by Marge Piercy
Joanna was standing in front of him. Her hands dug into the mass of her tangled hair. It was not red yet. “It has to be done soon. It will upset people to know we’re here.”
“By all means, let’s everybody pretend nothing is happening” Corey heard himself and felt shame, but he could not stop. Bitterness rode him. He was rubbing himself into it, and he could not stop.
She looked at him, stepped close, her eyes narrow and hard. “Do you want me to do it? Is that it?”
“Of course not” But he was fascinated. A pit. He did not know if he were more fascinated by the idea because that proved she would kill the boy for him, or because then he would not have to. It made him dizzy.
“I don’t believe you” After a minute she went and picked up the gun. She held it gingerly but did not offer it to him.
“God damn it, what is going on?” Shawn came over.
“Corey can’t do it”
He did not move. He did not know if it were true or not. He had the feeling he could, if he chose, rise and do it and be done. Still he did not. He was waiting for something else.
“Oh shit” Shawn said softly.
They stood there. The gray wind very slightly moved Joanna’s hair. Shawn took the gun from her. He shook Corey by the shoulder roughly. “Come on, we have to carry him out.”
“Untie his legs. He’ll walk.”
“I’m not going to shoot a man running from me. Why should he walk out? Come on.”
Shawn pulled him to his feet.
Shawn took Chuck’s shoulders and he took Chuck’s legs. Chuck stared at him over the gag and mumbled something. They sat him up against a tree and Corey took the gag from his mouth. Wet with spittle.
Chuck made a sour face and felt his lips with his tongue. “Are you going to shoot me?”
He was looking at Corey, but Shawn answered. “Yes” He got the rifle and fumbled with it, finding the safety catch. “Is it loaded?”
Corey nodded. He wanted to turn away but could not.
“Why are you doing it? He can’t. Corey! Let me go, Corey. I knew you couldn’t do it to me. You don’t have to tell anyone. I’ll go away, you can trust me, you know that. Corey!”
Shawn stood about ten feet from him and raised the rifle, squinting, grimacing. Still he missed the first shot. Chuck screamed and tried to roll away. Shawn stepped close and shot into him, shot into his neck and head. The shots came quickly and horribly loud. He shot until the rifle clicked empty. Then he threw it down.
Joanna took two steps forward, staring. The blood ran out of Chuck in a pool that looked black on the gray leaves. Then she turned away and vomited. Corey felt his gorge rise and fall back. He took a deep breath. Still the blood ran out of the boy. He saw Sandy again. Killed by a shotgun blast. Mechanically and remotely, he made his body work. He got to his feet and walked over to Chuck and examined him carefully. “He’s still bleeding.”
“I guess he will for a while,” Shawn said. “Come on, we have to carry him to the hole. I wish we hadn’t made it so far away.”
When they lifted him, blood ran in torrents from his mouth and Corey almost dropped him. They carried him between them. Joanna stayed in the clearing. Then she called, “Corey! Corey! Wait!” And came thrashing after them.
They put him down in the hole. His legs were crumpled and Corey knelt and straightened them. The legs were still warm and he was not sure Chuck really was dead. Then he looked at the head and away. He took the shovel and threw dirt down on him. Dirt hit the face. Dirt fell on the open eyes. The open mouth. He bent and shoveled, bent and shoveled, until there was no more hole but a small mound. Then they scattered leaves on top. It still looked like a grave.
“You’re both bloody,” Joanna said. She looked down at herself, turning round and round. “Is there blood on me?”
“Why would there be?” Shawn asked. He turned and led the way to the spring. Shawn knelt and washed himself in the cold water, and Corey did the same. Cold fresh water tightening his skin, Corey felt that they had come through, but that he was the only one who saw that. Shawn took off his splattered shirt and rolled it into a ball. Then he shoved it under a rock. He went shivering back to the cabin and took the blanket off the bed, and after they had dried themselves, he wrapped himself in the blanket.
Outside, he picked up the rifle and handed it to Corey. “It’s yours, isn’t it?”
“Do you want it?”
“Oh, sure. Listen, you know we can’t tell them who did it.”
“Why not? You did it,” Joanna said sourly. “He couldn’t.”
“You know why not. It’s done and it doesn’t matter which of us. But it will matter if they find out it was me”
Corey shook himself. “We acted together. No one will ask. Let them think the easiest thing.”
They went down the hill silently, Corey first, Joanna second, Shawn last. Corey carried the rifle, still warm in his hand. Joanna had the flashlight. When they got to the farmhouse, he put the gun back in the storage room. Nobody was up.
“Good night” he said to Shawn and touched his arm. When he and Joanna had gone to bed, they did not make love. Neither of them moved to do it.
He forgave himself for not shooting Chuck, but he saw that Joanna did not. She could not see yet why that had worked. Because he felt enough steel in himself that he could say in the privacy of his head that if neither of them had stepped forward, he would have done it—and that the proof of the fact that his weakness had function was that Shawn had stepped forward.
Out of the dark, Joanna said, “You know, I made it with Shawn once.”
Why did he feel so cold? “Yeah? At the dance? I don’t remember.”
“Of course not. Last year, before I met you”
“How come you never mentioned it?”
“Well, I never gave you a list, did I? You never told me everybody you went to bed with. You never even told me Ginny used to be your regular girl”
“That was in high school, before the Indians. Before anything. And it didn’t mean shit.”
“Well, this was a long time ago, and it didn’t mean anything either. I didn’t even know who he was.”
“So why do you tell me now, Joanna?”
“I thought of it. That’s all.”
“Have you ever gone with him again?”
“Here? Don’t be silly.”
“Why should I care? We don’t own each other.”
“Of course we don’t” Joanna said, and rolled over away from him.
“Do you want to?”
“Want to what?”
“Go to bed with him again.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I never thought of it”
“No? Shawn goes to bed with everybody.”
“But I don’t. Not any more. Do I?”
She was punishing him, but he could not accuse her, because he could not say how. He could not explain to her that he had not failed that night. Her sharp behind stuck into his stomach. She went to sleep.
Joanna in Harness
The rendezvous was in Bear Mountain State Park. They pulled the car off the road, camouflaged it and hauled in the provisions on the hiking trail to the site agreed on in the negotiations: Corey, Shawn, Carole—who was on the farm recuperating from a bad beating—Big Ned and Joanna. Nobody was at the meeting place. They built a fire and sat around waiting, and after a while Ned and Shawn began to speculate that they had stopped hiking too soon. Then they saw they were surrounded.
Joanna went stiff with fear when she saw the kids. Immediately she was ashamed. Unconscious prejudice. After all, people were scared of the Indians often enough. But the skinny, skinny bodies standing just into the firelight holding clubs and chunks of rusted metal and knives and two with guns, froze her. Black impassive faces and pitiful, emaciated bodies dressed in rags and a few too-big coats.
The tall boy carrying one of the rifles, Marcus, came forward and examined the packages of food, holding the gun on them all the while. “Okay,” he said.
“Search them.”
They were lined up and searched and their weapons taken. Ned started to object, but Corey signaled for him to submit. Then with Marcus still holding the gun on them, the black kids fell on the food. Wrappings went flying. With a knife, a boy who looked twelve called Tiger divvied up the salamis into sections, and then they were gone, skins and all, gone. Like tossing bread into a school of hungry fish. A swirl of dark bodies and rags, and then nothing. Her mouth twitched, but she was too scared to smile.
“Bring me food” Marcus commanded, and a couple of the kids scurried up with chunks of bread and cheese and raw hotdog. Within minutes everything was eaten and the boys sat on their heels staring at them across the flames. “Is that all you brought?”
“That’s all we brought this time. There were only us to carry it, after all” Corey said with a big easy grin. “How to get you more food is one of the things we have to talk about. But we did bring blankets in the green pack.”
So they all sat around the fire, and the parley commenced. It was tense enough. Some of the older boys kept eying Joanna and Carole, and their chief asked outright if the women had been brought for their use.
Corey explained that they were warriors, too, and part of the negotiating delegation. Some of the kids sniggered, but the moment passed. Normally Joanna would have pushed into that breach, because she was increasingly aware of how disregarded women were in parleys and councils. But tonight she wanted to stay invisible. Corey could give an imitation of ease, and tonight that was fine with her. Even Shawn looked cowed.
The kids had been in a summer camp for underprivileged children when Harlem was shelled, and they had fled the camp into the Catskills. They had had a hard time. They had known nothing of how to live outdoors, and they had had to learn. Food was their biggest problem, and medicines second. They had learned to hunt and trap: they ate squirrels and birds and dogs and occasionally a deer. They raided campsites and cars. They lived assuming they would be shot on sight. They became fast-moving nomads. They counted five days’ journey north, south, and west as their territory. Winter was the worst time. Though they tried to give the impression they were so tough nothing could scare them, five boys had died the winter before, and clearly more would die this winter if they faced the same prospects of overexposure and starvation. They had tried to make clothing out of hides of animals they caught, but they did not know how to preserve the hides. The skins rotted and stank and fell apart, or they dried brittle and tore. Corey told them to try soaking the hides in piss. (Later she would ask him why he had said that, and he would say he did not know. He would change the subject.)
Corey was making his pitch for why the boys should think of themselves as Indians, but they were not interested in hearing him out. “Solidarity, shit. What we want is food” their chief Marcus said.
“But the only reason for the food is because we’re allies. We don’t give charity.”
“You give whatever we tell you to, Whitey, if you want to get out of here. You’re hostages, dig?”
“We don’t give hostages. We’re all expendable. You think the tribe would have sent us otherwise?” Corey smiled and smiled. “You can kill us. Then try and find any other natural allies. We’re trying to help, because we want you occupying this territory. But we don’t want you starving to death doing it. We don’t want you occupying territory defensively. You should be in a position to conduct guerrilla warfare—to raid and retreat and raid again, at your choice. Your band should be growing, not dying off. You should be recruiting kids to join you. Otherwise you’re accomplishing nothing here.” He was on his feet now and they were watching him and listening. Mesmerization. She had thought they might prove immune. Just once, she thought secretly, she’d like to see him work on a person or a group and the object of his manipulation just sit there and yawn, with the words sliding off like drops of oil.
“This should be territory you occupy not to hide on, but to control. Both a field mouse and a mountain lion occupy territory. The one does it defensively, and the other offensively. Dig?”
Oh, they were all going to be mountain lions tonight. She was scared and bored, too. All the fencing. Quibbling over semantics. The kids wanted food, and Corey wanted to arrange for them to have it. But he wanted some sort of agreement with them that they were henceforward Indians; he wanted lines of communication and alliance set up. She thought half of it was that he wanted to be able to say to people that there were black Indians. Words. Shawn was as bored as she was. “Oh, to die and be eaten in the Catskills, under a harvest moon” he murmured in her ear. “Poor kids, all they have is hating whites, and Corey’s damned if he’s not going to steal that away, too. Does it ever come over you in the middle of one of these half-assed trips, to wonder why you’re here? But after all, you’d be with Corey anyhow”
(Yet the next day on bread it came back to her differently. Not all of her had been bored. Or scared. She went into vision and danced away from Corey. She turned on him in anger and forced him back, to leave her alone with her vision for once. She danced into that small fire. She danced that they had taken her away with them, only her. The others had been left to depart in safety but had not been able to stop the boys from stealing her: see, see, she said to them, to Corey, the black Indians of the Catskills have stolen me away and they are real savages, not like you: they are real savages. By a small fire they raped her, each and all. She became their queen and their slave. She did not belong to anyone, not even the tall leader, Marcus. She made it with all of them, anyplace, by the side of the trail, by a creek running over flat rocks, by the evening fire. But she was as tough and as good a hunter and as good on raids. She felt herself growing hard and lean and wooden with hunger and cold. She felt herself turning into a fox. She was happy.)
The negotiations were drawing to a close. The moon was behind a mountain and her legs were numb under her with cold, while her face was parched with the heat of the bonfire. The boys were not to be Indians, but they were to be cohorts of the Indians, allies: a complicated nonsensical treaty was arranged, such as was dear to Corey’s heart, plus a few practical arrangements in the real world for food drops and medicine and warm clothing worked out.
They stood in the clearing saying good-by with stiff solemnity. Nobody smiled, nobody touched anybody. Corey had started to suggest dancing after the treaty, but Joanna had said loudly, “No! It’s much too cold” He was crazy sometimes.
After they had put out the fire, Marcus stood on the ashes and spoke to them, his arms crossed. “If you come here to fool around with us and pull the wool over our eyes, don’t go away thinking you fool us. We don’t believe in nothing white. Nothing half white. We know each other. We know our territory here. This turf not a bad turf. We know how to die on it. We’re into waiting, and we’re into seeing if the food and medicines you made big promises about turn out to be just words, or if we can eat those words. But get one thing straight, you, Whitey. They are never going to take us. They are never going to bring us in. They are never going to put us in the can or in the cage or behind barbed wire, dig? We don’t know about you. Sooner or later, we going to find out if you got balls or just big mouths. So have fun, Whitey. Maybe sometime we can see about parleying again.”
Marcus waved them off from where he remained, holding his band drawn up—emaciated children standing at attention around the ashes— until Joanna was no longer able to look back and see anything. They returned stumbling through the black woods, twisting ankles and tripping over logs and treading in icy water. Finally they came to the car and dug it out of the brush.
They always had to be traveling lately. “The only tiling that can save us is growth” Corey said, again and again. He gave a lot of speeches. Half the time she knew what he was going to say. When he found a good phrase, he did not believe in letting it go to waste. He was trying to fight factionalism and get the tribes into harder organizing. “Better people who aren’t quite Indians yet, than standards that keep people from ever joining.
” There were groups calling themselves Indians in Portland, Oregon, and Iowa City, Iowa, in Austin, Texas, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and they had to be on the road more and more.
Too often the tribes seemed to be waiting for kids to come to them. Too often they got quickly into local confrontation that worked to seal them off from kids who might be won over, but didn’t yet see the whole point. She noticed that Corey really did not trust the reports of other travelers. He had to go and see for himself. If he heard that things were bad, somewhere in himself he believed that he could set them right. So even when he delegated traveling, he tended to do it himself in the end anyhow.
Often they traveled in a loose band, taking some people from each tribe along to the next to tighten the bonds, as Corey called it. Always there were the three of them. Shawn had stopped fighting Corey’s pull. There had been no discussion. As much fuss as Corey had made before about wanting Shawn involved, about the need for Shawn to step over the line and give himself fully, Corey never rejoiced aloud in the change.
It came out of that night on the hill. Sometimes she wanted to finger that sore. She would have thought Shawn might withdraw. Perhaps because he had shot Chuck for Corey, he could only make sense of that by coming even closer. It rubbed on her. Corey had won out of weakness. He had made Shawn assume responsibility, and now Shawn was hooked. She was almost sorry.
Back on the farm, Joanna and Corey had their own room. It had begun as a small meeting room that Corey used for talking over problems and ideas with people one or two or three at a time in his frenzied effort to keep track of developments, to keep close to everyone, to keep things in touch and moving. At first they spent the night there in sleeping bags when they just had to be alone. Then she had built what she called a couch, but it was really a three-quarter bed. She was proud of her handiwork. Corey couldn’t drive a nail in straight. The room was still called the small conference room, but it was their room where they could be alone any time when Corey wasn’t talking to someone. Others tended to hold their conversations elsewhere.