Those Bones Are Not My Child (53 page)

Zala had listened a long time for the answer that never came. She’d switched off the machine and removed the headphones. Maybe all of
Leah’s work had originally been about documenting the facts and spreading the word in a community newsletter. But what else was Leah Eubanks up to? She seemed to have the Spencer family surrounded. She’d interviewed everyone Zala knew except her pastor. And what had she done with B. J.’s tapes—blackmail?

Now Austin pressed a button on the intercom, and the receptionist walked in almost immediately to remove the restaurant trays. Austin had the tapestry on his lap, fingering the metallic threads that gave the rugged jute webbing a touch of elegance. She’d done some open-work knotting in the center section on the order of a Peruvian rug she’d seen at a High Museum exhibit. He held it up and watched the light reflect. She hadn’t laundered and blocked it, but he didn’t seem to mind.

“It’s like a runaway production,” he said, not meaning her work. “Like going onto the set of a much-touted multimillion-dollar picture directed by last year’s Oscar winner and starring the top box-office names, and finding the whole thing totally out of control.”

She murmured and poured herself another Drambuie. He draped the tapestry across the desk. The ochres, purples, and turquoise went well with his rust suede decor.

“I’d say your instincts were sound,” Austin said, placing his hands on the rims of the wheels and pushing himself around in little semicircles.

She’d been expecting an argument at every turn. But not once during her review of her four-month ordeal had he interrupted other than to have a point clarified. And now, “going electric,” as he’d joked, dancing a little in his chair when they’d been discussing the TF foul-ups, he drove up behind his desk and parked, looking all business. He was doing something clunky with the metal footrests; then he locked the wheels and shut off the zizzing motor.

“Now,” he said, moving a praying-hands ceramic to the side, “I will set things in motion.” He rubbed the bronze plate soldered below the praying hands, a prayer inscribed in the metal. Zala sipped at her drink. Drambuie was new to her, and she liked it. Austin drew the phone toward him and lifted the receiver.

She did not bother to listen or take notes. He knew what he was doing. He would see to it that Sonny’s folder was found and included in
the special investigation. He was a Morehouse man, a Kappa, and a fifth-generation homeboy. Wasn’t that what it was all about? So how could he miss? He had something particular in mind for getting Leah Eubanks checked out. And he had Spence’s address and number in Columbus. It was all in his hands now. She would lay her hands on some quality raffia and sisal and weave again. The thought made her rub her fingers together pleasurably.

Attorney Austin seemed to take her seriously enough. He was certainly making a lot of phone calls. She would have to work some wizardry with her fingers to do justice to his walls. Her eyes drifted onto a shelf in his glass étagère. A brand-new doll stood upright in a see-through box, hemmed in by three walls of cardboard and one of cellophane. The doll’s limbs were pinioned by white plastic rings that bound her ankles and wrists to the backboard. Her hair was stapled to the cardboard, a slice of white around her throat. And in the glass, Zala saw herself reflected and turned away.

Not long ago, Leah had guided her and Paulette through a number of glamour magazines, pointing out the increasing youthfulness of the models, the more recent issues featuring preadolescents made up to look like adults. The backlash response to the woman’s movement, Leah had explained. Paulette and Leah had kidded her that she was the petite, new-womanly ideal, the backlash ideal. Paulette had joked that they should concoct a line of cosmetics with an S&M look and get over like fat-cat capitalists. Leah hadn’t thought that very funny. To hell with Leah, Zala muttered to herself.

For a second, she feared she’d said it aloud, for Austin glanced her way. He was arguing with the security officer of the telephone company. She could’ve saved him the trouble. If she could produce a ransom note or proof of a threatening call, the police would ask Southern Bell to put the trap back on her phone. But not for a runaway. Runaways did not count.

E
ach time Spence returned to Atlanta he experienced a rush at the city limits. The same feelings surged as in years before when he’d come home from the war, back to The World from the smoke, the smoldering sandbags, and the blood-soaked heaps of fatigues. Spotting the capitol dome, he would rock forward in his seat, his face as close to the windshield as the seat belt allowed. The sense of expectancy as intense as in his search-and-destroy days, he would race recklessly toward Atlanta, driving the feeling into his lungs till he became the excitement itself and was protected, momentarily, from the dread collecting just below eye level, where a mortar might discharge at any second.

Steering with the heel of one hand, he always had to double back, having overshot the downtown exit to Austin’s by a good thirty miles. Then the feeling would begin to ebb. Fear would seep in. And the only thing keeping him buoyant was the sound of the radio. He’d touch whatever was on the seat beside him—the envelope of pages Zala kept mailing him, or the narrow green book of actuarial tables from Delia’s real estate office, to assure himself that he hadn’t gone under.

Now, tooling along Northside Drive, he grabbed a month-old issue of
Newsweek
to fend off the demons that had once lured him, years ago, into taking off his helmet to cook in.

With the Coca-Cola sign in his rearview, Spence turned up the radio. It droned on about MIRVs, MIGs, SALT, SAM, and
Pershing II
, everything but the case, everything but news of the two women MPYD officers who’d been busted in rank when the family of Lubie Geter caught the Task Force napping. He rolled up the copy of
Newsweek
, after glancing at the spread of pictures and stories from Charlie Company. The silence finally had been broken. The featured story on the ’Nam
vets had revived the night sweats for a time, but it also loosened him up; something wooden and blocky came unstuck.

On the radio, in between reports on the Camp David Accords, Poland, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, the announcer burbled about the parades, gifts, and job offers for the released hostages. There were still confetti storms all over the country for the fifty-three Americans come home after 444 days of captivity. But for the Vietnam vets there was only that January
Newsweek
. Testimony from brothers who’d been in Charlie Company hadn’t been quite on the mark. Edited with a heavy hand, Spence supposed. He glanced down at the crinkled pages, at the chopper blades, tattooed arms, jeeps, battery radios, and tried to be calm. But it was the same eerie calm he’d experienced under heavy shelling, sensing a high-caliber finality sailing through the dark toward his heart.

He’d tried to explain to McClintock how the stories and pictures of C Company had been both sickening and protective, a shield against the very terrors
Newsweek
evoked. Mac hadn’t understood. Later, when Spence read the interview Leah had conducted with Mac, he could see why. Spence’s babbling to Mac on his first trip back to Atlanta to see Austin about custody had become grist for the counselor’s mill. Estrangement, Mac had told Leah. Both husband and wife were estranged from their generation, she by early pregnancy, he by the draft, the polarization, and the silence. Lacking friends among peers, the Spencers sough professional confidants. Mac was hopeless.

So on his solitary rides into Atlanta, Spence invented someone who would understand what he meant. A bunker buddy, a front-line buddy, someone who continued to value and search for the intense camaraderie of war when a whole unit was but one life they all held in their hands. This someone was always about to pull up at the next light or at the next gas pump, ready to talk. Would take the stool beside Spence at the diner counter or, turning around in a booth, spot ’Nam laid out between Spence’s coffee cup and his toast plate and initiate conversation. Then Spence would not have to explain anything. This someone would be able to see with Spence’s eyes—’Nam, Bowen Homes, the look of the woods during those search weekends, the artificial busyness at the TF headquarters when Spence had been drawn back to Atlanta by the discovery of two bodies.

Now, maneuvering past the rubber cones and orange barrels where
a section of Northside Drive was under construction, Spence tried to get his bearings, feeling that the invented friend was at that very moment traveling great distances to meet him, to read Spence the coordinates, for Spence had doubled back too far and was lost, vulnerable, about to do something stupid, like years ago when he was tempted to extend his tour just for the few days’ leave in exchange. He’d ached that much for one hour of normality.

On his last trip to Atlanta, Spence had actually pulled over by a lean Johnny Reb in high-heeled boots who’d bent down to pick up a dime from the sidewalk. Spence had swung over to the curb because the reb looked vet age and had a magazine stuck in his back pocket. Spence had felt a kinship so strong, he’d cut the motor and slid down the window, certain that something crucial would be exchanged once the man, straightening, shoving his cap back with his thumb, revealing a stark white forehead above his windburned face and clearly more akin to the Deep South recruits who’d made ’Nam holy hell for Black men, finally turned in Spence’s direction and seemed about to speak. But the reb had only been working his mouth up to spit on the sidewalk. Then he hitched up his jeans and clomped down the street in his cowboy boots, his shirt coming untucked as he walked.
Popular Mechanics
, not
Newsweek
, had been in his pocket.

And once, missing his turn so repeatedly he’d had to admit that he was fooling no one, that he had no intention of keeping the appointment with Zala and Austin, he’d wound up in a cul-de-sac thinking about Sonny, thinking about POW training—had he told his son that the best time to escape was in the first few hours of capture?—and thinking about this buddy, who’d say, “Yeah, sometimes I think I died over there too.” Spence had sat in the limo surrounded by woods and wept over his dead self. Face wet, throat sore, he had wheeled the limo back to the main drag and blamed his blurry vision on the draggy wiper blades. Then, swearing he heard the motor cough, he had decided to go see Gaston. For something was wrong with the steering mechanism too.

Clear now of the construction near the Northside exit off I-85, Spence leaned over and changed the station. He wanted to hear an update on the suit the medical examiner had threatened to bring against the authorities for tampering with evidence and ruining a site before the coroner’s office arrived. As he fiddled with the dial he felt a definite yank in the wheel. It was as pronounced as it had been weeks ago when
he’d made up his mind to let Gaston look things over but had followed a Big Bethel AME van instead. Finding himself near Paschal’s, he had then decided to drop in on the Institute of the Black World. What did they make of the coroner’s suit? What would they make of Judge Webber’s latest news? A suspect the DA’s office had been interested in had turned out to be a stool pigeon living incognito in Atlanta under the Federal Witness Relocation Program. Webber couldn’t say whether the man was mafioso, Klansman, or porn kingpin, only that the interrogation had been kept off the police blotter. But he’d keep digging. So many separate and secret investigations being conducted by the various bureaus, it took some digging. Spence had wanted to talk things over with the members of IBW.

But he had not been able to find the Institute. Chestnut Street kept eluding him. He found himself on Drummond Street, slowing up behind a sheriff’s car angle-parked by a truck. There were Black men in the panel truck. Had Kofi been breathing down his neck, Spence might have been encouraged to step out and ask what was going on just to swagger a little. Alone, he had merely looked. Were the men a work gang from the pen being rounded back up? Where, then, were the tools they’d used to repair the streets? Maybe there’d been a roundup of winos from the wall near the liquor store on Jeptha and the sheriff had processed the vagrants on the spot and given the white truck driver, a crew boss, sole custody. In which case they’d be hauled off to a plantation to work. One of the men huddled on the bench in back under a tarpaulin had called out “Stretch!”—meaning the limo. An SOS or a hello, Spence didn’t take time to find out. The sheriff had waved him around the truck and he’d driven on.

Whether day laborers, winos, vagrants, or convicts, they’d been Black men and he’d wheeled the Flagship around them, merely looking at them lined up on the benches of the panel truck, a grungy tarp thrown over their shoulders. In ’69, the benches at the induction center had been lined with brothers. His platoon was three-quarters Black. The casualty list was four-fifths Black. Not one officer of color on the set. Always Bloods on points, Bloods on the front line. The double war, internal war, the total nuthouse reality took over with Bloods actually trying to make themselves equal to the mad-dog tasks before them, behind them, surrounded by hatred. In the end, they were all addicted to the adrenaline rush that kept them in a state of emergency even back in
The World, driving their families nuts with it, but propelled up the ladder by it, if, with luck, a job came their way that called for an all-time jittery high.

Spence had driven away from Drummond Street without finding out where those passengers were being taken in the middle of the afternoon. On promise of work, perhaps they’d voluntarily gotten into the truck, the sheriff’s presence a mere coincidence. It didn’t wash. The promise of clean cottages, running water, three squares a day, and good pay they had to know was a lie. Everyone knew, no matter how drunk, no matter how desperate for work or empty-handed in the face of a badge, the truth was flea-ridden pallets, mealy-bug grits and green slabs of baloney, no showers, no rest, one outhouse per fifty workers. And the day before payday the booze and the whores were brought in. The morning after, that cold day of reckoning, you learned you were in debt for that pallet, those meals, the whiskey at five dollars a pint, the women at twenty dollars a hump. And try leaving. Try making a call to the authorities. They’d turn out to be the plantation bosses, or their inlaws, their lodge brothers at least.