Those Bones Are Not My Child (49 page)

Without comment, Sandra had passed Zala a leaflet calling for an all-out attack on men, from the porn shops to Capitol Hill.

“We need to recruit more volunteers,” Monika said. “You look burnt out already. Take a break.”

“Talking to me?” Sandra worked nights at a crisis center handling a hotline. She divided her days between classes at Clark, STOP, and the Ronald McDonald House for ailing children and their families. “I can make it to spring break before I collapse,” she said matter-of-factly.

“You,” Monika said, pulling Zala’s chair out from under her. “Take a walk.”

So Zala had fixed herself another cup of instant and walked around the office, trying to concentrate on the Child Find brochure she couldn’t seem to put down. A movie was showing on the Sony someone had loaned for the day:
Ransom!
with Glenn Ford and Donna Reed. Ford looking steely with no top lip. Donna Reed rich, twitchy, and dogged. Ford, an industrialist, refused to pay the kidnappers. Zala went back to work.

There was a bunch of crank notes and hate mail that applauded the killers. Less explicit were letters clipped to pages torn from the
Torch
and the
Thunderbolt
, newspapers that had been whipping up a fury about unsolved homicides of whites. “What’s ten or ten thousand nigger lives compared to the loss of one white life!” the hate rags slobbered.

There were outraged letters demanding STOP to get more vocal about the media’s depiction of the child victims as passive and willing. There’d been an outcry when Aaron Jackson’s laid-out body was described as “peaceful,” the rock under his head “a pillow.” The children were called street hustlers and the killer “gentle.” “Like a kind slave master?” one writer posed.

“Is there a pile for drawings?” a new volunteer from Spelman asked.

“Drawings from psychics go to the left, drawings by children to the right,” Sandra instructed.

Many letters in Zala’s pile confused STOP with the UYAC-led search teams. They referred the searchers to Birmingham, where recently unearthed graves had disclosed the bodies of civil rights workers missing since the sixties. Assuming STOP was an adjunct of the Task Force, other writers directed attention to the situation in Trenton, New Jersey, where a pattern of missing and murdered children was being suppressed. Some assumed the Black vets group was the paramilitary arm of STOP and recommended an invasionary expedition to free captives on slave plantations in Florida and North Carolina.

“Here’s another for the Jekyll-and-Hyde pile,” Zala said, handing over a sheaf of papers. Lectures on the split personalities of the Boston Strangler and Son of Sam were mailed in by forensic psychiatrists who quoted their consultant fees. From Jonesboro, a woman named Detwyler forwarded a page from her “murder scrapbook” about the still-unsolved Wynton Stocking Strangler Case of Columbus, Georgia. “It could be related,” the woman wrote.

“The cult pile is getting too big to handle.”

“Who’s going to read through this material?” the new volunteer asked and was immediately sent to find a box. No one wanted to hear that.

In a thick manila envelope was a grisly account of a cult that had operated in St. Jo, Florida. For years the cult had been kidnapping hitchhikers and using them as sacrifices in LSD-induced rituals. They dismembered the bodies. Six hours before a scheduled raid by the sheriff, the cult’s church mysteriously burned to the ground, its congregation dispersed. The tipster urged that a white plainclothesman be sent to St. Jo to research the connection to the cult killings in Atlanta.

While the piles grew, Zala thought of Jan Douglass down at the Office of Community Relations in the City Hall Annex. Douglass was compiling a news-clipping file on random and systemic attacks on Black people. The first time Zala had visited the Annex, to accompany the vets who’d written a position paper responding to psychic Dorothy Alison’s allegations that Black men were the killers, Douglass had been using three legal pads to log her clippings: violence by the police, by white groups, by persons unknown. When next Zala went there, accompanying a delegation led by Teo and Sue Ellen to counter an all-white
group demanding to know what “responsible Negro leadership” was doing to defuse “militants,” the three legal pads had given way to large cartons for major categories like “Campus Violence” and smaller boxes for subcategories like “Drownings,” “Beatings,” and “Arson.”

“Here’s the end of the blue cow serial, Marzala.”

Zala recognized the blue stationery. For weeks, someone from Carson City had been sending newspaper and magazine articles about a case in the 1970s that had affected cattle ranchers in seventeen states from West Virginia to Utah. Cattle had disappeared from herds, then turned up dead days later with broken legs and shattered ribs. An unusual number of UFO sightings had occurred in fifteen of the seventeen states during a given period. But ranchers were convinced that the culprits were not from outer space or even from out of town. First they investigated the agricultural barons. Then they began watching the skies, not for spacecraft but for army helicopters. They went into court armed with photos of government choppers with heavy nets carrying massive brown cargo. The autopsy reports on the dead steers indicated surgical tampering and viral infection from intravenous injections. Broken bones were attributed to having been dropped from the choppers.

“Ask the government,” said the writer on blue stationery. “It’s the work of a well-organized occult group operating in collusion with government researchers.” The second page of the letter compared the condition of the steers with the description of Angel Lenair’s body—leatherlike skin, missing lower lip and left ear, so aged in appearance her mother had not recognized her.

The packet was handed around the office while Zala broke open a plain brown envelope with three dollars’ worth of canceled stamps on it. Zala shook out calendars, a how-to manual, and promotional material for a group called NAMBLA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, dedicated to “liberating” young boys from loveless situations. News clippings from Troy, Auburn, and other cities in upstate New York identified defendants in child molestation cases as NAMBLA members. The writer urged STOP to investigate before the network of doctors, teachers, lawyers, and other “respectable” types went underground. Zala tried to pass it around, but everyone was preoccupied with the cattle story.

“In this article, the marginal note says we should be monitoring
biochemical warfare centers in this region. Here’s a map. The Anniston Center in Alabama is circled.”

“Sounds out to lunch,” the new volunteer said. “The government?”

Monika and the office manager gathered up the checks, money orders, and international bank drafts and slipped them inside the ledger to be placed on the main desk.

“Have you heard Dick Gregory on the subject? He may be thin, but the man’s heavy.”

“The government? He thinks the government is involved? That’s too crazy.… Isn’t it?”

“Well, you know the Health Department with the backing of the Catholic Church sterilized over thirty percent of the women in Puerto Rico,” Zala volunteered.

“Why go all the way to Puerto Rico? Right here they’ve been sterilizing Indian women and men for generations.”

“Well, what about the sisters? In some places you still can’t get on welfare unless you sign away your womb.”

“That can’t be right,” the new volunteer resisted.

“Come on, girl, wake up. More than half the doctors where I come from won’t deliver your baby unless you agree to have your tubes tied, snipped, or cauterized. Every time the census comes out, white folks start getting nervous. So they make Mexicans honorary white folks to beef up their numbers. Then they roll up their sleeves and reach for the surgical knives.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Are
you
kidding?”

“I hope we’re not going to spend the afternoon trotting out horror stories for her edification. Let her read the mail, she’ll see.”

“Well, who’s heard Dick Gregory?—that’s my question? Zala, you still have that tape? School this child.”

“But he’s not a … a learned person. Okay, okay, I’m listening.”

“Basically, his lecture was about interferon. It’s produced in collectible amounts by people who have sickle cell. So it’s collected from African and Middle Eastern people mostly, wherever the malaria is rampant and people’s immune system produces the substance to combat it.”

“So?”

“So, it’s important to cancer research and to longevity research. I
typed up part of an interview a friend did at the Centers for Disease Control last week. The CDC workers have been studying the missing and murdered children’s medical histories for background in sickle cell.”

“Get to the good part. Sit down, sister, while Marzala tells you how much they sell this interferon—which, incidentally, is collected from the foreskin of Black males. Give her the bottom line.”

“It’s worth two billion dollars a pint.”

“Now get to that. Folks are wondering how come the reward hasn’t pulled in defectors from the killer gang. The reward is chump change compared to … hell, I don’t even know how many zeroes there are in a billion.”

“But the government?”

“Please go find me a small carton to put these bank drafts in,” Monika interrupted, and the new volunteer walked away, grateful to be out of their midst. Monika sighed. “We’ve been watching
Mission: Impossible
all our lives, but some of us still don’t get the message.”

The credits were rolling. Zala scanned the faces of those nearest the TV. She’d missed the ending of
Ransom!
Had the industrialist father relented and paid the ransom? Had the child been returned? Had Donna Reed rallied from her sickbed? There was nothing in the expressions of the STOP workers to give her a clue. Zala turned back to the pile of brochures she’d set aside for her own mailing list. The volunteers, worn out from haggling with the true-believer college girl reluctant to return to the table with the carton no one really needed, were quiet. Zala unfolded the Child Find brochure and concentrated on the story she’d found so troublesome.

Through the efforts of the parent organization, a young boy had been returned to his family after a four-year absence. But he was so changed by his experience with the salesman who’d stolen him, who locked him in an old coal bin when he went on trips, that the boy’s parents began to doubt he was their son. And who had the forethought to fingerprint their children in anticipation of monstrous events years later? Footprints on baby records, fine for avoiding mix ups in the hospital nursery, were too uncertain after ten years. The boy was a definite look-alike, gave credible enough impersonations, but one morning when his father woke him for school, the boy said, “These aren’t my clothes. Whose house is this?” The therapist quoted in the brochure
said that formation of dissociated selves was a not uncommon consequence of trauma, but most people managed to integrate their multiple personalities without undue difficulty. Sometimes, however, trauma caused a separation, a split, and barriers grew up between the parts of the self. Memory lapses turned into long bouts of amnesia. Worse, those barriers could harden and the former core self be banished to the wings, leaving a minor player to hold center stage ever after, with only a portion of the life script.

The brochure did not say what had happened when the family took the boy to visit their former house, the one he’d grown up in. Nor did it say what had possessed the family to move from that home in the first place. That was the part that kept sending Zala back to the beginning of the story looking for a footnote. Why had they left the one place the six-year-old boy knew as home? And why hadn’t someone proofing the brochure not thought to place a note of explanation somewhere? It was supposed to be a success story.

The more she read, the more disturbed she’d felt. She’d begged off sorting mail and taken the bus to the Omni to shop for Christmas gifts.

Stumbling off the escalator, banged in the back with boxes, asphyxiated by perfumes, and suffocated by fur coats, Zala had veered to the right, away from the stream of shoppers. She’d stood in front of the Rizzoli international bookstore a long time trying to catch her breath. In the window was an old, brown-shellacked circus poster. Busy, a cast of thousands, animal acts, a full palette of colors, the poster would have caught the children’s attention. She could hear Kenti and Kofi pleading with her to take the escalator down to the ticket booth for the circus that came to town every February. Alone, she stared at the center circle, where a family of gymnasts in blue and white tights formed a preposterous pyramid.

Zala had stood at the window studying the poses, the lines and curves of the bodies, the strain of the muscles, the pattern of weight and counterweight. How could any move on anybody’s part result in anything but broken bones, torn ligaments, and all seven facedown in the sawdust? Who would do what to make a springboard turn the family into an aerial act? But there was the parasol. And there was the wire. And there were the seven faces shining with belief in their ability, in their future.

Zala turned and elbowed her way through the shoppers to the railing,
leaned way over, sucking in the blue-mint chill of the ice rink below, where her three children should have been skating.

Zala sniffed back the tears with such force, her scarf was sucked into her nostrils. She mashed her bundle against the panel and eyed the emergency button. She might not get what she came for from Austin. She was already dreading the trip back home through the darkening streets, past the garrisoned homes to the empty house.

On the twelfth floor, the elevator doors opened onto a meadow of lavender moss. Mushroom-colored modulars arranged in an L were propped against potted plants six feet tall. Beyond was a wall of glass sun-splashed by the skylight. Behind the glass, blond desks floated on a creamy carpet with magenta zigzags. Zala got a good grip on her package and on herself and followed the sounds of a typewriter toward what she hoped was the entrance to Attorney Austin’s office.