Those Bones Are Not My Child (5 page)

A whir and a whine made her turn toward the archway that opened onto the kitchen. But even as she looked at the fridge, she was thinking the sound might be herself, an overwound spring. She felt like brittle
clockworks trembling near the shattering pitch. It was a car coming. The seams of her skirt pockets strained with the thrust of her fists.

A car had turned into the street from Ashby. She backed up over the rug, grazing her hip on the table. The TV shimmied against the button box, the sour yellow of the sewing-machine bulb blinked. She planted herself in the middle of the room, her legs straddling the bald spot in the carpet. “Pushover,” she’d heard him tell his scatter-tooth friends. Let him try. He was not going to get by her this time.

It was a car and not the van from the Metropolitan Boys’ Club. Its headlights strobed the panes in the door. The lights hit the hedges, the jade, the window-glass spaces in the macramé drapes before they shut off. When last she’d been out, marching up and down Thurmond Street, the jade had been shaggy inkiness behind blocky hedges of black. Now she could see three different shades of green in the yard, a network of browns, and a halo of mauve outlining the bush.

It was morning. “Morning”: The sound of it fueled her fire. Twelve years old and out all night long. She pitched forward, her toes sliding out of the sandals and clutching at shag. She mouthed all the things she would say to him, all the things she’d been lashing together to flay him with since the day before when Kofi had shrugged and said “Went.” Sonny had actually gone to the Boys’ Club cookout when she’d told him flat out no, he couldn’t go. He was asking for it, and he would get it this time.

The car pulled alongside her Bug out front, then swung wide. It cruised up the driveway across the street. She could hear Mean Dog yank on his chain. She shoved the drapes aside and dust sprinkled down on her arm. She added that to the boy’s crime sheet; he hadn’t vacuumed. The car went all the way up to the carport. No doubt Sonny was directing the driver far away to avoid a scene.

It was not the camp counselor that got out, but Chaz Robinson. She couldn’t figure out how Sonny had hitched a ride home with their neighbor. Robinson closed the door softly and waved the thick Sunday papers at Mean Dog. He got a frisky welcome, the dog nipping his own backside, nearly twisting in half. Robinson held his finger up to his lips and the dog wagged his head, backed into the butterfly bush, then sprang forward, forepaws scratching at air. The yelping was muffled low in the throat. She could hear Robinson’s husky chuckle as he opened the
side door and went in. Ears forward, Mean Dog waited, then dropped flat on the lawn. His tail beat the ground and petals spattered the walk.

No one else was getting out of that car, she could see that. Mean Dog nosed his dish toward the walk as far as his chain would allow. The back of her throat thickened, but she waited. The dog dropped his head on his forepaws and slept. Maybe Sonny had been dropped off at the corner and was coming around the back way. She moved too quickly, barking her shins on the sewing chair. The choir robe fell to the floor in segments.

“You stompin’ again and waking us up, Mama.”

Zala swung her head in the direction of the backroom. Her hemplike braids swatted her cheeks.

“Never mind what I’m doing, you two. Go back to sleep.”

She heard the wheeze of the cot, Kenti turning over. Kofi muttered; then his bedsprings squeaked. She went into the kitchen, skirting the drawer of the cupboard. She’d left it just as Sonny had left it, pulled all the way out on its runners. The food stamps were gone and a good fork was missing.

She leaned over the ironing board. The clothes she had sprinkled and balled up for church were now bone dry. The backyard was deserted. But once before, when she’d grounded him for running off with his singing friends who swore they were the Commodores, he’d pitched a tent under the dogwood near the other half of the duplex. She hurried into the bathroom. That was the window he’d used that time to lure Kofi and Kenti out to join him under her one good bedspread for a feast of raw hot dogs.

The nails were secure in the bathroom window. And nothing was moving in the yard. It made no sense. The counselor should have brought him home in time for dinner, then taken the others onto the campsite. How could they take Sonny without her permission? She’d always made a point of phoning the Boys’ Club director to make sure the signed slip was on hand. Sonny lost things, like keys, like report cards. She always called too, to get the exact location of the outing and to find out the exact time of return. She made it a point to be among the early arrivals, leaving work early sometimes in order to do it. No one was going to say she was a single parent who couldn’t cut it.

Wandering out of the bathroom, she added forgery to Sonny’s
crimes. And though she knew he was too proud to use the back way, she’d take a look from the children’s room just in case.

“Ain’t you sleepy?”

Kenti spoke the moment she entered the room. On each eyelid, Zala saw now, were daubs of blue eyeshadow. Kenti’s lips were red on top of Popsicle orange. Zala hadn’t noticed that before. Tiptoeing in the dark and cupping the girl’s chin to close her mouth, she’d been aware only of the perfume, the reek of it sickening, the fact that it had been a present from Dave, annoying. She had almost shaken her daughter awake to fuss. But she hadn’t, didn’t trust herself, hot with rage couldn’t risk it.

“Sonny’s gonna git it, hunh?” Kenti leaned up on her elbow.

Zala turned away from the scrape of skin against canvas, the girl’s bottom sheet half on the floor. She went to the window with only a glance toward the top bunk. The cash-register bank was nested in a pile of dirty socks in Sonny’s bed. The fork, bent from jimmying the bank’s payoff lid, was missing a tine.

The yard on the Griers’ side of the house was as quiet as her side.

“Is it the next day?”

“I’ll get you up in time, don’t worry.”

Her seven-year-old fussed with her sheets, and Zala made a mental note to get cocoa butter for the girl’s elbows … until she could see her way clear to get her a proper bed … to get them all better housing. Kofi grumbled and rolled away from the wall. He looked at her upside down, and she almost reached out to shake him by his hair. But he didn’t like that, and this was no time to talk about haircuts.

She lost herself for a moment. One minute she was looking at the gray rings the fishbowl had left on their study desk, the next she was sinking into the blistered paint on the windowsill. She was falling asleep on her feet again. She tried stretching her arms up, but she couldn’t sustain it long enough to work the crick out of her neck. Her arms flopped and she folded them on top of her head and tried to work out the knots in her back.

“It don’t go like that, Mama. You suppose to stretch up on tippy-toe. That’s how we do in the morning before the Pledge Allegiance. And Miss Chambers say, ‘Reach me down a piece of sky, children.’ She so silly.”

“You better tell her something, Ma.” Kofi’s gruff-grumpy voice came up from under the covers.

“Beg pardon?”

Kofi kicked the covers off and drew his knees up. He walked the soles of his feet across the bottom of the mattress that sagged from above. “Ma.” The fork clinked against the bank. “You call Dad?”

“Yes. I called your father.”

“Dag, I was just asking.” He dropped his legs down hard and the bunk ladder creaked. “Can’t say nothing around here.”

“I’ve been calling him all night,” Zala said. “He’s probably on the road.…” Her voice thinned, for try as she might she couldn’t remember whether Spence was still driving for Mercer, showing houses for his sister and her husband, or peddling insurance again. “I spoke to Bestor Brooks, though, and he was supposed to meet Sonny and Cousin Bobby at the Boys’ Club.” She drifted over to the bunks.

“I know, you told us. Two times you told us. ‘Bestor’s under punishment,’ ” Kofi mimicked, making a face, “so he couldn’t go.”

“Sonny was under punishment, wasn’t he, Mama? And he went, hunh?”

“Yeah, but he all the time do like he want.” Kofi punched his pillow and flounced down in the hollow. And when Zala leaned in to draw the covers up over his shoulders, he shrugged her hand off. “He always do what he wants. And you let him. You don’t never say nothing to him. You jump on me all the time, though.”

Zala sighed and moved toward the door, but Kenti grabbed a fistful of her skirt and tugged her back.

“Don’t forget,” Kenti said, while Kofi mumbled a list of complaints that threatened to drown her out. “Pancakes and bacon ’cause it’s Sunday.”

“Keep creeping in here waking us up, asking me the same things all over again, like I know. He don’t tell me nothing. He just go on and do like he wanna onnaconna you ain’t gonna do nuttin’ about it.”

“Enough, Kofi.” She could hear that he was reaching for dems, dats, and doses just to annoy her. “Enough.”

“Enuf. You doan tell Sonny enuf when he say sump’n. Just get on my case alla time.”

“Enough. I mean it now.”

Kofi rolled to the wall and socked it. Kenti yanked on Zala’s skirt and whispered the Sunday menu again.

“He could be in trouble, ya know.” Kofi bolted upright in the bed,
talking loud. “Maybe the cops got’m. Betcha they beating him up. And you just walking around and everything while he in trouble.”

“So what should I do, Kofi?”

“ ‘What should I do, Kofi?’ ”

“You taking Mama to the bridge,” Kenti warned, releasing Zala’s skirt.

“Well, Sonny is in trouble all right. He’s in deep trouble. With me.” She thumped her chest, but the feebleness of the gesture made her flush, and she couldn’t meet her almost nine-year-old’s eyes. He saw that, and now she had to go because he was calling up the same pictures that had driven her up and down Thurmond last night, too keyed up to stay home, too embarrassed to knock on doors, her gas tank empty from shuffling back and forth to the Boys’ Club, no one in sight, not even directions to the campgrounds posted on the door.

“Would you quit it!” Kenti was tumbling things out of the bookcase, looking for something to throw at her brother.

“He could be already dead, ya know, out in the woods. Could be a bear got’m, or a moose. Or the Klu Klux Klan!” Kofi shouted, falling forward on his knees to make sure she heard it before she closed the door.

Sonny hit by a truck. Sonny hitching a ride with a lunatic. Sonny ducking in an abandoned building to pee, crazy junkies jumping him. Sonny missing the van and striking out on his own, a branch felling him in the woods. The woods booby-trapped, people said, by ’Nam vets who lived wild on patrol. Zala felt the stitching in her pockets give. She was grinding her teeth. He played her. He depended on her fear being stronger than anger. So he could come home when he got good and ready, saunter in, the crooked grin, that chipped tooth in front a prize he would flash. And she, relieved, would let him outtalk her. But she was not going for it, not anymore.

“Well, this is a new day, so don’t even try.” She shredded the words through clenched teeth. She filled the Coke bottle with tap water and shoved in the sprinkler attachment. She hated ironing and so she ironed, determined to hang on to her rage.

“Come home now,” she muttered. But each time the iron thudded against Kofi’s shirt, she heard her younger son’s taunts and couldn’t fend off the horrors. Sonny stumbling down a ravine. Sonny trapped in an abandoned house. Sonny pole-axed by a maniac.

Zala flung open the doors of the cupboard and didn’t bother getting a glass. She swigged a mouthful of Southern Comfort and the woods began to fade. The body facedown in the gully blurred. Blood seeping between the stones dissolved.

Now that she was on the toilet, she didn’t have to go. The fishbowl was in the tub. She didn’t feel like changing the water. It was too early yet and Roger the fish was still sleeping.

Kenti made herself get up. When she sat a long time, she’d start sticking to the seat and it would hurt to get up. She could hear the telephone wire slapping against the side of the house. Some pigeons were making noise up in the roofing somewhere. Everything else was quiet. No bacon sizzling. No choirs singing on the radio. Mama was on the couch, half in and half out of her nappy bathrobe. She had her legs over the arm of the couch so Sonny couldn’t get in the door without waking her up. He was going to get it, ’cause she wasn’t fooling this time. On top of the arts and crafts box was that long whip of leather.

Kenti leaned against the arch post, one foot on top of the other. She could feel grit when she wiggled her toes. Sonny wouldn’t mop the floor or nothing. Even when she stuffed the pillowcase and dragged it to the hall, he wouldn’t get the cart and take it to the laundry. Said, “Ain’t my work, it’s her work, wasn’t me that kept having babies.” Like he wasn’t one of the babies she had. And like she didn’t work a lot at the barbershop and the art center too. Sonny’s work sheet was under the kitchen table. It wasn’t crumpled up, so maybe he hadn’t thrown it there. Probably it had slipped from under the banana magnet on the refrigerator door and blew there. Nothing he was supposed to do was checked off.

Kenti sniffed to see if maybe the refrigerator was open. Sometimes the wooden spoon stuck in the bowl of batter wouldn’t let the door close. But all she smelled was gas, ’cause there probably was no bowl of pancake batter to begin with. She was sure the smell was gas, because the stove was broke. Sonny was supposed to go get the landlord about it. But she didn’t think he did, ’cause she sure smelled something. And it wasn’t just the bottle pushed down in the trash. Mama call herself hiding it under a bread wrapper. If Daddy came by he would get on her about that. But Daddy wasn’t coming by so much no more.

Kofi’s shirt was hanging on the ironing board, but her dress was
balled up on the table. One of the table legs was sticking out funny. That was where Sonny and Uncle Dave had a fight. Uncle Dave was all the time saying something. So Sonny would say something right back at him. And it wasn’t any use telling Sonny he better watch it ’cause Uncle Dave was big and a man and used to working with them rough boys down at the juvenile, ’cause that to Sonny wasn’t nothing but a dare. So next thing you know they were shouting the house down.