Those Bones Are Not My Child (31 page)

“Like Sonny and his paper route,” Kofi explained.

“What’s bad about that?” Kenti wanted to know, looking at both of them, then sitting back down.

“Nothing, baby. That’s what I’m trying to tell you if you would listen.” Zala pulled Kenti back between her knees but didn’t start braiding. She was biting her lips. “It’s people’s prejudice is what it is, and using language in a hateful way. For example, if you look a certain way and live in a certain part of town and you’re a kid who rakes leaves and carries groceries, then people say, ‘Isn’t that nice. What a fine, industrious child to be helping out.’ Understand? But if you live in another part of town and are doing the same thing—”

“And you’re Black.”

“Okay, Kofi, and you’re Black, with not much money—then people
say, ‘Why don’t their parents look after those kids running around neglected? They’re little hoodlums, street kids, hustlers.’ Understand?”

“They so mean,” Kenti said, punching the mattress.

“Now, for example, if I lived in a certain part of town, people would call me a working mother. ‘There goes Mrs. Spencer. She works so hard raising her children. Bless her heart. She’s taking courses at college and working three jobs. And such lovely children. So smart, so cute, so well-mannered.’ ” She tweaked Kenti’s nose but she couldn’t hold on to her smile and next thing she looked angry. “But don’t let me be who I am, then people say, ‘There goes a terrible mother. Always going off here and there, leaving her kids all alone. How awful.’ ”

“Mama, you don’t leave us alone. Do she, Kofi?”

“She sure don’t.” He sat back on his heels knocking the boots over.

“You a good mother, Mama.” Kenti fitted herself between Zala’s knees and wrapped her mother’s legs back around her middle.

“Understand? About using words for this and that?” Zala held out her hands, smiling at one and frowning at the other.

“Like when Ma’s in a good mood,” Kofi said, leaning toward Kenti. “Then we’re her sugar dumplins and her punkin pies. But when she’s in a bad mood,” he bared his teeth and growled in Kenti’s ear, “Then I’m
Mis
-ter Kofi and you’re
Misssss
-y Kenti.”

“ ‘March yourself to bed, missy, with yo’ fast self.’
You
do it, Mama.” Kenti tugged at Zala’s legs. “Do how you do when you mad.”

“Oh, lamby pie, I simply couldn’t,” Zala cooed like a pigeon. “Mother dear is so weary, so please don’t elbow me, dahlins, or I will surely collapse—then who will fix you wonderful children dessert and put you beddy-bye?”

“Dessert? What’s for dessert?”

“First we must finish your hair, my sweet. And you, my precious scruffy one, quick like a rabbit before the water overflows. Or mother will be mad and gobble you up like the gingerbread boy.”

“Ooowee, Mama. You losing your beads!”

Kenti dove under the bed after bouncing beads. Kofi scrambled after those sinking into the rug. Zala leaned over, picking up some but mostly tickling the kids. Kofi hated to leave. He dashed as fast as he could and turned off the bathwater and skidded back, sliding to home plate in time to get tickled. Leaning over, she was playful and silly. But
when she sat back and the top sagging bunk touched her head she froze, then kind of caved in.

They poured the beads into her lap, waiting while she poked the needle a couple of times before hitting the hole. Then they watched for a while as the beads slid down the thread, clicking into place. Then Kofi sat back on his heels.

Kenti felt her head, then sat back down and hugged her knees.

Kofi picked up the boots and ran his hand over the toes. They were a little scuffed, but he could fix that with red polish. The saddle stitching was gray, but he could scrub it with an old toothbrush. They were a little too big, but they’d fit if he wore two pairs of socks.

“Ma, can I have ’em? I mean, can I wear ’em?”

“Hand them here.” She looked them over carefully, then shook each one like they were supposed to rattle. “Hot as it is?”

“Least let me see if they fit.” He was reaching for them when Kenti laughed.

“You already had your ole stink feet in ’em. And I’ma tell Sonny too.”

“How’d they get in there, Kofi? We went all through that closet. Where’d they come from?”

“How I’m supposed to know? They Sonny’s.”

“Don’t raise your voice to me, please.”

“Dag. I just wanna wear ’em. I didn’t do nothing.”

“Nobody said you did anything, Kofi. I’m just asking who brought them into the house. I’ve never seen them before.” She rolled the tops of the boots down, looking for something. “Get Cousin Bobby on the phone. Maybe he knows.”

“But can I try them on?”

“Hear what I tell you?”

“Better march yourself to that phone, Mister Kofi,” Kenti yelled at his back through cupped hands.

What a drag, Kofi thought, bumping his shoulder along the hallway wall. Kenti could be fresh, but he better not try it. Sonny could talk like he felt like, but he’d get punished. A bunch of birthday presents in the closet and Sonny wasn’t even home. And here he was nearly nine but nobody said boo about what he wanted for his birthday. And all he’d asked for was some boots. Now she’d probably give ’em to the police
and he’d have to go to school barefoot. At Andrew’s house they had dessert right after dinner. But no, he had to take a bath first. Well, next time the phone rang like that, he was going to be ready. He didn’t have to stay around where nobody combed his hair or smiled at him.

“I want to speak to him, Kofi.”

“Yeahhh,” he said, making a face in the direction of the backroom.

I
t was a new neighborhood with no definite look of its own yet, with no tales and gossip to be spun into lore in the local barbershop. No shops had opened yet. And on either side of the one-story complex of spaces to lease, two rows of townhouses with fresh cedar shingles stared, curtainless, tenantless, at the partly bulldozed woods across the street, the Cat sunk up to its hocks in mud, the driver lounging against the smeared yellow machine, smoking and gazing off into the distance where the soft, gray haze scrubbed out the building lines of DeKalb County. In the block they drove through, though, things were sharply etched—a moving van, a landscaper’s truck, a convertible sports car dripped on by the leaves of trees bitten into the landscape. Zala felt the neighborhood with her teeth. It was a community-to-be for self-invented people unsaddled by nightmares and conflicting dogmas, people who could toss mamasay and preachersay over their shoulders with a pinch of coke and, applying one of Atlanta’s upbeat sobriquets to their lifestyles (“City too busy to hate”), required nothing further to move ahead. Zala looked out at the trees, newly planted, held in place by clean stakes and near-invisible guy lines. She wondered what it would take to live there, how much she would have to cut, tuck, and gore to fit herself to such living.

“I feel I’m aging by the second,” Spence muttered, cruising slowly past the rental office.

“Mmm,” she said, her cheek against the window.

On the corner was a vacant house from a former time of mills and farms and company stores. Rainwater tinted red by leaves and clay puddled in the well of the bottom step. She imagined boarders pausing there to chat with the mailman. Weeds and twigs and vines had closed in on the porch altogether. Wasphives and cobwebs clumped in the corners
of the windows of a large room, the dining room no doubt. She pictured mill hands rising from sturdy chairs to spear potatoes from plain, chipped bowls. The food platters set in the middle of a long, wide table covered not by a tablecloth but by shiny oilcloth stretched tightly and held firmly underneath by thumbtacks, so it could be wiped down in a flash with a dishrag while the cutlery soaked.

“Baby, we’ve got to start,” Spence said. “Where do you want to go? We’ve got another hour before Teo knocks off at Daily’s.”

Zala shrugged, and Spence lingered at the intersection, watching pigeons on the ledge of a building slated for demolition.

Less than thirty minutes after Paulette had chased them away to spend the day together, they’d found themselves in the East Point section of town, not far from the airport, cruising along Redwine Road, where a body had been found the year before. They tried to keep up a conversation about the library books she’d checked out from the Uncle Remus branch, ten minutes from the house, midpoint between four marks on the map rolling across the backseat. Driving through the southwest district, they’d chatted relentlessly about Kofi’s birthday party, carefully avoiding calling the names of friends to be invited, as though Paulette were breathing down their necks from the backseat. Discussing the birthday present for Kofi, repeating themselves, not listening to each other, they’d moved onto Cascade from Gordon and headed toward Fairburn, still keeping up the pretense as they reached Niskey Lake Road, where the first two bodies had been found. They were not patrolling, merely driving, talking, reminding each other that they’d meant to drop in to Paschal’s for iced tea and pie when they’d left the library. So they’d headed back to MLK Drive and forgotten they had a destination until the drive led them to Hightower Road, a rock’s throw from the Verbena Street–Anderson Park area where the Wilson girl had vanished, Mac and Mattie carefully expunged from their conversation as stale suspicions rose afresh in their minds. Then, hesitating where Hightower split into Jackson Parkway and Hollywood Road, they’d grown nervously silent, taken the fork along Hollywood, where another victim had lived, and when Spence could stand it no longer, pulled over for gas though the needle read three-quarters full. Then, in spite of themselves, they were drawn back to East Point, speeding north of Washington Road to Forrest Avenue to Norman Berry Drive, doing five mph over the new site neither had yet charted on the map.

Spence had taken eagerly to her suggestion that they get back to the Southwest, go by the Neighborhood Art Center and see the new exhibit hung in the center’s Romare Bearden Gallery. But somehow they’d turned off Georgia Avenue and wound up in the McDaniel area, where Camille Bell lived, not letting each other know that they were scrutinizing each passing car and rehearsing what they would say to each other if they spotted any STOP members going over the route and signaling for the limo to join them. Forgetting the exhibit altogether, they’d picked up Memorial Drive and headed east toward DeKalb County, Spence wrenching the car off the route the minute he recognized the houses, the lots. Frantic to bypass the sites and give the day a chance to develop into something casual, he lost all sense of direction. But each side street, each turn only showed how a schoolyard or alleyway shortened the distance between the victims on the list, linking more closely neighbors, schoolmates, youths who’d ridden the same bus routes, frequented the same fast-food joints, knew people in common from old neighborhoods. This boy’s sister was that boy’s brother’s girlfriend, B. J. had told her. This child’s backyard was that one’s shortcut to church, one of the parents had told her. The playground bordering the house where she’d been killed contained the basketball court where two others had played ball. His neighbor, her uncle. His hangout, her workplace. The store where one boy ran errands next door to where another bagged groceries, the store’s parking lot a third had ridden through on his bike passing the Laundromat where a fourth had been seen being strangled, on his way to visit an aunt in a housing project where a fifth had disappeared.

“It’s not a light, Spence. It’s just a stop sign.”

“I know,” he said, but didn’t move other than tapping his foot on the pedal and jogging them in their seats. She wanted to get going. She didn’t care where.

“I can’t seem to shake off this … It’s as though we’re being compelled … or surrounded.” He pumped the gas pedal. The limo rocked at the intersection. He didn’t know where they were, and that was good. But he didn’t trust any direction, not left, not right, not straight ahead. “Where to?” he demanded.

Lost, they were safe for the moment. Zala squinted at the overcast sky for signs of a seam, for an entry into the other Atlanta where they’d been safe from moment to moment. “Anywhere,” she said, afraid she
might blurt out what she was thinking, longing for. She leaned again against the window as a jet roared overhead.

Adjacent to the abandoned house she’d people with mill hands was a small gabled building from that same old time, the street dead-ending into an excavation plot courtesy of MARTA. The building housed a Laundromat and a grocery store below, a dentist’s office above, and pigeons in the dormers. A woman in a coarse hair net and stockings rolled below her dress hem was stiff-joint walking around large paper bags lined up on the sidewalk. The laundry or groceries or jawbones-and-teeth didn’t fill the bags but left sagging pockets of dark space in the sides of the heavy brown paper. Perhaps she was a sculptor, or archeologist, or astronomer, or a bone-casting diviner. It seemed inconceivable that she could be merely a stranded woman trying to figure out how to get herself and her belongings home before the downpour. When the woman suddenly reversed herself, circling the bags counter-clockwise, then turned to watch the limo finally go through the intersection, Zala busied herself with the books in her lap, rocking forward, trying to hurry the car and get out of there.

“American Drama in the Thirties,”
she said loudly.
“Eugene O’Neill and the House of Atreus, The Plays of Jean-Paul Sartre, Aeschylus and Attic Drama, Gluck’s Opera Libretti.”

“Un-hunh,” Spence muttered, trying to get interested.

She went through the books again, stacking and restacking—
Iphigenia
, the
Oresteia, The Flies, Mourning Becomes Electra, Freud and Greek Myth on Broadway
—keeping her eyes downcast, averted. Because if the woman caught her eye, she’d rip off that hair net and there’d be nothing stiff-jointed about her once she shed her disguise and called Zala out.

“What’s the matter?” But he didn’t want to know. He only wanted to know how they were going to work themselves out of the sandtrap. “Baby, we’ve got to,” he said again, wagging his head, his tongue a wasp in his mouth.