Dance the Eagle to Sleep

by Marge Piercy

  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.

  Billy Batson and the

  Teentsy Revolution

  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 normalit
y. 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.

  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 t
he 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.”