Those Bones Are Not My Child (39 page)

Rapt, Kofi watched the sleeve being rolled up like his father was getting ready to lead an orchestra, take his own pulse, throw a knife, or slap him across the living room. When Spence didn’t lean over and hit him, Kofi felt like a fool for ducking. He watched his dad pivot in that cool way of his and put out his hand to her. She took it and he pulled her up from the corner of the couch. Kenti drew her legs in so they
could squeeze past the spool table and the couch. Kofi did a parachute roll out of the way to give them room to dance.

Spence hummed the song in Zala’s hair, compensating for her initial clumsiness by dipping her backward, then holding her tight in a half-spin. For a moment it felt like old times, the kids up late watching them dance around the living room, the two of them holding each other close no matter what the music said or the latest craze demanded. There’d be pots on the stove and bags of ice for drinks in the sink, friends in for cards and gumbo, laughter and flirting and loud-talking mock debates filling up the rooms, and always the two of them dancing. Then the music ended and Zala was pulling away, and Spence reminded himself that he’d yet to ask her to call Dave about getting a group to monitor that part of the route nearest Cobb County so Teo and the others could relay the clues from their snooping.

“Awww, y’all looked so nice,” Kenti said, as another song began, blocking Zala’s way back to her books and papers.

Zala bumped against Kenti’s legs in time with the rocking tune till Kenti let her go through the turnstile. Zala bounced down on the sofa to get the girl to laugh. She was groggy, but in a good mood. Spence bounced down too, to keep Kenti laughing; then, counting on the fact that Kofi could never resist a cool move along with a little romance, stretched out his hand to get five. Kofi slapped his palm rather hard. Kenti looked up to see how her daddy was taking it. Spence smiled.

A band of light from the table lamp cut across the slats of light coming through the macramé curtains from the street. The map, curled and creased, lay latticed in shine and shadow on the cable-spool table. Spence set the jug of pencils and markers on one furled corner to hold it flat. Kofi and Kenti scooted forward and held down two corners with their elbows. Reluctantly, Zala surrendered up the opera libretto as a paperweight and joined the huddle. The four of them focused and close, shoulders touching, Al Jarreau soft on the radio, it was like that Christmas in Epps, Alabama, the logs wheezing and crackling in the fireplace Spence had helped Widow Man build, Mama Lovey shaking the long-handled cast-iron popper and singing along with Nat King Cole crooning about roasted chestnuts on an old 78 while they worked an impossible puzzle that Sonny had put three allowances by to get for the visit so he could sit back with the top of the box facedown in his lap while they tried to get the picture together of the Great Sphinx, the one
whose nose Napoleon had blown off riding into the Nile Valley like John Wayne.

Zala, her arms crossed lightly over her chest as she leaned toward the map, pressed her arms against her breasts thinking of a tarot reading Mattie had done. She’d sat on Mattie’s rattan couch watching the cards being spread: the figures were Nubian; the designs on the back of the cards showed dense vegetation with scarabs, birds, snakes, salamanders, and clusters of stars worked in the vines. Mattie was attempting to teach her about the ancient arcana, riddling her speech with hissing sounds—synodical, synchronic, celestial, Isis, Osiris, Horus, systemic, asp, uraeus. Zala looked for serpentine patterns on the map. There were none, only the right-angled intersections of streets and avenues, the curves where an old street turned into a new one and changed its name; the squares, circles, and X’s she’d drawn.

Spence flicked the bent corner of the map and cleaned two fingernails before he spaced again. “My family,” he had grinned that Christmas, one side of him radiant from the fireplace heat. “My family,” confident that he was experiencing the core of it—heart, hearth, heart-works—though he’d only been skimming the outlines of the form of it, following the course of an airbrush. Zala, looking up from the hassock, had given him a look while she flipped the heavy pages of Mama Lovey’s photo album.

Spence selected a purple marker and thickened the line outlining the killers’ route. Family. Six out of ten nightly calls to the police were to report domestic violence. Twenty percent of all homicides were family related. One-third of all female deaths were at the hands of husbands or boyfriends. He hadn’t run across figures of how many men were annually maimed or murdered by female relatives, though as a child he’d eavesdropped on plenty of stories of women throwing lye, pulling razors, burning up beds, or garnishing salads with diced onions and ground glass, Uncle Rayfield’s second wife singing “Cut’m if he stands still, shoot’m if he runs” in between the bits of gossip. The tales the drivers of the fleet told each other about city life were fairly mild in comparison—wives tipping the collection agency as to where husbands had stashed their Mercedes on girlfriends’ property, wives stuffing husbands’ doctoral theses down the garbage disposal. Only lately had Spence perused data concerning children murdered by relatives, driven to research in order to weigh how serious Zala’s performance on the
polygraph was from the police point of view and from, he was finally admitting to himself, his own.

“There’s a little frog in your throat, Daddy.” Kenti placed her fingertips on Spence’s neck when he cleared his throat. “You sick? Daddy feels hot,” she informed them. Kofi reached up to feel his dad’s forehead but Zala’s hand got there before his.

“What is it?”

“Nothing, Zala. Just thinking.”

“Them bats?” She chuckled.

“Naw.” He was thinking about home, longing to be home, at home, longing for Atlanta the way he had in the jungle, in the swamps, at the bottom of mud-filled trenches, reading off dog tags and helping to swing the bodies up.

“Thinking about Sonny, aincha?” Kenti leaned her head against his chest and patted it.

“Sort of,” realizing that he wanted Sonny to be there not so much to complete the family portrait as to give him the opportunity to alter it and his own relationship to it. “My family,” he said aloud, to see what it felt like to say it now. He hugged his daughter’s shoulder and with the tip of his fingers grazed his wife’s back. He stretched his leg out on his son’s side of the table so he could feel the warmth of Kofi’s knees against his instep. “Family,” he said again.

“What about it,” Kofi wanted to know.

“I think the Chinese have the right idea,” Spence said, “or at least the way my bunkmate explained it.” With family, relations were fairly formal, particularly between postadolescents and their parents. Casual and informal relations were fine with nonrelations. He wondered if he’d gotten that right. One thing was for sure, familiarity bred twenty percent, one-third, and six out of ten. Chin had been delirious at the time, though, burning up in his bunk with marsh fever, the soles of his feet spongy with jungle rot. But, how could a man with a name like that be taken seriously, and in wartime too?

“Cliff Chin, can you believe that? Sounds like a cousin of Rock Hudson and Mark Trail.” Spence fell against the sofa pillows laughing while the rest of them looked at him and mugged.

“Chin the Chinese dude that came by that time? I think I remember him.”

“You were so little, Kofi, I can’t see how,” Zala said.

“That was a long time ago.” Spence had pulled some of his unit together to try to get a buddy released from jail in their custody. So many vets had wound up in jail when what they needed were jobs, medical attention, detox programs, review of bad discharges that had resulted in loss of benefits, and maybe just some attention, a breaking of the silence which not even the uprisings of Vietnamese refugees at Fort Chaffee had been able to crack. Spence continued darkening the line around the target area, wishing he had the energy to break the hush that seemed to be settling again in the room. He stuck his tongue out and worked on the map like a kid at a coloring book. He felt them smiling at each other.

“Sounds like they saying ‘I believe in mackral,’ don’t it?” Kenti poked Spence in the stomach and pointed to the radio. She tried her hand at the hillbilly twang. Kofi joined in and Spence tried, but only Kofi seemed to know the words of “I Believe in Miracles.” Zala had half a mind to join in but held back. It seemed just another snare that would get her caught up and entangled all over again.

“You hungry, aincha, Daddy?” Kenti poked him again when his stomach grumbled. “Want me to fix you a baloney sammich?” She crawled under the table. “I know how to fix it. And there’s devil eggs too.”

“That’d be nice.”

“There’s tuna salad,” Kofi said, “but she put apples in it.” He rolled his eyes.

“Well, I like apples.”

Kofi made a face but got up. Then, inspired, he chopped the air with the side of his hand. “I know how you like salad, with tomatoes in it, chunked up like lemons for iced tea, not sliced roundways like some people do.”

“Sounds good to me.” Spence smiled, smacking his lips. He feinted a jab to Kofi’s shoulder and the boy dropped into a crouch and threw a left hook. Spence fell over on his left hip and threw Zala down against the books.

“Coming up,” Kofi said, striding off to the kitchen.

“And you like mustard, doncha?” Kenti was talking loudly for Kofi’s benefit. “Not on the bread, just on the baloney, right?” She leaned over the table and yanked on her daddy’s pants leg but he was trying to hug Mama. “Right? ’Cause I seen you fix it like that.” Hands on her
hips, Kenti marched off saying “Seeeeee,” lest her brother think for one silly minute that he was champ in the Know Dad contest.

When the news went off, Zala glanced up from the map. Spence was facing the kitchen, a faraway look in his eyes. She eased the marker out of his grip and finished outlining the danger zone. They’d tried to convince themselves that there were two Campbellton Roads, two Martin Luther King Jr. Drives, two Gordon Streets—one crowded with squares, circles, and crosses, the other clean and spacious, where Spence lived, where she lived, where the barbershop was, safe behind a veil that separated that city where they continued to live out their lives troubled by nothing heavier than bills and disagreements about lifestyle, and this city of torment.

“I don’t know about you, Zala, but I can’t continue like this.” He took her hand and drew her closer. “We’re entitled to live, you know, no matter what’s happened.” He felt her stiffen. “What the hell will we have to show for all this time and worry? To Sonny, I mean. Bills, tension, confusion worse than before. At the rate we’re going … I don’t know,” he whispered, leaning against her shoulder.

“You feel feverish,” she said. “You really do.”

“I picture it sometimes,” he said, sweeping his eyes around the room. “Sonny coming through the door with a satchel of dirty clothes and a sheepish grin. And what’ll he see?”

“What?” she said, her eyes on him, her throat constricted.

Spence laughed. “I should have made this speech a few days ago.” Despite the piles of ragged papers—
Burning Spear
, the
Public Eye, Klan-watch
, the
Revolutionary Worker
, items that had boiled his blood until he met Leah and learned who’d supplied them—the place looked good. He’d been a clumsy gumshoe trying to find out if the hat in Zala’s car had come from the same source; but Leah, a step ahead of him, had smiled slyly, telling him if he had to live one day as a woman he’d understand the mad strategems one had to resort to for safety’s sake. He’d felt stupid, exposed.

“He’ll come in the door, you were saying.”

“We should have something to show. We should be trying to build something—a community organization.” A family, he did not say, for she was watching him curiously.

“You think he’ll be walking in that door soon, Spence?” She put the marker down.

“I can see that you’ve gotten yourself back on track,” he said, indicating the library books. “But I was talking about us, Zala.”

“I see,” she said, waiting for a confession. Soon, then, she could be done with it—the dread, the blame, the masquerading as a wounded animal collecting praise and hoarding sympathy. “Promise?”

“Don’t be stupid. How can I promise?” He dropped his face in his hands.

Kenti had found a faded bib in the bottom of the kitchen cupboard and, climbing over the sofa bolster, she tied it around Spence’s neck. Kofi, taking his cue, fed his father forkfuls of salad, conscious of his mother’s eyes on him whenever tuna fell on the carpet.

“That’s a good boy,” Kenti encouraged over Spence’s shoulder. “Daddy a big boy.”

“You still say you like apples in your tuna fish?” Kofi had his doubts, for his dad was making a face, but maybe it was because Kenti, thinking she was patting him, was thumping him on his head.

With the kids in such a playful mood, Spence didn’t mind the mustard plastered all over the sandwich, nor the two-inch column of sugar that stayed stuck at the bottom of the glass, nor the tomatoes that had gone soft and slightly sour. Zala’s spirits too seemed to lift once Kofi took the napkin and wiped up the crumbs. And Spence didn’t have to coax her when a good rocking tune came on. She even got fancy on him, swinging him around while she did a tricky cross-step, then challenged him to rock hip to hip, knee to knee, ankle to ankle, right on down to the floor, the kids beating on the table, Kofi grinning, Kenti swearing she heard bones creaking, Zala shaking her shoulders, and Spence congratulating himself for not wondering too much if Dave and/or the owner of the hat in Zala’s car had taught her the new steps.

“It looks like a shoe, don’t it?” Kenti was darkening the circles on the map with a red pen. “Don’t it look like the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe’s shoe?” She made crisscross markings with her finger back and forth between the eyelets along Memorial, Gordon, MLK, and Hightower, lacing up the shoe. “Really like a boot, don’t it?”

Zala dropped down by the spool table. “Oh my God.”

“It’s too crumpled-up-looking to be a shoe,” Kofi scoffed. “Where’s the heel?”