Dance the Eagle to Sleep Page 11

  “So that’s why the rule that no one keeps money, and no one spends money except the group.”

  “Because you can’t cut down and withdraw a little. You feel poor then. You feel like you’re broke in the supermarket. You get into hustles, and then they have you.”

  Corey knelt banging unevenly at the shingles. Though they worked side by side, it was easy to tell the work Corey had done from his. It would be better if he worked alone and Corey just sat and talked to him, but Corey would be offended if he said so. Corey squatted with his collarbones poking out and his ribs showing in his sides and his face open in a big grin. He made passes at the nails and missed them, knocking them in crooked. Shawn would have to do half the work over. Corey stood up to stretch, flapped his skinny arms and almost lost his balance, laughed happily and sat down again, kicking his hammer off down the slide of roof. Shawn grabbed for it and caught it.

  “The societies kids naturally form are tribal. Gangs, clubs, packs. But we’re herded into schools and terrified into behaving. Taught how we’re supposed to pretend to be, taught to parrot all kinds of nonsense at the flick of a switch, taught to keep our heads down and our elbows in and shut off our minds and shut off our sex. We learn we can’t even piss when we have to. Raise your hand and ask the teacher for a pass. What kid isn’t humiliated by that? What kid isn’t scared the teacher won’t let him go? And the teacher has the right to make the kid sit there hurting in his bladder until he pees all over himself. That’s slavery. That’s how we learn to be plastic and dumb.”

  “I went to a very permissive school” Shawn said. “Yet here I am. My grade school was too much better than the outside.”

  “We learn to be stupid. That the day is divided into periods, and nothing in any period has anything to do with anything else. One fourth divided by one half is what, sonny boy? Dayton is the capital of Chicago. A verb is an action word. Gravity is what makes things fall. Say it back right. Say the right words, and draw pictures in the margins of people shooting each other”

  “Did you ever kill anyone?”

  “Not personally. But we have. It’s the same thing. We have to start over. We have to start while there are still human people left. Kids have a chance. We aren’t mortgaged yet. We have to get all the kids out who are still alive and keep them alive. People who still have eyes will pick up on the way to live. The others can go on trying to make their crazy machine work on each other. But the young won’t go into their system to be ground to hamburger any more, and gradually it will slow down and come to a halt. And people will walk away and learn to live again.”

  He put his hand on Corey’s shoulder, smooth and bony and hot to the touch. He could feel the pulse. “I don’t believe those who have hold of the riches of the world, including our bodies, are going to let go. But I don’t have any better ideas.” He believed in nothing beyond the moment, but the moment was good. Corey wanted more from him, searching with his black stare. Shawn felt vaguely pressed on and picked up the hammer.

  In August, Corey went out to Chicago, and thirty more Indians followed him back to the farm. He was already talking about starting one on the West Coast. While he was gone, the dark woman Dolores who played the drums gave birth to their first baby, who was named in council Leaf.

  Billy Assumes the Offensive

  “If you had bothered with nineteenth-century history, you’d know that this whole farm business is a throwback. Brook Farm—utopian cranks off in the woods to start the good society, and at each other’s throats in six months.”

  “We aren’t giving up on our organizing. This is just one of our bases. Don’t you see what it does for the kids—letting them get their heads together.?” Corey flung himself down in the high grass and sprawled there waiting for Billy to lie beside him.

  “Sure. A regular summer camp and 4-H Club training program. Sound minds in sound bodies. Maybe our melons will win a prize at the county fair. If they don’t wise up and bust us all first”

  “It’s a lot less likely here than at the city communes. We’ve taken good precautions against a raid. With the warning system and the tunnels, they wouldn’t find a soul aboveground who can’t wave a solid ID in their faces” Again Corey motioned him to lie in the rippling grass, giving him a broad lazy smile. He wore only a pair of dirty wash pants cut off at the knees, and his body had tanned a coppery brown.

  Billy felt sweaty and uncomfortable standing, but if he lay down it would be hard to get the confrontation he wanted. Corey was always slipping through his hands. He would come to meet Billy agreeing, partly agreeing, turning everything off obliquely, turning concrete objections into abstract agreements and turning general criticisms into reasonable and loving accounts of minute details. The gentle runaround. Corey could not let him disagree. He felt smothered and handled and yet somehow not touched. Shifting from foot to foot he felt like a big hot sweaty fool, and finally he got down on his haunches and pulled loose blades of the tall grass between his fingers. Fingers stained with chemicals. Still a freaky specialist.

  Corey was staring with wide eyes up into the sky. “First, our people make themselves real here. When they leave, they’re stronger. Some may not be able to take the strain in the streets, but they would have broken anyhow. Here they can be useful.”

  “Some of my boys find it harder to take farm life. They miss the action. They didn’t join up to plant potatoes. They want to take on the man”

  “Well, we’re doing that. But we have to try to be self-sufficient. We have to show what we mean. We have to give people something good to feel loyalty to.”

  “People can feel loyal to each other if they’re fighting together. Unity that people get through struggling is worth ten times as much as what they get handed to them on a plate.”

  “Creating something better is struggling, too. We need to keep it up on both fronts: making real, visible alternatives, and confronting the system.”

  He would seize Corey, and Corey would change shape and color. Stay! Stand! “So we set up a summer camp in the Jersey hills for wayward adolescents. The man can let us get away with that. What would it matter to General Motors if we set up twenty? The kids aren’t causing any trouble here.”

  “But they’re all the way out of the system. That’s the biggest trouble we can make.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. There’s nothing political about squash and beans.”

  “Don’t kid yourself, Billy. Food is the basic stuff of politics”

  “Only where people are hungry. There’s more food to be looted from a big supermarket than we can raise here.”

  “That’s an idea” Corey sat up on one elbow. “Exemplary action. In some suburb. Shopping plaza situation—like Franklin, remember? We’ll bring that up in council” Corey’s eyes were crinkled up with excitement. He scratched his chest with excess energy, “INDIANS RAID SUPERMARKET. Wow! I dig that. That’s beautiful. Free food now! Give some of it away nearby, someplace where they need it. Big Robin Hood scene. It’s lovely, lovely. I’m going on the first one. Soon as possible”

  Billy felt numbed. First, it had not been a suggestion. Second, if it had been, that would no longer matter. He had learned, in fact, never to tell Corey his strategic, even his tactical ideas, because Corey would just naturally co-opt them. Corey would present them to council as his—just naturally. Because Corey did not differentiate between where he personally stopped and the Indians started. He wanted to present an idea as groovy, to get it across, so he took it over and dressed it up in his best rhetoric, thus somehow transforming it completely. Corey acted as if he truly could not, did not, need not distinguish between the I and the we, yet he was only one man, and maybe his ego was as sore as Billy’s. Yes, it was there, throbbing away.

  “Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is just this: Maybe a healthy army of barefoot kids who know how to pick tomatoes isn’t a good fighting corps. My warriors belong on the streets.”

  “So keep some of them on the streets.” Corey grimaced. “But w
e have to gather all the tribes. Everybody can’t make it on the streets. We have to grow or we perish.”

  “I’m not saying we should scrap the farm. But too much effort’s going into it. We don’t need it that bad. We do need the warriors. They’re the core of our power.”

  “The tribe is the core. The whole tribe.”

  “You can prance around all night beating on cans and turning red in the face and having fits, but if we can’t defend our people, we can’t lead them out of the system” Corey did not pay enough heed to their reality, their vulnerability. He was hung up on symbols. “Without the warriors, we’re just a mob of silly kids ready to be herded up.”

  “Right. We have to protect our people.”

  “How? Corey, how?”

  “By growing. By building up the tribes. The warriors, too.”

  “Right” he said, but didn’t change. Like Corey’s absurd catering to Shawn. Shawn wasn’t even a warrior. He had never gone through his initiation, and Corey defended that openly. Said that Shawn was a shaman, not a warrior, and they needed shamans. Needed his obscene strutting and showing off. All they needed from Shawn as far as he could see was Shawn’s money, his name, and his talent at getting kids excited. Billy was sure there was some cheap efficient chemical means to the same target. Yet Corey treated Shawn with that same deference he used toward Billy, absolutely the same. Besides that, Corey hung around with Shawn; he would pick Shawn out to work with.

  He had tried to talk to Corey about Shawn. He had used a phrase Corey had picked up with delight, but not as he had meant it. He had called Shawn “post-scarcity man.” Corey grabbed that phrase as if he had meant Shawn was some sort of ideal they ought to strive toward. Jesus! He had meant that Shawn acted as if they were already in post-scarcity, whereas they were in the belly of the beast fighting their way out. There was only the potentiality for post-scarcity, but people were hungry and deprived and destroyed. He meant that Shawn had never known scarcity himself. Corey had answered him with a smile, that neither had they, after all. Of course Billy hadn’t—not physical scarcity—but he had known emotional starvation and intellectual deprivation, and he had taken care to comprehend the power structure and economic web of the world they lived in. And imagine Corey saying he had never known scarcity. Billy had seen the shack Corey had grown up in: a peeling wooden box stuck up on cement blocks. Not even a lawn, just a shack stuck up lopsided out of the mud.

  Corey didn’t have a father, his mother worked. Early he had been shunted into the lowest track. Even if there had been no Nineteenth Year of Servitude, what would he have had to look forward to? The Army? Trying to get hired in the mills? A dishwasher’s job or a job in the car wash in the shopping plaza? Jail, if they had caught him in the one job he had held. Sometimes Billy felt years older than Corey.

  If they hadn’t started the Indians, he, Billy, would be at Cal Tech, but where would Corey be? Corey didn’t understand that the titillating prestige he had enjoyed as a dealer in high school was just a way of keeping him quiet until he went into the cheap labor pool with the other discardable slobs. The only sector of the economy where post-scarcity reigned was the labor market, where there was no lack at all of Coreys ready to do whatever it was not yet economical to have a machine do better. Then his only contact with Shawn would have been to fill the tank of his sports car and wipe his windshield. Corey thought he was saving everybody else, but never noticed the despair yawning before him.

  “What’s wrong?” Corey leaned on bent elbow, tickling Billy’s arm with blades of grass. “Tell me what’s eating you”

  “What’s really going to happen to us? Don’t you think about it? Don’t you wake up at night and feel you have to know?”

  “We’re going to make the revolution. We have no other choice”

  He yanked the grass out of Corey’s hand and scattered it. “Look at me, Corey. We’re going to make a revolution in the United States, in the center of the empire. With bubble gum? We’re going to blow up the Pentagon and bring the troops home?”

  “If nobody would go to work at the Pentagon, if nobody would go into the Army, they couldn’t crush us. We can’t break their machine—they have enough firepower to blow up the world ten times. But we can get the people out.”

  “Corey! No rhetoric, Corey! Look at me. I think we’ll die in a skirmish long before the real revolution.”

  “We win, or the world ends. There’s no use being defeatist. Despair is the worst vice for a revolutionary. We can win.”

  He wanted to take Corey by the shoulders and shake him. To hurt him into response. He raised his hand, but he could not touch Corey. Could not touch him. “Don’t call me defeatist. I’m looking with my eyes open. I’m ready to die in that skirmish. I don’t think we can win in the fat homeland. Do you think so, Corey? I think all we can do is help the people out there fighting for their freedom. Are you ready to die?”

  “You have to want to win, Billy. People come to us for a better life, not a good death.”

  “I’m asking about what you think will happen!” He turned away, resting his cheek against the ground. His eyes closed for a moment. He felt weak and huge, then his anger came back. “I’m going back to the city. I want to fight the enemy, not pretend they’ve gone away”

  “What about the lab?”

  “The boys can turn out bread and anything else we need. I’m not in the mood to work in it anyhow. I’m tired of cooking”

  Corey grimaced with worry, but his voice was soft and pushed at agreement. “Sure it’d be good to have someone strong back on the Lower East Side. Things are moving fast. Also, we need somebody good in Chicago. The shit has really been coming down on the kids there. And things are uptight in L.A. It’s good to move around and keep your hand in, keep an eye on how things are shaping … What about Ginny?”

  “What about her?” Billy hunched into his shoulders.

  “She’s doing a good job here. I’ve never seen her so together.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  Corey sat up. “Well, because she loves you. Naturally, I think she’d want to go with you.”

  “What for? She’s always got Shawn.”

  “She hasn’t got Shawn. You know. She just screws him sometimes. That’s not anything.”

  Shawn the prick and his nocturnal games. He debased the girls by his strutting, but none of them could see that. Nobody cared except him. Of course, Ginny didn’t mean anything to Shawn. That didn’t keep him away from her. Didn’t keep her away from him. “Don’t see what it has to do with me.”

  “Don’t you believe she loves you?”

  “If she doesn’t have sex with me, she has it with somebody else”

  “That’s not what I mean” Corey shrugged. “You don’t sleep with other girls that often, do you?”

  Billy shrugged back, scowling. After all, Corey knew he didn’t dance, although he ignored it. Often he had tried to push Corey for a confrontation over the dancing, but never succeeded. It was too popular to make an issue in council. He knew he would lose. To strut around in the circle stark naked: the idea that anyone could conceive he would do that made him furious. He wasn’t a smooth talker like Shawn. Oh, he’d gone to bed with other girls a few times, especially after some street action when everybody would be making a fuss after him and some girl would decide she was interested. Like Carole, who was a good warrior, with tight discipline and never lost her cool: but how embarrassing to have her suddenly want that. Only with Ginny sex was easy; only with Ginny he did not feel awkward. He was used to her and she made it comfortable. She admired him in a different way from the others. After all, she had come to him before he’d become some kind of freaky hero.

  He was intensely annoyed with Corey for talking about it. He didn’t talk to Corey about his private relationship with Joanna. Why should he drag Ginny off to New York with him? That’s how Corey acted. Joanna was very ambitious, he could feel that in her. She wanted people to look at her, to admire her, to
pay attention to her too. But she couldn’t get into anything, because Corey was always having to run here and there, and he just dragged her along like his baggage. If he didn’t know where she was for ten minutes, he would start asking people frantically. He seemed scared shitless she would vanish.

  When Joanna spoke up, people would notice her with surprise as a person rather than as an emanation of Corey. They’d say with shock, Joanna really is bright, you know? Joanna has ideas of her own. Then Corey’s voice would ring out, Joanna? Joanna? and she would go running. She sat in on meetings as Corey’s woman, because Corey needed her there. She wanted to be there in her own right, but she never had a chance to prove that right. And Corey could see nothing.

  Then Corey dared sit in judgment on him because he would not say he loved Ginny and drag her off with him away from her job. He did not know if he loved her or not. Probably he could not love anyone. There was too much anger in him. But he knew he would not gobble her up to feed his esteem and smother his loneliness. So he scowled at Corey and kept his face shut. In the warriors men and women were equal and fought as equals or they went down, and there was no messing around when they were under battle discipline.

  Corey made a sad face and shut up about Ginny. “When do you want to go?”

  “Soon.”

  “Be careful, you know. We can’t afford to lose you. Our chief thrust now has to be organizing. We’re not ready for too much confrontation. We should never fight when we can’t win. We should never move into the streets when we know the injuries will be all ours.”

  “We have a lot to learn about street tactics. We won’t learn it digging potatoes and sewing pants” Billy raised his big fist. “Fighting is what takes people across the line. Then they’re ours. Otherwise we’re just bullshit.”

  “What brings people across the line is what we offer them that they can’t find out there”

  “Kids that come in because they think it’s groovy to take off their clothes—we haven’t changed them, we haven’t got to them. Somebody else will offer them a new game, and off they’ll go. One kick is like another. The new one wins.”