Those Bones Are Not My Child (18 page)

“Smut,” Delia said, climbing back on her stool. “Smut,” she told the bartender, jerking her chin toward the ladies’ room.

“Aw, hell,” the serviceman said, slapping his forehead.

“What happened?” Cuba Libre sucked on the lime.

“Aw, hell,” he said again.

The bartender moved back toward the serviceman with a fresh beer. “I bet the kids thought he was decked out for a costume ball when he got to the prep school, hunh?” He laughed good-naturedly at Spence’s uniform, then cut it short when Cuba Libre leaned over the bar and rapped with her knuckles for the serviceman’s attention.

“So what happened?”

“Three blasts from a shotgun. Man-oh-man.” He folded the paper over and gulped his beer.

“Have you noticed,” the white woman asked no one in particular, “when a woman commits suicide, she just kills herself. Why is it a man always tries to do away with his whole family? It’s so macho.”

“A good thing the wife wasn’t there. Were there other children?” Cuba Libre set the lime rind on her napkin and shook her head. “You’re right. He’d’ve wiped them all out if he could’ve.”

Delia tried to steer away the conversation. “Well, Nathaniel, what are you going to do? Where do we go from here?” But it was clear that Spence was somewhere else.

He was on the road between Chattanooga and Nashville. The sign:
LANE FOR RUNAWAY TRUCKS
. That outer lane widening as the grade steepened, swerving in the middle of the bluff away from the rest of traffic on 75 north; the lane ending in an embankment of sand. He’d noticed the sign at the top of the hill and had smiled, recalling
Thieves’ Highway
, an old black-and-white he’d stayed up one night to watch
when Sonny came by on his bike just late enough to be invited to sleep over, but on the alibi side of dusk so as not to be fussed at for riding in heavy traffic, at night, at his age. Slick. One of those hardboiled stories, the hero and his sidekick as thuggish as the villain; the girl, a heart-of-gold streetwalker with a foreign accent, pretty much talked out of the side of her mouth too. Hollywood’s version of the working class, he’d pointed out to Sonny. During commercial breaks, they crowded each other in front of the refrigerator talking like hoods: “Put a nab on that last apple, Pops, and I’ll climb into your hair.”

Apples: the drama hinged on getting a shipment of golden delish to market on time, otherwise the bad guy would take over the union and corruption would reign. The hero and his sidekick loaded the crates onto two broken-down trucks, then really pushed it, no pit stops, no sleep, barreling down the highway to market. They get to a hill, sidekick’s truck begins to come apart. The gear stick’s stuck, the brake pedal’s juicy, the wheels won’t catch, the speedometer needle careens, ropes snapping, crates sliding, apples bouncing all over the highway, close-up of sidekick’s terror-struck face, the hero wrenches his wheel to head off the runaway truck—too late, it’s crashing through the rails, plummeting down a mountain end over end, crashing in a ravine—explosion. They’d loved it.

So he took it.

He shot over into the runaway lane doing eighty-five, ninety-five, picking up speed, streaking down the hill, the thick white lines signaling when to ease into the turn away from the rest of the traffic. He plowed the hood of the limo into a hill of sand that stopped him. He’d been sitting there a long time, sand covering the windshield, motor purring, adrenaline draining away from the muscles it had flooded. Then she spoke. Hands folded over her briefcase, the bulge of her cosmetic bag outlined in the leather, the tube of lipstick like a vial of nitro from some other crazy-ride movie, her lipstick always the same shade of dark plum no matter the trademark or scent—Carole quietly asked, “Is something wrong with the car, Spencer?”

“He wants to know if you’ll have another.” Delia was elbowing him.

He threw down a twenty. “I want to be there when Zala picks up the kids.”

“I should think so.”

He turned to take a good look at his sister, realizing as he did that
it had been a long time since he’d done it. She’d developed an upholstered look over the years. She’d never been anything but chunky, layers of corseting garments underneath the stiff tailored suits; but now her face, her expression seemed built, stuffed, and covered with something unyielding. He frowned.

“You’ve never liked Zala, have you?” Rather late in the game, Zala would have said, for nearly ten years ago Delia had summed her up—“The girl just doesn’t have it, Nathaniel.”

“You can ask me that? You can say that to me? To
me?
” Her voice snagged on all she had done for them both in the name of family and just because help was what people were supposed to do for each other.

He should have apologized, should have moved closer to his big sister and said, “Hey, Dee, I’m hurtin’. I hurt bad.” But instead he left the change on the bar, knowing that would get her goat. Overtipping was vulgar; pointing it out, worse; snatching up the excess and cramming it into Spence’s pocket, unthinkable. So he chuckled on the way out, the cardboard disc hanging from the light fixture inviting him back to gusto, the clock over the till saying Happy Hour would begin in earnest in an hour or so, then the bar would become predominantly Black for two hours more and he might meet an old friend before the day gave way to the expense-account crowd, predominantly white. He paused in the doorway, one shoulder in the cool, dark interior, the other in the eye-stinging sunshine. He was feeling stupid, his mind mush, and feeling rude keeping his sister waiting on the hot pavement. And he was hurting all over.

“You’d better watch yourself, Nathaniel,” she said as they headed for the limo. “Please drop me off at the Russell Building. And by all means, see about your children.”

Spence parked at the corner he was sure Zala would be passing in a matter of minutes. The stream from the AC vents fluttered a list he’d begun after his session with the judge. He pulled it from under the banana magnet Kenti had stuck on the ashtray to hold her drawings. Friends, associates, buddies, colleagues, people to contact, groups to petition—it took up less than a third of the paper. Over a million and a half Black people in the city, two and a half million Black vets active and organized in the Southeast region, twenty-five of his thirty-one years on earth spent in Atlanta, and he could think of no one to drop in on and say, “Hey, man, I’m hurtin’.”

In his haste to catch up with those who’d scaled the ladder while he’d been crouched down in the mud and the leaders at the Paris peace talks were debating the shape of the conference table, he’d let crucial ties slip. Couldn’t even remember the last Thursday Night Forum he’d attended, the last African Liberation Day ceremony he’d helped organize, the last prison support committee he’d joined. If his life depended on it, he couldn’t say if the Institute of the Black World was still there on Chestnut Street, or if Atlanta U’s poli-sci department was still a progressive enclave. The last thing he’d heard, when Zala had insisted on having lunch in Leilia’s Diner rather than at the Abbey, which he thought better for contacts, there’d been a lunch-counter philosopher telling an anecdote about the poli-sci chairman throwing two equal-opportunity officers from the CIA out on their ear only to receive a call later from the college president reprimanding him for interfering with the career prospects of AU students.

Ten years ago, Spence had still been serious about becoming a community organizer. General Giap, Malcolm, Che Guevara, Amilcar Cabral, C. L. R. James’s
Black Jacobins
, Sam Yette’s
The Choice
, Sam Greenlee’s
The Spook Who Sat by the Door
—he wracked his brain for the books he’d read, the passion he’d had, the plans he’d devised before swerving away to another persona, another agenda, when one by one the firebrand combatants he’d come home expecting to hook up with left the city or left the path in some other way. He’d defected and hadn’t even noticed. And now he was hurting, the skin under the gold band raw from twisting, the band of skin over his lip sore from touching.

He’d been a thorough asshole right from the start, running off to New York instead of standing up to Delia when she took over the house, all but turning their parents out. Asshole for trying to repair the damage to his warrior image by throwing himself body and soul into the campus thing, for not being a “pragmatist,” as his roommate put it, for political activism was right on but not if your grades suffered and not if you risked losing draft-deferment status. “I hate to pull a fade, bro,” his roommate told him just days before Zala broke her news, “but the heat’s too heavy.” Eugene moved out and transferred to another campus, where he immediately signed up for ROTC. No fool, Eugene had read the handwriting on the wall. They were talking troop withdrawal, but they were stepping up recruitment in the Black neighborhoods using War on Poverty programs as their cover, using the Moynihan Report for
their slogan: Join the army, escape from Black matriarchs who’re fucking up your male minds. Eugene planned to go in, not as cannon fodder, but as an officer. And in the meantime, his mother could use the monthly stipend he got from ROTC.

Asshole, his buddies at CCNY had told him—marry the girl and claim hardship status. But Spence had gone in the army, fled in fact, still using the Black Power salute to repair the damage, wearing his “No Vietcong Ever Called Me a Nigger” pin, hanging “militant” posters over his bed, playing Gil Scott-Heron records loud on his box, draping the black, red, and green over his foot locker. Dogged, brave, noble, right on. “Asshole,” said the play-it-safers who cut off their ’fros and kept
Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama
carefully tucked away. “Asshole,” said the truly political brothers he’d been trying to impress.

He’d blown an opportunity to become a radio operator when he laughed at his squadron leader’s suggestion that he stop listening to Hanoi Hannah. It might land him in the box; worse, might earn him bad paper and reduce his benefits later to zero. In Nam, when court-martial actions were streamlined to “administrative memo,” a mere zing of the pen for behavior considered an offense by an officer, Spence got a haircut, straightened up, and buttoned up. But he refused to join the opportunists who brown-nosed their way to desk jobs in the rear, where they could stock up on souvenirs to make their fortune with back in the States, or wangled jobs in the PX that assured them a role in the local black market.

He hadn’t thought he’d see combat at all, or if so, not for long. Asshole that he’d been, he’d underestimated three things: the government’s gene-deep commitment to the national image as invincible cowboy; the utter demoralization of combat troops that had to be replaced by fresh blood, and fresh Blood and Latinos it proved to be; and the serious vested interest in the war by officers, journalists, and freelance profiteers. For all of Dave’s johnny-one-note harping on drugs as the crucial piece in all things wrong, Spence had to admit that Dave was mostly right. The drive to establish the U.S.-Southeast Asia connection to challenge the France-Turkey drug trade in that part of the world was the only momentum Spence had observed in the otherwise winding-down war machine.

Spence stared at the half-moons in his thumbs and thought about
Zala’s childhood friend. He’d been to see him once and they’d set up another meeting to compare leads. Hardly someone he could drop in on for a can of beer and say, “Hey, Dave, I’m hurtin’, brother man.”

Going to STOP hurt all the more. So he didn’t go there. And he didn’t know the other drivers of the fleet well enough to call by their first names, much less argue with when they said, “They must’ve been up to something dumb, those kids.” His mind was mush from so many years of thinking he was thinking when he was not thinking. Those kids. Like prisoners. Wouldn’t be there if they hadn’t done something wrong. Like the homeless who slept under the viaducts along the highways. Must like it, the bums—hell, they could always rake leaves or something. And women. Looking for trouble, they got what they deserved. So he avoided the office, tallied his receipts in the car, visited on radio waves only. Hardly men he could drop in on for a beer.

Then who? He’d traded gumbo and whist for pepper pot and cricket when he’d thought the West Indian Association ripe for group plan insurance. Traded pepper pot for backyard grills and leather bars in finished basements when up-and-coming wheeler-dealers took him in on the inside real-estate track. The last get-together he remembered all too well. It had been a Mother’s Day feast in ’78, the men cooking outside by the pool, the women on the sun porch drinking and talking, the teenagers batting balls on the tennis court, the children in the basement den throwing darts. A gallon of Chivas Regal and a gallon of Jack Daniel’s had been killed waiting on a couple Spence was eager to show a house to. The wife came in a cab, ducked in with a black eye and a cracked wrist, and locked herself in one of the upstairs bathrooms. The women rushed up to attend her. The men gathered at the bottom of the stairs split into two camps—those who argued that domestic matters were private matters, and those who felt nothing but disdain for men who had to resort to violence to control their women. So he’d gone alone to see Charlie, ice cubes clinking in his brain, a schematic forming on a blackboard in a dim corridor far back in his head: the diagram shifting, erasing, re-forming, turning at angles to show hierarchy one minute, the grid the next. He’d driven to Charlie’s trying to fit domestic violence into the scheme of things. Not that he’d planned to draw the diagram on Charlie’s wall and take up a curtain rod as pointer. Not that he’d planned to lecture about personal violence as a sociopolitical imperative
in a society based on dominance, militaristic solutions to conflict, et cetera and so forth. He knew only that the brother would be hurting and would be needing somebody to wrestle him to the mat and drag him off for professional help. Knew only that what the men swigging their drinks at the bottom of the stairs had said was wrong, though he couldn’t nail it, couldn’t pin it to the grid and argue. Knew only that he would want somebody to come rescue him, drag him back from the edge. They’d seen each other since the barbecue. Took in a movie,
The Great Santini
, which Charlie ran out on when Robert Duvall bopped Blythe Danner around the kitchen and the kids jumped him.