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

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.”

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.