Those Bones Are Not My Child (19 page)

He’d waited in the bar across the street for Spence to come out. They’d laughed uneasily together about therapy, each of them in an encounter group. Not much to talk about.

Spence rubbed his eyes hard with the heels of his hands, then scanned the limo’s complicated dashboard of dials and gauges trying to find out the time in Atlanta, Georgia, in the U.S. of A. He could circle the block and intercept Zala. Except he wasn’t sure what he would do—beep the horn and pick her up like a sensible person? Cruise along behind, surreptitiously following? Follow her. Follow his wife. He would have to watch himself. There were granules of sand on the wiper blades the car washers had missed. He would definitely have to watch himself. Two and a half million vets. He would have to look into that. Child Find, Inc. He would have to see about that too. He cranked up, then shot up the wrong way of a one-way street, bumped over the curb and into the schoolyard a good distance away from the driveway designated for picking up children.

When they saw him, Kenti and Kofi came out of the doors holding hands. The other children pranced around hitting last tag. Kenti had a large sheet of drawing paper that was giving her trouble. They ran down the steps, the paper slapping against her legs, threatening to trip her up. Kofi wouldn’t release her hand so she could roll up the drawing, so she put it on her head. Spence slid across the seat. He wanted to open the door manually. He wanted to be right there for a hug and a kiss when they climbed in, knees first, full of “guess what” and “that ole teacher” and “my friend” and then and then and “you know what, Daddy.” He pushed the door open with his fingertips and sat there leaning, tangled, contorted, but safely away from the steering wheel. So if he planned to
actually pick them up and take off, not waiting for their mother, he wanted to see himself deliberately turning the key, so he’d know it was not a mistake, not an oversight, not a move of habit.

“Ole naked-face Daddy, look at you.” Kenti was pointing and laughing before she reached the door. By the time she climbed in and grabbed him, the chant had become a song.

“You need a suntan, Dad,” Kofi said, pushing his sister in. “Look like you been drinking Clorox.”

“Where’s Mama?” Kenti had one knee on the seat and was reaching for his neck but hesitated. Hesitation and suspicion, he detected both. He grabbed her in a bear hug and growled in her hair, dragging them both toward the wheel to make room for Kofi.

She thrust the drawing between them and broke his grip. “Mama comin’?” She sniffed at his face and frowned, then settled down, kicking the ashtray, while he inspected the picture. A stick-figure mother with bushy hair. A stick-figure father with hat and pipe. A yard full of pencillike tulips. A boxy house with a red triangle roof. A radial-tire sun. And by a lollipop tree three children—two boys and a girl. Behind the tree a smeary purple thing, something stormy and scary.

“Hey, Dad, for real, what’s up?” Kofi leaned across his sister to hug Spence, doing his best to mash Kenti’s head under his armpit. She pummeled his ribs, then bit him, and he leaned back against the door. “No kidding, you look weird.”

“I feel weird.”

“Then don’t be drinking,” Kenti said, pouty, folding her arms over her chest. She kicked the ashtray harder till he patted her legs. “You smell,” she said.

“Yeah, Dad. Don’t drink so much, hear?”

“I’ll watch it,” he said, laughing.

“You laugh raggedy,” she said, moving her legs away.

S
he didn’t know where she was or which who it was dreaming, her day self in a half-doze or her night self sleeping. Nor was she sure if she was the dreamer or the being dreamt. And where was her body? Earlier, she’d thought she’d heard a scraping noise.

She was asleep, she was sure of that only. Asleep and uneasy. Too much effort at trying to be lucid was waking her. She sank down into dreaming as Mattie recommended, teaching her how to set up a movie screen while dozing off (“Since both you and your husband seem to be movie-oriented”), her unconscious mind registering in dreams what her day self had failed to make note of.

She tried to get up. There was an awful smell in the room. She might have put the tie-dyes away before they’d sufficiently dried. Someone might have left a damp mop about that had gone sour. But the funk wasn’t fabric. It was something more organic, more noxious, more shaped than mildew. Maybe a skunk had gone in. She heard more thumping, then a rush of water, then scampering sounds not unlike the earlier scraping, which she’d attributed to the clock. Part of her wanted to wake up, another followed Mattie’s advice. Part of her jumped up and skidded across the slippery Sunday-mag section of the
Journal-Constitution
. She threw up her hands to keep from falling. She fell anyway and bumped down on the mattress.

Zala’s gaze poured into a black so pitch, so opaque, she was sure her blindness meant that the walls had finally closed in. Surely that had been the grating noise earlier, the walls moving in on her. She leaned up on one elbow and concentrated on piercing the dark. A pinpoint of light on the edge of peripheral vision turned a corner, then disappeared from sight. Was she in a tunnel? There’d been a poem that Ebon, one of the
founders of the art center, had written—“Take heart, sometimes the light at the end is caught in the bend of the tunnel.” She sat up.

“Mama gonna get after you,” she heard from the backroom. She was home, then, the dreamer awakened, not the dreamt adrift in the limbo between episodes. She heard the click of the flashlight and a shush, then the rickety wheeze of the bunk bed’s joints. She needed to attend to that while she still knew where the carpenter glue was. And while she was at it, she’d find the mug of brandy she’d thought she’d placed on the window ledge back of the bolster before rolling over, punching a hollow in the pillow to sink down into, away from their snickers. Kenti and Kofi had been entertaining each other all night with a version of “The Gingerbread Boy.” She knew she should have stayed awake and monitored the story for clues, or for—what had McClintock said?—acting out, indications of coping strategems. She’d been too tired, too tired even to sleep soundly. Twice she’d shot up straight in the bed and reached behind the bolster and come up empty-handed. Then she’d stared at the walls, listening, stared in the dark till her eyes teared.

Of course Spence had noticed it. He’d come over again to pace back and forth, going over the details of that distant weekend, his footfalls bringing it closer and closer, and the walls moving in. Back and forth, slamming his fist into his palm, pounding each
maybe
, each
what if
, each
should have
, blaming her, blaming himself, faulting the police, suspecting everyone, socking his fist, pulverizing each hunch, each overheard, grinding it all beneath his knuckles. And the walls moving in, but not together, one sliding soundlessly on greased ball bearings, another scraping over the bunched-up carpet, the room a rhomboid. He knew it. She could tell by the way he reached for the tape measure around her neck. The way he touched it, then stared at the pinking shears. He hadn’t taken them, though. Shears were hardly strong enough to wedge under a wall and keep it from crushing them. When he finally tugged at the tape measure, she knew he knew. Of course the room was getting smaller. He paced from wall to wall popping the coated cotton as though it were elastic. But what good would it do to measure? A tape, a ruler, a yardstick, whatever they chose would be off too. Inches, feet, yards foreshortened. The conventional laws of perspective shot. Their son at the vanishing point.

“Ma?”

“Go to sleep.”

She pulled the tape measure from around her neck and threw it toward the sewing table. She flung back the sheet she was tangled in and swept it to the floor. Then she swung her legs around and tried to stand up. That’s when it seized her, all of her bones at once gripped in the vise. How could she have thought she’d slip past it? The dark made no difference. Daily it grew more relentless, cutting her legs out from under her. She fell back on the bed. It did no good to go through a checklist, because no, she hadn’t left her purse at the grocer’s; no, she hadn’t locked her keys in the car. What seized her could not be reasoned with—the jets were turned off, the doors were locked. It didn’t matter. In the middle of a sentence, in the middle of the street, it attacked without warning, without mercy. She’d double over gasping for air until someone ran up behind her, lifting, knuckles pressed into her diaphragm trying to help her dislodge the bone stuck in her life.

“Ma, we getting up now?”

The vise melted, leaving her with a dull aching throb. She could at least tell them to go to sleep and put force into her words this time. She got up and steadied herself against the cable-spool table before venturing toward the kitchen. Glue. Brandy. And what had that scampering sound been moments ago? A dog digging in the yard. She listened out, cautioning her mind to stay where her eyes were and not race ahead to that smell, leaving her a paralyzed woman marooned in the kitchen totally mad. On the ironing board, where she’d eaten dinner, staring out into the yard, rivulets of sweat running down to her feet, was the greasy skillet and the soup spoon. The mug, though, had been placed in the sink with a juice glass Kofi had drunk out of. He’d run water in the mug, but it was still faintly sweet. But that was not it, not the smell that had seeped into her dream. Something more pungent, more clotted and dangerous, and too familiar to blame on soil mold or on the fridge that needed defrosting. She couldn’t pretend that she didn’t know what it was.

She opened the porch door and sprang back from a snowstorm of feathers. Someone had left the yard door cracked. There was no sign, though, of the Griers’ tomcat or of the dead bird’s skull. And the scratchy, scampering noise had sounded more like a dog anyway, a dog digging in the yard, where the smell was overpowering. She stepped down into the dirt. What had the dog unearthed? What had it run off with?

Nostrils flared, sinuses burning with the effort to search it out, she moved through the yard, measuring the shape and weight of the smell and making bargains with God. Heavier than a sparrow, ranker than a chipmunk, it was the smell of something large decomposing, reaching out from the briars back of the dogwood. She picked her way carefully past a circle of pigeons in the yard, on the ground, heads on backwards, beaks nestled between their shoulderblades, sea gulls without legs. Bastards, she thought when she realized they were not the source of and therefore not the cure of her agony. Simply asleep. Mattie could make something of it. Didn’t pigeons signify messages—and in the yard rather than up in the dormers, with a full-grown hunter cat on the grounds? She scuffed up dirt with her bare feet and sent two waddling away, ruffling their wings before squatting down in ruts made by the garbage wagon. She sniffed. The smell was not from the wagon. Thicker.

She eased around the dogwood, bark coming off in her hands. Her foot struck a rock. She stopped. That was a good sign. That was a saying, a slogan of the South African women who’d protested the pass—When You Strike a Woman, You’ve Struck a Rock! She waited for insight, for release, something, certain it was a good omen. It should at least put starch in her back, as Mama Lovey would say. She squatted down in the brambles and parted the weeds, sniffing. Nothing but Popsicle wrappers and a bald baby doll, its face disfigured by rain.

The odor seemed to be coming now from the shadows under the hedges out front. A sickening smell, fleshy, grim. Not the heavy oil-and-spearmint stink of a skunk’s fear, but something dead. Maybe Mean Dog from across the way or one of Old Man Murray’s pack of hounds had buried a meaty bone under a bush. Maybe the tomcat had made a raid on a family of squirrels and half-buried what he’d been too full to eat. She headed toward the light the street lamp threw on the front walk, hoping her eyesight would arrive before her feet did.

There were no signs under the hedges of bushy tails, bones, or shallow graves. And the stench seemed to have spread, she noticed, all over Thurmond Street and beyond, everything for miles and miles driven to some terrible putrefaction.

“Getting more like Savannah every day,” a man passing said with a husky laugh. He moved his finger from the side of his nose to the brim of his hat in greeting, not once looking in Zala’s direction with eyebrows
that said, What the hell are you doing parading around in your nightie? She hadn’t seen or heard him approach. But as he went past the house, leaving a trail of gentle perfume, she heard a door click, then the porch light went off three yards down.

Zala looked over toward Paulette’s house, drawn by the glint of binoculars in an upper-story window. Peeper at his post, the brass knob of his bed a third eye. By tomorrow, a tale of romantic intrigue would have traveled the block, and the report that Zala’d been traipsing about in a diaphanous shortie would circle round to her ears by supper. She riveted her eye now on the open window, the shade pull swinging back and forth. Of all the people she knew, half-knew, Peeper was the most likely suspect. Sexual spying. Supposedly bedridden, perfect alibi. She’d turned over his name to B. J. Greaves. They’d asked Zala down at the Task Force office if she harbored negative feelings about the disabled, except they’d said “the physically challenged,” and she’d bungled her answer trying to decode their question. No one had been over there to Paulette’s to question anyone, she was sure of that. But it could be that Peeper was studying her face with high-powered lenses and now knew. But who said the glint was binoculars? She eased backward away from the light, sure that she was caught in the crosshairs of a rifle sight.

“Stop it,” she told herself, just for the sound of her voice. It didn’t sound like a crazy person’s, but maybe that was a sure sign that she was. A chain rattling made her push through the hedges to look. Two boys were standing by the telephone pole half the block down. One boy waved goodbye and ran into a house near the corner; the other, a jaunty boy in cutoff shorts, methodically unfastened a ten-speed bike from the pole, stashing the chain in a bag that hung from the back of the seat. He was doing a drill-team step, throwing his legs around as he wheeled the bike into the street, ran with it, then jumped on and pedaled toward her. A high-school senior or college freshman, she judged, looking him over as he raced by. Did he know he was endangered? Or was the Task Force to be believed, that only younger children, boys of slight build, were qualified for slaughter? She stepped to the curb and watched him approach the lights and sounds of Ashby Street. From out of nowhere, a scrawny brown-and-white mutt took off after the bike, leaping at the boy’s foot, nipping at the reflectors in back, then turning around in the street to bite its fleas.