Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist (20 page)

The first
baton went straight to the head, a stereophonic boom that seemed to blow out his ears. Victor tried to crawl away, but someone kicked him and flipped him on his back and then stepped onto his flailing hand. Time seemed to slow. He felt the boot pinning his upturned palm to the pavement, felt the pinch of gravel against his skin, and he felt the beginning of a knowledge. They were working on his body, but he was just a hand turned to the sky. He felt where the tread was worn and thin, felt where the sharp edges dug into his fingers as the cop bore down, felt in his palm every impress and contour of the hard rubber sole. It was as if his hand were the centering essence of his fluid being, he felt it wholly as if he were not a man and a body, but only a hand cradling a boot, open to receive a sky swollen with cloud.

He was both boot and hand. Black boot and brown man's hand. His hand, skin the color of strong tea, the hard knobby knuckles pressed to the pavement. The warm pulse of blood in the veins, the lined white palm with his creased fortunes and folds. He looked at the storm clouds, blackness within blackness, and he felt something sliding from him.

Cops coming a-running to join in the fun.

The cop lifted his foot, releasing the pressure for a moment, and then smashed the boot down hard to stomp Victor's hand where it lay on the pavement.

The sound was the crush of shovel on gravel that was the bones in his hand shattering.

Victor screamed. He couldn't help it. He pulled his destroyed hand to his chest and felt it coming over him fast now, an ache inside his chest that he had felt forever and never named. He didn't want to die. Simple things this young man loved. The color of the leaves in bright morning, how the green seemed lit from within and the sky so endlessly blue. The smell of woodsmoke high in the mountains. The mottled brown-gray of a river in flood. An open window and whatever sounds might drift through. The song of the world, taxicabs, laughter, birds. Just one bird washing herself in the rain gutter beneath his open window. The quality of attention, to idly watch a bird flutter and preen, to hear the soft whirr of her wings, to hear her whistle.

He did not want to leave this place yet, this planet of mountains and seas, the human body, the blood-heat of a hand pressed against your own. He felt a terrible sadness sweeping over him. There was something about meeting her, perhaps not apparent at first, but which revealed itself slowly, the way that a bell will strike and the awareness of it comes after the fact of the ringing, so too it came over you gradually while spending an afternoon with her digging in the veggie garden, or perhaps you spent your summer Saturdays from grade school on up working down in Beacon Hill, constructing those simple wooden frame houses that had not existed before her arrival, yet which were after such a part of the neighborhood, such a part of the character of the neighborhood and what the neighborhood thought of itself, that it could be said that perhaps she had not organized the men and women and materials, not cleared the lots, not spent every Saturday there with hammer and nails in her dark hands, but instead had arrived with the wooden frames already intact and existing fully built and had only set them down along the avenue in the same manner that she had arrived in Seattle with her young son and climbed the steps to their room and set down their suitcases.

Victor's mother.

Perhaps you spent a cold and shivering morning opening the soup line, from the time you were eight on up, in the early morning hours before the first school bell, fed the men who would spend all morning, perhaps all day, shivering in their thin clothes from warmer weathers and waiting for a job to come by in the form of a pickup truck and a wave and a whistle. Not so different from the whistle of her own childhood, she had once said to him, the steam-kettle shriek that had called his grandfather to the factory. Maybe you spent a cold morning with her offering these men hot soup and rolls, so that they would have some food in their stomach to sustain the wait, something even to sustain the work were they lucky enough to get it.

Maybe it was a hundred cold mornings you spent with her. Even a thousand would not have been enough.

Maybe you were with her one of these many cold mornings with the steam rising from the pots, and it would have come over you slowly, as you passed the hard rounds of day-old bread, as you listened to the way she spoke with the men there, noticed the way they joked with her as a friend without any trace, large or small, of self-consciousness or shame or even deference, the way the men were grateful for the hot food yet accepted it only as one might pass a plate down a family table. God bless the beautiful necessity of food and flesh. And a certain funny feeling stealing over you because how do you see your mother as a person separate from yourself, a person necessary to other people, and loved, and yet Victor had, he had seen and understood that if tomorrow the order were reversed and these men, warmly clothed, handing the food to his mother, to himself, then it would be unchanged. He had seen and known, yes, this boy, with the uncanny sense that were it he in his thin clothes, shivering, blowing the steam from the soup, wondering about work but talking about other things, then all eyes would still be clear, there would still be the low murmur of a joke in the thin air and the food still passed from hand to hand with a nod and a word of gratitude, and whether he knew its name or not, this was all of life that Victor really would ever need to know. All of them, finally, eating, his mother, this black woman with earrings of hawk feathers, and Victor slurping soup from his bowl in the cold morning, talking and nodding with the men, and they treated him, too, as one of them, as a boy, but someone worthy of talking to, and Victor chewing and listening, eyes bright, and when had he ever in his life felt so at home as in this moment, among these men, and his mother's guidance that allowed him to see it, that allowed him to be, and it finally clear to him that he was in the presence of something which he did not completely understand but which he knew to be great.

When that is taken from you, there can be no giving it back. No getting back to where you might once have been. God knows he had tried. Had traveled the world up and down and not come upon it again, the feeling of standing there in the cold mornings, and his life with some purpose. And it was as simple as this. Feeding a few hungry men before they went to work. That was all, and it was both the largest, most important thing to be done, and the smallest, and Victor didn't want to go. Not yet. All the people he would never meet. To sit and talk, to waste time together, to eat beans from a bowl, to pass nothing more than a few cans of beer, to watch their faces as they laughed. He felt the baton blows raining over his body like fistfuls of packed dirt and felt for the first time how nearly unbearable the power of human life, the unbelievable fragility—there were times with people, touching them hand to shoulder, walking, singing, the human voice, there were times when he was with people that he could hardly stop himself from crumbling, just falling to pieces. What was that? Not sadness. Goddamn this place. It had been with him forever and did he just now know? Why now should he know just how much he loved this dark fucked-up place. A baton smashed his mouth bloody and he thought I don't want to go. I don't want to die. I will join you, one day, but please just one more day here, one more hour with these people. I just started. Let me see one more face. One more moment in this place. How fucked-up it is. But I don't want to leave.

He felt a tooth work loose. He felt the batons battering him like hail, a shot to the kidneys that exploded like a star. He choked back a laugh that wanted to become a sob. He was glad to have done what he had done. To have wandered the world. To have loved his mother while she was alive. Even to have joined the people here today, it was nothing, so insignificant, but he had raised his voice to a good and true human pitch, that was what he had done, but now he knew all along it had been this. This had been the plan. To stomp the breath from his belly until he breathed no more. They wanted to erase him and all that he was from the face of the earth.

And he was going to let them.

Ju saw
the girl coming before the girl even knew she was coming.

When Park and the Chief had gone spinning off the side of the PeaceKeeper, Ju had climbed down to the hood. She was alone, but she felt calm. The kids were shouting stuff up into her face, but she wasn't worried, no, she was holding them back with the baton leveled at their chests and looking around, and waiting for some help. Not wildly looking, because it was important to remain calm, to retain the appearance of calm.

Ju wanted to remember they were human, these screaming mouth shapes beneath her, but she already had everything, both arms and face and the way you stand and how you respond to stress and the way you carry yourself, engaged in trying to hold them back.

Because that is what it meant to do the job. To be a well-trained police officer and not an angry hippie punk protester with a face full of metal and the privilege of getting pissed off whenever you felt like it.

Beneath her armor sweat was sliding down her back, gathering in the crack of her ass. Her hands were clammy without her gloves. She was armed, of course, with her pepper spray and her service weapon in a positive retention clip, but her bullets she preferred in her clip and her clip on her belt. The weight and heft of violence—an officer with a gun on the hip—were under ordinary circumstances enough to calm and quell. It was how you carried it—the ineffable it-ness of you in the world. The threat of force, the ability to dispense death and immediate pain—this she preferred over that force unleashed.

If she had had time to think, she would have thought there will be time to think about all this later. Time aplenty to contemplate and look at the day from different angles. Time enough to consider her actions and what had led to what and how it had all come undone. Time to let the guilt or shame or pride take up residence in head and gut, but later, because now she was a police officer in this city by the sea, this shining beacon of democracy and freedom and there was a threat.

She had watched as Park fired and his rubber bullet took the kid in the chest and he went down. Four officers swarmed him, but then she lost sight of the melee because more officers were running to surround the pile and now she watched as this wild horse of a girl broke from the mass, dodged the three officers in front of the PeaceKeeper, adjusted direction and picked up speed, pointed toward Ju like a bullet with her name stamped on the side.

It all registered in a flash. She didn't need to think about it. That's what it meant to be good police. And later. She would think about what all this meant later, at home, a week from now, watching TV, or in the bar with Park, because right now she was a cop and there was danger approaching. The girl was coming on hard. The girl was already in the air and climbing the distance like a series of steps and she was about five seconds from Ju when Ju reached for a rubber bullet to drop in the chamber and discovered she was out.

Time was moving slowly. This was how it worked. She was processing information. She was making decisions. She was trained. She knew what to do. The girl's face was a contorted mask of rage. But not her. Not Julia. No anger in her, no she was calm, she was reacting calmly, she was in control even if she felt the buzz of stretched nerves as she reached for a rubber bullet and found she had none left. Things were happening slow and fast. She was trained. She was responding to a threat to her life and body. She was making decisions.

Because the girl was leaping, the girl was in the air, and she looked aglow with flame. This was not peaceful protest. This was grief in all its loss and fury. This was the world coming to kick down your door. To steal your family.

Ju unholstered her sidearm.

Then the girl landed on the hood of the PeaceKeeper, and Ju raised her department-issue .38 and still the girl was coming and she fired.

The bullet took her high in the shoulder, the dark blood flowering like a bruise and how funny, how weird and funny that she didn't know about it yet even as the force of the bullet took her high above the heart. Ju raised her gun and fired and the girl stopped in mid-stride, trapped on the trajectory of the bullet like laundry hanging on a line, her face pure surprise.

Things moving slowly, very slowly, the noise narrowed to a tunnel, the chanting a whisper, the roar a soft sighing. Nothing but the shot and the girl.

It would repeat later in Ju's mind on a loop she could replay at will, the shot, the shoulder, the dark blood, her arms pinwheeling, and the falling. Later Ju would think of the way it stopped her, the force of her violence, the way it threw the girl's body in the street like something you kick, and it wasn't really worth kicking in the first place, but now, now there was a hand on her leg, and she turned to see Park at the bottom of the PeaceKeeper.

Park's hand on her leg. Park climbing up onto the PeaceKeeper at the sound of the shot. Park's hand on her leg to help himself up and she was turning and there he was, her partner, a look in his face that she had never seen, saying, “Ju, what happened?”

“I went live.”

His face looking frightened and human.

“You did what?”

“Live. I went fucking live.”

She would think about it later, when she had time to think about it, what his face had looked like in that moment and what she had felt, she would remember and piece it together. Frightened and human. So scared. She was a trained police and what had she done? She wanted to tell Park she had done what she was trained to do. She had protected herself and her fellow officers. In the face of a clear threat, she had laid it down.

Look, there it was. Dirtying the street with its greasy blood.

The threat.