Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

by Sunil Yapa

  The shot and the way he blindly reached, arm pointing and falling back. The airy bubbles of blood that sent his last breaths into the world.

  The bar paused at the top of the arc.

  In the mirror of the window she saw her own reflected face staring back at her.

  When she was thirteen she had watched the Brixton riots on TV. She didn’t know what it was at the time but her mother’s boyfriend, who had hooked up an illegal cable box, didn’t go to work for a week, and they sat on the couch, drinking beers forbidden by her mother, and watched London burn. Sat on the couch next to each other while the hot summer sun baked the yard where tires collapsed and gathered rain, but it was cool and dark in the trailer and they were drinking beers and the beers so cold. Fresh from the fridge where he pulled and cracked and wiped a lip of white foam and grinned.

  So cold her teeth hurt in that good kind of way.

  All those people so angry and he didn’t have an answer for what made them that way, just said, “The cops shot someone’s mom,” and then drank and grinned and she didn’t need to ask because it was written into his face and his body and the way he moved through this stupid trailer and this stupid town, she would burn it down, too.

  Sitting on the couch watching people burn and loot and smash, the gasoline vapors of whatever thing she was had found their image in the world and she moved from the couch to the floor, this thirteen-year-old girl in front of the TV with her cutoffs and her long white legs curled beneath her like earrings of silver or steel. She felt the heat baking her face and the gasoline wetting her hair and she looked into their faces and the thing that was inside her cried out in recognition. Half-drunk on the floor and her mother’s boyfriend doing something in his jeans behind her and calling her name.

  A faraway shouting, a rhythmic chanting, a siren singing somewhere up there in the daylight above the well.

  She brought the crowbar down, swinging hard. It crashed into the window with a rolling, sickly, solid boom. Her reflected chest split with spiderwebs. She raised it again, swinging, and let it fall, driving it into the window with all her force. She felt the solid weight, the crush of tempered metal on glass, as the clawhead leapt into the window. She took two steps back. There was nothing in her mind save the window and the bar and her wish to utterly annihilate that fractured beautiful green-eyed fool looking back at her.

  No thoughts in her mind, just a cold mechanical rage. The window imploded. Glass laminate raining across the potted plants, the wooden desks, the smooth stone floor.

  There was a gaping hole in the window, a ragged crater at the center of her chest. The line of people who were protecting the bank window moved back in alarm.

  A wailing started on the far corner. A human wailing.

  In some part of her heart she wished it were a cop. But it was not.

  She turned to see a young girl kneeling on the corner, maybe sixteen or seventeen, blood running down her face. She was crying.

  “Please come help us,” she said. “The cops are going crazy. They’re beating a man in the street.”

  King was beside her and did not want to be.

  The girl was crying and having a hard time just making sentences. And King, what did she care? She knew she needed to leave. The girl was on her knees in the street. At the foot of a traffic light saying, “We didn’t do anything. And they just went crazy. Please. Please come help us. We need more people. We didn’t do anything.” And then she was crying again and King couldn’t understand what she was saying because the girl was sobbing in her arms and King was holding her and waiting for her brain to tell her feet to move. They weren’t going to just start moving on their own.

  Move, she told them.

  The black-hooded monks headed for another target and King standing stupidly in the street, holding the bleeding girl, while she stood waiting for her brain or her feet or her heart to make a move while the cops came a-marching and the explosions rocked over their heads and a girl sobbed beneath a traffic light, which was going from red to green to yellow and back to red again and somewhere a siren like birds singing over the sea.

  35

  Officer Tim Park lived in a one-bedroom studio in Ballard where he slept on a futon that turned into a bed, or was it a bed that turned into a futon, he didn’t know and it didn’t matter because he rarely slept, and when he did, barely managed to shed his uniform before falling heavy to a sleeping bag, exhaustion being the price for the relief of dreamless sleep.

  Most nights he drank and then crashed, the TV throwing light across his face, and the futon, and the near-empty apartment where the only thing he had hung on the wall was a set of photos he’d brought with him from Oklahoma in heavy frames and glass. They showed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in black and white.

  Before and after.

  He didn’t like the photos; they bothered him, the face of the building blown half open, insides gaping. You could look right into the blasted interior. The contents of offices—charred desks, overturned chairs, phones still connected—just hanging in empty space like something torn out by the roots. Shredded and burnt office paper drifting like confetti.

  He had been there that day, of course, one of the first responders, but still those photos looked to him like something utterly foreign. Something he could not relate to, even though he had been there, like pictures he’d seen on the news of places like Venezuela or the Philippines when an entire hillside gave way and the people and their cooking stoves and their dogs and their TVs and their kids went sliding into the mud-slicked abyss. More than anything the photos reminded him of the moon, and he often stood there alone, home after a shift, the lights off, stood there alone just looking; 168 people died in that blast, more than 600 injured, stood there alone in the darkness with a beer in his hand and his shirt unbuttoned. And if his hand went to the scar, if his fingertips softly traced the smooth flesh, idled along the density of that patch of wealed skin where no hair grew, did he notice? Did he notice his own hand touching his face as he contemplated his photos in total bewilderment?

  He wanted to know: How did they allow that to happen? And every day since. How did they allow that to happen?

  Not here. Because here he was taking care of that. On top of the PeaceKeeper tracking the crowd over the barrel of his shotgun loaded with rubber bullet shells and laying the violent ones down.

  The crowd was furious. Objects, small objects, were flying over his head, ball bearings and golf balls and water bottles. He was standing on top of the ’Keeper and Ju was keeping them back with the baton, but they were at his feet, screaming. A plastic bottle bounced off his helmet and how the fuck were they going to get out of here?

  He heard Ju on the other side of the ’Keeper, cursing, saying, “What the heck was that? A soup can? Was that what they just hit me with? A freaking can of soup?”

  Not thinking how are we going to get out of here. Not thinking because he didn’t have time to think, what is a choice and what is not because here he was standing atop the PeaceKeeper, while the crowd surged and screamed, and down below him on the front hood was the Chief himself. The Chief, who right this very moment was swinging with his baton, unaware that the very same kid that Park had nearly busted this morning for selling weed was headed right toward him. That skinny black kid with the braids and the olive green jacket. There he was making his way through the crowd, headed straight for the Chief. The kid with the strangest, weirdest sort of grin on his face. He looked happy. And the Chief—did the Chief even see the kid? No time to ask. The kid looked nuts and Park lifted his shotgun and placed the barrel on a line that connected him, Officer Timothy Park and his weapon, to the black kid in the street with the crazy-ass grin. He would protect his Chief. Because that’s what a good cop did. A good sane rational cop who understood how things worked. He closed one eye and cocked his head to the barrel. Sighted on the kid, who the closer he got to the Chief, the nuttier he looked. He was about twenty feet out now. Dang, Park thought as he sighted and
took a breath, preparing to squeeze the trigger on the downward slope of his exhale, kid is so crazy it looks like he wants to hug the old man.

  What a fucking world.

  36

  Bishop knew he had not necessarily been the best father. He had raised his adopted son as though he were his own. More than his own child. He had loved Victor, when he was young, as though he were a living part of the man himself. And yet he was not tender, exactly. No, he raised his son to be the man he knew he would need to be. To have done different would have been a disservice to the boy. A mercy he could not afford.

  He had grown up poor, Victor, and this the boy did not seem to regret or resent. He never said his mother should have provided him more. She should have bought him and fed him and given him more, because she did feed him, feed her son, and she did love him, love her son, and if he didn’t have the fashionable clothes, Suzanne had said he didn’t need to be another asshole in two-hundred-dollar sneakers.

  But then Suzanne died and Bishop bought his son the shoes, the shoes that were for assholes and the shoes that were on his hero’s flying feet, but Victor left them in the box wrapped in paper. It was a gesture of love and defiance, was how Bishop saw it, and then his boy disappeared and maybe, Bishop thought, he should never have bought him the shoes. Maybe he didn’t know a goddamn thing about his son.

  How can you protect your children if they don’t want to be protected? How can you protect your children if the thing from which they need protection is you?

  Bishop had once stumbled on him, surprised his son in his room with his head buried in the orange box, inhaling the odor of rubber and new leather and imagining what?

  When he raised his head from the box and saw his dad standing in the doorway, the thing he wanted to know was did he think the world was a good place?

  Did Bill Bishop think the world was a good place?

  For whom, dear son?

  And yet they were happy for a time, the three of them. Fifty-nine years old and it had been a good life. He had a wife he loved, a happy home, a good kid with good grades heading to a good college when that day came. And then Suzanne was gone and everything gone with her—his son, his family, his belief that the world made some kind of sense, that justice prevailed. She left and the gravity from beyond just pulled him inside out. Left his guts hanging in the wind.

  His silences engulfed him. And into that silence he threw his son.

  Victor came to him one evening, a little less than a year after her death, some sort of ticket clutched in his trembling hand. “Dad, I’m not going to college,” he said.

  “And why is that?”

  “I’m going to Guatemala.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I don’t know exactly.”

  “And what do you hope to find there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Is this about me burning your mother’s books?”

  “No.”

  He was a month past his sixteenth birthday. He was a child and a fool. But what were you going to say? Bishop sensed that he had already lost him; failed to protect him in some crucial sense. But it was exactly this knowledge he could not allow himself to see or speak. This traveling—it was merely a boy’s bluff against his father. A more sophisticated version of the play Victor had enacted at fourteen following his mother’s death: running away from home every three weeks with the regularity of clockwork. Various sheriffs picked him up in his hovels of rebellion and brought him back: hitchhiking on the I-90; burgling a house on the outskirts of the UW campus; in the Great Northern train yard, trying to jump a freight. He never escaped a radius of more than thirty miles, and they always brought him back home.

  He wanted to say, Victor, go to college.

  He wanted to say, Son, the world is not hard. It is awful.

  But how could he, a white man, truly prepare his son for that bleak knowledge which was coming? White man. Black son. Bishop hardly thought in these terms. But he knew. The world would judge Victor harshly. It was a narrow road he would have to walk. Even with all his advantages, still there was little margin for error. One mistake could cost him everything. Bishop knew. Christ, he was a cop. There is less room for forgiveness, son. Keep your hands in plain sight, son. Don’t make a sudden move, son. Don’t wear those baggy jeans, son. And no matter what, no matter what, no matter what the officer says to you, do not respond in anger. Ever. Do not lose control. Just do whatever they tell you to do, no matter how humiliating.

  And did he say this to his son? Which was worse? To tell him. The necessity of telling him. To ruin that innocence. To prepare him for a future which, god willing, would not come to pass. Or to not tell him, and by not telling him ensure that that future did indeed come to pass?

  Bishop remembered it so clearly. Victor standing beside the stainless steel refrigerator and holding a plane ticket and staring at his father as if he were a person he had never seen before. A strange man who had put on glasses and taken up residence in his home. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say Victor was looking at him as though seeing him for the first time.

  And what did Bishop say?

  He adjusted his glasses and went back to his paper and said, “Well, who’s stopping you, son?”

  Victor would have to learn his own lessons.

  “Your mother would be very disappointed.”

  Bishop’s radio babbling.

  Gasoline

  Bishop

  Kerosene and ninjas.

  Gasoline. Stolen gasoline.

  Bishop Bishop Bishop

  Snipers and kerosene.

  Bishop pointing and Park firing. Another protester went down in a heap. He switched the radio off and felt an odd immediate relief. Thank fucking god.

  A protester stepped from the crowd and a space seemed to clear. A burning dumpster was behind him, and in the flickering light Bishop saw bars of shadow across his body and he looked something like his son might have looked waking up from a nap, thirty pounds lighter and covered in oil-flecked grit. Flames huge behind him.

  His face hidden in the hood of an olive green jacket. He was yelling something at the PeaceKeeper. The crowd was chanting. Surging toward the hotel.

  Rain in the air and no small number of memories suddenly pressing in on him, ghosts rising through the smoke, the creak and haul of riot, and Bishop seeing none of it. Seeing only the white shoes polished to a shine. All week he had watched the faces of the city pass. How many he seemed to recognize! And from each familiar face bloomed a memory, a shock of emotion that buzzed around his skull. All week he had walked and wandered, he had watched and waited for that one face to pass—Victor.

  And now here he came. His son.

  His physical appearance so markedly changed from when Bishop had last seen him. A boy become a man. But what he encountered there in the darkness of the clamor, what he saw, was not the sun-kissed world traveler he had perhaps imagined his son would look like. No, what he saw was a skinny man destroyed by the day, bedraggled, with eyes nearly shut and two loose braids and a pair of Air Jordans on his feet which had always seemed out of proportion, too big for his body at sixteen, but which Bishop realized weren’t too big for him at all anymore.

  The very same shoes. The very same son. He had grown into his feet. Into his skin. The son who had lifted his head from a shoe box at the age of fifteen and said, “Dad, do you think the world is a good place?” The son who, one year later, had disappeared into the world and Bishop wishing every day since for him to come back. The son who was now nineteen and it made him want to weep. When had his son gotten so tall?

  Bishop heard the sound of the shot before he realized what it was.

  Didn’t know what he was seeing as he watched Victor crumple in the street like a paper kite.

  And then he realized. He took two steps across the running board and grabbed Park by the vest. Another explosion rocked the intersection. Bishop swung him around just as the man was about to fire his weapon again. Swung him arou
nd until they were face to shocked, surprised face. You have to take a side, and in that moment it could never have been any more clear. The police fired on Victor, fired on his son, and Bishop chose his side. He knew exactly to whom he belonged. Whose body. Whose hands. Whose breath and beating heart.

  Looking into the man’s eyes. Seeing the fear there. Asking himself, What about an unarmed nineteen-year-old scares an armed police officer?

  37

  King saw Victor twenty feet from the PeaceKeeper when the shot took him in the chest. The daydreamy feeling was gone, shattered. She felt a certain clarity in the deepening dusk as she climbed the hill to Sixth and Pine. The smell of burning diesel drifted down the street. It was a sort of antiseptic, this familiar smell of combustible fuel and trash. It took her back to Central America, to Chiapas, to Mexico—diesel fumes and the sweet pungent odor of fruit and sweat. Bus-seat stuffing and a leak in the roof and a sweat-soaked shirt hung on a line. Big-leafed trees in the backyard. The way the first drops of rain raised craters in the roadside dust; the veneer of oil collected from passing cars, taxis, Toyota trucks, the rumbling multi-ton buses with their wheels the height of a child, their swinging crosses to guard against the low mean spirits of the night.

  She saw the rubber bullet crush Victor in the chest. His arms snapped back and he went down, legs tangled, his down jacket leaking feathers in a great burst of white.

  She saw Victor go down and she saw, tracing the rubber bullet’s path backward to the PeaceKeeper, the asshole cop from this morning who made the shot.

  And then the cops descended because you do not try to approach the PeaceKeeper, you do not threaten a police officer by walking toward him, and she saw Victor, curled and cramped and surrounded by armed angry cops. His face looking up among the dark anonymity of the assembled riot gear.

  Four of the cops stood back. As if joined by one brain, one beating heart, they stepped forward together and their batons descended.