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

When it seemed safe again — the Vail thing over and the FBI with no idea who had done it or how — she went to Portland to protest a toxic incinerator. There she fell in love with a Greenpeace guy and decided to stay awhile. Wide-eyed and cursing and slapping her knee, she listened to his tales of high heroics on the North Sea. Then one night he had tried to rape her while she slept, had come home drunk and tried to fuck her, had continued even after she woke and said no. King broke two of his fingers. One in the confused struggle. The other, afterward, in the quiet of his weeping.

Colorado and California and Oregon, finally she drifted north. At the age of twenty-six she arrived on the Olympic Peninsula, the rough and wild coast where she did tree-sits in the Olympics and slept with no one save the warm solitude of a mummy bag bivouacked eighty feet high in the trees and the sheltering morning light of liquid gold that gathered in her lap and warmed her face.

And for the first time in her life, among the quiet of the massive moss-bearded trees and the curled booming of the salt-whipped waves, she felt like she could finally hear herself think.

Yes, there had been a time when it could be said that King felt the burning glow of violence, but no longer. Now she believed in the transformative power of militant nonviolence. Now she suffered to see so many thrown in the fire.

Which was why King could not believe that here she was fucking with a police.

This was not how you de-escalated. This was not nonviolence as it was practiced or preached. She saw the cop’s blue eyes go hot and then his riot baton wasn’t poking or prodding, it was rising and immediately King regretted what she had done, regretted not the baton which was about to come crashing down on her head, regretted not her anger which had pushed her to humiliate this man. No, she wanted that. Big man on his horse — she wanted to make him feel confused and small; she wanted to fill him with helplessness and the need to hurt. Yes, let him feel that electricity for a minute. Lord knows she had felt it often enough — that sad frustrated rage lighting up her brain for years now.

No, what she regretted was that her involvement in the day’s direct action was about to end before it had even started.

With both hands and arms, she covered her head. She knew it would not save her. She had fucked up. She had lost control of herself, of the situation, of her own tightly wound bitterness. She waited for the heavy wooden baton to fall across her arms and head.

Royally was the word. She had fucked up royally.

But it didn’t happen.

She risked a glance upward.

The commanding officer had stepped forward. The commanding officer who had earlier been calming the crowd over a megaphone, who had been pacing and calming his own agitated line. His hand was on the flank of the horse. And the look on the cop’s mangled face — it was so classic she wanted to take a snapshot. He looked like a little boy whose mom just told him not to spit on the sidewalk; he knew he was caught; he looked, in fact, not unlike her mother’s boyfriend the day King had slammed the trailer door while he stood there with his dick in his hand.

The Chief’s hand patted the horse. “What seems to be the problem?” he said.

“Sir?” the cop said. “This woman, this citizen here, was directly—”

The Chief wasn’t really looking at the cop. He was looking at King with a cool appraising glance. He wasn’t smiling, but something ironic shone behind his glasses. He clearly did not like this officer as much as King had decided she didn’t like him.

“Park, I want you to report to MACC.”

“Chief Bishop, sir?”

“I said I want you to report back to Command. We are not going to start beating our own citizens,” the Chief said. “Not on my watch. Now get your ass back to the MACC.”

The cop seemed about to say something, but then decided against it. “Yes, sir. Back to the MACC.”

He clicked from the side of his mouth, turning the horse.

“Hey,” the Chief said mildly. He patted the horse’s rump with affection.

“Sir?”

“Did you hear me say take the horse?”

Cops all down the line were coughing into their fists, trying not to laugh.

The Chief pointed at Park and then pointed to the ground.

“But this is my horse. ”

“You walk, my friend,” the Chief said.

His humiliation complete, Park climbed down from the saddle. The Chief wrapped the reins in his fist.

King couldn’t help it. She was smiling so wide her grin could have powered a thousand cities for a thousand years. Her cheeks hurt. It just confirmed everything she believed — the Chief showing up like this. The power of love. The transformative power of nonviolence. The indisputable fact that the universe itself was on their side.

Two cops stepped aside, pointedly gazing out at the crowd, and Park stepped through the hole they had made in the line. He looked back once, marking her face, King knew, for all eternity.

She put her lips to her palm and blew him a kiss.

Bye, asshole.

As he disappeared back into the sea of black-suited riot gear, just one more anonymous storm trooper among hundreds, the crowd behind her suddenly erupted in a roar. She turned. People were applauding. Folks who had watched the whole scene play out now jumping and clapping and hooting. She waved, feeling a little queasy. This wasn’t about embarrassing the cops. This wasn’t about the cops at all. This was about shutting down the meetings. Peacefully.

“Are you all right?” the Chief said. He was studying her with some care, fingers idling along the horse’s mane. He seemed amused.

Now that it was over, her adrenaline was running an even race with her shame — shame starting to pull ahead, and she couldn’t remember what she had come up here in the first place to do. She could hear her heart beating in her ears. Breathe, she commanded herself, and took a deep gasping breath, all the way down to the pit of her stomach. She let it out with a long sigh. She shook her head.

“Sir, all due respect, but we don’t intend to provoke you or put your officers in harm’s way. We are not here to riot.”

“Good,” he said.

They stood for a beat just looking at each other. This was one of those moments. The calm, the sudden sharp sense of ease. The tension was still there but different, somehow transformed into a kind of high-wire clarity King recognized from her time working with the inmates.

“Chief, I want you to know—”

King breathing steady now. They had passed out of the moment of confrontation and into a moment of human dialogue. She wasn’t sure how she had accomplished it, but she was here now, exactly where she wanted to be.

“I just want to say again, this is a peaceful protest. We have trained for months. We are disciplined. We are here to shut down the meetings. Peacefully. I can promise you there will be no violence.”

Chief Bishop with his hand on the horse. He seemed relaxed, the Chief next to this huge animal, rubbing its neck.

“Good. I’m glad we understand each other. Because I’m going to need you to clear this intersection in fifteen minutes.”

It was like a punch to the stomach.

“What?”

The Chief waited.

“Didn’t you hear what I just said? We don’t want there to be any violence,” she said. “We aren’t here to riot. We’re here to shut down the meetings.”

“Yes, I heard you the first time. And I’m saying I need you people to clear this intersection.”

“Okay, I understand you want us to clear the intersection,” King said. “But I’m not in charge. There are tens of thousands of people here.”