Bombshell (15 page)

“What like?”

“I work with young women, providing education in reproductive health. There are still taboos that prevent them getting cancer screening. Last week I met a woman whose mother told her that Pap smears were for married women only. The kid came to my office with cervical cancer that had gone undetected. When we finally managed to get her diagnosed, her husband left her, because he said she must be a whore. You know what I'm talking about. I don't need to lecture you about the dangers of ignorance.”

“Oh, I know about it, alright.”

“Yeah. I deal with preventable disease, but the women in these communities are susceptible. Some of them don't even know what their cervix is. Many of the women I counsel think that
all
cancer is terminal, so they don't want to get screened. They'd rather just not know about cancer, period, because they're fatalistic about it. They'll shrug and ask me what difference it makes if they know they're going to die—that kind of bullshit.”

When they had finished the tea, Nona went to the kitchen, returning with a tarnished silver tray, arranged with glasses, a bottle, and a kitsch oriental sugar bowl. “Let's drink this. It's absinthe, imported. Not the fake
shit that has no wormwood. Look at this spoon . . . ” The spoon had the twisted image of a skull punched through it. Cash watched Nona balance the spoon across her glass and add a single sugar cube to it. In gentle increments, she poured chilled water onto the deliquescent lump, watching it drip through into the liquor in her glass. “We can stay up all night,” Nona announced. “If the house is swimming, we might as well swim with it.”

Cash smiled and shrugged her shoulders. “Hell, I'll do whatever voodoo that you do, Nona. Especially if it will stop the feeling of the road under my ass.” Cash reached for a second slotted skull spoon and a cube of sugar. In time, as she continued to sip the absinthe, her consciousness swam. Nona's dark skin spread out, hot, maternal, her words formed a whirlpool. For a moment, Cash felt suspended in the funnel, in a gyrating wall of memories that were not hers: April 26, 1961. Twenty-five years before her birth, the regular beat of darkness: French nuclear weapons testing in the desert at Reganne and In Ekker. It was the morning after. Rupturing the crust of the northern range of the test mountain, the atomic blast had broken into the open desert, immersing the Tuareg in radioactive fallout. Some were eating
beghrir
pancakes with honey from Algerian bees when the crackling cloud shifted across the hot winds and fell upon them. Jerboas hopped between the tents like rats fleeing a sinking desert ship. Thousands of nomads and soldiers were penetrated with cancers and slow mutilation of their flesh, bones, and brains. The device had stretched out its perverse limbs of welcome over the dead ground. A voice said: “
Allez
, walk toward the bomb!”

Nona's voice filtered back in, and Cash focused on the New Orleans room again. She rubbed her eyes and took another drink.

“Yes, but I couldn't do this in Portland, right?” Nona said. “Here, I can do direct community outreach, plus I do some work at Tulane. I try to raise
community awareness of the need for screening, and for the vaccine, the simple damn vaccine . . . ” She broke off. “Oh, Christ, look at you, Cash! It's been ten years! Okay, I don't want to be rude, but really, what the
fuck
are you doing in New Orleans? And in that asshole car?” She laughed.

“That car
is
trouble, but it got me here.” Cash studied a streak of gray in Nona's thick hair. “So,” Cash began, “what happened with Janelle? Did you both leave Portland at the same time?”

“Oh, man. Shit, I miss Janelle. I have so many, many regrets, because back then, I was an angry young woman. I think it got bad after you left.” Nona caught herself. “It's not your fault of course, but with you and Zelda gone, things weren't the same, and even though Janelle and me agreed on so much, I made it seem as if we didn't. I was frustrated, and I hurt her. I called her a sellout. She went to Olympia and we lost touch for several years. It was sad. Finally, Janelle moved to D.C. Anyway, we're back in touch now. It's really infrequent, but it's all good.”

“She didn't understand what was going on for you?”

“She totally
did
understand. You were very young, so maybe this won't make sense. Janelle once said something like, ‘What will become of our scene when the music stops?' Well, she was right: The music stopped and we all just . . . dispersed.” Nona made a sweeping, flattening gesture with her hands. “What our parents or our younger selves had known as feminism was suddenly so fragmented. It was barely even a
thing
anymore. In some ways, it was like a defeat, or a failure. Maybe it was a victory. I'm still not certain what happened. We all scattered in a thousand directions. For a while, Janelle and I lost our friendship in the panic.” Nona stared at Cash. “What were you doing in
Nueva
Mexico?”

Cash said: “After what happened in the Tenderloin, I needed to get off the map.”

“What happened in the Tenderloin?”

She concealed a jolt of fear. In one plain sentence, in the green faints of absinthe, she had said more than she had intended. She felt herself suffocated by the weight of Nona's surrogacy. Guilt closed her throat. In the candlelight, fires passed across Nona's gleaming eyes. Her lips had settled into a soft, imperturbable calm. Her body, shrouded in a cable-knit shawl of gold, radiated a subtle heat. Cash remembered falling asleep against her, more than a decade ago. Nona's entry into the void left by Cash's real mother left a sphinx at the shadows, a gatekeeper. Nona had taught her about truth. She struggled for the words.

“Maybe we talk about the future, instead? I have to tell you something important about the future. I'm driving to New York, where I plan to kill a man.”

Nona laughed and looked to the window where rain had begun to rattle against the sill. “There's the rain.”

Cash said, “It'll be the anniversary soon.”

Nona misunderstood her. “One year since the oil spill, you're right.” A great and terrible snake had shimmered in the waters off Louisiana, eighty miles of oil.
Li Grand Zombi
. “April twentieth.”

By April 26 of the previous year, the industrial fireball of
Deepwater Horizon
had set corpses floating on the black-streaked waters of the Gulf of Mexico. A sluggish atmosphere of poison and defeat had fallen over the coast. Beneath the surface of the water, robots worked by remote control
to stem the contamination. Despite the passing year, despite the fact the people no longer watched the cruel slick threatening the swamps and wetlands, the oil was still there, in the eyes of the men and women of the Gulf Coast. It had settled there, a black mote of the sins of others.

“Really, it was nothing,” Cash said.

Nona raised her eyebrows.

“That is, compared to a nuclear accident.”

For Cash, the tragedy was that in the wake of the oil-drilling and coalmining disasters of the spring of 2010, the corporate families of nuclear power had seized their moment. She thought of Evelyn Winters being interviewed on television as she and Molly had watched the oil slick spread. The old man smiled into the camera as he spoke of his clean technology, his pristine, safe nuclear plants, and the need for expansion. Now they would all walk on gilded splinters of strontium, and shed their skins in the boneless slither of cesium. Cash explained: “Not far from here, back up the Mississippi, just north of Baton Rouge, I passed the River Bend Nuclear Plant. I wanted to see it because it came online two years after Chernobyl burned up, so by the schedules of obsolescence and accidents, its time is near. I could almost feel the fissures as though they were right inside my skin. And then there's Waterford, the reactor that's within twenty minutes of the city here, right on the river.”

Nona stood up. “Wait. Let me get us some beer.”

Cash swiveled and spoke as Nona made for the refrigerator. “It's in St. Charles Parish. It might as well be inside downtown New Orleans. As the wind blows, it's about ten miles from Louis Armstrong Airport and
little more to us. It could rinse the frat boys off Canal Street in less than an hour. They had to shut it down during Hurricane Katrina, but it's back online. These decaying nuclear stations are owned by the Winters Corporation. They have dozens. They operated one in Vermont on the banks of the Connecticut River called Yankee. The Senate just condemned the Vermont Yankee plant, and has ordered it to be closed—and they don't do that every day, but it was truly fucked. The cooling tower collapsed and smashed into the reactor building. Radioactive waste has been leaking from the reactor's corroding pipelines for decades. The Winters Corporation denied any knowledge of any pipes even existing. The point is that
every last nuclear plant in the world
is full of death, and
leaking
. That oil in the Gulf was
nothing
.”

Foam overflowed from the cold beer bottles as Nona returned.

Cash went on: “There is
no such thing
as clean, safe nuclear waste disposal, but since 2005, legislation regards nuclear plants as
clean
merely because their primary emissions are not
carbon
. As a supposedly clean technology, they qualify for subsidies, and, furthermore, the corporations that build, operate, and own the plants can build them on risk-free government-insured loans. Chernobyl didn't emit much carbon, but what would you prefer in Louisiana,
Deepwater Horizon
or a nuclear meltdown? You know, a hurricane passes, and eventually you can go home and rebuild. Meltdown at Waterford, and no one is
ever
coming down here again.” She stared at her beer bottle, overwhelmed by a sense of futility. “I guess I thought that if I could see you and Janelle, because you know where she is, right, that I could ignite the old gang. Then I wouldn't be alone.”

“Oh, Cash, I can't even tell how serious you are—”

“I'm deadly fucking serious, Nona! What can't you see?”

“Okay, okay . . .
Easy
. . . I hear you, but this isn't my bag. I've got my own wars to wage.” Nona's eyes widened with inspiration. “Say, do you know about gris-gris, baby girl?” Nona asked, and Cash shook her head. “Wait here, I have something for you, something of yours.” When Nona retuned from the adjoining room, she was carrying a small pouch. “Cash,” she said, tossing it to her. Cash fumbled the bag, dropping it onto the chaise lounge before retrieving it. “I kept it,” Nona said.

“What is it?” Cash asked. “It feels like skin.”

“Gris-gris. It's voodoo. Look inside it.”

Cash discovered a small plastic bracelet curled inside the gris-gris bag. It was translucent, pliable rubber, like a hospital bracelet from an infant. Cash recognized it. It had been hers. She began to weep, tears glossing her eyes without falling. Then, as she stared at the tiny bracelet, she began to sob, her shoulder heaving in the candlelight. Nona embraced her, and explained: “You had this on you when we found you.”

“I came to America on a ship, with my parents. I dream about it sometimes.”

“I know you do. I want to help you, Cash. Tie the gris-gris onto your necklace. With this you will have the strength to wage your war.”

Cash fixed the gris-gris to her bicycle chain necklace, next to the shard of trinitite that emitted a ghoulish light in the shotgun room. Cash wiped her eyes with her sleeve. With each word, she punched her breast. “I am Death.”

April 9, 2011. Cash and Nona breakfasted beneath the green palm fronds of Café Freret; hanging moss and tropical mist. To assuage their hangovers, they sipped their Louisiana coffees and ripped into their croissants as the grackles and parakeets plunged between the metal tables. It was still early on Lowerline Street. Streetcars crossed the intersection at St. Charles, rattling coffins in the humid morning. Cash and Nona sat close to one another and spoke quietly as the waitstaff came and went.

“I'll stay one more night. I'm exhausted.”

“What you told me, about shooting a cop in Texas, was that true?”

Cash nodded.

“Holy shit,” Nona hissed.

“I told you. I thought you wanted to help me. Last night you . . . ”

“We were both pretty drunk. Oh my God.” Nona's eyes flashed toward the street.

“There must be atonement, Nona.” She pulled the plastic bracelet from inside her T-shirt. “This has to
mean
something!” It appeared to Cash that Nona was looking for an exit. “Truth, remember?
You
introduced me to Valerie Solanas, all that stuff, remember?” Cash gripped Nona's hands across the white metal table.

“Cash, listen to me: Valerie Solanas was
crazy
.”

Wounded, uncomprehending, Cash stared at her in silence. She began to weep as she asked herself how could she command that kind of unflinching
truth from Nona, or anyone, when she couldn't even tell her surrogate mother about Zelda and her last days in the Tenderloin? For Nona, it was that uncomprehending look that she had received when she had told Cash where and when she had been born. She thought of the way in which the child's face would brighten when she told her about the Amazon women, whose country had been hers.

“One more night.” Nona declared and raised her hand for the check. Was it possible that she had played some prior role in this new violence bursting out of Cash? An aspect of her refused to believe that it was real. There was no dead cop. Cash would never reach New York in that flashbulb of a car. Something in Cash had given way, a cracked levy, containment wall split with fire. Yet, had it not always been so? Nona pitied her. Most of us, she thought, have some chance to revisit our birthplace, to inhale and touch the ground. Not the children of Chernobyl. Nona remembered the day that she managed to have Cash's natal bracelet deciphered, the sadness that bloomed out of an empty incubator in her mind. “Dry your eyes, baby girl. Let's go. I don't want what I saw in 1987 to happen again, Cash. I'm supposed to protect you.”