Those Bones Are Not My Child (40 page)

Kenti took up the fork and prodded the East Point area where four X’s lined up in a square. “See?”

“It does look like a boot, Spence.”

Spence squatted down beside Zala, wishing it didn’t.

“Them some weird toes,” Kofi said, taking the fork from his sister and dragging the tines across the McDonough/Moreland area where a bridge was drawn. “It scoots up here like somebody’s bent the foot up, then all of a sudden it gets fat.… Naww,” he said when he saw how crazy his parents looked staring at the map. He rapped the fork in the upper-left-hand corner of the purple figure, where Bolton Road swung over into Jackson Parkway. “Plus, it’s all closed up. How ya gonna get a foot in? You can’t onnaconna it’s closed. Whoever heard of a boot with no way to get the foot in?” He searched the figure for more wrong things to point out. He felt his dad burning up beside him. “Naww, naww,” he said, wishing the radio would go loud and they’d get back to dancing.

“How’d we miss seeing it?” Spence’s voice was trembly.

“Well, you could cut the top open and put your foot in.” Kenti was reaching for the fork, but Kofi wouldn’t let it go. She picked up the pen again and pointed. “You could cut it open with Sonny’s camp knife right here. Couldn’t you, Daddy?”

“You stupid!” Kofi wanted to stab her. He stabbed the map instead. “That’s stupid. Tell her, Dad. Tell her.”

But Spence had already run to the phone, drying his damp hands on his jeans and carefully choosing what he would say to the vets, to the Task Force, and to any parents who might be at the new STOP office on MLK Drive.

Kofi was at the window with his packed bag rehearsing his getaway when a crowd of boys came marching down the middle of Ashby Street, singing.

“Sardines, ugh, and pork ’n’ beans, ugh.” The marching team broke rank as a car drove by; then the boys filing on either side streamed together again, getting louder. “Sardines, ugh, and pork ’n’ beans, ugh.”

“There’s a moose,” they stomped. “On the loose.” March, march. “And it jumped.” Boom. “In my juice.” March, march. “Sardines, that’sallIeat. And pork and beans, that’sallIeat. Ugghhh.”

Standing on the chair, he could see over the Griers’ bushes. He counted seven boys. Coming home from a game, Kofi thought enviously,
maybe from the stadium or their high school. A long-leg boy with a high behind was in front calling the moves. The others marched in ranks with pretend instruments. Bringing up the rear was a big guy in glasses banging like he carried a huge drum. They were doing it like the Grambling Band, shuffling forward, bending and dipping, skipping backward, gliding sideways, then hiphaw marching ahead in precision drill steps.

“A parade?” Kenti was crowding him at the window, stepping all over the runaway bag. Kofi hoisted her up in the chair, then onto the desk. She propped the curtains back with the fishbowl.

“There’s a snake,” the lead yelled.

“On my plate,” the group yelled.

“And it ate”—boom, boom.

“All my steak.”

“Uuuugggghhh!” Kenti joined in.

Kofi had just enough time to kick Sonny’s gym bag under the desk before Kenti turned around. “What they doing out so late?”

“Having a good time,” he said. In searching the hall closet, he’d found everything but the cigar box. He’d wanted the box for the open-sesame to the hideout. But he’d have to settle for “Valencia cigars” as a password. He’d ask Ms. McGovern how to pronounce the word.

“There’s a bear in my chair / And it ate my underwear.”

“Awww, they’re going, Kofi.” Her face was pressed against the screen.

“We’d better close this window a little. Getting cold.” Part of the curtain hem was wet from the fishbowl, but he didn’t tell her. He wanted her to get to sleep in a hurry. “Roger’ll be okay,” he added when she started baby-talking the goldfish. Kofi climbed up to the top bunk as the cadence grew faint.

“I don’t like sardines. You?”

“Go to sleep, Short Legs.”

“But I didn’t finish my story from before,” she said, poking his mattress from below.

“Go ’head.”

“Well, for my second wish, I want a big o’ sausage pizza and some beer.”

“You don’t even drink beer.”

“Well, I wish I did. This is my wishing story, don’t forget. I’m talking about me and Moon Fairy, ya know.”

“Okay. It’s just that it’s stupid wasting a wish to wish you liked beer. Why can’t you just double up on pizza and soda and that’d be one wish?”

“Soda make ya pee the bed.”

“So does beer,” Kofi said, punching his pillow. “You could wish soda didn’t make you have to pee, or you could get up and go.”

“Then I’d be wasting a wish wishing to wake up before I peed the bed.”

Kofi rolled over and slapped his foot against the wall. “Well, I wish you’d finish.”

“It’s not your turn to wish.” Kenti adjusted her covers. “You want to hear what the Moon Fairy grant me or not?”

“Go ’head.”

“For my third wish, I wish myself to where Sonny at. And I tell him, ‘Come on home, Mr. Sundiata Spencer. It’s your turn to stuff the laundry in the bag.’ And I’ma tell you took his tapes too, Kofi.”

“Shh.”

“Shh yourself. I saw you at school.”

“Go to sleep.”

“Go to sleep yourself, Frog Face.”

“Betchu pee the bed. All that ice tea you drank.”

“Won’t.”

“You oughta go pee now so you won’t be stumbling around later waking me up with your crybaby self.”

“Better quit talking mean. I’ll tell Daddy and he’ll come in here.”

“No he won’t.” Kofi leaned over the edge of the bunk. “ ’Cause they don’t have no clothes on.”

“Oooh.”

“Go to sleep.” Kofi held himself still and waited. After a while he
heard her mumble nighty-night. He counted to twenty-eight, then thirty-six, then nine, then seven, then three. When he couldn’t think of any more of the magic numbers his mama’s fat friend had been talking about, he answered nighty-night. Kenti had to be asleep, ’cause she always wanted to have the last word but she didn’t say anything.

Kofi turned toward the moonlight, trying to stay awake and go over his plans, but the curtain was puffing up, then going flat, then puffing out again, making him sleepy. The house was quiet, not even the clock was ticking. He thought about tiptoeing into the front room to get the boots. If Dad woke up, he’d play like he wanted to ask if he could go to the Halloween party at Kwame’s. He’d planned to go as a cowboy, but when he ran across his birthday present in the closet, he decided to go as the ghost of Bruce Lee instead. The house creaked like someone was coming in. But it was only the curtain getting sucked against the scratchy screen. He settled down and worked on his costume. He decided to make up a character—the Karate Cowboy. He almost woke himself up, smiling so hard.

A finger of gauzy white reached out toward the bedpost. The breeze grazed the side of the bed, then bounced off the door into the hall, streaming under the arch into the living room, flowing into the cross-current from the front window. The boots stood upright side by side near the door as though an invisible boy were standing in them listening to the still, waiting for the two figures to roll toward each other again. The under-door draft bellied the carpet, and one boot leaned against the other as though the boy were standing hip-shot now, hugging himself, chilled.

F
ive minutes after Spence drove off and Zala curled up again in the warmth they’d made, the phone rang. Kofi stumbled out of the bathroom, saw his mother hopping toward the table with the quilt wrapped around her, and continued on into the kitchen, where Kenti was trying to fit two heels of bread into the toaster.

“It don’t work, Short Legs. And anyway, you got to plug it in.”

“I know it.” She went to the fridge to get the jelly. He went to the cupboard to get the matches.

Before Zala could get out the second hello, the three middle toes of her right foot cramped. She cursed the drafty house and threw her weight onto the ball of her foot, massaging it against the floor. Kofi was lighting the oven to knock the chill off, she noticed groggily. She snapped her fingers to get his attention. The oven was tricky; he should be careful.

“Cora?” Zala adjusted the quilt under her armpits and sighed—two grown women acting the fool, it was time to call a halt to the game. “That you, Cora?” She could picture her mother-in-law smiling, payback, though she barely sensed any breathing. Suddenly wide awake, Zala gripped the phone with both hands. “Sonny?” The quilt slid down as she heard the click.

Kofi pulled the broiler pan out and sniffed. “You sure you want toast? Oven stinks.”

Kenti pointed her knife toward the living room. “Who she fussing at?”

Kofi listened. It was the bossy voice telling somebody what to do. “Landlord probly.”

Kenti pried the lid off the jar and looked again toward the living
room. Her mother was wrapped in the quilt, the curly cord wound round her. “She look like a mummy and calling somebody else.”

“You pozed to toast it before you put all that junk on it, ya know.”

“Then never mind.” Kenti painted both pieces of bread red, clapped them together, and bit. “Mama look like a mummy.”

“I heard you. Don’t talk with your mouth full. It’s nasty looking.”

Kenti held the jelly bread in her cheek and sucked her teeth at her brother. He rolled his eyes and turned slowly around in front of the oven, soaking it in, storing it up.

“Wish me happy birthday,” he said.

“It ain’t yet.”

“You might forget.”

“Can’t talk with my mouth full, ya know.”

Kofi stood as close to the hot draft as he could get. It might be real cold where he was going.

Ten minutes after Paulette left to take the kids to school, Zala eased the receiver up and listened. The security officer at the telephone company hadn’t called back, nor the police. If they didn’t know the importance of a tracer, she did. They hadn’t believed that Earl Lee Terrell’s aunt had gotten a ransom call, so the FBI were not called in, but the newspapers ran the story, and that, the boy’s family said, had scared the kidnappers off. Darron Glass’s foster mother was certain a silent call she’d received was from the boy who’d vanished in September. Zala tried to remember if any of the parents had been able to get a tap on their phone. She couldn’t calm down enough to figure out where her blue notebook might be. She’d begun a section under the yellow tab the day she’d learned that Venus Taylor hadn’t had a phone when her daughter’s classmate saw Angel crying on a corner near home. Zala secured the receiver in place. It was working. She hoped that the APD, the Task Force, and Southern Bell were too.

It wasn’t a telephone van that drove up as she was stepping into her skirt. Nor was it Detective Dowell arriving in a police cruiser. It was Sergeant B. J. Greaves pulling up in a Charger.

“This will take some doing,” B. J. warned, handing Zala forms to fill out. She declined coffee, saying she was in a hurry. But while Zala completed the tracer request forms, B. J. continued smoking and talking,
running topics into each other without pause—red tape, new slant on the case, a rescheduled test, the sudden change in the weather. Zala gave up trying to follow the woman’s train of thought and simply found her an ashtray, then sat down by the phone with a bundle of shoes, knee-highs, and a vest.

“Have you seen this?” B. J. shoved a stack of albums aside and laid a copy of
The Caped Crusader
down in front of Zala.

“For the kids? Thanks.” She pulled one sock on and massaged her foot.

“You’re not listening, Marzala. I was saying that this comic book is a convention souvenir from the United Klans of America.”

“Oh.” Zala straightened her sock and looked at the comic. She knew it should ring a bell, but with B. J. standing over her stubbing out a butt and rattling the ashtray, she couldn’t concentrate. A test? Whose, hers or B. J.’s? Back in the summer, when a squad-room memo stated that the moratorium on promotional exams was still in effect, B. J. had taken the news of her continued suspended status badly. Chainsmoking and rambling. A new child’s folder under her arm, she’d gone on and on about how hard it was to hide a dead body in summer, oblivious to the effect she was having on mothers of missing children. Bacteria activated by the heat, swelling, the odor—any corpse looked like a homicide when it burst. Lousy detail having to take charge of the gore, B. J. had told them, before she noticed that one of the mothers had rushed to the bathroom.

“No, I guess I’m not listening, B. J. Sorry.”

“Understandable.” B. J. stirred in the ashtray with a match stem. “But I wanted you to know, though I may be jumping the gun, that it looks like my assignment to the Task Force has finally come through.”

“Really? Thank God. Maybe now we can get somewhere,” Zala said, slipping on her shoes. “With you on the team, we can break this thing wide open.”

“Not so fast. It’s just a maybe, a good maybe, but …” B. J. broke up clumps of ash till the match stem bent. “There’s something to be said for working quietly behind closed doors.” Zala froze, one arm through a hole in the vest. “I mean working without interference, okay? Being able to do the job without the eyes of the world boring through your head. Once the press charges in, the pressure mounts.”

“You always said that publicity and pressure was what this case
needed.” Zala buttoned her vest slowly, giving herself time for something to register. What was the woman talking about? Sensationalist reporters, undramatic police work, things out of control. Nerves? An impending interview, perhaps; B. J.’s leather and metal were highly polished, the three-inch-wide belt, her badge, her earrings. She’d done something with her hair too, either a hot comb or a relaxer; it fit like a cap.

“Publicity don’t always work in our favor,” she was saying, using a lighter this time. “Especially when it’s out-of-town reporters poking around looking for something flashy but not taking the time to get the facts straight.” She snorted; smoke streamed from her nostrils. “Police reporters at least have to. They can’t afford to get on the bad side of their main source of info.” Her mouth set, B. J. flicked, and ash broke over the rim of the ashtray.