by Marge Piercy
He debated on the way back what to tell the others. It would not be good for them to know. But what could he make up? George could not be trusted to keep his mouth shut, even if Marcus gave him a good scare. The picture would haunt him. He would have to tell it to somebody, and then no one would believe Marcus any more. He could not save them then.
The gang had been so different: all that jockeying for position. Nobody wanted to push him out of being leader here, but how heavy the leadership weighed. At first he had acted like the big man, taking the biggest slice. Now if there was not enough, he went hungry. It was a burden: all of them on his back. He felt more than two years older; he felt a century older. His woman was too young to share his troubles. He made George push himself, trotting faster and faster, because he was scared now, scared scanning the face of Muhammad Ali, that his people would be gone. He was scared to find them fried bacon smoking in the sun. Yet when he arrived, he yelled at them. He yelled out the news all at once and fell back.
After that sometimes they ran from patrols, but sometimes they fell in behind them. They waited for a chance to pick off a straggler. Now the men hunting them were soldiers. They wore uniforms and carried all kinds of equipment, rifles and grenades and walkie-talkies and radio apparatus and even cameras.
One time Joe was lying up among some rocks with his woman watching a patrol. Marcus was on the other side of the ravine with Tiger and Skinny, while everybody else was off food gathering. He watched the patrol stop and take up a covered position, and then they fired some kind of rocket at the ledge. They got both Joe and his woman. He did not understand. The soldiers could not have seen them. Joe had not fired or shown himself. It was not possible for them to know. But he did not stop to think about it, just high-tailed out of there with his boys.
They were more careful after that. Staying way back, they waited for times when the soldiers were not alert. A lot of the time the soldiers shot up patches of woods where there was nobody at all but chipmunks and deer and jack rabbits. Finally Marcus and Skinny and Tiger captured a soldier. They had been following a patrol from the top of the ridge for three days. The soldier had stopped to take a crap and he was long about it. They hit him on the head and carried him off, but it was hard for them. He weighed ten tons.
The soldier was scared and not scared. His name was Ed. Ed kept saying it was a big laugh. He kept telling them they were nothing but punk kids. He was twenty and from Akron, Ohio. He said the soldiers were Special Forces—special counter-insurgency troops—and this was part of their training. Tiger said it was fighting, not training, and didn’t they understand this was guerrilla warfare? Ed said that was pretty funny, guerrilla warfare with a bunch of colored juvenile delinquents, and that more of his buddies would get killed driving around on Memorial Day weekend than in their whole time hiking around the park. Matter of fact, they liked this assignment. They got a lot of time in New York City, and now that the weather was getting better, it wasn’t so bad tramping in the mountains.
Ed kept saying they should realize they had not captured him, but he had captured them, and they should all go in with him and quit playing hide and seek in the mountains. If they didn’t quit while they were still in one piece, they’d all get blown to bits by next Friday. He kept talking like it was a big joke, and Marcus kept thinking about the bodies of the other kids by the lake, about what was left of Joe and his woman splattered on the rocks. “We fight till the last of us get killed.”
George just got up and spat in the soldier’s face.
“Jesus Christ” Ed said with disgust. “What shitty luck being captured by a bunch of crazy ten-year-old spades”
Only Gladys was ten. Her sister had been Joe’s woman. She sat like a skinny brown chicken with her knees drawn up to her chin and her hand with the knife going stick, stick in the earth.
Marcus questioned Ed about how come the soldiers had been able to send that rocket at Joe when he was hidden behind the rocks. Ed explained that they were trying out all sorts of brand-new body detectors. They had one that worked by detecting body heat, and another magnetically sensitive device that located pieces of metal from a good distance. That one had not worked so well, because enough tourists had come through the hills to leave scraps of metal and old beer cans pretty nearly everywhere, and for a week they had been shooting up bushes before they sent that one back upstairs. The heat detector, however, was pretty effective, and it sure could pick up one of them hiding in the hills from a couple city blocks away. Professors had been developing these gadgets for locating natives in jungles for years, and now they were getting a good testing. “You kids are just amateurs. You got the whole might of the U S and A on your tail, picking you off like flies. You better wake up.”
“The whole USA ain’t worth my mother’s ass” Marcus said. A pang went through him. Alive, dead, busted, free. He felt that if he could only see that fat old woman for five minutes, even his mean sister with her stinking hair straightener and her strutting around, he would be so happy he would go straight through the ceiling. He felt a sharp disgust at living. Weary, weary. But his people were looking at him. They had to move out.
They tied up Ed’s mouth with his undershirt and took whatever they could use off him. Then they beat him to death. Except for Gladys with the knife, they did it methodically and without much excitement. They were all too depressed by the business about the body detectors.
Tiger started in, “Maybe it high time to clear out of here. Quit hanging around these old mountains and find some other place to hide out.”
“Yeah?” Marcus gave a short disgusted laugh. “We so invisible. All we got to do is just walk out down the highway. They used to seeing just millions of raggedy black lads running around in packs in these parts. We can just mix with the crowd natural-like, so nobody will give us two looks.”
After that everybody shut up, but they went back to their old way of just trying to keep out of the path of patrols. When they came to blasted patches, they did not walk out into them but skirted them superstitiously and turned another way. They never ran into any other of their people, and they did not come on any bodies. He thought of the third band as dead, but part of him kept hoping, part of him would not give up that they were hanging on, too. Then Gladys and Skinny got picked off when they were tracking a deer, and just three days after that, Terry got caught in a clearing where she was picking some greens, and the plane dropped some kind of bomb that exploded all these hundreds and hundreds of little pellets. The pellets just tore right into her.
Marcus and Tiger carried her between them all day. She was in awful pain. He sat up with her away from the others, because she was moaning and wailing and the bleeding just went on and on. He tried everything he could think of to ease her and to stop that blood running out. Terry was a thin buck-toothed girl with a light yellowish cast to her skin, and she hadn’t even started to have hair yet. She was kind of silly, and she would still cry for her mother sometimes, and she was always bitching because the Indians didn’t bring them nice clothes to wear. But she was okay. When they were hungry and couldn’t find a thing to eat, she would just keep on looking for nuts and leaves and bark they could chew on, long after the others had given up.
Now she kept gripping his hand and asking, “Marcus-honey, am I hurt real bad? Please, I feel so cold.”
He kept telling her she was going to be all right, but he knew she didn’t believe him, and he knew better too. She just kept on bleeding. Just before the sky began to turn gray, she conked out.
Ho just disappeared. They found a big hole in the ground but they couldn’t tell if he had been blown up in it or not. It was a pretty big hole.
Finally there were three of them left. Marcus and George and Tiger, only them out of everybody. They ate roots and leaves, and they were hungry all the time. They didn’t dare hunt, and they seldom could stop long enough to set traps and take animals. They did not ever leave each other’s sight.
Tiger said one morning, “Tomorrow t
ime for the drop. We going to the rendezvous this time?”
“What for? Exercise?” Marcus asked. But they were hungry all the time. What the hell! If they walked into a trap, it would be done with. He could close his eyes and die. He was so weary. Besides, he knew that what they really hoped for more than the food or the medicines or the ammunition, was that they would show up and find the members of the missing third band, and then there would be more of them again. Dying he wasn’t scared of. What kind of life was it running like a mouse around these damned stinking hills, while the white bastards practiced their machines on them?
Still they moved in cautiously. He was sure all the time it was a mistake, because they were depressed and short-tempered with each other. It was like licking a wound. Nobody was there. They hung around back in the woods watching nothing for a while. Then Marcus wigged out. He got so mad he couldn’t stand it. He ran out into the clearing and started yelling, “Crazy mother-fucking white bastards, why don’t you kill me! You shitty white murdering bastards!”
“Hello?” A white girl with a small rucksack strapped to her back crawled out. Sort of dumpy-built white girl with brown hair. She explained she didn’t have much for them. What she had was on her back, a few days’ dried rations, because she had hiked in to find them. “Where are the rest?”
“Dead. What do you think? Dead. We all that’s left”
She had a map. It was all worm tracks to him, but they managed to figure out where she was talking about. In two days they were supposed to be waiting where they could see the road, and Corey was going to try to have a truck there for them. She told them things were not going to be a great improvement out there. The Indians were being hunted, too.
The three of them squatted down and had a vote. George was for taking her with them and going back to their turf. This could only be a trap. Why should they trust her? They’d made it so far, they could go on making it.
Tiger wanted to move out. If other people were fighting, then he would go and fight with them, pink or purple or even white. He reminded them they had seen black soldiers with the others.
Here he was going to go out of his skull with them being picked off one at a time. If Tiger was ever left alone, he’d just jump off a cliff or run into a patrol firing. Look what old Marcus had just gone and done. Suppose the enemy had been in ambush? They were all going stir crazy, and it was no good.
Marcus squatted on the ground considering. He looked the girl over. She was wearing pants and a man’s padded jacket, and she carried her rifle as if she was used to it. Her hands were rough and callused. Listening to them she leaned against a tree, and she was calm. She was alert and together and calm. She was not scared of them. She was standing in her own cone of silence waiting. Alone she had come in looking for them, and that was a crazy stupid thing to do, and she had done it well. If they went back with her, what she had done wasn’t crazy. That was her bet. Corey had come through on his promises to them. And he just plain wanted to get out. There were too many bodies here already.
“They said some of their women were warriors. Are you a warrior?”
“I guess I am now.”
He voted to go out with her. George just stood there shaking his head and grinding his teeth together. “We all gonna die. Don’t you know that yet? Can’t that sink through your thick black head? Gonna follow a white cunt out to where they can pick you off, squash you like a roach scuttling up the kitchen wall. This here is our turf. They let us down once, those Indians, they gonna let us down again. I remember every body the enemy got. Here’s where I fight”
He wanted to force George to stick with them, but he knew he did not have the right. They weren’t going to safety: he didn’t believe that. So he had to stand and watch George go off by himself among the trees, while his eyes ached like raw meat. Then they started walking with Marcus leading, the girl behind and Tiger bringing up the rear. They went cautiously, but they kept going all night. They did not dare stop while it was dark, because, in full daylight planes and helicopters would be cruising overhead all the time.
During the day they rested in a heap of big round boulders. They dozed but could not really sleep. They were too wary. Marcus kept hoping George might come after them, and he did not want to miss him. They spoke in whispers.
“What’s your name?”
“Ginny.”
Tiger asked her if she wanted to fuck. She said she was too scared. Besides, she thought it would bring them bad luck.
“Do you belong to anybody?” Marcus asked her.
She stuck her chin down into her jacket. He thought she was smelling somebody else in it, maybe the man it belonged to. “Sometimes I think so now.”
The drone of a plane coming low. They pressed among the rocks and lay still. Marcus always found himself holding his breath. That made him angry. To be so stupid and so scared. Freezing like a rabbit. The ground vibrated under him. Like a hawk the plane circled and circled, and he felt its eyes. But it passed away in droning circles. Unless it was radioing for bombs?
Ginny went on trying to explain her mind after the plane had gone, as if she had thought of nothing else in the meantime. “I think I finally have learned how to love the people I love. It isn’t belonging, but it’s serious. I’m trying to make a baby with someone. It has to be his. So I can’t sleep with anyone else.”
“It’s not such a hot time for making babies,” Marcus said.
“I think it’s now or never, with this one. And I’m getting sick of never”
She was a plain girl mostly, but as sturdy as a good rocking chair— sturdy as a big old table for eating on and putting your feet up. She was not flashy-attractive like a white girl should be, she was only funny and sturdy. He grinned at her. “Maybe after you have that baby, I’ll come by and give you another, in a contrasting color.”
She laughed. “I’m not even sure I got this one yet. But I used to be good at growing vegetables.”
When dusk came on, they started again. Tiger asked, “How come you guys knew to come in and get us?”
“We saw you on television. One place where we stayed, they had a television, and we saw your program.”
“What you mean, our program? What you talking about, girl?” Tiger stopped and stared at her. His eyes were big and the eyeballs white in the dark. Marcus knew what he was thinking, and he was suddenly scared too. Suppose the chick was crazy?
“They have a new adventure show, it’s one of the most popular shows on TV. It’s on every Monday at eight, and a lot of kids stay up to see it. Everybody watches. See, it’s the adventures of K Company, but K Company really exists. They’re one of the Special Forces companies assigned to mopping up in the Catskills.”
“You mean they’re filming us getting bombed and burned and shot up?”
“They do a lot of filming right on the trails and from the helicopters, but they fake a lot of it, too. The critics say it’s a new art form—a mixture of news, documentary, and drama serial. There are lots of shoot-’em-up scenes. Part of what excites people is that they never know if what they’re watching is real action, real black kids getting blown up, or if it’s staged. You can think whatever turns you on the most. Corey says it’s the last stage of the spectacle—a sort of living-room bread-and-circuses with the cop-out of letting you pretend it’s not real.”
“Those bastards. Too bad we didn’t get to kill more” Marcus fingered his belt. “They got a sponsor for us?”
“A men’s deodorant, a soft drink, and plastic wrap. So we decided you’d sold enough soda and it was time to get you out.”
All night they kept on and into the next morning. They had to keep going in the daylight to reach the road. Then they crawled into the bushes and waited. It wasn’t good cover, but it was all there was. They could not afford to miss the rendezvous. All day they lay hungry and exhausted—too exposed to risk sleep. Finally the truck pulled over and they ran for it, to be taken up into the back.
The Eagle Stoops on Corey
Shawn and Ginny had worked hard on getting the tribes dispersed, and they had in large part succeeded. Many of the Indians had gone underground or had rendered themselves invisible. They were ready to be tapped when the time ripened. But they had run into a widespread stubborn refusal.
The ideological split between the Fire People and the Water People, the kids who thought the only hope lay in immediate guerrilla warfare and those who favored a massive diffuse organizing strategy, was re-enacted in tribe after tribe. The more threatening the situation grew and the graver the danger of imprisonment and death, the more the kids seemed to want to stay huddled in familiar rooms arguing theory with each other, each reaffirming his own militancy and dogmatism in the face of his “enemies” the other faction across the room.
Perhaps, Corey thought, he had emphasized too much building a people instead of training organizers, and now he had kids who feared the loss of their sense of clan more than they feared dying. They were like animals that below a certain minimum population will not mate any more and become extinct. He had set out to disperse the tribes and ended up heading a migration.
So they fled under the strafing of the planes and the ambushes of the different corps of police and militia and National Guard and Army units, leaving their broken dead scattered across the land. When he closed his eyes, the bodies sprawled before him—obscene, gaping, maimed, even pretty, often pathetic in their tousled haphazard tumble. Lovers lying in the green wheat fields riddled with bullets.
Yet as they fled across the vast bowl of the plains, where going twice as fast seemed to keep them in the same place, the young came out to join them, out of the Nebraska towns the highways had been built to curve around, towns with cottonwoods and spires and grain elevators sticking high out of the wheat. Towns spread on the bends of sand-colored rivers riffled with bars. Towns coming down from bluffs into sudden river valleys, throwing out a bridge to a collection of random frame buildings on the other shore.