Those Bones Are Not My Child (48 page)

“That’s right.” A woman on the long seat behind the driver added to the conversation going on toward the front of the bus. “It’s another way of blaming the mothers and mothers in general.”

Her companion began explaining to the passengers that “motherhood” and “woman’s place” were being bandied about at work. “Getting ready to cut back women workers’ hours. That’s the point of it all.”

The people behind Zala were talking about the effect of the curfew on family budgets. Teenagers were discouraged from seeking after-school jobs, and employers were reluctant to hire them because of the ban.

“I’m telling you,” the woman on the long seat spoke up, “if the community doesn’t rally behind women workers, we’re going to lose the whole city to foreigners.”

Several people toward the front chided the two women in deference to the driver, a Filipina. The two women on the long seat paid no attention.

“It’s a fact that the situation is serious,” the one in the brown coat continued. Vietnamese were taking over the wig shops and small clothing stores in the West End. Didn’t people realize that Cubans, Koreans, and anybody who was not a hometown colored person was grabbing up all the small-business loans and setting up along Peachtree where not even Black people had stores?

“Not Black Cubans,” someone inserted. “They’re up in Atlanta Federal Pen.”

“Don’t get us wrong,” the other woman worker said. “We don’t have hard feelings against foreigners. It’s the government. They open the doors and open their hands to them refugees.”

“While they backhand us,” her co-worker added.

“Please turn that up,” one of the passengers across from the driver requested.

The driver leaned over and turned her radio up. It hung from a loop on the fare box. When the bus reached the corner, she swung the lever to open the front door, then turned in her seat. She planted one foot down hard near the base of the coin box and looked at the two women behind her on the long seat. The two women nodded briefly, then looked away.

Two young men dressed for the labor pool escorted an old gent down the aisle and turned him over to the driver, who stood up to take his hand and ease him down the steps.

“They’ll be lifting the bans soon,” the old man said, poking the radio with his cane as he got off.

“What’d he say?”

“Says the roadblocks and the curfew will end soon,” one of the labor-pool brothers reported, going back to his seat.

“All this talk about it’s under control. Just like the recession. But you see how they keep talking patriotic talk about buying American goods to get the economy up.”

“Yeah, they keep talking about competition,” the other laborer said, “with foreign businesses. Now, I ask you, who’s kidding who? Them so-called foreign companies ain’t nobody but Americans who ran out on us to avoid taxes and decent salaries. Competition my ass. We’re supposed to compete with each other,” he told those sitting in aisle seats. “Me and you. But not them. They cooperate with each other to hold us all down. Then when some shit get in the game, it’s time to go to war. Who’s kidding who here?” He took a seat in the back of the bus with his buddy and slapped the pole with his work gloves, disgusted.

“That’s what I was saying,” the woman on the long seat called out. But people shushed her as the bus took off. They wanted to hear the news on the radio.

Quiet was the word. There’d been no abductions since Aaron Jackson disappeared over a month ago and was found on the south bank of the river. Everything was quiet, according to the authorities.

Zala sucked her teeth. Quiet, if they didn’t count the others. Patrick Rogers, considered the linchpin in the case by one of the VIs because he knew so many of the victims both on the list and not on the list, had disappeared nine days after Jackson. Found in the river, Pat Man was still not on the list. Nor was the Armstrong girl. A neighbor of LaTonya Wilson’s and found strangled the week after Jackson’s body was found, the same week Pat Man vanished, the same week
The Call
added three women, two men, and three children to the community-kept list, the Armstrong girl had been all but ignored by the press and was unknown to the Task Force.

“Looks like they’ve got this thing just about solved,” someone
seated near the rear door commented. Several people leaned into the aisle to hear what someone up front said in response. A fusillade of coins hit the box as boarding passengers dropped in their change. People sat up and drew in their feet, continuing to talk as the bus took off.

Where the bus turned to leave the ’hood for the straight shot downtown, girls were jumping rope with a fury. The two turners were lashing the sidewalk. The jumper was burning up the soles of her shoes. Waiting her turn, another girl was getting her hair cornrowed by a friend whose hands worked quickly. Then the girl tore loose and was rocked back and forth by one of the turners, her mouth grimly set, her hands balled into fists, her chin beating out the rhythm of the rope. She jumped in and so did the braider. They jumped with an attitude, refusing to duck, forcing the turners to step in to accommodate them. They were practicing their art, defying the cold and the fear. They eyed passengers as the bus sped by. The braider waved when the man seated next to Zala leaned over to give them the power salute. The other girls smiled. To be seen by members of the community, no matter how faultfinding some of them were, was encouraging, their smiles said.

“I guess I’d do the same thing if I were a child,” a woman across the aisle conceded. “In any case, it’ll soon be over.”

“You believe that, you believe anything,” one of the new passengers snorted, grabbing a strap. It was a mucousy snort, and he hawked and hacked for a minute. Those who sat below him frowned and leaned away.

The floodgates were open, seven or eight conversations going at once. Would someone be arrested? Was it the Klan after all? What was the mayor going to do about all the bounty hunters pouring into the city? Maynard Jackson was likened to the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike.

“Everything quiet and under control is something to put in your Christmas stocking,” the snorter said, his voice struggling through layers of phlegm.

“Quiet” was a can of green beans put in the holiday baskets for the poor, called “needy” two times a year, called bums, welfare chiselers, or nothing at all the rest of the time.

“Peace on earth and good will to men,” the man said. “In other words, go downtown and shop in peace and put yourself in hock. Maybe
you’ll climb out in time for Easter shopping to throw you right back on in.” He strode toward the rear.

People busied themselves with breath mints or loose threads in coat buttons. Others held their lapel bells quiet and tried to think of ways to resume conversations with those around them. But the snorter in the peely bomber jacket had managed to kill the mood on the bus.

Zala rang the buzzer and got off. She thought of her own children. Away from the fear and the bulletins, they would be practicing no arts with dedicated fury—no singing, no dancing, no jumping rope. Primly seated between Nana Cora on the couch, they’d be turning the pages of the family album, looking at the commemorated moments that fulfilled the Spencers’ expectations of the good life. Perhaps that was a defiant art, Zala thought. Spence, a baseball cap slung over one ear, washing a dog in the carport. Delia under the trees holding hymnal and gloves, her feet close together, her knees greased. Zala couldn’t recall having ever seen baby pictures of Spence and had commented on it more than once. “We weren’t studyin’ cameras in them days,” Cora would say, quickly changing her statement into good English, which made it no less a lie, for there were lots of snapshots from those years, but none of Spence. But then Cora was a notorious liar anyway. “Gone visiting.” “At the movies.” “Down to see his uncle Rayfield.” The only way Zala had been able to reach the children was to call late at night, when they habitually got up to use the bathroom. All Kofi had to say was to hold his place in the Christmas pageant. Kenti asked after Buster the cat, Roger the fish, and Aunty Paulette, still away in Miami.

Zala pushed through the revolving doors and scribbled something in the sign-in book that the guard didn’t challenge. She went to the bank of elevators and scanned the directory.

The one time she’d tricked Spence into coming to the phone by disguising her voice, he’d held her off with a bunch of statistics. Last year more adolescents died from booze, dope, and suicide than from disease or accidents. More children under five were murdered by their parents than died from natural causes. One out of four females was raped before twenty-one. Over a million children were sexually abused per annum. Over five hundred thousand children were reported missing per annum. What did that have to do with bringing the children home? In autumn he’d told her that she was a jerk for letting B. J. convince her
that it was a porn ring and not the Klan. But what were his statistics about? It was all so stupid. How could anyone carry on a conversation with a person who said “per annum”? He hadn’t even given her the satisfaction of hanging up on him.

“I’ll fix his ass.” She punched the button for the twelfth floor on the elevator panel, and four people stepped to the rear of the car to give her plenty of grumbling room.

She leaned the bundle against the elevator wall. She fingered an index card with the day’s errand in her left coat pocket. In her right was a wad of address labels to remind her to pick up typing supplies. Crumpled there too was the Child Find brochure she’d found so disturbing. A minute ago she’d felt ready. Now she couldn’t free herself of the memories of that day. It had been depressing from start to finish.

In the morning she’d gone to see about Dave. They’d thrown him in the holding tank after he squared off on an officer of the court who kept saying, “I gave him a direct order, a direct order.” Then she’d doubled back to the house: no sign of Spence and the children. The barbershop was crowded, but she’d left her kits at a Mary Kay demonstration. So she’d gone to the STOP office to help out with the mail. The smell of burning leaves behind her, she’d gone up the stairs through a wave of floral perfume left, no doubt, by one of the many self-appointed spokesladies who were forever volunteering their services for the poor unfortunate mothers who could not possibly be regarded as spokespersons of even their own tragedy. Tragedies, after all, happened in castles, not in low-income homes. Good speechifying was done by the gentry, not by common folks. Folks could hang around the palace courtyard commenting on the king’s business, or they could narrate the adventures of the captain obsessed with the whale. But dramas of common folks were not good literature. So reporters came to ask loaded questions designed to get poor Black women in trouble to crack on uppity Black men in office. And the gentry came to suggest what to say and how to say it, most surprised when they were shown the door.

Near the top of the landing, Zala had been hit with a mixture of coffee, overflowing ashtrays, and the musk of hucksters bringing in logo designs for T-shirts and bumper stickers, outlining how to bankroll a regional investigation for only one thousand down. In the doorway air deodorant took over. But there was another odor too. It emanated from people come to tell the office workers what couldn’t be safely told to the
police. The office itself smelled of secrets, fear, exhaustion. The phones were ringing off the hooks with callers wanting lists, maps, charts, chronologies, and the personal bios of STOP’s members. And the volunteers were patiently explaining that the office was not equipped with computers or a full-time staff.

Zala hated going to STOP, but hated not going. She didn’t want to be disconnected from people who felt as she felt. But she also didn’t want her presence mistaken for greed now that contributions were coming in. She never knew where to sit, with the mothers or with the volunteers. When people invited the volunteers to lunch and included her, she always felt like a moocher. She would nurse a Hojo cola while the others ate fried clam platters. The family men had allowed the media’s emphasis on the mothers to rob them of their identity just as she had allowed the Task Force list to steal hers. Neither the men nor the families of children not on the list were official.

At the office, she would fix herself a cup of horrible instant coffee, dawdling; then, when no one called her, she would find a quiet corner and break open a pack of mail. The piles had already been started by those who’d driven from as far away as Tuscaloosa, Talladoga, and Tuskeegee to lend a hand. Real workers, they had clear-cut motives and moved about purposefully. Zala felt like a fake. Fear of her lonesome house drove her to STOP. Since Thanksgiving, she’d been on her own for the first time in her life. And it was spooky.

On the top of the pile that day had been still another copy of Kübler-Ross’s
On Death and Dying
. From local hospice centers came offers to conduct workshops for the survivors. Church groups, sororities and fraternities, families, prisoners, schoolchildren and senior citizens sent condolences and contributions. A Golden Age group wrote about the methods used to “calm” elders concerned about the awful situation in Atlanta: In nursing homes, medication was increased; in centers, lunch portions were enlarged and the thermostats turned up. They urged the STOP committee to speak out on behalf of prisoners, who were no doubt being “calmed” more brutally.

“This pile is for letters that want an answer,” Monika had told Zala that day. It was a hopeless task to even sort them, much less respond. Often people sent tips and clues requesting feedback. But their letters sounded like overtures from lonely people reaching out with the one thing they were sure would not be rebuffed.

Karen was handling the mail from angry parents everywhere who wanted STOP to help improve child-protection laws. These parents had lost children to drunk drivers, malpractice, experimenting pharmaceutical companies, to child molesters who’d plea-bargained for lesser charges and early parole, to patients released from the back wards because of overcrowded conditions in state asylums, to companies who dumped chemical and nuclear waste near schools, to ambitious developers and corrupt politicians who went ahead and built houses on contaminated sites.