Those Bones Are Not My Child (24 page)

Zala leaned against the side of the Ollie Street Y. The DJ had switched from his rapping voice to his news-bulletin voice. Zala strained to hear, but the boy changed the station. She slumped back against the wall, her breath hot on her top lip. Earlier, while the newscasts continued the daily countdown on the American hostages in Iran, Zala had logged in her notebook the errors made and opportunities blown to rescue the child hostages in Atlanta. Five weeks of deprivation and desolation bordering on insanity, and she was told (her civic conscience being appealed to), “But we can’t let this reach the front pages—all hell would break loose!” As if that wasn’t exactly what she wanted, if only she knew how to do it. The authorities had told Mrs. Camille Bell that her husband had done their boy in but they just
couldn’t prove it. Mrs. Bell went right on raising the alarm. “Check it out,” one of the parents at STOP had tried to school Zala, “the figures speak for themselves, so of course they’ll say anything to keep you quiet. In 1969 one-half million convention delegates poured sixty million dollars into the local economy. You ready to hear the figures for last year? Hold on to your hat now.” And each time Zala had said, “Well, I don’t know,” stalling, looking for something particular in them that could not be found in herself. Maybe it was true what the police told Mrs. Bell, so she studied her most especially, but she could not come up with anything better than that Mrs. Bell wore glasses and she didn’t. Stupid. So the parents talked to her like the stupid person she was. “Don’t you remember the trouble downtown last summer, Mrs. Spencer? A white woman, onetime secretary to a former governor, got killed, remember? And one hundred state troopers were on the scene just like that.” Snapping fingers one inch from her nose, while one of the mothers kept saying, “You know it’s true.” And still she didn’t know, because that was too impossible to think about, not about the mayor and the commissioner.

But she did write on tissue-thin airmail, “Convention dollars speak so much louder than an invisible community silenced by their very wealth of pigment and their very lack of dollars.” But wrote it without rancor, wrote it to two not-quite relatives on the other side of the ocean, so it didn’t count, didn’t mean she was anything like the grief-struck, outraged parents. And true, she’d been watching the news for years, and there was no getting around the fact that the authorities were dragging their feet. On TV the Red Cross, the fire department’s emergency medical team, unions, civic organizations, governments, citizens of neighboring towns or countries always rushed into a flood area, an earthquake region, a plane-crash catastrophe to restore order, rescue and treat, declare a state of emergency. In the movies, army generals, university professors, health workers, and ordinary people mobilized quickly, pooled resources, and brought things under control. The robot has run amok—quick, call in the welders, make room for the lab techs. Someone’s broken into the lab and stolen the petri dish with the virulent virus—quick, inoculate the citizenry, all vacation leaves canceled by order of the superintendent and the mayor. We’ve got the alien creature trapped in the old silver mine—quick, bring in the torch throwers and dynamite setters, clear the highways for the tanks, evacuate the town.

Like a fool, she’d photocopied Sonny’s medical records, packed a Moon Pie wrapper he’d stuffed in a corner of his gym bag, took along a pencil he’d chewed on, and the pick comb with his hair wound round the tines. With Kofi’s help she’d lifted prints from the cassettes onto cellophane tape and took the bag down to the TF. She’d read some-where—and not in the comic strips, either, with crisp-angled arrows pointing out the crime stopper’s two-way-radio wristwatch, she had to tell the ironic officer—that fingerprints could be taken from inside a rubber glove; that the sex, age, and blood type could be identified from a single strand of hair; that trained dogs could track a given scent through a crowded city; in short, that crime labs were being run by thinkers, so yes, of course, damn straight she expected results overnight. But when she’d gone back to follow through the next day, no one could locate Sonny’s folder and she’d lost her momentum of the previous day and decided to play on sympathies instead. From one day to the next she flopped back and forth between outrage, disbelief, and faith that a little wretchedness and courtesy could win the day, still murmured “I don’t know,” not wanting to link herself to those who did seem to know, parents whose children were dead.

The blue car went past again, turned tightly, and bumped its two right wheels up on the curb, barely grazing the boy’s behind with a fender. The boy leapt up the steps and glared at the driver, who gunned his motor, then took off up the hill. Zala dug out a pencil and took notes in her checkbook. Blue Ford Galaxy. Fulton County plates. Male, Black, thirtyish, air-force-type sunglasses, arm slung over the backseat, driver and passenger side windows rolled halfway down, man roasting in a storebought safari suit. In her notebook at the barbershop and on the bulletin board at home was a category called “Cars”—blue, blue Ford Galaxy, blue-and-white sedan, green station wagon, yellow like a cab. Mattie’s clairvoyant friend had said a blue Ford Galaxy figured in at least one of the abductions. And B. J., in touch with several families of missing children whose files had come back from the TF office with no comment, had mentioned a blue car at least once. “Blue car” was scribbled in the margin on the page of the dead who were not on the TF list. Was it the Tammy Reid case, the girl who’d been found stabbed to death behind a warehouse the same day Angel Lenair was found strapped to a tree? Zala wracked her brain. Beverly Harvey—killed the same week as Reid and Lenair, same week Jefferey Lamar Mathis vanished—was
the blue car on the line next to that name? The Mathis boy’s sister had been accosted on the same corner from which her brother had disappeared, by a man driving a blue car. Was it a Ford Galaxy? Zala’s mind spun. One of Dave’s boys had told a story of a nine-year-old kid who’d been taken from a store in the Stewart-Lakewood area by two men who put him out later near Pickfair when he refused to go down on them for a dollar. Or was that the green-station-wagon story?

Zala ran to the side door of the Y. Where the hell were the counselors while creeps menaced youth out front? A voice in the back of her head told her it was up to her:
You the one
. She tugged on the knob, knocked. What was she supposed to do—run the car down, smash his glasses with her key ring, gouge his eyes out with her pencil?
You the one
. She wasn’t the one. There were people trained and paid for this work. Mama Lovey had told her to stick close to home and let the police do their job, Widow Man grumbling in the background about the phone bill. Sit tight, act normal, maintain routine. But “normal” had always been a threadbare throw rug Mama Lovey slung over the snakepit and called wall-to-wall deluxe as she swept up broken dishes and shattered light bulbs, then gathered her brood around her to pose for family portraits.

Zala raced toward the back in search of an entrance. Maybe she wasn’t the one, but then, “Whatever the Task Force is doing is the best-kept secret in the world,” Camille Bell had said. So she had become a one, ’cause the TF was ignoring half the victims, yet talking about a “composite profile.” Like shopping for a wide-patterned plaid with a one-inch-square swatch of fabric for matching. She tried doubling back through the grassy yard, no other door in sight. Maybe she was the one, because in real life there was no bumbling Columbo dropping cigar ash on his rumpled trenchcoat as he pestered people and put the case together. There was only the STOP committee sifting through clues and keeping the fire lit under the TF’s behinds. In real life Dave, not the Mod Squad, questioned kids in the shelters and detention centers. Dave driving up and down Dimmock Street showing Sonny’s picture to the young dealers in case he’d been grabbed in a case of mistaken identity. Spence and his army buddy Teodescu, not Billy Jack or Sheriff Walking Tall, keeping tabs on the Stone Mountain yahoos. And there was no Lois Lane to emblazon headlines across the front page so all hell could break loose.

The side door was flung back and hit the brick wall as she approached. Boys crowded out pushing and shoving, twisting wet towels and snapping each other, taking over the sidewalk. Several boys bunched together separated and streamed past her on either side. Others grabbed their buddies in choke holds and drag-ran them across Ollie to the park. She tried to get around to the front of the building, but two boys were roughhousing on the corner and she could not get past.

“Hey, Jeeter,” she heard, then shoved the boys out of her way. A rowdy kid about thirteen was pushing up against the boy on the bottom step, trying to wrestle the radio away. “Awww, c’mon, lemme hold it a minute.”

“Forget you, Scoop.”

So this was Scoop, the singer Kofi had tagged UFO, Unidentified Fat Object. Not so much fat as waddly, he walked on the back of his heels with his torso thrust forward, in imitation, perhaps, of a potbellied father. Another boy, whom Kofi had ID’d on the tapes as Flyboy, the neato dresser, was coming down the steps eating Chee•tos, lifting an elbow, twisting at the waist, fending off the boys pushing at his back and reaching around him trying to make a grab for the Chee•tos bag. His ’fro was freshly trimmed, a part on the side razored in. His towel was neatly folded around his neck like a pilot’s scarf. His denim shorts were hot-starched and pressed hard, his shirt, striped a cool blue and white.

Several bigger boys sauntered out of the door tucking their shirts in. They took the stairs slow and easy, one of them breaking open a pack of cigarettes, another frisking himself for matches. Then Bestor Brooks came out, a taller version of the sandy-haired, square-jawed boy she’d followed from downtown. She held her breath waiting for the circle to be completed, the four boys already moving on. And in the doorway was a man, not a boy, a musclebound man in a white terry-cloth shirt, wrinkled beige pants, and white tennis shoes who was closing the door.

“Pig out!” Scoop was racing up to the rise of the hill, a stream of Chee•tos littering the street behind him.

“Your ass is grass!” Flyboy hollered, and the three boys took off after Scoop. Zala, following, was remembering that she didn’t like Scoop. On the tapes he’d interrupted rehearsal to punch Sonny in the arm for not breaking off a line crisply enough to suit him. She’d been playing the tapes over and over, listening for a name, a place, a tone, a
clue. But all she knew was that Scoop was older than Sonny and Jeeter and missed no opportunity to lord it over the two.

The blue Ford Galaxy was waiting at the very top of the hill, no moving traffic in sight. She stepped behind a bush when she saw Bestor Brooks, leaning in to speak to the driver, glance her way as if giving directions. The other boys had moved to the park side of the street and were bent down gathering up trash. Whatever Bestor Brooks told the driver did the trick. The car spun around in a juicy U-turn and sped her way, the boys leaping to the middle of the street bombarding the Galaxy with rocks, soda bottles, and beer cans. Veering from one side of the street to the other, the car sped past her, the driver doing a mean lean, head cocked, the tinted glasses covering half his face, the heel of his hand maneuvering the wheel. Hollywood. She took down the licenseplate number and resumed her pursuit following the boys’ voices, on the down side of the hill, laughing and congratulating each other.

Would they now lead her to Sonny? “Probably holing up with a friend,” Dave had said. “Kids will do that,” Mac had said. “When families break up, the child often feels it’s his fault, and feels torn by conflicting loyalties. Often they run to resolve the tension.” Zala had sat patiently listening to that crap while Mac talked and scribbled in his notebook as if she hadn’t learned to read upside down all these years—“lower socioeconomic …” “a surfeit of problems …” “no perceptual set for …” “limited ability to …” “Poor orientation to civilian life,” he’d written once, as if that took profound insight. He wouldn’t join in filing suit against the army, but he sure could scribble. Medication, yes; litigation, no. “Passive aggressive,” he’d written about her. “Carry on as usual,” he’d had the nerve to tell them. You’re lousy parents and your son has split, but carry on as before, what the hell.

She trudged up the hill on the lookout for the blue car. She was learning. There was no Kojak to grab a creep out of a car and slam him around while sucking on a Tootsie Pop, just the boys and their rocks and her pencil. There’d be no Virgil Tibbs arriving on the scene all scientific and articulate, bringing the culprits to justice and leading her boy safely home.
You the one
nagged at her and sent her scurrying down the hill, her feet sliding out of the front of her sandals. Real life; she had to stick to real life. Only in stories was there a detective to reach under the counter where the dead body slumped on its stool, coming up with a wad of chewed gum that a retired orthodontist hermit up in the hills
could trace to the culprit minutes before the final commercial. In real life, all cops could do, they told her, was listen, keep an eye peeled, and wait, the squad rooms looking more and more every day like a fast-food annex, greasy white bags on the desks, bulgy Styrofoam cups on the file cabinets. In the movies they fine-tooth-combed an area and sent bags of clues to the crime lab. In her basement they’d overlooked the area behind the stairs and the area behind the furnace and had been so gruffly rude and clumsy questioning Mr. Grier when he came down his cellar steps to see what was going on, that her neighbors hadn’t spoken to her since. Just that morning when Zala had run to set her garbage out, she heard the Griers’ Herby Curby wheels stop short in their driveway. They’d rather live with garbage for a week than say good morning to her.

She followed the boys onto Mayson Turner. They’d found a dented lard can perfect for soccer. She’d thought the police would talk to these boys, would assign a detail to watch the comings and goings of neighbors and friends, would stake out the Boys’ Club and the campsite they’d used, interrogate the counselors, grill Sonny’s former teachers. She was learning. Maybe she was the one. But so far every time she’d listened to that voice she’d wound up a stranger to herself, a crazed woman with snakes in her hair and film on her teeth, spying on neighborhood children, squatting down in neighbors’ driveways peering into basement windows with bloodshot eyes, intercepting boys her son knew on the way from the pool and following them home ready to tear the walls down or crowbar the floors up, but only breaking her nails on windowsills a little too high. One Sunday she’d seen the Brooks family walking from church and, telling herself she would overtake them in the next thirty feet and offer a lift, knowing good and well she wouldn’t, the Bug couldn’t hold half of the group, followed them home, parked around the corner, and crept close to the house, looking in every window for who might emerge from a closet or crawl from under a bed. The you-the-one self had been urging her lately to set aside the artsy-craftsy farting around and run up a navy-blue shirt and skirt that could get her past the inner-sanctum doors at headquarters and city hall. But would she find out anything from those quarters worth knowing?