Those Bones Are Not My Child (35 page)

“Boots,” Spence muttered. The ballot secured, reps in office, relying
on the intricate etiquette of minuet steps meticulously choreographed, folks had lain down their weapons in the public square and sauntered off to read the papers, mad as hell if the ten-cent discount coupon for a mouthwash they never heard of was missing from their edition.

“What boots?” Teo opened one eye, then closed it when no one answered.

Spence drove past the lumberyard at Northside wondering where he should check in to say he was available for drafting. A sawyer covered in dust, paper-thin wood shavings in his hair, came out of the lumberyard beating a butter-yellow cap against his work pants till it returned to green. Was he a warrior? There’d been a time when Spence could gauge at a half-block distance the warriors, the amazons, the queens, the obeahs, the griots, the seers. Something had happened to his eyes in the past ten years. Zala had said as much one evening when they’d been cruising along Bankhead looking for the gun shop one of the STOP men had said offered target practice for youths. “Is it my eyes,” he’d said, watching folks stream out of the mosque heading for their cars, “or have Muslims changed? They used to glow. They used to have such a light around them.” She’d said that everyone and everything had changed a little, most especially his eyes, which had changed a whole lot.

Spence turned off Northside into a side street. A hasty row of new housing among the old had the air of a bivouac encampment. Were these the residents digging in, or the annexers slipping in to commandeer turf? By the construction foreman’s padlocked shack, a watchman, an old man, sat cross-legged on a stack of bricks covered by cloudy plastic. He was taking off his vest to cover his head from drizzle. Spence turned on his lights. In the cone of yellow, rain fell like Zala’s sewing pins. It was a city of elders and endangered children. If warriors were somewhere marshaling their forces against the goose-steppers afoot in the city, they hadn’t thought Spence rated a call-up. His eyes burned. Disinfectant, puddled gray in the gutters, overpowered the smells of raw lumber and wet cement. He slid the windows all the way up when rain slanted in, pelting the sleeve of his jumpsuit.

It was a weird state of affairs, psychopaths coming to a city of psychopaths. What else could he call the up-and-comers who smiled how-I-got-over smiles on the screen and on magazine covers, the I-made-it photos never having to be airbrushed, for the whole city was touched up, everyone falling for the ad-agency slogans created to attract
out-of-town dollars. The same programmed notions of invulnerability, progress, health, and superiority plagued the whole country, boasting of big bombs, good teeth, strong bones, a miracle science and an advanced technology—meanwhile spending half their income on pills, booze, doctors, psychiatrists, sex manuals, sleeping potions, and assorted witch doctors to help them un-mismanage their lives. He right along with them.

“Spence?” Her voice seemed to echo from within a cave. “I want to know about this box.”

“Me, too. Pass me one. I didn’t even know you two were back together.” Teo flipped up the lid and drew a cigar under his nose in pantomime. He bit off an end of his air caballero and lit up, doubling over in a coughing fit. Zala didn’t bother to smack his back. She knew a cover-up performance when she saw one. She’d watched Teo’s throat redden as his own words played back on his ears. It struck her as funny, Spence pressing her thigh, Teo embarrassed for indelicately referring to their rocky marriage, and an empty box on her knees. She ran her hand around the inside. As in life, so with boxes, she thought—emptiness weighs.

“Where did you get it, Spence?”

“Quit clowning, T. Will you guys do it? At least poke around out there in Cobb and see what’s what?”

“I dunno, Spencer. I’ll talk to Beemer, see what he says.”

“I asked you a question, Spence. Whose box is this?” Zala struck him lightly with it to get his attention, then tuned up her hearing. She’d developed a pitch-perfect ear. She waited, ribcage clenched, to hear a catch in Spence’s breathing, a false note, a cover-up. “Whose box?” she repeated, trying to keep her voice light.

“Nobody’s.”

“Had me one of those once,” Teo said, glad for a shift in the conversation. “Had me a Prince Albert can too. Kept my aggies in the can and my holding stones in the box. I don’t guess a kid can grow up without one, hunh?” His voice trailed off in reverie.

“Nobody’s,” she said. She searched for the courage to goad him into translating “nobody,” but she drew herself back, afraid, unprepared, her bomb bays empty.

“Think about it, T, and let me know,” Spence said.

He veered to the right to glide by the Pool Checkers Tournament Association Building, near Griffin and MLK. The library books fell against Zala’s ankles, and she was spooked again. A box, five books, several unknowns. There had to be signifying grammar that could help her factor. It was obvious that Spence had no intention of taking her question seriously. So she started with the books.

Of all the characters in the spring course, why had she chosen Clytemnestra? And why the delay in doing the paper? She’d never risked an incomplete before. She was lagging enough behind her life schedule as it was. Perhaps she hadn’t been able to reconcile herself to the official line espoused by the Southern-belle instructor and the few old books she’d gotten around to. Adulteress, murderess, Clyt had spelled sin, crime, and disorder and little more. But would she, Zala, have sat still while General Agamemnon sacrificed their child for favorable winds to get the warships to Troy?

Sacrificial children. Little Lamb, they’d called their firstborn long before he was Sundiata, Sundi, Sunday, Sonny. Who didn’t call their babies little lambs? In the beauty magazines that cluttered the barbershop, she’d read about rejuvenation clinics that performed lamb-gland transplants to revivify aging clients. Injections of lamb-placenta extract were routinely sought in movie-star and celebrity circles, she’d read. Were there explorers in Atlanta hunting for the fabled Fountain of Youth, spilling blood again in their expeditions? Hadn’t the forensic psychologist down at the Task Force been speaking of metaphorical cloning of some sort?

Zala sat up straight and moved closer toward the arena of danger. “What do you mean, ‘nobody’s’?”

“What?” His voice was light, smiling. When she turned to confront him, he was waving to a group of elderly men crossing from the Pool Checkers building to Canopy Castle restaurant.

She opened her mouth, then closed it. There was a streak of lightning poised just above her right brow. She waited to be struck dead for what she was thinking.
Careful
, she cautioned herself, drawing back from the danger line.

“It’s just a box, baby.”

“What’s with you guys?” Teo said. “You muttering about boots and her with this box.”

“A damn cigar box,” Spence said, driving the limo through a cloud of vapor spiraling up from the sewer in the middle of Martin Luther King Drive. “Relax. It’s only a box.”

“Are you sure?”

“About what?”

She reached for the dashboard and held on.

“I have to know where you got this cigar box. It looks like Sonny’s box.”

“Get off my bones, woman. It’s not Sonny’s. It’s from Bryant’s office, if you need its provenance. A grateful client. His property had been tied up in probate.”

“Provenance?” Teo grinned. “Kiss me quick, somebody.”

“Sonny had a box just like this.”

“Don’t put boxes in my head. I’m having enough trouble with them damn boots. Here, give it to me.” He made a grab for it, but she was holding on. “Let’s throw it out if it’s going to haunt you.”

What good was it? Spence had cajoled Bryant to smoke up and pass the cigars out so he could take it to Sonny. It had been on the seat beside him the Sunday he’d gone by the house for his family to join him on the trip to Columbus. Sentimental, or maybe superstitious, he’d been peopling it with the men who could call up Ironjaw and Gate-mouth. Now, worse than useless, pointless, the box mocked him. He yanked it from her and tossed it to Teo.

“For your holding stones,” he said.

“Some of those old geezers must be a hundred,” Teo said, drumming on the box. “Are we stopping or what?”

“Retired merchant seamen, cooks, teachers, journalists, bricklayers.” Spence followed the men with his eyes into Canopy Castle. “Old Garveyites, Southern Tenant Associates, race men.” Walking encyclopedias and atlases. Mobile archives. Storytellers.

Spence used to rush from sixth-period English so he could catch the men during their coffee break at the restaurant. Taking up the booths, tables, and counter stools, they’d talk history across the room, telling how it had been when old Hunter Street had been a mud-and-plank cowpath. Telling how voluntary tithing in the old days had created a common pot to dip out of for community-benefit enterprises. Telling what Du Bois had been like during his days at Atlanta University. And how they’d pooled money to send a trainload of supporters to D.C. to
protest Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. How important it had been to visit Garvey in the Atlanta Pen, going back again and again no matter how often they were turned away. He couldn’t have gotten through English or history or economics without those men, who’d put on support hose and slipped foam-rubber cushions in their shoes to march in the sixties. “Mayhap too late for us, but we’re marching for the generations.”

“Is someone going to clue me in about the boots and the warriors?” Teo nudged Zala, but she gave no response. “Another movie company in town shooting in this area?” Teo examined the streets for a film crew.

On Teo’s side of Hunter Street, renamed MLK Drive, a youngster was slogging through a pool draining from Mr. Cooper’s Gulf station. On Spence’s side, in the liquor-store lot, three boys on bikes had found a slick perfect for hydroplaning. Listlessly, Zala watched as spray whooshed out from the bike tires. The drinkers who usually sat on the wall at Jeptha shooting the breeze with customers in and out of the Busy Bee Cafe weren’t there. The only adults who could be said to be keeping an eye out for the children were five men under the roofing of Paschal’s, the community landmark, tapping their cigar ash onto the wet pavement and holding the big palaver. One ducked out from under the roofing and scooted along the buildings’ edges past the Metro Pool Hall. Spence slowed down, anticipating a blind dash across the street to a Cadillac parked by an expired meter near Sellers Funeral Home.

“Traded breastplates and shields for houndstooth.”

“Would you mind repeating that for the West Coast audience?”

Spence ignored Teo, Nowadays when Bloods moved up and down the block, streaming in and out of the real-estate offices, insurance companies, and Bronner Brothers stores, he saw no salute, no secret sign, only a two-finger touch to a hat brim in greeting, an acknowledgment of the blood, but not of the tribe. He rubbed his eyes.

“Is something the matter with your eyes?” Zala reached in her pocket for a tissue.

“Yes, yes, that’s it.” Spence gripped her hand suddenly. “It’s got to be my eyes. Got to be. And that’s only half of it.”

“What’s he so perky about? Did you goose him or somp’n?” Teo leaned against the dashboard, expectant; he’d missed the gag somewhere. “If you were planning to hook a right here at Ashby to drop me at MARTA, I’m in no rush. Nothing cheerful about walking into an
empty house.” Teo sighed and shook something down from his sleeve. “Course, if you two got something going for the evening, I’ll cut out.”

Spence wheeled around in the intersection being widened and made a U-turn back up Ashby. “What makes you think it’s all right to smoke dope, man, just because you’re in a Black neighborhood?”

“I thought you guys might want … Damn, you sure do change up, Sarge.”

“Can it.” He turned to Zala suddenly. “You all right?”

She nodded, but didn’t take his hand in time, and now he was maneuvering the limo into a space in front of the pool hall. She promised herself a long, hot bath in the deep tub. If the water were hot enough and she slid down low enough, she’d be too slack to torture herself trying to decipher her thoughts and feelings. An obviously new cigar box that hadn’t been scratched, dirtied, written on, a box that smelled mannish, not boyish, and it had sent her right over the line anyway, so eager to trade her allegiance and sense of what was for—what?—sensation, the sensation of having answered a riddle cleverly, having fitted in a troublesome-shaped piece of a puzzle no matter how terrible the cost? She hugged herself and smiled wanly when Spence turned down the air-conditioning and massaged her arms. She shook her head; she didn’t mind the cold. It was a good, punishing cold cutting across her knees.

“Tell me that ain’t the axe-murderer and I’ll try to believe you,” Teo whispered, meaning the man out front of the pool hall. “Friend of yours?”

“Not yet.” Spence dragged his tires against the curb to get the brother’s attention. He liked his looks. One leg bent up in back against the black plate glass, his thumbs hooked in his side pockets, elbows taking up lots of room so no one could sidle up on either side, the Blood looked as though he’d said no to all manner of seductions and had never turned in his weapons. He wore a red leather cap ace deuce which he now tugged down as he eyed the limo, eyed Spence, then Zala, then Teo, then Spence again. He folded his arms and pushed away from the glass, kicking the crease back into that gray linen leg. He held Spence’s gaze for a second more before he strolled off toward the men in Paschal’s doorway. Spence turned off his lights and tapped his horn. Several more men his age came out of the pool hall and stood in the doorway waiting for Spence to approach.

“What’s up?” Teo had one hand on the handle but he didn’t get out.

Zala shrugged. She had no explanation for the stop, and had expected none. She was grateful for the room to spread out in. They’d been too close too long, turning the air between them phobic. She sat there thinking about the other parents in the city quarantined in their misery, no way to be comfortable, at ease, even asleep. She tried to get comfortable and breathe deeply. But even with Teo close to the door sensing her need for room, she felt crowded. It was worse than the ninth month. She’d needed countless pillows to plump under elbows and knees, to prop against her back, to stuff under her neck. Six hadn’t been sufficient. Their double bed shrinking each day. Spence had usually given up fighting for his share of the covers and padded into the kitchen to raid the fridge, eating out of bowls by the tiny light, settling down in the living room to read baby manuals. She’d find him in the morning balled up in a chair.