Those Bones Are Not My Child (33 page)

“I heard a question mark on the end of that sentence. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Shut up, Zala. Just shut the fuck up.”

“Pull over.”

“Let’s knock it off,” he said, and they rode in silence for half a mile.

They were driving through what he called mixed neighborhoods, meaning a mix of real-estate values. Big homes with wraparound porches and dentil moldings. Across the way, a golf course where retired men raced electric carts to the clubhouse for two fingers of Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. And in the middle of the block were rental units with no landscaping. Children were sitting on the curb pulling crusts from mayonnaise-and-sugar sandwiches and dropping them in the stream to race to the sewer. And then a Spanish-tiled building with a shingle out front: Notary Public, Chiropractic Clinic, Norma Baines Charm School. Then an adults-only apartment bloc with swimming pool and clay courts. On the opposite corner, the Resurrection of Christ the Nazarene, a whitewashed weatherboard rectangle that rocked three nights a week and all day Sunday. And sharing the driveway, a huge house with mullioned windows and a widow’s walk.

Mixed, he called these neighborhoods. Middle-class, the people called themselves, job-starved and poverty-pinched, doily-fine and blue-veined privileged alike. A family of five, four with two jobs apiece, but look out if one library book was overdue. Couples who’d pulled themselves up from day-old wares at Colonial Bakery and greens from the cemetery, fighting the mockingbirds for first licks on the purple-green leaves of the pokeberry bush. Called themselves middle-class so long as there were down-the-street neighbors still battling the birds and stopping the meat truck for fifty cents’ worth of salt pork to cook up the poke salad with. Middle-class up-and-coming. Bachelors who lived in their two-toned Sevilles, performing their a.m. toilette in bus-depot restrooms, their evening ablutions in bars, continually changing “address” two steps ahead of the collection agency. Teenage mothers on
stoops rifling through
True Confessions
while their babies drank formula stretched with Kool-Aid. And where was he, what did he call himself? His daddy used to say, “A working stiff with apologies to no damn body,” rising proudly each morning to walk the high steel.

“You think they’re sure, Spence? Suppose the family says he’s not their boy?”

He didn’t answer. Instead he looked at the freshly mown lawns and inhaled, though double-glazed tinted glass separated him from the green.

“We’re on the route again,” she said. “I believe the Middlebrookses live over there,” When he didn’t respond, she sat quietly looking at houses and stores she had stopped at while tacking up handbills and showing Sonny’s picture around. Some eyed her with misgivings: “I suppose you’re taking up a collection as well?” Others heard things she hadn’t said and responded: “Why do you want to make trouble for Maynard Jackson? Don’t you remember how things used to be before we got him elected?” And there were those who examined her closely the way she had done at STOP: happened to her, can’t happen to me because I wear stockings and wouldn’t dream of leaving my hair like that. Some made things up to offer assurance: “But those were hoodlums, I thought. Yours looks like such a fine boy.” Mostly people were kind, wanted to help but didn’t know how.

“Know a shortcut downtown? To Daily’s,” Spence added quickly so there’d be no misunderstanding as to where they were going. She leaned against his arm, pointing him into a turn. He had doubts about the narrow lane, but bumped through it, cinders beating against the underside of the limo like hailstones, tree branches scraping the side windows trying to get in.

“When we patrol again,” he said, astounded to hear himself saying it, “let’s pay attention to where army camps and police stations are on the route.”

“Army?” she said, her voice trailing off.

A boy of twelve with squared-off shoulders seemed to come out of nowhere, and they couldn’t take their eyes off him. He stepped off the curb and stopped traffic with his hand. He wore khaki shorts and a green polo knit, hiking boots laced mid-calf with green socks cuffed at the top. He toted an army-green backpack. There was as much equipment clipped to his hip as to B. J.’s—a battered canteen, a flashlight, a
leather pouch pointy at one end, lumpy at another. He clanged across the street as if off to war.

“Is he by himself?” She scanned the sidewalk for a counselor, a troop.

“Looks like it.” He leaned forward, expecting to see the boy take up position on the double lines and wave across younger children temporarily hidden by the hedges.

The boy walked without breaking his stride, stepped up on the curb, jounced the pack on his back a bit, and walked on, solid, there—defiantly so, thought the two in the car, who half-expected to see him swallowed up in the haze. They sat staring till traffic closed in on them, one hasty driver beeping, then passing, an infant standing in her lap playing with the driver’s glasses as she drove.

“He was so …”

“Actually he wasn’t, Zala.”

“Maybe we should double-check downtown.”

“Think so?”

“But then the Stephens family already … And I don’t think I could bear it.”

“Maybe there’s something on the news,” he said.

“Do we have to have that thing on?”

“Yes.” After a few seconds of blasting music, he turned it off, but she turned it on again. “Make up your mind. What do we do?”

“Why do you keep asking me?” She snapped the radio off. “This is your outing.”

“Mine! How did it get to be mine? You and Paulette cooked it up.”

“She said that you said … I could’ve stayed in bed.”

“Why didn’t you? I could be working. Saturday’s a fat day.”

“Then work,” she said, pulling the radio phone from its catch and handing it to him. “Don’t turn off the beeper for me. Nothing I like better on rainy days than reading.” She flipped open a book and angled it in her lap.

He set the radio phone back on its catch. “Tell me where to drop you off. I’m not going through these changes.”

“Just tell me, dammit.”

“Tell you what?”

She threw the book on the floor, “Your hunch. The army and the police. He’s my son too.”

“Boots, that’s all. Them damn boots. Combat boots, mounted police boots, motorcycle copy boots. I can’t get them damn boots out of my head.”

“You don’t have to yell. I can hear you.”

“Well, I told you.” He stroked his neck, pinching the skin where it felt clammy. He would have to grow his mustache again. He missed raking it. And in shaving, he would have to approach his lip with more caution.

“Please don’t do that,” she said, turning her face away. There was a page in her notebook called strangulations. They said the last two boys had had rope burns on their necks.

Sitting at the kitchen table knocking his knees together in fury, rage swelling his neck like a puff adder, except that she didn’t have time to make comparisons because Dave was trying to be funny cracking on the boy’s father and Sonny making his eyes small as he plucked at his neck while she beat the eggs chasing the bowl around the wet counter and the more they talked the more the kitchen heated up
.

“Spence …”

Spence raced to the curb in front of Daily’s, braked in a whiplash stop, then gunned the motor to discourage her from talking. He leaned on the horn till Teo came out, jerking his thumbs in the air and all tuned up to launch into a narrative of his workday. Teo jumped into the car, filling it at once with the pungent smells of the restaurant and the jangly electricity of the tales he was about to spin. Spence cut him off quickly and asked him to find the gum he was sure he’d tossed into the glove compartment the day he’d taken the Saudi children to Grant Park Zoo.

“This y’all’s anniversary?” Teo wrestled off his bow tie, ripped his shirt collar open, and released the catch on the compartment. “Must be somp’n up, you in that purty dress and him with enough grease in his hair to fry a possum.”

“Just find the gum, man, and cut the cracker comedy.”

“Don’t raise a blister, good buddy. I’m a-looking and a-cooking with Crisco.”

Teo’s face was mottled red except where he needed a shave. Zala wondered how he always managed to affect a red, white, and blue look when he played at the drawl. She felt pressure against her left thigh, Spence signaling her not to ask about Sue Ellen, their marriage rocky.
It struck her as funny that Spence should be so delicate about somebody else’s marriage.

“Aha,” Teo said, holding up a blue paisley scarf by a corner, “Who’s been going to the girlie shows?” He dangled it so the fringe swayed.

“Gum, Teo.”

Zala took the scarf and shoved it toward the back of the compartment. Amid a jumble of matchbooks and business cards was a cigar box. She drew back, staring at it; the hairs at the nape of her neck prickled. While Teo rummaged for the gum, Zala carefully slid the crumpled page of the telephone directory from under Spence’s pistol. She ran her eyes over the eagles and enlarged eyes that dotted
this page
of the Atlanta Yellow Pages, but her mind was riveted on the box.

“Leave it,” Spence said when he saw her smooth the wrinkled paper across her kneecap. He glanced down at the advertisements and tensed.

The big ads at the bottom of the page boasted of specially trained undercover agents operating throughout the world with the help of consultants in overseas branches. They boasted of the latest in photographic and surveillance equipment and a policy of efficiency and discretion. A cat burglar kneeling before the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet had a heavy flashlight for spying, and maybe for clubbing unconscious the night watchman. In another sketch, the artist had drawn a man who looked like a respectable banker and at the same time the neighborhood flasher; in a foreign-intrigue trenchcoat, he was reaching behind a drape doing something efficient discreetly—planting a bug, or signaling his cohorts to swing across the airshaft and kick in the window, or removing a gun planted in the valance. The largest graphic showed a grim-mouthed killer in dark turtleneck and beret straddling the globe; under one arm he hefted an M-
I
; under the other, mountain-climbing gear. The ink of his boots dripped down into the longitudinals and latitudinals of the world.

Spence grunted and hoped she’d tire of reading the page and put it out of sight. How little he’d been able to tell the private investigators he visited. One had clamped a chummy hand on Spence’s shoulder and told him not to feel bad for being unable to come up with much about the habits and quirks of his son. “More than half the men who come here looking for runaway wives can’t remember what color her eyes are.”

“I didn’t send you in there to do spring cleaning.”

“Hell, buddy, it’s a mess of stuff in here,” Teo said. “So its more’n a ramble. But I’m dead on the case of the missing gum.”

Spence felt the muscles in the back of his neck tighten. He flexed his driving arm, his driving foot, and tried to get comfortable. Zala placed the yellow page back where she’d found it and was now staring into the compartment as though peering into the mouth of a cave. That was how she’d looked the day after the rally when the police called her in and she’d had to face them alone. He felt damp and salty thinking of it. He should have been with her. But he’d been leaning over the desk in the outer office placating Carole. But then Zala should not have gone down there, he argued to himself, to no avail. He should have been there, planting his fist in the cop’s jaw or wherever the professional venom was distilled.

“Quite a collection.” Teo was looking from the gun to Spencer to Zala, who sat motionless.

“Gum, not gun,” Spence said, remembering the day he’d shoved his bullet clip in, torn the yellow page out, then raced from his sister’s house sure that he knew where he was going and whom he was gunning for. Guys from his unit who’d approached him near the end of his tour had asked for his help in setting up conduits in Georgia for drugs, money, and the skull, ear, and pelvic-bone souvenirs of the war. There’d been twice as many threats as entreaties each time he put them off. That hunch turned out to be a bust, making less and less sense the more he learned about other missing children. As the days dragged at him, nothing was making sense except that somewhere in the middle of it—drugs, cult, porn, Klan, sex for hire, or whatever it was—were cops covering their tracks before they could be caught red-handed.

“Very fancy,” Teo said, tapping the pack of gum against the edge of the cigar box. He passed two slices of gum across Zala as she took the box from him. “Expecting?”

There’d been a cigar box like the one in her lap on the shelf in the children’s closet last winter. “50 Hand Made Valencias” from Brazil, she’d thought it had said. The one on her lap said “50 Hand Made Caballeros.” A small box behind the Christmas bulbs, it had been just large enough to hold the fret clamp, a tortoiseshell guitar pick, and a prism the size of a pecan. She’d asked Sonny about it, and that’s when the story of the clamp came up; “borrowed,” he’d said. Zala ran her
hands over the lid, staving off what it might mean if this was Sonny’s box in Spence’s possession.

“So what did you find out, man?”

Teo skinned down a stick of gum and folded it into his mouth. He thrumbled the foil into a ball and rolled it between his palms.

“Dammit, Teo, have you heard anything?”

“I hate to tell you, good buddy, but you’re driving with your emergency on.” Teo licked his thumb and riffled through several pages of his scratch pad, then folded them back, creasing the fold with the side of his thumb.

“Sometime this week?”

“You’re as bad as Sue Ellen,” Teo said, prying his damp shirt from his skin. “Welp, you know that guy I’ve been telling you about, the one in Sue Ellen’s drama group? Been talking with him just about every day since last we talked. And it’s just like the paper say. There’s gonna be a big hoedown in Atlanta this weekend. Getting under way right now, as a matter of fact.” He checked his watch and chewed. “Hosted by that great American, your friend and mine, J. B. Stoner.”

Spence hissed and chomped down on his gum. “Indicted in the Birmingham bombings. He wasn’t convicted and now he’s running for office. Just what we need.”