Those Bones Are Not My Child (58 page)

“You’re not eating.” Claude dipped his fork in his wineglass and scratched lines between the crumbs. “Feeling all right?”

“I’m mellow,” Spence smiled. Claude had complained that he’d come to Atlanta ready to do the do, only to find everyone laid-back and oh-so-mellow. Everyone, that is, but a cartoonist he’d met who was frantically searching for the agency producing the safety-ed comics. The only passionate discussion of the case he’d heard thus far was between the hotel chambermaids, fiercely defending the STOP mothers, and the head housekeeper, who’d called them mercenary so-and-sos for charging lecture fees. “As if Kissinger don’t or Jimmy Carter don’t,” the maids had argued.

Spence watched Claude and waited.

Claude threw down his fork. “What about the feds?”

“I thought we’d exhausted that topic.” Before they left the hotel room they’d agreed that the feds were good for finding a stolen dune buggy, a yacht taken from a marina, an AWOL perhaps, but not children.

The waiter cleared away the dishes and brushed the crumbs into the
breadbasket. Claude emptied out the Ziploc bag and began lining up the photos.

“Why don’t we hear more about that sex ring they caught in a dragnet a few months ago?”

Spence shrugged. While searching for the Terrell boy, the police had collared three men. And for a time the reigning theory on the block was S&M gotten out of hand. The official story was that Wilcoxin, St. Louis, and Hardy had exploited white boys only. The story had died down.

“The trial’s set for spring,” Spence said. “They made a point of saying that no Black children were involved.”

“I noticed that. But how often do you see that in the papers—so-and-so, white, and so-and-so, white? Think they hit paydirt and are holding the media off with the ruse? Or are they afraid to say the three white men were roughing off young Bloods?”

“Could be.”

“You don’t think so?”

“I know only that they’re lying. A friend of my wife works with JDs and the word is young Bloods were originally scheduled to give testimony. They’ll probably do it in judge’s chambers now. But …”

“I don’t think so either, Nat. The sex angle may be a small part of the total scheme, but … In a word, what do you think?”

“Klan.”

“Just as everybody thought the minute the story broke. Which brings us back to the feds.” Claude leaned down again to think, his chin wobbly on the back of his hands.

Spence moved the candle jar closer to inspect the photos. One was crackled and had been cropped, evidently, to fit into a wallet case. Another bore signs of yellow tape at the corners. Apparently it had been in an album. In the three hours they’d been together Spence had learned few facts about his companion. On the hotel dresser there’d been an envelope with
HOT SPOT: ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT CO-OP
printed in the return-address section. That, and the address label on the second
Newsweek
, was about it for print. For the rest, he had to take the brother at his word.

In the wallet-cropped photo were two women. The older, thirtyish, wore her hair swept up in back and brushed over her forehead in fifties bangs. She gripped the handle of a baby carriage, glancing over her
shoulder to smile broadly at whoever took the picture. The younger, eighteen at most, wore her hair pulled back and brushed to the side, held with a tuck comb. A chiffon scarf was around her neck, tied to the side. A cardigan, pushed out in front by an ice-cream-cone bra he remembered Delia wearing in those days, was buttoned up the back. The skirt, long, straight, and tight, was the kind Cora used to call a “hobble skirt.” “Fast” they called the girls who wore them; “slack,” the mothers who permitted it.

When Spence reached for the color prints, Claude spun several of them across the rows like a card sharp. But he made no attempt to identify the subjects. In one print the woman and the girl, older, were joined by a middle-aged woman with a hearing aid. In another, taken on the steps of a church, foxes chased each other around her broad shoulders, dead teeth clamped on dead tails. Spence picked up a jumbo print of a family picnic. A boy who might be Claude was rassling with a teenager under the trees. Men lounged on a patchwork, laughing and lifting paper cups. The girl with the pointy tits held a cup under a thermos spigot. The two women sat back to back supporting each other. Their legs were tightly crossed at the knees, the fox-fur woman tugging her skirt down.

Once again, Claude spun a snapshot across the table. Taken in ’Nam, it showed barechested servicemen posing in front of a supply tent. Whoever took the picture was more interested in the tent than in the men. Heads were cut off, elbows out of the frame, but the tent was carefully centered. The angle had been selected for optimum light on the side of the tent where the flap had been tied back, exposing the weapons—M-60 machine guns, M-79 grenade launches, 155-millimeter guns, howitzers, Uzis. Was the brother from California trying to tell him something?

“A wiretap,” Claude said, hitting his fist on the table.

“What wiretap?”

Claude opened his napkin and unfolded the blue airmail letter from the Ziploc on top of the napkin. He used the same meticulous gestures he’d shown in the hotel room rolling joints. Though his hands were calm, his legs weren’t. He was swinging his knees back and forth, rocking the table.

“If not the feds, then who, Nat?”

“I don’t follow.”

Claude drummed on the table a while, then looked over the airmail letter. Everything about him was still now. Spence drew from one of the rows a photo that looked the most recent. The three women were in a densely thick, green landscape. On one side of the photo the sun seemed scalding hot. The woman who’d worn bangs now wore her hair braided in front. She was lowering a heavy skillet onto a sawhorse table. A bunkhouse behind her, though blurred, had a readable shingle over the doorway—
JANE PITMAN PLACE
. On the dark side of the photo, where the surrounding green was nearly black, the fox-fur woman in a bib apron bent over a cook pot. At first glance she seemed doubled over in laughter. But the smile was forced. The bend in the middle was real, though, and pained. Sweat spread on her back like Rorschach blots. She cocked her ear toward the camera in an “Eh?”

It was the girl who dominated the scene, though she stood at the far end of the table in shadows. No longer a girl, her breasts were a soft line across her T-shirt. She held a wooden shoveler, the kind used to remove pizzas from ovens. A peel, Spence thought, remembering the last time he and Zala had curled up with the Sunday papers and worked the cross-word together.

Claude was watching him closely for his reaction. Spence looked at the photo some more. The young woman had mastered the art of appearing before the camera and commanding the eye. A manifesto was being stated in the lift of her chin, her grip on the peel. But what? He noticed then that the fox-fur woman was not wearing her hearing aid. Eh? Was there a message in the Rorschachs on her back? Eh … eh? On the flipside of the print was written, “Paradise at Last—Love, Alma, Theresa, and Pat.”

“They ain’t playing,” Claude said, leaning back in his chair and signaling the waiter. “I don’t know if you’ve been following their escapades, but they’re knocking over banks now, counterfeiting big bills, cleaning out armories, bombing public utilities. They’ve got their own wire service. They’re computerizing their mailing lists. They’ve got more front organizations than
Klanwatch
can keep up with. David Duke, their talk-show pinup, may have split with jet-setting Bill Wilkerson, but those two managed to cover a lot of ground, a whole lotta ground, jim. And now with the Carolina senator as ideological point man—”

“Jesse Helms,” Spence inserted, now that he’d caught up.

“Damn straight. They’re recruiting everybody that the center and the left overlook—parolees, mental patients, bag ladies. Figure it out. There you are on the streets, no driver’s license, can’t vote, don’t nobody want to be bothered with your sorry ass, no place to live, no job, bad credit, bad risk all around—ripe, jim, ripe. The Christian Front is recruiting leftover flower children by the vanload on the West Coast. On the East Coast, the guardians against smut are aiming to make common cause with the antiporn feminists. Never mind what they used to say about the Pope, they’re recruiting Catholics now, and not just in front organizations. They’ve got a Black klugle out in the Midwest. And they’ve begun soft-pedaling the Jewish thing, if you’ve noticed. They no longer say in the newest literature “Onward to the White Christian Republic.” Now it’s “Save Judeo-Christian Civilization.” Now, how do you read that? But my question is,” Claude said, leaning over and tapping the table in front of Spence’s arms, “do they have the balls to wire-tap the white boy?”

“Maynard and them, you mean?” Spence couldn’t see how, not with the GBI breathing down their necks, the FBI at their heels, the media dogging them door to door, and the good ole boys waiting to pounce. He bit his lip and thought it over. “Police Chief Napper was relieved of duty on the Task Force. That might mean something. We thought it was because he moved too fast when one of the VIs brought in a psychic. The city got stuck with her bills. But maybe he was moved so that with less visibility … hmmm.”

“More likely the feds. There’s no love lost between the Bureau and the Klan. There are as many agents in the Klan as Knights in the Bureau. It’d be prettier, though, if the brothers were trump-tight. Maynard and Jackson and them, I’m talking about.”

With a quick sniff at the coffee carafe, Claude waved the waiter away with the tray, then called him back and ordered a bottle of cognac and a fresh pot.

“You look worried, Nat. You think I’m going to stiff you for the bill?” He grinned, sporting two rows of picket teeth. “So what do you think?” he asked after a long pause.

Before Spence could brush his top lip where his mustache was coming in bushy, Claude began lining things up on the table. He positioned the candle jar to the rear of his wineglass. When the waiter put down the bottle and two balloon glasses, Claude made them part of the battle
formation. The lecture part of his brandy demonstration, though, was not forthcoming.

Wiretap. His niece Gloria’s boyfriend, a ham operator, boasted that he would bag the reward once he caught the killers on the wire. Tap. How much time would it take? Spence wondered.

More than ten years had passed between the bombing of the church in Alabama and the trials. Robert Chambliss was finally doing time for the murder of the four little girls. But he’d been loose to plot and scheme for fourteen years before going to jail. Stoner beat the rap and was running for office, despite the well-known secret that his roommate was the brother of James Earl Ray, still in Springfield prison for the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.

“File an FOA, jim. That’s the answer,” Claude said. “That’s it, Nat. The Freedom of Information Act.” He reached across the table and grabbed Spence’s arm, tipping his brandy glass.

Spence rescued the rolling snifter. Claude jumped up when the stream reached his side of the table and poured into his lap. He didn’t use his napkin on his pants but moved quickly to grab the photographs from the spill.

“Shit,” was all Claude said when he sat down again, holding the Paradise print and the airmail letter close to his chest. He seemed a million miles away. Spence sat down, uneasy. It didn’t seem a good time to leave the table to phone Judge Webber. He scooted his chair closer to Claude’s when the brother slumped and let the photo drop.

“What is it we don’t know to say to the sisters, Nat?” Claude said, reaching for his cognac. His voice seemed to be coming up through loosely packed earth. “What do these self-styled messiahs know to say that we don’t?” With the hand holding the snifter he gestured emphatically over the floor where the color print lay. Brandy dripped onto the carpet.

“Take it easy, Claude!”

“Our pastor refused to bury them. All up and down the coast, jim, ministers refused to hold services. Suicide and holy ground, that shit. Some admitted they were scared of the People’s Temple.”

Spence placed a steadying hand on Claude’s arm and brought the brandy glass safely down to the table. “Take it easy. I know you hurting, brother.”

The waiter threw down a towel, pressed, snatched it up and flipped it over his shoulder and left.

Claude twirled his snifter and inhaled. “Would you believe it? I once worked for Jones. Did promotional films for the Temple when he had the place on Geary Boulevard. Used to fly up to San Francisco every week. Every week, jim. Worked my buns off. We all did. Huey Newton, Angela Davis—anybody who was anybody spoke up for him. Shit, he was doing good things then. My sister left a good job—social worker, Black adoption stuff. Went to work for Jones. That was in the days when he was getting awards from the Human Rights Commission for the orphanages, the old-age homes.”

“This is your sister?” Spence picked up the Paradise print from the floor and laid it on the table.

“Yeah … I had some serious questions when they started getting the children. You know, placing Black children with white couples. I said heyyyyyy, wait a minute. But she talked me out of it that time.” He drew the photo closer. “But Charles Garry—you know, the Panther lawyer—he stuck to the bitter end. The bitter end, jim.” Claude poured two fingers of brandy into Spence’s glass.

Spence waved the waiter away after he set down the coffee tray. Claude rubbed a finger over the rim of the carafe, satisfied that it was freshly brewed.

“When I realized what was up … man! We started hearing about the beatings and the rapes and the drugs.” He shook his head and the table shook. “All them sisters. All them children. We wrote letters everywhere—FBI, State Department, CIA, the President, the U.S. embassy down there—all the finks you swear you’ll never deal with, much less beg. I mean
beg
, Nat. And that Burham … Why do we have to rubber-stamp those bastards just because they’re Black? Burham’s a bastard all around, Nat.”

“I hear you.”

“We went to see the Panthers. We tracked down every senator and congressman we could. You know what got Leo Ryan to take it on? One of his students was a defector from the Temple and he got murdered. His family pleaded with Ryan to look into things. We were running around trying to put a fire under anybody’s ass. But you know the coast, Nat. Everybody’s spaced out and fucked up. Everybody sipping wine
and stoned out on Acapulco Gold and quoting the yogis and burning incense and catching the view—the Palisades, the Bay, the bridge, the this, the that.”