Loaves and Fish

At one in the afternoon, we are hot and sweaty and tired, having baked under the heat of the sun for hours now. Salome’s statement on television has swelled our numbers by another thousand or two, and the wave of demonstrators flows out of the plaza and into the nearby streets.

The police have been getting antsy. We see the way that they eye us up, the way their fingers itch on their triggers, ready to fire at a moments notice. Canisters of tear gas are loaded on a police van nearby, while a firetruck has its hose primed to pump. Officers have been spotted on the rooftops of nearby buildings. So far, all they’ve done is watch. But it wouldn’t take much to change that.

We have a few trucks of our own, a row of pick-ups parked on the streets to the north. But they’re not filled with tear gas. On the contrary, Scarlet and I stand by one of the trucks, unloading crate after crate of bottled water and packed sandwiches.

“One thing I’ve learned doing this? You’ve got to keep the people well fed, or they’ll pack up and go home,” Scarlet says, passing me a box full of water.

Her white jacket is draped over the side of the truck, and she’s rolled up her sleeves to match the dozens of us in the human chain. We started passing things out thirty minutes ago, and we’re only about halfway done unloading these trucks. I’ve been trying to chat up Scarlet this entire time, seeing if I can make any inroads to furthering our relationship, but she’s wanted to talk nothing but business.

“Well, good thing we’re not giving any to the cops then,” I say, giving her a smile. “It would make our job a lot easier if they decided to call it a day soon.”

“The cops are getting our sandwiches and water too,” Scarlet says, giving me a patronising smile. “They’ll be the first ones to get it, in fact, once our stuff makes it to the front lines.”

“That’s a good one,” I laugh, passing down a crate full of sandwiches from her.

“I’m being serious,” she says, and I take a second to study her beautiful face, her brunette hair just the slightest bit damp from her sweat, clinging to the sides of her face as she stares at back at me.

“You are serious,” I say, widening my eyebrows.

“Come on, my Father said you had a better head for politics than me. You can work it out yourself,” she says, picking up on my confusion.

“I understand the theory,” I say. “Make sure the cameras are watching when you hand out lunch to the police, you look like the good guys. Maybe the police even feel a little bit of sympathy for you, and they’re a bit less willing to crackdown on you when the time comes.”

“So you needn’t have acted so shocked.”

“I thought that was a tactic that only worked in the first world,” I say. Scarlet looks at me and frowns. “Are the police here going to be gracious? Are they not just going to spit in your face and laugh at you when you tried to give them their handouts?”

“They might, but that’s not the point,” she says. “There’s a bigger strategy at play here—”

“Isn’t your strategy to bait the police into beating us bloody and raw? You and I both know that your Congress is content to sit their in their Capitol and ignore us until this all blows over. The only way you gain any traction is by turning this into a bloodbath,” I say. “So what good does making peace with the officers do?”

Scarlet pauses as she’s about to hand me the next crate, the cardboard box full of muffins sagging in her arms as she stares at me. The look on her face is not shock, but weariness.

She looks over to the side, where a couple of young folks are on their phones, chatting and laughing.

“Raul, Maria, step in for us for a couple minutes, will you?” she asks.

The two, in their twenties and both sporting shoulder-length hair that looks like it’s been never washed, are happy to step up and lift boxes in our place.

“Come with me,” Scarlet says, her voice icy sharp. She slips on her white jacket and then pulls me into the front seat of the pick-up truck we were just unloading boxes from. She slams the door shut, checks around to make sure that nobody can see us, and then she lets loose at me.

“Never say that aloud in public again,” she fumes. “I don’t care who you are or what you think you know, never so much as try to verbalise a thought like that again.”

“Whoa there, I’m sorry for making assumptions about your campaign,” I say. “There was definitely a more sensitive way for me to say that, and you’re right, I shouldn’t have said it in the first place…”

Scarlet sighs.

It’s a tired thing, tired in a way that another cup of coffee couldn’t fix.

“The problem,” she says, “is that you are right.”

“What, that I’m sorry? Because yes, I am sorry, I was being sincere…”

“You’re right about my strategy,” she says. “Most of our people out there don’t know it, or they don’t want to know it, but you and I know the truth. This bill will pass unless something more drastic than a hippie gathering in the square takes place.”

“So you got mad at me for nothing,” I say, looking at her again.

She stares out the front window of the truck, at a small trickle of people joining our crowd. Who are they? Students? People cutting work?

“I got mad at you because nobody can know,” she says. “Yes, it is our strategy to provoke the police into attacking us. To make a massacre on television so horrific that there is **** but for the country to accede to our demands. But it only works if they think we weren’t asking for it ourselves. There are cameras everywhere, and not all of them are friendly. I cannot be caught even discussing such a strategy, and you are now close enough to us that you cannot either. We’d be ruined in a heartbeat if that were the case.”

“So that’s why you’re giving the cops sandwiches,” I say.

“Because how could we be the aggressors when we’re the ones giving out food?” she says, a tight smile on her lips.

“I think your Father might have been wrong,” I say. “You have a better head for politics than me.”

“Thank you,” she says, a semblance of a real smile crossing her lips now. “Now, I’ve got to get back out there. Let’s make sure those policemen are get their just desserts.”