Dance the Eagle to Sleep

by Marge Piercy

  His parents thought he was in the clutches of an aging adventuress. They said the affair was squalid and that he had lost his mind. “I want to help her and the kid,” he said. He talked about the street where old people sat looking at blank walls like television, and the buses where people were into each other without joyful groping—just meat on the hoof. He talked, and they shut off. Bang. Slam. They refused to empathize.

  Jesus, it was simple enough. He wasn’t even in love with her. He just liked her. He liked the kid. He liked her climbing on his prick and burbling her funny noises and milking the come out of him. He liked her praising of him. Why not? He turned her and the kid on, and they would go along with Stevie’s always damp hand gripping his, and his skinny legs pumping away and his face under the shock of slicked-back brown hair turned up like a sunflower in a silly grin. It was another world. It was through the looking glass into Everybody. But just from the old personal-comfort point of view, he wanted to drive over to see her and park on a street where kids wouldn’t cut designs on his car, and listen to music so he could feel it in his head and body, and climb into a real bed in a room with a door that shut. If he was an average schmuck taking care of his woman, nobody would make a fuss.

  But they blew up a giant shitstorm, and then Denise was not in the office. They got her fired, man, like that. And she disappeared. Gone, his weeping plush goose and the kid, gone. Well, if they could pull a disappearing act and disappear his woman, he could put on a little magic show, too. He felt stripped and sore, sore in his body and mind, sore through. He went with what was on his back and in his pocket. Took the bus to New York—he was practically acclimated to buses—and headed for the Lower East Side. AWOL. Eat shit. There were always kids down there hiding out. Runaways and AWOLs and kids dodging the eighteen months of slavery. He was on the street for a day and a night, and then he landed in a crash pad. Four rooms, railroad flat, with ten kids bedded down wherever they could.

  There was a redheaded kid with a sleeping bag—sixteen? seventeen? She said eighteen. He didn’t believe it. Didn’t care. “Shawn?” she said. “I’m Joanna.” She had a funny voice, metal that caught in her throat. Lots of kinky red hair, mounds of it falling on her back and shoulders. A skinny kid wearing a striped tank top with no bra and dirty denim bellbottoms and sandals on dirty scarred feet. “You want to ball? Take off your clothes and let’s get in the bag.”

  Little feather points stuck through the cloth. It was hot and stuffy, and they sweated like pigs. She was bony after Denise, sharp hipbones that poked him, low breasts that flattened against his chest. She bit her lip and held him firmly by the buttocks with her nails digging in. She frowned with concentration and worked, worked, worked him into her tight cunt. Came with a muffled sigh and a grimace. Let him finish while staring at the ceiling and thinking about something else.

  “I boosted some meat this afternoon, but I’m hungry again. The stew’s all gone. You got any cash at all?”

  They struggled out of the sleeping bag, and she dressed without wiping herself. Rank salty smell. A fat boy was rolling joints, and they smoked for a while, and then she fell asleep on top of the sleeping bag, kitten curled with her mouth slightly open. He nudged her over, spread out the unzipped bag, and lay beside her back to back, bone to bone. Spines in hard tangent. She mumbled in sleep. He fell under and drowned into nightmares of flight and confrontation.

  The third night, the pigs arrived. Lined the lads up against the wall and came down the line. They used their night sticks in the small of the back, slammed heads against the bared bricks, taking identification and dragging the kids out one by one knocking on the steps. When they got to the redhead, she had no ID on her.

  “How old are you, kid?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “In another five years. You might as well finger the guys who’ve been into you right now. Be sorry if you wait till the matron turns you inside out”

  “Get your motherfucking hands off! I’m eighteen and it’s my business.”

  “Some business,” the pig said genially, and pulling her back by the hair they worked her over, both of them punching her breasts and belly and back till she went down vomiting. The bigger one kicked her, and she sat forward bleeding from the mouth. Then yanking her by the hair to her feet, they carried her out cursing and wriggling and bleeding and still drooling vomit.

  When they came to him in the line, one rabbit-punched him in the kidneys while the other turned him around by his hair. Then one of them said, “Hey, don’t this look like our sweet baby?”

  They did not work him over. One seized him by the legs and the other by the shoulders, and they carried him out, only striking his spine against the steps from time to time. They were throwing the other kids in the wagon, making a bang as the bodies struck metal or a thud when they landed on each other. But they took him off in a car.

  He had his court-martial and got what was considered a light sentence to brig. There they beat the shit out of him, but did not break him. They did what the Army was supposed to. They made him a man—one man: Shawn the Prophet, who saw light rising out of hell as he lay with the guard’s foot on his neck in his first shit-splattered latrine.

  Corey Receives the Buffalo

  The attack was a thing Corey associated with early childhood, partly because he could not remember when he had been without the fear of it, and partly because that fear was so total it made him a baby again. It came out of exhausted sleep or near-sleep. He would wake up feeling he could not breathe. He was suffocating. His chest was in a vise, his heart beat hugely and shook his bones. He knew he was dying. But he could not lie still, no. He had to keep moving, to thrash and roll on the floor and run from room to room. He would pinch himself and bang his head on the wall. Inside his skull was a sense of mounting pressure. Everything rubbed on his nerves. His hearing grew so sharp he could detect sounds in the next house, he could hear all the fluids of his body sloshing like an old-fashioned washing machine.

  Gradually the thing would recede. For hours, his chest would feel tight and sore. He could be sucked back under. He could not stand to be alone. Then that blind dependency made him despise himself. It was an eagle that stooped on him as he slept and tore into him, that carried him bleeding high up so he could not breathe, and dashed him to the ground.

  As well to think of the attack as a bird as to think of it as a disease. The few times he had tried to describe it to some doctor in school, once in a clinic—they tested his heart perfunctorily and told him to stop worrying about nightmares. They asked for a history of epilepsy in his family. They checked his reflexes. In high school the doctor asked what drugs Corey used. Ho, ho. “Aspirin.” Corey made his face blank and innocent. “Once I had penicillin” To relax with any stiff in the whole bureaucracy was to lay traps for himself. They were there to stand on his head.

  Once he had had an experience on acid that was similar but not bad because spaced out, without the pain. Since his vision, he had not dropped acid, just as he had not smoked cigarettes. Gone from two packs a day to nothing, watching his nerves writhe like a tortured cat.

  “The white man’s gifts to the Indian were smallpox and cholera and rum.” He said that in a report in American History class. He stood hand on hip, looking evil: the face that scared uptight people. His darkness against them. “The Indian’s gift to the white man was lung cancer” The kids giggled knowingly: he was putting down tobacco because he dealt grass. He did it for the money and the style and to buck the system. He dealt the best he could get, which was saying little. Sometimes he could have sprinkled it on pizza and nobody could have told the difference, and sometimes the cat would go crazy and try to claw into the bag, and then he’d know what they had cut it with that time. Like everybody else he turned on, but he was not a head. Not any more. Islands sealed in by fog.

  He was tired of dealing. Tired of the tension. Knowing that any time they chose, they could bust into his locker and paw through whatever he had there, notes from Gin
ny, secret things he wrote to himself. They had done that once but missed his stash. Ah, he was tired. Dealer: hero and parasite. Something in the scene rubbed on old sores. “Kid, how come you’re so dark? You don’t look like a nigger in the face. Did you know your pa, kid?” One of their neighbors in Franklin’s Ditch. They didn’t talk to him that way any more. He hadn’t had to cut anybody in a while. Proving himself over and over on a score that never balanced, never would. Fighting on all fronts, he courted complete collapse and surrender. He seldom risked open bravado in class any more. The frustrated, embittered lumps who taught at Franklin High were good at one thing: hating.

  In the tenth grade they had taught him a valuable lesson: there was no right or wrong there, only the powerful and the powerless. He had got into a fight with Old Man Prit-Shit when Corey said in American History Iz (they had him tracked into the boob class) that the whites had practiced bacteriological warfare against the Indians way before the Revolutionary War, intentionally spreading smallpox among the Delawares with infected blankets and handkerchiefs. Old Man Pritchett had contradicted him, finally thrown him out of class. He had come back with a library book to prove it, and been suspended from school for a week.

  Yeah, he owed a big debt of gratitude to Old Man Shit with his paunch and his prejudices and his mean, safe digs to goad the boys he hated most to that spasm of anger when he could dump them out of school for good. He owed him a big debt. Old Man Shit assigned the class a book report. They were supposed to go to the public library and get a book and read it. Of course it was a safe bet that most of the kids would never do it. The library was in Valley Acres, and most of the kids in z track came from Franklin’s Ditch, among the old canals and marsh against the steel mills. But he could get a lot of mileage out of role-playing in places where he didn’t belong. Then the thing happened that wasn’t supposed to: he found out there were books in the library about how things had been, and he got mad enough to read them. He could read well enough when there was a reason for it. And he read himself right out of the bag they’d shut him up in. It all started with the first lie: Columbus discovered America. The white man had stolen the land and attempted to wipe out his people and lied to him to make him ashamed.

  The school was a prison scene anyhow. Indians loved their kids, but the white man feared and hated his children. You couldn’t even take a crap without a teacher standing there hurrying you. There weren’t even doors on the john cubicles for fear the kids would smoke or shoot up: all sins were equal. You had to get a pass and carry it to go anywhere. He had a collection of forged passes and passes he had conned teachers into signing, on which the date was written in pencil or the old time could be torn off and a new one added. But beating the system was only grooving on his own slavery.

  When he got out of school, Ginny was hanging around his rusty old Ford in the parking lot and she begged a ride home. She lived in the Ditch too, upstairs in a two-family frame house the color of smoke from the mills. Finally when he was dropping her off, she couldn’t stand it and she had to ask him if she was going to see him that evening.

  He sat there at the wheel pretending to think it over. She was easy to tease and torture. Ginny was okay. She had big boobs and she put out. She wasn’t really dumb, but she’d do anything he told her to, because she wanted so much to please. She had an old man who was always knocking her around and five brothers and a couple of babies to take care of. Her mother didn’t do anything but lay babies around the house. Her mother was after her to quit school and get a job, but she hadn’t done it yet, because she wanted to hang around him. She was a pretty girl who acted like she didn’t know she was pretty, with her round wistful face with the pointy chin and her sandy eyes lighter than her hair. He had picked her out in homeroom the first day in September, but he’d never let her know that. Publicly and privately she was his property.

  He drawled at last, “Yeah, I guess so. Why not?”

  When he came home, Linda was twitching up and down in front of the house in a pair of their mother’s high heels and an old lace tablecloth. “Well, here comes the bride.”

  “Shut your mouth. They almost fit, see?”

  Almost, by two inches. Linda was ten and lighter than both his mother and he were, with light brown hair like Ginny’s. Her father was a white man, while he had some of his Indian from both sides, Oglala Sioux from his father and Choctaw from his mother. He respected the combination. Sure he had learned his heritage from shitty cowboy movies, in which the Indians died grunting in the dust, and then out of the library. He had not thought of himself as an Indian until high school. He had learned his identity out of books, but he had made it real the old way, by fasting and vision. He had made himself real.

  His mother was in the kitchen. He looked in the pot. “Fish and dog stew.” His literary joke.

  “Cut that out, sugar. That’s short ribs and onions. Supper’ll be on the table in twenty minutes.”

  She always cut times in two. He took his semiautomatic .22 out back by the stinking canal to shoot cans. “Honey, the neighbors are going to report you” she called softly after.

  “They’re chickenshit, honey. Get on with my supper.”

  She shook her head over the stove, and Linda came out behind him. His mother didn’t bug him to watch out for Linda, because lie took care of the kid as much as she did. Mother spoiled him as well as she could, with leaning on him the rest of the time, but she hadn’t needed Linda, hadn’t wanted her. Damn Polack took off as soon as her belly started to show. Not that Corey had minded seeing him off. Cheap at half the price. Used to get drunk and tear up his ass like Ginny’s old man. Linda was an okay kid, although sometimes he wished she had a little more sense. Took after his mother. Too easy for people to push around, including him.

  “Sure, go on, make a couple more babies,” he would tease his mother. “We got room.”

  She would get angry and carry on, but she knew he halfway meant it. It was a drab, thin life for her. He wasn’t around much, Linda was no company in the evenings, and all day she stood on her feet behind the counter in the doughnut shop in the plaza. Mostly fat kids and housewives eating themselves sticky and not bothering to leave a tip. Though he was only five seven, he’d always felt tall, because she was just five one. He hated to see her running back and forth behind the counter.

  His father didn’t sound like he’d scored high on brains either. Next year Corey would catch up with his father and pass him, forever. His teenage old man off to the Indo-China War and splattered all over the jungle by a shell his first week in combat. Here comes daddy home in a box. A couple of photographs of his parents crammed into a booth giggling at Riverside Amusement Park. A bundle of illiterate letters full of complaints about the weather and the food. A green check suit he had once put on for a joke, and his mother wept, wept. Then he realized with a shock his father had been real, a man, a lover.

  He drilled the tin cans that sat in a row on the broken dock. No reason to fix it. He had had a good childhood along the canal with the other kids, with a leaky rowboat to explore their junk-pile wilderness among the slag-heap outposts of the steel mills. In his games the Indians were heroes and the Indians won. They played Tarzan too. He could swing pretty well by the arms and beat on his chest. Cottonwoods grubby by the canal, scrawny sumac trees. Grassy hummocks and islands and weedy hidden places.

  “Die, Yankee dog!” He shot the last can and emptied the spent clip.

  “Now can I look through it?”

  He gave it to Linda clean and steadied it against her small shoulder. “Die, Yankee dog!”

  She made pow noises.

  Just stride into school cool and easy some morning with the rifle on his back like a guerrilla fighter. Better a machine gun. Line up the faculty. Torture the principal to learn where they kept the anxiety gases and the chemicals they put in the soup to make the kids stupid and passive. He used to try in school. He used to be all ready to prance and dance and memorize the lies in the textbooks so teach wo
uld pat him on the head and say Good Doggie. Though down in z track, they didn’t want you sounding off much. He remembered forcing himself to sit through a test without writing anything. Because then he knew he had outlasted them. They could no longer play on his wants and fears. They could no longer cut him off from Iris brothers and make him try to outdo them.

  The teachers mocked him in class and threatened him with expulsion and the cops and reform school and jail. But he had learned to cool it. The worst they had been able to do was suspend him now and then. He had learned not to be tempted into defiance they could crush. The only thing they had on him was that he did want to stay in school for the time being, because his people were all gathered there for him.

  The pressure was constant. Never could you think you were a man, never could you forget you were under their laws. Sit here. Shut up. Platoon B, line up waiting for Platoon A to gobble their slops in the lunchroom. No talking. Keep your hands to yourself. Don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself, ever. Don’t laugh out loud over your peanut butter sandwich; don’t get into excited conversation about anything you care for.

  So you’re trying to find out who you are, huh, kid? and you like the way you look. Well, get a haircut. Take off those obscene pants. Go home, girl, and wash that stuff out of your hair. Because we know you’re dressing for each other, and we won’t let you. We’re going to make you look ugly, if we choose. You got no rights, kid, and don’t forget it. You’re our property to shape or break. We can humiliate you as much as we want to, and we want to a lot. What else do we get out of life?

  He had been enormously excited when he learned that even the long hair bit was anticipated by his people. Earlier in the century, Washington had tried to shear them too, sending orders that all male Indians must cut their hair. Indians who refused were handcuffed, chained, and shorn. It was always symbolic castration.