Dance the Eagle to Sleep (25 page)

They were waiting in the clearing in a nervous cluster. One more woman with a rifle had come up the path to join them. She had already given them the news that she had seen two more tunnels attacked with gas and the people inside made prisoner. She had set fire to the lab and then fallen back.

Shawn looked carefully at Corey. He was quiet but together. Everybody started down the ravine. By the time they reached the truck it was just after seven, not really light, a dull morning and raining steadily. The boy was still lying in the truck, but Carole was gone.

“We buried her the best we could,” New John said. He had been crying. They got into the truck. The floor was still sticky.

Big Ned and Corey got up front, Ned to drive and Corey with the maps to figure out their course. Everybody else squatted in back around the wounded kid. They were anxious and glum, all expecting a roadblock. It was tense in the truck because they couldn’t see anything, and every time the truck slowed down or came to a stop, everybody strained to hear, and those who were armed held their rifles at the ready.

“I hope Dolores wasn’t in tunnel D” he said to Ginny. She was leaning wearily against John with the baby finally asleep from exhaustion in her lap.

“I hope she was. That’s where Joanna took Leaf. If they’re separated, she’ll be terrified”

Shawn shook his head and told her briefly what Carole had told him. Depression thickened in the back of the truck. They were all close to exhaustion and despair. Nobody made conversation. Nobody had anything to say.

It was nine when the truck stopped for the last time and the motor was shut off. Corey came around to open the doors. “Out, quick. Ned has to ditch the truck. We’re in Hoboken. We don’t dare try to reach Manhattan in the truck. We can rest and eat here, and wait for Ned to get back.”

The Hoboken commune was in an old frame house. Shawn fell onto a mattress, kicked off his boots and peeled his wet pants and fell to sleep. He did not wake till late in the afternoon. By then Ned had come back and Ginny was acting as barber. A sign on the wall in Corey’s big block printing read: sometimes the red man must paint himself white. Corey’s hair was cropped already. His ears stuck out. He looked younger and skinnier. Looking at him, Shawn did not believe he had slept at all. The bones seemed to be coming through his skin in desperation. His eyes glittered and saw no one.

At least Shawn was sure Corey did not see him. He wanted Corey’s gaze. He kept telling himself his sense of guilt was irrational—that Corey would probably have been captured along with Joanna if he had not been up on the hill, but he still felt as if everything, everything were somehow his fault. He kept realizing that Carole was dead. No one spoke about it. They could not afford to think of her yet. But he felt immobilized by guilt.

After Ned had been shorn, Shawn sat down in the chair and Ginny spread the towel around him before beginning to slash and cut. The floor was deep in fallen locks, brown and black and now his yellow hair. The first report over the radio came on the three o’clock news. They figured the radio report to mean that what was going to be raided had been hit already. The radio described raids by the police of two states on the headquarters of an illegal armed gang of deserters. It promised more information on the evening news.

Scouts sent out from the Hoboken tribe were back by supper. One of the Manhattan communes had been hit during the night, caught by surprise, and everyone busted except for one boy who had jumped naked from the fire escape to the next building and been taken in by a girl. Several carloads of kids from the farm had arrived in New York. Nobody who had been known to be hiding in any of the tunnels had turned up.

Corey was functioning on his will. His face frightened Shawn, but he kept moving and giving directions and asking questions and calming people. “We have to move into New York. Have to disperse the communes. They’re down on us, and it’s time to set things in motion so they can’t pick us all off and round us up. We have to send runners to every commune. Got to get the word out.

“In the meantime, we have to find out what’s happening to our captured brothers and sisters. What’s being done to them. We go to Manhattan in groups of two”

Ginny went to fetch the baby, but Corey stopped her. “This commune has voted to receive the baby Sarah Jean as their child.”

“But she’s the only child our tribe has left”

“We are all Indians. There’s work to be done” Corey’s hand tightened on her arm. She sat down. He went on, “Who knows when we’ll meet together again. Maybe on the streets. We knew they would come down on us. Now we’ll find out how well we used the time we had, how well we built ourselves a movement and a people.”

They all kissed and embraced each other. He had the feeling Corey still did not see him. He was acting, he was strong, but he was locked in himself. Then they got ready to leave by twos. Ruthie was persuaded to stay in Hoboken, but Ben insisted on his right to go. Shawn was quietly certain that Ruthie did not want to argue any longer, but that she would follow her brother by herself.

New John and Ben left first. Shawn stood to go. He looked at Ginny, but she was still sitting where she had been, and Corey was also looking at her. Corey gave a little jerk of his chin. “Come on,” and she followed him out without ever looking aside. Five minutes later, Shawn followed them with Big Ned. As they walked into the tubes, he felt as if he was really passing into the underground. The catastrophe numbed him. He was glad that there was much they had to do.

They held the council Thursday in a hall where rock concerts went on every weekend, disguising it as a concert. The rock group was sympathetic, and Billy’s boys tied up the manager backstage. An hour before announced concert time, the Indians started arriving, filled the auditorium and the box office was closed. It had been engineered in such a fashion because there had to be a general meeting, but the chances of all their best people getting busted in one big raid were grave. Shawn had done a lot of the footwork—after all, it was his show-biz world they were borrowing—and the Indians arrived with previously distributed tickets and were checked by face at the door.

People buzzed to each other, obviously uncomfortable with the format of everybody sitting in seats instead of the familiar circle, speakers addressing the group instead of each person speaking what he had to say in his turn. Billy had foreseen that and approved. No time for rigmarole and mystic formulas when they faced destruction. They had to sit still and listen to be moved into action. Tonight was to be the step beyond games. He needed the mass effects, the ambience of audience caught in large currents to pull them across.

Having kept the arrangements in tight hands, he had placed his warriors around the edges and across the sides of the stage for visual and psychological effect. They looked tough and disciplined. They were his pride and delight. From adolescent misfits, sour and lazy and rank with self-pity and spongy daydreams, stupefied and vain and whining and on the make, he had created real urban guerrillas. He had forged a responsible, trained corps. They were the fruit of months of hard work, so let them stand where everyone could see and admire and want to emulate. If he considered them an elite, it was with a consciousness of what material he had squeezed that cadre from. If they were an elite, an elite could be made out of any material with sufficient work, intelligence, direction, and pressure—pressure from the inside and the outside. It had been a matter of upping the ante for the prestige that all kids wanted from their peers. Now let his warriors, his best
troops, be prominently displayed around the hall as one of his best arguments in the fight that was coming here tonight.

The walls and the stage were heavily hung with posters and pictures of Third World revolutionaries. Beside the portraits of Che and Mao were innumerable Bolivian and Guatemalan and Algerian and Vietnamese and Angolan martyrs and fighters. That too was part of upping the ante. It was not merely a matter of needing alternative heroes. The past struggles in the United States could have filled the walls with dead radicals. It was not merely a matter of feeling solidarity with others who were fighting the same enemy in various parts of the empire.

It had to do with wanting to be somebody else. It had to do with the middle-class guilt that all these kids had instilled in them, a sense of powerlessness in themselves, futility, the subtle socialization through guilt and shame and the daily quiet gnawing fear of the loss of love through which they had all been persuaded they wanted to shit in the potty and keep their hands off their peckers and eat their food and not kick or punch each other. And go to school and sit in school and not wet their panties and keep quiet and keep still and be good and perform well. It was not enough not to fight. If you went inert, you got sent down to the lower tracks to be packed into hell and welfare. No, you had to perform. Neither an overachiever nor an underachiever be.

So they all wanted to be somebody else, someplace else. They hated where they came from too much to want to think about what a revolution by and for such people might involve. He was giving them images of manhood to enter that vacuum.

The meeting began with terse reports of what had happened—the two raids and a general dragnet on the streets. The cops had hit another commune two days before, but the commune had already dispersed and nobody had been taken. Marilyn, chosen by lot to head security for March, gave her report. Evidence suggested the Indians had been informed on by someone who had lived in the Hudson Street commune and spent time on the farm.

Two people fit that description: Ellie was a high school dropout who had joined the Indians the year before. She had been arrested in demonstrations at the schools between semesters, with the bunch of high school kids she was working with. Tim was an experienced warrior and bread distributor who had been trapped by narks on February 14 and was being held without bail and was expected to be court-martialed for desertion from the street militia in Cleveland. As far as they could find out, Ellie was in an institute for juvenile offenders upstate. Tim seemed likelier, as he could face a death sentence
for desertion, as well as life imprisonment under the federal legislation against psychedelic drugs. They had been unable to trace his whereabouts.

People were scared as they listened to the reports, he could feel that. Not scared for their necks, not scared for their politics, but little scared: scared for their comforts and their tribes and their friends and their daily pleasures and hassles. Scared of a change, that was what it came down to. He could thank the enemy for breaking up the communes, because from organizing tools they had become homes for wayward adolescents, and everybody would have been content to play ring around the posy for the next ten years. Now the people were shaken out of their comfy social burrows.

The meeting moved slowly, like a fat old dog looking for fleas. He forced his patience to stretch and stretch, letting the tensions speak themselves, waiting until the room was on the edge of impatiently demanding an answer, a plan. Then just as he was ready to move, just as he glanced over at Matty to give the sign, Corey rose out of the audience like a waif and jumped up on the stage. He took the microphone, going to sit on the apron with his legs dangling over.

“Sisters and brothers, this is the season of the steamroller, of the club and the net. But we are water, and we will flow away, and re-form ourselves together in our season.

“Brothers and sisters, we have taken ourselves, frantic freaked-out kids with the man’s programming in our heads, fear and poison in our bodies, and we have made a new people. Now the man is breaking the center. We must flow out. Those who are deserters have to go underground, and we must have solid ID for everyone in danger. But those of us who face only small detainment have to be strong enough to pass through organizing. It is time to go home for a while. It is time to go back where we came from, bringing the message, and spreading the tribes.

Today is March 18. The year’s big call up comes after July 4. We have almost four months to organize a massive refusal. We have four months to pull friends out of the system. In the summer we will come back together in a new wave, five times as strong. It is time to show the strength of water and flow away from the man’s steamroller. To stand is to be crushed, but to flow out is to gather new strength. We have to be ready for the most massive organizing and recruiting campaign we’ve ever tackled. What we have to do is break into small groups here in the auditorium, and each person should hassle out with his tribe what he should do: the danger he faces, his resources, his tasks. We must develop clear organizing strategies. We can help each other to choose not just the survival route, but the growth route,
in spite of the club, in spite of the raids, in spite of our sisters and brothers now in the man’s jails.”

As Billy strode forward to grab the mike, he was not really angry. He was exalted, he was more high and ready than angry, but anger was his manner. Corey could not avoid this confrontation. Let him try to turn this clash into cornmeal mush. The lines were drawn past his old ability to soften and confuse them. The lines were drawn before everyone.

“Warriors and tribesmen, we have just heard the council of defeat. The enemy is attacking us, so we should surrender our territory and scatter before the heat. Who here doesn’t dig that our only strength comes from being united? As individuals, they can pick us off. As tribes, we can fight back. We should go underground, says a former leader. But our friends went underground, into the tunnels, went into hiding instead of fighting, and where are they? The only good defense is offense. The only people who got off the trap of the farm were those who fought their way off. They’re here tonight. Where are the others?”

He had touched them on a nerve. He felt it. “The proposal of my opponent is basically that since the enemy is attacking our organization, we should disband it before he attacks more. Why should we quit? We lost members of two communes, sure, but two months ago we had that many less members. Why are we growing? Because we fight the man. Because we attack instead of letting ourselves be rounded up like sheep. Because we are militant and protect our people, and everyone knows it. It’s no time to abandon what we’ve stood for that brought people to us—that brought in every warrior in this room. The enemy won’t change his mind about squashing us if we’re stupid enough to do his job for him and disarm ourselves and scatter back to the homes and stinking neighborhoods where we could not survive before. Go back, pretend it never happened, maybe the man will forget. Maybe we should all turn ourselves in and enlist. No, warriors and tribesmen. We aren’t that weak. It’s time to strike back. It’s time to take the offensive. It’s time to attack. We’ll defend our territory. We’ll call out the high schools. We’ll have actions in the streets, and we’ll tie up this fucking city. The man won’t know which way to swing his club. The whole city will be cracking. We’ll make the Lower East Side so hot, the man won’t be able to patrol it. Well force him out and patrol our own turf. That’s how we’ll save ourselves as a tribe. Not as chickens running for shelter. As Indians fighting together for our communes and turf. Call out the high schools! Call out the tribes! Into the streets and onto the housetops. This is our city. The streets belong to the people. Let’s take them!”