Jellyfish Hunters

At about seven o’clock one bright summer morning, driven by the natural forces that cause flowers to seem to open like time-lapse photographs and grass to grow visibly beneath our feet and between our toes, my mother and our next door neighbor Toni, mother of Dick and Susan, stepped into their respective back yards and began to chatter over the backyard fence like a pair of delighted songbirds.

“What a beautiful day!” I heard my mother declare.

“Yes, it is!” said Toni. “Know what?” she added. “We should do something today. We should gather together everyone in the neighborhood who wants to and can, and we should go to the beach. Do you suppose we could all pack up some sandwiches and our kids and go to the beach for the afternoon?”

“Yes!” cried my mother. “Let’s do it!”

Wow! The beach! What a great and stupendous idea. This was the sort of thing that made my crush on Toni Harwood deepen and sing and dance the foxtrot inside my stomach. This and the fact that she was kinder and gentler than a newly-mown lawn and as attractive as a steaming plate of Toll House Cookies.

“It doesn’t have to cost us anything, really,” Toni continued. “We’d make sandwiches if we stayed home anyway, and there isn’t anything else to buy. Except maybe some potato chips and a few Nehi sodas.”

What followed was a flurry of maternal energy. Mom and Toni called all the neighbor moms on the phone and got together a group of about sixteen mothers and children, four cars’ worth. Mom gathered a couple of towels, dressed me in layers—swimming suit, over that some jeans, over them a tee shirt and a sweatshirt. Soon I was ready to be the most overdressed child on the beach.

Susan and Dick were dressed similarly. We talked T.J.’s mother into letting my mother take care of him since Mary McGarry couldn’t bring all the members of her unwieldy brood, some of whom were still infants. Wendy from next door and her sister came along with their mom. Even Tom and Irving Flumm (whom we called “Slow-talk” and “No-talk”) and their mother, Fern, were part of the group. And before you knew it, we’d formed a caravan and were headed toward Redondo Beach, where people and oil pumps play together a few feet from the Pacific Ocean.

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You had to feel good about a neighborhood that could, on a moment’s notice, improvise its way into a whole new idea of how the day would go. The beach day rose up out of nowhere like the unexpected arrival of a flock of beloved second cousins. Obviously, we’d chosen a nice place to live.

Just a few days before, T.J. and I had been climbing across some neighbors’ backyard fence, and did these neighbors complain? No!

They said, “Why, hello. You look like the children we’ve seen over on Sycamore.”

I smiled and declared, “3837 South Sycamore Avenue is my address and this here is T.J. He lives right across the street and he has a growing family [a term my mother often used] with lots of brothers and sisters.”

“Ah,” said the neighbor. “And what is your name, young lad, and how did you happen to memorize your address?”

“I’m Billy Fisher,” I said proudly. “My mom had me memorize my address. She said it was for safety.”

The man, who had curly silver hair and a slight beard on his chin and cheeks, held up his hand, looking at his wife. “That name,” he said. “Doesn’t it have a familiar ring to you, Mita?” Mita had hair as black and long as a night in the desert without stars, and she wore a silver chain around her neck with a bright blue disk like a knowing eye attached to it.

She considered a moment. “Wasn’t there a famous hunter named Fisher?” she asked. “And didn’t he live on Sycamore, Hal?”

“Think so.” He looked at us. “Think he had a sidekick named “P.J.” or something.”

“T.J.,” my friend insisted.

Hal, who had been standing over an open grill, said, “Oh, yeah. It was T,J.” And T.J. beamed, but he asked skeptically, “You haven’t really heard of us, have you?”

“Why yes,” Hal said. He looked at the meat he was grilling. “Know what this is?” he asked.

“Something to eat,” I said, confidently.

“Um, yes. But what exactly?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“It’s elephant steaks!” he said grandly. “And if you can stay just a minute, I’ll give you a bite.”

But we heard my mother calling, and T.J.’s mother as well. “Gotta go,” we said.

“Well, come back any time,” Hal offered. “We’d love to hear about your adventures.”

“Okay,” I said, and the deal was struck.

“Nice guy,” I said to T.J. as we ran home.

“Yeah, but did you notice that she talked a little funny?” T.J. asked.

“So did he, I guess. So what?”

And as I looked both ways and ran across the stree, I called out. “I hope they have some more elephant steaks next time we drop by.”

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Our caravan soon reached the beach and our cars emptied out.

“Stay by the cars!” all the mothers commanded. And we did, hopping up and down excitedly as if we were waiting for our turn in the restroom.

“What’s this?” Wendy asked, pointing at what looked like a lump of clear jelly in the sand.

T.J. and I were on the case, Sherlock and Watson, in a flash. We poked and prodded. “What would this jelly be doing on the beach?” I asked the mothers, but no one seemed particularly concerned.

“Seems like jelly to me,” T.J. said. “Pure and simple.”

We soon lost interest and found ourselves sitting on our towels in the sand, downing baloney sandwiches, potato chips and sodas, which we’d stopped for on the way to the beach. I was a big fan of Nehi Grape, which I rarely was given. Milk was standard fare.

“Eat all your food,” mother said. “Don’t waste a bit. Remember the starving children in Ethiopia.” No one had an idea who Ethiopia was or why we should worry about her diet, but my mother brought her up frequently.

“And remember the seagulls,” I added mischievously and threw a corner of my sandwich high into the air, where a trio of squawking birds dove to retrieve it.

“Do that again and you won’t go swimming today,” Mom warned.

We were ready to swim the moment we’d finished our food. “Now, mom?” I implored.

“No,” my mother said. “We have to wait a half hour while your food digests. Otherwise, you’ll get a cramp while you’re swimming and you could end up at the bottom of the ocean.” (We’d heard it before: “Other mothers would make you wait a whole hour.” So who needs other mothers, anyway? A half hour was torture enough.)

“Aw,” I complained, and soon all the children joined me in a chorus of “Aw’s.”

“Enough!” said Fern Flumm in a serious but good-natured way. “Play hide-and-seek or something.”

“On the beach?” we said. “You’re kidding.”

But we invented games that generally involved chasing one another and covering ourselves with sand.

At last, we were allowed to go into the water. We all ran and dove like I’d seen my father do. But I dragged along the bottom of the sandy shore, scraping my chest. Still, I didn’t tell anyone how much it hurt.

“Ow!” said T.J.

“Sshhh!” I whispered.

“Oh—ouch!” said Wendy.

We climbed out of the water, all of us saying there were bees or something in there and we were being stung.

“Nonsense,” my mother declared pithily. “Get back in and enjoy the ocean.”

But Toni, who so often seemed to save my day, said, “Oh, dear! You don’t suppose the little ones are being stung by jellyfish.”

Everything stopped.

“Jellyfish?” I said.

“You know, stupid—those pieces of jelly all over the beach,” Wendy explained. “They’re out in the water and they want us for lunch.”

“Not exactly, dear,” Toni explained. “But we’d better find a drug store and get some calamine for these stings.

We looked at ourselves. We were covered with little welts and there was a stinging under our skin that you couldn’t stop, not by rubbing, not by scratching, not even by rolling in the sand and cussing.

“Don’t talk that way, children,” a mother warned. And soon we drove off, a caravan in search of relief. We found a drug store, bought large bottles of lotion, and drove home, where each of us was deposited in a bathtub, and our skin was rubbed down with ice cubes.

“I hate this!” Wendy cried, and though we couldn’t hear her since she was ensconced in her own bathtub, we all heartily agreed.

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“Got any more of those elephant steaks?” we asked Hal a couple of days later as we scurried like squirrels along the top of his fence.

“Ah, Mita!” he said. “The great hunters, Billy and P.J.—“

“T.J.!”

“and T.J.,” he said, “have returned. Sadly, my men,” he added, “we have no more elephant meat. Tonight we are cooking up some ground anteater meat.”

“Mmmm,” said Mita. “Verily good,” she added.

“So what are the latest adventures?” Hal asked.

“Anteaters?” I demanded, trying to appear nonchalanet.

“Not bad after the first bite,” Hal explained. “Magical, in fact. But you—what have you been doing?”

“We were nearly eaten up by jellyfish,” T.J. said, exaggerating slightly, and he unbuttoned his shirt and pointed at the welts that remained on his chest, each of them covered with calamine.

“Ah, I read about those jellyfish in the newspaper. Sounds like a very, very dangerous enterprise,” said Hal. “You must be some of the bravest hunters I’ve ever encountered.” He held out his hand to shake each of ours. “Very proud to know you,” he declared.

Inexplicably, the welts felt a bit tamer and the itching subsided a bit, as if Hal’s words had a healing effect on them.

He cooked the anteater burgers over charcoal, sprinkling them liberally with salt and what looked like ketchup (“sauce made from the blood of water buffalos,” Hal whispered secretively to me), and soon we were all eating.

“Like it?” Hal asked.

T.J. was visibly surprised. “If I didn’t know any better,” he declared, “I’d say these were regular hamburgers. But they taste better.”

“What about you, Billy?”

“I agree,” I said. “Especially about how they taste better.”

“Well,” Hal said, “I’m proud to be able to offer a good meal to my friends, the hunters.”

Mita said, “Me, too.”

“Thanks,” I declared. “You are very nice people.”

“And so are you,” said Hal. “You shall have to return now and again. It gives me great pleasure.”

He took a long drink from his glass and clinked his ice. “Now, I must go to bed soon, my friends, so I will have to ask you to go to your homes. I need my beauty rest.”

T.J. and I each finished off half of our anteater burger, thanked our hosts profusely, and scrambled back over the fence.

“What do you suppose beauty rest is?” T.J. asked as he and I ran home together.

“Gosh,” I said. “I don’t know. Mom talks about beauty rest sometimes.”

“But that has to be different,” T.J. said skeptically.

“Well, Hall and Mita are both kind of beautiful, I think, even though they’re old. Maybe their tribe needs special sleep each night or they begin to fade away.”

“Maybe,” said T.J. And we ran into the pleasures and dangers of the approaching evening, hoping Hal and Mita would still be there, cooking up unexpected nourishment the next time we visited.