Those Bones Are Not My Child (50 page)

“Glass,” she said, easing around the sofa. “Glass, glass,” in case she hadn’t given up on the dream of finding a permeable membrane to pass through to the other Atlanta where newspapers spoke of earthquakes in Italy, uprisings in Poland, the murder of a diet doctor in Scarsdale; the only hometown count the final score in the last Hawks game. But there was no place to dream anymore. No matter how far she fanned out from the killing ground with her manicure kit and her makeup and hairdo case trying to fill in the gap left by CETA and the Board of Ed’s nonrenewal of her contract, it was the same. People whispering “phantom” and “random” like little children running to the edge of the subway platform to scare themselves. Fathers nailing up hasty basketball hoops and grounding grumbling teenagers. Mothers racing door-to-door with a coffee can to take up collections. Babysitters arriving with an escort of friends and relatives. Paper boys slipping pay-due envelopes into the folds and slinging the bundles from the safety of the sidewalk. Bored and sullen children reciting the dos and don’ts for travel to and from school. Yard boys dismissed early, leaves still blowing across the walk. Red pepper and pigeon-feather charms in doorways, asafetida bags around necks, garlands of garlic set in tubs of oil on front steps. All over, the same talk. Street crime was down, liquor sales were up, ditto for locks, flashlights, and baseball bats. No place to dream and no way to live a rational life.

Do you know you’re stolen? Is your father talking bad about me? Don’t let him turn you two against me
.

She was in an irrational state, her husband on the phone had told her, citing his statistics, refusing to put the children back on the phone. Afterward, on the radio a sleuth played with the dates of the victims in order to prove a periodicity pattern that pointed to a murderess with an irregular menses. On another station, a policeman was being interviewed: No, ransom was definitely not the motive in the M&M case, the kids were poor, keep in mind, so poor they’d do anything for a buck. Robbery? Why, no—poor, I’m telling you; we found nothing on them. That was rational thinking? And then: There’s no substance to the rumor of bickering between the various bureaus, and we’ve good communication. Yet Cynthia Armstrong had been in a city shelter while her mother had been badgering MPYD, was in the city jail while the APD assured her they were searching high and low. And then the girl was murdered. But there was no dead cat on the line, as Mama Lovey would have put it. Zala had flipped the dial until she found the Wailers. Babylon, Babylon. But her per-annum husband had hung up on her.

If she had indeed been insane, insane enough to cling to the dream, the looks she got upon entering the attorney’s office would have cured her. Fingers froze over the keyboard, one hand battened down on the phone. She was scrutinized, her scruffy package eyed. The typist stared, but the receptionist smiled, dimpling, and offered a patient, sisterly look. Zala relaxed and took in the office.

Newspapers were spread out on desks, the photos of the children peppery. Telltale slips of paper were tucked under the phones—junior at school, junior at neighbor’s, hubby at work. On the corkboard were the
SAFE
flyers and the Task Force posters, six emergency numbers in the lower-right-hand corner. On a dropleaf table between two bookcases, a foil-covered cake tin for office donations. On a glass-top coffee table in front of the sofa, photos of Austin and his wife in hiking boots, quilted down jackets, and ski pants, shaking hands with the Reverend Arthur Langford, the city councilman who’d organized the civilian search teams. Sticking out of copies of
Southern Living, Ebony
, and
Variety
were slips from a notepad, someone free-associating with the reward in mind.

“May I help you?” The receptionist’s voice was soothing and her smile earnest. Zala rested her package and handed over the old business
card she’d found among mildewed supplies when Paulette came by to borrow the last of the suitcases for her trip to Miami.

“I’d like to see Mr. Austin,” she said, flipping the business card over for the receptionist to see where Austin had written. More than two years ago he had approached Zala about doing tapestries for his office, but then she’d started work at the art center and had let it slide. Meeting his wife at a Mary Kay party had reminded her of this resource. She waited while the receptionist read in Austin’s hand that Zala should drop by. “I think he’ll see me,” she said. “Marzala Spencer.”

The typist looked up. “Marzala Spencer? Didn’t I just read about you in
The Call?
” The receptionist stuck her pencil in her topknot, but the typist ignored the signal. “Well, what do you think?”

“Think?” Zala hoped that whatever the typist was searching for under her desk would give her a clue.

PEOPLE’S POWER
was emblazoned across the front of
The Call
. The typist was looking for something particular in the center sheet to speak about. “A People United Will Prevail Over Terror.” Lynchings, rapes, bombings, nations brandishing nuclear weapons. Don’t give up your power in exchange for the false security of deadbolt locks. What little Zala had had to say was lost in the avalanche of fight-back proposals and slogans. Think? She was thinking of the children, popping, breaking, turning, jumping, refusing to let the power of terror drive them under.

“You wouldn’t remember me,” the typist said, ignoring the receptionist, who turned in her chair and dug once again into her topknot. “I was at the Greater Fairhill meeting that night. I took your picture.”

“Picture. Fairhill,” Zala echoed.

So many that night at Fairhill had reached back for childhood memories of their country schools. Modest efforts at education, barely open more than two seasons out of four. No floors, most of them, without roofs some of them, a few backless benches, waxed-paper windows, one lap chalkboard per ten students. But still it was too much, an affront, for they’d actually painted the walls when many poor whites in the county had houses without paint. So the county spent less, eight dollars per white child, seventy-six cents per Black, the salary differential more criminal than that. And still an affront to whites, felling trees to block the road, turning the children back, waylaying the teacher, threatening the minister, eventually storming in to send the few assembled to the fields. And still it was too much, for in the canebrakes the children
taught each other counting; in the snatch rows they practiced spelling; the crops laid by, they pulled those lapboards out of root cellars and set up again. So the school buildings, such as they were, were targeted. Kerosene was sloshed against the clapboards even as students inside were bearing down with stubs of chalk. Torched, bombed, and the grounds salted over so not even a weed could rise again. “But this is a new day,” some of the country elders had said at the Fairhill meeting, surely meaning that the old taboo against retaliation no longer applied.

“I had those photos in here for the longest time,” the typist was saying as she searched through the drawers of her desk. “I must have put them in the album already.” Then, pressing three fingers against her collarbone, she whispered, “I was so glad you said what you said.” She had trouble swallowing. “It’s so awful. And I’m so sorry.” She patted her throat to get the words out.

Zala nodded and waited for the young woman to lean over the keyboard again.

“Please have a seat. Attorney Austin’s on the phone.”

“Of course,” Zala said.

She gazed around the walls of the office. Among Austin’s certificates, degrees, and plaques were numerous well-wishing glossies, from Keisha Brown, the Commodores, Jean Cairn, Curtis Mayfield, and Peabo Bryson. Zala took comfort in the familiar faces of several musicians, Ojeda Penn at the piano, Kofi’s friend Kwame’s daddy; Joe Jennings the percussionist, one of the drummers at the Neighborhood Art Festival booths in Piedmont Park, and his group the Life Force. And below a photo of Austin and his wife at a celebration was the son of the Gulf station owner on Taliaferro, Al Cooper, and his partner in comedy, the actor Bill Nunn.

All over Atlanta, men were on the phone. In blazers, in shirtsleeves, in sock feet jogging on electronic treadmills, upside down in strapped boots hanging from orthopedic contraptions to improve circulation and forestall baldness, men were on the phone, curly cord, cordless, red, round, cylindrical, or see-through, making the long-distance run on an exercise bike while making the long-distance deal on the phone. Men on the phone sparring with a tetherball or dropping a golf ball into a teacup, or seated at the console, activating the Dictaphone by slight pressure on the foot pedal, so that the administrative assistant will have the confirmation letter typed and ready for signature before the receiver
is placed in the well of the panel that boasts a memory disc of one hundred numbers, gives the temperature and barometric reading for the day, the time in Honolulu, and plays the
Bridge on the River Kwai
theme song on Pause.

Loan officers, art directors, detectives, school superintendents, doctors, the limo fleet owner pulling out the bottom drawer for a footrest while they talked on the phone, rapped on the fish tank with school rings, leaned over and set silver balls swaying one, then two
click
, three
click
, four, head bobbing in time as they filed her resumé, turned down her loan application, warned her about sleeping pills, or told her to come back tomorrow when they’d once again be on the phone, wondering why she’s brought in her son’s medical papers again, or her marriage certificate, or her bills, and wait if you wish but I can’t release your husband’s salary to you.

Then through for the day, the phone too greasy to handle—
I’ll see what we can do about your gas bill, about your children’s truancy, about your insomnia, about your son’s disappearance
—then out to the assistant—
did you call the garage about my car, did you pick up my suit while at lunch, did you confirm my first-class nonsmoking aisle seat
—and, unable to resist, pick up that phone for one last call of the working day before a drink at the bar and a quick call from that phone before going home to the pine-paneled den to fix a drink at that bar and make a call from that phone while some other woman waits till the state-of-the-art equipment is demonstrated, touted, and explained—call waiting, the new videotelex, “Lara’s Theme” while someone is put on hold, as men talk on the phone, each boasting that his equipment is bigger than his.

“He’ll see you now, Mrs. Spencer,” the receptionist said, holding the door open for Zala.

“Thank you.”

Zala passed under the woman’s arm into the short corridor. Lester C. Austin rolled forward in his wheelchair, clasped her free hand in both of his and ushered her into a comfy office of rust suede and semigloss coral.

“Diligent” was the word she came up with, appraising him. Pen and pad in his lap, he was rubbing his hands together. The gesture if done by anyone else would have seemed oily and full of shit. Zala relaxed and listened carefully as Austin went over his rates, smiling at the tapestry she’d brought along. No problem there, art for counsel, fine.
She got up without the least self-consciousness when he indicated the silver tray of stemware on the sideboard. She poured two generous drinks from the decanter while Austin discussed his views on her mass mailing campaign.

“I wonder if you’ve considered what you’re letting yourself in for, Marzala.” He glanced briefly at his desk, then pressed a button. “Loretta, please hold my calls.”

He rolled his chair closer to Zala and pulled up from one side a writing shelf that fit across the wheelchair’s padded arms. “Maybe Anne told you the story. My aunt and uncle also thought it was a good idea to mail pictures of my niece all over the country. They hired private detectives, engaged lawyers, and dunned the FBI and the local authorities for years. In those days, there weren’t as many child-find agencies as there are now, but they managed to connect with numerous groups. You have no idea how many tips a mass mailing will elicit. How many people, crackpots included, will swarm into your life with reports of having seen the missing child.

“Eight years after my niece eloped, a retired social worker located her in Englewood, New Jersey. She’d been working under the same social security number she’d used in high school. She’d used her Georgia learner’s permit to file for a New Jersey driver’s license. She used her birth certificate to get a passport for the honeymoon. Even on her renewed passport, she used her given name and maiden name in addition to her husband’s name. In all those years, she’d done nothing spectacular to change her appearance either, nothing one couldn’t have anticipated given the change in styles since the time she left high school as a sophomore and the time she was located again, a married, working mother with an M.A.—in her surname, I might add.

“What I am saying, Marzala, is this. Finding a missing child is a priority for no one but the child’s parents. You could spend the rest of your life on one wild goose chase after another.”

My Life As a Goose. Zala wondered how that essay would sound. Not long ago, Leah had called her a silly goose when she’d accused Leah of hiding two of the B. J. tapes. And not long ago, Paulette had called her a crazy loon for not accepting her invitation to visit Miami. It had a lonesome sound, “loon.” “Wild goose” sounded not wild but pathetic. She had no use for the pathetic anymore, and the wild woman no longer shrieked in her dreams, daytime or night.

“Actually, I wanted to talk to you about a few other things,” Zala said.

“Shoot.” He was rubbing his hands again. “Then let me take you downstairs for a bite to eat. Or we could have something sent up. If you don’t mind my saying, you look all in.”

She didn’t mind. Even if he refused to take her on, or rather to take on the authorities she wanted to sue for criminal negligence, and even if he tried to talk her out of slapping a kidnap charge on Spence, or didn’t agree that Leah had invaded her privacy, at least she had his ear, had a chance to focus, talk, sort things out. She held her glass as he placed the order and took another call, picking over what she’d tell Austin and what she had no intention of telling anyone, ever.