Sunil Yapa - Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

“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.

She cried when she read that, drinking her bitter coffee sitting alone at a kitchen table that could have been hers, and was, or could have belonged to any one of a thousand other people who had misplaced their lives like it was something you could lose among the folds of the newspaper or the litter in the street and she didn’t know why exactly she cried reading that because she hadn’t misplaced her life like some sad homeless nobody. What she had done is she had lived through the L.A. riots, lived through the mayhem and rage, do you understand, the pain of the destruction of a city, and when you are police and do you understand, when you are police and you live through something like that, you have only three choices: you can quit, you can start making change, or you can suck it up and ask someone for a favor. Ju knew someone in the Seattle Police Department. And she knew, too, even then, that she was police for life. And she surely wasn’t made for political hearings, so six months after the riots, she put in her papers and made the call to Seattle.

Imagine that man seeing something on his TV and standing from his couch to go down there to stop them from beating that truck driver as if what happened on the TV and what happened in the world were somehow related, as if he believed them to be the same.

Crying alone there in her kitchen, the coffee going cold in her hand because what exactly? Ju staring into the middle distance and the sound of her own weeping competing with the old refrigerator because what kind of courage makes a man. What kind of thing in a man watching it on TV makes him jump off the couch and go racing down there on a bicycle? Was it courage or something else entirely, she didn’t know, really, but god she felt it in her chest like a certain heat, had seen it how many thousands of times on the faces of the men and women she worked with, had felt it how many hundreds of times herself. Had seen on it the face of this walking landmine of a cop, who was out there in the crowd right now harassing protesters with his horse. The what? The willingness to carry the burden of protecting other people from themselves? Well, yes, except that sounded like some mierda to her, except mostly not when it came down to it, it sounded exactly right, so let’s just agree to never talk about it again. Because why else would she be here, dressed head to toe in riot gear and willing to risk her bodily safety, if she didn’t love being police in the greatest goddamn country in the world?

Something was happening in the street. She saw a woman standing next to Park’s horse. Saw her touching the horse. Saw Park’s baton begin to rise.

His eyes were the color of blue marbles, his arms long and muscular, but how did you ignore the scar, that was really the question, wasn’t it? She didn’t know. With a final-sounding sort of click, she flipped down her face shield, turned her back on Park, and made busy watching the marchers marching toward wherever.

Willing to protect people from their own stupidity. Willing to be the bad guy. Knowing when to look and when to look away. That was the job, too.

There was a time, perhaps, when it could have been said King was in love with violent revolution. At eighteen she carried Che Guevara on a key chain. She read Live from Death Row and quoted Mumia Abu-Jamal to her growing circle of activist friends.

It started as a simple infatuation. A New York City girl, a Brooklyn transplant, rising from the cinders of the dead hamlet where she had been born, she read FBI surveillance reports on John Lennon. She studied the details of CIA assassinations in Colombia, in Congo; in Guatemala and El Salvador; in Iran and Angola and Greece.

At age nineteen she went to her first protest. The School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Georgia, where the American military taught Central and South American leaders how to torture their own people. One night camped in a muddy field, she slept with a towheaded gangly boy with a Southern drawl who was not her first, technically, but the sex wasn’t bad and the conversation was better. She discovered to her surprise, it was sort of thrilling to fuck someone who believed what you believe.

At the age of twenty-two she learned how to hop freights and headed west. Her confidence grew. She made friends and in the high-altitude forests of Colorado they studied revolution. She read the books they gave her: Manufacturing Consent, If They Come in the Morning, copies of the journal Earth First! Her friends and her books gave voice to what had been inarticulate; they gave shape and mission to what had been a formless longing. She practiced climbing and spiking. On the western slopes of the Continental Divide, she tore distributor caps from twelve-ton Cats. She sugared tanks and hammered sharpened steel rebar into logging roads. She went camping and torched a ski resort.

The cascading whump of ignition a pleasure she felt from the flat muscles of her belly all the way to the crown of her head.

She changed her name to King and did a little hideout time in Humboldt County where she slept with a woman who called herself simply — and accurately — Red. Together they started a ’zine and distributed the anonymous black-and-white sheets of text and drawings, folded at the break, all over town. They wore gloves to keep the ink off their fingers and their fingerprints off the paper. At night they leafed through federal manuals on covert operations in Chile, hearts leaping in their chests. Together they made love among the mimeographed pages of their ’zine and the ink stained their bodies with letters and strange hieroglyph tattoos which they examined together in the moonlight drifting through the window, laughing.