by Marge Piercy
Nowadays he dressed like a slob. He had been into that hip dressing scene; that’s where the take from the grass had spent itself. But he had gone through a repulsion. He was done supporting teen industries. He saw that style was another way to hook him. All the energy that went into dressing cool and pursuing fads kept him in his place. His people had been tricked into selling land for beads and gewgaws. Now the teen industries were fattening off the fact that the Nineteenth Year of Service made parents all the more ready to fork over money to buy their kids records, clothes, a car and a phone of their own because, after all, it would end. Bad as it was, high school was obviously paradise, soon to be lost. The coming regimentation hung over them all. Afterward, nothing would carry over, nothing could remain the same. The teen culture was sealed and cute as baby clothes. By the time the twenty-year-olds got back, they were ready for job training and the speed-up. They were hot to buy I louses and settle down. They married in droves and began laying babies around. He felt he had nothing in common with the guys who came back to the neighborhood. Some growth mechanism had been shut off in them, permanently.
Not that he wouldn’t some day want children. Everything useful that he knew (the history that led to him, how to shoot, how to stay out of jail, how to handle somebody on a bad trip, how to talk to people to move them) he had learned on his own, and like a tribesman he would pass on what was truly worthy. To find the woman. He imagined her Oriental. Delicate flower body with the downcast mysterious eyes and the mystic sexual lore of the Orient and a rifle on her back. He would not have to decide. It would happen to him like a grenade exploding. Maybe love was all bullshit. Tough and silent as a shadow, she would follow him.
Linda was making faces. “Corey! Listen to me. You didn’t hear a thing I told you. Corey?”
He took the rifle back. “Time to clean up for chow!’ Sitting Bull swaggered from under the house and stood meowing by the door. Gray tabby-striped male with big balls and bigger scars. Chewed ear and a bald spot, fleas and a randy smell. “We are two of a kind, compañero” he said, and stooped to scratch the cat’s chin.
Let it be reported that I was the last man of my people to lay
down my gun.
But he laid it down. And they shot Sitting Bull down, the dirty Indian cops sent out to murder him. He was a chief and a medicine man. A great leader in a people rich in great leaders. They knew they could not bring him in alive, and so they determined to kill him where he stood among his people, disarmed and starving in the lousy reservation at Standing Rock.
He washed, glowering in the bathroom mirror. Black hair straight and coarse, long sideburns, high cheekbones that jutted out of swarthy skin. Sullen eyes. The half-breed villain about to pull a knife. So he gave the mirror his dazzling smile—big oversized white teeth gleaming, yeah, charm turned on at the flip of a switch. Now turn it off. His morose evil look. Tough now. He pulled his mouth tight, turning slightly sideways to sneer from narrowed eyes down that hooked Indian nose.
“Corey’s making faces at himself! Corey’s loving himself in the mirror!” Linda sang.
“Oh baby, I’m so good,
Oh baby, I’m so pretty.
If you get down on your knees
I will squeeze your little titty!”
He pinched her arm hard enough to hurt, feeling his meanness as she cried out in pain and surprise. Sometimes he felt crushed by them, his silly sister, his silly mother. He would leave, he had to breathe, and then where would they be? Then he hated them for their clinging weakness. He made ugly noises in his throat and pushed past Linda to the table. Sitting down, he reached over the table for the pan of short ribs, took a huge helping and began to shovel it in without waiting for them. Pig Corey. Yes, look. See what I am. Choke and let go.
After he picked up Ginny, they went to the drive-in and saw two bombs, a science fiction freak-out about giant computers that took over men, and the other a spy movie with a duel between astronauts outside spaceships. They cuddled during the pictures, and he felt Ginny up. She was warm and ready and kept sticking her tongue in his ear. It was four hours of eating caramels. His brain felt rotten. He parked with her and started to make out, but suddenly he felt blank and bored, and he stopped and took her home. She looked miserable, but she was too conned by the system and by him to challenge anything. She’d go inside and change her deodorant or her toothpaste.
He intended to do his homework. He spread out the plastic books on the kitchen table and tried to eat them like cardboard breakfast crunchies. He sat there grinding his brain against the books and getting angrier and angrier and more disgusted with himself. The radio was on and the real rock kept nudging at him to remember he was alive.
Oh baby, take my hand
‘cause the night is hard and long.
Your living hand to take my hand
‘cause it will be a long time
a long time till the dawn
and the dark, the dark
the dark is coming on.
Harsh electronic wail like the pattern of a nervous system flashed on a screen. Shawn’s human voice cutting through, sailing through golden and living.
Oh baby, take my body,
it’s too dark to see your face,
my living body baby in your own
‘cause we are sinking in the night.
This is our only time and place
‘cause the long night,
the long, long night is coming on!
Voice like a naked male swimmer cresting the wave of sound. Shawn’s voice always moved him, like a friend speaking, like a friend urging. To touch people directly fucking them all at once in their minds, instead of having to talk to them one at a time, one at a time, trying to make them see what was happening. To move people naturally that way. Everybody knew what that song was about except adults, except the enemy. They’d ban it. Soon the recruitment assemblies would start, pigeons from the different branches of servitude making their pitches. Because they wanted you to knock yourself out at those exams. They wanted you to try real hard to make street militia and be crushed if you ended up in a shovel detail. Imitation choices. Brand A or Brand B death.
Even Shawn the golden was caught, pinned fast. But he had tried to escape and now he was in stockade. You couldn’t just quit the whole thing; you couldn’t even get a job. What Shawn did and what Corey was doing were about the only ways adolescents could make it on their own: rock singer, dealer. But somehow They used you anyhow. He snapped off the radio, depriving himself of its useless pretense of solidarity. At least Shawn had tried to escape. Here he was grinding his brain against the programmed learning texts, making a last-ditch effort to make it in their system, to keep from being shipped off to be killed overseas. A lemming like all the rest. All his rejection had caused him to do was give up smoking: by that standard, the Surgeon General’s office was radical. He reached no one, he moved no one. All his relationships were lies. He had settled for a sullen inner alienation and the ethics of a small businessman, peddling grass for a fair price. He would take the exams, he would bow his head, he would march under. Follow his father into the great incinerator.
He went into his room and slammed the door. On the walls, quotes he had scrawled with marking pen. “Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”—Chivington’s instructions for genocide against the Cheyenne. “I am determined not to live until I have no country.”—King Philip of the Wampanoags, who saw his people lose their land to the Puritans his father had been naïve enough to help. “My idea is that, unless removed by the government, the Utes must necessarily be exterminated… The State would be willing to settle the Indian problem at its own expense. The advantages that would accrue from the throwing open of twelve million acres of land to miners and settlers would more than compensate all the expenses incurred.”—Governor Frederick Pitkin of Colorado.
The ancestors he loved best among the Sioux—no, the Dakota, don’t use white names—were those like Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, w
ho had excelled both as warriors and as holy men—men in touch with what is. That he had some sense of what that meant, he owed to acid, but now he must do without chemical aid. On his wall, too, was a photograph he had ripped out of a library book—because it belonged to him. It showed frozen half-naked bodies stuck in grotesque attitudes of flight and terror and defiance, mostly women and children, the women with their thin shawls pulled up to try to protect babies, some of the bayoneted children scarcely old enough to run before the soldiers of the Army of the United States. It was a photograph taken after the last “battle” of the Sioux Wars, the Battle of Wounded Knee.
All the Dakota who had been forced onto reservations and promised so many things were starving that winter when they began the ghost dancing, the dancing they believed would bring back the world they could still remember, the world in which things had been happy and good and right, when there had been buffalo for all to eat. In the dance they would remember small things, even the games they had played to pass the time, and the intensity of joy and pain would cause them to faint. They danced to bring back their dead, to bring back the buffalo, to bring back the world that was good and made sense. It all ended in the snow at Wounded Knee. They were his people. So he had stolen the photograph to study and learn.
When he went to bed, Linda and his mother had been asleep for hours. Small noises nagged him, but finally he slept. Then it came down on him in deep sleep. The eagle stooped on him, dug its beak into his chest and gouged for his heart. Every nerve jumped.
He rolled from the bed, hit the floor. Rose, stumbled into the wall scrabbling for the light switch, pushed into the kitchen, turning on every light. How the air leaned, solid. Everything was edged with black, the blackness pressing on the film of light that pressed hard on his eyes. He swept a glass from the table and heard it break. He fell groaning and clawed at himself. He would die now, now.
Ran the cold water at the sink over his hands, splashed his face, drank. Then the cold water slid down into his stomach. His heart thumped. His blood seethed in each and every vein. Fear had him by the nape, shaking him so he would break open.
He came storming into her room. “Mama, mama, wake up! Wake up, goddamn you, wake up!”
The next day he was burnt out. After an attack, he could not sleep. The fear kept him from letting go of consciousness, slipping down. He stayed in bed until first Linda and then his mother left. Then he squatted among the rumpled sheets in his underwear searching for pimples to squeeze until the blood came. He warmed up the breakfast coffee and drank it, but he ate nothing.
When he heard their noises, he locked his door and would not answer to their knocking and pleading. Finally in mid-evening, he let his mother come in with a plate of food. When she had gone, he locked the door again. Then he crossed to the window, raised the screen, and emptied the plate on the hard earth outside.
He considered it possible that he was crazy. They would judge him crazy, sick. But he had learned from his Indianness that he need not necessarily remain closed in his shame. To be different was to have a different path. Each man excelled his earlier stages, proceeding on his own way. Out of the raw agony of the attack he might penetrate to something he must know.
He disgusted himself like something gone rotten. He smelled like stinking meat. He could do nothing but wait and let the bad thoughts work in him. As long as they swarmed, nothing else could come. Fantasies. Women crawled through his bed like pink maggots. Tableaux of torture and humiliation. Slowly he slit open the cavities of his enemies. He lay in mounds of severed breasts. He stole Ginny’s cunt and had it installed: he was self-sufficient. He lay on a pile of breasts fucking himself while his enemies were burnt in segments at his feet.
He felt heavy as stone. Thick oozes poured from him. All the people fooled by his grin and easy charm, they should come and behold him on his dung heap. He would put their heads up on posts on his palisade. Ginny hung on the wall weeping for her stolen cunt, Ginny whom he could not love. He did not know why he could not love her. Somehow he did not doubt that she loved him, any more than he doubted the love of his mother. He thought his inability (or unwillingness) to love her had to do with the fact that he did not love himself and she did not love herself.
His mother brought him food like a jailer—food that he dumped out the window so that at night dogs fought for it out there and rats scuffled— but he was the jailer. His mother and sister lurked and scuttled and talked in whispers, trapped by him.
Fraud, he accused himself, pimpled fraud. You’re no more an Indian than your little sister. What do you know about it all? It’s something you read in a book. You might as well decide to be an Eskimo or a Zulu. He remembered the time he had driven into Chicago to the address he had secretly copied of a sort of social hangout of lots of Indians. He had parked nearby and walked by, walked by, and finally he had run away. He had felt ashamed. They would look at him and they would see he was as much white as Indian, and that he had never known anything of where he came from. His father had been born on a reservation in South Dakota, but his mother had never been on a reservation in her life, and neither had he. The Choctaws had been terminated by the government. He had never even met his old man’s family. He had made it all up. He was nobody. He was a lie.
Diarrhea left him empty, light as a dried leaf. Finally his head cleared and settled. Now he was only waiting. Now he sat cross-legged, and all was dry and clear and chilly within and without him in the late-April twilight. The frogs sang under him, under the house set up on cement blocks, like the high floor of a ritual hut where he squatted waiting.
In the dark, he smelled the buffalo. There it was—gamy, harsh, warm, rank. Then it spoke to him with its huge head hung over the bed, bearded, mammoth, and streaked with gray. The grandfather buffalo took him up on its broad humpy back, and he clung to the greasy wool and was carried jogging through the long grassy night of the prairies, westward from the mills, westward from the expressways and the clutter of little houses, westward from the vast blurred skyshine of Chicago.
“I was the bread of your people. I was the house and the shirt and the blanket and the bow and the belly. I was the tool and the stuff that is worked, I was the hand of the maker. Your people lived on me as on a mountain. The grass waved and I ate it as far as the clean fresh wind blew. “Then I was burnt and left to rot” And the grandfather buffalo set him down on a high hill. And as far as he could see was the long grass of the prairie, dense with millions and millions of buffalo and pronghorn antelope and elk and herds of wild horses running before the wind, and the winds were heavy with the fluttering of prairie chickens and wild turkey. Then as he watched, the white men came and began killing, quickly, so that money might be made and the Indians starved to submission and death. They brought better and better guns till they could kill as fast as they could shoot. “And the wind turned bad and blew the soil away. I was killed and left to rot. I became garbage. It had been beautiful, the world made out of my flesh and my bone, my hide and my sinews. The people danced each season on my back. If there was plenty, all shared it. If there was nothing, they moved on or they starved. But what each man and each woman did was real and good and belonged to each like his arm. Every man had his song and his name, which made him strong and gave him dignity. The word was real, and every man had his own poem to connect him to himself.
“Now what is there? My people starve. They have no good work to do. They die of the white man’s diseases in bits of desert allowed them. And what have they done with the good land? Are those who seized the land happy?
“Now there are people in boxes, their heads full of noise, their lungs full of smoke and poison, their bellies full, but their flesh sour. They do what they are told. They call the waste of their hours work, yet they are not making things others need—healthy food, strong clothing, pleasant shelter. At the top are a handful of men who buy and sell the mountains and the rivers, who pollute and explode and set aside as preserves all the lands of the earth. The people
are barnyard animals who give milk and butter to their owners and decide nothing, not even the hours of their slaughter. They are chained together and crippled by shame. They cannot dance. Only the young are alive a little while to dance and feel and touch each other.”
He was standing on a hill to watch. Young boys and girls were throwing their clothes into piles and running away to dance together around bonfires. The music was drums only. Naked people dancing together who had left all things behind and wanted only each other. So they became more real to each other than gadgets and fantasies. They left everything and came out of the rotting cities to dance together.
Then he was lying on his back in bed and the buffalo stood over him with hooves on his chest, a mountain crushing him.
“You see and do nothing. In seeing we begin, but you have not begun. Lead the tribes to water. Soon there will be no more people. Your generation is the last. You must lead the tribes to water. You must save your generation.”
Corey sat on his bed, alone in the first false gray before dawn. Tears crept down his face. To begin. To commit himself to his sense of the good that could flower out of his muck. Somehow he must manage to trust himself if only as crude instrument. The world that wanted to be born was pressing on him.
It seemed clear enough in a general way what was to be done. It did not matter that he was not an Indian among Indians. The children of the people who had plundered the land were being themselves consumed by the greed of the plunderers. They could turn away from the ways of metal to the ways of the flesh. They could learn the good ways of being in harmony, of cooperating, of sane bravery in defense of each other, to be one with their bodies and their tribe and each other and the land.
The children would turn away from being white. For the whites were crazy. The whites were colonizers and dominators and enslavers. The whites always defined themselves out of nature, on top of the landscape. They came to rob and steal and develop and conquer. Already the children wore beads and headbands and smoked ritually. They were awaiting the coming of the real tribes.