Those Bones Are Not My Child (25 page)

What mild complaints she’d voiced about the lead-footed leadership had struck Delia as heresy and the twins, answering her letter, as naiveté. “The job of the police,” wrote Gerry, a Peace Corps deputy in
Lesotho, “is to protect the interests of the ruling class and keep the animals domesticated.” And Maxwell, a health worker there, had written on the same blue airmail, “The
comprador
class maintains its privileges by doing the dirty work for the real rulers.” Zala had dropped on the sofa with two dictionaries, studying the letter for counterfeit, for the twins had been the ones who’d taught her that the Black leadership in Atlanta was a true leadership, not an appendage of, not operating at the whim of, an outside group, but accredited by its own community which had built the economic base to launch them. She had no gift for politics. All she wanted was for everybody to get out of her head and to have her son back.

She was glad that the game was a rousing one and that the boys had established a penalty for kicks that sent the lard can anywhere but up ahead. The street offered so little in the way of trees and bushes, the sun bright, starkly flat and unshadowed. She was glad to get past the railroad-track area back of Troy Street. How grim a vacant lot could be even in daylight. A few months ago, though, she would have paused to see if the pecan tree was bearing. Now all she could think of was getting away from that desolate spot. What if Blue Car returned, pulled up in a van with some helpers, grabbed the boys before they reached the back of Church’s Chicken? What could she do? Who would hear her if she screamed? Scream? she asked herself from the back of her head, where she sat on a stool with her arms crossed over her knees, smoking a cigarette, you’ve barely learned to talk good, sister.

When the boys shoved each other into Church’s Chicken, Flyboy pounding on Scoop’s back and demanding he pay up for the Chee•tos with an order of corn on the cob, Zala posted herself by the Dumpster eyeing the parking lot, Troy Street, and Simpson Road, wondering where she could place herself to scream to best advantage. How exciting the simple heroics had looked on the screen in the Ashby movie house:

Doris Day and Jimmy Stewart running into the Albert Hall, the assassination scheduled to take place during a particular passage in the music. Doris rushes down the aisle scanning the audience for the assassin. The faces are calm, comfortable, attentive to the concert. Jimmy races up the carpeted stairs to find the dignitary’s box and warn him that he’s been targeted for murder. The security guards stop Jimmy. The music races on. The shot will be fired when the cymbals clash, he explains
to the guards. He races along, yanking open doors to the box seats. Along the row the dignitary enjoys the music, out of it. Below, the audience enjoys the music, out of it. The musicians on stage turn a page of sheet music, into it. Only Doris and Jimmy to save the day. A gun appears through a curtain. The percussionist is about to clap thunder. Doris sees the gun and screams. The gun tilts. The shot is fired off its mark. A scream. A scream can save a life. And if she screamed? Someone would come along on the trot and offer to take her to church or to Grady’s eighth floor.

“Miz Spencer, did you want to see me about something?” Bestor Brooks was peering around the corner, hanging on to Church’s door, balancing on the loose step.

“Sonny.” It was all she knew to say, caught out that way, her eyes seeping into the boy’s pores. “Sonny.” Surely that was enough. She watched him studying her, her hair uncombed, forehead furrowed, eyes bloodshot, the mouth hard drawn. She’d never felt uglier. A friend’s-mother-who-followed-you-through-the-streets-and-skulked-around-a-garbage-Dumpster-waiting-to-pounce-on-your-bones kind of ugly. “Sonny,” she said through her teeth when pity washed over Bestor Brooks’s face.

“Say, Miz Spencer.” He stepped down and shrugged. The door closing was stopped abruptly.

“Friendship and loyalty is one thing,” she said, a grown-up. “I can understand that. But Sunday’s his birthday. It’s time he came home.”

The other boys came out, looking embarrassed for her. They stood together in a tight clump hugging their square-shaped bundles.

“Sonny,” she said to them. She fixed again on Bestor Brooks, the eldest, the one who broke up the squabbles, the oldest child in his family too. He would not play with her. “Sonny, Bestor—Sonny.”

“We haven’t seen Sonny since Fourth of July, Miz Spencer, I swear.” He turned to the others to confirm it. They nodded. “That time we came by to see if he was going to the cookout.”

“But he was on punishment,” Scoop said.

“Except for that other time,” Flyboy corrected, “the time I came by to walk him to rehearsal.” They all nodded. “But then you called, right?” He rubbed his shoulder against Jeeter, who rearranged his radio on top of his bag and bobbed his head up and down. “Jeeter called to say we’d been locked out of the basement again, so we called rehearsal off.”

“Yeah,” they all mumbled, looking down at their shoes. Then one of them said something about being made late now and getting locked out again. She singled Scoop out, certain it was he trying to rush things.

“That’s where we’re going now,” he said, looking straight in her teeth.

“To rehearsal? That’s where you’re going? You’re still a quintet, the five of you?”

Jeeter was counting each of them with his chin, not sure what she was driving at.

“We got somebody else,” Scoop said, knowing. He rocked back on his heels.

“Somebody else. You got somebody else.” She looked at each of the boys and they all hugged their bags more closely, except Flyboy, who held his away from his clothes.

“Yeah,” Scoop said, like he was picking a fight, “we got somebody else.”

“But he’s not as good as Sonny, though,” Jeeter said quickly. “He don’t even play a little bit of guitar.”

“Yeah,” they all said, shifting their weight from one foot to the other.

“He sings good, though,” Scoop said. “Real good.” Nobody echoed this.

She fixed on Scoop. What kind of name was that anyway? Did it mean he was an ass grabber? He liked to punch, but they didn’t call him KO, they called him Scoop. And before that he was called something else, Kofi had told her. A kid with aliases. She moved in on him, thinking over what B. J. had said in the Busy Bee Cafe. She’d tossed down a packet of photos on the counter and asked Zala point blank, “Sonny a faggot?” Then asked if he knew the punks who hung around the Greyhound terminal or the bars she referred to as “S&M meat markets.” Scoop was backing away.

“We ain’t seen’m since then.” Scoop’s voice was suddenly whiny. “We told Mr. Spencer that the time he came looking with his pistol.”

“What do they call you at home?” she hissed, and Scoop jumped back, hitting against a parked car in the lot. “How many names have you got?”

“Say, Miz Spencer,” Bestor said. “We don’t know anything, I swear. We’d tell you if we did. We just don’t know where Sonny went to.”

She turned around and looked at him. “Sunday, I told you.”

“Ma’am?” He leaned his face forward but kept his feet planted where they were.

“Sunday’s his birthday.”

“Yeah?” Jeeter was interested.

“You think he’ll be home by then?” Flyboy asked.

“Hope so. What do you think?”

They looked at each other, then looked at the ground. Flyboy did a quarter-turn and watched traffic along Simpson Road.

“If you ask me,” Scoop said, “you oughta go see that newspaper joker.”

“Mr. Murray?”

Flyboy arched an eyebrow and stared hard at Scoop. “Man, that’s really outside,” he said, leaning hard on the words, then jerking his shoulder against Scoop, nearly knocking him into Zala.

“Mr. Murray’s all right,” Jeeter said, stepping between them again. “He’s just old and kinda crankety.”

“Murray,” she said.

“Say, Miz Spencer. We’re looking too. We’re asking around. He was our friend.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say ‘was’ to me.”

Bestor stepped back and mumbled something, then pointed his bag toward a telephone pole on Simpson. “I only meant we’re really looking.” She followed his gaze, then nodded when she recognized the handbill tacked on the pole. Bestor tucked his package under his arm and reached for her. She almost came apart with relief till she realized he was simply pulling her out of the way of a taxi that had driven around the restaurant in search of a drive-up window.

“You all right, Miz Spencer?” Jeeter Brooks looked concerned.

Was she all right, a boy was asking, a boy menaced by creeps who cruised young boys, by drug dealers who used them dangerously, by numbers dealers who exploited their mobility and quick memory, by larceny-minded adults who had them climbing in windows or thieving from coat racks, going in men’s rooms to roll homosexuals, menaced by Saturday-night juiceheads, by dogs, rats, reckless drivers, and don’t-give-a-shit landlords, by leaky gas pipes and space heaters that fell over and sent curtains up, sleeping on roofs in summer with no retainer walls, crummy jobs or no jobs at all to prepare for, join the army and see
the world from a body bag, student loans that kept you in debt past thirty, weirdo mothers of lost friends who stalked them, and maniacs on the loose grabbing and killing, and was she all right?

“Mrs. Spencer.” Flyboy was offering his towel, but Bestor had already stuffed a napkin into her hand.

“Want us to take you home?” Jeeter piled his radio and package on top of Flyboy’s and reached for her arm.

“You want us to walk you home,” Flyboy asked, “or you gonna take the bus?”

The boys were patting themselves down for bus passes or change but already limbering up for a walk.

“Wait. Please.”

But Bestor Brooks shook his head. Eldest boy of eight children, his gesture was the soul of economy. No, discussion over, nothing more to be done today, go home and go to bed, lady. Zala followed him out of the parking lot and the others fell in step behind her, quiet as no boys she’d ever known to be.

“Does the number 14 go downtown to Central City Park?” Her voice so light, so casual, it seemed to be coming from another time zone. She rummaged in her purse, then rummaged some more just for the there-and-now sound of it to ground her. “You all go on,” she said listening to herself. “I’ve got to get downtown and meet the kids.” She was already flashing forward to Margaret Mitchell Square, Kenti prancing along with her new library card, Kofi’s nose stuck in a book about quasars, and Gloria leading them to the park, where boys her age hung out after their part-time summer jobs.

“There’s no more 14 Dixie Hill bus, Mrs. Spencer. It’s the 51 Simpson bus now.” Flyboy had his towel draped over his arm in case she might need it.

“Does it go to Central City Park?” Such an ordinary question to be asking in the third-degree brightness of the afternoon. She heard the sentence echo as a caption, under an illustration in her Spanish text,
Preguntas y Respuestas
. What wouldn’t she give to curl up inside the type and live that life: Is the book on the table?
Si
, the book is on the table.

“It goes there after a while.” Jeeter smiled when he saw her smile. He drew circles and loops in the air with his chin. “Quickest way to get there if you ain’t in a hurry,” he said, then laughed when she laughed.

Flyboy flagged the bus down and was the first to take her elbow. Bestor and Jeeter bumped into each other to take her other arm and help her aboard. Scoop hung back. And long after she’d chatted with the bus driver in translated Spanish text sentences, remarking how a fifty-cent fare was a sign of the city growing too big too fast, then seated herself by the window and waved adios to the boys still standing by the bus post, Scoop was standing way back where the sidewalk met the dirt, his back up against a wall of green leaves.

The young woman across the aisle had a handmade loom propped against the seat in front of her. She had reinforced a nine-by-eleven picture frame, then set nails in on four sides and strung her warp. Zala found it soothing to watch her send the smooth boat of a bobbin through the twine, drawing aquamarine yarn across the frame. Several small balls of colored yarn were in the woman’s lap, together with a fork for tamping and delicate, filigree scissors for clipping. From time to time she worked in an inch or two of a contrasting color, plucking the threads with her fingertips. Slowly, Zala relaxed into the rhythm of the woman’s weaving, her own fingers working in her lap in concord. When the bus braked suddenly for a cyclist, the woman looked over at Zala and they smiled. The ancient smile that weaving women secretively exchange in a country, Zala imagined, that once burned spinsters as witches. Burned at the stake. Zala leaned her head against the window. Burnt on the altar. She closed her eyes and begged for mercy. But there they were, the children, burnt offerings.

Abraham piling the kindling on Ike, whom he’s promised to God. The good fairy arriving to save the day slips Abe a ram. Abe agrees. To save face in front of all that goodness, no doubt, same fairy from the drama of Hagar and Ish, the baby killed off by hunger, thirst, and overexposure revived. Abe, in a sleight-of-hand, substitutes the ram for his son. Does he think his God is myopic?… Dusk, the sun going down on a field of carnage. With God’s help Colonel Jephthah has smote a mighty army of enemies and so has promised to burn up in thank-you the first thing he lays his eyes on back at the ranch. At home, the household’s excited with the news of victory. The lovely daughter dons her high holiday threads, puts flowers in her hair, a trimbal in her hand, and
dances down the road to meet Daddy. Jeb lays his eyes on his daughter’s loveliness and rends his clothes. “Alas, my daughter—what you have done to me!” Blood in his eye, he can’t read the fine-print escape clause the way Abe did. Besides, she’s asking for it.

The barrier was down at the railroad tracks, the bell clanging, the light a twitching red eye. As a schoolgirl Zala had tried to wade through the Old Testament without offending her teachers with her real thoughts; eager to be a good girl, she usually came up with the official version. But there were current voices now in her head: Mattie talking about the children’s bodies laid out just so and expounding her cult theory, Paulette talking surgical sutures, and laboratory diabolics reminding anyone in earshot that the Atlanta-based Center for Disease Control had monitored the Tuskegee Experiment, using Black male subjects from the thirties to the seventies, Spence pounding his fist in his palm and talking Klan. Zala, gazing out of the window, could believe the whole city was made up of covens and klaverns and demons with scalpels. Burnt offerings were everywhere she looked. A trash heap on fire was a funeral pyre. Even a moldering blanket in the weeds past the cinder patch looked like it would burst into flames if she stared hard enough.