Those Bones Are Not My Child (51 page)

That she’d been jealous. And, jealous, had stopped transcribing Dave’s tape. No longer an interview, it had become a seduction, a game of double entendre between interviewer and interviewee. Paint fumes coming up from the bookstore below, the room she worked in unheated, Leah not back with the correction fluid, no one around to give her a hand, and getting dark too, Zala couldn’t be expected to continue typing. She’d cleared away Leah’s cup and the silver tea infuser she’d coveted. She pressed it open and released the aroma of sassafras. The Spencer men for Fourth of July used to take a whole day to marinate a fresh ham in sassafras beer, garlic, rosemary, thyme, and crushed peppercorns. She didn’t want to think about that. She wanted to think about why she kept having the suspicion that Leah had doctored the tapes.

Zala remembered having asked some pretty good questions out at Bowen Homes in October, but only now and then could she hear her voice on those tapes. And the session that Leah had taped with Speaker and one of the study-group students and Zala, with Paulette cracking in the background, definitely had cuts in it. “You took my reasons off your tapes,” Zala had complained. “I sound so stupid.” Leah had leaned over her shoulder to read from the page, letting the word hang in the air much too long before she offered the observation that the presence of equipment did funny things to people; instead of giving one’s true opinion, people often made “public” statements when confronted with a microphone or a camera. Zala’s remarks about how haggard Maynard
Jackson and Lee Brown were looking lately sounded like an endorsement. Her remarks about STOP, when Leah asked if it wasn’t the most natural magnet around which working-class Atlantans should be mobilized, sounded like petty gossip, like she thought the members were too distracted—worse, too evil and jittery—to work along class lines. She was sure she’d said more.

All afternoon Leah had kept assuring her that it was the nature of interviews. Sometimes respondents opted for received wisdom rather than their own good judgment. Microphones tripped people up.

Spence’s tape, for example, Zala was to learn. Hearing his voice had been shock enough. But hearing him speak of personal things had outraged her.

Zala had used the last of the fluid whiting out his references to her. Only now and then could Leah, the interviewer, get Spence off the kindness theme to discuss his theory of the case.

Toward the end of side A, Zala had stopped typing. Spence was telling Leah things he’d never told her.

At that point Zala had taken off the headphones. If Leah’s answer came in that same purry tone of voice, she’d find them coming on to each other on side B. Maybe in the privacy of her home she could listen to more, but not in that cold room over the bookstore.

Zala had stood at the window, watching the streetlights go on along MLK Drive. She could hear caroling down the block, a junior choir rehearsing. She tried to justify going the short distance from the bookstore to home on the bus. She didn’t relish walking through the streets, seeing grandmothers putting up doilies and sugared leaves in the windows, kids on sunporches stringing popcorn, fathers on the roofs setting reindeer in place. She thought of the Christmas she’d spent in New York. Aunt Myrtle at the stove reaching under her long-line bra to scratch as she stirred the pot of boiling cranberries.

Coming down the stairs to the bookstore with the load she had told herself she was removing for legitimate reasons, she was stopped in her tracks by a bull mastiff curled up by the back burglar door. It lifted its pushed-in snout from its haunches and peered. The satchel inside her coat was cutting into her shoulder; the typewriter weighed a ton. The dog stood up. His medallion clinking against his collar bought one of the painters out of the bathroom. He insisted on helping. She had to get rude refusing before he’d back off. Help? Where was he six weeks ago when she needed help? She’d found Kenti in the Reading Corner eating paste and staring at the smashed pumpkin that had spattered her socks and summoned up nightmare pumpkin-head monsters. She’d had to lug the half-sedated child the whole seven blocks home.

The dog came up behind her when she hefted her load toward the front of the bookstore. She could hear his claws scraping against the newly laid tile. The entry to the bookstore was blocked by a ladder and a can of adhesive. A short-barreled .38 was on the lid of the can. The men in the store were busy handing up shelves to the owner, who was setting up a new section for hardbacks. She backed up and into the storage room and set the things down on a box of books. She heard the dog go back to the rear door and sit down with a clink. His forelegs kept sliding, his claws trying for traction. She waited till he gave up and lay down again.

The box was full of dictionaries, the kind with tabs in the back for medical, legal, musical, and literary glossaries. She learned in one flip toward the front of the book that “chaos” for the ancient Chaldeans was “to be without books.” Well, that would be her story if anyone asked. Why she’d removed the things from upstairs. She was taking them home to finish transcribing, for without records there’d be disorder. And hadn’t Dave’s major complaint in the interview been that people kept getting sidetracked reacting to media instead of doing the work they’d said they would do?

Mason and the other vets, instead of organizing self-defense squads, kept editing the position paper they’d drafted in response to Dorothy Alison’s allegations, going over the wording so that the criticisms they leveled at the authorities would not play into the hands of the militant right that seized on every opportunity to trash the very notion of Black leadership. Mac was supposed to help Dave organize youth workers and undo what the police canvassing of the juvenile shelters had done—
namely, pry open mouths clamped shut, for kids called anyone who even stood still to hear the cops’ questions snitches. But Mac, like other workers at the OEO Center on Verbena, was shitting in his pants ever since the Wilson girl’s body was found in the area. Youth workers were as useless as Mac, according to Dave. They ran for cover each time links between the victims were reviewed and the Boys’ Club was mentioned. Dave joked that Mac, Mattie, and anyone else who worked or lived in the area were running around getting character references. It looked bad for everybody, especially for Mac and Mattie. The media was still harping on the idea that the killer had “hypnotized” or “psyched out” the victims. As for Spence and Lafayette, instead of getting Mason back on track, they were helping one of the vets put a handbook together—how to upgrade bad discharges and challenge the 201 forms, how to get retroactive benefits, how to press the VA to come across with some of the dough earmarked for Operation Outreach. After some newspaper pundit theorized that the killer was a disgruntled vet done out of his benefits and trying to crack the official silence about the whole Vietnam War, vets forgot about securing rooms for karate lessons and started running around asking about benefits. “The kids are getting dusted, and we’re standing around with our dicks in our hands reacting to shit!” Dave had bellowed.

Well, she at least was on the case. She was guarding against chaos. That would be her story if anyone stopped her to question the bulge in her coat.

The painters cleared the ladder away and she headed for the front of the bookstore.

She had trailed across MLK Drive behind one of the transvestite whores, telling herself that if the dictionary was not meant for her, it would have opened to “honesty.” Miss Thaang had run interference for her along Mayson Turner, where men from the bar grabbed at his leopard skin boots, red hot pants, and short lamb fur jacket. Miss Thaang would not be put off. He swung Zala’s satchel around one furry shoulder, grabbed up the typewriter case by the handle, and walked Zala to the bus stop. Despite his frequent side glances, Zala offered no explanation for her rectangular breasts.

Maybe it was best that Spence had taken the kids. But for how long? There’d been a mother who’d written from New Hampshire that
it wasn’t until her baby girl was returned three years later—plump, cheerful, her ABCs and a few numbers in her repertoire—that she acknowledged the disintegration around her. Her husband had become a drunk. Her older daughter was suffering from double vision and malnutrition. Her son was withdrawn, had failing grades and a juvenile record. The mother had collapsed.

An old Chevy hardtop and a red Mustang were parked out in front of the Griers’ home. Zala could hear company stretching out the goodbyes just behind their door as she came up sideways, one step at a time. Leaning the machine against her door, her body about to give out, Zala had stolen a little of their warmth to drive the goblins to the back of the house.

“Pass the night safely,” someone said to the Griers in such a lovely way.

“Give a kiss to the pikney,” Mrs. Grier said. She sounded so cheerful, so warm. How Zala missed Mrs. Grier’s long ago hugs, missed hugging in general.

Zala had tripped on the doorsill and bumped her chin on the typewriter case. Nothing seemed broken. More important, nothing had sprung from the dark to attack. The crash hasn’t brought the people in from next door, either. She kicked her door to. They were still saying goodbye and giving regards to each other’s kin in the Islands, in England, in Brooklyn. Door locked, Zala had raced toward the bathroom by the light from the front. The toilet was running. It needed a tap. Legs crossed at the knees, she’d felt for the switchplate. A loose screw ripped her finger on its grooves. She’d nearly peed on herself, trying to remember where the light bulb she kept moving from one socket to the other could be. Two weeks and she still hadn’t gotten to the store.

She had set the stolen dictionary on the sink and gotten up shivering. She’d done it all wrong. The bulb was in the living-room lamp. She’d seen to it before going out so she could enter as she’d rehearsed, but she’d forgotten. And now the coach lamp had gone off, and she could feel the dark streaming at her from four different directions as she inched along the hall.

Those nights when she’d lingered too long at candlelight vigils or meetings, she’d come back to the house chanting a spiel to get her courage up.
Yes, evil things happen, but people must live through it all, so stop
at the cleaners, buy a new broom, buy some light bulbs
. But she’d be distracted, something on the ground. A wad of gauze. Had a child been chloroformed and tossed in a car trunk? She’d have to start all over again.
Yes, evil things happen, but life must go on, you must flush that dead goldfish, been put off too long. Keep moving for the usualness of it. Act usual, Zala, and it’ll be usual, Zala
. And if swaggering through the house didn’t get it, touching her name in the phone book sometimes did.

Zala had marched herself to the front, not stopping when the sewing box the goblins had hung shoulder-height in the air fell. She recognized the rolling spool of number 6 mercerized cotton thread as it pursued her. She stepped on the satchel and nearly slid when the canvas smooshed out. She grabbed the table and turned on the lamp. The room sprang at her. It looked awful in the dim light. She lifted the load in one heft, remembering to bend her knees. She carried it into the kitchen and set it down. She felt along the side wall for Kenti’s Easy Sew pattern placed just so to lead her to the refrigerator handle. She opened the fridge door for the additional light and took a slug of ice water while she was at it.

In the hall, she’d pulled the light string in the closet and picked up the fishbowl and gone to the backroom. The eight of clubs was waiting for her in the switchplate. She’d turned on the light and doubled back to the bathroom. She’d scooped Roger out with the card and flushed him, giving the handle a tap. Passing the sink she’d said olé to the book that stared back in Spanish. She was doing okay, olé, oyeh Zala.