Dance the Eagle to Sleep (30 page)

“They said some of their women were warriors. Are you a warrior?”

“I guess I am now.”

He voted to go out with her. George just stood there shaking his head and grinding his teeth together. “We all gonna die. Don’t you know that yet? Can’t that sink through your thick black head? Gonna follow a white cunt out to where they can pick you off, squash you like a roach scuttling up the kitchen wall. This here is our turf. They let us down once, those Indians, they gonna let us down again. I remember every body the enemy got. Here’s where I fight”

He wanted to force George to stick with them, but he knew he did not
have the right. They weren’t going to safety: he didn’t believe that. So he had to stand and watch George go off by himself among the trees, while his eyes ached like raw meat. Then they started walking with Marcus leading, the girl behind and Tiger bringing up the rear. They went cautiously, but they kept going all night. They did not dare stop while it was dark, because, in full daylight planes and helicopters would be cruising overhead all the time.

During the day they rested in a heap of big round boulders. They dozed but could not really sleep. They were too wary. Marcus kept hoping George might come after them, and he did not want to miss him. They spoke in whispers.

“What’s your name?”

“Ginny.”

Tiger asked her if she wanted to fuck. She said she was too scared. Besides, she thought it would bring them bad luck.

“Do you belong to anybody?” Marcus asked her.

She stuck her chin down into her jacket. He thought she was smelling somebody else in it, maybe the man it belonged to. “Sometimes I think so now.”

The drone of a plane coming low. They pressed among the rocks and lay still. Marcus always found himself holding his breath. That made him angry. To be so stupid and so scared. Freezing like a rabbit. The ground vibrated under him. Like a hawk the plane circled and circled, and he felt its eyes. But it passed away in droning circles. Unless it was radioing for bombs?

Ginny went on trying to explain her mind after the plane had gone, as if she had thought of nothing else in the meantime. “I think I finally have learned how to love the people I love. It isn’t belonging, but it’s serious. I’m trying to make a baby with someone. It has to be his. So I can’t sleep with anyone else.”

“It’s not such a hot time for making babies,” Marcus said.

“I think it’s now or never, with this one. And I’m getting sick of never”

She was a plain girl mostly, but as sturdy as a good rocking chair— sturdy as a big old table for eating on and putting your feet up. She was not flashy-attractive like a white girl should be, she was only funny and sturdy. He grinned at her. “Maybe after you have that baby, I’ll come by and give you another, in a contrasting color.”

She laughed. “I’m not even sure I got this one yet. But I used to be good at growing vegetables.”

When dusk came on, they started again. Tiger asked, “How come you guys knew to come in and get us?”

“We saw you on television. One place where we stayed, they had a television, and we saw your program.”

“What you mean, our program? What you talking about, girl?” Tiger stopped and stared at her. His eyes were big and the eyeballs white in the dark. Marcus knew what he was thinking, and he was suddenly scared too. Suppose the chick was crazy?

“They have a new adventure show, it’s one of the most popular shows on TV. It’s on every Monday at eight, and a lot of kids stay up to see it. Everybody watches. See, it’s the adventures of K Company, but K Company really exists. They’re one of the Special Forces companies assigned to mopping up in the Catskills.”

“You mean they’re filming us getting bombed and burned and shot up?”

“They do a lot of filming right on the trails and from the helicopters, but they fake a lot of it, too. The critics say it’s a new art form—a mixture of news, documentary, and drama serial. There are lots of shoot-’em-up scenes. Part of what excites people is that they never know if what they’re watching is real action, real black kids getting blown up, or if it’s staged. You can think whatever turns you on the most. Corey says it’s the last stage of the spectacle—a sort of living-room bread-and-circuses with the cop-out of letting you pretend it’s not real.”

“Those bastards. Too bad we didn’t get to kill more” Marcus fingered his belt. “They got a sponsor for us?”

“A men’s deodorant, a soft drink, and plastic wrap. So we decided you’d sold enough soda and it was time to get you out.”

All night they kept on and into the next morning. They had to keep going in the daylight to reach the road. Then they crawled into the bushes and waited. It wasn’t good cover, but it was all there was. They could not afford to miss the rendezvous. All day they lay hungry and exhausted—too exposed to risk sleep. Finally the truck pulled over and they ran for it, to be taken up into the back.

Weary and battered and haunted by their dead, they were trying to move through into unoccupied land somewhere to the west where they could stop and heal themselves. Maybe they were even willing to settle for a reservation. To scuttle into some empty place and collapse there, together. That was the nub: together.

Shawn and Ginny had worked hard on getting the tribes dispersed, and they had in large part succeeded. Many of the Indians had gone underground or had rendered themselves invisible. They were ready to be tapped when the time ripened. But they had run into a widespread stubborn refusal.

The ideological split between the Fire People and the Water People, the kids who thought the only hope lay in immediate guerrilla warfare and those who favored a massive diffuse organizing strategy, was re-enacted in tribe after tribe. The more threatening the situation grew and the graver the danger of imprisonment and death, the more the kids seemed to want to stay huddled in familiar rooms arguing theory with each other, each reaffirming his own militancy and dogmatism in the face of his “enemies” the other faction across the room.

Perhaps, Corey thought, he had emphasized too much building a people instead of training organizers, and now he had kids who feared the loss of their sense of clan more than they feared dying. They were like animals that below a certain minimum population will not mate any more and become extinct. He had set out to disperse the tribes and ended up heading a migration.

So they fled under the strafing of the planes and the ambushes of the different corps of police and militia and National Guard and Army units, leaving their broken dead scattered across the land. When he closed his eyes, the bodies sprawled before him—obscene, gaping, maimed, even pretty, often pathetic in their tousled haphazard tumble. Lovers lying in the green wheat fields riddled with bullets.

Yet as they fled across the vast bowl of the plains, where going twice as fast seemed to keep them in the same place, the young came out to join them,
out of the Nebraska towns the highways had been built to curve around, towns with cottonwoods and spires and grain elevators sticking high out of the wheat. Towns spread on the bends of sand-colored rivers riffled with bars. Towns coming down from bluffs into sudden river valleys, throwing out a bridge to a collection of random frame buildings on the other shore.

“We’re the Pied Piper.” Shawn squatted on the other side of the breakfast fire, stirring coffee boiled in a can. His hair had grown out a mixture of dyed brown and yellow like leaves turning in the fall, and he was tanned the color of cowhide. “They swarm out like lemmings. It’s driving me crazy. What are they looking for?”

“There’s nothing to hold them where they are. They aren’t attached” The kids in the towns that had been emptied of their content and left to decay only needed a body in movement to draw them out of those houses where they were precariously lodged, loosely attached, ill at ease. A faith flared up in the columns that if there were enough of them they would survive. Even Corey felt that way sometimes. “They won’t kill all the kids. They can’t. What animal kills off its own young?”

Ginny was sitting cross-legged with her hands resting lightly on her belly. Her skin was dappled with freckles, so that her eyes stood out of her face a clear honey brown. “The corporate animal. People are functions. Institutions spin off corporations. You can always replace a body or a brain that stops functioning efficiently with another just like it. Can’t you? That’s what they think the world is.”

Then they came to a valley near Salt Lake City and found an Army encamped blocking their way.

Corey was made of wire. His skin was paper. Always he was weary. He walked four times as far as the column, because he went back and forth, back and forth, shepherding. He had been superficially grazed and wounded a dozen times but never hurt badly enough to keep him down the next day. He ignored that kind of danger. He did not believe they could kill him that way. But constantly he nagged at Shawn and at Ginny to stay out of danger as well as they could, especially Ginny.

At night as he lay in her arms, her body felt soft and vulnerable to him, a thing metal would want to tear. They were short on food, they were hungry all of the time, and now he could feel her bones against him, till she almost felt like someone else. He tried to restrain his anxiety, to keep himself from calling her name again and again in rising hysteria when she passed out of his sight. That reminded him too much of Joanna. All things reminded him of Joanna. So he stifled his voice and instead his eyes swung
in his head, while he looked and looked for her in silent panic. Watching him always, Shawn would understand. Shawn would come to his elbow and say quietly, she’s over by the stream, she’s resting in the bushes.

For a long time he had not wanted to give her his child. Though they made love, he did not want to make a baby with Ginny. But as they slept together night after night on the ground in the old blanket, he began to tell her secret things, sacred things, things of his childhood, things his mother had told him about the stars and the earth and the moon and Coyote—old silly dark things that ran in his head. He told her his first vision, and the coming of the buffalo. Then he gave her the child that was the small swelling in her belly, between the hipbones that should not be visible, that he should not be able to feel. The things he was telling her were for the child. He was telling stories to the minnow child hidden in her flesh and the woman who held it and held him.

They camped waiting for the scouts to come back. Marcus led the scouts. Marcus and Tiger were their eyes and ears and long tentative fingers. They could slip through an encirclement and back without raising a random shot. Time after time Marcus had brought them through. Now again he came back with a report. He had found a way up and out of the valley on a narrow exposed trail. They would have to wait until dark. They would have to fool the soldiers into thinking they were still camped in the valley, blocked there. They held council and debated. A group of seventy women chose to stay. They would dance and keep the fires burning. They would try to fraternize with the soldiers and persuade them not to attack.

One of the couple of survivors told Corey about it two days later in the mountains. After all, the soldiers were young like them, just like them. It was easy to talk in the dark across no man’s land. They had long conversations. Some of the soldiers came over. The girls taught them to dance as the Indians did, and the soldiers took off their uniforms and danced naked in the firelight. They turned on with bread and with the grass the soldiers had. Some couples went beyond the light of the fires and lay together. Before dawn the soldiers went back, in time for the attack. As soon as it was light, the planes came over.

When helicopters found the main column again, they dropped leaflets urging the Indians to surrender. They would be allowed for a brief period to turn themselves in safely, the leaflets promised. They offered a parley. Some of the leaflets mentioned Corey by name and said he must come to parley for the surrender, that the terms would be explained by a former Indian who had been captured at the raid on the New Jersey farm.

If the leaflets had said Joanna, he would not have believed them. He would have seen a trap. But because the leaflets did not mention her by name, he knew it was really Joanna. She had managed it somehow. Yes, they had put his name in because she had said he was a leader, in order to find him. Probably she had pretended to know him casually. He said nothing, nothing, except that he would go to the place specified in the leaflets and hear the terms the government was offering.

Ginny knew at once. “How can you be so sure it’s her?”

“Who?”

She laughed at him harshly. “You pretend so badly. But be careful. Be careful! I think it’s her too. But we think so with different parts of our-selves—you with the strength of your hoping and me with the strength of my fearing. Reality is someplace else. If you are disappointed, what will you do? Don’t throw us away.”

In an abstract way he wanted to comfort her. After all, he was still with her lying in the blanket. He reached out his hand and touched her cheek, and a slow tear came out of her eye and ran over his finger tips. He stared into her face, her clear honey-colored eyes melting into his gaze. She wanted to believe, he could feel her wanting to hope and believe. Odd how she had changed and not changed. The same round face with the pointy chin, same clear eyes and little nose, same freckles and smooth hair a shade or two darker than her eyes and soft as down. Her expression was changed. But her desire to feel him loving her was just the same. She had been good to him. She was strong now. He even believed that she loved him and that her love meant him well. She was like a round hut in which he was safe, in which there was little that could hurt him, less that wanted to. She had come to him when the world had broken on his head. It had been her decision to be there. After all, she had chosen him in his weakness and despair and defeat. She must have known Joanna would come back.

Now Joanna came like the sun and stood between them. Wanting awakened in him again. He became a man instead of the ghost of a shaman, and he kept his secrets in himself.