Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (3 page)

Reports were
coming in from all over the downtown, crackling through the radio clipped to his belt, and Chief Bishop knew he should be paying attention, but he felt distracted, a kind of tectonic drift of soul, as if something fundamental were loose inside, an oceanic plate going molten beneath the continent's weight.

Tom-four-two.

This is Command. Go ahead.

Approximately seven thousand southbound. We see chanting and signs. Over.

Bishop listening to the radio chatter on his belt and looking over the growing crowd from a spot twenty feet above their heads in a cherry picker requisitioned from Seattle City Light. He felt a fondness for these people, a kind of love-struck nostalgia for his city. Americans marching in the rain. Their faces, failed and flawed—they were the faces of a part of American life that was passing away, if not already gone, the belief that the world could be changed by marching in the streets. Bishop perched like a bird on a wire watching the crowd from the cherry picker. He extended the crane to get above the bare branches of November trees, thinking he had protected these people for thirty years—first as a beat cop, and then as a captain going to the community meetings twice a week, which was where not incidentally he had met his wife, on and on up through the ranks, working the job, investing himself, practicing the profession of policing as he best knew, and now here he was their Chief, their leader—and, now, why now did they see the need to come marching like lambs to the slaughter?

Four-one-three to Command.

Go ahead, Four-one-three.

Anarchist seen headed south.

Can you describe the anarchist?

Black hooded youth. Over.

Bishop in the bucket at the end of a crane wearing his Chief's blues with the five stars on the lapel. He kept himself fit, but he wasn't a gym rat. He preferred to be outside—fishing, camping, diving—and after a summer spent diving alone in Mexico, hiking alone in the Cascades, he had a deep tan, a healthy glow about him that had absolutely nothing to do with his mental state or inner condition of the soul. His hair was sandy brown, going gray at the temples, his eyes a watery blue behind his out-of-fashion overly large glasses, and he held a radio in one hand and a megaphone in the other. He brought the megaphone to his mouth and clicked it on:

HEY YOU. YOU CAN'T PEE THERE. YES YOU. MOVE IT.

Bishop knew his son was out there somewhere in the ragged crowd. His sweet skinny ebony son, missing since August 1996. Three years. His son who had graduated from high school at age sixteen, part of an accelerated program where they jumped you grades because of your high IQ, and when you finished early you jumped your home because of your asshole dad. Or so Bishop supposed. Who knew.

His son left when he was just sixteen, disappeared into the world, and some part of Bishop's memory still insisted on remembering him as that skinny sixteen-year-old sitting on his bed with his Jordan posters hanging on the walls.

“Electricity,” his son said, gesturing around his room, books stacked in piles on every available surface. “Do you ever think about what electricity means?”

And Bishop, thumbing idly through the odd titles, said, “Sure I do, son.”

“I flip the switch and the lights come on.”

“Son, go to college,” Bishop said, putting the book down. “We can afford it. Join a group. Hand out flyers.”

“I flip the switch and the lights go off. Where does it all come from?”

Bishop and Suzanne's only son. Suzanne's son, in fact, whom Bishop had inherited when they married eight years ago, so, not his son by biology or birth, but did that make the loss, the crush of longing, any less dense? He felt like he was sixty meters below and falling still.

“Go to classes,” Bishop said. “Meet a girl.”

His son—missing since August 1996, a little less than a year after Suzanne's death—saying, “Water. I twist the handle and it comes streaming out. No buckets, no pails, no trudging to the well in the ashy light of dawn. Anytime I want it…boom! There it is.”

And Bishop saying, “The ashy what? Listen, college is the key. We can afford it.”

“Water in the kitchen. Water in the bathroom. Water in the garden hose.”

“Go to college. Meet a girl. Get a job.”

“Dad, are you even listening to me? Water. I twist a gold handle and it comes leaping out as if it had spent its whole life waiting for my sweet touch.”

Bishop paused. He saw them there in his mind's eye, two men, blue-eyed father and brown-eyed son, breathing and talking in the son's room, and him so blind, so alive and blind to the intensity of his son, of what it meant to live as a brown man, a black man. And which was his son, he didn't entirely know. They had never really talked about it, one among a million things, and why should we, he is my son and I am his father and he, a black man or brown man, but a young man and me, his father, a grown man, and I love my boy. Me, a man who only wanted somehow to protect this younger, more vulnerable version of himself. Tell me what else is there to it?

“Son,” Bishop said, “suffering is everywhere. I see it every day. And if you wear your heart on your sleeve, the world will just kill you cold.”

“What's that mean?”

“Stop caring so goddamn much.”

And if you were counting, Bishop thought, go ahead and add this conversation, which occurred one blistering summer afternoon exactly two weeks before his son took off, to the long list of his failings as a flawed human being, his failure as a father. Because, truthfully, Bishop had recognized the thing in his adopted son for what it really was—the fever of grief. It was a brokenhearted rage that he, too, felt slamming around his chest. Suzanne. Yes, the boy missed his mother and what did Bishop want to say? He wanted to say, Life's a cruel thing, son. Give it enough time and it will take back everything you have ever loved.

Three years his son had been gone. Suzanne—it seemed she had left just yesterday.

Four-one-three to Command.

Go ahead, Four-one-three.

We are a soft platoon here, Command. Permission to go hats and bats?

The Chief brought the megaphone to his mouth and then lowered it. What had he missed in the world that had brought these people into the streets? He watched them pass and felt a dip in his mood, the familiar phlegmy despair, because what kind of revolutionaries were these? They didn't wire themselves with explosives, strap ball bearings and nails to their ribs. They didn't detonate themselves in a crowded marketplace at noon.

No.

These were children who put their bodies in the street, who chained their bodies together and waited for the cops to come—his cops with their batons and their tear gas and their pepper spray.

Eighth and Seneca we see—

Three-five-one to Command. Over.

Bottle in a brown paper bag. Be advised
.

He had scheduled nine hundred on-duty officers. Now they were looking at upward of fifty thousand protesters in the street and four hundred delegates—four hundred delegates from one hundred and thirty five countries who may or may not speak English—to safely shepherd from the Sheraton Hotel to their meetings at the convention center.

Nine hundred on-duty cops. Fifty thousand demonstrators, maybe more. It was only three blocks up Sixth Ave, and yet these streets were impassable. They might as well have built a wall in the intersection. He would have to clear the whole damn thing to get those delegates through to the other side. And how the hell was he going to do that? These streets were shut down.

Bishop watching the crowd, watching his line of officers and thinking about his son, when a voice cut through the noise. It sounded irritated, harried, on the verge of out of control.

Bishop, this is MACC, do you copy?

Chief Bishop recognized the voice as belonging to the Mayor and he imagined the Mayor there at the Multi-Agency Command Center, surrounded by FBI, by State Patrol, Secret Service, by all the agency men. The Mayor in a suit, talking tough and waving a cigar. Even though, to Bishop's knowledge, the man did not smoke.

Anarchist seen headed south with flammable accelerant. Advise. Over.

Please stay off the

Is Bishop. Repeat.

Not under control. We need

This is MACC. Bishop, what is your situation? Over.

Repeat Bishop, what is your situation at the Sheraton?

The MACC was the new two-story complex halfway up the hill, the nerve center and brain trust for the officers in the street. The central control room was lined with monitors relaying information back from the more than two hundred cameras installed all over the city and where Bishop himself, as chief of police, probably should have been, but he wanted to be out here in the street. Where police belonged.

Bishop brought his radio to his mouth. What the hell was the Mayor doing at the MACC? He wasn't a tactical director. He was a politician. A fucking PR man with wingtips and a firm handshake.

Mr. Mayor, sir. Our situation at the Sheraton is stable. I am seeing three to four thousand protesters in our area. But they are peaceful. Repeat they are peaceful. Over.

Bishop, the delegates. They need to be at the convention center. Where are the delegates? I got Secret Service breathing—

Bishop keyed his radio.

Mr. Mayor, the delegates are safe. I have instructed them to stay inside the hotel.

Sixth and Seneca. Over.

Please stay off the command.

Bishop, I need that street clear for the opening ceremonies. We need to get the delegates to the convention center. Do you copy?

Seattle Command, this is Three-five-one. 11-40 at Eighth and Seneca.

Bishop's radio hung in front of his mouth like a forgotten forkful of supper. 11-40. That was a request for an ambulance. And then the Mayor's voice was so clear a shiver went spilling dark and cold down the Chief's spine.

Bishop.

Sir?

I don't care what you do to get it done.

Sir?

Bishop, clear that fucking street.

Victor marched
and moved with the crush, nodding his head to the syncopated beat. He checked out the hippie chicks in rain-soaked fairy wings, the punk chicks with pierced lips, and he laughed and did a sort of high-necked slouch strutting and bouncing down the street. His jeans were belted around his skinny waist and the extra loop of leather wagged loose from the buckle like a tongue.

He was high as shit.

For three years he had wandered the world and he remembered seeing burning cars on the streets of Managua; he remembered a man in India who would not eat; he remembered a line of women in their bowler hats and long skirts standing atop a hill on the high border between Bolivia and Peru, each with a stone in their hand silently waiting for the police. Protest. Globalization. Victor carried the two lines deep within him. He saw the secret and not-so-secret threads that connected his body in the here and now to worlds three continents away.

The dark sky above him like the dark sky above Shanghai where he had hardly seen the sun, people walking with surgical masks as if that would protect them from the fleets of particulate matter flying their skies like endless flocks of blackbirds bound for the rich nations of the West.

Victor pierced by clues and impressions gathered from the wind like pollen. It was like a radio dial between stations, the way they chanted and cried. The overlapping voices like whispers of other realms—come in, London, come in, New York, come in, Paris, France. Yes? Give China back her sun.

Doing the strut past Banana Republic, past Old Navy and the Gap. Beneath Niketown he stopped. The lights were on and people were in the stores doing their holiday shopping. People were drifting leisurely through the aisles, comparing prices. What were they doing behind that glass? Buying
pants?
He hammered against the window with a closed fist. A woman who was placing folded garments in a bag looked at him with a face like murder.

Whatever.

Trying to sell to a union man—that had been stupid.

He was smarter than that.

Since then Victor had made three more attempts. He tried a girl in a sundress who, when he offered, looked at him like he was diseased.

He tried an old man banging a goatskin drum. The old man closed his eyes, hands going full tilt, lost in the rhythm of his own making, and the way he smiled Victor figured he was already stoned.

He tried a kid in black boots and suspenders wearing a Rage Against the Machine shirt. The kid showed him a large X razored into the back of his hand. Victor had said, “Okay, but what about the weed,” and the kid just shook his head and told him to go fuck himself, he was straight-edge. Victor almost threw the weed at him, bounced it off his ugly fucking mug, but then he thought better of it and moved off, shaking his head, sliding the weed back into his zippered pack.

If only someone would buy a goddamn bag. At least an
eighth
.

People were looking at him funny, and he knew why. The pair of loose-tongued Nikes. Yeah, white Nikes with a red silhouette of a black man who could fly. Go ahead and look. He wanted that, he needed that, the edge, the distance, the fuck you. Wearing a pair of sweatshop shoes to a sweatshop protest—well, he wanted to say, what the fuck do you think you're wearing? I wear my Nikes and they remind me I am small and the world is large and who are you to judge me for a thing like that? The world is large and I am small. The first thing he thought when he woke up. The thing he had thought at her grave just two days ago. Four years to the date. The last thing he thought every night when he went to bed in his tent with the waves bellowing and the cars chugging like ships passing through the port, every night since he had returned to Seattle three months ago, returned to his father's house on the hill, busted the latch he had always busted, crawled in the basement window he had always crawled into (or out of), and retrieved the shoes in their box from the closet of his room.

So hell yeah, go ahead and look, people. They're my lucky sneaks.

And then he saw them. The perfect boomer couple. Victor decided to go for the woman, she was wearing gold earrings in some Native design, attractive and kind of hip-looking in a funky hat. She was with her husband and a little girl who was stuffing carrots in her mouth.

Victor sidled up and went into a monologue, improvised on the spot, about marching for Native rights.

The woman's eyes lit up. She began nodding enthusiastically, wisps of brown hair lifting in the breeze. “We're marching with the Nature Conservancy,” she announced, something mildly apologetic in her voice. “Working on the turtles.”

“Freedom riders in '64,” the husband said.

“Wow,” Victor said, “far-out.”

The note of pride in the guy's voice contained something Victor suspected he was supposed to relate to, being a brown man with two thick braids, but he couldn't guess what.

“Listen,” Victor said, trying to read their faces, feeling this might be his last and only shot at making some cash.

“You guys are some pretty cool heads,” he said. “Should I call you Mary Jane?”

Blank looks all around. He searched desperately for the perfect word.

“Reefer. Do you guys puff the reefer?”

“Wait a second,” the man said. “What are you trying to do?”

“Grass? Dope?”

“Are you trying to—?”

“Skunk? Dank? Pack a pipe of the kind bud?”

“Are you trying to sell me marijuana?” the man said.

Victor smiling huge, clapped once, glad they could finally connect. “That's right,” he said. “That's it, exactly.”

“Jesus Christ,” the man said.

The lady picked up her little girl and put her on her hip like a sack of groceries.

The husband was suddenly not so friendly. He was irate. Righteous-looking. “They put stoned Indians in jail is where they put you,” he said. “You know that?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Victor said, “I read something about that once.” He back-stepped into the heat of the crowd, looking at the little girl still shoveling carrot sticks into her mouth like trees into a mill. He wanted to tell her: Don't grow up. Nothing but assholes.

They were mad and happy and Victor, he felt suddenly tired. Flat-out exhausted. He climbed a bench and sat with his feet on the seat, letting the people flow around him, feeling low, the self-pity and bile building in his throat. Fucking protest march.

Was that what you called this shit anyway?

A protest march?

When you take to the street to chant the chants, to stomp your feet and rhyme the rhymes?

And all the energy you spend, all the outrage and disgust, is not for you, no, not some sort of personal draining of the pus-filled guilt, but an expression of your compassion for a sad desperate people in a country far away?

Some expression of your compassion for that war-torn country whose citizens are just skin and bones, and who, you imagine, weep long into the night cursing God for a scrap of bread?

A protest march—that's what we call this, right?

Or maybe they're crying because their children make T-shirts in an export-zone sweatshop and yesterday there was an accident—the place burned to the ground and no one had the technology on hand to identify one pile of human ash from another.

Or maybe their son was shot in the head and dumped in a muddy hole and floured with lime and buried beneath a shallow mound of bulldozed earth.

Maybe it was HIV and they couldn't afford the drugs.

Wasn't that what it was called? When you called some friends and made a sign with colored paper and scissors and glue to express your solidarity with the charred bodies of children?

A protest march?

“Sometimes,” Victor said to nobody in particular, “I feel like I'm living on the fucking moon.”

“I know. I mean that's why we're here, right?”

He turned to find a girl sitting next to him.

She took his hand nonchalantly as if they were brother and sister, Christmas morning, circa 1989, waiting for the orgy of paper and presents. “Can't you feel it? All these people out here together, marching for, you know, justice?”

Victor nodded. He was sort of noticing her hair. Noticing the way she was sitting next to him on the bench. She was pretty in a sophomore year of college kind of way with a button nose and a pink bandanna knotted peasant-style in her corn-silk hair.

She noticed him noticing.

“Don't you have one?”

She touched her hair. Apparently she thought he was checking out her bandanna. When he didn't say anything, she undid the knot. She unwound the bandanna, shook her hair free, and offered it to him.

“That's all right,” he said, and touched his forehead where his own bandanna held back his braids. She smiled and shrugged and together they sat and watched the crowd.

On an impulse, just the good feeling of it, he leaned into her ear.

“Let's get high.”

Victor felt an immediate ice. She was still sitting there, but it was a certain thing you could sense, a withdrawing into the self as if a switch had been flipped.

“It's good shit,” he said, and reached for the half a joint in the pocket of his down jacket.

She actually stepped off the bench.

He bent and lit the roach. Made his body a cave in which a match could flame, and by god it did. He nearly cheered. He shook the match and took a great gasping drag. He held it in his lungs a beat, and then exhaled sweet smoke that zipped across the heads of the crowd like a little runaway train careening off a bridge.

The girl was just standing there looking at him. People were passing in the carnival behind her.

“You can't do that here,” she said.

He offered it to her. “Don't worry about the cops,” he said.

“No. Look, you don't understand. This is a drug-free area.”

He took another drag and laughed smoke. “This is a protest march.”

“Where'd you hear that?” she said. “This isn't a protest march. This is a direct action.”

“Whatever,” he said. He hit the roach again. “What's the difference?”

She stepped forward, put one foot onto the bench, plucked the joint from his lips, and then flicked it to the ground and crushed it into the pavement with her boot.

“Fucking seriously, dude.”

In the beam of that cool knowingness he suddenly felt less sure of himself. How could he ever have mistaken her for nothing more than a sexy undergrad? She was a radical, a revolutionary, and he suddenly wanted to be as far away from her as humanly possible.

Her bandanna. The pink flap of cotton which had been holding back her hair. She pressed it into his hand and closed his fist around it.

“Trust me,” she said, beginning to move off, “you'll want it later.”

Victor, frozen to the bench, dumbfounded, watched her go, the bodies moving past him, sat there mute and scared, letting the noise wash over him in waves.

He wanted to call out to her. He wanted to apologize, to throw away his weed forever and call her back.

He looked at the pink bandanna in his hand. He wanted to call out, “I'll need it for what later?”

Which is when he heard the man's voice. The pissed-off Freedom Rider husband saying loudly, “That's him, Officer. That's him, right there.”

Victor turned. The husband was talking to a cop on a horse. The cop was sitting tall. Following the husband's finger pointing Victor's way. There was something wrong with his face. A seriously nasty burn running along the right side of his jaw. And the look on the cop's messed-up face? God bless him if he didn't look like he'd just won the lottery.