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

King was scared.

Maybe not on the surface, surrounded as she was by her brothers and sisters fifty thousand strong, her cadre of companions committed to the struggle. But no, he heard it in her voice. She knelt in front of John Henry and spoke and despite her demeanor what was it in her voice? What was it that made him think at the eye of the slowly turning hurricane that was her self, she was near panic? On the deepest level, this woman was terrified.

“You think we’re going to lose,” Victor said.

King turned to him. She made her mouth into a smile and rested a hand on his shoulder.

“I don’t think we’re going to lose, Victor.”

“Yes, you do. And you’re afraid.”

“Listen,” she said gently, and what was it in her voice that made him feel like he was the biggest fool the world had ever known. “Listen, Victor, nobody expects you to do this untrained. Everybody here will understand if you want out. You just need to tell us because we would have to replace you. Are you scared? Do you need out?”

“No, no, no. I’m good. I want to be here with you guys. I mean I get it now. I think I know why we’re here.”

“Fine,” she said, and started to stand up. “Good.”

“But listen,” he said. King knelt back down in front of them. Looked at him with eyes so green he understood how you could drown in someone and never want to come back. And why did he say it? Because he wanted to prove to her he wasn’t a fool? Because he wanted her to stay? Because he wanted her to kneel here forever and touch his face the way she had knelt and touched John Henry?

“It’s all right,” he said. “It’s not wrong to be afraid.”

She smiled. “Victor. I’m not afraid. I’m committed. This is what committed looks like.”

“No, you’re afraid,” Victor said. “I get it. I understand. I was afraid, too. But now I’m not. Watching Edie I knew. We have to stay. We have to win. And if they beat us, I understand that now, too. And I accept that. We’re going to win.”

She smiled again, but there was something cold in her eyes that he didn’t like at all. An ice in her voice as she said, “I know, Victor.”

“You don’t have to be ashamed to be afraid, King. You just have to own it.”

She paused and he thought for a second she was going to slap him.

“Don’t tell me what I have to own.”

“King, we can’t leave. It doesn’t matter if we’re afraid. We have to stay. You have to feel the fear. You have to own it. Make it yours.”

She exploded. Went from calm to furious as quick as turning a coin on your finger. There she was, right in his face, screaming at him.

“Don’t you tell me what I have to fucking own!”

Victor cringing from the force of her anger.

She was spitting in his face while John Henry said, “King. Quit yelling at the boy.”

“Are you fucking hearing me, Victor?”

And Victor saying, “Okay, okay, okay. I hear you.” Because where was there to go? Nowhere. He was in lockdown.

“I am committed! Am I getting through, you straight-ass motherfucker? Committed!”

“King, goddamn it, quit screaming at that boy!”

“Don’t you dare tell me what I have to own . I own what I own! And what I have done—”

Suddenly she put a wrist to her mouth. Took a deep slashing breath.

Victor saying, “No, no, no.” Still leaning as far back as the chained-in pipes would allow.

She inhaled deeply again, her voice on the far edge of tears or no tears. “No, Victor.” And now she did touch him. Held his face between her hands and looked at him. Her eyes were wide, eyelashes sequined with tears.

“You don’t have to back away from me,” she said.

“Where would I go?”

She laughed and ran a sleeve across her nose. Snuffled once loud and long.

“That’s right,” she said, trying to smile. “Where would you go? You’re stuck with me. Big bad King.”

She snuffled again and hawked from deep in her throat. She leaned over their knees and discreetly spat a yellow mess on the concrete at their feet and in that motion all was gone. It was as if she had sucked and spat the regret right from her chest. When she turned back she was all business.

“I’m sorry, Victor. I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I shouldn’t have put you in lockdown is what it comes down to. That was my mistake. I pushed you.”

And John Henry saying, “King.”

And Victor saying, “No. Nobody pushed me.”

“And I’m sorry for that. But now I’m taking you out. Non-violence is communication. Nonviolence is admitting your mistakes.”

And Victor saying, “No, no, no.” While King turned and said into her radio, “I need one for lockdown in front of the Sheraton.”

And Victor saying, “No. I want to be here. This is where I belong. With you and John Henry.”

Feeling something he did not want to feel, feeling the thing he went to bed feeling, the thing he woke up feeling, the thing he felt at his tent beneath the highway when he moved gravel from one spot to another with that stupid broom.

Bishop atop the steps of the Sheraton, beside the flagpole, looked at the mess of people gathering around the hotel and he looked up at the city towers and the apartment blocks and thought of the way people do people in what they call daily life. All the calls and all the years. Domestics and murders. Gunpoint theft from the store where you buy your cigarettes and milk. Apartments where he found babies taking care of babies and roaches in the beds looking at him like they owned the place. Maybe they did own it because there sure as hell wasn’t any adult sort of figure around who might be a bill payer of light and food.

Here came the PeaceKeeper growling in low gear. He had called it back from Pike Place Market where the idiot Mayor had sent it. God knows why. The PeaceKeeper climbing the steps of the Sheraton. Bumping over the low steps. Down below any semblance of order was gone. His line had broken and he saw clumps of black in the crowd like lumps of cancer in a radiated lung, the backs of his troops’ hooded forms chopping through the crowd. Batons swinging freely. He watched as one cop swore and delivered a sideways kick that barely missed a black kid’s skull, the cop’s boot landing instead squarely between the boy’s birdlike shoulder blades.

Sometimes the job wore on you. Riding the ride and thinking about your history with people and persons. Thinking of your various failures to be the man you were supposed to be. Thinking of the way people do and the numbness that wants to shrink-wrap your heart and stick it in the freezer and where does it come from and what are you supposed to do once it is there? How to be free of it?

If he was being honest what he wanted most was to follow his son into the wild blue fuck-all.

Because life seemed what?

Simple there.

He remembered a party when they were first married, something one of her painter friends had thrown, and when they walked in, he in jeans and a brown corduroy coat, she in a short black dress with thin straps like dark string across her brown skin, and not just one but every head had turned. He could almost feel the conversation come to a stop. But she liked the attention and he did, too. He liked looking across the room at her talking to a man, some man, any man, or men, these artists, students, and such, and him a young cop on the rise, and what did he have to worry about, she loved him, and he liked to watch the men as they watched her, and she aglow with the story, she there, too. Then a gulp from her drink and a glance across the room at him as if to say, You know this story, this one that I’m telling and this other one, too, this one that I’m acting, here in front of you, the party, you know this story, it’s so old, and who’s that anyway you’re talking to, a redhead? well then, back to my story, but later, tonight, in bed, it will be you and me and not these fools, no, and not that one either.