Dance the Eagle to Sleep (15 page)

“What for? She’s always got Shawn.”

“She hasn’t got Shawn. You know. She just screws him sometimes. That’s not anything.”

Shawn the prick and his nocturnal games. He debased the girls by his strutting, but none of them could see that. Nobody cared except him. Of course, Ginny didn’t mean anything to Shawn. That didn’t keep him away from her. Didn’t keep her away from him. “Don’t see what it has to do with me.”

“Don’t you believe she loves you?”

“If she doesn’t have sex with me, she has it with somebody else”

“That’s not what I mean” Corey shrugged. “You don’t sleep with other girls that often, do you?”

Billy shrugged back, scowling. After all, Corey knew he didn’t dance, although he ignored it. Often he had tried to push Corey for a confrontation over the dancing, but never succeeded. It was too popular to make an
issue in council. He knew he would lose. To strut around in the circle stark naked: the idea that anyone could conceive he would do that made him furious. He wasn’t a smooth talker like Shawn. Oh, he’d gone to bed with other girls a few times, especially after some street action when everybody would be making a fuss after him and some girl would decide she was interested. Like Carole, who was a good warrior, with tight discipline and never lost her cool: but how embarrassing to have her suddenly want that. Only with Ginny sex was easy; only with Ginny he did not feel awkward. He was used to her and she made it comfortable. She admired him in a different way from the others. After all, she had come to him before he’d become some kind of freaky hero.

He was intensely annoyed with Corey for talking about it. He didn’t talk to Corey about his private relationship with Joanna. Why should he drag Ginny off to New York with him? That’s how Corey acted. Joanna was very ambitious, he could feel that in her. She wanted people to look at her, to admire her, to pay attention to her too. But she couldn’t get into anything, because Corey was always having to run here and there, and he just dragged her along like his baggage. If he didn’t know where she was for ten minutes, he would start asking people frantically. He seemed scared shitless she would vanish.

When Joanna spoke up, people would notice her with surprise as a person rather than as an emanation of Corey. They’d say with shock, Joanna really is bright, you know? Joanna has ideas of her own. Then Corey’s voice would ring out, Joanna? Joanna? and she would go running. She sat in on meetings as Corey’s woman, because Corey needed her there. She wanted to be there in her own right, but she never had a chance to prove that right. And Corey could see nothing.

Then Corey dared sit in judgment on him because he would not say he loved Ginny and drag her off with him away from her job. He did not know if he loved her or not. Probably he could not love anyone. There was too much anger in him. But he knew he would not gobble her up to feed his esteem and smother his loneliness. So he scowled at Corey and kept his face shut. In the warriors men and women were equal and fought as equals or they went down, and there was no messing around when they were under battle discipline.

Corey made a sad face and shut up about Ginny. “When do you want to go?”

“Soon.”

“Be careful, you know. We can’t afford to lose you. Our chief thrust
now has to be organizing. We’re not ready for too much confrontation. We should never fight when we can’t win. We should never move into the streets when we know the injuries will be all ours.”

“We have a lot to learn about street tactics. We won’t learn it digging potatoes and sewing pants” Billy raised his big fist. “Fighting is what takes people across the line. Then they’re ours. Otherwise we’re just bullshit.”

“What brings people across the line is what we offer them that they can’t find out there”

“Kids that come in because they think it’s groovy to take off their clothes—we haven’t changed them, we haven’t got to them. Somebody else will offer them a new game, and off they’ll go. One kick is like another. The new one wins.”

“Joanna! Hey, over here” Corey sprang to his feet. She was plodding down the hill with a basket of gooseberries, sweaty and red-faced with her carroty hair tangled over her shoulders.

“I have to take these into the kitchen before they get bruised. Let go, I’m dying of thirst.” She tried to push Corey away as he hugged her. “I’m dying for a cold bath.”

“Come on, we’ll take a shower together.” He pulled the basket from her and started downhill. The conversation was over. Billy remained squatting in the grass. Then he got slowly up. Maybe he had wanted Corey to talk him out of going. He knew only that he felt cheated.

The bread had no effect that night. He could not get high, could not rise off the ground where he sat into the distant cold ring of liquid stars above them. The drums pestered him like mosquitoes. He was invisible sitting against a tree in the vague flicker of firelight. Invisible to all of them drunk with their bodies and their sensuality.

He did not mind the mystics, the solitaries, the seekers who spun on the wheel at the beating heart of the music. They were only after what he was after when he took bread. They could not see him or anyone else. They were solitary and pure in their burning, and their flesh was an instrument. Like dervishes. They shared nothing he could not reach. The vision hardened them. He approved, though that was not his way.

It was the others who danced on his head, those who used the ritual to move each other, to finagle what they wanted, to strut and preen and rub lasciviously in the firelight. The painted bodies wavered like flames. They were so sure. They could tease and mock and wriggle their breasts and buttocks and poke their dicks in the air without shame. Without shame or clumsiness they summoned everyone to look at them.

Rage grew in him. It was a lewd nightmare danced on his head. They ignored him sitting alone, or if they looked, they smiled or waved or felt sorry. Dared to pity him as he saw them in his clarity.

Even Ginny forgot to glance at him when she was in the center. There she was mocking him with her wriggling body. And Corey could say obscenely that she loved him. There was Corey leaping about, shaking himself like a puppy dog with Shawn, imitating the combat Shawn had never yet been tried in—tried and found wanting. He ground his teeth. Joanna was dancing with one of his warriors, Big Ned, almost dancing circles around him. Dancing to be watched, showing off. He shut his eyes.

Middle-class brats having fun and confusing their games with changes in the real world. The government had for the moment chosen repression, but the liberal mode would come in again, and all that fun and games would be co-opted. Sex was the hottest commodity. You’d have the whole population fucking like rabbits at every bus stop, and so what? The Roman emperors had been fond of orgies. They’d all rather fuck than think, fuck than fight. Easy! In the morning he would talk to his men one by one and see how many were fed up and willing to return to the city. How many would follow him. How many were ready at last for some action.

As soon as he was back in the city, he knew he was right. Running away was nowhere. To stay in there close to the enemy.

Now every day he had his face rubbed in what he was fighting, who he was fighting, why he was fighting.

He found the atmosphere slack in the communes, but the opportunity for change wide open. Let Corey stay in the country. He would run a tight ship for a change. Time for the warriors to shape up: drill and weapons practice, discipline, political education. Anyone who could not keep up the pace should be jolted out. He had made enough excuses about what the warriors were not ready for. Maybe the farms would have a use, of stripping off the soft queasy layers and leaving only the unyielding core for him to work on.

He looked through the potential cadre with a harder eye than he had ever used. He had to choose well. He studied the warriors who had followed him from the farm, the few who had already come back to the city before him, the new recruits. Carefully he chose his lieutenant, Matty, solid, strong, politically hard. He was sick to death of the mushiness. All the soft democratic mumblings of the council did was to concentrate power in Corey’s hands. Corey pretended to a false equality. He pretended there was no leadership, that he was not a leader; with the other half of him, he pretended that he was the tribe.

Billy could remember when in fact there had been no leadership: when they had taken the school, the first time. But patterns developed. Now there was merely unconscious leadership, irresponsible leadership, leadership with the left hand and out of the side of the mouth, leadership through charm and manipulation.

Well, Corey had for the moment abandoned the city to him. Corey was bored with New York. He would not remain fascinated by the farm forever, but in the meantime the city was Billy’s, and here he was going to develop the kind of model the rest of the tribes could emulate. Responsible leadership, practicing criticism and self-criticism, would relate to the mass of the tribes and the kids they were trying to organize in a conscious, political way. A cadre responsible to itself with discipline and a clear sense of priorities. Why fight the farm? He would simply make it irrelevant. He would not deny he was being elitist: he would be clearly and responsibly a leader and create an apparatus that would produce others, thus making himself finally and truly unnecessary.

He loved and hated the city. It was the city of empire. Yes, he was locked in combat with it the way the old radicals of Israel, the prophets, had gone railing to Babylon. Whore, cesspool, golden sepulcher. Corey felt nothing of that. He was never anyplace. He was always wandering around the map of his brain. The chemistry of real places could not get through to him. He would sit on the subway humming and babbling to himself as if he were jogging along a country lane in the back of an open truck. Shawn: what was his natural landscape? The cinematic floodlit pools of youthcult: an eternal wave coming in on an antiseptic beach, high midnight on the Strip, strobe-spastic boutiques. The carbonized freeways of the brain. Los Angeles: city that was nothing but a slot machine dispensing plastic toys. Nothing was visible there but a whole people dying of consumption. Here you could see the pillars of the empire.

Pillars of the empire. It had been stinking hot for a week. He had been killing himself every day. Wednesday at noon he smelled a wind stirring the fetid air of the Lower East Side. There was a vein of lead in the mugginess. Green and gray shimmered in the sky. He told his new right hand, Matty, “I’m going off to inspect the ass of the ruling class” He had to scowl to get off alone. As soon as he came out of the subway at Thirty-fourth, his stride lengthened, his pace quickened. How clean it was! A light fog of poisonous smoke hung in the air here, too, but of course no one in the glass houses was smelling it.

Buildings where corporations live. Prettier, as the time and money
defined pretty, than anything else built. They could even afford to “waste” a little of the golden footage in plantings, cement plazas, arcades, once in a billionaire’s while a fountain or a reflecting pool. Nothing went on for miles that was humanly useful. Somewhere out in the empire people were mining tin and pumping oil and growing soybeans and making rubber. Here was the accounting and administering, the finaglings of how to turn labor into profit, the edifice of words and lies and images created, the selling of what no one needed into what everyone must want, the high-level bribery, the stock-option plans and the media bamboozles.

The Garden of Mammon, full of glass headstones glaring in the sun. The earth is my shit heap, I shall not want, say the ruling class. They were gutting the earth as fast as ever they could, their vast factories pissing into it, scooping out the elements and the minerals and leaving only a poisoned desert for the billions who would inherit the plundered craters from which everything profitable had been extracted and consumed. After them, around them, the big famine, the final hunger.

Corey would be wondering what to do with these strange aquariums built for paper. But Billy understood that that was not his problem. He would not live on to being human. He was a weapon, forged in a society that had discovered that great profit could accrue to some people (those who counted, those who counted each other) by sending the young of the powerless off to be killed killing far larger numbers of peasants here and there who wanted to control their own lands and their own lives. Because every time a bomb exploded, every anti-personnel weapon that sent its hundreds of particles tearing through the soft tissues of soft bodies, every helicopter that was shot down with its crew, every plane hit with a missile: brrrring, brrrring, on the great cash register in the homeland bank. It was all profit. It would have to be replaced. It was the perfect form of fantastically expensive and forced consumption, paid for by taxes.

He walked and walked. Now he was among their dwellings. The wind was rising down the long avenues. Lava-like clouds were piling up beyond the East River. How comfortable they made themselves! How jolly and cozy it must be in there, knowing rats were chewing babies just three miles north on 110th Street and that two miles south on Fourteenth Street girls were selling themselves for supper and a fix for their pimp.

Did that consciousness titillate them? Or was part of owning the world never to think of all that? Did they laugh at the fools they robbed, who were fool enough to admire them and vote them into office so they could arrange things more conveniently for their enterprises?

He felt silly asking those questions. They thought they were the real people. The people they ate were just fodder. It was like asking a diner to weep for the fish on his plate. No, it did not do to be concerned with them. He watched the limousines glide by, the exotic cars, the exotic dogs. He carried over his shoulder a sack of grenades, still invisible, and tossed them right and left to bloom like Johnny Appleseed planting his trees.

He must remember that it did not matter if the lady walking that fuzzy orange beast was softhearted and spent boring hours at meetings she thought worthy and worried about the starving natives of some other place. She was dressed in the skins of natives. He must not concern himself with the inside of her head.