Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (18 page)

Guatemala, Honduras,
Nicaragua, El Salvador—the places in Central America Victor had come to love—where the governments had gone to war—not even gone to war, shit. No. Guatemala, where the government had started a soft war aimed at the hospitals and schools and families. Guatemala, where fathers and mothers and sons and daughters had been stolen and shot and tortured. Disappeared. Imagine a man taken from bed in the middle of the night—your husband, your brother, your
father—
the sounds of trucks in the street, the rifle butt on the door, they drag him across the room and out of the door by his hair, with a fistful of hair, and he's holding both hands above his head, both hands wrapped around the fist that drags him as if he had found a new way to pray when he is only holding tight to the fist to keep his hair from being pulled out completely, to lessen the pain that is not even beginning to make sense yet, the onrush of terror so complete it is a blank dark wall with one light shining, outlining a stain there, his terror complete and dark like a bag pulled over his head and that bulb which shines against the blank cinderblock wall, the only light in his terror is the thought to grab with both hands the fist which pulls him across the floor by his hair.

And the only thing remaining the unbearable silence which follows as you look into the eyes of those that remain as if looking at the very future itself, the future which just now began as his feet bumped over the threshold of the door and the sound of the night started again as if nothing had happened. He is gone. And you never had a husband. You never had a father. You never had a son.

Two years ago, Victor had been picking lettuce in California. The Inland Empire, Watsonville, where he and forty thousand had gathered to protest. Gathered to protest, he heard his father laughing, and what is that supposed to mean?

He didn't have an answer to that. It was the phrase you used when someone asked What did you do in Watsonville? We gathered to protest. It was small talk. It was what you said to the neighbors, people that maybe understood, or didn't and called forth what empty image in their mind? Gathered to protest? A labor march?

Words mean things, Victor, and what do these words mean?

And what
did
Victor mean? Why had he gone? It wasn't something in the usual run of things, no, to walk away from work, to join a group, to mix with their bodies, their clothes and hair and sweat and conversations which he didn't understand, and he didn't know what it was at first, a sweet sort of overpowering perfume, and then realized it was the smell of other people, realizing with a smile and a shock that it was the smell of the food they made, the smell lingering in their clothes, it was the smell of their homes, walking together, what a beautiful intimate kind of crazy thing, and he laughed and imagined a whole family of people with food on plates gathered around the TV and he recognized the smell, and he knew the music from the TV, and he smiled, imagining himself part of a family, a visitor or a guest, or maybe a son, why not, sitting there with his brother, and his cousins, and his aunts and uncles, and his parents, all of them gathered around a TV, paper plates on their laps, eating and shouting the answers to
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Why did he go? He went because the people who worked in those lettuce fields were abused. He went because he worked, too, and he understood it, but he didn't have to live it and that was different.

But what does that mean, son? The people in those fields were abused. I work, too.

Victor didn't know. It was shorthand somehow. He couldn't think of how to explain what it was shorthand for. His father said I've seen dogs that were abused, I've seen horses that were abused, but what in the heck does it mean, those people were abused? And Victor wanted to say they are decent people, Dad, if only you could have been there. They are human beings of worth, as much as you or me, and he heard his father laughing and coughing, not because he disagreed they were good folks, but that phrase, human beings of worth. Was there not a single word he could say that had not been emptied of value?

What he wanted to say was there are workers in California, and they work in Watsonville in the fields of lettuce. They work for money like we all do. And these workers, these workers that are abused, that don't get paid enough, that work terrible hours, and make nothing, that are abused, that wash their feet and faces in ditches, that wash their little babies, if only you could have been there, Dad, and seen them washing their children's faces with ditchwater, scolding and talking as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

What we get used to. Do you understand? What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?

If you had met them, Dad, you would understand. If you had stood in that field, heads of lettuce stretching to the horizon, and the feeling, if you had met them, I'm not saying you would feel one way or the other, he wanted to say to his father, but if you had met them, shook their hand, and marched side by side with them, heard their voices, heard them laughing, and shared lunch with them, you used to like to laugh, Dad, remember, before Mom died? If you had eaten lunch with this family, seen the mother scolding her kids and laughing the way Mom used to yell at me and laugh, and the dark face of the father breaking into a smile as he offered me an orange soda—if you had drunk an orange soda from the bottle, warm from the bottle, but good, an orange soda on a sunny day in a lettuce field, and you arrived walking, and forty thousand people arrived on buses—this is what he wanted to say, if you had sat in the dirt and the heads of lettuce to the horizon. Lunch, Dad. This is what he wanted to say, if you had eaten a chicken salad sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin, and the mayonnaise leaking down the little girl's chin, and the father, his face was wrinkled, you know by the eyes? and he wore a mesh hat that said Budweiser on it, like the one you used to have, and he wore it kind of at an angle, not a fashion or anything, but just the angle it landed on his head when he took it off to wipe the sweat with his forearm and then snapped it back onto his head, and he put his hand on my back to say welcome, or thank you, I don't know, and the chicken salad sandwiches, and that orange soda warm and fizzy from the bottle that he opened with a bottle opener that was swinging from his belt. He wanted to say all this and more to his father three years since he had spoken to him. It was a feeling he had, as difficult to name or say where it came from or where it went as the fizzy mist of the orange soda. He wanted the words to describe all this and more to his dad. He wanted him here and by his side so he could say these are human beings. These are people and their lives are no different than ours. We are human beings. That woman could have been my mother. And they work hard, too hard, Dad, but they still remember how to laugh. Remember what it used to feel like?

Instead he said, “We went to protest. I walked into the lettuce and we gathered to protest. Those people work hard picking lettuce. Lettuce? Lettuce. They are not paid enough. They are treated badly. So we gathered to protest.”

That's what he said to his father because the words to say otherwise simply weren't there.

He said, “I went, Dad, because it was the right thing to do.”

Except he said none of this. Just mailed him a postcard of California grapes postmarked Salinas.

He looked at John Henry from where he sat propped against the newspaper box, his new friend, this white man with the red beard and the black glasses and the cowboy hat, and what Victor wanted to say, simply, was thank you.

He looked across the street, and there was the armored truck. Two cops atop it firing concussion grenades into the crowd. And there beside them, his father.

And Victor taking this in, looking at his father standing there on the running board of the PeaceKeeper, really looking at him. He saw the heaviness of the man's body, as if the bones were weighing him down. He looked at his back, at his shoulders and arms, at his father's
hands
and he knew. This was the desperation he had always felt. This was the blindness he had fought so hard to be free of.

Victor nodding and thinking, The world will kill you cold? Maybe it was worth it. He turned back to John Henry, thinking of all the man had done for him, and Victor, he decided it was all of it worth it. All of it worth the possibility that he might end up cold, worth the possibility that he might get hurt. He smiled at his friend and handed him back the bottle of Maalox and water and climbed to his feet. He steadied himself on John Henry's shoulder. And then he turned and stepped into the intersection. He pushed through the crowd and passed out of the mass and into a stretch of empty asphalt, a black stretch of road leading him from here straight to the PeaceKeeper. How it had taken him so long to realize, he didn't know. He walked toward the PeaceKeeper. He could end this entire thing right now, if he could only speak to his father.

And that's exactly what he was going to do. Go speak to the man.

Go speak to his father.

The Chief of Police.

King was
running.

And then she wasn't.

Because the knowledge had come pounding up through her feet as she ran. There is no way to take back a bullet. King. The most perfect American girl with only love in her heart—she had killed a man of eighty-some years. Why not admit it? She had put a bullet between his belly and his Cracker Jack badge and she had looked in the mirror every day since and nowhere in all her years had she ever seen the person she would become hiding there inside her face.

No way to take back a bullet. No way to ever go back to John Henry.

She slowed to a walk. On a side street, away from the action, a sort of loose-limbed group carrying backpacks leaned against a dumpster in various postures of total boredom and how fucking stupid is this riot. In their oversized black hoods, they looked like some sort of Judgment Day cult, monks risen from the radioactive mud of a burnt-out city. They squatted and stood and leaned against the dumpster, looking as though they were waiting for the signal to come alive, the command no one else could hear. A few had gas masks. Some had crowbars.

Two of the black-hooded monks disengaged from the dumpster and approached a bank window. A group of protesters—middle-aged men and women—had decided to organize themselves against what they thought was an act of vandalism. They were going to protect the bank.

The two lines were yelling philosophies in each other's faces.

King had trained three hundred nonviolent revolutionaries in the desert, every one of them a good soul and King herself with only love for the millions of the Third World and she asked herself what was one man's death—border patrol agent or racist militiaman—against so many millions dead? She told herself the scales did not balance. One man's death didn't matter because there was the truck, and there was the CB, and she had dragged him among the dark trees to watch him die. It did matter and she knew it. The millions dead—they were exactly what made it matter. And yet there she had been, her, King, kneeling in the sand beside him, watching the odd sad way he clutched at the air as if there were something there in front of him which might save him if only he could catch ahold of it.

Two of the black-hooded youths casually kicked a newspaper stand into the street. And the violence of it, the anger toward a newspaper box—King slowed and stood watching.

“Stop!” one of the marchers said. “This is supposed to be—”

King noticed a crowbar leaning against a lamppost. She picked it up and tested the weight of it in her palm. It was extra long, a four-foot piece of metal designed for maximum wreckage. It felt good in her hand as she pushed through the crowd, using the handle to clear a way. This tall woman dressed in black pants and a white T-shirt splattered with blood as though a map of parts as yet unexplored, unconquerable lands far or near—the men and women looked at her face and then stepped aside because she was maybe one of the lunatic blessed, a radical personage willing to give her life, possibly infected with the disease or despair of those she touched.

And she felt it like a cold block of ice lodged in her chest, leaking slow cold into her veins and she knew exactly what she was doing, this twenty-seven-year-old woman who wanted to shut down the WTO, who wanted to end the suffering which was the world without end, this twenty-seven-year-old woman, who wanted to remember, but could not, a time when she had still been a little girl tugging on her mom's hem in some innocent supermarket aisle.

And yet, no way to go back to the girl she'd once been. No way to go back to John Henry. No way to go back to the lie she had built.

She was a nonviolent revolutionary. She believed in the transcendence of suffering. The righteous power of pain, and yet no way to avoid prison of one kind or the other. The memories started coming. A small shudder in the drizzle and here it came, that familiar blinding comforting rage, the familiar anger sharp as any knife.

No way to undo the world where they lived in a shack made of loose boards, a family of six in a shack the size of a car on blocks, and in her life anytime she wanted she could sleep in an apartment where she turned hot water on and off and stepped from the shower and toweled dry thinking about what to eat for breakfast.

How easy to slip into that life where she had a closet for her clothes and a closet for food and how easy to believe this was somehow normal. That's what got King. Because where was the logic in the thing? The gun in her hand and the man's chest opening to the sweet smell of his blood among the sagebrush, a smell she would never be able to forget, to unremember, like a handful of pennies on a sweaty summer's day. What could possibly connect that man's breathing beating conflicted life to this singularity of blood in the sand? How could a human life, a thing so layered and vast it was a world unto itself, be reduced so quickly and completely to a cold corpse beneath the trees?

In Mexico she had seen shipwrecked houses lit by candlelight. Houses of cardboard and tin. Scavenged wood. Night fell and here came the little flames. Light spilling from the warped boards like a flood of little hands to grab at her face, her shirt, her heart. And she remembered how she had squatted there on her haunches in that concrete truck stop in McAllen, Texas, hitching to Seattle, how she had leaned against a cinderblock wall, the cracked pavement and twilight. She remembered washing her hands and face in the metal washbasin of the restroom, the water going pink and brown, and then outside the arc lamps, orange flowers blooming in a pot on the barred windowsill, how she had bowed her head, while her chest heaved and the full weight of what she had done came trailing its fingers along the smooth cavern of her chest. She had huddled against that wall and wept and let it come, trying to remember it all passes. Even this.

The world and all its impossible wanting.

The bank window was a mirror and in the mirror she saw the green eyes of a coward. She hefted the weight of the crowbar. The green eyes of a girl who did not deserve anything but the burning to which the world had condemned her.

Arrest her? Let them arrest her. Prison was where she belonged.

They were chanting like an army of robots. The window in front of her beckoned. Something that looked like her face standing there watching her. She began swinging the head, getting the weight going. She heard wind pushing paper down the street, the rough whisper of the crowbar swinging in her callused hands. From far off, she heard voices, but they were distant decaying whispers as though she were at the bottom of a well.

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.