Those Bones Are Not My Child (44 page)

“Would you repeat that description, please?” Leah was saying as Zala, moving in close, asked, “Did you see a car or a truck in the area? Did you notice Cobb County plates? Or out-of-town plates?”

The man smoothed down his pajama top through the opening of the lining and thought. Those around him were pooling information about the colors of various counties’ plates, hoping to jog the man’s memory.

“Walk me over there,” he said. “Maybe being there by the fence will refresh my memory. But don’t try to feed me information,” he said, pointing his newspaper to Zala. “We want to get this right, now don’t we? The rumor mill is already operating at full swing. I don’t wish to be a part of any of that.”

Zala nodded and held the mike’s jack in place as she followed the man. When Leah tried coaxing a description of the two suspects, the man stopped short to chide her for trying to put “suspects” in his mouth.

“I’m using the word ‘prowlers,’ ” he said, “just as I reported it to the police.” He waited till he was satisfied that the two women had that straight before he proceeded up the hill.

Two more police cruisers were coming into the area from the east entrance and three TV vans were trundling in from the west. Spence moved the man in tattersall out of the path of a cameraman. His arms still outstretched, his eyeballs rolling up and revealing a lot of white, he looked delirious.

“Was that your boy?” Spence took out his handkerchief, but the man was unable to take it. He shook his head no, a glistening rope of snot and saliva dangling from his chin. Spence wiped the man’s face and lowered his arms. “Take it easy, brother man. I know you hurting.” He thumped the man on his back until he stopped gagging, trying to speak.

“Get a shot of where the door landed in the parking lot,” Lafayette was saying to the brother in sweats jogging through the crowd taking
pictures. Lafayette sidled up to Spence and tapped his arms locked around the sobbing man. “No boiler did this kind of damage. No way.”

“Is that what they’re saying, a faulty boiler?”

“No telling what they’ll be saying. But Mason’s inside with the fire inspector and Vernon’s getting pictures. Ain’t that your lady up there?” He pointed to the slope behind the day-care center. “Them sisters been taping like champs.”

“Then no suspects have been taken in?”

“A couple of tenants spotted some jokers early this morning, but that’s about it.”

“Wh-who would k-kill li’l children?”

Lafayette wagged his head then reached up to pull his cap down, remembering only when he touched his scalp that he’d given it to one of the little boys the ambulance had refused to take, saying only the most severe cases would be transported. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Been thinking that all along,” Spence answered.

Tattersall, wiping his clothes and looking from Spence to Lafayette, was trying to speak. “J-just like before,” he managed to get out before he gagged again. “In ’79. One of them m-meetings.”

“Whattayamean?” Lafayette moved closer to the stammerer as Spence turned, his attention on someone behind the cordon. “What’d you say?” Lafayette propped his shoulder against the man lest he keel over with the effort to speak. Tattersall’s eyes seemed to be staring at a new darkness opening up within. And when he caught his balance and moved off to follow Spence, everything he looked at was branded by what he suspected, knew.

“There was a gathering of one of them Klan groups in ’79 when the killings started? Is that what you’re saying?” Lafayette caught up with Tattersall, who was coughing into the handkerchief. “Is that what you mean?”

“If the fire inspector’s inside,” Spence said, looking at the tall man by the nursery entrance, “then who’s Murder Incorporated, dressed to kill?” He shouldered his way through the crowd and vaulted over the barrier, the two men close behind.

While the fire brigade wore smeary rubber jackets and knee-high boots with dirty soles, the man they headed for wore a long, gunmetal-gray slicker with silver galosh closings and new Wellington boots, silver
stripes around the tops. He had a Lucite clipboard tucked under one arm, his hands deep in the slash pockets. He surveyed the three men, then surveyed the scene, and took no notes.

“From the FBI field office maybe?” Lafayette ran his hand over his scalp. “I know they’ve changed since the Hoover days, but I didn’t know they had Pierre Cardin designing for the bureau. What say I slip around back and see what Mason’s found out while you keep an eye on Slick. I’ll be damned if they’re going to jerk us around with some bullshit about a bum boiler.”

Dave spun an officer around by the shoulder and found himself staring into the face of a rookie fresh from the academy.

“What’s the story on the bomb threats?” He didn’t expect an answer any different than the one he’d been getting.

“Bomb threats?”

“Duh,” Dave mugged, feeling like one of the wiseasses from his caseload. “You’ve been getting bomb threats over the wire since this explosion went off. That’s why it took you guys so long to get here. So knock it off. What’s the deal?”

“Please step back, sir, we’re trying to form a second perimeter here.”

“Yeah, great. But did a description come in on any ‘tentative lookouts’?” He waited. And the rookie was obviously waiting too, for Dave to show his shield. When he didn’t, the rookie piped up again about stepping back.

“Yeah, right, a second perimeter.” Dave moved on, looking for the official in command. He grabbed the arm of one of the TV cameramen and asked him.

“I don’t know who’s in command,” the man said, brushing hair out of his face. “And no, I haven’t heard about any other bombings.”

“Did you ask?”

“Hey, wait a minute,” the man yelled, turning on his camera and trying to follow Dave through the crowd. “Can I ask you a few questions?” Somebody was giving a physics lesson. Someone with metallurgical smarts was inspecting fragments on the ground. Others leaned on history to add weight to their speculations. And one old man kept repeating how he’d stepped from the shower to see his bath mat suddenly
speckled with glass and grit. Dave bumped into a woman threading sheer curtains on a bent rod and trying to reach an apartment house up ahead. He stepped in front of her and ran interference, holding on to the gauzy hem.

The police were demonstrating their skills in crowd control, the fire department its usual efficiency in securing order around the site and dispensing coffee to its workers; the medics were swift, eight hands apiece it seemed, swabbing and bandaging and moving the injured out. Workers from the day care kept ramming into him, frantic, for not all of the eighty-two preschoolers and eight adult staff had been accounted for yet. Dave sidestepped his way toward a door propped open with a red plaster Buddha and let go of the woman’s curtain and continued on, trying to spot an official. He took note of the scraps of information being passed around in the crowd, but it wasn’t much—prowlers, the missing and murdered, would the feds step in now and investigate?

It could’ve been summer ’64, Neshoba County: missing—three civil rights workers; question—when would Bobby Kennedy get the feds to move? All Dave could remember was the feeling of the crowd, the three names—Chaney, Schwerner, Goodman—and the amount the feds later paid an informant for other names: thirty thousand dollars. He looked toward the destroyed building. It could’ve been his freshman year, Orangeburg: the bullet-ridden dormitory, the police, the crowd, a Browning automatic aimed at his window.

“Excuse me.” A reporter stopped him, poking Dave’s arm with a blunt copy pencil. Dave sized up the brother; he too looked fresh from the classroom. “Many here today say that they’ve never seen the likes of this. May I get your views?”

“The sixties, man. Bethany, Mount Moriah, Bethel Baptist.” Dave tried to keep the growl out of his voice. “And the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, where the four little girls were killed.” He tapped the notepad and ordered the young man to write.

“And would you say there’s a similarity—”

“Take off your tie, brother, it’s choking your brain.” Dave patted the reporter’s shoulder and moved on. There was a sock on the ground, green and orange like peas and carrots out of a can, and so small it took him a second to realize it wasn’t a doll’s. He felt his throat tighten and hurried on, not seeing very clearly where he was going, but needing to get out of the crush.

“I heard a buzzing like a thousand wasps,” the woman in tattered clothing was saying into a camera. “Then I felt the sting of bricks and glass.” She touched herself, astonished to be alive. Her dress dropped away from the waistband.

“An awful thing, awful. Them people will have this on their conscience for the rest of their unnatural lives.”

“Who?” Dave grabbed the old man by the back of his collar and tried to ease him around. “Do you know who did this?”

“Their sins will find them out,” the man said, turning. He stroked the back of a boy clinging to him.

The boy looked up at Dave, then drew the old man’s jacket back around himself. Dave had seen teenage toughs roughed up in gang fights or worked over by the thugs on payroll who called themselves youth workers. He’d seen pyro kids who’d lit one fire too many and gotten caught in the fry. But he’d never seen that look on a little kid before. And when he examined the faces of people around him, he realized they all had that look. And now he was trapped in a circle of people listening to a dude in a camel’s hair coat and a fifties beret ace deuce. He held a brown scarf between his hands, popping it, twisting it, as he spoke.

“I’d only just gotten back to the city last night. Jet lag sacked me out, bam. Next thing I know, I’m rocking and bobbing like there’s air turbulence. I sat up and reached for the oxygen mask like they show you before I realized I was in my crib. What got me moving was the knowledge that there’s no nuclear plant in this district. So what could this be? Never, never ever,” he said, wrapping the scarf around both knuckles, “would I have imagined this.” He reached suddenly for Dave and pulled him out of the way of a green minibus leading an ambulance to the high street. “You know, they’re trying to give that brother over there some hooey about this being a corroded boiler.” He turned and the group swung around with him to face the rubble.

Mason and the fire inspector were behind the ropes arguing about whether the jacket casing of the furnace had imploded or exploded on detonation. One scrap of metal was bellied out, another caved in, a lever jammed, the rest of the jacket casing missing. Then Dave saw Zala slipping under the ropes with a tape recorder and heading for her old man, who was lockstepping the clown slicked out in silver and Lucite. It wasn’t a cop but the tie-choked reporter who loud-talked Zala, an amateur claim jumper, and made her leave. Hemmed in by reporters with bulky equipment, Dave couldn’t get to her. Reporters were shoving mikes into the faces of children and attendants dressing wounds as the gurneys and the cameras rolled. “How many dead?… How many injured?… How many in shock, would you say?” One reporter, writing as he spoke, bent over a prostrate woman—“And you’re the mother of which dead child?”

Dave picked him up and buried his fist in his stomach. Easing him down to the ground, he saw Eldrin Bell, the deputy police chief he often ran into out on the strip. Bell seemed not to have seen Dave drop the reporter, or if he had he was giving it a glass eye. Bell had just found Mrs. Nell Robinson lying over a child she’d died to protect. He was breaking the news to director Betty Smith. To the right of the ambulance, Dave heard police exchanging information: twelve bomb threats had come in between 10:10 and 10:45. He put that together with the report of prowlers on the roof, the story of ofays being eighty-sixed from the neighborhood, and the comings and goings of conventioneers Teo and Beemer had been shadowing.

“Is the school over there targeted?” Dave pulled out ID for the police and jerked his thumb in the direction of A. D. Williams Elementary. “I know people on the scene here who can assist in evacuating the school without a panic.” He gave the cops two seconds to study his card and size him up. “Come on, we ain’t got all damn day. Is it only Atlanta Housing Authority schools?” He tried to remember where Zala’s kids went.

“We’re taking care of this,” an officer said. “Now suppose you step back. We’re trying to form a second perimeter.”

“Swell.” Dave turned around and headed for Deputy Bell, never one of his favorite people to hook up with; Dave’s memory of Atlanta’s SNCC days were enough to make him wary, but Bell outranked anybody else on the scene, and hell, it was an emergency.

It wasn’t reasonable, it made no sense, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere in the middle of the phone conversation with the network man, she’d wished for something like this, like a stupid, self-dramatizing child: Just you wait and see, you’ll be sorry, then see if
I care. Zala heaped ashes on her head listening to the tape play back. “I guess they’ll yank that TV special on the Klan scheduled for tonight,” a newsman handing down a tripod had told his colleague. A motorist who’d pulled over his VW with oversized tires had looked down from the parkway and shaken his head—“Like ducks in a shooting gallery.” She backtracked to the description of the prowlers, the man interrupting himself to point out a cruiser speeding away with two motorcycle escorts—“I hope someone snapped a picture of whatever they’re in a rush to remove from the scene. And no, I don’t care to speculate about what it might be or if the public will be informed. I’m simply making an observation for the record.”

A woman with a thermos was motioning Zala to put her machine down. “Coffee?” Her pockets bulged with jars and cups. “Cream and sugar?” The woman’s gesture was a reminder that there was a world beyond this chaos. Zala accepted the cup.

Two women were dragging kitchen chairs along the pavement. The brother in sweats ran past them shouting, “Here comes Maynard,” then crouched to snap a picture of the mayor and his retinue gliding onto the scene. “Thank God,” the two young women said in unison, parking their chairs.

The woman with the thermos crimped her mouth, then turned. “Pull that chair thisaway,” she instructed. There was a pregnant woman on the ground behind her, Zala saw, down on the ground blotting the grass with a fuzzy beige sweater.