Dance the Eagle to Sleep

by Marge Piercy

  The Indians opened free stores and medical centers and armed whoever would take arms, marking out an area of the Lower East Side where they would no longer permit the enemy to patrol. They had plenty of rifles and shotguns and homemade gasoline-based explosives, some machine guns, and a few mortars. They had bought some half-tracks and armored trucks from surplus stores. Billy argued that they could inflict the most damage by attacking to the south—into the complex of government buildings and beyond into the financial district.

  Detachments began moving south at three in the morning. It was a cold damp night with the lights of the remote skyscrapers reflecting off the leaden clouds. The wind swept up Allen Street as Billy led a company of his best warriors past the rows of shuttered stores selling men’s neckwear. His random army was moving south by every street and avenue, as he led his men west along Grand. They had a brief but staccato battle with a group of TPF just east of the Bowery, in the blocks where tawdry shops sold wedding gowns and mannequins stood in the stiff white garments swathed in yards and yards of tulle and satin. Burning dummies lay in the street among the bodies of the dead as they advanced.

  Men were moving in firing from the side of the Centre Street police headquarters already—the narrow north side with the carriage entrance. Headquarters was a misshapen fussy building with a dome and a clock on top amid allegorical statuary, made out of yellow gray sandstone that suggested a sidewalk on which many dogs had pissed. It brooded like a shabby hen over a neighborhood of Italian stores and used machinery exchanges. He stayed long enough to see the mortar emplacement and the beginnings of the assault. He did not care whether they really took the headquarters or not, although they might. This action must divert from their real objectives downtown, where the major fighting was already getting started at the Criminal Courts Building and the circle of government buildings around Foley Square and Federal Plaza. He climbed into an armored truck and directed the driver south on Centre.

  Going south they were attacked by a helicopter, zooming down on them with a high nervous whinnying. It killed one of their men and wounded two others before they could bring it down exploding in the street. The battle was underway now. Fighting appeared to have broken out in several places.

  He hopped off the truck. One hundred Centre Street—a building every Indian hated. That was where you ended up. That was where you were taken and where you might get out on bail and you might not, where you had your trial and where, after they found you guilty, if you were male they took you across to the prison on the north. Dark gray building with shiny marble at the base—chunky, linear, aspiring: a kind of heavy modernistic stone temple to oppression.

  The troops assaulted from three sides. On the south from Leonard Street, the kids had already taken the district attorney’s offices through the windows, low enough to boost each other in. On the east across Baxter Street hunched a row of seedy luncheonettes and law offices and bail bondsmen, where warriors were holed up firing, and where that petered out, Columbus Park, mainly a cement lot that the kids from Chinatown beyond played in during the daytime. For the moment, it made a good staging area. In that Baxter Street wall an entrance for deliveries stood open, but it was still being held by guards from the prison. As he hurled himself across the street under sporadic return fire from the broken windows of Criminal Courts, a plaque crossed his field of vision: a black group founded in 181c had placed it there to commemorate a former stop on the underground railroad. Freedom Now.

  He had a certain amount of radio contact with the leaders of some bands of warriors, but he was in no position to have a strategy beyond turning his troops loose—his only in the sense that he had made minimal plans and secured the weapons—in an area where they might wreak damage before the end. He allowed himself no illusions about being a general. There was no discipline in this army beyond a handful whom he considered adequately trained. Whatever they had agreed to do in council, whatever directions had been handed out, on the streets the kids were doing whatever occurred to them, and if something looked exciting or groovy they would imitate it. Even with real weapons in their hands at last, even with explosions shaking the ground and bodies going down to the right and to the left, they were still playing guerrilla theater. He watched one boy pause to adjust his headband and preen his mustache before charging to his death in the driveway entrance, machine-gunned down and cut in two.

  He moved around to the Centre Street side. Waves of troops came across the barren little plot of grass and the parking lot between Lafayette and the Criminal Courts. They are, he thought: the criminal courts. They have dispensed the moneyed white justice for too long. Selling people back their liberty. Kneeling and firing, he could remember crossing that parking lot to the cafe beyond to bring back paper cups of coffee and ham sandwiches to Indians who were on trial up in one of the courtrooms. He had never seen them again.

  Free-standing pillars big enough to shelter several men firing and hurling grenades stood in each of the two entrances, but beyond them was an exposed run to the doors under fire. But their side had people. They had bodies. He was growing used to seeing people die. People were so liquid, so easily squashed. A cockroach was much hardier. Essentially they were into the building, and he called off some of the troops and sent them to aid the forces assaulting the new police communications building by the Brooklyn Bridge.

  The National Guard began to arrive with tanks. There was fierce fighting across the square, in the pinkish granite amphitheater before the squat black glass Customs Court and the big black and white radiator cover of the Federal Building. The troops were coming at them along Worth. He hurled himself down in the dry fountain, round and rimmed like an ash tray. It made a good trench. The boy firing beside him was wearing an athletic sweater from a Catholic high school. The woman on his other side was a fat forty-year-old Puerto Rican who looked like a weathered Dolores. She was chewing sugarless gum, which she offered him, and firing continuously and wildly. The boy had the top of his head shot off a moment later. The blood splattered Billy’s glasses. He had to stop shooting to wipe them.

  Artillery had been brought up, and the Indians’ positions in the open area under the Customs Court were being attacked. A couple of direct hits on the thick supports they were using as bunkers, and with a great crumbling roar, the whole building settled and collapsed like an elephant going down on its knees.

  This was it: reality at last after so much fantasy. He was really fighting. Billy with a gun. Fact at last. Why did it feel so … thin? He could not connect. He was functioning well. He kept in touch with his captains as best he could. He supervised the use of the mortars. He rallied and advised retreat. He did what he was supposed to. He was not afraid, except sometimes in his belly and then with a moment’s almost overwhelming nausea. His head was not afraid. But he could not quite grasp the events. They broke into bizarre images and faded from him.

  Most of their army fell among the office buildings. They never managed to get farther than Duane, where they blew up a couple of banks. When they retreated to their turf, the guard came after them and formed a cordon around the Lower East Side. The remaining Indians delimited an area they would try to hold. Posters all over the neighborhood went up at the same time as the barricades on their sixteen-block chunk. They tried to take the Con Edison plant, but the National Guard was already entrenched there, and they sustained bad losses in the assault. The guard came in with tanks and armored cars.

  After burning barricades came burning houses. The tenements went up like paper. Among the roar of shells and the rattle of machine guns and the crack of rifles and the explosions of grenades and homemade bombs, his troops moved back from house to house. After the first day none of them succeeded in slipping out of the encirclement, but they fought well. Black kids, Puerto Rican kids, hippies, high school kids, and Indians fought in small bands in the rubble from house to house and went down.

  He lay shooting from the ground-floor windows of a one-room apartment with the Virgin Mary over
the bed and a pot of red rice and beans moldering on the table. Ben lay on the bed in a dark puddle. He was probably not conscious any more. He no longer responded to Ruthie when she crept back to speak to him. Then they could no longer leave their post, Matty and Ruthie and he with Korean War surplus rifles, one German machine gun and a decent supply of ammo.

  He felt calm and tired, but with a hollow high in his chest. He had sustained the test of combat. All he had ever claimed for himself was that he might be a useful weapon. He had proven himself. He had set an example and fought well. Again and again he had held a forward position, letting others fall back. They were losing, but they had proved themselves to the others around the world fighting and dying.

  He might have been a monster. He had been in line to serve the empire. He might have become a contented scientist writing the formulas for nerve gases by day and going home to water the lawn or grow rare fungi or play poker or string quartets at night. He might have studied the trajectories of missiles or the stimulating problem of how to differentiate the various objects upon re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere, warhead from dummy. He might have been studying how to package the black plague conveniently for dispersal. He might have been working on a chemical that could perform the equivalent of a prefrontal lobotomy on a whole population in ten seconds. He could have been busy and secure and happy in his work, solving technically interesting problems that damned the vast numbers of mankind to death or continued slavery and starvation.

  He looked over at Matty, who was sweating hard and whose hands looked almost green against his rifle. He looked at Ruthie, whose face was smeared with tears that had dried and whose blouse was soaked with her brother’s blood. She was biting her lip with concentration, staring through the sight. The last thing he heard was the whine of a shell from a tank that was moving across the ruins of Avenue C toward them, where they lay shooting from the ground-floor windows with the Sacred Heart of Jesus in four colors on the wall over them. The next shell made a direct hit.

  Marcus as an

  Underdeveloped Country

  That winter had gone okay. None of his people died of starvation and only one of exposure—from getting caught in a blizzard. First off, Marcus felt they’d finally learned their hunting ground. They had learned how to make it outside and live off the picked-over land. Besides, they had food and medicine and weapon drops from the Indians. They had added to their band. They had raided a school excursion and got girls. Marcus was relieved. He had the explicit fear of homosexuality of the street child: the fear of being used by a bully male and losing his manhood, the fear of being turned to a simpering, pimped object for money. Even in the hardest pinch of the winter, things were not so tough. He vaguely remembered Robin Hood tales. They even had fun.

  It was good-looking country, and they knew it better than anybody since maybe the redskins who’d lived there. Marcus wondered sometimes about them, imagining their bones under the loam of rotting leaves. They named every trail they found or made, every stream where they drank, every overhang or cave where they slept, every mountain with a good lookout point.

  Every night, they built their small fires. The kids would be sprawling around making music, dancing, boasting, competing in memories of the city, talking about their families who might be living and might be dead, but that they never would see any more. Sometimes he worried that the recollecting might be bad for morale, but morale in general was high. No one had killed himself since that first bad winter when they had been four days hungry. Hell, now they were all used to doing without food for a day or two. The boys didn’t panic at that any more.

  Naturally it was hard in the winter—a mean cold that froze him clear through to his bones: he was never not cold, never, for month after month. He remembered when he was a little bitty child, when the landlord would cut off the heat in the winter or the furnace would blow, and his ma would take him in bed and warm his back and rub his arms and legs between her hands. For months now, the cold never eased up and he never got used to it. If he was lying by the fire and his face was scorched, his backside was still freezing. His woman, Terry, had lost toes from frostbite, though he had sat up half the night with her trying to rub the feeling back in. They couldn’t cover ground fast in the deep snow, and always they were nervous about their tracks and dependent still on the food drops.

  So he felt the first signs of spring as he never had, the rocks and then the earth sticking out through the mushy snow, the patches of mud, the green shoots they fell on like rabbits, some sour, some sweet, some bitter, some that made them sick. Green is for eating—fresh green. Little animals skinny and ragged from hibernation, little animals hungry like them, began to come out. They started telling stories in the evening of what they were going to do as the weather got warmer: how they would go swimming down by Piss Lake and by Mau Mau Lake where the bottom was sandy, and how they would go fishing and catching frogs and there would be more berries than they could eat. In all the camping sites there would be fat tourists with picnic baskets and refrigerators full of groceries and suitcases full of clothes, and it would be easy living and plenty of times for just acting like kids for a change. George swore he was going to grab onto one of those put-put outboard motorboats and give them all a ride on Mau Mau Lake as fast as the engine could go.

  It was still lean pickings, but it was clearly spring, and clearly it would be summer. Then just when they were beginning to feel alive and kicking with the changes, it came down on them.

  They began to be hunted.

  With spring, the tourist cars, the local cars on the park roads did not come back. Only cop cars and cars belonging to the park administration. Small planes and helicopters kept crossing overhead. When they went down for their next rendezvous and food drop, no one was there. Nothing. It gave Marcus a chill. Naturally he cursed around and said Whitey had let them down and they should have been expecting some such stab in the back, but they had all grown used to having a connection with someone out there. They looked forward to the drop, to the ritual negotiation, to the social contact no matter how guarded and full of careful poses of putdown and hostility and menace, to the things they needed and had been waiting for and the things that surprised them. It was their regular holiday.

  All the time now a helicopter was hovering in their sky looking for them, veering slowly back and forth like a hornet cruising or a nasty horse fly. There were too many of them to take cover easily. He considered and considered what they must do. Finally they talked it out and decided they had to split into three groups. Marcus worried about that a lot. He was two years older than any of the rest, and he was responsible. He was the man. He was the leader. He could not split himself into three and go with each of the groups. He tried to guess what would be best, though it weighed on him, and he appointed Shirley leader of one of the groups, because even if she was a chick she was older and smarter than the others, and the third group he gave to Willy, and then they chose up their teams.

  He took his girl, Terry, and Joe and his woman and George and Tiger and Skinny and Ho (from Horace) and little Gladys, who was only ten and the sister of Joe’s woman. It gave him a sick lonely feeling to go off from the others, and then an hour after there were only the nine of them, and the others were swallowed up in the woods. Who could guess what was happening to them? He could not know any more and he worried, but he kept it to himself. He kept the gang moving fast so they would forget. Still, it was easier to find food in the smaller group. They heard gunfire and dogs from time to time, and patrols passed on the major trails.

  If only the leaves would come out on the trees! There were just buds. Every morning, he looked at the branches over them. The sun was hot on their heads, though the air was cool. Water was a problem sometimes when they were hiding up on the peaks. Often when they set a trap, they could not get back before the animal had rotted, because they had to run before a patrol.

  One morning high on Muhammad Ali, they saw one of the planes dropping a load of explosives do
wn the valley by Piss Lake, where they had used to camp in the summer, watching for tourists to raid and fishing and swimming and having a high old time. They could see flames for a while and then not any more. They all squatted on the ledge arguing whether they should find out what happened, if it was just walking into a trap to go down. Finally Marcus decided they had to take a chance, because suppose it was some of their people in trouble and needing help. He took George with him and they went to scout, while everybody else promised to wait around on Muhammad Ali till they came back.

  They were quick runners, so they made it down to the spot in under two hours. They didn’t have any trouble finding it. They just followed their noses. Things were still smoldering. George got sick and puked on his shoes when they started looking at the bodies, but Marcus was so petrified by fear and rage he was all right. Five of the bodies were crisp and burnt. That left two, including Shirley, and he called their names loud as he could for a while, though his voice scared him. He didn’t want to die that way. He was of two minds. He half hoped they’d escaped, and half he was afraid that Shirley had run off and deserted the others, and that he had chosen wrong. Then Joe, who was down at the lake washing the puke off, saw two more bodies in the water. Probably they had run in, trying to put the flames out, and drowned or burned—who could say? They were sure dead. One was Shirley and the other must be Fats, though it was hard to tell any more.

  George said that they ought to bury them real quick, or they’d get caught down here and fried too. Marcus said no. They had to get out at once. Surely some patrol would come to do a body count—they liked that kind of thing. Then they multiplied times five and put a story in the newspapers. Besides, the enemy could not know how many of them were in hiding. Maybe they’d think they’d incinerated them all, and leave them alone in the mountains. Then they’d be all right; they’d make out somehow.