Those Bones Are Not My Child (42 page)

In another time, in another life, gazing out the window, swinging her foot against the sofa, she’d be planning a trip to the Tombigbee near Epps, or the shore in Brunswick where her daddy’s folks lived; or to where autumn colors looked best, planning an outing to the approach trail of the Appalachian. Staring a pleasurable stare and not minding the prickly feeling in her foot, she’d consider which weight of water-color paper she’d pack, which brushes, which tubes of pigment for when Kenti tired of painting pictures with grasses, flowers, berries. Then they’d up and go, on the seeming spur of the moment, giving the girl no time to get excited and run a fever. Mother and daughter off for the day, no boys allowed, nyah, nyah, nyah. Kenti leading the way over the switchbacks where lichen sparkled, leaving the path to point—“Foxfire, right, Mama?” Picking up twigs to burn for charcoal, finding rocks just right to sharpen the charcoal sticks against, a picnic on a carpet of needles—deviled eggs, sausage and biscuits, a thermos of hand-squeezed orange juice, and apples for munching as they made their way to a watering spot. Mama and Chile gathering bouquets of brights and delicates, predicting which would be stingy, which generous giving up their colors. Then, leaning over a finger inlet of the Tombigbee River,
or crouched down by a creek in the north Georgia woods, bracing themselves against each other’s legs, they’d jar water, not minding too much the bugs and sediment that went in, for sometimes happy surprises occurred when bits of things mixed with the pigments and were laid on the paper with brushes of ferns.

The throaty cooing of pigeons somewhere over the bathroom dormer called her out of the mood. She snapped to attention at the sudden flapping of wings, brisk, panicked, as though a shot had rung out in the woods and geese were breaking from cover. How she hated pigeons. But did they care? They came and went as they pleased, on her front steps, on her car windshield. How she hated that yapping dog, the wind, the emptiness that ached like a severed foot. Who cared? Whether the phone rang again, or a cab arrived, or she got up and found a tissue, the grass grew anyway.

From the moment the man got on the line it was clear that dialogue would consist of one mouth and two ears if she wasn’t aggressive. Glib, flip, in love with his facility for lists and impersonations, the newsman didn’t sound like a serious someone Speaker would recommend calling for help. She didn’t know where to break in, how to get him back on the track. Yes, he agreed, there was a media whiteout on the Atlanta situation, on Blacks in general for that matter, then off he went cataloguing stories that came up over the wire each day, got clipped, and collected in the waste bin—cross burnings, firebombings, snipings, pejorative slogans smeared across Black workers’ lockers at Bethlehem Steel, hate mail delivered to the Black Student Association at Harvard, mysterious drownings, beatings, burnings, truckloads of bigots with bats ambushing interracial couples in parks, gangs of white youths on the rampage at skating rinks, the police rioting in Black communities around the country.

“Then how come—”

“What can I tell you? Blacks just aren’t news anymore, Mrs. Spencer. Take those women that were bludgeoned to death in Boston. A group called a press conference and no media showed. Let’s face it, if it hadn’t been for Mount St. Helens blowing her stack, the Miami story would’ve received no coverage at all.”

“I’m not talking about Boston or Miami. I’m talking about Atlanta and the children who—”

“Lady, Black boys getting killed in the South just ain’t news.”

“And girls,” she inserted. “And women and men.”

“Oh?” He was rustling papers. She didn’t know what to say next. “The information Earl Reid clipped to his letter seems to be about boys … two pages full of typos and contradictions under an official letterhead … hard to believe this bulletin is from Atlanta’s Commission of Public Safety. They’ve listed one boy as missing, for instance, three days after his death. What kind of Amos ’n’ Andy operation—”

“I’ve seen it. But I can forward better information if you’ll give me your address.”

“I know how you feel, but I don’t make network policy. The news of the moment is Iran, when it’s not the election or stories about international terrorism.” And off he went again, while she reached for the newspaper, grasping at straws. He was ticking off headlines, mimicking newscasters, referring to Ted Koppel of
Nightline
as Alfred E. Neuman, a.k.a. Howdy Doody, impersonating Jimmy the C speaking on the hostages, but calling the President Tom Sawyer, then rustling the papers again that Speaker had sent and tagging him Earl the Curl, which threw her, but maybe before Speaker had dreaded, he’d jerried.

“But if you could—”

“The problem is—and I don’t mean to sound insensitive to your situation—but the Atlanta story lacks scope, if you will, as opposed to, say, Iranian women putting the veil back on to become revolutionaries, or terrorists skyjacking jumbo jets.”

“Please! There’s terrorism right here in Atlanta. Atlanta, I’m talking about, the ‘New International City.’ We’re not some mail-order postal address you see on late-night TV—smokeless ashtrays, bamboo steamers. Look, mister, children and not just children have been murdered here, and you’ve got to do something about it. Earl says you’re a newsman. Well, this is a news story I’m talking about. Terrorism.”

“Formations on the left are the sort of terrorists that—”

“Then you think it’s a right-wing group here, is that it? A lot of people would agree with you. I can put you in touch with them. Listen, here’s an angle. Let me read this item to you. ‘Self-proclaimed white racist J. B. Stoner and his National States’ Rights Party will host an international conference in Atlanta.’ International,” she underscored,
moving her finger down the column. “Here, about the State Department and the Immigration people. ‘Nazi leaders from Belgium scheduled to come to Atlanta for the Saturday, October 11 meeting had their visas revoked on Friday.’ Quote—‘Their presence in the country is not in accordance with the U.S. public interest’—unquote. So what about that? International enough for you?”

“As American as apple pie and H. Rap Brown,” he laughed, icing the wire.

“He’s here too,” she sighed, tallying up what the clock now said about her phone bill.

“Is he?” The man sounded interested. “And he’s involved with the community’s handling of the case?”

She couldn’t think of a lie fast enough, and he took off again, the second hand sweeping around the dial as he mused about his apprentice years covering firebrands and mastering the gimmick of news pegs.

“As in the Miami uprising,” he said. “Nature supplied a savvy reporter with something to hang the story on—two kinds of eruptions, a volcano and a community. It worked. The networks snapped it up.”

“You’re a journalist,” she jumped in. “You could find a peg. I can set up interviews, introduce you to the STOP committee, to the volunteer investigators, to someone on the Emergency Task Force. You could interview my family. Our boy’s been gone since July, but I believe he called this morning. That’s a beginning. I can help. I really can.” Sweat soaked through the ribbed cuffs of her sweater.

“Today? He called you today? You didn’t mention that.” He was about to laugh that not-quite-laugh again.

“Please listen,” she said, cupping her hand over her outer ear to tune out Mean Dog. His howling sounded like something more than a cat was tormenting him.

“Mrs. Spencer, I don’t make policy. What can I tell you?”

“Tell me
something
.”

“I know how you feel, but—”

“Do you? Do you really? Rot in hell!” she yelled, slamming the phone down. Chips of plastic hit the wall.

She stomped along toward the bus stop, heaping curses on the heads of the newsman, Speaker, B. J., Cora. And herself. “Rot in hell.” So
lame. First Amendment rights was what she should have launched into. That’s what was in the news lately—adult-bookstore owners, pornomag editors, fascist fundamentalists, the ACLU, radicals—even Kofi running off at the mouth about the rights of the governed. The right to speak, the right to know. So what was the media whiteout but a violation of everybody’s First Amendment rights? That’s what she should have told the bastard up there in the nation’s capital, so dry, so droll.

The dogs in the side street were baying like wolves. Furniture was piled on the sidewalk. First cold day and someone was being evicted. Ain’t it the way, she muttered, grinding her heel in a patch of dandelions between the paving stones. Crazy damn mad, man, as Mr. Grier said of the world, coming in from work every day, wiping his feet on the mat and wagging his head. A greasy skillet full of steaming beans had been set on top of a sateen slip, then dragged across towels to a better perch on top of a mattress, the sheets fallen away, showing a pattern of stains. No privacy for the poor, she wanted to tell somebody, the “anybody” who should be there to do something about it, to at least snatch the dirty underwear spiked on the plastic dish drainer and stuff it in the chest of drawers sitting upside down in a chair. Who gives a shit! she thought, but she didn’t feel better, she felt fake and as ineffectual as she had when she’d broken her phone. She approached the high curb and spied discolored pots and pans with dents in them, a burnt muffin tin holding earrings and old tarnished keys. She shivered. Hobgoblins, unleashed early, were driving the dogs up the scale into the tenor range.

“
Marzala!
” Hearing her name thundered, she wheeled around, frightened.

“Get in,” the driver of the green minibus ordered. “Dammit, sister, get in!” The passenger door sprung open and Zala jumped in. The bus shot past the heaps of furniture, leaving her stomach behind.

“Quick, stash your bag under the seat and change the batteries. Load all your pockets with tapes, sister. This is it.”

“What is? What’s happened?”

At 10:12 a.m. a roar had gone up from the boiler room of the Gate City Day Nursery in the Bowen Homes project of the Black community’s northwest district, hurtling hot metal helter-skelter into the
sunny playrooms of preschool children. Falling walls wrecked toy chests, splintered cribs were upended; floorboards unmoored spun in an avalanche of plaster; tables, picture books, and wooden blocks tumbled against plastic clocks that ticked away on pastel blankets spongy with blood.

A locket and chain torn from the neck ripped the skin of a toddler running with a slashed femoral artery through hot debris. Bawling babies crawled over blistered pacifiers, dropping scorched dolls on dump trucks smashed flat by scrambling knees cut on the metal edges of robots leaking battery juice. Soaked socks, torn drum skins, hands clawing at the mesh of playpens while tinny xylophones plunked eerily pinching fingers. Spines rammed by table legs busting the strings of ukuleles curling into black lumps. Teddy-bear stuffing like popcorn in the gritty air where glass spattered into the wounds of toddlers. Flashcards fluttered high against Venetian blinds clattering down on brightly painted furniture collapsed on a baby boy’s life.

The cook, preparing lunch when the blast blew the juice can from her hands and sent the metal trays flying, got trapped in the kitchen when the stove was thrown in the doorway and jammed from the hall by flooring hurled from the office where the director reeled in her swivel chair phoning for help. The social worker snatched up a child as the ceiling caved in on them both. A teacher, broken-field-running through heat and fear, a child tucked under each arm, made it to the lawn strewn with rubble slippery underfoot and collapsed for a moment into the arms, bosoms, blankets of neighbors come on the run who couldn’t hold her for more than it took to deposit the two and turn back to the building, one teacher diving through the pebbly air to cover a little girl knocked down on the tiles when a face bowl broke away from the bathroom wall.

Residents poured out of Bowen’s buildings to pull screaming children, shocked mute children, stark-eyed children from the arms of the women who wrenched themselves away again, slipping on the dew-red grass where chipmunks had given way like grapes underfoot. Squirrels, tumbled down from swings and jungle gyms fifty feet away from the blast when a door sailed through the playground and ricocheted off the cyclone fence on the Jackson Parkway side, were trampled by motorists who thudded down the slopes to help. Birds, perched on the voltage
wires along the perimeter of the hill, were felled by a storm of bark and twigs when a desk blew two hundred feet from the nursery below into the brambled lot on the high street, tire treads of delivery trucks and a church excursion bus scored across their feathery backs. Flung over the two-story apartments next to the nursery, soaring three hundred yards along Yates, a metal door landed in a parking lot, cracking cement and blistering paint from the cars rocked by the explosion.

Across the way, children in the A. D. Williams Elementary School took cover when the orange-brick valley shook, teachers racing to the rattling windows to look up at the hill for signs of cannons or tanks attacking. No assault platoons, only cars stopped in the middle of the streets and drivers crowding down the slopes, the teachers hustled their classes out of the rooms to huddle under the stairs and wait for the principal’s voice over the PA system.

Stiff-legged and shivery, dogs whined alarm, relaying the disaster to Bolton Road, to Hollywood Road, to Hightower, and down to Martin Luther King Jr. Drive as more neighbors sped across the open terrain of the low streets from Walden, Chivers, Yates, First Street, Grant Drive to arrive stupefied at the scene of destruction.

“Oh my God,” Zala gasped, yanked along on the cord of the tape recorder as Leah Eubanks moved through the crowd angling her mike—“I thought it was MARTA blasting below,” “I thought it was Judgment Day,” “Wh-who’d do th-this?”—stunned, stammering, a man in a bathrobe gritting his teeth, a woman in a dress ripped from the waistband, a stutterer in a tattersall vest holding a boy limp in his arms.

A school crossing guard whose yellow harness was streaked with char ran up. “Get that damn thing out of my face!” she bellowed. “What kind of people are you?” She spat in the direction of Zala’s foot and flung her arms about for the group to break up. “Get these people cracking. We need bandages!” She sprinted past them along Yates to Fields, then uphill to the firehouse.