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

and floured with lime and buried beneath a shallow mound of bulldozed earth.
    Maybe it was HIV and they couldn’t afford the drugs.
    Wasn’t that what it was called? When you called some friends and made a sign with colored paper and scissors and glue to express your solidarity with the charred bodies of children?
    A protest march?
    “Sometimes,” Victor said to nobody in particular, “I feel like I’m living on the fucking moon.”
    “I know. I mean that’s why we’re here, right?”
    He turned to find a girl sitting next to him.
    She took his hand nonchalantly as if they were brother and sister, Christmas morning, circa 1989, waiting for the orgy of paper and presents. “Can’t you feel it? All these people out here together, marching for, you know, justice?”
    Victor nodded. He was sort of noticing her hair. Noticing the way she was sitting next to him on the bench. She was pretty in a sophomore year of college kind of way with a button nose and a pink bandanna knotted peasant-style in her corn-silk hair.
    She noticed him noticing.
    “Don’t you have one?”
    She touched her hair. Apparently she thought he was checking out her bandanna. When he didn’t say anything, she undid the knot. She unwound the bandanna, shook her hair free, and offered it to him.
    “That’s all right,” he said, and touched his forehead where his own bandanna held back his braids. She smiled and shrugged and together they sat and watched the crowd.
    On an impulse, just the good feeling of it, he leaned into her ear.
    “Let’s get high.”
    Victor felt an immediate ice. She was still sitting there, but it was a certain thing you could sense, a withdrawing into the self as if a switch had been flipped.
    “It’s good shit,” he said, and reached for the half a joint in the pocket of his down jacket.
    She actually stepped off the bench.
    He bent and lit the roach. Made his body a cave in which a match could flame, and by god it did. He nearly cheered. He shook the match and took a great gasping drag. He held it in his lungs a beat, and then exhaled sweet smoke that zipped across the heads of the crowd like a little runaway train careening off a bridge.
    The girl was just standing there looking at him. People were passing in the carnival behind her.
    “You can’t do that here,” she said.
    He offered it to her. “Don’t worry about the cops,” he said.
    “No. Look, you don’t understand. This is a drug-free area.”
    He took another drag and laughed smoke. “This is a protest march.”
    “Where’d you hear that?” she said. “This isn’t a protest march. This is a direct action.”
    “Whatever,” he said. He hit the roach again. “What’s the difference?”
    She stepped forward, put one foot onto the bench, plucked the joint from his lips, and then flicked it to the ground and crushed it into the pavement with her boot.
    “Fucking seriously, dude.”
    In the beam of that cool knowingness he suddenly felt less sure of himself. How could he ever have mistaken her for nothing more than a sexy undergrad? She was a radical, a revolutionary, and he suddenly wanted to be as far away from her as humanly possible.
    Her bandanna. The pink flap of cotton which had been holding back her hair. She pressed it into his hand and closed his fist around it.
    “Trust me,” she said, beginning to move off, “you’ll want it later.”
    Victor, frozen to the bench, dumbfounded, watched her go, the bodies moving past him, sat there mute and scared, letting the noise wash over him in waves.
    He wanted to call out to her. He wanted to apologize, to throw away his weed forever and call her back.
    He looked at the pink bandanna in his hand. He wanted to call out, “I’ll need it for what later?”
    Which is when he heard the man’s voice. The pissed-off Freedom Rider husband saying loudly, “That’s him, Officer. That’s him, right there.”
    Victor turned. The husband was talking to a cop on a horse. The cop was sitting tall.