Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist Read online

  An old man in a union jacket was yelling at the police.

  “Fucking pigs! You fucking pigs! You make me sick. Look at you! Tools of the corporations. Puppets of your corporate masters. Pigs! Tools! Fucking dirt! Huh? Think you’re tough now? Fucking capitalist tools.”

  The cops stared straight ahead. They didn’t move a muscle. Not a flicker of an eyelid or the flexing of a fist.

  “Bunch of kids! Jesus, what’s the matter with you?!”

  Were they trained to react like that? To go faceless, not lift a foot while the crowd built and they waited for their orders? To King their shocked stillness said it all: like any cops in any American city, they were used to patrolling streets that they controlled. They owned the streets, and they enforced their laws. This was something else, and they knew it, and they were afraid. How to handle it? Their stillness said it all.

  The cops were standing stiff and silent, all the tools of pain hanging at their waists—but what were they protecting? Nothing. They were on the wrong side of the intersection and plain and simple the police had fucked up. King couldn’t help smiling. The morning hadn’t even begun and already she and her friends—the various affinity groups scattered strategically throughout the city—had won the most important battle. They had all the territory they wanted, and the cops had none.

  Had she thought yet about whether the police would allow that situation to remain as it was? How they might want to retake that intersection? What violence might lie in store?

  Sure. But right now they owned the intersection and she had other things on her mind. Right now King was watching a mounted cop in the front line halfway down the block where things were a little looser. There was something about him which had caught her attention. He was a medium-sized white man, maybe thirty, unremarkable save for the birthmark (or burn?) ascending pink and smooth from the left side of his mouth, over his cheek, and into the whiteness of his hair beneath the riot helmet. Goddamn. Looked like a slab of raw steak. Visible from fifty feet away and King felt momentarily heartsick. She had a flash of recognition, a moment’s transportation to her childhood in western Pennsylvania, when she had been what, thirteen? fourteen? and her stepfather, who’d worked for a while as a short-order cook, because he didn’t have the temperament for coal, couldn’t stand the cage or the drop or the dust (least of all the darkness), and what else was there to do for money after the mills closed their doors and your education consisted mostly of knowing the difference between pounders and ponies. Well, this guy, her mom’s new husband or boyfriend or whatever, he had some sort of accident at the restaurant, something had happened when he was changing the oil in the deep-fryer, and he deep-fried his face.

  When the gauze came off however many months later, the left side of his head looked like it had been pressed to a sheet of hot steel. His left ear reduced to a lump of melted wax.

  A thirteen-year-old girl, what did she think about that? She didn’t think anything about that. She knew he deserved it.

  This cop’s face looked nothing as bad as that but he was messing with a kid, a protester, and for King, really, the feeling was the same.

  The kid in question—a young light-skinned black man with two braids and a badly mistreated olive green puffy jacket—was playing tug-of-war with the cop on the horse. A sort of middle-class-looking couple stood on the corner pointing to him. The backpack seemed to be the object in question, the point of dispute, and although the couple was angry—red-faced and gesturing—and the cop was clearly on their side, demanding the backpack, the kid hadn’t given it up, and hadn’t, it appeared to King from where she stood, given in to panic. His manner was both calm and strong and King admired that. He looked clear-eyed and intelligent, cloaked in a defiant sort of loneliness, which was nothing new to King, and she liked him in a way she didn’t need to define or articulate.

  He looked totally alone out there, and now this cop was messing with him and King didn’t like that. She didn’t like that at all. She pulled the gas mask from around her neck and slung it underhand to Edie. Edie caught it by the strap and winked.

  “Go get him, girl,” she said.

  King crossed into the thirty-foot strip of pavement that separated the front line of the cops from the heaving surging crowd behind her. Into the no-man’s-land and down the street, heading for the cop. She looked for the officer who seemed in charge, a tanned older man in glasses who had been up in a cherry picker making unintelligible pronouncements on a megaphone: I don’t want to hurt you this… I don’t want to hurt you that… King saw the cherry picker parked down the street, behind some buses, its crane folded, but she didn’t see the Chief anywhere around.

  The cops all watched her coming, all, that is, except the mounted asshole on the horse. He didn’t even notice her until she was beside his horse and the boy. Her body so close to the horse she could feel the heat coming off his heaving sides, the horse, and, ridiculous, yes she knew, she longed to reach out and stroke the soft hair, to comfort the animal with her touch.

  “Hi!” she said loudly, neck craned backward to see the man’s mangled face.

  Up close it was even worse, the skin angry and red, glistening in the drizzle as if it were made of plastic.

  Suddenly his riot baton was out of its holster and pointed at her chest.

  “Miss,” he said, “please return to your people.”

  “Hey, that’s a little aggressive,” King said, still smiling, trying to keep her voice bright, “swiping at me like that. I just want to talk.”

  But what she really wanted to do was touch that horse.

  “Miss, return to your people.”

  “Why don’t you leave this kid alone,” King said. “This is a peaceful protest.”

  “Miss, I am not going to warn you again. Step back.”

  She felt the other cops watching with interest and she took one more step forward reaching for the horse’s flank with one hand and with the other taking gentle hold of the backpack. The horse shied from her hand, lifting its feet high and moving a foot or two away. The cop let go of the backpack and suddenly she was staggering with the weight of the pack and feeling the first flush of triumph running hot in her veins.

  “Hey!” His voice suddenly beyond angry. “I said that’s enough. Now step back.”

  King knew she was antagonizing him. She should never have touched the horse. But she was beginning to feel a little amped—the familiar current of voltage as she got her first real taste of action. Once that juice got going in your veins, it was tough to stop. She should know. She was a student of conflict. She had been trained in the tactics, techniques, and philosophy of nonviolence. She was a trainer herself and she knew how to engage with police, with security officers, with enraged people of every stripe. When she had lived in the city, she used to go into the federal prisons—the maximum security blocks where the prisoners were on lockdown twenty-two hours out of twenty-four, the murderers and rapists, the friendly demented men who had taken a hammer to their neighbor’s skull in an argument over a dented car door.

  She went into the federal prisons, this green-eyed woman with dreads to the small of her back, and they respected her. They talked to her.

  No, ma’am.

  Yes, ma’am.

  No, ma’am, I should not have hit him with the hammer, ma’am.

  It was a delicate art, conversation with incarcerated men, men who had killed. You had to push to get to the real. And you had to be real—you couldn’t go in and ask these guys to share their life stories and not share your own. That would be straight chickenshit. And that wasn’t her. So she shared her own stories. She wasn’t proud, if anything she was often ashamed of her own temper—the way she sometimes lost control. But she told them about it nonetheless; shared her fury and violence there in the concrete-floored room with wooden benches and a guard doing a crossword with his chair leaned on two legs against the locked door.

  Mexico? Did she tell them about Mexico? No, she did not. She wanted to break through
, yes, to dissolve momentarily the prison walls, but she didn’t want to end up living inside them. No thanks. So no, she did not share her stories about Mexico. About her disaster on the border.

  Her heart tripped over itself every time she entered the prison—no matter how many times she went, she never got used to that electric buzz and rattle as the double sliding electronic doors rolled shut behind her. But it wasn’t that she was frightened of the men. No, it was that she was frightened for them. Because anger expressed in prison —well, who would really be the one to suffer? This was why a prison employed guards, was it not? In the corralling of all the unaccountable emotions?

  Yes, Alfred Framingham, a man convicted of killing his wife and both of his children (and a UPS man who had the unfortunate timing to arrive at the door just as Alfred was putting the shotgun to his wife’s head), had once put a sharpened spoon to the soft hollow of her throat. Great big Alfred whose hands were so lashed with scar tissue it looked as if he scrubbed them every morning with shredded razors—King had suggested one morning that maybe Alfred killed his wife because he was scared of her.

  That had been very stupid. The result of her blind impulse to get at the truth of a man. She had spent years trying to tame it.

  But that was the thing with anger. That was the tricky thing about pain. Sometimes it was hiding around a corner just waiting to slice you from stomach to throat.

  She studied the mounted cop. There was something loose and frantic in his eyes and she imagined the nightmare scenarios pounding in his brain—Molotov cocktails, blown out storefronts, the city descending into explosions and flame.

  “Miss,” he said, “step away from the horse.”

  She knew instinctively that she needed to de-escalate the situation. She needed to find some way to relate, some way to empathize. And where the fuck was John Henry? John Henry could talk to cops. John Henry would help her calm down. Because the problem, she was discovering, was that she didn’t want to de-escalate the situation. She didn’t want to fucking empathize.

  “Miss,” he said, and there was no mistaking the tremor of impending violence in his voice, “step back now. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  King leaned forward. She laid her hand along the horse’s neck and then, pitching her voice low and kind of sexy, said with a smile, “You want to hurt me, darling? I’d sure like to see you try.”

  7

  Julia was Guatemalan, originally, as they said, by way of L.A., city of angels, and as she watched Park on his horse messing with a protester she found herself thinking of her rookie year cruising MacArthur Park, L.A.’s Central American ghetto for Guatemalans, Salvadorans, all the economic refugees who had made the journey north to send their money south. There was a lake in MacArthur Park—a little piss pond with a fountain covered in fading tags that they called Gun Lake because it was filled with so many weapons discarded after jumps and murders and jackings. No matter. Talking with the men on the stoops, the ’bangers that owned the corners, the old men who fanned themselves with their mesh hats and ate whole-kernel corn roasted on a stick—she felt at home down there. Relaxed.

  But then in April ’92, the Rodney King verdict came down, all five officers acquitted, and Ju wasn’t joking with anybody on any stoop because the city had lost its collective mind and was trying to burn itself to the ground.

  On Crenshaw Boulevard they were looting. Down in South Central, Korean shop owners were building their own private armies, scared clerks firing into crowds with shaking shotguns.

  Ju had caught one woman climbing out of the shattered glass of a pharmacy, not like she was the only one, just the only one Ju had caught because the others took off and this woman here was a good four hundred and fifty pounds if she was one. The woman stood there holding her loot, face devoid of expression. In her hands she held two packages of Pampers, a can of roach spray, and a Pepsi.

  “They be climbing over the baby when he asleep,” the woman said by way of explanation. “The cockroaches, I mean.”

  Ju took the Pampers and the roach killer. Then she cuffed the lady and put her in the van with the others.

  Because that was the job.

  Front-cuffed her on account of the soda because sometimes you had to break the rules to hold true to a higher law. Even if it was just a woman’s need to drink a stolen Pepsi on her way to jail.

  Because, in Julia’s opinion, then and now, that was the job, too.

  “You know what I see?” Park had said before mounting his horse. “All this racket and complaining?”

  “You see someone getting me some decent coffee? What’s the matter, you get some for yourself, you don’t get any for your pal?”

  “Soviets in blue jeans. Rooskie revolutionaries with their stale black bread and their crappy weak tea.”

  Park was fresh from Oklahoma, early thirties with the long lean muscle of the compulsive triathlete. Ju thought he had a decent smile and a thin sort of nuclear skull and he might have been good-looking were it not for that patch of scar tissue occupying the lower right side of his face—from the chin running back along the jawline and then up across his cheek and disappearing into the shorn field of dust that was his ash-colored hair.

  Nuclear. The guy was as radioactive as a blast survivor. Like someone who lifts their head from the dirt where they fell and their face is as white as the flash and their eyes radded little pin dots flattened by memory. A ghost looking up at you and hoping you are the salvation they were promised so long ago.

  That was the sense she got, at least, from, you know, looking at the guy. And she was not his salvation. Standing day after day in the 4-by-6 of his private space. Ju got the sense the nutjob had mined his personal bunker, booby-trapped it against intruders, and she thought it was burn tissue from the color, a mottled pink you might see beneath the skin of a peach that’s been violently slammed against a wall. And you might think that a disaster that difficult to hide, something that visible and out there and sort of heartbreaking in its ugliness, would change a person’s demeanor. Perhaps make him shy, or awkward or silent. But no. Not Park. His head-on collision with the howling shitstorm of life hadn’t broken him in the least. It had made him outgoing and goofy and weird, cast out forever with a radish-colored head and a private smile and a hair-trigger temper that could go off, it seemed, at any moment.

  And yet. And yet, despite all the reasons not to, there was something about him that she liked. The secrecy. The scar. The weird, private laugh. His aura of utter and total self-reliance in the teeth of the world—it appealed to her. Because this is a man, let’s say you’re on a date and some guy comes out of the alley with a knife and a rapey kind of vibe. You think this ruined, grinning beast, this nutjob freaking cop who once drunkenly half-bragged to Ju about pulling burned bodies from the rubble of a building, saving them, that is (he shut up when he realized what he was talking about, and the next day she did not mention it or even forget to mention it), tell me, this is a man that hands over your purse? This is a man who begs for his life? No. This is a man who cuts monsters into little pieces and eats them like the weird pieces of vegetable in an MRE.

  He kept inviting her to his Wednesday night youth-league basketball games of which he was the volunteer coach—the counselor of troubled juveniles or maybe just their broken-toothed leader, she wasn’t quite sure which. And can you imagine, I mean, asking her to a hot, smelly gym to watch sweaty delinquents pound up and down a basketball court? I mean, the fucking cojones, right? One of these nights she was thinking of going. Maybe.

  “Commies writing in their diaries about the pretty girls.” He had mounted his horse now and was looking down at her with that weird little smile. “Because really that’s what all this revolutionary stuff is about. Deep down, you know. The evil system that steals the pretty girls.”

  Ju made a sound through her teeth that was something like a laugh.

  “I mean where did they go?” he said. “Those pretty little girls we used to play with in the grass?”
>
  On the second day of the Rodney King riots, half-cracked on lack of sleep, Julia and four male officers had stopped a wild-haired Latino man coming out of a charred and smoking store with a package of Oreos and a gallon of milk in a yellow jug. The smell of gasoline hung heavy in the air. The man got aggressive, dropping his cookies and pushing Ju in the chest in an attempt to get away, or maybe, more precisely, he dropped his milk and screamed bloody murder when she circled her hand around his wrist like one half of a pair of handcuffs and then they all five beat him like he was a dog they didn’t like and left him bloody in the street for somebody else, someone who cared about things broken by the world. One cop removed the man’s watch and held it to the light.

  “Stop screaming,” he said. “You sound like a girl.”

  She watched as Park out in the crowd now turned his horse in a circle. She tapped her face shield with one short lacquered nail. If you disregarded the scar maybe he was kind of cute. Broad in the shoulder. Eager to please.

  But how could you disregard the scar?

  Five days of lunacy. A city burning itself to the ground. On the TV in the precinct when she went back to refresh her supply of plastic cuffs, she had watched live as a mob, mostly black, pulled a white truck driver from his cab and beat him over the head with a cinderblock.

  She read later in the papers that a man, watching the same live footage at home, raced down there on a bicycle. An unarmed black man. He kept the mob at bay somehow and pulled the unconscious white man back into the cab of his truck and drove him to the hospital.

  Ju cried when she read that, and she knew if she ever had a son, just what she would name him.

  Bobby Green Jr.

  The name of that man on a bicycle who had saved the truck driver’s life.