Those Bones Are Not My Child (32 page)

Make a clean start, she quickly phrased in her mind. Act like it never happened. Of course it never happened. It was just as Spence had said that day on Aunt Myrtle’s stoop. Never could count straight. Made it all up. The girls at school had quizzed, examined, and said she couldn’t be pregnant. She wouldn’t have dared, not after Mama Lovey had worked so hard putting things in her head, like Do Not. There’d
been no son, because with a son, her aunt had told her, you spent your life praying in the window and cursing the streets.

“Whaddawedo?”

Begin again. Fresh start. Square one. It never happened. Couldn’t have. Bad dream gone nightmare. She hadn’t been down on all fours in the basement. Hadn’t searched the yard for his body. Hadn’t been trying to dig up the woods with her nails. Hadn’t seen the dogs blunt down in the meat of her son. No son.
Una buena madre empleada cuida su trabajo
. A good mother does her work. Then goes to bed and sleeps tight if the sherry holds out, so in the morning Paulette can tromp in with a friend and a cleaning brigade of neighbors, whip off the covers so the whole block will know by supper that Marzala Spencer sleeps in her panties and bra on filthy sheets. No such boy. The body found on Norman Berry Drive did not concern her directly. So she could fix coffee and ask Paulette’s friend all about Miami and promise to visit. No Sonny. Another family had claimed the body from the morgue. So she could let Paulette fix her up with a blind date who turned out to be—small world—the boyfriend who’d kissed her in the vestibule of her aunt’s apartment house, mailboxes imprinting on her back. A date, a drive, fresh start. This time she’d be more careful, not allow “orphaned at both ends” to drive her engine. So she dressed and put on makeup and skipped down the steps. Because it never was. So of course the boys had acted strangly, how else should boys act when a nut in mother-detective disguise follows them through the streets? Not her. Some wild woman dreamt up after too much wine.

“What’s funny?”

“My mother. How she didn’t know that ‘Marsala’ is wine. Thought she was naming me after a flower, using a
z
to make it more Southern, more cullid,” she laughed,

“It can’t be that funny.” He was annoyed that her laughter didn’t include him, didn’t infect him. He ghosted a smile, then dropped the attempt. “I don’t understand why your mother doesn’t get here.”

“She’s got a dying man on her hands, don’t forget. And what about yours?”

“After you told her not to come? Hey, look, let’s take it easy.” He leaned over the wheel. “I wish it would go ahead and rain. The clouds just hang there.”

“Wake up,” she snapped. The windshield was dotted, then dappled,
then streaming. She flicked on the wipers, then moved to the far end of the seat where the leather was cool and dry. “What do you want to do?” She forced herself to sound pleasant, casual.

He wanted to see the boy but not the body. That made no sense, so he didn’t say it. They might have made a mistake in identification. He didn’t dare say that. He didn’t want to say anything or see anything, and hoped it would be dark and stormy by the time they picked Teo up from work to hear what he’d found out. He wasn’t sure he wanted to hear what that might be, but he was certain he didn’t want to go to headquarters or to the coroner’s. And never again to the woods, even if the others were game. He’d chunked rocks at the dogs right up to the very second he realized it was only a half-burnt mattress and not a body the dogs had been nuzzling. If she reached around and got the map, he’d insist that the flashlight was weak and that the dark would catch them down a dangerous ravine. On the first time out, when three vets and two of B. J.’s colleagues had joined their caravan, zigzagging around Primrose Circle to the “trestle,” then north along Moreland to Memorial Drive, moving in and out and around the points, night had overtaken them before they could rendezvous back of Gaston’s station. And no one had thought to bring a torch; no one had thought it would take so long to cover the ground.

“I can’t truthfully say you ever penned me up,” she said, turning to him matter-of-factly, as though they’d been discussing just this point for the past few minutes. “And yet,” she continued, oblivious to his efforts to follow her, “somehow my life was bordered by the house, the yard, the classroom, and work. Now why was that, do you think?”

“What brought this on?” He looked at the books in her lap for a clue. Maybe Delia and his mother were right; but then he talked off the wall on occasion too, or so Carole had been saying. “Baby, what are we talking about?”

“Adam and his pumpkin shell. And don’t use that tone with me. That’s how Paulette talks to her patients, the ones she’s trying to sweet-talk into bed so she can jam an enema up their ass.”

“I thought it was Peter and the pumpkin shell.”

“It’s Peter and the Lost Boys. Peter and the cave.”

He looked at her sideways. “Is this a conversation about something?”

“God, I hope it rains,” she said.

He dropped the lever to its slowest beat so she could watch the rain hit the glass.

“And what did you call me?”

“Call you?”

“I’m a grown woman with three children,” she said.

“Noted,” he said, willing to humor her, but only up to a point. He’d stop her cold, though, if she hinted that they should go downtown to inquire about the body. If, on the other hand, she suggested going to City Hall to chalk four-letter words on the walls, he’d have to give that serious consideration.

“What I mean is, please don’t call me ‘baby,’ Spence.”

“Right. Check.” He swung the car around a partially cleared woods and pleaded with his hands to relax on the wheel. Taut, they looked like his mother’s hands. He settled back, remembering how he’d had to explain to Zala that his mother didn’t wear gloves out of affectation. Piecework, production step-up, tendonitis, no compensation, no medical coverage either—for years after she was laid off she wore white cotton gloves that smelled of wintergreen. He’d tried to remember to always take his key. He hated the sound of her fumbling with the lock, while he stood, feeling guilty, listening, and smelling wintergreen through the door.

“What’s the matter?” she said. His face looked twisted.

“The smell of spruce and pine seems awfully strong for this time of year,” he said, the rumbling of the Cat drowning out the tumbling of the lock. “Echolocation,” he said. “Remember? The bats?” He took his hands from the wheel and shook them. “Smells can tell time and sounds can see space.”

“What?”

“Echolocation. At the zoo,” he said. “How bats locate themselves because they can’t see. They send out a high-frequency pitch, then listen to sounds reverberating from their surroundings. Remember?”

“Bats?” She examined the trees and rooftops. She saw only pigeons, sparrows, and starlings. “You can turn off the wipers,” she said. “It’s stopped again.”

“Don’t you remember? How could you not remember? It’s called echolocation. We were all at the zoo.”

“I wasn’t with you,” she said. “Don’t get me confused with your other women.”

“All of us,” he was saying, frantic to have this bit of history confirmed. “My parents had driven up and we all … What women are you talking about?”

“We’re going in circles, Spence.” She reached for the wheel when she spotted seven large grocery bags by the curb. “Don’t turn down there. MARTA’s digging. We’ll never be able to turn this boat around.”

“Take it easy, Zala. Let go.” He swerved to the left when an elderly woman stepped into the street and flagged him. He swung into a side street he hadn’t seen the first time round.

“Jesus,” she said, peering over her shoulder.

“I wasn’t going to hit her. I had the car under control, dammit. Don’t do that again,” he warned, tapping the steering wheel. He thought she would argue, would point out some reckless act on his part that he hadn’t noticed. Perhaps a cat had darted across without his being aware. But she said nothing, merely flung herself back against the upholstery and pulled at her hair.

“There’s a comb in the glove compartment,” he offered.

“Whose?”

“Aw, shit, woman. I need this shit? Look, I don’t need this shit. I really don’t.”

“We’re riding around in circles, Spence.”

“I can see that. You don’t think I can see that? Well, I can see that. I know where I am.” He took a deep breath and blew out. Then, trying to get his body to remember his usual driving position, he eased his arm on the sill, but the window was rolled up. His elbow thudded against the glass.

They were moving through that part of the neighborhood yet to be transformed, part of it hanging on, the other already reduced to rubble. Three buildings scheduled for demolition bore large white
X
’s on the doors and windows. One was an old-fashioned pharmacy, its front window crisscrossed with tape. Boxes of diapers were stacked in a pyramid. Would Mattie call that a sign?

“We’re doing it again,” Spence said, his voice tight. “We’re back on the route. I can’t seem to get away.”

They’d each heard it separately on the radio more than a month ago, the DJ sandwiching in the news of the route between community bulletins of upcoming Labor Day weekend events. She’d been in the Morris Brown Post Office near the campus flipping through FBI Wanted
posters on the lookout for a name, a face, or a record that included kidnap and murder. A student buying stamps had set his radio down on the Xerox machine near where she was learning again, in law-enforcement language, that militancy was synonymous with crime: wanted for questioning in connection with armed robbery, the suspect is a member of a revolutionary organization and should be considered armed and dangerous. Spence had been pacing back and forth in his one-room efficiency pursued by the dinnertime demons: eat out, eat in, pick up, call for delivery, invite himself over to Carole’s, or invite her out? Each possibility raising a fresh set of questions: what to do with leftovers, eat and run or spend the night? The DJ’s announcement that a former APD officer had discovered a clue in the case halted him in his tracks. The route was used, the DJ speculated, by the killer or killers regularly, by day traveling from home to work, by night from work to a girlfriend’s. “Or to a Klan meeting,” Spence amended, the demons routed for the moment and the roller-coaster car his stomach rode in clicking up the tracks.

“We can’t live like this,” he said. She seemed so far away on the other end of the seat. He made a sharp left so she’d come sliding toward him. Only the books did. “We’ve got a problem, Zala.”

“Yes,” she said. She was watching the sideview mirror and listening to the map roll across the backseat. Any minute Jesus would loom up in the tinted glass and announce that the ordeal was over, that they’d come through the test. If Never Happened had happened, there was still This Too Shall Pass.

“We’ve got to come to some decision about what we’re going to do, Zala.”

“I vote we get Kofi a proper karate outfit.”

“Zala.”

“You can turn off the wipers. It’s not raining now.”

Spence hit the brakes when a dog wandered into the street. From habit, he threw his arm out across her chest. She fell against it, then slammed back against the cushion.

Hockey stop. Sonny at the Omni rink skating fast and low, pulling up short, scooting ice on Spence’s good pants. Laughing
.

“I wish you’d buckle up,” he said. He’d meant to say, “Sorry, reflex,” from driving the kids around. But she tugged up the belt with no comment. It seemed that no matter how he maneuvered the wheel, the map
rolled across the backseat, slapping up against the near door, then the far.

Bales of chicken wire hitting against the sides of the panel truck. Sonny on his lap steering Widow Man’s truck around the edges of the farm, dipping down into ruts, bouncing up over mounds, lurching from mud slick to pothole when they reached the cement of the main road
.

“What’s the matter?” She plucked at his sleeve when he pulled the car over. She asked it again when he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. She answered herself: Yes, we’ve got a problem. They used to tell her in Sunday school that five verses a day would help solve problems. Told her in junior high that algebra sharpened that ability too. Was told at home that the community that named her, claimed her, sustained her, held the answers, she had only to listen. She moved across the seat and embraced his shoulder. She didn’t remember his being so broad. One minute hating him for making it happen, the next wanting to wrap her legs around his hips. What would it mean to unbutton their clothes and tumble into bed? That they were desperate to replace a life. That it had happened and happened and they’d given him up for dead.

“I’m okay,” he said when she took her arms away and bent down to stack the books on the floor.

“Good,” she said. “Why were you afraid to break into Murray’s place?”

“Are we back to that?” He pulled off without looking, then swerved when a camper nearly sideswiped them.

“Want me to drive?” She was holding the buckle and waiting.

He grunted and drove.

Once again they cut across Interstate 20, designed, it would seem, for the purpose of splitting up clusters of Black neighborhoods. Rather than ease up on the gas when a couple huddled under a newspaper were crossing, he hit the horn and made them run.

“You’re being stupid,” she said, then heard her mother: “Quit picking, baby. It may be a long haul up the rough side of the mountain. And y’all can’t pull each other up if you’re both face down in the muck.” She’d hung up and gone to get the toolbox.

“I’m stupid? I jimmy open a neighbor’s basement? A neighbor known to raise vicious dogs? Yeah, right. I’m stupid, but you—”

Standing in the doorway, his voice like sandpaper but his eyes giving him away. We’re trying to do our homework back here. We’d go to the library if it
was open. Then turning away—I sure would like to go somewhere and get on out of here
.

“Finish it. Can’t you complete one damn sentence? Say it, I can’t even keep track of my own child.”

“He’s mine too.” He hadn’t meant to start anything, so he put a plea in his words.