Dance the Eagle to Sleep (7 page)

They had conned him plenty of times. Like the brotherhood bit. He got his own black boy to tutor, slow reader to bring up to age level. He was pretty excited about it all, a regular bleeding-heart liberal prepared to share his enlightenment. He had worked hard and Joe had made steady progress. Then he took a good look one day at the books they were using.
Bobby’s Career in the Coast Guard. Jim Gets His Wings. Dick Flies His First Bombing Mission. Jack Goes Down to the Sea in a Submarine.
They were instructive, all right. After that, he couldn’t ignore that he was coaching Joe to get him up to the level where the Army could use him.

After that, they talked some. He found out that Joe was quicker than he had been in figuring it all out. But what could Joe do? In the Army he would have money in his pockets anyhow, and it was better than rotting in Gary and doing the welfare shuffle.

With luck, they might even teach him something he could make a living at afterward. But Joe cast a cold eye on that, too, for he had seen too many black guys come back to the neighborhood trained at things they couldn’t get hired to do. Then they had to find a hustle, or re-enlist. Likely they were pretty soon in jail or back in the barracks.

It had never before occurred to him that Joe was not stupid. Joe was a certified slow learner. He was in the dropout track. But stupid he wasn’t. He had seen himself as Joe’s liberal teacher, but Joe was giving him more real and more useful instruction than he was giving Joe. He felt as if a box had been taken off his head. He was naïve enough to try to explain to his parents his excitement, and they immediately lost their enthusiasm for his tutoring. He could see they were scared of something.

“I know you’re lonely, but you’ll only cause yourself and him damage by trying to pretend you can make a friend out of a boy so different from yourself. Why, he doesn’t even know what you’re talking about half the time.” She crossed her arms, clucking.

She had a way of putting a finger on sore spots. Part of the trouble was, after he invited Joe over, Joe kept saying that coming from a nice home like that, he had nothing to complain about. Nice? He hated its banality. Even his mother was always saying it was nothing but a disguised tract house. When he visited Joe, he envied him his easy rapport with his family and his brothers and sisters. He knew that in a fancier way he was just as trapped and manipulated as Joe, but he could not explain to him how it was so. What really drew him was pure mathematics, but everybody had always shunted him ever so firmly into physics. In school, he could not study anything he really wanted. There was the assumption that what was really pretty and interesting belonged to a “club.” and physics was the bread and butter reality.

Anyhow, it looked good on the record, the tutoring deal, and the Science Club and the Mathematics Team, though they remained to him mainly occasions of shame: how he had been conned for a while. How satisfying it would be to let them know he saw through. But where and who were They?

He sat up and fished
Grassfire
out of the wastebasket—woven bark with a brass eagle on the side: it would be called Colonial Something. His mother was big on Colonial Somethings. He pieced the halves of
Grassfire
together. It was as gaudy as she had implied. He felt as if the dayglo colors would
bleed on his fingers. wake up, cattle: you are their meat, no hamburger tomorrow: jam today. fight for the man or fight the man.

Corey’s boys were amateurs of hating. They hadn’t studied who was using them and how and why. He was careful to remember that the teachers were fools who were never going to make it the way they were programmed to feel that they should, that the teachers were merely the assembly-line workers and occasional shop stewards in a corporate factory. Corey’s boys hated the teachers as if they were the enemy. He tried to remember he only had to suffer their bumbling malice a few months before he achieved the high-pressure, more interesting oppression of the university, to prepare him for the job where he would be paid extravagantly and might even be allowed to play sometimes. Always he would be a fish in somebody’s aquarium. But he did not confuse the stupidity of the teachers with power. They were like the corner cop: they could make you very uncomfortable on their turf, but their turf was small and they could be easily removed from above. Only as long as you were clearly under them would they think of threatening you.

After all, the school had ways of using the kids to control each other. The “good kids” would man the corridors, demanding to see passes, would act as monitors, would do the unpaid labor that kept the school functioning. They would join the clubs and write the school paper, dull and full of photos of other goodies, and make civic speeches and sit on the sportsmanship council and be cheerleaders and run for the school elections on the platform of a straight, bland smile: perfect training in elections as popularity TV contests that never threatened the economic status quo.

He watched Corey’s boys marching around and yelling and writing mindless slogans with magic marker. the schools are yours: take them. up the body! Noisy, silly, easily stampeded, they waved their pricks like bombs. Then they took the school and that arrested him where he stood. They took the school!

Corey found him in the physics lab and told him he could still leave. “We aren’t keeping anybody who doesn’t want to fight” Corey leaned in the doorway squinting at him and speaking gently. “They aren’t even after you, so we’d understand. Like if you stay, you might lose your science deferment”

“Think they’re doing me a favor, don’t you, boy? If I’m not a good slavey, they won’t let me do my thing. But it’s not my thing, it’s theirs. I could do mine sitting at the bottom of a crater”

Corey sat down on a lab stool, swinging slowly to and fro and turning a bunsen burner on and off. Whoosh, whoosh went the blue flame. “If it’s their thing, why do it at all?”

“It’s more amusing than getting stuck in the Army.”

Corey’s face spread with a slow beatific smile. “So you’re caught too. Balls in the vise, like the rest of us”

“Does that give you a thrill?”

“I don’t believe people come over except because it’s bad where they are. So don’t work for them. Technology for the revolution. Do it for us” The burner spat fire and went out. Tongue of fire, hiss, hiss, dark pure blue.

“Why should I care if it’s their thing or yours I’m doing?”

“Our
thing—yours too. Maybe you have to do our thing before you can do your own private thing and have it come out good, good for you, for everybody. Science has turned into a cancer.” Corey tapped his knee. “I want the good technician working in the good society in a human way … “

“I’m a mathematician who will be forced to study physics. I am not some sort of super plumber.”

“What can they give you for being their toy physicist?” Corey held out a bony dark finger. “Exemption from the Army and other grinds. A house out past the expressway, a split-level you can spend your life paying for and filling with kiddies and electric can openers and electric blankets and outboard motors and electric fry pans and floor polishers and coffee grinders and power drills and three-speed lawn mowers and large shiny books about the history of locomotives to lie on the Danish coffee table. A hi-fi they can hear in Toledo. Two shiny cars that don’t work. A sex manual next to the bed about how to fuck your wife so she’ll be magically satisfied with being locked up in a box full of kids and gadgets …”

“I call it the glass mountain. I don’t think it’s worth rapping about. Could you spare me the rest of the spiel?” He glared around the empty lab.

“But a lot of kids haven’t seen it yet. How do we know you see, if you keep it to yourself?”

“Who’s us? The shepherd and his flock”.

“They’re turning on to themselves. We’re building a real community here. That’s what we can offer you, Billy. First, exemption from the Army—”

“Through your pull with Congress?”

“We don’t go, Billy. We say no, and mean it. We build our own nation in the belly of this one. We make a good community for each other, based on cooperation and starting right now.”

“Until tomorrow, when the police come and throw us out”

“We’re practicing here. But I think we can hold it a few days.” Corey looked up at the ceiling. “They built this school without windows to hold out a neighborhood, to hold out living, to hold out distraction—a
fortress of a school. I think we can keep it long enough to change the people inside.”

“Playing games, that’s all” Billy got up and stomped around the long lab table. “You should be ashamed to talk about revolution. Just playing games. Have you read Marx? Have you read Lenin? Che? Mao? Do you have any idea what you think you’re doing playing hide and seek in a school building?”

“Moncada was just a building too. And they didn’t even hold it briefly. You start where you’re at and where you can’t stand any longer to be. You start saying no to the system and yes to each other.”

“Rhetoric. Bullshit. You have no analysis and no strategy. You have no program.” Billy sat down sneering.

“But we have a thousand kids in motion. Don’t we?”

To that he had no answer. That was what had kept him there. Maybe it was simple curiosity to see forces in confrontation.

“What would be the use of having an analysis right now, when the kids wouldn’t be ready for it?” Corey bent forward, touching Billy’s knee. “This is what they’re ready for, and this is going to make a lot of difference in them”

“A few holes in a few heads.”

“Are you going or staying, Billy? Are you staying with us?”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Come around with me and review the defenses.”

Billy shook his head no. But the picture amused him, him and Corey the raging delinquent strolling arm and arm through the rabble looking at “defenses.” He shook his head no, but waited.

Corey smiled. “Come on. Want to see what you think of them. Get your thoughts on how we can improve our positions. We’re buying time, remember, time to organize each other.”

He saw that he could not simply sit out the siege in the physics lab. He wanted to touch that sense of motion. He would be busted with the rest of them, so he might as well plunge in and satisfy his curiosity.

“They’ll be surprised to see me.”

“Maybe.”

“You were surprised to find me here”

“Maybe” Corey grinned. He got up, stretched himself like someone much taller, and motioned him toward the door.

Billy got up heavily, emphasizing his bulk and sticking his belly out. “But now I’m part of the master plan, uh?”

“You’ll be part of making it, won’t you?” Corey led out. In the hall kids were sitting in loose circles, kids were scrawling slogans on the walls, and
a boy was working on jimmying the lock on a storeroom door. Everything was much more diffuse than he had imagined. People had broken into small details and everything seemed to be happening at once in all directions without coordination or direction. Corey did take Billy’s arm, but his fingers were unconscious. He was alert only to the scene. Nobody paid much attention to them.

Corey explained in brief snatches. “We’re taking turns sleeping up on three, so that there’s always somebody on duty.” They stood watching the kids working on the barricades inside the doors. Chairs, shop benches, tables, desks were heaped up bristling.

There were meetings going on all of the time in one or another room, big meetings in the gym every few hours, constant announcements over the PA system and rock music blasting away. Their talk had excited Billy. He knew he was a fool to take any of the gab seriously. Corey was just trying out his charisma on a new sucker. But on the other hand, something was happening here. Action combined the niceties of game theory with the shock of collision. Close to five hundred lads had taken the school. They occupied the lunchroom and fed each other. They served on the sanitary and food and building squads. They had meetings at which they argued about what they wanted in their lives and what kind of world they would be willing to live in. They danced and smoked grass and played basketball in the gym. They took down the pictures of George Washington and the Superintendent of Schools and put up posters of Che and the Rolling Stones. With all the art department supplies for the rest of the term liberated from the storeroom, they were making a huge collage and painting a mural in the cafeteria depicting themselves and their culture heroes seizing the school and the Franklin shopping plaza.

Corey assigned him a crew, and he set them to making smoke and stink bombs for the defense of the doors. This was the longest time in his life he had been away from home except for camp. He had hated camp. Here he was not under anyone. He could go away from them into a room and shut the door and work on a problem. Mostly the problems did not engage him long. He would hear noises outside and want to know what was up. His curiosity surprised him. He did not want to miss anything.

Corey asked him, “Is everybody treating you well?”

“Aren’t specialists always treated well?
They
do that too” He liked and hated it at once. Respect. He wandered around the edges of the groups. He hated the dancing. Obscene movements. Some of it was naked and that was worse. Taunting him for being fat, for being awkward, for being him.
Not overtly, of course. They were respectful. Indeed, they treated him like Captain Marvel wandering through in his red plastic suit. Gee, look who’s here, how are you, old man? You want to dance? He turned on with them and went high up into the pinnacle of his head and looked down on the motes in Brownian movement and no longer cared.

He found his interest in the cookbook fiddlings of chemistry revived. Pick out the active ingredients in grass and synthesize them cheaply. Or play other changes on the chemistry of human absurdity. Corey would provide him with the volunteers he needed. Yes. When they lost the school, he would return to chemistry.

Corey had assigned him a girl; he was sure of that. Her name was Ginny, she said in a soft voice and slept beside him on a table in the physics lab. The second night he had sex with her. He was grimly determined, though scared she would figure out he was new to it, but she acted pleased and friendly. She seemed relieved that he wanted to.