Thunder In Her Body

by C. B. Stanton

  “People who pass generally live a lie, and live most of their lives in terror of being discovered. That’s a dreadful way to live,” Lynette explained dispassionately. “For men and women of child-bearing age, they fear that genetics will expose them, and they’ll have a child or children who are obviously of mixed race. You can’t have two supposed white parents producing a tanned child with kinky hair without suspicion and tremendous recrimination. On top of that, passing means giving up all semblances of relationships from the birth family. Or at best, having a secret family that no one can ever know about. Making up stories of why you have no other family, to conceal the truth; or hoping that you never open your front door, and find a relative from that part of the family, standing there. Think how easy it would be to be blackmailed, especially if your life was in the public eye or you’d achieved some sort of social prominence. Oh, passing seems so easy, until you measure the costs. Women have been beaten, turned out into the streets, sold into prostitution or worse yet, killed for being discovered as a racial fraud. There can be a high cost to pass for white in America, with black blood running in the veins,” she concluded. She was silent for a moment, as Blaze observed pain beginning to show on her face. Racism in America was hard to understand, even for a woman of Lynette’s intelligence and education.

  “My mother’s life might have been so very different if she had passed. With her drive and determination, her innate intelligence and education, she might’ve had lots of career choices. She chose to teach and she left a legacy in the lives of her students. Who knows who she would have married? But then, she wouldn’t have had me, and I probably wouldn’t have met Blaze. I can’t imagine going through this life without him, even though we found each other late in life. So, as most things turn out, something very good came from Mama’s decision to honor the black blood in her. When you think of it, that’s a privilege white people don’t have. Mama had a choice. It doesn’t matter that it was made because of the ingrained racism in America and the terrible cost of crossing the invisible color line. She had a choice, and she gave up possible wealth and privilege in order to live an authentic life,” Lynette said, with a tiny smile creeping across her lips. She took no insult from Aaron’s question. She only wondered why it hadn’t been raised earlier.

  Lynette walked out of the room for a few minutes, then returned in the way women do when they’re not finished with an argument or felt a need to continue the conversation.

  “I’m gonna share this with you. I’ve told Blaze this. I’ve always been in a unique position in this color-conscious world, and yes, I have taken advantage of it. I sometimes get to know the inner workings of other people’s minds just because of my color. Sometimes white people, slip and say what they really mean among their peers. Now I don’t want to intimate that all of them do it, but trust me, it’s more common than one might think. Anyway, they utter statements about them or those people, or that kind. Sometimes they just come on out and say nigger, kike, spick or wetback, when they feel safe around people who might share their views. Oh, they’ll deny on a stack of bibles that they have racist views, but when you scratch the surface, there it is. We’ve heard elected officials slip. I remember many years ago when I was a social worker, one of the agency directors told a stupid joke about tying little black boys to fishing poles as bait to catch alligators in Louisiana. He thought it was funny. As the words came out of his mouth, more than half the assembled group was deadly silent and looked at me to get my reaction to so senseless and ignorant a joke. I’m sure one of his aides later told him why his “joke” fell flat. He didn’t know that a black woman was sitting in his midst, only about five chairs from him. So you see, I’ve been privy to conversations and actions of people who felt safe with expressing their views, most of which were and are based on out-dated, unexplored stereotypes. But people like me really get to measure the barometer of racism here in this country. The comfortable theme is to say that it is dead here in America. Oh, if only the truth was really told! Racism, bigotry is alive and well all over this country. On the other side of the coin, I’ve been around lots and lots of blacks – remember we’re now African-Americans – who resent me, or at best are suspicious of me because I look white. They don’t feel they can trust me because they know that I’d probably get services, privileges, or accommodations that they’d be denied. And they’re right. In the worst case scenario, that I’d sell out to any white faction to get favors for myself personally. There’s racism on both sides of the coin. It is degrading and restrictive. I’ve been in department stores where no one paid attention to my shopping, but followed a darker-skinned African-American customer around watching to see if they were trying to steal something, just because they were obviously black. This color thing in America is insanity. It defies reason. Yet we hear all the time on TV, and in the media how color-blind America is. And that’s bull! In another instance, how many movies or television productions do we see about Native-Americans that are positive. Most of it is about the abject poverty on the reservations; suicide rates and murders. They’re either depicted as the noble savages or just ignorant savages. The pity of it is that we are all the same. We may have definite and identifiable DNA traits in the human genome, but we’re all human. We all bleed. We all give birth in a human way and none of us get out of this life alive. When our time is used up, we die. How we live in between is what matters, and frankly, color doesn’t or shouldn’t matter. Somehow, some people just believe they have to be better than someone else, and to bolster themselves that way they have to dehumanize others; pick categories of people. I never will forget what happened when I treated my sister to an Alaskan cruise. We were assigned to an eight-person table for dinner. When I sat down everyone was friendly. My sister wanted to run to the gift shop before dinner, so she was delayed at first. Everyone was fine. The couple who sat across the table from me said they were from Georgia. Of course they were curious about Texas. Both of them conversed, though the husband was somewhat quieter. He was friendly though. When my sister, who is obviously black, arrived and sat down at the table, his head sort of jerked back and he kept looking from her to me with a frown. From then on he was silent, but he kept staring at her. Before the dessert was served, he left the table and never returned. In fact, for the duration of the next five nights, he never came back to the dinner table. Everyone else inquired about him, thinking he had come down ill or something. His wife, who did come back for a few of the dinners, made excuses for his absence. I strongly suspect that he couldn’t countenance eating dinner with a black woman, or black women, once he realized I, too, was black .If I’m correct, he couldn’t go back to wherever he came from and admit that he had dined with some nigras. My sister and I thought it was pitiful, but then it was his loss. We made friends at that table and his poor wife, who was very pleasant, ate her sumptuous dinners with us but without him. As the slaves used to say, ‘How long oh Lord, how long?’” Lynette walked slowly out of the room again, leaving both men quiet. Thinking.

  Chapter 34

  ¤

  The Mountain

  As time went on, Lynette stopped dying her hair. It had nothing to do with Blaze as his beautiful locks continued to turn silver. She just decided to be more natural. It was time she let the examples of graceful aging take their place in her life. Still, at over 60, she didn’t look more than a woman in her late forties. Living good, loving lives was good for them both. He stopped aging – just stopped. There were no more lines in his face than the day he and Lynette met. And his bride, his wife, still had no crow’s feet around her eyes. He joked with her about that – how young she looked, and he was sincere. She always told him that the lines were there, they were just filled with adipose tissue. That was one of the benefits of being zaftig – Rubenesque, filled-out! Blaze liked the way she filled out her jeans, too, and whenever he could, he got into them. He was just a horny, virile old man, and she figured at this rate, they’d still be bouncing around on their mattress into their eighti
es. He reminded her that he had degrees in Biology, and he had identified her as his special bird – a brown-breasted, coral-lipped mattress thrasher!

  Lynette could only ascribe Blaze’s virility and continued stamina to the strength of his breed and the incredibly difficult training he had to undergo to become a Navy Seal. Then, too, ranch work was hard, and he worked hard, keeping his body in relatively good shape. On the other hand, she was just a “strumpet in disguise,” and she’d been horny since she was about twelve. What a match they were for each other. And what an idealic life they had together, in this most beautiful spot in the whole of New Mexico, with Sierra Asombroso looming majestically above them.

  Yet this mountain, the mountain that she loved so dearly, almost took him away from her. During the winter that BC was ten – the winter with the highest snowfall recorded in over 40 years, Blaze took some friends skiing in her bowl. There had been avalanche warnings posted for about a week, but with shells shot into the overhanging snow ledges, dislodging them, the adjacent slopes were declared safe for expert skiers. With companions challenging him on virgin snowfall, he and the four other men locked on their goggles, adjusted their clamp-on boots and headed downhill on a black-diamond run. They let out individual yells as each launched themselves forward, carving wide S’s as they careened toward the bottom of the slope. The run was fast, the cold air stung their faces and the emerging sun made the snow glisten like billions of white diamonds. Toward the midway portion of the run, they heard a crack – a sharp crack – as if a huge tree had snapped in half. They turned to see the first horizontal break in the snow pack working its way across the upper level of their run, then came the roar. A deafening roar, and the earth shook beneath their skis.

  With poles digging deep for speed and traction, the five men moved with breakneck speed down the mountain, trying to stay ahead of the cascading avalanche. But, with the snow moving down at as much as one-hundred miles an hour, there was no way to outrun the flow. Beckoning with one ski pole, Blaze tried to lead the group to the side of the avalanche in a futile attempt to get out of the oncoming rush, but it caught up with them and all five disappeared in the white cloud. Then as fast as it had begun, the snow stopped moving far below where the men had been trapped – and all was silent.

  The expert group of ski rescue personnel, which included several of Blaze’s Apache tribesmen, suited up their rescue dogs and organized an immediate search party. As far as they knew, there were only five men on that run. From the air, red jackets appeared to move back and forth in a systematic pattern, searching for the trapped skiers. The dogs hurled themselves through the deep snow, sniffing periodically and moving on. The rescue team stuck long poles down into the snow hoping to touch a man. After more than two hours, one of the veteran dogs started digging furiously at a site. The rescue team pushed her aside and began digging with their bare hands. A ski pole was the first object to appear, and beneath it was a yellow and black gloved hand, then another. Now digging with small snow spades, the upper torso of a man appeared. He yelled that his friend was beneath him, and the rescue team began digging the hole wider as the first man was extricated. As his boots exited the hole, they could see the orange and black knit cap of the other man. In a matter of seconds, the second man was up and out of the hole. Higher up the slope, two of the dogs alerted on another spot, and began their characteristic digging. At about twenty feet apart from one another, these two more men were dug from beneath the packed snow. But where was Blaze?

  Using lanterns and torches, calling and punching holes in the snow, the rescue teams of men and dogs continued to search for Blaze long after darkness overtook them. The command from headquarters was to cease the search until daylight the next day, and it was Aaron who took the call from the slopes. With no hat or gloves on, and his jacket wide open, Aaron appeared white-faced at Lynette’s door.

  “What’s wrong?” she immediately asked, seeing the terror on Aaron’s face. “Say something damn it, what’s wrong?” she asked again impatiently.

  “It’s Blaze. There’s been an avalanche. They haven’t found him yet,” Aaron said breathlessly. “Now don’t panic. They’ll find him. They just had to call off the search until first light in the morning,” he tried to assure Lynette.

  She stood looking at Aaron in disbelief. She neither moved nor spoke. She just stared at his face. She kept staring as if she was trying to tune into something, but she never spoke. Slowly she walked away from the door. Stopping momentarily, she looked back at Aaron, who was truly dismayed by her behavior. He thought she should scream or break down in tears, but she did nothing. She just stared at him.

  “Lynette, did you understand what I said?” he asked, not sure what to do or say.

  Her eyes began to move sideways, back and forth, back and forth, the way a person scans the ground with a metal detector. She was looking for something, Aaron could tell, but he wanted a response from her. This was not normal. Lynette walked slowly out of the foyer, down the hall and into her bedroom where she stood in front of the huge glass bay window. She stared up at the silhouette of the mountain, but still she said nothing.

  “Goddamnit Lynette, say something,” Aaron demanded as he followed her into

  the room.

  Still she did not speak. Aaron advanced toward her to shake her, to make her say something, but before his hand touched her shoulder, she said, “Don’t! Don’t touch me.”

  Aaron withdrew his hand quickly and shoved it into his coat pocket. She placed her hands up over her face, covering her entire face, and she began to breathe deeply. Four or five times she breathed deeply, raising her shoulders high, then letting them slowly relax.

  “Take me up the road to the slope,” she said to Aaron, with no emotion in her voice.

  “That road is hell at night, Lynette. You know that, and they probably won’t let anyone up there until everyone is found,” he protested.

  She didn’t argue with him. Reaching beside the night stand, she picked up her purse and pulled car keys from it’s inside pocket.

  “Oh no you don’t, damnit woman, you ain’t gonna tackle that road at night,” Aaron protested futilly.

  She turned to him with a look he’d only seen on her face once before. It was cold, mean and determined. Her eyes squinted into narrow slits.

  “My husband is on that mountain and there’s not a motherfucker in this world that can keep me off it,” she spewed at Aaron. Knowing Lynette, he knew she was right.

  “OK, shit, I’ll drive,” he relented. “Get your coat or you’ll freeze your ass off,” he directed.

  At no time did Lynette utter another word on the scary forty minute drive up to the ski slopes. From the reflected glare of his headlights, he could see her eyes moving side to side, scanning for something. When they reached the office where the assembled rescue team was disrobing and tending to the dogs, she walked like a zombie through the door. Two of Blaze’s rescued companions stayed at the shack with the rescuers, waiting to see what they could do to help. The other two were sent down the mountain to the hospital. They looked ragged and worn, but the two men stood immediately when Lynette entered through the wind-driven door.

  “Where did you find the men?” she asked in an eerily calm voice. The team leader took her and Aaron over to the large map on the wall and pointed to the two spots where the men had been extricated.

  “Mrs. Snowdown, there’s nothing else we can do tonight, ma’m. We’ll start out at first light in the morning. I’m sure we will find him one way…” and his voice trailed off. Lynette stared at the oversized topographical map for a long time, as if reading something from the swirls and rises, then turned abruptly and walked out onto the wooden deck of the headquarters shack. She stared up the slope and she just stood still.

  “Talk to me Blaze,” she said in her mind. “Call me. Speak to me. I won’t let you go. Talk to me. Talk to me,” she kept demanding in her mind. Aaron stepped up behind her. “Don’t touch me,” she said in a strange whis
per. For over an hour, she stood exposed in the freezing night. Ice crystals clung to her hair and her ears were red and burning, but she stood, looking up at the mountain. The men inside kept urging Aaron to bring her back inside where it was warm, but he knew not to touch her, even if he didn’t know why.

  “Blaze. Blaze. Blaze. Blaze, call me,” she was now screaming in her mind. All of a sudden she wheeled around and burst back through the door into the brightly lit shack.

  “He’s up there. He’s alive. We have to go get him now,” she shouted. “He’ll die up there if we don’t.”

  “Ma’m we can’t go back up there in the dark,” the team leader protested.

  “Yes, by God you can,” she insisted angrily. “You have snow cats. You have plows with lights on them. You have snow-making tractors. I’ve watched them moving up and down these slopes too many nights from my bedroom window. You’ve got snowmobiles. You can get a vehicle up this damn mountain. You will! You will!” she demanded. “I know where he is,” she shouted. She moved quickly over to the map and placed her open palm on a part of the mountain not too far off the run where the avalanche took place. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and bowed her head. “He’s here – he’s somewhere in here,” she said, certainty in her voice.

  “Mrs. Snowdown, there’s no way you can know that. There was no trace of him anywhere near where we found the others. The dogs would have alerted,” the second team member spoke up, keeping his voice soft and controlled. Aaron spoke up.

  “Listen man, I can’t tell you how I know she’s probably right, but trust me, if she says he’s somewhere up there, and he’s alive, you’ve got to trust her. Damn the cost to the county. I’ll pay whatever are the expenses for the fuel, the drivers, whatever it costs, to fire up those damned tractors and go where she says,” he insisted.