Dance the Eagle to Sleep (21 page)

Corey still talked a lot about the Indian resistance in the past, but that mythology meant little to most of the others. Most of the kids talked a great deal of Mao and Che and Lenin, and if they could make a comparison, no matter how farfetched, between something they were doing and some action of one of their heroes or some piece of history in China or Cuba, then they were suddenly more confident, they felt real.

“Despair is a revolutionary crime” Corey would tell her. “We must have a real will to power. We must break through our own impotence into real struggle” At times she felt as if that breakthrough was only a form of theater. They were always whipping each other into more-and-more-militant thrusts of rhetoric. Nobody dared seem less revolutionary than anybody else. Their language was all of armed struggle, while they had not one plane or tank or bomb.

She thought again and again of what Corey had said about Fink’s Bend, and it seemed to her that in a way he was wrong: that they did have something to say to everybody. The desire to be free was an old native urge. Fink’s Bend had been populated by people who had gone there to be free and independent. Everywhere the mechanisms for keeping people passively in their places were eroding. People were not getting back what they wanted for their sold labor. Taxes grew and services shrank. Prices rose and quality decayed. Everywhere people felt used and betrayed and coerced and cheated. Mostly they blamed each other or the blacks or the foreigners who kept
making trouble for the U. S. Army in the various countries they happened to live in, or the kids who kept making noise and rocking the boat. Joanna kept thinking that somebody ought to be talking to them.

But somehow they were not getting any better at talking to people who were not yet Indians. They were getting louder and angrier and shriller. They were getting surer they knew the answers—all the answers. Councils tended to turn into sharp debates now between different sides gathered around leaders who could argue a position and put others down. The shyer, the less verbal, got less verbal still and finally kept their mouths shut. The louder got louder still. In some tribes the women might as well have stayed out of council, for they were ignored and afraid to speak.

There was fear everyplace. There was reason for fear everyplace. Wherever they went, they heard stories of arrests and beatings and raids and imprisonment.

Shawn felt burnt out much of the time. The three of them were still together a lot, but they were separated more in their functions. He would set himself up with whoever he was playing with while Joanna went off to do her woman’s thing and Corey rapped with the council. Joanna had her own style— tense, and yet somehow plain—but she didn’t think so, or pretended not to. “I don’t like you to listen. Eh, I sound like Corey.” She made a monkey face.

Shawn said, “We all sound like Corey.”

“Nobody sounds like you.”

“Nobody looks like you.”

She fluffed out her hair in mock coquettishness. “Do you look at me?”

They flirted that way, in intervals. They were so much together. Of course he and Corey flirted too, but in an easier way, all told. It was easier for Corey to demand affection and easier for him to express it. There wasn’t even curiosity between Joanna and him, because what could happen had, long ago, and meant nothing. But he saw her and she saw him clearly. They were alert to small signals. Shawn always knew when she was bored or irritated or tired to exasperation. She could tell when he was about to become monolithically stubborn or to infuriate strange warriors by acting in ways that showed off his utter contempt for their virtues, his gentleness, his sensuality, his mockery.

They watched over each other and took care and tempered the rasp of circumstance. They were each other’s road managers.

Corey had to be more alert to the special conditions of every commune, every encampment, every council. He could not listen at them the way they listened at him and each other. They took care of him but he could not, on the road, take care of them. Corey kept pushing them to play larger and larger independent roles—within the context of what he was about.

“Corey’s less dependent than he was?” Joanna said, trying out the words. It was snowing. They sat in a car with the heater and wipers going, waiting for a warrior to bring them formulas that Billy wanted to go into production in the lab at the farm. Some kind of cheap explosives. They felt uneasy
but as Corey said, they couldn’t oppose what had been decided by council, and who wanted to sound counter-revolutionary?

Shawn drew on the steamed-up side window. He drew a Corey devil face with horns. “Nonsense. He’s just completely assimilated us. We’re extra selves.”

Or they would reverse positions. Both Joanna and Shawn could do that, because they could switch their polarizations according to mood. Generally he had a strong sense of self and was seeking a sense of connection. Generally she had a strong sense of connection and was seeking a sense of herself. But they could switch.

He shared with her a mistrust of their roles. At times she accused Corey of using the aroused interest in women’s liberation to sneak in his influence through her, Trojan-horse style. She would say the division of labor between them was the same old sexual division of labor—reproduced. Then she would change her mind and assert that only a woman could speak to women’s problems, because a man could not help but be manipulative in any situation with women.

Whatever the rhetoric, in tribe after tribe women mostly ended up running the kitchen, taking care of housework and babies, running the mimeograph machine, serving as bodies in demonstrations they had not planned or directed, serving as runners carrying messages or equipment of whose purpose they were often kept ignorant, doing all the tedious daily tasks that made tribal life possible. The women who made it into more effective and interesting roles did not think of themselves as representing a constituency of downtrodden women, but hung out with the male warriors and acted as much like them as possible. Joanna never felt that she was in danger of behaving that way (like Carole for instance), but she felt something crooked in the heart of her new political role that she could not quite isolate.

“I’m not liberated!” she yelled at Corey.

“Nobody is till everybody is. How can you expect to be liberated in the middle of a vast prison?”

“Words, words! You just mix them around and make boxes with them to hold your head in. I ask something real, and you give me back an abstraction. Plastic Man!”

Shawn thought Joanna was a little off in thinking of it all as a man/ woman thing. He thought it was beyond that, a whole way of relating in dominance or submission that was built into the sex roles, true enough, which was one reason he wouldn’t fulfill them, but built also into other relationships—parent/child, teacher/student, employer/employee, doctor/
patient. Whenever the balance of power was unequal, there was a driver and a driven. Power was the lethal vice, the turn-on with evil built into it, because it required a victim to manifest itself. Power implied subject and object. They needed some way to recognize (for everyone to recognize) that everybody was a subject. Corey and Joanna were still arguing in the back seat as Shawn drove.

“For instance if I disagree with you, I do it now. I don’t stand up and argue with you in meetings. I say it to you afterward”

Corey shrugged broadly. “Well, I can listen better now. We don’t have to use councils to talk to each other. We need to use councils to listen to everybody else. It would be irresponsible for you to use up council time on something we can do better on our own time.”

“Because I’m your private property. That’s why”

They sulked and scratched at each other and filled the car with the sulphurous fumes of their angers. They made up, curling into a ball. Black coarse hair, tangled carroty hair, their tough skinny bodies criss-crossed on a mattress into a porcupine of warm flesh and wild hair. They found each other in some dark underground knot of interlocked roots. Shawn sniffed around them. Different from anything he had known. Not for him. But it had an interesting atmosphere to it. He wondered what it would feel like to live so embedded in another.

And Shawn’s own role? Why wasn’t it altogether right? Better than it had been before the Indians. What he did was no longer ambiguous or commercial or sold out. Still, in the context there was something manipulative. He could remember how it had been when The Coming Thing had first got started, that sense of music being the most important event in the world, that sense of white-hot sexual joyous happening, of the world in flower. He had shared then a sense of making a new music with honesty and passion and abandon, of being the creative center of a pulsating universe.

He wasn’t making a new music now. He was using what he had learned. Rather, it was being used. He had put himself and his music in the service of the revolution, but somehow there was no interaction. In itself his music had become less vital. He knew he was not as good. How could he be without a regular group, without a committed group of genuinely talented musicians to work with, without being able to close into himself and into them and build musical ideas? He said every day that that was no longer important, but part of him did not believe it.

Yet he knew that he fooled himself when he imagined being someplace with a good group of musicians really turned on again and making the
music he wanted. Running away from the Indians would not bring him to musician’s heaven. The happiest time for The Coming Thing had been when there was the least gap between audience and performers. They hadn’t been that wise musically in the early days, though they had listened to all the old blues records and country music and fifties and sixties rock, and they’d thought they were able to do anything under the yellow sun. They had had great energy and the conviction of being right and a desire to play their music and get laid by groupies in piles from one coast to the other.

But already before the hired systems analysts had come trekking to Washington with their mammoth tracking system in the sky, The Coming Thing had been losing that natural rapport with their audiences. As they gained musical sophistication, they had begun to lose some of their teeny-bopper audience, who turned from them to newer, harder-sell merchandise to gobble down like candy.

Cracks had begun to appear in their solidarity. Shep had wanted the accouterments he expected with his money: what had really got him pissed was being treated as a hippy instead of as a successful young entrepreneur. He wanted to marry his debutante and receive the social deference that should be his by virtue of birth and education and accomplishment and possessions, in spite of his hair hanging down in brown curls on his shoulders and transparent shirts and brocade pants and jewelry to his navel. Frodo had wanted fun and games, a never-failing supply of sexual victims. His sadism had flourished. His games had grown more elaborate, his rites had required more props.

What had Shawn wanted.? After a certain point it had not mattered what he wanted. He knew that the world that had seemed to float on their best music required a revolution to come to pass. Insofar as their music spoke urgently of joy and spontaneity and connection, it had been unconsciously but inevitably political. Their music spoke naturally of the world where the streets did belong to the people, where the grass was to sit on and to smoke and every child had hills to run on. The music called people to dance together loosely with their whole bodies.

The necessities of making a new world call for different behavior from what will be typical of that new world: he told himself such things every day, to produce in himself patience, to hold to some simulacrum of discipline, to keep his temper in check. But sometimes he wondered if the Indians were interested in making a world where he could play his music.

The media discovered them. First liberal magazines for intellectuals wrote studies about why they were not significant. The
Village Voice
had
for some time covered their visible actions, usually with an ironic detached reporter sounding rather weary of it all. The hippest of the commercial mags, aimed at exploiting the teen market, assigned a woman who sounded sympathetic and who was also very careful to make it clear that they were totally incorrect, of course, even if they were personally groovy. Then an interpretive piece appeared in the Sunday magazine of the
New York Times
on how they were merely the newest embodiment of generational discontent such as readers were accustomed to accepting as inevitable, comprising a small minority of young people (polls cited). Their ideas were influenced by anthropology but little different from the last generation of disturbed students who had been handled competently, while the peculiar form of their tribal customs could be traced back to conceptions of the Noble Savage, James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain and other writers tamed by the schools into docility.

Esquire
put Shawn’s face on the cover in feathered headdress, and inside had a snotty article heavily laden with psychoanalytical insights. The author attacked the rock scene in general and claimed it had been only a matter of time before some manufactured sex hero took his power seriously and abused it, leading his mesmerized fans after him. The author depicted Shawn as a pampered teenager unable to adjust to adult authority, who had created a cult around himself of permanent adolescent irresponsibility.

If the Indians had read magazines, he would have been in trouble being set up as a leader. But they did not. Shawn found it all pretty funny. He had never felt so crushed by responsibility before in his life. Corey was not amused, but Joanna was. She memorized the juicy parts and recited them at what she felt were appropriate times when they were traveling. The gist of most articles was that the Indians were a violent, pseudo-fascist group of adolescent misfits, a band of bottle-throwing Peter Pans.

The brunt of the media attack on them, the “line” of explanation, however, was set by a group of ex-radicals and left-liberals comfortably housed in various universities. It was a real ulcerated hatred that seethed in the works they produced that analyzed the phenomena of the Indians. Men who had tenure in oak-shaded campuses where, amid the rhythmic yells from the football field and the songs of the glee club, institutes solved the problems of dispersing tularemia germs against enemy populations and invented models for counter-revolutionary game theory in Brazilian villages and chatted of megadeaths and genetic management, wrote about the violence of kids in the streets armed with bricks and bottles with thunderous denunciation and scathing indignation.