going to slap him.

“Don't tell me what I have to own.”

“King, we can't leave. It doesn't matter if we're afraid. We have to stay. You have to feel the fear. You have to own it. Make it yours.”

She exploded. Went from calm to furious as quick as turning a coin on your finger. There she was, right in his face, screaming at him.

“Don't you tell me what I have to fucking own!”

Victor cringing from the force of her anger.

She was spitting in his face while John Henry said, “King. Quit yelling at the boy.”

“Are you fucking hearing me, Victor?”

And Victor saying, “Okay, okay, okay. I hear you.” Because where was there to go? Nowhere. He was in lockdown.

“I am committed! Am I getting through, you straight-ass motherfucker? Committed!”

“King, goddamn it, quit screaming at that boy!”

“Don't you
dare
tell me what I have to
own
. I own what I own! And what I have done—”

Suddenly she put a wrist to her mouth. Took a deep slashing breath.

Victor saying, “No, no, no.” Still leaning as far back as the chained-in pipes would allow.

She inhaled deeply again, her voice on the far edge of tears or no tears. “No, Victor.” And now she did touch him. Held his face between her hands and looked at him. Her eyes were wide, eyelashes sequined with tears.

“You don't have to back away from me,” she said.

“Where would I go?”

She laughed and ran a sleeve across her nose. Snuffled once loud and long.

“That's right,” she said, trying to smile. “Where would you go? You're stuck with me. Big bad King.”

She snuffled again and hawked from deep in her throat. She leaned over their knees and discreetly spat a yellow mess on the concrete at their feet and in that motion all was gone. It was as if she had sucked and spat the regret right from her chest. When she turned back she was all business.

“I'm sorry, Victor. I shouldn't have lost my temper. I shouldn't have put you in lockdown is what it comes down to. That was my mistake. I pushed you.”

And John Henry saying, “King.”

And Victor saying, “No. Nobody pushed me.”

“And I'm sorry for that. But now I'm taking you out. Non-violence is communication. Nonviolence is admitting your mistakes.”

And Victor saying, “No, no, no.” While King turned and said into her radio, “I need one for lockdown in front of the Sheraton.”

And Victor saying, “No. I want to be here. This is where I belong. With you and John Henry.”

Feeling something he did not want to feel, feeling the thing he went to bed feeling, the thing he woke up feeling, the thing he felt at his tent beneath the highway when he moved gravel from one spot to another with that stupid broom.

Bishop atop
the steps of the Sheraton, beside the flagpole, looked at the mess of people gathering around the hotel and he looked up at the city towers and the apartment blocks and thought of the way people do people in what they call daily life. All the calls and all the years. Domestics and murders. Gunpoint theft from the store where you buy your cigarettes and milk. Apartments where he found babies taking care of babies and roaches in the beds looking at him like they owned the place. Maybe they did own it because there sure as hell wasn't any adult sort of figure around who might be a bill payer of light and food.

Here came the PeaceKeeper growling in low gear. He had called it back from Pike Place Market where the idiot Mayor had sent it. God knows why. The PeaceKeeper climbing the steps of the Sheraton. Bumping over the low steps. Down below any semblance of order was gone. His line had broken and he saw clumps of black in the crowd like lumps of cancer in a radiated lung, the backs of his troops' hooded forms chopping through the crowd. Batons swinging freely. He watched as one cop swore and delivered a sideways kick that barely missed a black kid's skull, the cop's boot landing instead squarely between the boy's birdlike shoulder blades.

Sometimes the job wore on you. Riding the ride and thinking about your history with people and persons. Thinking of your various failures to be the man you were supposed to be. Thinking of the way people do and the numbness that wants to shrink-wrap your heart and stick it in the freezer and where does it come from and what are you supposed to do once it is there? How to be free of it?

If he was being honest what he wanted most was to follow his son into the wild blue fuck-all.

Because life seemed what?

Simple there.

He remembered a party when they were first married, something one of her painter friends had thrown, and when they walked in, he in jeans and a brown corduroy coat, she in a short black dress with thin straps like dark string across her brown skin, and not just one but every head had turned. He could almost feel the conversation come to a stop. But she liked the attention and he did, too. He liked looking across the room at her talking to a man, some man, any man, or men, these artists, students, and such, and him a young cop on the rise, and what did he have to worry about, she loved him, and he liked to watch the men as they watched her, and she aglow with the story, she there, too. Then a gulp from her drink and a glance across the room at him as if to say, You know this story, this one that I'm telling and this other one, too, this one that I'm acting, here in front of you, the party, you know this story, it's so old, and who's that anyway you're talking to, a redhead? well then, back to my story, but later, tonight, in bed, it will be you and me and not these fools, no, and not that one either.

It was not always her, people gathered around him, too. The confidence of his quiet manner which drew them in. The way he listened and didn't jabber on. He had the air of someone you could talk to. Air your doubts in a private setting. Ask him what he really thought. This was a man whose opinion was not influenced by the mob, a man familiar, it seemed, with the darker corners of the human soul, a man capable of both fairness and forgiveness.

But fuck, right now, he wanted to be somewhere nobody knew his name; somewhere nobody looked to him for answers, somewhere nobody expected him to know what to do. He wanted to be in a place that smelled of diesel exhaust, sweetly rotting fruit, meat cooking on a grill.

He wanted to walk streets whose names he didn't know and couldn't pronounce. Wanted to be somewhere nobody knew his preferred brand of breakfast cereal and boxer short. Not an American male, aged fifty-nine, widower to a wife of long patient looks, father to a disappeared son, police chief of a medium-sized American city tasked with corralling fifty thousand citizens in the street. The Chief. No, he didn't want it. Just an American. That's what he wanted. To be in a place where he was just an American—even if he was hated, or an invading force, or an expatriate, or a coward, he didn't care.

You get a call on domestic violence and you arrive to find the man beat his girl until she couldn't see. You ride along with the ambo to the trauma unit and the woman who can barely see, you ask does she want to press charges and she says, “You don't know. None of you know the way that man loves me.”

Bishop didn't want to know. Sometimes the world was too much. Too much blood and too much violence and too much gone-out-of-your-head-crazy to include in the human experience. You had to let it slip from your consideration of human life on the planet Earth. Didn't count. Except it did. No way to reckon it except the world was dark. The world wasn't hard. It was awful. The Cold War was over and the Darkness had begun. The one where some people were scared to ever fall, the so-called middle class; and the others, fallen already, were squeezed beyond measure. And policing? Well the days of community policing were over. The world was a bottleful of sparkling darkness and cops the ones charged with keeping the cork in while the rich shook and shook.

But what were you going to do? Resign? Quit? Bishop was the Chief of Police, not the President. No, you made your notes and you shook your head and you did your best while the coldness slipped in, while the vise jaws squeezed shut. Tutted your tongue and when your shift was done you had a few beers and a shot and one of the other cops said something low, something funny and sad and twisted that let you laugh away the craziness of what you had to do and see. He laughed. They all laughed. Because the closing of the eyes was not something he wanted and the remaining human was.

Bishop descending the steps to meet the PeaceKeeper where it now sat rumbling halfway up the Sheraton plaza. Bishop's radio erupting in chatter as he climbed onto the running board.

Bishop Bishop Bishop.

Tom-four-two.

Bishop Bishop Bishop.

Horses. The horses—

Down below black-clad demonstrators dragged a dumpster into the street and, after some arguing and effort, pushed it up and over onto its side. They soaked it with gasoline and lit it.

Someone tossed a Coke bottle filled with gasoline and the dumpster erupted.

They were burning paper and sticks and garbage. The signs that earlier in the day had carried another people's hopes for a better world. They broke the signs over their bent knees. They threw the pieces into the fire, whooping with a crazed delirium.

Blue flames licked at the wood. Charred and damp soot rose into the air and the way the flames seemed to eat the paper and the way the kids danced around the flames, jeering and celebrating, he just wanted to climb that thick rope of smoke up and on out of here.

A boy standing on top of the dumpster with his fist held righteous in the air.

A group of five flannel-clad demonstrators kicking trash cans into the street. The contents of a briefcase went flying into the flames.

Bishop's tanned face and the high color on his cheeks. His blue eyes gone small in his head. This was the face of a man trying to summit a peak about to grab his chest and pitch forward into the ice, never to move again, that's how much he disbelieved what was before his eyes.

An object whizzing for his head. Bishop ducked and a bottle bounced and rolled down the hood of the PeaceKeeper, unbroken. Disbelief like high-altitude death rattling in his chest because how and when had he ever believed this city was
his?

He watched the kid silently raise a fist and felt a blinding sense of bafflement and defeat. Who knew what circulated in his mind, this boy, who perhaps imagined himself in a stadium in Mexico City, the winner of a gold medal in the 1968 Olympics, standing not on a dumpster but on the highest podium, his best friend beside him wearing the ribbon and the bronze, tens of thousands of spectators watching them—and he was not white but black, Tommie Smith with John Carlos, barefoot on the podium, the gold medal around his neck as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played to the assembled crowd; his hand a fist of solidarity and strength raised to the indifferent world, a black glove raised straight from the shoulder.

“Look at that fucking kid,” the cop next to him on the running board of the 'Keeper said. The officer that earlier in the day he had busted from his horse. Officer Park. He was here on the PeaceKeeper beside Bishop, and how the hell did he end up here, who knew, that was exactly the kind of day it was. The peaceful protesters long gone and the citizens run amok, rioting and rampaging and he had once nearly broken his son's arm, done everything but force march him to the door and kick him out in the world. Burned his mother's books in front of the boy. Jesus god almighty, how could he have ever explained it wasn't the books which inspired the rage, it was loss. Nothing but loss and confusion and fear.

And it wasn't that Bishop had only scheduled nine hundred officers. No, his mistake, today, he thought was very simple. He had been too kind. He had allowed himself to trust these people. Kids spitting in the streets. These weren't peaceful protesters. These weren't decent people. These were punks and trash. He had mistakenly respected the truth of their position, treated them with a mercy they did not deserve. He had failed to see the true nature of the situation. All-out war in the streets of the city he was sworn to protect. War. And he was losing.

“Hey,” he said blandly to Park, “take that kid out.”

Park turned and raised his shotgun. Turned to his left and raised the gun and found the kid atop the dumpster in one fluid motion. Park shot in a direct line. The kid was across the intersection, a good sixty feet out, and yet the rubber bullet flew straight and true and took the kid in the stomach and dropped him in the street like he'd taken a punch to the gut. He went down like a bag of fertilizer, tumbling into the street, loose-limbed with the dumbest fucking look of surprise.

The daily meanness. The absolute petty nature of the day-to-day. It was like everyone's eyes had gone hard. Not his fellow cops. The people. Women and men, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. They weren't criminals. They were people with no light left anywhere on their person.

He didn't know what was worse, really, taking down a couple of rioting citizens or having to roll out to the suburbs and smile into plastic faces whose eyes had gone gray as ash. People out there talked, oh yes, they hung bright colors on their words of this and that, pretty bold ribbons of kindness and concern, but he looked in their eyes, poor folks and rich alike, especially rich, and it wasn't nothing coming out but the dead hot light of I don't give a crap, just keep it out of my yard.

The necessary numbness, the cold core of watchfulness, and the problem of remaining a person yourself, a person who cares. A person who feels. A person who does not hate.

And then, as it sometimes happens, this man of good faith was given a gift. There was his mistake standing in the crowd. Standing there in black with a white T-shirt rolled to the shoulders and her hair piled atop her head. A black gas mask covered her face, but he knew who it was. The girl from this morning. He saw her singular presence, the singular mistake that started it all. Dear God, thank you. And he thought, I will fix this. Praise the Lord in his infinite goodness, and forgive me if I was wrong. But I will fix this. I see my mistake and there she is and I will wipe this mistake from the books.

I will get this day back on track.

A dignity they did not deserve—that was my mistake.

Look, there she is, he thought, and the anger seemed not the point at all anymore. “Thank you,” he said because the sight of her—his mistake standing there in the crowd—had filled his heart with a simple gladness. With a deep-welled gratitude.

If he couldn't have his son, at least he could have his city back.