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

The canister came winging back.

He ducked and pointed. Park turned and fired into the crowd.

Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador — the places in Central America Victor had come to love — where the governments had gone to war — not even gone to war, shit. No. Guatemala, where the government had started a soft war aimed at the hospitals and schools and families. Guatemala, where fathers and mothers and sons and daughters had been stolen and shot and tortured. Disappeared. Imagine a man taken from bed in the middle of the night — your husband, your brother, your father— the sounds of trucks in the street, the rifle butt on the door, they drag him across the room and out of the door by his hair, with a fistful of hair, and he’s holding both hands above his head, both hands wrapped around the fist that drags him as if he had found a new way to pray when he is only holding tight to the fist to keep his hair from being pulled out completely, to lessen the pain that is not even beginning to make sense yet, the onrush of terror so complete it is a blank dark wall with one light shining, outlining a stain there, his terror complete and dark like a bag pulled over his head and that bulb which shines against the blank cinderblock wall, the only light in his terror is the thought to grab with both hands the fist which pulls him across the floor by his hair.

And the only thing remaining the unbearable silence which follows as you look into the eyes of those that remain as if looking at the very future itself, the future which just now began as his feet bumped over the threshold of the door and the sound of the night started again as if nothing had happened. He is gone. And you never had a husband. You never had a father. You never had a son.

Two years ago, Victor had been picking lettuce in California. The Inland Empire, Watsonville, where he and forty thousand had gathered to protest. Gathered to protest, he heard his father laughing, and what is that supposed to mean?

He didn’t have an answer to that. It was the phrase you used when someone asked What did you do in Watsonville? We gathered to protest. It was small talk. It was what you said to the neighbors, people that maybe understood, or didn’t and called forth what empty image in their mind? Gathered to protest? A labor march?

Words mean things, Victor, and what do these words mean?

And what did Victor mean? Why had he gone? It wasn’t something in the usual run of things, no, to walk away from work, to join a group, to mix with their bodies, their clothes and hair and sweat and conversations which he didn’t understand, and he didn’t know what it was at first, a sweet sort of overpowering perfume, and then realized it was the smell of other people, realizing with a smile and a shock that it was the smell of the food they made, the smell lingering in their clothes, it was the smell of their homes, walking together, what a beautiful intimate kind of crazy thing, and he laughed and imagined a whole family of people with food on plates gathered around the TV and he recognized the smell, and he knew the music from the TV, and he smiled, imagining himself part of a family, a visitor or a guest, or maybe a son, why not, sitting there with his brother, and his cousins, and his aunts and uncles, and his parents, all of them gathered around a TV, paper plates on their laps, eating and shouting the answers to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

Why did he go? He went because the people who worked in those lettuce fields were abused. He went because he worked, too, and he understood it, but he didn’t have to live it and that was different.

But what does that mean, son? The people in those fields were abused. I work, too.

Victor didn’t know. It was shorthand somehow. He couldn’t think of how to explain what it was shorthand for. His father said I’ve seen dogs that were abused, I’ve seen horses that were abused, but what in the heck does it mean, those people were abused? And Victor wanted to say they are decent people, Dad, if only you could have been there. They are human beings of worth, as much as you or me, and he heard his father laughing and coughing, not because he disagreed they were good folks, but that phrase, human beings of worth. Was there not a single word he could say that had not been emptied of value?

What he wanted to say was there are workers in California, and they work in Watsonville in the fields of lettuce. They work for money like we all do. And these workers, these workers that are abused, that don’t get paid enough, that work terrible hours, and make nothing, that are abused, that wash their feet and faces in ditches, that wash their little babies, if only you could have been there, Dad, and seen them washing their children’s faces with ditchwater, scolding and talking as if this were the most normal thing in the world.

What we get used to. Do you understand? What we require of others so that we may live our lives of easy convenience. Dad, there are people who work all day every day for thirty years assembling the three wires that make a microwave timer beep. What are we supposed to think of this? How do they survive it? Why do we ask them to?

If you had met them, Dad, you would understand. If you had stood in that field, heads of lettuce stretching to the horizon, and the feeling, if you had met them, I’m not saying you would feel one way or the other, he wanted to say to his father, but if you had met them, shook their hand, and marched side by side with them, heard their voices, heard them laughing, and shared lunch with them, you used to like to laugh, Dad, remember, before Mom died? If you had eaten lunch with this family, seen the mother scolding her kids and laughing the way Mom used to yell at me and laugh, and the dark face of the father breaking into a smile as he offered me an orange soda — if you had drunk an orange soda from the bottle, warm from the bottle, but good, an orange soda on a sunny day in a lettuce field, and you arrived walking, and forty thousand people arrived on buses — this is what he wanted to say, if you had sat in the dirt and the heads of lettuce to the horizon. Lunch, Dad. This is what he wanted to say, if you had eaten a chicken salad sandwich wrapped in a paper napkin, and the mayonnaise leaking down the little girl’s chin, and the father, his face was wrinkled, you know by the eyes? and he wore a mesh hat that said Budweiser on it, like the one you used to have, and he wore it kind of at an angle, not a fashion or anything, but just the angle it landed on his head when he took it off to wipe the sweat with his forearm and then snapped it back onto his head, and he put his hand on my back to say welcome, or thank you, I don’t know, and the chicken salad sandwiches, and that orange soda warm and fizzy from the bottle that he opened with a bottle opener that was swinging from his belt. He wanted to say all this and more to his father three years since he had spoken to him. It was a feeling he had, as difficult to name or say where it came from or where it went as the fizzy mist of the orange soda. He wanted the words to describe all this and more to his dad. He wanted him here and by his side so he could say these are human beings. These are people and their lives are no different than ours. We are human beings. That woman could have been my mother. And they work hard, too hard, Dad, but they still remember how to laugh. Remember what it used to feel like?

Instead he said, “We went to protest. I walked into the lettuce and we gathered to protest. Those people work hard picking lettuce. Lettuce? Lettuce. They are not paid enough. They are treated badly. So we gathered to protest.”

That’s what he said to his father because the words to say otherwise simply weren’t there.