Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions

by Toni Cade Bambara

  All weekend we tried to scheme up ways to take our wall back. Daddy said we were getting sickening about it. Mama said to sit down and be quiet. My grandparents said to quit dropping cake crumbs between the sofa cushions. Me and Lou were miserable until a movie came on about New York. In one scene a train pulled into the station covered from top to bottom, side to side, windows too, with drawings and writings done with spray paint. Granddaddy said the ones who did it should have to scrub it clean with toothbrushes. Grandma said it was a shame kids in New York didn’t have something better to do … like chores. Mama said, “Hrmph,” And Daddy was asleep. So he didn’t see me and Lou slap five. We couldn’t wait to get back to the block.

  We couldn’t find a can of black spray anywhere. But in a junky little hardware store downtown, we put our allowance together and bought a can of white epoxy, the kind you touch up old refrigerators with when you’re trying to sell them. We’d spent our carfare, and it was too late to use our schoolbus passes. We had to walk home lugging our books, our gym shoes and shorts, and the bag with the can of spray paint.

  When we got to the corner, it looked like a block party. The only things missing were the food stalls. The whole neighborhood had turned out, gathered on the sidewalk. Side Pocket and his buddies were standing leaning on their cue sticks, hunching each other. Daddy was there with one of the linemen he catches a lift with sometimes. Mrs. Morris had her arms stretched wide, resting on the shoulders of her children on either side of her. Mama was talking with her cooking spoon, looking like a drum majorette leading a parade. Customers were standing with her, napkins silly at the throat. Mr. Eubanks came out, followed by a man in a striped poncho, half his face shaved, the other half full of foam.

  “She really did it, didn’t she?” Mr. Eubanks huffed out his chest like he’d just performed major surgery and the patient lived. “Didn’t she though?” He started pressing people around him. Lots of people answered quick when they saw the razor in his hand, but you could tell he didn’t know he had it, which made it all the funnier to me.

  Mama called us over. And then we saw it—the wall.

  ICE

  None of the grown-ups can look us kids in the face because of the puppies. They must have been squealing in the cold, and Lady, the mama dog, probably raced from door to door scratching and howling trying to get somebody’s attention. It must have been awful for her. The grown-ups can’t say they weren’t around and didn’t know the pups were freezing, because every single one of them was at home all day long. Folks who work at the post office work nights. Folks who work at the hospital are still out on strike. Folks who work at the bottling plant were laid off till further notice. And folks who work in the city were excused from their jobs because the highways aren’t clear yet.

  Seems to me the old men who live on the corner with the meanest dog in the world could have taken the puppies in, put them in a box with an old sock or two, and set them in the basement away from Mean Dog. And the crazy old lady who lives at the other end of the block could have called them in. They would have come. Puppies don’t have any better sense than to come to a crazy old calling lady. Somebody should have helped Lady, for there’s just so much a mama can do. At least that’s what my mama is always saying when she throws down the dish towel and stomps off to her studio back of the house.

  We kids left for school this morning muffled to our eyes in pulled-up collars and yanked-down caps and scarves wrapped round and round like bandits. We stumbled along to the bus in layers and layers of clothing, shouting to Lady to get her pups out of the street. Little Marcy was shooing them away from Mean Dog’s yard because Mean Dog is likely to break his chain and attack anything and everything in sight. Last month, for example, when Lady’s litter was barely walking, he broke loose and got hold of three pups. Our parents kept calling us in. The weatherman had said a storm was coming up fast. But we were busy beating Mean Dog with our book satchels and lunch buckets to make him let go of the puppies. It was like a shark movie when Mean Dog got hold of the runt and that furry little head started disappearing into that huge mouth. But then Tommy Jeeter came by on his skate board, and that was the perfect thing to go upside that mean dog’s head with. He kept twisting around growling and snapping at us, but we kept shoving that skate board at him. Tommy Jeeter grabbed one of the pups and I grabbed the other. And for one wonderful moment, Mean Dog dropped the runt and backed off and Marcy almost got it. But then his huge white paw came down on the poor thing like a stone. And it got mashed so hard into the ground, you couldn’t tell mud from pup from grass.

  So Marcy was shooing the puppies away from Mean Dog’s yard, and Marcy’s mother kept hollering for her to get on the school bus with the rest of us stumbling aboard in our fat clothes like helpless astronauts. We were mumbling about the wonderful thank-you cards we would send the mayor for sending an emergency school bus and messing up our holiday. And then we were banging on the windows, trying to tell anybody who could hear us to get Lady and her puppies out of the cold.

  Aunt Myrtle was in the driveway pouring steaming water on her car door, trying to get the lock to unfreeze. But when she saw that the key would still not turn, she just dropped the kettle right there in the driveway and scooted back into the house. It was that cold. My mama was waving the bus good-bye from the warm side of the storm door, wrapped in two quilts mummy-style with my old skating cap on her head, so I doubt she could hear. My stepfather and the two other men who led the strike at the hospital were on the curb, talking, beating their gloves together, jumping up and down in their boots and explaining ways to keep warm. At our house, we’d been burning the telephone books, the Christmas tree, gift boxes, even my old doll-house—anything that fits in the fireplace and will give heat.

  Just as the school bus pulled off, it skidded on a skin of ice on the sewer grating that’s home plate in nice weather. And right away all the parents huddled in doorways in bathrobes and coats and blankets started hollering directions to the driver to cut his wheels this way and pump the pedal that way. They were making so much noise, they didn’t hear us, didn’t notice Lady shivering for all her fat and fur. And the puppies, scrambling out of the street finally to take shelter in Miss Norma’s carport, got no attention whatsoever.

  My stepdaddy built a doghouse for Lady and the pups. But they wouldn’t stay put. The day after Lady had her puppies in the carport, Miss Norma packed them in a milk crate and set them out on the sidewalk like it was a case of pickup and delivery. Me and Marcy and Tommy Jeeter went round with a coffee can I grabbed before my mama could stuff her paintbrushes in it, and we collected enough for a sack of dog meal but not enough to buy a doghouse. So we asked my stepdaddy to build one. While he sawed wood and sang work songs, we cut pictures out of Ebony and Sepia. And while he nailed the house together and sang about rivers rising and floods flooding, we went through my mama’s sketchbook. And while he sanded the whole thing down, he let Tommy Jeeter hold the huge basketball of tinfoil he’s been building since a long-ago war, a time when the government paid people to save bacon grease and newspapers and rubber bands and things. Tommy Jeeter kept rolling the crinkly thing around on the rug, saying, “And you never once sold it.” He said that about five times. You could tell that he would have sold it; Jeeter would not have spent his life strip-mining gum and candy wrappers. It was a fine doghouse when my stepdaddy finished, but the dogs hardly ever used it. Lady was always begging up and down the block at kitchen doors, and the pups were always right behind her, “doggin her steps,” as my mother would say when she means for us kids to get out of her face so she can paint in peace.

  When the school bus passed Bowker Street on the way home, we knew something bad had happened, because we didn’t see Kwame on his bike throwing newspapers. It is the thing to do when you get to the corner of Bowker and Third—watch Kwame straining up the hill, standing on the pedals, his head thrown back and his hood slipping off. You think that any minute his clothes will pop loose with all that effort and fly up t
he hill like the kites we write wishes on and release on the first day of carnival. The bus turned into our block and we saw Kwame’s bike sprawled in the middle of the street. We got off that bus so fast, we didn’t even fool around with last tag and “See you later, alligator.” We flew. Kwame was in Miss Norma’s yard cracking the ground with the heel of his boot, trying to make the ice give the puppies up.

  There were two of them, gray and stiff and dead. Their mouths were puckered as though somebody had come along with a sewing machine and stitched their faces. It was more like they had snarled at the end, had growled and taken their anger into death with them and would come back in the next life meaner than Mean Dog to get us for not taking care. We found the other three all piled on top of each other by the mailbox, as though they’d been waiting for the mailman with the overdue packages to take them aboard or mail them to Florida so they could live. Tommy Jeeter, his hands shoved up his armsleeves, kept jiggling from one foot to the other, saying, “Oh wow, oh wow.” He’d said, back when Lady’s belly was dragging the ground and she could barely sneak up on the squirrels, that he wanted to train one of the litter as a hunting dog to present to his uncle. Sweet Pea and Brenda buried their faces in each other’s furry shoulders and hugged each other’s coat sleeves. Joanne just stood there watching Kwame with his pick-‘n’-axe boot, cracking that same gum our teacher had tried to get her to throw away all day. Me and Marcy tried to make a fence with our legs to keep Lady away who was moaning and whining and running around in circles, trying to get to her dead puppies.

  “You stupid old fool dog. Where were you when your puppies were freezing to death? Get out of here.”

  “Quit yelling at her, Joanne, wasn’t her fault,” Marcy tried to say. But as soon as she could get a few words out, the wind shoved them right back down her throat.

  Brenda picked her face up from Sweet Pea’s fur collar long enough to say, “Suppose that was you, Joanne? You wouldn’t want your mother to just walk away and leave you there.”

  Joanne sucked her teeth. “Forget you, crybaby.”

  “Who you calling ‘crybaby’?” Sweet Pea and Brenda were ready to fight.

  “Oh shut up,” Kwame said, looking around for something to put the puppies in. Marcy dumped her books right out on the ground and held her satchel open and Kwame plopped them in. I reached for a strap to help, but Marcy swung the load onto her shoulder and walked off. She looked just like the women in my mama’s sketch pad, women with that same look carrying things on their back or on their heads, looking like they’ve just done something wonderful like dump their schoolbooks on the ground and offered their brand new book bag for toting. We all followed her to the hide-‘n’-seek woods, Joanne stretching her gum in and out like she was having a very boring time.

  “Hooo-hooooo.”

  We were standing by the home-free-all tree watching Kwame dig a hole and none of us wanted to turn around. We knew it was the crazy old lady calling us from her house on the hill at the corner. But she kept calling, so we did turn, and right away we were sorry. There she was in her window looking like some Halloween thing, her teeth not in her mouth, her old-timey shawl looking like a huge spider web, some weird thing on her head like a bowl cover you use for keeping the onion smells out of the Jell-O. Any other time, Joanne would have said, “I dare you to go up on her porch and tip over her rocker.” But she didn’t, went right on pulling at her gum. Any other time, Brenda and Sweet Pea would have taken off like Olympic runners, afraid the old lady might tell their grandfather she’d seen them lollygagging in the woods instead of going straight home from school. They didn’t run. They kept handing Kwame sticks to dig with that kept crumbling. The ice storm had made everything brittle. Any other time I would have held my breath and prayed she wasn’t calling me to pick up the pans and plates. My Aunt Myrtle always takes food to Mrs. Blue because she’s from “down home,” and because she knew Aunt Myrtle “when,” and because she has a “gift,” and just because. I was too cold to think of anything but how weird she looked tapping on her window with a spoon.

  “Maybe she wants to give us a shovel so we can bury them,” Tommy Jeeter said. Then he grabbed Lady by the collar and took her off into the woods to find beer cans to sell to his uncle who collects them.

  “Let her bring it, then,” Joanne said.

  “It’s cold and she’s old. Why don’t you go get it?”

  Joanne gave Marcy a hot look. “Forget you, Marcy.” Then she strolled off in her sheepskin coat like she was in a fashion show and we were buying.

  “We gotta go,” the twins said, shivering and shaking and walking off.

  “Guess God decided to take them,” Kwame said, meaning the puppies he had just buried. And it was too cold to open my mouth and say that I’d always heard that God receives, not takes. Besides, what would God want with puppies? God is not running a pound. But someone has to say some sort of words when dead bodies are put into the ground, so I shut up. After a while, Kwame nodded to Marcy and me and trotted up the block to deliver his papers. Me and Marcy stood there looking at the mound of dirt and twigs and pebbles as though a certain amount of time had to be spent standing there in silence and mourning.

  “Mrs. Blue is probably thinking the same thing could happen to her,” Marcy said. “She could starve to death or freeze right there in the window and nobody would go and see about her.”

  I didn’t say a word. I was numb. I tried to think of something hot to warm me up while we stood at the grave. All I could think of was the fire my mama used to draw. When she was a little girl in Holly Springs, Mississippi, some do-wrong people set a torch to her daddy’s farm. And there was no firehouse in the Black community then. The fire was so bad, birds fell down dead from the sky. There’s a drawing in red ink and charcoal of grandma trying to beat flames from the mattress, its insides jumping all over the yard like popcorn, and the emptied-out houses and sheds and barns for miles around glowing like coals in a grate. My mama drew the trees like giants with their hair on fire racing through the fields holding their heads, then crashing down and rolling around in the cornfields burning everything up. None of this made me warm. It made my teeth chatter all the more. My bones felt like they would shatter any minute.

  “Maybe we should stop by on the way home,” Marcy said. “Poor Mrs. Blue. I bet her house is like the cold box.”

  And I remembered the first time I ever saw Marcy with her spatter-paint-freckled self. She was in the butcher’s with her parents, reading out loud all the signs. But when the butcher opened the cold room where the meat hangs, Marcy started whimpering. There was a rabbit hanging on a hook by its tail. “Ohhhhhhh, what have they done to the Easter bunny?”

  We called her “Cotton Tail” for a long time, until we realized she was going to ignore us until we learned to say “Marcy.” I was going to remind her of that time, but it didn’t seem right to talk about it with the puppies there under the dirt.

  “I’m going to see what she wants,” Marcy finally said, and waited to see if I was going to move. I didn’t. Mrs. Blue is a very spooky person and her house is dark and I don’t like going in there. So Marcy went off by herself.

  By the time I made the rounds of the houses, reporting what had happened to the puppies, the streetlights were coming on and the moon was chasing me. For a whole hour I fussed about the puppies dying right there under everybody’s noses, and Aunt Myrtle didn’t tell me to hush. And my stepdaddy rubbed his forehead a lot like he had a headache. And neither of them could look me in the eye. They just said soft things, short things, like the other grown-ups on the block. “A shame,” or “Winter’s mean,” or “Poor Lady.” When I went into my mama’s studio to talk some more about how it wasn’t fair, five puppies freezing to death with so many grown-up people right there at home, my mama squeezed some purple paint out on her paint plate real slowlike. “Bury them?” was all she said, and she wouldn’t look me in the eye either.

  I sat on my bed a long time putting together the story of
the storm, how the berry bushes looked lovely at first, all silver and frosty, till the branches split and the bushes fell away. How Mrs. Robinson took a spill on the ice and the ambulance driver wouldn’t take her until Marcy and me ran around with that same coffee can and collected thirty-two dollars. How the second wave of snow came and piled up banks of hard ice on the curbs and against porches and steps and cars. How my doll house got tossed into the fire; even though I was asked and did give permission, it hurt. And how the puppies died like that. It’ll be a story for my children, I was thinking, sitting on my bed, just as my stepdaddy sings about the time the river rose and his town was flooded but people rebuilt the town and everything was alright. And just as my mama draws about that fire but people rebuilt the farm and she grew up to tell us about it. But what if my kids notice there’s a hole in my story, I asked myself, a hole I will fall right through in the telling. Suppose they ask, “But, Mommy, didn’t you go and see about the old lady?” So then I’ll tell them how I put my boots back on and put them silly pot-holder mittens on too to carry one of Aunt Myrtle’s casseroles down to Mrs. Blue. And with the moon pushing at my back, I’m thinking that maybe I’ll sit with Mrs. Blue a while even though she is a spooky sort of person.

  LUTHER ON SWEET AUBURN

  Luther is confused. Thinks I’m still a youth worker. Thinks he’s still a youth. Thinks this is Warren Street, Brooklyn. That is, 1962. Stops me in the middle of Auburn Street to ask for help. I’m coming out of Big Bethel Church: joint meeting of Black and foreign students, a call for a rally, press releases, position papers on the Cuban influx, Miami, the Iranian situation there and here, one lit. student insisting on reading Jerry Ward’s poem into my camera eye: “… don’t be surprised when Africans and Volcanoes disrupt in harmony … belch ash in your eye.” I’m heading up the block to the Peacock Lounge: my new play in rehearsal, theme of hostage-keeping in U.S.—slavery, reservations, ghettos, prisons, internment camps for Japanese, GIs in stockades for organizing, cities hostages of Big Business, the whole country kidnapped by thugs. Station manager not interested. Fine. The camera crew drive off. I’m preoccupied.