Dance the Eagle to Sleep (12 page)

To be a member of the warriors, a militia composed of both men and
women, a kid had to prove his loyalty, his willingness to follow orders and his guts. He might be told to steal a piece of machinery, chemicals, a truck. Two boys were sent to penetrate Bellevue and bring out an Indian under observation there.

The task had to be one for which the need was clear. Assignments were made in council. The kid being tested could argue and invent options, but if he refused, he would never be a warrior. Why did the kids want to be warriors? Prestige. People needed such strange paste to stick them together. Some of these rituals struck him as silly as those of the summer camps of his childhood, but he kept his amusement to himself. Billy was the war chief: he had invented the warriors. He makes good machines, Shawn thought, with an edge of respectful distaste. He found Billy opaque.

That night, he sat in his first council. Everyone in the commune took part, and anyone could initiate business. People spoke one by one going around the sprawly circle. You could pass, but if you passed too often or someone thought you were holding back, he would chide you and urge you to speak out. The process was slow and Shawn found it tedious. Many were inarticulate and grappled painfully to get some half-formed idea out. Those who had strong opinions tended to soften them. “Well, I don’t know, but it seems to me … I think we could kick it around something like this …”

Side by side with that style was developing another—more militant, more “political,” with its own jargon. It seemed to come most naturally to the warriors. They were harder and fiercer in speaking their opinions, as if the jargon insulated them. They were always “fighting our bourgeois violence hang-ups,” “locating the cutting edge,” “exploiting the contradictions of imperialism.”

He passed the slow time examining the girls in the circle, trying to guess who they might belong to, looking for the bodies in the rough work clothes. That night for sure he wanted to get laid. As he sat cross-legged his prick was slightly swollen. He was coming back from the dead. Really it was a drag how they dressed. Fine for scrubbing the floor and hauling bags of potatoes, but it was a pig in a poke trying to read the body through the loose denim and khaki.

When the council finally ended, most of the Indians took bread. He was curious but not willing to take the risk that night. Suppose it cooled him off. Often when he was high, he wanted nothing but to listen to the patterns in his head. Then dancing began. He asked a blonde standing near to dance, and she stared at him. Then she laughed and told him he would first dance with everyone. She told him they always danced together after council, except in an action crisis. People were to dance for a better understanding
of decisions. They were supposed to dance out any ruptures or quarrels. It was another way of being together, of expressing the tribe and each other.

“But suppose I want to express myself to you” He leaned close.

She would not flirt back. “Wait. Wait and see. Learn the language first” She skipped away into the big circle that had formed.

They played oil drums and paint cans and gongs and tambourines and a couple of guitars—neither in tune. It was raw. He would have to improve matters. Some kids shook rattles and clacked bells as they danced. Others squatted at the side rapt in making music. A short dark woman with an oil drum set the rhythm. Inside that rhythm the others improvised as they saw fit. The result was cacophony. Though sometimes they came together strangely into chance measures, mostly they hurt his ears.

He joined the slow shuffling outer circle. Sometimes people would do the same thing, pass along gestures or steps, sometimes they would just shuffle along doing a kind of grapevine. At times they would hold hands and at times they would jog or whirl along without touching. Most were concentrating on what was happening inside the circle, but some were indrawn and pulled into their muscles, and after a while he understood that they were preparing their dances. Soon they would step into the center.

A girl or boy would step from the circle and take off the rough work clothes and drop them. Sometimes he would stop to paint himself. Sometimes she would not. Some spent ten minutes slowly drawing designs on their bodies. Sometimes a couple would stop and painstakingly paint each other. Some people stopped only to draw a line or two or a symbol or to write a word across their chests. Some just threw off their clothes and started to dance.

Mostly, early in the dance, they danced alone. But often enough, couples danced. Sometimes boys danced with boys and girls with girls. Occasionally groups of three or four would form. Some of the dancing was passionate, some comic, some competitive and muscular, some consciously graceful or expressive, some overtly sexual. Two guys were teasing each other, mocking, leaping higher and higher and making fierce grimaces and chopping gestures—a danced-out samurai duel. A girl was spinning in trance, spinning, spinning till she fell and lay on the floor, and another girl squatted to take care of her and eventually to lead her to resume a place in the outer circle. Sometimes after they had danced, people would dress again, but often they did not—especially if they had painted their bodies with care. The music pounded on. Bodies expressed the music’s rhythms and their own.

The woman with the oil can was not bad. He watched her for a while. Strange-looking. Such a fat body and such thin arms. Like an insect. Then
he realized she was pregnant. Yes, that explained the awkwardness as she leaned over her own belly toward the can. Pregnant. He did not know why that little fact kept tweaking at him. There were no children here, any more than in any other group of kids dancing. But if she was so pregnant and still in the group, they must mean to raise the baby. Maybe they really would be a tribe. But he must fight the Indians’ latent Puritanism, which made them play such crude instruments and restricted the decor to a couple of red and blue gels laid over two light bulbs. They had to understand that being ashamed of what’s beautiful was a conditioning as repressive as any of the other programming—economic and social—that they fought.

If a woman was dancing alone and a man wanted to dance with her, he would approach slowly. Shawn understood as he watched that if a dancer was in trance or vision or working out a pattern of her own, she did not want anyone to relate to her. So the guy might watch and then drop back and dance alone, or dance an invitation to someone else to join him. Equally, a woman would step out of the circle and approach with the same caution, waiting to see if she was accepted.

Some of the couples danced a flirtation, danced a display to each other. Sometimes their dance ended with their walking through the circle and climbing to the dormitory, where only a dim bulb burned or seeking some private corner. People noticed or did not notice. It was accepted. It was one way of ending the dance. One couple danced rubbing against each other, a slow rubbing of belly against belly, breasts against chest, a short hairy bearlike warrior with a bandage on his head and a girl with cropped brown hair slightly taller than he, with long muscular legs. In the dim light he was not sure, and then he was sure, that the warrior had entered her. They continued their slow dance interminably swaying and writhing, and the fucking was part of the dance. For a long time he watched them until they eased apart and returned to the circle.

He saw that the rough clothes and the nakedness were part of the way the group assimilated their sexuality. That what they were to turn on to in each other had its origin in the tension between the working self with its lack of allurement, the men and the women working together in the kitchens and the lab, fighting together in the streets, and the dancing body, naked and precisely sexual. The body itself gave out its message: I want, I am, see me. They were not objects. They did not use clothes to broadcast their sexuality. The body, the dance, did that. Shawn danced smiling and approved. People turning under the feeble, the ridiculous, the puny wattage of a couple of bulbs screened with one red and one blue gel, dancing to the half-witted
bang and clatter of crude instruments awkwardly played, still were glorious. They were naked in a new sense, or a very old one. Long ago people had of course taken off their utilitarian furs and skins to dance. Dancing is the art of the body. It wants to be bare. Yes. He understood the strength of dancing naked, and he was firmly convinced that they had never yet seen anything such as he would show them. Learn the language first, the girl had told him, but she did not know how quickly he began to speak in certain tongues.

Slowly he took off his clothes. He stepped over to the paints and considered. Then he dipped his fingers first in the blue and then in the red and painted a tangle of vines over his body. They would appear mainly black. He moved to the rhythm and found a song, one of his old songs that would lift on it. His voice could penetrate brick walls with amplification, but without it he could still fill a good-sized room.

Shady baby,

let the sun shine on your skin.

Baby, baby, warm you up again.

Gonna come back tomorrow

be sure you let me in.

Yeah, I’m coming back tomorrow

make sure that I get in.

The dark and very pregnant woman on the oil can had picked up on him already. Yes, she was with him. Good drummer. Get her a decent set of drums and watch her go. Yes, he would form a group out of nothing, if necessary, but she would be with him. Open the doors of your body, drummer lady, and let out the baby, ripe and squalling. He wanted a flesh and blood baby, smelly and insistent and ready to grow into a child that would be his too. For the rest, he just kept on above the general clang and crunch of the random instruments.

Throw open the doors of your body,

open the windows,

pull up all those blinds.

I am the sun baby,

I am the sun oh baby baby

watch me rise and shine.

I’m gonna warm you,

love you, love you

till you feel

oh yeah, till you feel so fine!

Two girls started at once in the circle. The first paused at the paints, looking at him, seeing him, and then began carefully to paint a sinuous design over her body. The second saw that and came directly to him, throwing off her clothes in a straggled heap. So even here, a little competition. Grinning he came to meet her.

He stopped singing to keep his breath for the dance. The rhythm quickened and they circled each other feinting and tempting. She had a long braid thrown over one shoulder. She was pear-shaped and cuddly and frisked her round ass at him. Girding they teased each other. Her small breasts shimmered as she arched back and raised her hands high, high over her head.

He waited and then reached forward, took her firmly by the hips, lifted her high up in an arc and then brought her down slowly on his prick, slowly, slowly. He could feel the sexual vibrations back from the circle. Tensing his muscles, holding her firmly, carefully suspended and impaled, he moved half time against the increasing tempo, turning them slowly in the center of the moving outer circle, making a public ritual. Embarrassed, she leaned her head forward hiding in his shoulder, but her hips and firm ass responded. He could not tell if she came or only acted out coming, but it did not matter in ritual. As he came, he let his breath out in a loud high cry.

Thinking how in concert he had cried so hundreds of times and the girls would shriek back—an orgasm of the ears. As he started to slide out, he lifted her high and gently in the air again and swung her around completely, then slowly let her down on her feet. Quickly she ran out of the center to the waiting circle.

He looked around for the other girl. She was stepping in place alone watching and did not come forward. She looked rather frightened. He came directly to her and invited her forward, and reluctantly she came with him. Gracefully, sensually he danced with her, keeping back, and she began to relax, though if he came too near, her brown eyes would widen with worry. He smiled at her, shaking his head. Even he couldn’t do that twice in a row, and besides he did not wish to. She had prepared herself carefully, and he would wait for her. He would spend the night with her, he decided. She was plump the way he liked, and he liked too that she had stopped to make herself ready.

He danced well with her. He did not mean to do anything spectacular again that night. He liked to turn people on, and the outer circle were supposed to dig the solos. He had justified their eyes. She was good and responsive, and often she would inject an idea of her own and he would pick up
on it. He did not have any intention of becoming a warrior, but the dance was his natural place. He looked around covertly and saw that many were still watching, and their glances were mostly friendly. Then his gaze brushed Billy’s, and before he could control himself he had looked away from that intense stare of disgust. The big war chief leaned against one whitewashed wall, never joining the dance but watching always. A concentrated hostility in his eyes like electricity.

While he was pausing, Corey came and signaled that he wanted to dance. He had been dancing for an hour most of the time monotonously with Joanna, the two of them in close absorption. Occasionally they would hold each other close. Then Corey would dance alone, sometimes in joy, sometimes in frantic pain. His almost hairless body was thin, with the bones starting through the dark skin. His penis was flaccid and disregarded, never quite erect, never fully limp. He was not graceful. His movements were hurried and jerky, or slow and sullen. But his dancing was wildly expressive. He danced in god’s eyes—in good or bad agony. He danced his visions. When he danced with Joanna he expressed inturned dependency, low-key sensuality—clutching the still center of his being.

Corey sought him out to dance, with steps and gestures wild but open. Corey was selecting him and dancing his affection openly. Corey, this dark skinny saint, was choosing him his brother. He could have picked up Corey in his arms and carried him.

Shawn wanted to go back to his girl. He was careful to throw her a glance from time to time so that she would know that he was meaning to return to her. She nodded at him with a strange smile, as if she tasted something bitter and sweet, and she waited. He could not refuse Corey. It was a ritual of pledged affection. In boyish admiration Corey had selected him and carried him off to make him a member of the tribe, to make him brother. He half suspected Corey had brought the Indians to his concert in the park not only because he expected the cops to come down on the kids, but because Corey had wanted him with the Indians. Or maybe began to decide to recruit him as he watched the concert?