Dance the Eagle to Sleep (26 page)

People were on their feet, yelling. His warriors were beating on the floor in unison, with a weird hollow drumming effect that made the hair on his neck rise. Childish rituals. He could taste the excitement, he was himself high and riding on it, yet he knew the crowd’s excitement and his own were alien as mouse and giraffe.

Never sentimentalize your material. The bricklayer who overly cherished bricks would never build a wall. And other homilies. Speechmaking rotted the brain. But over time he had dealt with his own repulsions, his clumsiness, his shyness before groups.

A couple of his warriors followed to support him. All that arranged beforehand, the general pitch. They were doing okay. He did not have to listen but could watch the crowd instead. Tilting his glasses, pressing them hard into his cheeks to make out the haze of heads farther back, he read face by face through the rows, counting votes by expressions. Yes, he would carry them.

Corey got the mike again. He should not have been able to. He just gently took it, and the warrior, Matty, who had been speaking let him. Billy thought quickly, procedural point. No, let him go first, then come on himself to clobber.

Corey stood with head jutting forward, his face gloomy and sullen and his eyes glaring out from under half-shut lids. He looked awful. Billy moved up to stand beside him, towering over. Lack of sleep, fear for Joanna, hair cropped almost to baldness: Corey’s charisma was damp and low. For once, they were equal in this fight. Corey would pull no miracles of flesh and charm and brother-me sister-me words. He had no miracles to shake out of his skinny body like the bullfighter’s red satin cape magically whipped out of his bony ribs. Nothing but empty hands that cut the air mechanically as he spoke. His voice had gone dry. He turned and saw Billy standing over him, and for an instant their eyes met with a full glare of hostility on both sides.

“We grow dizzy with our own rhetoric. We give ourselves visions that blind us to the real situation. There are not yet enough of us to fight the state. There are not yet enough of us to bring down this city. We don’t want to take over the system, but to abolish it. There are many ways to fight, but with weapons is the worst right now, because we can’t win. We should never fight when we can’t win”

Some of the warriors booed and pounded on the floor in derision. The bad luck, the shame of the farm fell on Corey.

“We must not be blinded by our own metaphors. We call ourselves warriors, we call ourselves guerrillas—so we can understand we’ve left their
machine and are out to destroy it. But we must not be trapped inside our words. There are times to be visible and times to be invisible. We are afraid to leave the comfort of our communes and our tribes, but we must go out and organize everywhere.”

“It’s you who’s scared now!” a woman shouted. “We don’t want to run away. We want to fight. Sit down!”

“We must not let our own words and our habits and our past trap us. We must not just react to the enemy but act freely out of our own need to grow, and the need of those still inside the beast for liberation. We must go back and come out again. This is the path of growth. That is the real path of the Indian now, more difficult than rushing into the streets, because it will take greater strength and more purpose than we’ve ever shown.”

It was not working, it was not working. Corey hated being booed, and he showed it. His voice sounded petulant. He retreated into self-righteousness. Their mood was running against him, and he could not come to meet it. He was not moving to effect the compromise that would heal. The more the warriors booed him, the more he repeated himself, embracing his martyrdom.

“It’s going to be hard to go back where we came from because we were all so proud we left. But we have to go back for the others and bring them out too. We don’t have the strength of metal but the strength of water. We must trust our own strength and take the difficult path of dispersing in order to reunite.”

Billy stepped nearer. Enough, enough. Corey was still holding the mike and tried to speak to him directly: “Billy, don’t hold too hard to the line. We need to loosen, to change as the situation hardens—”

Billy pulled the mike from his hand. He turned to the audience, stepping to the edge of the stage. “Who dares to say we can’t fight? Who dares to say, now that the chips are down, that being warriors was only a game, only words? Look around you. These are fighting men and they’re ready to fight. It’s always easy to find excuses for your lack of nerve. We all have reasons to be afraid. Let’s stop pointing fingers. We all get tired and lose our nerve. We get confused and think up reasons not to act. It seems to us too much has been asked, that the price is too high. We want to rest for a while, to take it easy. That’s how defeat comes: when we’re defeatist beforehand. Of course there’s danger. Only a fool would pretend there isn’t, and only a fool would deny what you know: that it will be tough and dirty on the streets, and many of us will go down. But we’ll push the pigs off our turf and liberate our streets if we hang together. If we’re defeated, then is the time to counsel
retreat. Then we can disperse and run away. But we’re not defeated. We’ve been attacked, we’ve lost a few prisoners. But here we are, look around! Are you beaten? Tell me!” Shouts of “No!” “Vote, then. Let me hear you! How many are ready to fight?”

The shout was deafening.

People hated the smell of defeat, and Corey gave it off, standing backstage with one tall guy. Shawn! Billy felt in his euphoria like giggling. Shawn had cut his hair and dyed it brown. There was a warrant out on him. Put on a pair of specs and a secondhand suit. He was talking fast and earnestly at Corey, who did not appear to be listening. Corey would not accept defeat— not this personal setback. Billy had won the solid man’s victory of strategy: could Corey see that?

Every man came at last to the end of his nerve. But Billy did not run on nerve. His was the leadership now, not grabbed, not connived for or leaped into, not fallen upon him by chance, but slowly built for. An organization that supported him and whose embodiment he was before the others lent him weight. The other leaders rapped and trafficked in charm and the lure of their ease. He stood for discipline and he moved for power, and he would lead the tribes through. The outsider became the insider not by selling his brain and not by currying favor, but by building a slow necessary core about himself until the outside was the inside and the head of the pyramid was where he stood.

Ginny popped out from between two warriors. She looked strange. He figured that out as she crossed the stage through clots of excited people: a skirt and sweater. He had not seen her in a skirt since high school. Her job was over. Gone with the farm. So she was free now. Ginny had never been initiated as a warrior, but what about a nursing corps? With her efficiency, she could put that together in a couple of days.

He strode over to intercept her. Said hello awkwardly, how are you, getting the perfunctories over. Sketched out his idea.

She did not smile. “Certainly you’d better get that organized, but I don’t think I can take it on now.”

“You’re not going to try to go back to the farm!”

“I think we’ll be on the road. But I’ll let you know if we stick around.” She slipped past and went on to Corey, her smooth hair sleek under the lights. She walked quickly in her sure, slightly flat-footed way, and poked Corey in the shoulder. There was a flurry of consultation between Shawn and her. Then she took Corey’s arm and tugged him off, Corey moving as if drugged, with Shawn just behind them.

A bolt of anger fixed Billy. The weak soft squishy core of her. Of course she took the losing side. If Corey had won with his giving-up-in-advance strategy, she would be hanging around Billy, acting all butter and broth and nursey. Maybe what she had liked in him had been his awkwardness and his freakishness, and now that he had mastered his life, learned to function on his strengths and neutralize his weaknesses, she looked at him blankly and moved away. Mother searching for baby boys to hang at her breast. Forget her, forget her. She belonged on a farm, all right. She would never escape the soft doom of her automatic taffy-sticky maternal machine. Now he must think clearly about the tactics of the next days. Time to break up the general meeting and call his warriors into special session. He was better off without sources of confusion licking at the edges of his mind. He had offered her a chance to be useful, and she had refused it. Someone else would fill the position before the evening was over. Call it the hospital squad. Maybe draft Marilyn.

The demonstrations focused on two major demands: Free the Indians (the occupants of the tunnels and the raided commune) and Stop Police Dragnets—Let the Community Patrol Itself. The high school strike was about 60 percent effective except in places like Staten Island. It was being coordinated by a committee of kids active in the schools, usually around anti-pigeon agitation and disruption of the recruiting assemblies and placement exams. They were nice hip kids, but their vision was limited. They wanted to demonstrate effectively and show their support for the demands: they anticipated, perhaps, that that might have some effect. They actually hoped for the release of the prisoners, at least on bail. They did not understand there was no possibility of avoiding violence, because the demonstrations were going to be smashed. Therefore when the time came, he would have to bypass and discredit them. In the meantime, he let them run their show and filled service functions.

That was the one thing he could count on: if a bunch of people took to the streets asking for something they could not get in any other way and would not get that way either—whether it was to vote, or to have a voice about what wars they would die in, or to protest arrests or beatings or cur-fews—the police would go crazy and try to blind and maim and cripple them. A field day for sadists who felt unappreciated. To have a streetful of young boys and girls to beat was a cop’s wet dream.

For years, the culture had been telling everybody through every boob tube that only youth was sexual and beautiful, and that all an over-twenty-five schmuck like you could do was buy Brand X to look a little more
youthful. Schmuck, schmuck, the boob tube said all evening long, you’re powerless, sexless, fumbling, clumsy, mindless, unable to decide. Average man = schmuck. Average woman = bag. Buy our product at once, and maybe nobody will notice what a drag you are.

Because products wear out, right? Who wants last year’s car or last year’s dress or last year’s avocado refrigerator? You want to look like a fool? You are a fool, but do you want to look like one? Look young, baby, or nobody will want to buy you any more. As a commodity, you can go out of style.

Thus is a people conditioned to hate its young and focus its frustrations down upon them in a vast dream of those half-dependent, half-independent children demanding and rebelling and threatening. A slow damp daydream spread among the ranks of the
Daily News
readers and readers of
Life
and
Time
of the rape, the torture, the humiliation of uppity sixteen-year-olds. Dozens of women’s magazine and Sunday supplement articles advised in jargon, how to handle “them” They were different, alien. You were warned that you could not hope to communicate with them or understand their ways without the guidance of certified experts who had degrees in studying them, like biologists specializing in tree monkeys or fighting fish. Them. Versus Us: the first step in the psychological conditioning for war.

The weakness of the young was that they did not believe in death. Their basic experience of relationships was all in the rhetoric of protection and nurture and punishment for their own good: parents to child, teacher to pupil, counselor to counseled. They were used to the repressive atmosphere of the schools, but that was a persuasion of fear, shame, manipulated competitiveness, failure to please and fear of failure. They were angry enough, but they were not yet serious.

Inside their skulls they thought they could go back, and the weakness in Corey’s strategy was that they could for the most part—back to New Rochelle and Shaker Heights and Winnetka with fond memories of playing red man in the streets for a season or two to keep with memories of other team sports that were supposed to build character in adolescents. Corey had no place to go back to, so he could not imagine the co-optative softness of the average suburb. He had to be pushed aside, because he could not see that his plans would gut the movement.

Instead the kids would be thrust over the line so that they could never go back. They had to be forged in seriousness by the simple understanding that they must win or die. They must experience the brutality inside the empire that it exercised over subject peoples outside: armed repression, mass murder. Then they would become real revolutionaries. They would fight.

In the meantime, who was yelling for their blood, who was organizing counter-demonstrations and waving flags and out on the streets looking for kids to beat up and heads to break, but all the working class who thought they were bourgeoisie, who felt the squeeze of inflation and the grinding pinch of depression, who bore the weight of taxes to support the whole shebang, and who were conditioned, frustrated, mad, fagged out, not willing to let go of one piece of the mortgaged jerry-built house or the tin-can car with six taillights, who felt the thrust from below and wanted to stomp.

All their lives they labored at a job, at two jobs, to buy only the gim-crackery in five shaky rooms, and why should they give up one fubsy lamp? Concessions to blacks, to kids, to the people howling about pollution, to the overseas proletariat would come right out of their pockets and off their backs: they sensed that. No corporation was going to reduce its take by one half of one percent to pay for the demands of anybody. The cost of the war, the cost of a settlement was ground out of them. The blacks and the kids were to use their bodies to stop up the gaps, to sit out of the labor pool and be properly conditioned or barely maintained. But if they tried to shake things up, the folks already caught in the bind would be ready to start stomping. For twenty-five years they had been sold a crusader’s world of Armed Might Versus the Bed Hordes and now at last the myth was flesh and blood in the streets. Perhaps the Russians hadn’t finally landed, but you didn’t have to go farther than a subway token would carry you to Kill a Commie for Christ.