Dance the Eagle to Sleep (29 page)

He took his girl, Terry, and Joe and his woman and George and Tiger and Skinny and Ho (from Horace) and little Gladys, who was only ten and the sister of Joe’s woman. It gave him a sick lonely feeling to go off from the others, and then an hour after there were only the nine of them, and the others were swallowed up in the woods. Who could guess what was happening to them? He could not know any more and he worried, but he kept it to himself. He kept the gang moving fast so they would forget. Still, it was easier to find food in the smaller group. They heard gunfire and dogs from time to time, and patrols passed on the major trails.

If only the leaves would come out on the trees! There were just buds. Every morning, he looked at the branches over them. The sun was hot on their heads, though the air was cool. Water was a problem sometimes when they were hiding up on the peaks. Often when they set a trap, they could not get back before the animal had rotted, because they had to run before a patrol.

One morning high on Muhammad Ali, they saw one of the planes dropping a load of explosives down the valley by Piss Lake, where they had used to camp in the summer, watching for tourists to raid and fishing and swimming and having a high old time. They could see flames for a while and then not any more. They all squatted on the ledge arguing whether they should find out what happened, if it was just walking into a trap to go down. Finally Marcus decided they had to take a chance, because suppose it was some of their people in trouble and needing help. He took George with him and they went to scout, while everybody else promised to wait around on Muhammad Ali till they came back.

They were quick runners, so they made it down to the spot in under two hours. They didn’t have any trouble finding it. They just followed their noses. Things were still smoldering. George got sick and puked on his shoes when they started looking at the bodies, but Marcus was so petrified by fear and rage he was all right. Five of the bodies were crisp and burnt. That
left two, including Shirley, and he called their names loud as he could for a while, though his voice scared him. He didn’t want to die that way. He was of two minds. He half hoped they’d escaped, and half he was afraid that Shirley had run off and deserted the others, and that he had chosen wrong. Then Joe, who was down at the lake washing the puke off, saw two more bodies in the water. Probably they had run in, trying to put the flames out, and drowned or burned—who could say? They were sure dead. One was Shirley and the other must be Fats, though it was hard to tell any more.

George said that they ought to bury them real quick, or they’d get caught down here and fried too. Marcus said no. They had to get out at once. Surely some patrol would come to do a body count—they liked that kind of thing. Then they multiplied times five and put a story in the newspapers. Besides, the enemy could not know how many of them were in hiding. Maybe they’d think they’d incinerated them all, and leave them alone in the mountains. Then they’d be all right; they’d make out somehow.

He debated on the way back what to tell the others. It would not be good for them to know. But what could he make up? George could not be trusted to keep his mouth shut, even if Marcus gave him a good scare. The picture would haunt him. He would have to tell it to somebody, and then no one would believe Marcus any more. He could not save them then.

The gang had been so different: all that jockeying for position. Nobody wanted to push him out of being leader here, but how heavy the leadership weighed. At first he had acted like the big man, taking the biggest slice. Now if there was not enough, he went hungry. It was a burden: all of them on his back. He felt more than two years older; he felt a century older. His woman was too young to share his troubles. He made George push himself, trotting faster and faster, because he was scared now, scared scanning the face of Muhammad Ali, that his people would be gone. He was scared to find them fried bacon smoking in the sun. Yet when he arrived, he yelled at them. He yelled out the news all at once and fell back.

After that sometimes they ran from patrols, but sometimes they fell in behind them. They waited for a chance to pick off a straggler. Now the men hunting them were soldiers. They wore uniforms and carried all kinds of equipment, rifles and grenades and walkie-talkies and radio apparatus and even cameras.

One time Joe was lying up among some rocks with his woman watching a patrol. Marcus was on the other side of the ravine with Tiger and Skinny, while everybody else was off food gathering. He watched the patrol stop and take up a covered position, and then they fired some kind of rocket
at the ledge. They got both Joe and his woman. He did not understand. The soldiers could not have seen them. Joe had not fired or shown himself. It was not possible for them to know. But he did not stop to think about it, just high-tailed out of there with his boys.

They were more careful after that. Staying way back, they waited for times when the soldiers were not alert. A lot of the time the soldiers shot up patches of woods where there was nobody at all but chipmunks and deer and jack rabbits. Finally Marcus and Skinny and Tiger captured a soldier. They had been following a patrol from the top of the ridge for three days. The soldier had stopped to take a crap and he was long about it. They hit him on the head and carried him off, but it was hard for them. He weighed ten tons.

The soldier was scared and not scared. His name was Ed. Ed kept saying it was a big laugh. He kept telling them they were nothing but punk kids. He was twenty and from Akron, Ohio. He said the soldiers were Special Forces—special counter-insurgency troops—and this was part of their training. Tiger said it was fighting, not training, and didn’t they understand this was guerrilla warfare? Ed said that was pretty funny, guerrilla warfare with a bunch of colored juvenile delinquents, and that more of his buddies would get killed driving around on Memorial Day weekend than in their whole time hiking around the park. Matter of fact, they liked this assignment. They got a lot of time in New York City, and now that the weather was getting better, it wasn’t so bad tramping in the mountains.

Ed kept saying they should realize they had not captured him, but he had captured them, and they should all go in with him and quit playing hide and seek in the mountains. If they didn’t quit while they were still in one piece, they’d all get blown to bits by next Friday. He kept talking like it was a big joke, and Marcus kept thinking about the bodies of the other kids by the lake, about what was left of Joe and his woman splattered on the rocks. “We fight till the last of us get killed.”

George just got up and spat in the soldier’s face.

“Jesus Christ” Ed said with disgust. “What shitty luck being captured by a bunch of crazy ten-year-old spades”

Only Gladys was ten. Her sister had been Joe’s woman. She sat like a skinny brown chicken with her knees drawn up to her chin and her hand with the knife going stick, stick in the earth.

Marcus questioned Ed about how come the soldiers had been able to send that rocket at Joe when he was hidden behind the rocks. Ed explained that they were trying out all sorts of brand-new body detectors. They had
one that worked by detecting body heat, and another magnetically sensitive device that located pieces of metal from a good distance. That one had not worked so well, because enough tourists had come through the hills to leave scraps of metal and old beer cans pretty nearly everywhere, and for a week they had been shooting up bushes before they sent that one back upstairs. The heat detector, however, was pretty effective, and it sure could pick up one of them hiding in the hills from a couple city blocks away. Professors had been developing these gadgets for locating natives in jungles for years, and now they were getting a good testing. “You kids are just amateurs. You got the whole might of the U S and A on your tail, picking you off like flies. You better wake up.”

“The whole USA ain’t worth my mother’s ass” Marcus said. A pang went through him. Alive, dead, busted, free. He felt that if he could only see that fat old woman for five minutes, even his mean sister with her stinking hair straightener and her strutting around, he would be so happy he would go straight through the ceiling. He felt a sharp disgust at living. Weary, weary. But his people were looking at him. They had to move out.

They tied up Ed’s mouth with his undershirt and took whatever they could use off him. Then they beat him to death. Except for Gladys with the knife, they did it methodically and without much excitement. They were all too depressed by the business about the body detectors.

Tiger started in, “Maybe it high time to clear out of here. Quit hanging around these old mountains and find some other place to hide out.”

“Yeah?” Marcus gave a short disgusted laugh. “We so invisible. All we got to do is just walk out down the highway. They used to seeing just millions of raggedy black lads running around in packs in these parts. We can just mix with the crowd natural-like, so nobody will give us two looks.”

After that everybody shut up, but they went back to their old way of just trying to keep out of the path of patrols. When they came to blasted patches, they did not walk out into them but skirted them superstitiously and turned another way. They never ran into any other of their people, and they did not come on any bodies. He thought of the third band as dead, but part of him kept hoping, part of him would not give up that they were hanging on, too. Then Gladys and Skinny got picked off when they were tracking a deer, and just three days after that, Terry got caught in a clearing where she was picking some greens, and the plane dropped some kind of bomb that exploded all these hundreds and hundreds of little pellets. The pellets just tore right into her.

Marcus and Tiger carried her between them all day. She was in awful
pain. He sat up with her away from the others, because she was moaning and wailing and the bleeding just went on and on. He tried everything he could think of to ease her and to stop that blood running out. Terry was a thin buck-toothed girl with a light yellowish cast to her skin, and she hadn’t even started to have hair yet. She was kind of silly, and she would still cry for her mother sometimes, and she was always bitching because the Indians didn’t bring them nice clothes to wear. But she was okay. When they were hungry and couldn’t find a thing to eat, she would just keep on looking for nuts and leaves and bark they could chew on, long after the others had given up.

Now she kept gripping his hand and asking, “Marcus-honey, am I hurt real bad? Please, I feel so cold.”

He kept telling her she was going to be all right, but he knew she didn’t believe him, and he knew better too. She just kept on bleeding. Just before the sky began to turn gray, she conked out.

Ho just disappeared. They found a big hole in the ground but they couldn’t tell if he had been blown up in it or not. It was a pretty big hole.

Finally there were three of them left. Marcus and George and Tiger, only them out of everybody. They ate roots and leaves, and they were hungry all the time. They didn’t dare hunt, and they seldom could stop long enough to set traps and take animals. They did not ever leave each other’s sight.

Tiger said one morning, “Tomorrow time for the drop. We going to the rendezvous this time?”

“What for? Exercise?” Marcus asked. But they were hungry all the time. What the hell! If they walked into a trap, it would be done with. He could close his eyes and die. He was so weary. Besides, he knew that what they really hoped for more than the food or the medicines or the ammunition, was that they would show up and find the members of the missing third band, and then there would be more of them again. Dying he wasn’t scared of. What kind of life was it running like a mouse around these damned stinking hills, while the white bastards practiced their machines on them?

Still they moved in cautiously. He was sure all the time it was a mistake, because they were depressed and short-tempered with each other. It was like licking a wound. Nobody was there. They hung around back in the woods watching nothing for a while. Then Marcus wigged out. He got so mad he couldn’t stand it. He ran out into the clearing and started yelling, “Crazy mother-fucking white bastards, why don’t you kill me! You shitty white murdering bastards!”

“Hello?” A white girl with a small rucksack strapped to her back crawled out. Sort of dumpy-built white girl with brown hair. She explained she
didn’t have much for them. What she had was on her back, a few days’ dried rations, because she had hiked in to find them. “Where are the rest?”

“Dead. What do you think? Dead. We all that’s left”

She had a map. It was all worm tracks to him, but they managed to figure out where she was talking about. In two days they were supposed to be waiting where they could see the road, and Corey was going to try to have a truck there for them. She told them things were not going to be a great improvement out there. The Indians were being hunted, too.

The three of them squatted down and had a vote. George was for taking her with them and going back to their turf. This could only be a trap. Why should they trust her? They’d made it so far, they could go on making it.

Tiger wanted to move out. If other people were fighting, then he would go and fight with them, pink or purple or even white. He reminded them they had seen black soldiers with the others.

Here he was going to go out of his skull with them being picked off one at a time. If Tiger was ever left alone, he’d just jump off a cliff or run into a patrol firing. Look what old Marcus had just gone and done. Suppose the enemy had been in ambush? They were all going stir crazy, and it was no good.

Marcus squatted on the ground considering. He looked the girl over. She was wearing pants and a man’s padded jacket, and she carried her rifle as if she was used to it. Her hands were rough and callused. Listening to them she leaned against a tree, and she was calm. She was alert and together and calm. She was not scared of them. She was standing in her own cone of silence waiting. Alone she had come in looking for them, and that was a crazy stupid thing to do, and she had done it well. If they went back with her, what she had done wasn’t crazy. That was her bet. Corey had come through on his promises to them. And he just plain wanted to get out. There were too many bodies here already.