Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  “A jug of wine, a crust of pizza and thou for Crissake,” someone was saying. Then the note shuddered to a gasping halt and the bedtime boy’s wail was cut short by a resounding slap heard on the dunes. After a faint ripple of applause, attention turned fully to the lifeguards prying open the last crate, the parkees spinning out the remaining pinwheels to hold the audience until the specialty works that would spell out a message, the final event, could be crammed into the cannons and fired off.

  “Girl, wake up and watch my money.”

  Honey, knees wobbled against Clara’s back, glanced round and smiled at her efforts to come awake and keep her mother company.

  There was no way she could carry her child to the car anymore, lay her down gently in the back seat, cover her over with a dry towel, and depend on tomorrow for what went undone today. Clara turned toward the water and joined the people, attentive to the final event about to light up the sky.

  MADAME BAI AND THE TAKING OF STONE MOUNTAIN

  I

  Headachy from the double feature, she tells Tram and Mustafa that she’ll take a rain check on beer and carousing. The rest of the household, after all, expect her back by ten o’clock for an English conversation lesson.

  “A coffee?” Mustafa suggests.

  She frowns. Tram frowns. They stand there, jostled by the people coming out of the Rialto. She views it all as a tableau: three figures in the city landscape, winter gray, winter gray, reward posters on poles. Then as a bit of footage when they move along. That is what seeing her neighborhood, her city constantly on the news, has done to her perception.

  Mustafa shrugs. “Home then.” His coat, elegantly draped around his shoulders, falls in soft, straight folds, his sleeves swinging like regal robes as he saunters across the street to get a paper. From the back he could be her father. All he needs, she’s thinking, is a horn case and his beret a little more ace-deuce.

  She stands hipshot at the curb as her mother would, but she does not tap her foot. She can’t chance it, the wind beating at her back and she still wobbly from that particular loss. It’s a new way to be in the world, she’s been discovering, unmothered.

  “Rain check?” Tram gazes at the wintry sky, perplexed wrinkles scarring his broad-boned cheeks. She explains the figure of speech, the wind now at her throat, shoving the words back to her. Tram listens, his arms crossed in front, hands shoved up his quilted sleeves, an untippable figure, a pyramid. She shifts her weight to match his stance.

  Two young bloods, in defiance of the curfew, shoot out of Luckie Street and race between cars bouncing over the parking lot braker. Mustafa, reading the headlines aloud, rejoins his companions. She zooms in on the newsprint type, then looks away, not correcting Mustafa’s pronunciation. She widens the lens to incorporate a blind man tapping along the pavement toward them. There is, she decides, too lively a curiosity behind his shades. She watches warily as the man stops by the boys inspecting the kung fu posters outside the movie house. The boys move on and so does the man, his chin stuck out as if to sniff the wind, the aromas from the restaurant, the boys. She tenses. To her list of suspects—Klan, cops, clergy, little old ladies with cookies, young kids in distress used to lure older ones, adults in Boy Scout gear—she now adds blind people.

  “Oh God,” she mutters, stopping. The blind man, hooking his cane in the crook of his arm, picks up his pace, tailing after the boys. She opens her mouth again to call out a warning, clutching a fistful of Mustafa’s mohair sleeve as if that will anchor her for the bellow. The boys race down a side street toward the bus stops by Central City Park. The blind man continues on straight ahead toward Marietta. She exhales.

  “Yes?” Mustafa is studying her, his eyebrows arched so hard in query, his narrow forehead all but disappears under his beret. Tram, hunched up like all of Atlanta, shivery and intense, growls, “What?”

  She flops her hands around, helpless. The two men exchange a look. Their landlady/friend/English instructor bears watching, the look says. Tram lifts an elbow for her to catch on to. Mustafa tucks the newspapers away, not bothering to pull his sweater cuffs down. She hesitates to take his arm. His wrists are deformed. He swings his coat open like a cape and invites her in. They move up Forsyth, heads ducked, bodies huddled. She’s grateful, wedged between the two, for the warmth, support. And grateful too that Mustafa has not offered his latest theory on the missing and murdered children. He’s not in the habit of talking freely in the streets. He reserves his passionate tirades against global fascism to the late-night talk fests in the kitchen, having learned a hard lesson.

  They hung him from the ceiling by the wrists. The same Israelis whose parents had had them baptized in ’36, then sent to the convent school in Mustafa’s district to save them from the Nazis. The same school Coptic Christians of the district sent their children to, to save them from the backwardness of Jordanian society. The same district whose faithful evicted the French nuns to save Islam from the infidels. The same infidels who turned the city over to the invading Israelis, grown and in uniform, claiming God’s real estate covenant, who converted the old convent into an Army base to save the city from terrorists. Mustafa, a brash young student then, had been relating this history to a companion when they grabbed him and dragged him off for interrogation on the ropes.

  “Whatcha got up your sleeves, Chinaman?”

  She cannot believe her ears. They heard that selfsame line delivered just moments before in badly dubbed stereophonic sound, followed by a whistling knife spun from a tobacco brown silk sleeve that pinned the speaker’s shoulder blade to a beam in the rice shop. Courtesy of Hong Kong Eternal Flame Films, Ltd.

  Four white punks in gray hooded sweatsuits have slipped up alongside, cutting them off. They carry what looks like a three-foot grappling hook, something you’d use to drag the river with. She freezes.

  “Whatsa matter?” the leader leers, jiggling the pole. “No speaky de English?” The Confederate flag snaps down at the sharpened end.

  Mustafa slides away and quickly rolls his paper into a bat. Tram gets into a crouch, staring hard at the belt buckle insignia of the big-bellied punk. In the East it would be the reassuring shorinji kempo symbol, but in the West, the interlocking Z’s have been corrupted into the swastika. They’re jabbing the pole straight at Tram’s midsection, the flag snapping like a whip, like teeth. She fingers the pick comb in one pocket, her key ring in the other.

  “Chinky Chinaman no speaka de English.” The leader with hobnailed wristbands grins to his cohorts. “Speak gook then,” he prods Tram, no grin.

  Tram leaps back, then lunges suddenly into a high-kicking spin, pulling his fists out of his sleeves as he lands. Two of the punks slam hard against the doughnut-shop window. The others stumble between the newspaper boxes near the curb. The sound of the crash, of the hubbub as diners move from the counter of the shop to the window, the resounding clang as the pole hits cement, shuddering underfoot, propels her. Mustafa gets off a few good whacks before his weapon buckles. She’s leaning hard on the punk against the window, her pick in his gut, her keys grating against the bridge of his nose. Tram pulls her away to make room. She drags the punk with her.

  “The cruel and lively Thai boxer legs,” Mustafa announces to the crowd joining them, bouncing the big-bellied one off the Wall Street Journal box and letting him fall hard against the Atlanta Journal/Constitution’s. She hears glass shatter and expects to see the doughnut shop window in a slow-motion breakaway. She brings her knees up into the punk’s groin, then rams both elbows down hard in a V between his collarbones. He goes down.

  Tram’s final spin ends with one foot catching the leader on the side of the head, the other foot shoving Big Belly into the street. The other two are scrambling backward in a spatter of glass. She’s kicking at them while Mustafa, his coat blown to the ground, backs them into the gutter. Brakes screech, tires squeal, as the hooded ones race across toward the construction site, leaping hurdles of haystacks and sandbags.

  “Well alright
, alright.” A brother in seaman’s cap and sweater, jelly on his front teeth, dusty sugar down his front, slaps Tram on the back in appreciation, pokes Mustafa in the shoulder and helps him on with his coat. He bends and retrieves her keys, his body moving in sportscaster reply.

  “That was something,” he says, raising his hand high to give five, hesitating as though not sure who to give it to. She extends her hand, family. He sizes her up, considering—twentyish, Red Bone, krinkly riney fringe ridging the edges of her hat. She knows that look. It’s a stingy five he gives as though she, skin-privileged, doesn’t need it. And then his hand slides away, leaving the keys and leaving her with a bad feeling.

  “Really something,” he says over his shoulder, the Hawk spurring him and the crowd back inside.

  Mustafa brushes off his coat. Tram stands back hard on his heels, squinting toward the construction site awaiting a sneak attack of rocks and rubble. His calves strain against denim in back, thighs bulging in front, wind plastering his sweater against his chest so that eight separate segments of abdominal muscles lift like bas relief. He looks like sculpture, she’s thinking, though the sculptor in the household has long since made that observation. The raised scar on his rib cage like a length of packing twine, the quilted jacket a packing mat—statuary ready for shipping. They hook arms again and move to the bus stop, saluted by raised coffee mugs and banging soup spoons as they pass the shop.

  She hopes the bus will be overheated. Though her companions shelter her from the wind, she is chilled through, brittle, on the brink of cracking. They talk across her, warm breath smoke signals. They speak to each other across a colonial bridge, in French, Mustafa reliving the battle so much more graphic than the kitchen demonstrations Tram gives at the house, Tram complaining that breaking bones is not why he studies the arts, not why he’s come all the way to Atlanta to await the arrival of the celebrated Madame Bai.

  “Clearly, my friend”—Mustafa switches to her colonial tongue—“the first to make the phrase ‘What is up the sleeve, Chinaman?’ did not meet a warrior before.” He invites her to join him in a chuckle. She can’t risk it. She’s clamping down hard, jaws tight, stomach clenched.

  “I’m Vietnamese,” Tram says flatly, ignoring the compliment and peering for the bus.

  “The scoundrels cannot know this,” Mustafa says. “Chinese, Laotian, from Korea or Japan—all as same the things,” he says, drawing two tapered fingers close together and mumbling “Meme chose,” having bungled the idiom in English.

  She does not offer instruction. Tram has shoved two blunt-nailed fingers in her face, offering them up for examination. These fingers, he has explained at length at the house, he will return home with and help heal the wounds of war.

  “Two fingers,” he says, shoving them toward Mustafa, “and I can work. Go in”—probing Mustafa’s lapel—“find disease, snatch it too quick for scar tissue to wake.” He snips off a button and drops it into Mustafa’s palm.

  “Fine hands,” Mustafa mumbles, pocketing it.

  “For health, not breaking bones.” Tram adjusts his clothes, fingering the ridge through his sweater. He fastens the toggles of his jacket and shoves his hands hard up his sleeves.

  A healer from the Montagnard hills sealed Tram’s gash with a mud-and-dung pack, then bound the ribs with vines, and brewed a tea for the fever. Tram, a young schoolboy, had been dragged from the schoolhouse by Diem’s secret police and tortured in order to break the schoolmaster down. His tormenters would gain international notoriety that same year as the designers of the infamous, crippling tiger cages.

  “You are offended to be called Chinese?” Mustafa grins, trying to fit a cigarette into his ivory holder. His hands are shaking, she notices. She looks away. “You are jealous maybe of the great Chinese?”

  “What Chinese have?” Tram growls, taking the bait.

  “Fried noodles and Bruce Lee.” It’s not the usual taunt Mustafa offers that plunges the whole household into heated debate as to whether Mao makes it a gang of five.

  “Chao Gio restaurant on Peachtree have fried noodles,” says Tram. “And Bruce Lee, the myope and luster after things Western, is dead.”

  Mustafa shrugs, but his coat refuses to drape in its usual regal manner. His fingers, clumsy, shred tobacco down his coat, ruining what might have been an elegant portrait: Jordanian poet, ivory tusk smoldering, cape blown against body, high collar misterioso. He tosses the broken cigarette away and pockets the holder. She winces. He looks like something out of Madame Tussaud’s. She thinks of her mother, waxy and spent.

  “There will be news on the television,” Mustafa says quietly, fishing out his bus pass. “Another child found murdered.”

  Tram catches her from behind under the armpits. Mustafa leads her to the curb, rummaging in his pockets for a hanky. She dumps lunch into the gutter.

  II

  Madame Bai arrives on a drizmal day the week of the inauguration. There are two kung fu movies playing at the Rialto. There are always two kung fu movies playing at the Rialto. The bill is not in honor of the warrior-healer celebrated in shaolins and ashrams around the globe, revered by every master of the arts, quoted in all the texts. The Tai Chi Association near Lenox Plaza silk-screens new T-shirts. But the yin-yang figure is not bordered by the ideograms that hallmark the flag of Madame’s nation, Korea. Her presence in the city is not the occasion for the new apparel. Not a line of copy is devoted to her coming to Atlanta, magnet now for every amateur sleuth, bounty hunter, right-wing provocateur, left-wing adventurer, do-gooder, soothsayer, porno filmmaker, scoop journalist, crack shot, or cool-out “leader” not born from the fire of struggle.

  The Reagans, Carters, and the hostages home from Iran hog the news. The best of medical and psychological attention is mobilized for the hostages. Less than little is available for the Vietnam vets suffering from shell shock, stress, and Agent Orange genetic tampering. Gifts of things, of cash, of promising jobs, await the returnees. But a minister in Cleveland gets on TV to tell people not to send a dime to the parents in Atlanta. “They were getting along alright without us before their children got killed. They can get along alright without our help now.” And the media ferret out still one more “leader” to say “The mothers are cashing in,” or “Not racially motivated,” or “No connection with violence against Blacks in other places.” And the FBI with poison pen leaks “The parents are not above suspicion.” And as solidarity groups form and a movement seems to mount—“The parents did it.”

  In the northeast section of the city, yellow ribbons snap from flag poles, trees, door knockers, wrists. In the southwest green ribbons and black armbands are worn solemnly. The red, white and blue waves merrily over articles in Thunderbolt and Soldier of Fortune that urge good Christians to prepare for race war now that niggers, gooks, and commie jews and other mongrels are rising to take over God’s country.

  Tram runs a vacuum over the dining room floor, lifting the skirt of the tablecloth pointedly to route the household from its roundtable discussion over the latest National States Rights party rag which features faces of Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, and presumable Jews superimposed on apes’ bodies. Mustafa, an elaborate headdress of pillowcases protecting his hair, goes to tack the Korean flag on the door and hang a sign of welcome for Madame Bai. Panos, at the top of his lungs, sings anti-junta songs and restrings his oud. Jean-Claude takes up his position at the ironing board, composing aloud angry op-eds on the refugee situation. Maaza, the Ethiopian filmmaker, and Madas, the Chilean novelist, snap out the sheets and fold, eager to collaborate on a project showcasing the celebrated visitor, English narration to be supplied by their landlady/English instructor/ friend.

  She’s in the kitchen inching out saffron into the rice, explaining to the couple from Bahia mincing peppers that democratic action can be taken too far. A collective vote was made to postpone English lessons—and with it, her salary—until Madame is settled in her studio school. Tram drowns out her complaints, calling over the vacuum and
the singing, to review once more the self-defense system Madame Bai has designed especially for women, a sleight-of-hand placement on critical organs while maintaining an ingratiating mien that psyches out the aggressor. So quick a placement, it bypasses the eye. So deft a grip on a critical organ, the mind is discouraged.

  “Days to follow,” Mustafa, on cue, calls out from the doorway, “the rogue is coughing up blood and urinates rust. Kidney punctured.”

  “But illusion of tough intact,” croons Panos.

  “And not a clue as to who, what, when, why or how,” drawls Maaza, bored.

  “Yeh,” she hollers from the kitchen. “And all you need to apply is seven years of anatomy and fifteen degrees in one or more of the martial arts.”

  She is prepared for a light-filled imminence to grace them in the parlor, for an amazon to perform strike rock fist on the door, for Madame to pole-vault dragon fire through the window, pigtail flying, or to materialize ninja-style in the shadows of the fireplace. They assemble in the living room to wait like schoolchildren, the house aromatic with rosemary, curry, ouzu, and stinking with nuoc mam that could not be voted down, though close, five to three. Madame Bai arrives like an ordinary person, steps in behind Tram on soft cloth shoes, bows, sits, eats, pins and unpins the iron gray topknot held together by golden, carved fibulae. With Tram as translator, Madame jokes, converses and proves herself to be the sagelike wonder he’d promised all along. By 9 P.M. Madame has stolen away all of her students. A collective decision is made to redistribute the usual thirty dollars a week for room, board and English lessons into fifteen dollars for her and fifteen dollars for Madame.