Dance the Eagle to Sleep (6 page)

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.

Did he believe in the grandfather buffalo? What did that mean? There was a force powerful enough to kill and give birth, to create fire out of flesh, and that force seized him. The pillar of light: from top to bottom all things lined up in clarity and fire.

His totem was the mothering, fathering buffalo, body of the tribes, and his enemy was the eagle, bird of prey and power that had sold out to the conquerors, that savage, war-mad, torturing cannibal streak in the people,
which had joined with the old horde terror and greed in their conquerors and become the major mode of the land. With the strength of the buffalo, he was to destroy the eagle of empire and lead the tribes to water.

His mother came into Billy’s room and turned on the air conditioner so that it blew on his back. When she left, he shut it off. When she came back in again, he pretended to be totally absorbed in the problem he was working on, but she was determined to extract some conversation from him as her price for leaving again.

“Is that homework?”

He thought of lying, but it was not worth the effort. “Not directly. It’s just an interesting problem.”

She peered over his shoulder. She hated not being able to understand what he studied. She was intelligent, wasn’t she.? It was perversity. It was more cheating of her. She had been deprived of an education. What did not bore her was the closet drama of her martyrdom. Out of the corner of his eye, past his glasses, he scanned her face. She was a plain, rather squarish woman who boasted she didn’t carry an extra ounce of fat. She looked like the ex-teacher she was, but inside she was Hamlet and Juliet and Lady Macbeth. He was Horatio and the good gray nurse and the audience, too, the actor trained to feed her lines. Would she really let him go away to Cal Tech? She had to. To let him make good and come home laden with trophies. Never enough.

“What is this gaudy-looking object?” She pounced on the issue of
Grassfire
with its squiggly letters proclaiming no more pigeons, no more sitting ducks. all power to the students.

“Something the kids put out” Corey and his boys had run it off, a typical pornographic rag screaming for student power.

“You mean the school lets them get away with this nonsense?”

“It’s not official, if that’s what you mean”

“What are you doing with it, Billy?”

“Nothing. They were handing them out.”

She tore it across and dropped it in the wastebasket. “Don’t get involved
in any monkeyshines in school. After all the trouble I went to keep the mention of therapy off your record, don’t foul things up. It’s not too late to ruin your chances at Cal Tech.”

“I’m accepted. What more do you want?” He was not being recruited. He was excluded from the channeling exams. Of course he was staying out of the anti-pigeon agitation. What did it matter? All assemblies were displays of formalized bullshit: superb training in sitting being doused with propaganda and empty ritual while elaborating your chosen ability to produce sadistic or success-oriented daydreams. “I’m in, Mother. If you have to worry, pick out something real.”

“You’re not in yet, Billy-boy. And you didn’t make MIT!’

“Cal Tech’s just as good.”

“It’s not as famous.”

She had wanted to be a doctor. Her family had thought that unseemly for a woman. Instead, she had married his father, helped him through school, taught, and then there were children. His father was a pale gray drag. Started out as a high school math teacher and ended up as a middle-echelon man in a company specializing in auto insurance. He had been bigger than his father since he was fifteen, and his father had always regarded that as a breach of manners. His father read the paper and detective stories and watched television as if it were speaking to him. His mother had taught Billy a quiet scorn for his father without giving him anything else to love. Billy was to make up the world to his mother, to act out her dreams and bring home the grades and prizes and scholarships that proved her sacrifice was golden. Whatever he did would never be enough.

He waited; he held his big shoulders rigid, hoping she would leave. His refusal to arouse only irritated her. She patted at his hair, marched to and fro, peered again at the page he kept before him as if eager to get back to it.

“Sit up straight. You’ll grow up round-shouldered.”

“How much growing do you think I have left to do.?”

“Well, your head’s big enough. Being such a great clumsy boy doesn’t mean your bones have set. The first thing people notice is your posture, Billy”

“Nobody looks at me, Mother. I have a label on me—genius, freak, science major. I wear an invisible white coat” It might as well be a monk’s habit or a priest’s vestments, it reduced him so purely to function.

“That’s only high school. They’re just ordinary children, the sons of men who work in the mills. What do you expect? College will be different” She imagined she was comforting him.

“I imagine it will be. That’s where they start getting ready to use me.”

“With an attitude like yours, I’m not sure they’ll bother, Billy.”

Everything in the system had a double edge, a second and contrary interpretation. The little privileges of the school turned out to be unpaid labor in disguise, such as the Science Club, which scrubbed glassware and washed beakers, or the Biology Club, which cleaned animal cages. Even his name, for instance. Billy: not William, as he was named formally, or Bill, the manly shortening. Billy belonged to early identification with Billy Batson, the crippled newsboy who could turn into Captain Marvel. He had not yet found his shazam, only that he could master any consistent construct: chess, quantum theory, calculus, topology. He collected his science-fair prizes and headed the mathematics team for the glory of Franklin High, and remained Billy, the crippled newsboy—genius and freak. No one expressed resentment any longer because he knew the answers; they just looked through him.

“In ten years, you’re going to have backaches from slouching and wonder why. Then remember what your mother told you. There’s pain enough in store for all of us without looking for it.” Her hand glided suggestively over her heart.

He wanted to scream that she was healthy as a horse. Once she had been able to play him like a little violin, extracting from him all the squeals of sympathy and pain and guilt and tremulous desire to please that she wanted. “If you think I’m not getting enough exercise, I can always take up football again. I bet they’d be glad to have me back.”

“And break your neck? That’s a sport for ruffians, for boys who have no other means of making their way”.

He was big and strong enough and he liked the rough action. He had liked his anger on the field. But she was right: the science would take him through. He wasn’t giving them one extra bit of him. Two years before, even then, she had been able to make him feel guilty at will—guilty for making her worry. He had felt that he must somehow be in the wrong, be an insensitive lout, to enjoy football so much and worry his martyred mother.

She picked up the old glass paperweight from his desk. “I don’t know why you want to hang on to this shabby object. It’s not like you to be sentimental. You’re not the least bit sentimental about your father or me, for instance. Why cling to a piece of childish rubbish? You’re old enough to show some taste.”

“It amuses me.” He held out his hand until, reluctantly, she put the glass paperweight into his palm. At last she left him. He slumped forward. He had not let himself be roused. But he felt exhausted. He laid his head on his
arm and looked at the paperweight in which the fake snow swirled soggily. Faintly, he let himself smile. She would never know why he cherished it.

He had heard a fairy tale once, read by a substitute teacher. He had not been given such books as a child. Secretly he had read comic books. What shame when they were discovered by her, as later she found condoms on him. He carried them like the other boys, carefully tucked into his wallet. Aging there. Little tickets to normality. See, boys, I am just like you. Ignored. Once he had run water into one and watched it swell like a balloon until it burst.

The fairytale was about a princess who lived on top of a glass mountain that she made the knights who constantly came to court her attempt to ride up. They slid off, naturally. They fell down in a heap and died below. The glass mountain got rid of all the pesky unsuitable suitors. Finally one guy made it over all the bones and rotting bodies and horseflesh and rusting equipment, all the way to the top. The goal post. My hero, she said, and prepared to make the grand sacrifice and accept a mere mortal mate, because he had won fair and square. But all the corpses had turned his stomach, and he said No thanks. He didn’t want a princess who had to be conquered like a glass mountain. He went home. She leaped off and killed herself. That last was the fairytale part.

America was a glass mountain. School was a practice glass mountain. Growing up and marrying and playing football and taking exams and everything else. Sometimes working on a problem, he thought he had got off, but afterward he found that that pleasure, that excitement, was just their means of getting him to climb a little faster, a little higher. They had pretty aesthetic systems to turn him on, but it developed that what they wanted were glass mountain missiles and glass mountain nuclear plants and glass mountain satellites. The systems were daydreams of the knights climbing before they slid down and were smashed. Or before they made it to the top and married the glass princess and began to wonder just what they had done wrong.