Dance the Eagle to Sleep (20 page)

You have not yet broken your ties, Corey said back. Guerrilla warfare, nonsense: this is only a family quarrel. You are not working in a counter economy, you are not recruiting. You have not yet left home.

Joanna spent her time sitting out on the dock freezing in the jagged wind, wrapped in a blanket over her coat and watching the gray waves and the white birds. The fourth day in the afternoon, Corey came and plunked down beside her. He spat into the waves and spat again. “Shit”

She looked at him sideways. His face was soft and sullen and yet amused. Only a slit of black eye showed under lowered lashes. Lip thrust out. Slightly swollen. “My, my! What have you been doing with yourself?”

“So, she got me.”

“Was there any doubt? Isn’t that what we were waiting for? Can we leave these decadent little creeps now?”

So Corey for once gave up on a would-be tribe, and they left. They talked to the Suffolk County tribe that was making their bread for them, and discovered they didn’t like the beach folk either: felt used and patronized. They cut off the bread supply to the beach and let them be.

Corey was in a sluggish depression for two days. He finally told her what had happened. He had gone into the john to piss, not shutting the door because he never did. Gisele had followed him in and as he was finishing, she had helped herself to his prick. He had not been able to keep an erection, with her half seated upon the laundry hamper stuffed with used towels, and she had mocked him. That had made him angry enough to harden, and the act had been completed upon the lowered toilet seat. It was his opinion that that was where it belonged. As he left her, he had reached over and flushed the toilet to demonstrate his feeling.

“Oh, how can you be such a hypocrite? What else were we waiting for?”

“I was trying to get through to her. She had enough guts to drop part way out.”

“So why didn’t you go on trying to get through to her?”

“Because I’m not a machine. I don’t like to feel used”

And he hated to be laughed at, she thought. It felt good to be back at the farm. It felt good to be among their own people. To see the dance as it was supposed to be, instead of a crude parody. Though the dancing could frustrate her at times. Often it was just a way for Corey and her to express affection: no different from couples dancing at a high school prom, in a way. Corey had a responsibility to the ritual at the same time, and had to be keeping an eye out for people whose visions frightened them, for hysterics and bad trips. He was good at calming. She suspected that he played around with hypnotism in inducing or turning off visions. She suggested as much, and he got angry and scornful. “Hypnotism! What kind of bunk is that? You’re just not the visionary type, so you have to think there’s some sort of hocus-pocus going on”

He would use a bead necklace or a feather to send them under, she was sure, and his calm voice to call them back. Sometimes he would dance alone, lost in a savage agony in-turned and burning. If she danced off then by herself, he would grow angry. Indeed, his dances were regarded with
respect and people gave him room. She did not like them, but she kept her mind off that. Something violent and awkward and exhibitionistic made her want to turn away.

When she danced, she danced to a pattern that pleased her. She worked out steps that were graceful or sensual or amusing and then improvised against that pattern. But Corey would not let her improvise against him. Once in a while dancing with somebody else, she would really get going. Then she would feel a sense of continuity in being Joanna. How often she had danced alone in her room. For a while she had had ballet lessons, when her father had been assigned to Fifth Army Headquarters in Chicago. Though she had started out way behind the other girls, she was naturally well coordinated. But the teacher never made her a favorite. Madame LeBoeuf had said that there was something coarse in her movements. Too much earth. More fire, more air!

She was a much better dancer than Corey, but he wouldn’t admit it. Sometimes when he was gone for the evening, she danced and danced. Even with Shawn: he was graceful and clever, and they improvised along a fine thread of connection. There were other good dancers, and those nights she would dance with all of them. Once in a while Corey would be in a calm
laissez-faire
mood, and then she could do the same while he was present.

Naturally, the sexual dimension was missing. He would say, “You can be with somebody else if you want to. We don’t own each other” Sometimes when he was high or feeling his charisma, or conversely when he was depressed and wanting to prove himself, he would dance a lot with others, mostly girls, but also those mocking competitive prancing duels with other warriors. But always the time came when he turned and collapsed, pulling her to him from across the room, from whomever she was with or whatever she was into.

The other men liked to dance with her if they liked to dance, but it was an interval. It was nice but slightly artificial. Something in their manner said that when she used sensual gestures she was not quite fair, or that they would overlook them. She was unsexed for them. Corey was not quite unsexed. Sometimes away from her, he would go to bed with some girl. He would tell her deprecatingly. He told it that they came after him, and she believed it. Girls liked to flirt with him, girls liked to touch him. He was easy to touch. He was as simply sensual as a cat. He liked to be stroked. But then she would walk by, and he would nudge the girl off his lap and come loping after to tell her something. He was satisfied to try out his charm and get a response and quit. Many girls looked after him with a sour expression.

Sometimes she did get jealous of all the stir and fuss around him when they were traveling. Shawn knew that, and he would tease her:

What a road show are Corey and Shawn.

They like to turn the folks on.

They razzle and dazzle and burn to a frazzle,

while Joanna conceals a yawn.

Back on the farm this time, two weeks worth of new arrivals had come and settled in. She couldn’t just start orienting somebody who’d been there for two weeks and had already made a small place for himself. Finally she had to see that she couldn’t really make a case for the kids she had oriented doing a hell of a lot better than the ones she’d missed. It had been a make-work idea, a sappy scheme to create importance for herself. Corey must have been patronizing her politically to encourage her. Or he had simply refused to confront her on it. Or worse, he thought it did not really matter how she kept herself busy.

“Aw, come on” Shawn said. “It was a good idea. But with all this running around, you just can’t do it. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth doing. Can you judge how the kids felt?”

Big Ned was from Fink’s Bend. He was not exactly a runaway. A couple of times a year he wrote his parents a scrawly letter without a return address, and sometimes he would buy a gaudy postcard to send them from San Francisco or Seattle. This time, coming back from St. Louis, Big Ned was driving, and he drove them to Fink’s Bend. “I just got to stop by and see how the folks are doing. We’re safe with them. People, I just got to see if they’re okay. They can’t write to me anywheres. We won’t stay but an hour or two. And I can drive all night to make up.”

The river was pretty, the town was mean and the house was out back of town, as Ned had described it. It was a farmhouse without a farm, an unpainted two-story with a lean-to attached, and two tires in the yard full of dead petunias, while another tire for a swing hung from a horse chestnut. It was a couple of weeks past Christmas, but a tissue-paper wreath that one of Ned’s sisters had made at school was still nailed on the door.

The gas stove had a heater in it, and they all sat in the crooked kitchen around a big table drinking coffee and eating eggs and fried potatoes that two of the girls had cooked. Mr. Howard, Ned’s father, was a laid-off miner, ten years laid off. Joanna thought he was an old man until she looked at his eyes. Ned told them Mr. Howard was in his late forties. He was smaller
than his son by more than a head. His eyes were a pale but glittery blue-gray always roaming over them all and asking questions about who and how and what they were that he was too hospitable and too polite to ask out loud. They were waiting for Ned’s ma to come home. She was the only one with a regular job. She worked in a clothing factory moved into town to take advantage of the cheap non-union labor of the ex-miners’ wives.

Mr. Howard had been out of Fink’s Bend, mainly in the Army. He had come back with a metal plate in his knee and gone into the mines until the owners closed them down. Once again he had left, to go to Chicago for work. There he had been lured and laid off and mugged and his salary at the new job attached to pay for a TV he had bought for his hot furnished room, and the new company hadn’t liked his salary being attached, so they’d fired him. After that, everybody had said he was too old.

Mrs. Howard had had to send him the money to come home.

He was answering Corey’s questions one at a time, shaking his head as he talked and listening to his own tale as if wondering at it all. He told it as if he were sure there was a joke in it if only he listened. He watched them carefully for their reactions. He told it as if it must be a funny story, a shaggy-dog story, if only he knew how to look at it.

He wanted Ned to stick around a while. He kept saying Ned had to stay long enough to go hunting, and he’d see if his boy was still good for anything. See if he still knew how to use a gun. He poached, of course, and he hated the wardens.

Mrs. Howard arrived finally after dark, thin and wispy and gray and too excited by Ned to talk. Three kids were still at home, and Ned impressed them that they must not tell anyone that they were there.

After supper, Ned and his father and Shawn and Corey drank white lightning while Joanna sat in the kitchen with Ned’s mother and the girls. They were shy of her and did not talk much. Ned asked his father a lot of questions about people he had known, and Corey asked about the town. After a while he came out to the kitchen and asked the kids lots of questions, too. He had to loosen them up, but he teased them until they were giggling, and then he got them talking about the school and the kids there and their lives and the town.

They left the next morning, early. Corey was silent for half the day, before he began to talk about Fink’s Bend. “It’s a worked-out colony. The powers came in, they worked those mines and worked the men and got what there was to get, and then they cleared out. Leaving hunger and waste and a gutted land. I don’t know how to deal with it. Maybe we depend on a
certain amount of fat. Of course Ned isn’t revolting against his parents. They didn’t fuck up, they got fucked over. Like my old woman. But it’s like we’re irrelevant there. We can’t tell Ned’s family to come along and turn Indians. But they’ve been robbed. How can we give them back what they need?”

Ned said only, “It’s a pretty place. You ought to see it in the spring. There’s still a lot of room for hunting and fishing. It’s good country, even if you can’t do nothing with it.”

“I don’t know how to speak to the guys standing around the streets of that town. We’ve worked out our own language and our own way of being together, but somehow it doesn’t include those robbed bastards, and it ought to. It’s our fault that we can’t. It’s dangerous. The people who should be cheering us on all think we should be lined up against a wall and shot. But I know I can’t make it with them. Maybe we just have to try to reach their kids and that has to be enough. But it doesn’t feel like enough. It feels like failure.”

So much time riding in the rut of a highway. So much time half awake, half asleep, with his heavy head on her shoulder and their legs cramped in back seats. So much time driving into the glare of headlights with a rock station turned loud till the whole car pounded. Dairy Queens and Howard Johnson’s and Glass Houses and Savarins and Chicken Delights and McDonald’s Hamburgers and Dad’s Old Fashioned Root Beer stands. They were always constipated or belching and raw-stomached. Shawn and Big Ned could fart at will and had contests. Corey was broken out in pimples. He had picked up crabs somewhere, and now she had them too. They seemed to grow up in waves. She would itch frenetically. Then they would the away into a lull that would make her imagine she was rid of them. Then they would swarm again.

Yet, at times, it seemed to her that they ran back and forth across the countryside upon tracks. From commune to commune they rushed and imagined that they were reaching out. Every time they passed a school in session, she had a strong sense that that was where their caravan should be halting.

She tried to correct the maps in her head and tried to remember that they were only going from little group to little group across the country in scattered patches, and largely they were talking to themselves. Though their survival depended on building as big a base as possible, kids tended to become quickly uncomfortable with people outside the movement and not to want to deal with them. Their jargon and slogans isolated them. It was a drag to talk to people who did not share your assumptions: you had to start
with ABC, practically. Older Indians often showed their contempt for new recruits, who sounded too much like the society they had all just left. They hated what they had been, and kids who reminded them of their old selves.

Corey had a theoretical grasp of that narrowness and was always pushing the need to grow. Nevertheless, he would extrapolate from the tiniest scrap of contact to a roaring movement. Because of Marcus and his boys in the Catskills, he would talk about the Indians as a black movement as well as white. Actually, their only contact was the food-and-medicine drops monthly. Because they had some farms, he would talk of them as having gone to the countryside like Mao to build their peasant base. But no one on any of the farms ever talked to another farmer. They were farming in secrecy, as remote from the rest of the countryside as any gentleman farmer. Because Billy had trained a few warriors in small-weapons use, Corey would talk about the Indian army of urban guerrillas. Sometimes in listening she felt as if they were all manipulating words and symbols and imagining that somehow the symbols would convert themselves magically into real power at the instant of need.