Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist Read Online Free PDF

thing like that? The world is large and I am small. The first thing he thought when he woke up. The thing he had thought at her grave just two days ago. Four years to the date. The last thing he thought every night when he went to bed in his tent with the waves bellowing and the cars chugging like ships passing through the port, every night since he had returned to Seattle three months ago, returned to his father’s house on the hill, busted the latch he had always busted, crawled in the basement window he had always crawled into (or out of), and retrieved the shoes in their box from the closet of his room.
    So hell yeah, go ahead and look, people. They’re my lucky sneaks.
    And then he saw them. The perfect boomer couple. Victor decided to go for the woman, she was wearing gold earrings in some Native design, attractive and kind of hip-looking in a funky hat. She was with her husband and a little girl who was stuffing carrots in her mouth.
    Victor sidled up and went into a monologue, improvised on the spot, about marching for Native rights.
    The woman’s eyes lit up. She began nodding enthusiastically, wisps of brown hair lifting in the breeze. “We’re marching with the Nature Conservancy,” she announced, something mildly apologetic in her voice. “Working on the turtles.”
    “Freedom riders in ’64,” the husband said.
    “Wow,” Victor said, “far-out.”
    The note of pride in the guy’s voice contained something Victor suspected he was supposed to relate to, being a brown man with two thick braids, but he couldn’t guess what.
    “Listen,” Victor said, trying to read their faces, feeling this might be his last and only shot at making some cash.
    “You guys are some pretty cool heads,” he said. “Should I call you Mary Jane?”
    Blank looks all around. He searched desperately for the perfect word.
    “Reefer. Do you guys puff the reefer?”
    “Wait a second,” the man said. “What are you trying to do?”
    “Grass? Dope?”
    “Are you trying to—?”
    “Skunk? Dank? Pack a pipe of the kind bud?”
    “Are you trying to sell me marijuana?” the man said.
    Victor smiling huge, clapped once, glad they could finally connect. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s it, exactly.”
    “Jesus Christ,” the man said.
    The lady picked up her little girl and put her on her hip like a sack of groceries.
    The husband was suddenly not so friendly. He was irate. Righteous-looking. “They put stoned Indians in jail is where they put you,” he said. “You know that?”
    “Yeah, yeah,” Victor said, “I read something about that once.” He back-stepped into the heat of the crowd, looking at the little girl still shoveling carrot sticks into her mouth like trees into a mill. He wanted to tell her: Don’t grow up. Nothing but assholes.
    They were mad and happy and Victor, he felt suddenly tired. Flat-out exhausted. He climbed a bench and sat with his feet on the seat, letting the people flow around him, feeling low, the self-pity and bile building in his throat. Fucking protest march.
    Was that what you called this shit anyway?
    A protest march?
    When you take to the street to chant the chants, to stomp your feet and rhyme the rhymes?
    And all the energy you spend, all the outrage and disgust, is not for you, no, not some sort of personal draining of the pus-filled guilt, but an expression of your compassion for a sad desperate people in a country far away?
    Some expression of your compassion for that war-torn country whose citizens are just skin and bones, and who, you imagine, weep long into the night cursing God for a scrap of bread?
    A protest march—that’s what we call this, right?
    Or maybe they’re crying because their children make T-shirts in an export-zone sweatshop and yesterday there was an accident—the place burned to the ground and no one had the technology on hand to identify one pile of human ash from another.
    Or maybe their son was shot in the head and dumped in a muddy hole