Dance the Eagle to Sleep (16 page)

Let him live long enough to kill a few of his enemies: the enemies of most of humankind. Let him live long enough to forge a weapon that would kill more. Born twisted, born warped, born in the center of the empire, he could only pride himself that they had not succeeded in using him. They had come close. But he had escaped them and turned. For the society, the system was mad: it caused the people in it to go slowly mad. They could not care for each other. They could only hate and fear and compete and fantasize; they could only rub against each other and try to use each other and suck on their own anxieties.

He would never live to be human. Nobody like him or these people could imagine what it might be like to be human, in a society people ran for the common good instead of the plunder of the few. Dimly, like a blind man imagining the sun, he could call up fancies of a person who was strong, unafraid, social, generous, gentle, ready. The brother. He could almost imagine. Tenderness swept his body. Someday there would be people. But that coming would not be gentle. It would sprout from straggle and death. Someday there would be human people.

The skies opened up and the rain fell down, straight down hard upon his body. His shirt was plastered to his sides. Water ran in streams down the sidewalk over his shoes. People scuttled under canopies and sent out doormen to whistle at cabs. He was alone in the embrace of the water. He raised his arms into the torrent. How good it felt! Good to be alive for a moment, even as a weapon! Let it all come down.

Kids had broken tribal rules before. The error was discussed in council until they all agreed on a verdict. The person might be required to fast in solitude for a few days to clear his head and body of what had been eating him. He might be barred from the dance for a couple of weeks. He might even be expelled from the group. But Chuck was the first warrior to commit something that everyone saw as serious. He was caught selling bread at high prices and keeping the money.

Chuck had only stayed on the farm a few weeks before returning to the commune on Spring Street, so the council to judge him would meet there—his commune plus representatives from others. Corey would have been glad to avoid this council in the name of tribal democracy, but he knew the situation was important. Almost he had persuaded himself that he had to go to L.A. immediately instead. He knew it was from squeamishness that he wanted to stay out. He had to be there to make sure everyone understood the implications of what Chuck had done, that the political message of the situation was clear. A contingent from the farm drove in. He rode in the back of the closed truck with his head in Joanna’s lap and said nothing.

He had wanted Shawn to come.

Shawn had leaned on the new bench in the dining hall, still holding a plane in his hand. “No, man. Sometimes you’re blind. Willfully blind. I can’t sit in on the trial of one of Billy’s warriors. I’m not a warrior, I never bothered to become one, and I never will. All we need is for them to start talking about the elite country types trying to control their councils.”

Everybody always had such good reasons for not wanting to stick their fingers in the fire. Never that it would hurt, of course. “You think I shouldn’t go?”

“You have to. You’re a warrior. I’m not.”

“Don’t feel that way. You’re respected.”

“Not by Billy’s boys. That’s fine with me. I’m not big on judging people, anyhow. It’s not my scene.”

Do you think it s mine? he wanted to ask, but swallowed it. Don’t push
too hard on people. He had wanted Shawn with him. It wasn’t the same as needing Joanna there, but it was strong. Shawn made a balance in him. Shawn held him to the light side of himself, just as Joanna held him steady and sane. She kept him from sliding into his withdrawn inner blackness; she kept him from cracking, from splintering. Shawn gave him an opening to others. With Shawn he could play in a good way. With Shawn he could talk bluntly about what happened. He did not have to put on a performance, to convince and act out and demonstrate.

Shawn had not followed out of belief. Sometimes he was afraid he did not know why Shawn had followed. But with Joanna and with Shawn he could open his doubts, and that kept him able to move and change and roll with the punches. That was the major thing: not to get hung on being right, not to let himself go rigid.

They left the truck several blocks away and walked to the meeting. It was a hot September night, and the air felt like mud, an element twice as heavy as the air of the farm.

“How dirty it is” Joanna said softly as they walked.

To look at the garbage of casual living all over the streets, bottles and cans and newspapers and broken chairs and banana peels and pizza boxes, had to make you feel that being human was a mean low thing. City people were like pets trapped in a cage with their own shit. Shawn had talked about the use of shit to make you feel defiled, to break you down to self-loathing in brig.

“Hey, the air’s like spaghetti!” Corey shouted. Everyone felt dispirited. He had to rouse them. He pantomimed fighting his way through a forest of wet spaghetti. Clown, he went lunging over the sidewalk offering himself to their stares and laughter. At the top of his raucous voice he sang:

“I am an Indian, wild and mean,

The reddest thing you ever seen!

How! How! How! How! Now!”

All six of them joined hands and went dancing up the street with Ned, the husky AWOL with the fatback in his voice, at the head of the line whipping it around, and little Ben on the end almost flying. When they came to the commune, they shushed at once. But Corey thought they brought a little wave of energy—positive good energy—with them. The room was packed already.

At first when somebody had done something that bothered people, they held gentle family sessions, everyone talking about why they were
upset and the person responding and usually trying hard to understand. But somehow, slowly, a court emerged. Maybe their society had got them so used to thinking in terms of blame and punishment and using power to put down, that they had carried some of that over. He liked the old way of gentle sessions better. But they encountered little gentleness in the streets.

First the witnesses against Chuck spoke. Rumors had come to the commune that the Indians would sell bread to anyone now, but that their price had gone up. The rumors were so persistent that Matty, who was head of security in August, set out to run them down. Being head of security meant you handled intelligence for a month. Corey had been strong on that. “Function corrupts” he had said till he got the idea across. “We don’t turn anybody into a gun or into a shovel or into a stove or into a desk or into an account book.”

Matty had found that the peddler was Chuck, but he had watched him for two weeks longer. He wanted to understand what Chuck was doing. He then discovered that Chuck had opened a bank account in his own name and that he was buying a car, a three-year-old Ford convertible he kept in a garage in the Village.

Chuck rose to defend himself. Corey had known him since high school, and he felt sick. Chuck had been in the first assault on Franklin High. He had been beaten in the first bust. He was a solid-looking boy with a brown moustache, a deep voice, and an ingratiating smile. “Look here, I been with the Indians since the beginning, and I’ve pulled my share and then some. Everybody here who knows me knows that. I risked my skin as much as anybody, and I’m not boasting, just telling the truth. But a man has needs. I’ve always had a car. I like to drive. I like to move around. I can’t ask permission every time I want to wipe my ass, I’m not a kid. I had a job caddying in high school and I always had money in my pocket that I earned.

“Look, I see some girl and I want to take her out. I’m not going to try to convert her first. You got to have some money to spend on a girl. I want to take her to the movies or for pizza. Girls like you to have a car. It’s nothing serious. Maybe I just want to pick her up and drive around and lay her. It doesn’t do you any harm. The girls in the commune are fine. But when I’m on the street and I see a chick I want, I got to go after her. I don’t want to organize her. Maybe I don’t even want to see her again. I’m risking my ass peddling bread. The Mafia don’t like us none, and if they get one of us, they cut him up or bust his guts open. They killed Sandy and we think they killed Eileen. They don’t like us selling so cheap. I never held back a penny of the regular price. I turned that over fair and square. But what I could get above that was my own hustle, and I can’t see what skin it is off anybody
else’s back. I just want to feel like a man sometimes and have a good time. That’s only human. Why pretend to be some kind of crazy monks?”

Sitting on the floor beside Joanna with her knee against his, Corey could feel that she was unmoved by Chuck. She sat there rigid and condemning, and he wondered at her intransigence. The smell of his own early adolescence was in his nostrils. Maybe he had traded those needs in on others—Joanna and playing chief. She would laugh at his squeamishness. She would tell him, I’d make a tougher chief than you do. He answered her, But I’m not a war chief, Billy is.

Almost all tribes made that distinction, and he thought it a good one. It was too much to ask that the same human being be held responsible for protecting and nurturing and preserving the ways of his people, and for leading them into wars. For instance, Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce was thought of by many as a great general because he had shepherded his people on such a long skillful retreat, but he had never led them in battle.

Aw, poor slob. Why had Chuck followed them at all if he understood so little? How many kids were as untouched inside? Fifteen years of programming, and he thought he could shake them alive in a few months of communal living. Poor bastard, Chuck could never see how dangerous he was to the group. It was a re-education problem, but they had little way of handling the exchange of political ideas. After all, kids came in mistrusting words, hating their programming, sick of the processing of school, ready to puke at the old coercive rhetoric of Buy and Die. There were almost no tools available in the tribe to communicate political values, but only to embody them. Which worked, sort of. Sort of. To be left with exemplary action because they could not talk to each other properly, made him feel like banging his head on the floor.

Corey rose. “If you disagree with the rules, Chuck, the place to disagree is in the council, not in the streets, not when you think you’re off where none of us can see you. The enemy has guns and tanks and planes and submarines. The enemy has chemical and biological and nuclear weapons. The enemy is ready to use gases that choke and blind us and prisons to break our souls and clubs to break our bodies. He’s ready to use shotguns and dogs. The only weapons we have are our bodies and our lives. The only weapon we have is our solidarity. The only weapon we have is our trust in each other. There’s only one thing we can deny the man who owns everything: ourselves. He owns the streets and the skyscrapers and the water that comes out of the tap and the gas we burn. He owns the music we make and the cigarettes we smoke. He takes away our minds in his schoolrooms. Then he
sells us back our dreams and charges us our lives. He reaches into our pants and manipulates our wants and sells us images to feed those desires, so we will want and want and want. So we will become men defined by owning things made of pasteboard. The man taught you to take women like tissues and wipe yourself in them and throw them away.

You don’t need to go out of the tribe to know you’re a man. Here you can be yourself, and women don’t ask more of you—or less of you, Chuck— than that you be yourself. For real. Nobody gets caught. Nobody gets stuck. There is no marriage, because we are all married to each other. We are each other’s family. Children belong to the tribe, and we are free to love each other as we can. Yet you chose to travel back into the man’s bad dream. You took the promises of the system and cuddled them inside you, and you would not throw them out.”

Part of him was listening to himself and watching the faces … no, not watching. Feeling into. A sense that came back, like judging temperature, so that he knew he was in touch. The heat of attention. Part of him was steering his speech where it had to go.

“You came with us and lived with us and yet you did not belong in us. You want to be a part-time Indian and a part-time warrior and a consumer the rest of the time, a slave the rest of the time. But we live outside their law and inside our own. You cannot have what we have—the tribal thing, and what the man sells—the capitalist consumer thing. To play both sides is betrayal. To play both sides is treason.”

He looked around as he sat down, and he saw that the faces were still with him. The faces were against Chuck standing lonely in the middle, turning to his accusers as they spoke. They spoke for exile, and the sense of the group was to vomit out Chuck, to expel him at once. Corey knew expulsion was important, for what Chuck had done was the one absolutely rotting action. They could not contain in their body the dreams of success and merchandise and commodity sex that inhabited Chuck like demons.

Billy rose. Corey thought, he is going to speak against expulsion. Protect his warrior. He hoped someone else besides him would rise to oppose Billy, but he began to put together a speech in his head. In a way, such a crisis could be used for that political education they were always lacking, to articulate to the tribe in that very moment of making their collective decision some of the bases of such decisions. Then the judging itself—the expelling of the person from the tribe—was not purely punitive but contained the seeds of learning and growing for the collective. Then Billy knocked the rough framework of his speech out of his head.

“Expulsion.? What kind of fools are we? Are we playing children’s games? Chuck broke the rules, so we won’t play with him any more. He cheated and lied and bartered with our enemies, so we will let him go and do as he pleases all of the time on their side. What kind of fools are we? It’s our lives we’re playing with. This man is a warrior. This man has taken the oath to obey the group with his life. He knows our defenses. He knows where our communes are and who is in them. He knows where the farm is set up in New Jersey and where the West Coast farm is. Finally, he knows the formula for bread. He can go and manufacture it for the Syndicate tomorrow. He has shown already he thinks of it as something to sell to the highest bidder. He thinks of himself as something to sell to the highest bidder. If we let him go, we have only our own destruction to look forward to. I trained him and I trusted him. When we are on the streets fighting the man, when we’re moving into a new neighborhood or a new city, it’s our lives that are on the line. I trusted him and you trusted him, and we were wrong. We were dead wrong. He turned on us. He sold us. He sold us for cheap pickups and pizza and a flashy car. We are not playing children’s games. He sold us. We cannot expel him—turn him loose—and survive”