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

Author:Sunil Yapa [Yapa, Sunil]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2016-01-12T05:00:00+00:00

23

The Chief did not look good. His sandy hair lying damp on his forehead and his glasses askew and his face gone pale beneath the tan. They were chanting and they were singing and they were sitting linked arm in arm and they were not clearing the street. So he grabbed one of the dispensers and let the pepper spray go streaming over their seated dripping bodies. He released the spray to drift down in a fine webby mist.

He pushed his way to the front where two of his men were trying to extricate a boy in an army jacket from the chain-link of arms.

He reached down between his men and removed the boy’s bandanna in one easy motion. He hit him in the face with the pepper spray. His head was shaved. He wore loops of leather and beads around his neck. A purple crystal pendant on a silver chain.

The boy gagged and fell forward, still trying to chant. Bishop blasted him again.

“Sorry, kid,” he said.

People packed between the buildings; people spilling from the sidewalks and up into the potted ferns and cedar chips. People dangling from lampposts and dancing in the crosswalks. He shot the spray hard into their faces, two spots of rough red spreading outward from his bright blue eyes, his thin-lipped mouth. This was the face of a man on the edge of cardiac arrest.

Screaming now. The boy was arm in arm with two girls on either side and now they were screaming and screaming and screaming and he couldn’t believe how angry it made him as these kids sat unmoved in the mayhem and continued to chant.

Bishop laid his baton across the soft meat of the boy’s back. Bishop himself had said in the MACC, he had said it again in the street, “Don’t get out of control.”

He wasn’t out of control.

But he wanted very badly for this crowd to disperse. He wanted to clear a way through. He wanted to protect his city. He wanted the Mayor to quit shouting at him over the radio. He wanted his goddamn city back.

Bishop. KRRRCHHH

Anarchists seen headed north on Seneca.

KRRRCCCCCHH

Flammable liquids. Over

…soft platoon! Who can go hats and bats?

It seemed like everybody was talking on the same channel, and he felt a despondent anger, a helpless sort of rage as he keyed the radio and pressed it to his mouth.

Bishop here. Did not copy. Please repeat.

Chief! Chief!…KRRRCHHH

Fourth and KRRCCCHH

BishKRRCHH.

Bishop here. Did not copy. Please repeat.

Urine. Over.

Paper bags of crap. Over.

He stepped to the side. Kicked one of the girls in the leg, then stepped back and kicked the other one in her ribs. Kicked at their linked arms trying to break them apart.

“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

People stumbling from the intersection, choking, heading north or east, away from the gas.

He had ordered his troops to fire on American citizens and they had fired and now he could not take it back no matter how much he might have wished it to be so.

BishopKRRRCHHH

Need assistance at Fifth and Pike.

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