Dance the Eagle to Sleep (10 page)

to you.

Back behind them, people had started dancing in a rough circle. “Hey, Clare. Let’s go back and join them. I want to dance. It’s been so long, so long”

But Clare was moaning and swaying and grinding her hips. Joanna nudged her harder. “I want to dance. Come on!” She couldn’t get through to Clare, so she edged away by herself. Later on she’d find Clare or she wouldn’t. Anyhow, she didn’t want Clare pushing her to make a fool of herself with Shawn. Girls were strange. They thought getting fucked by somebody famous would electrify them. Somehow a white light would shine into their cunts and suddenly their lives would have meaning. The god would touch them and bring them into the sunshine. Then everybody would see who they were: secret princesses.

Shawn had been all right but only half there, like somebody stoned. He was angry and raw and kept his thoughts locked in. He was like a dozen other boys, except for being better looking. She remembered that his eyes were a deep dark startling blue. He had used his tall lean athletic body well and he had a big prick. But the sex had been nothing special. His prick might be a yard long, but his mind was someplace else. His voice was unmistakable and cut through the electric flak. Big, powerful and golden it rose. But she couldn’t remember his speaking voice. Mostly he had mumbled. He was a man like a dozen others who had entered but not touched her. Scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. She never pretended except when the powers had her entrapped.

After her arrest, the cops had questioned her a long time trying to establish who she had been having sex with, and she remembered now that they had asked again and again about Shawn. She denied everything. She didn’t care if the doctor reported sperm in her. She went on denying. If anything had happened, it must have been when she was asleep and how could she know? That was all she would say and they could not crack her. She didn’t care whether they sent her to jail or home. Probably they’d been out to get an extra charge on him. She was glad she had not talked. He had his own problems. The radio didn’t play his records any more. He was blackballed.

She pushed her way into the circle of dancers. First there was a rim of people watching. Then a slow circle moving. She could see now that kids came into the center to dance usually by ones but sometimes in couples or threes. When they came into the center, they would throw off their clothes and one of the people who seemed to stay there would gather the clothes into a pile out of the way. The kids seemed stoned as they danced, in intense and almost palpable vision.

I had a woman,

I had a son.

They took them away,

they made them run.

Now I have everybody,

everybody, everybody

and no one.

One girl, thin in her nakedness as a garden rake, began to scream and fell to her knees. One of the regulars, a dark skinny guy with glossy black hair, came and squatted beside her, talking. He helped her up and moved with her for a while and then she returned to the larger circle and resumed the slower dance around and around.

The nakedness had a strange quality to it. Every so often when there was a crowd in the park milling around and something was happening and people were turned on, some guy would take his clothes off. But this was different. She felt that the dancers did not have a sense of being looked at. That was not primary. Yet people were watching each other, watching the dancing carefully. Often in crowds if some girl got stoned and took off her clothes, she would be mobbed. It would turn ugly, with men swarming to feel her up. But people were respectful here. There was a discipline underlying everything. She could feel a response in the outer circle when somebody danced well, inventively, passionately. When a dancer finished he would find his clothes, dress and step back into the circle. Or he might fall to the ground and lie there until one of the attendants could come to him. Then the kid would be raised up and helped to dress. When he was together, he would return to the outer circle and the slower dance.

It was an image of something in her blood. There were things that all the kids who were not nailed down yet wanted, even if they could not say. Certain things they groped for, though no one had seen them. Something beyond the tight consumption unit of the husband/wife/kiddies box of inducing neuroses. Some form of commune. Some form of social bond not based on buying or selling or being bought or sold. This grave dancing naked in the circle was one such image, something groped toward in a hundred other botched contexts.

She felt a sharp urge to throw off her clothes and dance in the center. She was a good dancer and proud of it. She loved to move well on the music, feeling herself borne in it and swimming with the beat. But something held her back. She had a feeling that this was all a ritual, and she did not want
to appear a fool. How she would like to stand there naked burning like a torch with her wild hair flying and the beat surging up her torso into her flinging arms, while the circle slowly pivoted on her. It was a good ritual, if that’s what it was.

Then a heavy-set man pushed through the crowd into the circle but did not take off his clothes. He stood there flatfooted and slumping forward, with the circle spilling around him and reforming, and motioned the dark boy over, who came trotting. “Billy-O, what’s up? Something in the wind?”

Billy spoke into the dark boy’s ear, then turned and left, thrusting awkwardly through the dancers and into the crowd.

The dark boy came into the center. “Cool the circle! Cool the circle!” People stopped dancing in slowly subsiding motion. The attendants went about to the dancers in the center and talked them into stillness. Everyone got dressed. The attendants and most of the dancers did not dress cool or well but wore plain old clothes, jeans and work pants and work shirts, male and female alike.

“The pigs.” The murmur came around the circle. “Massed on the edge of the park. Going to raid us. Pass it on.”

A meeting was going on in low voices in the circle. Then everyone broke from it and began to circulate. They worked in twos with packets of papers in their arms. A pair looked at every person they came to carefully, checked the face against a sheet of photographs and passed out a flyer. As they worked toward her, two boys stopped beside another wearing beads and a serape. They whistled. He backed away, but the circle closed and held him. People on both sides held on to him, and he was stripped and tied with a rope and photographed again and left on the ground.

When they came to her, she felt briefly afraid. But they looked in her face and checked their photographs and handed her a map of the area. “We move out through B. Go south away from the precinct. We take the cops on that side of the park, break their barricades and move out. Escape routes through roofs and between buildings or through basements are marked on the map for emergency use” They passed on. In one corner of the map was a buffalo head, and on the top it said we are the people of the new nation of the young and the free.

The circle was dispersed. People were prying benches loose and breaking some of them up for the slats. People were digging rocks or bricks out of the earth, picking up whatever they could use as weapons. The pairs of Indians with their flyers and their photographs of plainclothesmen were moving through the larger crowd now, stopping to check people, warn them
and move on. The crowd began to eddy in the park. There was a smell of fear and anger. She could see nothing, but people passed on that the cops had completely surrounded the park.

“Why is this happening?” she asked the guy next to her.

“They’re trying to force us out of the Lower East Side, to break up the community. They’ll go through and check IDs looking for runaways and evaders. A lot of guys come down here to escape the Nineteenth Year. If you’re under twenty, they just haul you off!’

Up on the shell, Shawn could see something funny was happening. He announced his next number and asked what was coming down. The dark guy who had been in the circle leaped onto the stage and, putting his hand over the mike, spoke to Shawn. Shawn shook his head and grimaced. They argued for a couple of minutes. Then the dark guy took the mike.

“The police have the park surrounded. Don’t speak to anyone except our warriors. Notice their armbands. Follow them. Do as they do. Follow the instructions on your flyers and we’ll lead you out. Join the tribes and survive! We’re the new nation of the young and the free. Come with us!”

He jumped down into the crowd, while Shawn stood there rubbing his blond hair on end. “Shit!” he said. “We can’t even play for you any more without them turning it into a trap. It feels like dirt.” He threw his guitar down and walked off the stage.

Immediately she heard screaming, and people began to run and push and push back. Stuck in a press of people she was carried along, and all she could do was try to move with the crowd and keep her footing. If she went down, she would be trampled. Shots or firecrackers? Cherry bombs or fire bombs? Everywhere people were screaming and shouting. Some cop had a bullhorn. The big heavy-set guy named Billy almost knocked her over passing through with a whole park bench for a battering ram, leading a charge of warriors.

She was moving in the right direction, east and south, but the crowd came to a halt. Behind her people kept shoving till she wanted to scream. She could smell the first nauseous whiffs of gas burning her eyes and swelling in her lungs. Her heart hurt and she was being crushed. Acid rose in her throat and subsided. “Gas! They’re using gas!” people were shouting. “Hold the line! Hold the line!” Then a shudder, a massive recoil passed through the crowd, and she almost went down underfoot.

They began to move forward again. Moving fast now. It was harder than ever to keep her feet as she was pushed and shoved and knocked from the sides and buffeted from behind. As she felt the curb under her and lurched
forward and pushed herself upright on the man ahead, she felt something slippery underfoot. Wet and slippery. Bits of board and metal in the street.

She ran, she ran. The crowd was looser now. She was crying as she ran, but she remembered not to rub her eyes. She had lost the flyer she had been clutching and her pack had been torn from her shoulders. The small of her back ached from an incidental blow. She had torn her leg on something sharp. She ran and ran, the pavement pounding on her soles. Cars were honking ahead, people yelling. The wail of sirens from every side. She passed overturned cars. Some of the warriors were dragging wastebaskets into the street and setting them afire.

“Split up and move out!” the word came from ahead. “They’re waiting for us. Split up and move out!”

Turning, she ran down a side street. Others were running beside her. A police car pulled up on C with its light flashing, and two mounted cops came charging down. Someone seized her by the arm and pulled her stumbling down a half flight of steps into the areaway of a tenement.

She pulled her arm free but seized his hand. Cold, cold hand. He ran in big strides dragging her clattering after him. He boosted her up a fence and yanked her into a corridor and then up the stairs inside, up to the roof. Then pushing her down against the chimney, he lay on his belly and looked over the edge. He watched for a long time muttering to himself and cursing. Then he rolled over onto his back.

“I’m over here,” she said softly after a while. In the moonlight she poked at the gash on her leg. Her sandals were wet and dark with caked blood, as if she had stepped in a river of it. Her back ached and her eyes were raw and sore. She still felt as if she might throw up.

“Who?” He came slowly toward her, bent at the waist with his arms hanging forward like a chimpanzee. “Who?” He squatted before her and put out his hand to her face.

“Joanna.”

“I don’t know you. Do I?”

She laughed. “Guess not.”

“Shouldn’t have gone to take the mike. Should have been in front leading it. Got caught in the back. Mistake.”

She turned his face into the moonlight and saw it was the boy with black hair. He was mumbling and rolling his head back and forth on hunched shoulders. He looked spent.

“Are you hurt?”

“I never get hurt.”

“What’s wrong? Did they beat you on the head?”

“Mistake. But got the people out. Better clubbed than arrested. That’s our line.”

“Did you get clubbed?” She held his face in her hands carefully. Big head. Coarse black hair. Heavy bones. “I guess I was too worried to notice anybody. Are you going to join us?”

“I don’t know.”

“You have red hair.”

“You don’t even know what I look like.” She laughed, because she was miserable.

“Do you know what I look like?”

“Of course.” But then she saw what he meant. She came closer and hesitantly put her hands on either side of his face and lifted it into the gray dirty light. His hair was thick and straight and coarse and black. He had a high slightly hooked nose and heavy high cheekbones and large strong black eyes that stared into hers, stared and stared her dizzy. His face was sullen, morose and beautiful. He was swarthy and skinny with big tendons in the hands that lay on his knees. Then the hands moved out and took her shoulders.

“Joanna.” He gave her hair a tug and then he slipped one hand up under her shirt and gently touched her breast and then took it away. “I wish we could take our clothes off” Then he grinned, his face opened up in a dazzling smile at her, and he lifted her by his hands under her armpits and got himself up. “I’m tired. So tired. And I have a lot to do when we get there. I’ll have to go running around and talking my head off and I won’t be able to be with you. But you can get to know the people.”

“Will we be together later?”

“I think so.”

He walked on and she followed, and at every corner she wanted to run away. She was afraid, afraid. She had lost her sleepingbag and her identity all at once. She was Jill the prisoner on the base and Joanna the runaway outside who belonged to nobody. Here she was, following him like a stray cat hoping for milk.

Shawn woke on a cot and lay still. He had been gassed and the aftereffects made him think of his childhood. Once he had been given ether, and it had made him sick for several days. Sign he had noticed on Avenue A near the park in a storefront dentists office: gas administered here. Come to me, ye wretched of the earth.