357 magnum

Is there anything to want to be but a revolutionary? When did the notion enter Marina's mind? Growing up in Ventura there was nothing else anybody talked about, when her extended family gathered for the late afternoon visitas on the porch and later in the wide hallway, sitting in rockers, unfolding their endless story they were constantly enacting and narrating, other than what town the rebeldes had seized in the Cordillera Vertebral, or what road the clandestinaje had clogged with cars by artfully tossing tacks at critical intersections. She heard her father say celula comunista and she imagined herself in one. She pictured her future self in the Universidad, meeting in secret back rooms with other revolutionary students, planning heroic deeds. She imagined herself in other secret rooms withstanding torture, sitting in a chair being berated, beaten, having her fingernails plucked. What ever gave her the idea that pain would be nothing to her? That she would be fearless?

Years later, in exile, she forgot her child's decision to be a revolutionary and began to believe with time capitalism and socialism would meet in a middle ground of fairness. But she renewed her revolutionary vows when Mitch, her college friend, explained to her that unemployment would never be eliminated by such fairness because capitalism required it, it was what kept the cost of labor down. She and Mitch were sitting in the living room of her first apartment and Mitch was being avuncular, tutorial, mentor like, professorial.

She saw the light. There was nothing else to be. No other way to overcome the dizzying emptiness of wage slavery, or mortality, than to be a revolutionary.

Weeks later Marina, Mitch and Cojo were sitting in her living room thinking they had no option but to plan a military action, kidnap a housing official to oppose landlord arson, or to support tenant rent strikes, she wasn't sure.

She was assigned to acquire a gun for their cell.

She had no clue. She knew nobody who knew anybody or anything about guns. Except for Ray, her old neighbor in college, who was a quadraplegic from diving into a shallow creek, while on a hunting trip. Ray, her old quadraplegic friend, whom she hadn't seen or spoken with in the six years since she graduated from college, was the only person she could think of who could lead her to a gun. She took a 24 hour bus ride back to her college town and she showed up at Ray's door, and he remembered her, still had the poem she'd written for him.

She explained she needed a gun and Ray didn't ask her for what but next day he had it for her, a brand new, huge 357 magnum in a box. She traveled back by bus with the magnum hidden in a backpack.

She and Mitch and Cojo took it for target practice to a dilapidated farm. The gun's recoil sent her arm straight up, her bullets went noplace she meant them to. If shooting was required for revolutionaries how could she be one? She was too terrified.

She and Mitch and Cojo never again mentioned their action.

It was around that time she stumbled upon the Island Independence rally sponsored by the Partido de la Felicidad and she discovered ways to be a revolutionary that required no guns.

Later, a Party companero she never liked stole the magnum. He seized it when the Party ordered all militants to turn in their weapons,and months later Marina figured out that he had packed it into one of the crates he shipped by boat when he moved back to the Island.