by Sunil Yapa
Then anywhere could rightly be called home because you took a place and made it yours.
Goddamn right.
Find his boy, then, and wrangle up a couple of horses, a herd of sheep. Sit on the porch with a can of pop in his hand like a silver dipper of ditch water and the two of them watching their herd come grazing over the hills like puffs of cotton.
Was that what you called them? A herd of sheep? No. A flock. A flock of sheep to shear come spring.
For a week the Chief had known his son was here. A routine sweep of the homeless in preparation for the various foreign dignitaries—really it was just for Clinton—had turned him up. They didn’t arrest the boy. Just a discreet call placed quietly to his office. Yes, of course he had known Vic was here for a week, had even gone to find him. He had asked the officer who first called him, a beat cop who worked the neighborhood beneath the Alaskan Way Viaduct, to show him the encampment. He was a father, after all. He would bring his son home.
And so Bishop had found himself late one night after a shift following this young officer as he negotiated the blocky half-dark beneath the underpass. The blue tarps hung with clothesline, the crappy tents huddled in the grit with the trucks a constant pounding overhead like a galloping migraine. The cars green-bodied flies that whirred and buzzed above their heads. The concrete hollows lit by firelight and the blue hissing of the cookstoves. The low murmur of voices which disappeared beneath the sound of the nearby waves smashing against the seawall. He was frightened, and of course he said nothing, did not show this, how he was suddenly frightened of the dark, this dark, frightened by what might be out there and frightened by the sudden depth of the world and all he did not know. His son lived down here? In the darkness beneath however many tons of unstable concrete and rebar? He did not want this new knowledge of the world. He would stop at the first lighted corner and drop it in the nearest trash can. He would climb the hill and leave it on the street for someone to collect. Maybe as he walked it would simply fall from him as if this knowledge could be shed like dirt-stained clothes on the way to the shower.
The smile he wore like a clip-on tie because he wanted to give the appearance of friendliness, because these were his citizens, he was the people’s police, and yet they were the homeless and the mentally ill and my son lives down here and the mentally disturbed who belong in asylums, but do we even have asylums in America anymore, weren’t those for the fucked-up nations of the fucked-up world, weren’t those for paranoia and schizophrenia, and don’t show your fear because he wanted to know in which tent his son lived, but he did not want his officer to have to shoot anybody.
The beat cop stopped in front of a cheap-looking nylon tent which Bishop recognized immediately. It was his, purchased however many years ago and forgotten in some closet, except his son had not forgotten because here was where Victor was living: in his father’s tent bought five years ago for a fishing trip they never made. He must have broken into the house and found it in a closet. When did he break into the house? He was in my house? Bishop removing his cap in a gesture almost of deference as though at a grave, at an accident, something equally real, equally incomprehensible, the emotions running across his face as he stood and looked, as he stood and thought and remembered. He was in the house. Victor. My son.
The tent was empty.
All around him, the encampment made its noises of the domestic. The settling in. The eating of dinner, the howling of a drunk, and the beat cop saying he was just going to go check on some folks and asking Bishop if he was cool for a minute.
The Chief of Police saying, “Yeah, I’m cool.”
The tent as empty as the house as empty as Bishop now felt.
He gestured to the pilot. He had seen enough.
“Bring her down,” he said.
“Bishop,” the Mayor said. “I’m calling the Governor. We need the National Guard.”
What a panicky little political machine, thought Bishop.
“Sir, you don’t want to call them. You, sir, are the one that will take the blame. And I would be sorry to see such a promising political career cut short at the knees.”
The Mayor looked at him and then turned away, a greenish cast to his face.
Bishop looking out the bubble at the massing crowds threatening to overwhelm his city. He heard the unmistakable ring of authority in his voice—it was how he led his troops, it was, in some ways, how he’d won Suzanne, it was, finally, he thought, how he recognized himself, when he sometimes became afraid.
16
The PeaceKeeper motored through the streets, climbing curbs.
Ju could feel the grumble of the diesel engine all the way up through her spine, the coughy asynchronous roar ascending like exhaust through the rubber soles of her booted feet, a trembling vibrato in the deep tissue of her thighs, and she held tight to the rail to avoid being thrown.
She ducked when they hit a trash can and cups and cardboard went flying.
A garble of static from her radio. Then,
South on Seneca. Anarchist seen headed south on Seneca in possession of a flamethrower device.
Four-one-three. Did not copy that. Repeat. Did you say…? A flamethrower?
Repeat. A flamethrower. She appears to be using her mouth.
Ju looked at the radio and thought that was probably the stupidest thing she had heard in her eight years of policing. She shook her head. Finally, they stopped at the market. The engine wound down to an idle and Ju stood on the running board, feet planted wide, and began loading her six-shot semiautomatic projectile launcher, her GL6, or—in the words of the civilian crowd passing before her—her tear gas gun.
MACC had stationed the PeaceKeeper at Pike Place Market. They had called over the radio and said the crowd was rushing the market, arming themselves with fruit and other projectiles.
She only knew she was kitted up for civil war in the streets and people were freaking out.
But Ju? She was calm.
A man was building a pyramid of tomatoes under the overhang of the market. The neon lettering above him reflecting in the wet puddles along the walkway and she felt a tingling as she slid each round into its cylinder, locked it home, and spun to the next empty chamber, a tip-tap raindrop drumming on the canvas skin of her heart because what was a tear gas round but a genie in a bottle? Once free of her gun it would no longer be under her control, but captive to the vagaries of chaos, loose in the crowd—the milling, stamping crowd of feet and legs—and the gas—the powdered particulate—free to blow wherever the wind chose. Not in her control. Not under her domain.
Yes, violence was a genie in a bottle, even state-sanctioned, legal violence, because she knew the primal law, the lead-lined equation which was the foundation of all that happened on the street: if you want to carry a gun, you better be prepared to pull a gun; and if you pull a gun, you had better be prepared in heart, body, soul, and mind to fire a gun. To kill. Why else carry the freaking thing unless you were prepared for that? An empty threat was worse than none at all. And an officer unprepared or unwilling to kill? Just another walking target, another boob in blue and black.
PeaceKeeper idling. Ju loading her gun, foot astride the running board, feeling the vibrations running through her leg and up her hip. Concentrating and working carefully—perhaps working too closely, a little too fully absorbed in the task of round to chamber, the lock and spin, because when Park appeared at her elbow she was taken completely by surprise.
“What you say, JuJu?”
His face was hooded, smiling a devilish little smile beneath his black poncho as if he knew he had caught her unawares.
“Park,” she said.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to spook you.”
She gave him an up and down disdainfully as if clocking a staggering driver on Ventura Boulevard who stepped from his Porsche, breath so laden with bourbon it could be considered a flammable substance, to say, “Well, I might have had one drink with dinner.”
“Only thing you’re spook
ing in that getup,” she said, “is your mother’s memory of the sweet little boy you never were.”
He grinned. “I was a good boy,” he said. “Greatest boy ever, according to my mother’s birthday cards.”
“Hey, Park,” she said, “where’s your horse?”
He said nothing, but the look on his face was enough—he was a boy. A thirty-five-year-old boy with a fucked-up face. Something about him that was pure resentment. A pouting sulky little boy who had been wronged by the world.
“It’s all over the radio,” she said.
“What is?”
“How you harassed some kid with your horse. How the Chief intervened and busted you back to the MACC. That’s what.”
Park smiled and leaned in. “Ju,” he said, “don’t get too excited. You hear about the FBI report?”
Beneath the hood of the rain slicker he did not look right. Was he sick?
“Park, you’re supposed to be back at the command center. I heard the order myself. So I say again, what are you doing here?”
“The FBI report, Ju. Did you read it?”
She looked down at the GL6 in her hands. She noticed she was nervously fiddling with the last of the tear gas rounds. She slid it home and locked it tight.
“I read it, yeah. The Feds put the risk at low to medium.”
“Correct.” He stepped forward and let his hand come to rest gently on her shoulder, behind the gun. “But the risk of what?”
“The crowd going violent.”
“Is that what it said?”
“Yes, that’s what it said.”
“No. Incorrect.”
“Park, what is the point of—”
He stopped her with a raised finger.
“The risk of a terrorist attack,” he said. “Low to medium.”
“You’re freaking crazy.”
He laid his hand now on the gun itself.
“Young lady, you should really read your assessments more carefully. The FBI estimates, minimum, four to five officer deaths.”
He was close to her now, breathing in her face. Talking to her eyeballs basically, a trick her ex-husband sometimes liked to pull, sweet idiot.
“Officer deaths, Ju,” he said. “Four to five. Minimum.”
He was full of shit. He was so full of shit it was coming out of his ears. And yet, what was it, standing here on the PeaceKeeper, that caused her to shudder? What was this premonition she felt?
“Minimum,” Park said. “Better believe. Somebody is going to catch a bullet.”
A loneliness brought on by the rain? Some dim intuition of looming disaster? Perhaps some nameless form—thought to have drowned—rising from the deep wells of memory. The nightmare images from a war and a home she knew only through the fog of half-told stories barely begun before they disappeared like the people they were about. Guatemala. A place she both missed and did not miss. A place she both knew and did not know. A home she had never really had and yet longed for regardless.
“Four to five officer deaths,” he said, counting them off on his fingers. “One. Two. Three. Four.” He put his finger on Ju’s left breast, laid it lightly against the bright brass plate that carried her name.
“Five,” he said, pointer finger pressed delicately above her heart, thumb cocked in the shape of a trigger.
“Boom boom, Ju,” he whispered, close enough now to kiss her. “Boom boom. Your family gathers in a dimly lit room.”
17
Gooks. Slant-eyed motherfuckers. I can smell a gook-joint from two miles away. The vitriol, the way Park’s father’s face would crumple in bitterness as if fragile enough to shatter, the way he would suck his teeth and narrow his eyes, Park didn’t understand that kind of hatred. How a person could live with that beating like a living thing inside him.
Park’s pops had been a POW early on in the war, two years living in a hole eating white worms, blind scuttling bugs, whatever he could scrape from the mud, and Park supposed that entitled him. Who knew how the darkness had deformed him, what hunger and fear had done to his father’s soul. It was odd though, because apart from the alcohol-fueled violence, only in this was his father so off, so strange. Gooks. His voice stretched thin as if traveling a wire which originated from the dampness of that dark hole and terminated somewhere in his trembling brain stem. Gooks, his voice so tortured and weird. Weird—that was the word because in moments like this it was as if his father were not his father, but would always remain that man alone in a hole looking for a bug to eat.
That and his laugh while sucking beers at the VFW and the subject of work came up. Eventually, it always did. What a weird laugh uttered from his father then. It was a laugh that said my job is not union. I am not allowed the privileges of the union because I work a crap detail as a security guard and we are not unionized. But it was a laugh that contained knowledge of what union meant—that his mother and father had both been union. That he would be union, sure, if he could, but that wasn’t his job. But his job was his job and it paid the bills and he could hold his head up. It wasn’t McDonald’s for Christ’s sake. But it was amused, too, a complicated irony because the laugh said this is the world, and I accept this fact, I am not the only one in tough times, I am not the only one working but still poor, which wouldn’t be so terrible were it not for the indignity, for the shame, for being hungry, for the sheer fucking impossibility of surviving. A laugh which said, I used to be union, but the country has changed, hasn’t it? That was the bitterness in the laugh. I used to have a union job, the laugh said, but the factory went ahead and moved, didn’t it? South of the border, the laugh said. East of the sun, the laugh said. And we fought for what exactly? The laugh said, I ain’t the only one, but that don’t mean it ain’t a crap deal neither. And who heard his father’s laugh and understood? Well, anyone within earshot who was listening heard it and understood, except for the times there was only his son, only Timmy Park listening to his old man laugh and curse, which, truth be told, were many. Because Timmy loved his father and there were not many others on earth who could say the same of the man.
Park watched a woman in a lemon-colored slicker stoop to tie her shoe, thinking, in fact, there were a lot of people who couldn’t stand his father’s hateful guts.
“Hey Ju.”
“Don’t want to hear it, Park.”
“Ju, what the fuck is with that car?”
He had his baton out and was tapping it against his knee.
“Are they filming us?”
“Park.”
“Are they fucking filming us?”
He unclasped the holster of his pepper spray.
“I’m going to check them out. See who they are.”
“Park, Chief said—”
“See who the fuck they are and why they’re filming me.”
“Park!”
He stopped.
“Take it easy,” she said. “If you refuse to return to the MACC, at least just look from here. Chief said if there was nothing immediately threatening to take it easy.”
Park looked at the car. He looked at Ju—telling him what to do for the second time today. It was all on account of the Chief busting him back like that in front of everybody. The Chief shouldn’t have done it. It was a question of respect. The ultimate social law, the law of respect. In some ways a large offense done with respect was more easily overlooked than a small offense done with disrespect. Get busted smoking a blunt on the stoop of your building—an offense, sure, but one Park would probably let slide if you nodded when you saw him coming and put it out. Get busted smoking a blunt and lean back and let a big sweet reefer cloud go drifting over his head while smirking—that was taking your life into your hands. Not because of the blunt, but because you were disrespecting him, disrespecting the badge and uniform, disrespecting his authority. When you were on the street, respect was the currency by which you lived or died. Cops and criminals alike. And the more he thought about it, the angrier he got. Because who was Ju to tell him what to do?
“Wake the fuck up, Ju. We’re on our own out here.”
He pulled his arms free of his rain jacket and draped it over his shoulder, covering his badge number and name. So pretty when she was pissed at him, he wanted to what? He wanted to put ice cream in the angle of her hip and eat it with his teeth and tongue. He stepped into the street.
She grabbed her helmet from the top of the PeaceKeeper and hopped off the running board to follow him, saying, “This is crap, Park.”
And Park, well, Ju following him. That almost made him feel better.
Almost.
He rapped the car window with his baton. Knock knock knock against the glass.
“Down,” he said.
Two men sitting in the car. Caucasian. Age approximately fifty-five to sixty. Possible homosexuals. Not that it mattered. But everything mattered. Every stray scrap of information. You didn’t know what was going to matter on a day like this. You had to pay attention. A late-model Honda Accord in robin’s-egg blue, rust spots climbing from the wheel wells like mold. A handheld digital recorder was pressed against the glass of the closed window. What were they filming down here at Pike Place Market? This was about five blocks from anything going on. Maybe they were getting ready to film? Maybe they were set up here so far from the action because they were planning something? Sometimes you had to stop a thing from happening before it even happened.
Again the baton rapping against the glass.
“I said down.”
The driver nodded. Professional-like. He passed the camera across the seat to his friend or whatever and rolled his window halfway down.