Those Bones Are Not My Child (20 page)

Good thing we don’t have a dog. That had been Kofi’s two cents,
going over the advice the cop had given: a man, a gun, a dog. “Good thing,” he told Kenti, “ ’cause Ma’s dog wouldn’t know where to lie down.” And they had laughed. That was a saying: The washerwoman’s dog belongs to neither the house nor the river. Something Cora might say about a gallivanting woman. Something Mama Lovey might say about an itinerant worker. Zala applied it to herself, confused more and more each day as to what was her schedule—TF, Board of Ed, barbershop, art center, newspaper offices, B. J.’s, various stakeouts. Any dog of hers would run itself ragged trying to figure out where to lie down. That was the trouble with learning all these sayings, she sighed, pulling her hair at the roots. What to hold, what to discard?

The mutt had trotted back into a yard. The boy on the ten-speed was almost swallowed up in the neon haze of the one block still jumping after 10 p.m. She pictured herself a whippet, a greyhound, one of them bony fast dogs she’d seen at the races when her father-in-law tired of the zoo. A greyhound racing alongside the bike, then braking short at the intersection of Ashby and Simpson to howl and bring the nightlife to a stop. For nothing had stopped. That was the bewildering thing. Children had been bludgeoned, shot, stabbed, and strangled, and nothing had stopped. Conventions came to town. Save the Fox Theatre luncheons were served at fifty dollars a plate. Newspaper and magazine articles put asterisks alongside the Fortune 500 branches in Atlanta. Suits were pressed, briefcases polished. And nothing stopped. Students dragged trunks along the walk to their dorms, registered early for courses, purchased sweatshirts, made friends, and rode their bikes with no thought that they might never come back. Milton Harvey hadn’t. Eric Middlebrooks hadn’t. Children were sent on errands with no thought that a child could fall through a door in the air. Some said Jefferey Mathis had vanished in a puff of smoke before he reached the Star service station. Others, though, remembered a blue car cruising the neighborhood. But people saw blue cars, sent children to the store, or put them to bed with no thought that they’d be gone in the morning. LaTonya Wilson was gone. But nothing had stopped.

Along Campbellton Road where Spence drove up and down, jazz buffs crowded into 200 South, folks got down at New Orleans Seafood, and all up and down the strip from the Touch of Class to Cisco’s to Greenbriar Parkway, people partied with no idea that a boy had disappeared on that route. Went downtown to the movies with no information
of those two last seen on their way to the Baronet. And in parks and pools where she’d asked around, the lifeguards checked between the toes for sores but not the locker room for kidnappers, though she’d passed on the information that one of Mattie’s psychic friends had offered, that Earl Lee Terrell had never left the pool at South Bend Park alive. A sex-for-hire ring had been busted by the team searching that area for the boy, but nothing had stopped. B. J.’s list kept growing. And the media was mostly silent, burying the story in the back pages under liquor ads. So parents disciplining their children gave no thought to the possibility that the last gruff word uttered would be the last word heard.

Zala spun around, a light full in her face.

“Ma?” Kofi and Kenti were huddled in the doorway in the crisp green-and-purple pj’s their granny Cora had sent.

“Kofi, turn that thing off and go to bed.”

He played the light around her feet for a second, then shone it on himself. Sea grapes and kelp. “Mama, you better get in here. You almost naked.” Kenti ducked behind her brother before Zala could ask who she thought she was talking to with her fast self.

“We gonna clean up now? I tried to wake you, Ma.”

“Did you hear what I said, you two?”

“You said we’d clean up on Friday so we could go to the movies on Saturday. Well, we ain’t cleaned up yet.”

“Don’t play with me, mister. You heard what I just said. And lock up.”

They stepped inside, grumbling. Kofi made a grand effort to slam the door, but the carpet was thick near the threshold. He made the most of putting the chain on, though, trying to wake up the neighbors who might have managed to sleep through the Spencer Family Sidewalk Theater. Zala heard a thud, one of them tripping over the sheet, Kofi most likely, deliberately not using the camp light so he could be hurt and let her know it. She heard more stumbling and thumping. Her home was a terrible mess. But only a terrible mess: It was her life that was uninhabitable.

H
e pulled in between a Ford tow and a wheelless station wagon, a lousy taste in his mouth, as though he’d lit up a stale cigarette. He was about to get out when his scrotum tightened, the taste a warning, the diesel fumes and hammering registering at last. He’d actually been scanning the grease-gray terrain for sandbags and concertina wire, quickening the ghosts.
Watchit
. He steadied himself and tucked the folded flyer into his breast pocket. Getting out, he worked up the spit to whistle the ghosts away. Damn if he ever wanted to have the shape of his world determined again by vials from the VA dispensary. But the tune he was whistling, trying to armor over protectively, was Marvin Gaye’s—“Don’t punish me with brutality/Talk to me, … Oh, what’s going on.” Self-ambush. Spence slammed the door, hardened his stomach, and picked his way through a scatter of scrap-iron parts and hulks of vulcanized rubber.

It was a deep, open shed set squat on the ground, its front wall a corrugated door rolled up with padlocks hanging from loops. In the junked-up yards on either side, mounds of blasted parts poked through the weeds and bow-bent rust that might have once been fenders sunk under the assault of kudzu. The chaos inside the shed was lit here and there by sour blobs of yellow; heavy-duty trouble lights, oblong and caged, were hooked on a pegboard where fan belts gathered dust, and hooked on a slanted shelf that had spilled boxes of screws on the floor. Spence wondered about the man he’d come to question. Was the wreckage inside a sign of dotage or outright contempt for customers? Spence braced himself against the entranceway wall, trying to outline a path past spout cans furry with filth, boxes once damp that had dried, buckled, grayed, and become something other than cardboard. The more he could make out, the more worried he got for his boots, his
slacks; his hand was already a lost cause. There was no space in the burl pattern of grease to wipe his hands clean. That’s when he noticed the signs.
LOOK OUT BAD DOG
. He hadn’t heard any barking as he’d approached, only the wheeze and hiss of a hydraulic jack being pumped, only loud banging that had stopped abruptly when he’d slammed the car door.
WE HAMMER DENTS
. He could believe that. Inside, leaning against a pegboard under a series of baldpeens, was a John Henry sledgehammer. The sign he was leaning against was a favorite from childhood:
BEAR ALIGNMENT
with the puzzling logo of the laughing bear, or, as Kenti maintained, a little boy in a bear suit holding out his hand to show that M&M’s did so melt in your paw. What a bear had to do with front-end axles, welding arcs, and the din of iron knocking on iron—sounds he’d associated with machine shops ever since his Uncle Rayfield’s—not even his uncle, who knew everything, had been able to explain.

Spence told himself that he was standing there smearing his greasy hand on the doorjamb and indulging in nostalgia because he was waiting for the man to appear and guide him through the chaos. An Oldsmobile was up in the air on orange runners, but no one was anywhere near the jack. Beyond the Olds, over a table where a pencil dangled on a string and the phone book looked like someone had been practicing origami with the pages, a pane of dusty glass showed an office beyond. No one was there, either. He expected to see on the walls the signs of old—
VULCAN PLOW, HARNESS HITCH FIXED, FARM MACHINERY LOANED
. There were two calendars, the obligatory pinup, the equally obligatory insurance-company version of a harp-strumming angel gazing down through the clouds.

He thought he caught a movement. The siphon hose attached to the Olds’s underbelly swayed a bit. But when he cleared his throat and scraped his shoe against the pavement, no one stirred. A far door, near a series of small windows green with mold, was open, suggesting that whoever had been hammering was not now taking a crap. Spence waited. The more he looked, the more he was convinced that the chaos had been deliberately arranged. A battered tire rim leaned against three metal drums that had been punched with a serrated tool that had pulled the jagged ends out. A dangerous thing to go past, he noted. A waist-high, hospital-oxygen-looking tank had had its black lettering dimmed by a coat of navy deck gray, but the skull and crossbones had been revived
or invented with thick gluey white now a light shade of gray. Not contempt, not dotage, he decided when he spied the wire running from the tire rim to a complicated construction of hubcaps and spare parts near a soda crate. Fear. The place was booby-trapped. The wire was so visible now he wondered how he could have missed it. Ankle-high, it snaked between the jagged drums and the Jolly Roger tank and coiled around one of the hubcaps, then disappeared behind the soda crate. And what might be behind the crate, he wondered, massaging his chin with his clean hand—a crossbow straining in tension, which would discharge a quiver of arrows after the hubcaps crashed in warning and broke the final connection?

Trip wire. “Den diz muz be de playze,” he mouthed to himself, the way his uncle Rayfield used to, a punchline from some grown-up routine that had gone over his head as a child. There was another movement, a shadowy movement in the pit. A man? A bear? His heart quickened. The siphon hose was definitely swaying, then suddenly taut. Spence tried to call out. But it was too late. Too late for protective spit, for ghost-routing tunes, for muscle or shell or magical chants or even “Oh, shit.” He’d been summoning the haints from childhood all along, unaware, wanting to be anyplace and anyone other than where and who he was and in such deep trouble. He’d only meant to flirt with the past a little, dance near it, circle, call upon someone from those days when he could curl up in bed with his thumb in his mouth and a grown-up someone would take care of troubles. Someone like his uncle Rayfield had been before he knocked his favorite nephew flat on his ass in the dirt and unnamed him.

They’d been going to get him overalls, at least that’s what Rayfield told Wesley, overalls for Nathaniel to fish in—the first
he’d
heard of it, deciding “fishing” was a code word, for on the first day of the visit his uncle had called him away from Dee and the other big kids to ask if he’d ever seen a still. At eleven, Spence didn’t know what a still was, but his uncle had flashed a mouthful of gold, so he’d grinned too. The family’s return to Atlanta put off for the day, his father walked the two of them to the truck looking worried, stood in the road looking worried a long time after the truck rambled off. When they went past the main store, the only store, the store-post office-gun shop store, Spence pulled his head back into the truck and got worried too. When they took a side
road past the lumber mill, he got scared. His mama had strict notions about fooling around with “them people” who stayed “out back there.” Them people drank raw whiskey till they went crazy blind out back there. Lotta cussin’ and cuttin’ out back there. No house numbers even out back there. Don’t go to church out back there. Just soon bed down with a hound as their daughters. This heard, though, through the swinging door of the dining room. He was excited to get there but Mama-scared too. They bumped past lean-to’s, rattled past burnt stumps and blazed spaces between log piles. For all the cussin’ and cuttin’, Spence was thinking, his head bouncing against the roof of the truck, the trees were still closely thick and coming right at them, trying to crowd into the truck.

“Diz muz be de playze.” His uncle drawled his jokey line at a sudden clearing no larger than the yard in front of the machine shop. There was a gas pump that surprised Spence, though he doubted it had worked since 1902, his mama’s favorite year. The whole of it—yard, pump, house, laundry bush, side sitting bench—could’ve fit in the carport back home in Atlanta. The house was a box with a chiseled-out window; its door had no steps, had to hoist up to climb in; a metal chimney stuck up with smoke coming out; and all over the front of the house were signs—Griffin All-White Maybry Feed & Seed, Watkin’s Linament, A.J. Coasts & Threads, Duke Pomade. Spence didn’t think for a moment that the house was a store carrying any of these items or overalls, but that’s how they decorated out back there.

“Who dem?” he asked, not joking, and almost ducked from habit. His mama didn’t play about English and “resorting to savage,” as she would say.

“People. Folks. Can’t you see that, Nathaniel?”

On the side of the house, on a crudely made bench, three old folks balanced, a jar of pig parts by the woman’s left heel. Everything looked dark brown, the dirt, the people, the corn husks and cabbage leaves that littered the ground, the wet wash on the bush. Not even late afternoon, but the light brown too. The old woman had veins cording out of her ashy legs, her feet looked horny, her breasts were in her lap, and the dress not a dress was just some cloth stretched in front and held with a safety pin. The two men looked clouded over, so Spence figured they’d been drinking raw since 1902. A woman came to the doorway in a butcher
apron, looked at the truck, and spit a glob of brown juice into the dirt, hitting the only part of the ground not covered with garbage. Then she turned back into the dark, the apron not covering much in the rear.

Uncle Rayfield wrenched open the door, seeming to want to make a big racket of it. The old folks didn’t break their trance. He held his hand up to Spence like you do a dog: Stay. Spence was nobody’s dog, he was a Spencer, but he stayed, ’cause he’d seen the children by now and they didn’t look right. A little bandy-legged baby in only an undershirt was leaning against three teenage boys, who between them, Spence thought, had gone twenty-five years all told without a comb. They looked at him, then looked at Rayfield. Spence’s uncle was walking funny, his arms hanging well away from his pockets, gunfighter-style, his elbows bent, his hands palms up in front, no weapons, no aces. He stopped by the door and said something to the old folks—something gentle, it looked like, by the way he dipped his head to bend around the corner. The old woman roused herself, rubbed her legs a little, and answered, dipping her head too. Then a light went on in the house, a weak light, so feeble why bother? Spence thought. Uncle Rayfield turned and waved him out of the truck.