Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  “Starved? Say no more,” Honey said, walking off and yanking Clara along at the other end of the hamper. “Aunt Ludie swears she’s going to put her extramean gumbo together tonight. Needless to say, I told her to put our names in the pot.”

  “We’re not staying for the fireworks?” Clara pulled on the handle to make Honey slow up. “I thought we’d eat around here and then see the fireworks. I thought that was the whole point of parking in the lot instead of on the street, so we’d have access to the dunes and …” She felt panic welling up, time running away from her. “Five damn dollars to park just so we’d have a pass to the dunes, Honey.”

  “Whatchu care about five damn dollars, Mama? You a rich lady,” Honey said over her shoulder with a smile Clara knew was not a smile at all. If Honey’s lackadaisacal attitude at the Center was a hot issue, then the money was a scorcher. Her daughter had married into a family on Striver’s Row, had in-laws with little patience for “community,” “the people,” “development,” and even less tolerance for how their son’s mother-in-law, Clara, dispersed her funds and spent her time and tried to influence their son’s wife.

  “Not yet, I’m not rich. Not yet.” Clara stumbled along in the sand and wondered if she’d live long enough to see the money, at least to sign it over to the Center and its works. The suit the former GIs had brought against the Army had dragged on for years. And though the medical reports had grown sharper from “radiation exposure a high-probability factor in the development of malignancies,” to “disabilities a direct result of the veterans’ involvement with the nuclear test program”—and though the lawyers for the National Association of Atomic Vets were optimistic despite the sorry box score of twenty recognized suits out of hundreds of claims, and though the Board of Veterans’ Appeals had overturned earlier VA rulings, the Army was still appealing, denying, holding out.

  “It’s easier walking along the beach,” Honey was saying, shifting direction sharply and wrenching Clara’s arm, her thoughts. “And maybe we can find some sandblasted bottles for Daddy’s collection.”

  Nineteen eighty, deadline for probable-future choice imminent, people collecting shells, beer cans, stamps, rally buttons, posters, statistics, snapshots. Middle-aged woman in loose flesh and tight overalls pulled past old men sissy-fishing along sandbar in rolled-up pants. Tips of rods quivering like thin silver needles the Chinese doctor placed along meridian, electricity turned on, mother prayers turned up drowning Muzak out. Line pulled in, fish flopping its last, hook through gills, tail fin lashing at fisherman who’s wrecked its life. Life already ruined. Woman on leave from Department of Wildlife recites fish kills typed up daily. Agriculture—insecticides, pesticides; industrial mining, paper, food, metallurgy, petroleum, chemical plants, municipal sewerage system, refuse disposal, swimming pool agents.

  “Remember the church fish fries here when I was little? You’d leave me with Aunt Ludie to go visit the tearoom. Remember, Mama?”

  Dog River, Alabama; Santa Barbara Harbor, California; Anacostia River, D.C.; Mulatto Bayou, Florida; Salt Bayou, Louisiana.

  “Mama, you look beat. Wanna rest?”

  Slocum Creek, North Carolina; Radar Creek, Ohio; San Jacinto River, Texas; Snake River, Washington.

  “Why don’t you sit down on the rocks while I put this stuff in the car.”

  “Girl, don’t you know my sitting days are over? And there’s work to do and we need to talk.” But she let Honey take the whole of the hamper onto her shoulder and march off with it. So there was nothing for Clara to do but find a dry rock not too far out on the breakwater wall and sit down, be still, be available, wait. She slumped. The weight of the day, of unhealth, relationships, trying to organize for the end, pressed her down onto the rocks, her body yearning to return to the earth—disoriented, detached and unobliged. And then the picture flashed. The bush. A maze of overgrown hedges and thickets, prickly to the eye. She, looking for a path and it suddenly there, bones at the mouth of the passage. On her knees inching through briars. Inching forward to the edge. And nothing there at the drop. No matter which way she turned, the view the same. The world an egg blown clean.

  IV

  “They say, Honey, that cancer is the disease of new beginnings, the result of a few cells trying to start things up again.”

  “Your point being?” Honey was picking her teeth, weaving in and out of boardwalk traffic, deliberately allowing, it seemed to Clara, cyclists, skaters, parents pushing baby strollers, to come between them.

  “That it’s characteristic of these times, Honey. It signals the beginning of the new age. There’ll be epidemics. And folks, you know it, are not prepared.”

  “And so?”

  They were side by side now, veering around a “sidewalk” artist down on his knees, pushing a plate of colored chalks along the boards, drawing rapidly fantastic figures that stumped those strollers who paused to look, dripping the ice cream or sweaty cups of beer on the artwork. Together, they walked briskly past the restaurants and bars, the kiddie park, the wax museum, the horror house, finally talking. But Clara was still dissatisfied, had still not gotten said what she’d come to the beach to say to her only child. And she still did not altogether know what it was. When my time comes, Honey, release me ’cause I’ve work to do yet? Watch yourself and try not be pulled off of the path by your in-laws? Develop the gifts, girl, and try to push at least one life in the direction of resurrection?

  “You do understand about the money?” Clara was hugging close as marines, couples, teenagers walking four and five abreast, threatened to shove between them. She felt Honey’s arm stiffen as though she meant to pull away.

  “Money, money, money. I’m sick of the subject. Curtis, his mother … And his father, you know, has his eye on a liquor store and keeps asking me if …”

  An elderly couple clumping along in rubber-tipped walkers separated them. Then an Asian-American family Clara dimly recalled from the old neighborhood streamed between them, the mother spitting watermelon seeds expertly through the cracks in the boardwalk, the father popping kernels from what was evidently a very hot cob of corn, one youngster cracking into a sugar-glazed apple, the other absentmindedly plucking tufts of cotton candy from a paper cone as though it were a petaled daisy.

  Liquor store. Clara frowned, her face contorted from the effort to salute her old neighbors, answer Honey, and continue the dialogue on the inside all at the same time. And so she almost missed it, not the Fotomat Honey was pointing toward where summers before they’d horsed around, meeting up with odd characters they never told Jake and, later, Curtis about; posing as sisters or actresses fresh back from madcap adventures on the Orient Express, they would give each other fanciful names and outlandish histories to flirt with. She almost missed the tearoom. Jammed between the tattoo parlor and the bingo hall, looking tinier and tackier than she remembered it, was the tearoom where Clara had watched, under the steady gaze of Great Ma Drew, her work emerge clear and sharp from the dense fog of the crystal ball that good sense had taught her to scoff at till something more powerful than skepticism and something more potent than the markings on her calendar forced Clara’s eyes to acknowledge two events: motherhood, and soon (despite all the doctors had had to say about Jake’s sluggish sperm and her tilted uterus), and a gift unfolding right now, a gift that would enable Clara to train the child.

  Clara linked arms with Honey and steered her toward the tearoom with her hips. The woman, though, lounging against the Madame Lazar Tearoom sign was neither the seer Drew, nor any of the gypsified Gypsies or non-Gypsies that had taken over the business during Honey’s growing-up days. She was a young, mariny woman in a Donna Summer do—a weave job, Clara’s expert eye noted—wearing exactly the kind of jewelry and flouncy dress, vèvè-encrusted hem and metallic smocking in the bodice, that Clara always associated with the Ioa Urzulie Frieda. Clara felt Honey resisting, her hard bone pushing through flesh against her.

  “Sistuh, are you gifted?” Honey challenged, before Clar
a could speak, could get her balance, Honey still steeling herself against her.

  The woman’s eyes slid insolently over them. Clara was about to give in and let Honey steer along to the dunes, but the woman flashed, and Clara felt a reaching-out come in her direction, and then a mind probe, bold, prickly, and not at all gentle.

  “She’s telepathic,” Clara whispered, pulling Honey up short. “But can she see, I wonder. Can she see around the bend and probe the future?” Honey sucked her teeth and stood her ground between the two women. And now the woman smiled and Clara dropped Honey’s arm and dropped, too, her shield. At this point in time, Clara mused, I can afford to be open to anything and everything.

  “How far can you see?” Clara asked, setting up a chain reaction of questions on the inside for the woman to touch upon. She waited. In an open-bodied position, Clara invited the woman to move in.

  “Mama, come on, damnit.”

  And then Clara felt the woman withdraw. And it was Honey’s turn to smile. She was gifted, this new Madame Lazar. She was simpatico. But business is business, no freebies here. The woman slid her eyes over Honey in dismissal, and to Clara she jerked her chin in the direction of the incense-fragrant interior and passed, sashaying in her noisy crinolines and taffetas, through the curtain.

  “Oh no, you don’t,” Honey said, linking arms and shoving her hip hard against Clara’s, almost knocking her out of her clogs. “She has a gift alright, Mama, but no principles. Liable to put a hex on you,” she grinned, “plus take all your money. Let’s go.”

  “Now wait a minute.” Clara tried to disengage her arm and back up for a moment to get her thoughts lined up, but Honey was pulling her along like an irritated parent with an aggravating child. Hex, Clara thought, trying to get it organized. UF6, the gaseous form of uranium, was called hex and that was something to talk about. Gifts and principles—exactly the topic to get to an appraisal of the Center’s work. Money perfect. But Honey would not give her a moment. Who was the mother here anyway? Clara squinched up her toes, trying for traction, trying to dig in. She yanked hard on her daughter.

  “Whatcha so mad about, Mama?”

  “Well, damnit, what are you so angry about, and all week long too?” They were falling over the chalk artist, causing a pileup in front of the tattoo parlor. “You’re mad because I’m leaving you?” She was clutching the lapels of her daughter’s shirt, breathing hot breath into her face, her body shuddering. “Oh, girl, don’t you know it’s the way of things for children to bury their elders?” She barely had the strength to hold on as Honey dropped her face into her shoulders, pressing her beaded braids into Clara’s skin. They stood in the throng, getting bumped and jostled by sailors coming out of the parlor displaying their arms and banging each other on the back in congratulations.

  “Please, Honey, you say the words over me, hear? No highfalutin eulogies, OK? Don’t let them lie me into the past tense and try to palm me off on God as somebody I’m not, OK? And don’t let anybody insult my work by grieving and carrying on, OK? Cause I’m not at all unhappy, and Jake’s come to terms with it. I’ve still my work to do, whatever shape I’m in. I mean whatever form I’m in, you know? So OK, Honey? And don’t mess up, damnit.”

  “You and your precious work,” Honey hissed, catching Clara off-balance. And then a smile broke up her frown, the sun coming out, and Clara could bear the pain of the beads’ imprint. “Fess up, Mama,” grinning mischievously, “you’re mostly pissed about the five dollars for parking, aincha?”

  Someone on the dunes was singing, the music muted at first by the dark and the ocean breeze. Clara leaned back against Honey’s knees and issued progress reports on the boat. Decked out in banners and streamers for the occasion, flying its colors on the mast overhead, it was easing its cargo of fireworks out to the raft where T-shirted lifeguards and parkees in orange safety harnesses and bright helmets waited, eager to begin.

  She could feel Honey behind her—her knees softening at intervals, then jerking awake as the singer modulated—going to sleep.

  “Take care, Honey, that you keep your eyes sharp and spirit alert,” she instructed, her voice sounding to her already flat, lifeless, as if it traveled from a great distance and through a veil, vibrancy gone, her self removed to the very outskirts of her being, suspended over her flesh, over the sand, on the high note now sounding while the slap of the waves, a baby’s ball buffeted by the waters, was being sucked under the rocks of the breakwater wall, and bits of conversation from blankets around them and from the boardwalk overhead, and then even the high notes, churned below her.

  She was hanging in the music, in the swoop of the notes across the humps of the dunes so like beings rising from the sand, dipping down in sound between the childrens’ pail-castles and grown-ups’ plumped pillows, buoyed up again toward the moon, full, red and heavy, till the wail of a child and Honey’s jerking pulled her back again inside her skin. Being dragged past them by a mother determined to ignore her son’s bedtime tactic, a young child in a Hank Aaron shirt was trickling sand across Clara’s toes and bawling, his tiny hand digging up another fistful from a bulging pocket to trail sand across the tufts of dune grass and up the steps to the boardwalk gate, people shoving over as though they recognized this tribal wiseman spreading the time-running-fast message to the heedless, then making sand-paintings on the boards, chalkings, the ritual cure for sleepwalkers.

  “It begins,” Clara said. But still Honey did not sit up to appreciate the view. The fisherfolk had parked their poles and taken up their perch on the rocks, couples on blankets propped each other up, the boardwalk crowd bunched along the railing, the overflow packed on the top steps, leaning into the mesh of the gate—the vista was wide open for the first whoosh of yellow and pink that careened across the night sky. The ahhhhh from the crowd harmonizing with the singer climbing an octave and the bedtime boy still wailing and wheeling around in the chalk drawings, smearing and stamping. A rocket shot out across the waters and exploded into a shower of red, white and blue that fountained down at the far end of the breakwater wall.

  “Don’t miss this,” she said, her voice hollow again, drawn into the music, into the next burst of colors, pulses of energy like the frenzy of atoms like the buzzing of bees like the comings and goings of innumerable souls immeasurably old and in infinite forms and numerous colors. She was floating up, her edges blurring, her flesh falling away, the high note reachable now coming at her from nine different directions, sailing out with her past the boat’s flag, echoing through blue through time. And she was a point of light, a point of consciousness in the dark, looking down on her body accusingly—how could it let her go like that?—but ready to be gone and wanting too to go back and nestle inside her old self intimate and warm, skin holding her in, bone holding her up, blood flowing. Her body summoning not yet. Her daughter a magnet, drawing her back.

  A cluster of pinwheels came spinning from the boat deck, and the bedtime boy seemed content to whimper between wails. But the singer held on, leaning into the music, pressing sound into the colors. A salvo of sparklers shot out, streaking across the pinwheel’s paths, sizzling.

  She’d put sparklers on Honey’s birthday cake the year Alvin Ailey’s company came into town. Had thought it a brilliant change from pastel candles, but the children were frightened, leapt from the table, overturned the benches, dragged half of the tablecloth away in tatters, knocked over the ruffled cups of raisins and nuts, and the punch bowl too. She tried, as they scooted away bursting balloons which only made it worse, tried to explain, as they tripped entangled in crepe paper streamers and string, taking off to the woods before she could assure them, those children of the old neighborhood who’d never seen Chinese New Year, who’d never celebrated the Fourth of July with anything louder than an elder’s grunt “Independence for whom?” or “Freedom, my ass!” or anything noisier than a grease-popping what-the-hell barbecue, who’d never seen a comet or heard the planetarium’s version of asteroid, the running children who’d
never been ushered from bed to watch the street rebellions on TV or through the window and have explained why things were so—doing the hundred-yard dash to the woods fleeing sparklers, Honey right along with them, leaving her with frosting on her chin and hundreds of lessons still to teach.

  “You chuckling, coughing, crying, or what?” Honey’s voice was drowsy. And Clara didn’t know the answer, but remembered the twenty-five dollars’ worth of box-seat tickets to see the Ailey dancers, and the exhausted birthday sprinter falling asleep in the middle of Revelations, Jake shaking her by the shoulders to at least watch a few dollars’ worth.

  “That a human voice or what?” Honey sounded neither irritated nor curious, her way, Clara supposed, of letting her know she was still available for talk. The boy was still crying and the note was still holding as firecrackers went off, sounding powerful enough to launch a getaway spaceship. “Ain’t it the way,” Jake had said just that morning, huddled over the pale, “they mess up, then cut out to new frontiers to mess up again.” The singer climbing over the thundering, holding out past the crowd’s applause, past the crowd’s demand for release, past endurance for even extraordinary lungs, the note drawn thin and taut now like a wire, a siren, the parkees, looking now like civil defense wardens sending up flares from the shoot machines, cannons. And still the singer persisted, piercing, an alarm, step-sitters twisting round in annoyance now, the first wave of anger shaking through the crowd at the railing, a big man shoving through to the gate and to hell with a dune pass, heroic, on the hunt for the irritant to silence it. Then a barrage of firecrackers heading straight across the water, caused many to duck before reminding themselves, embarrassed, that this was Sunday at the beach, holiday entertainment and all’s well.