Those Bones Are Not My Child (59 page)

Spence moved things out of the way when Claude began gesturing. He moved closer and rubbed the brother’s back till the shuddering subsided. When Claude began to smooth out the airmail letter, Spence expected to hear the stories. The infrequent long-distance calls that sounded monitored, rehearsed. The powerlessness one felt at the other end far away while defectors predicted serious trouble from the step-up of suicide drills in Jones’s paradise in Guyana.

On public radio there’d been interviews with Atlantans whose friends and relatives numbered among the nine hundred and eleven massacred. The old letters were read over the air, monotone but a stray phrase took on sudden import—a coded SOS, a goodbye, a warning to watch your own back? Defectors came on the air and told of the floggings, the rapes, the venereal disease, the currency kept in mothballs, then transported periodically in hand luggage to Switzerland, Brazil, and the Soviet Union. Lawyers hired by relatives gave updates on the trials for a while, on the lawsuits brought against the two governments by the families, by Congressman Ryan’s widow, by the colleagues of the newsmen murdered on the airfield in Georgetown. Then silence. Just as the town criers had warned and as the defectors had predicted if there was no mass voice raised in protest, silence set in. By the time the movie
The Guyana Tragedy
came to town, the suppression of news had taken effect. Amnesia reigned. Pulled after two days, the movie didn’t even finish the week out.

“The Dark Ages, Nat. They’re close at hand.” Claude straightened up. “That’s why you were speeding, Nat.”

“
I
was speeding! You hit
me
, man.”

“Ghosts—we’re both trying to outrun the ghosts who want to make us ghosts. Well, here’s to them,” Claude said, raising his glass. “You’re not drinking. You got something better to do?”

“A belligerent drunk. You total my limo and now you get nasty.”

“It was my Chevette that got totaled. And it wasn’t even mine. Here’s to the Dark Ages coming at us.”

“I’m not drinking to that,” Spence said.

“What are you going to do? You’ve got a few choices.”

“I know, you’ve told me. Apathy, misery … conformity, madness, and …”

“Just two. Either you do or you don’t. Believe it. Trust me. I know what I’m saying.”

“You’re drunk, Claude.”

“And getting drunker. I hope you got some money on you,” he grinned, rubbing his nose bead.

Spence looked around for the phone. In the bar a TV was bolted to the wall above the till. They were running a review of the ease—the searches, a boat in the water, the grappling hook, a covered gurney being heaved into the coroner’s wagon, the mayor in a black armband, the commissioner looking weary, the mothers making a charge, an on-location reporter, classmate pallbearers gripping the handles with white gloves. Then the familiar school pictures crowded the screen.

“Close at hand all right,” Spence said, standing up. “As close as the TV set.”

“Closer than that, jim. Closer than that.”

The horn blew a third time before Zala thought to look. Headlights were blinking through the macramé slits. She peered through the pane in the door. Two drunks were stumbling up her walk, one in a blanket, the other half in a coat, a sleeve empty and dangling. She opened the door. They reeled into the hedges, grabbing at each other’s clothes. The cabbie got out to assist, waving X’s in front of his chest; he wasn’t in this mess, he wanted her to know. The coach lamp went on in her neighbor’s doorway. Spence scrambled to his feet and looked up. His eyes were half-closed, the veins in his lids thick, his lower lip wet and droopy. She’d never seen him so smashed. The drunk in the blanket was waving his arms to speak. The cabbie caught him under the armpits and walked him from behind over to Spence. He clamped his hands on Spence’s shoulders and pushed him toward the steps.

“Marazuuuul?”

“It s Nat,” the man in the blanket said and stepped back.

They were waiting now for her to claim him, this man who’d told a stranger things he hadn’t told her.

She took her time before she nodded.

“You all right now, jim. You home.” The drunk in the blanket gave Spence a pat on the back and turned, bumping into the cabbie who pulled him again to his feet, then headed for the curb.

“Hold it!”

They stopped by the hedges and looked at her. The cabbie lifted his cap, rubbed his head, then fitted it back on. The man in the blanket adjusted the folds that threatened to trip him. They leaned over at the same time to encourage Spence, who’d missed the first step, to untangle his legs and try it again. He bent down. He intended to come up on his hands and knees.

“Can you take it from here?” The driver went to his cab, not waiting for an answer. He sat down on the front seat, turned on his TV set.

The blanket man was yanking at the cab door handle. The cabbie was making no attempt to help.

“Take him to Greyhound,” Zala said.

“Say what?”

Zala pictured Spence waiting slumped over in one of those molded chairs, a coin-operated TV bolted to a reinforced arm the only thing holding him up from the coffee-spilt floor. Wrappers, butts, newspapers stuck in dried puddles of pop. Cops looking for someone to break up the boredom.

“Nat s your ole man, ain’t he?”

Zala looked down at Spence, fallen over sideways on the third step. She looked at a spot in the top of his head. His hair needed picking, his clothes were a wreck. He belched and giggled up at her. Miss Purple Mouth might find this amusing.

“The depot,” Zala said, then stepped back inside, closed the door, turned the lock, and drew the chain.

F
rom the northern breezeway of Judge Webber’s estate, the new housekeeper watched the guests in the carriage house. Parlor games among the leisure set. Who could they be that even before she could load the butcher-block cart with rolls, salad, cake, and chocolate cordials, as her employer had told her to, her nibs had tiptoed out there herself to serve them a tray?

“Those are no miscellaneous Negroes out there,” she said aloud, setting a pitcher of iced tea down on the window ledge.

In the carriage house, a man in a white athletic suit was folding paper, then tearing it along the edge of a carton cleared of demitasse cups. “Number your responses one to ten,” he could very well be saying. And the guests passed around the paper and the short, pointy pencils that Mrs. Webber’s club used for bridge and Scrabble.

The housekeeper steadied the plate of sandwiches on the ledge with her hip and waved to the packers coming across the patio to come in and eat. But they stopped by the trellis to watch the men and women in the small building at the far end of the flagstone walk.

“Must be a prayer group,” one of the packers said.

“Looks more like one of those singles groups.”

The packers moved on when the boss, a rawboned man with a goa-tee, a leather cap cocked on his head, came up the patio steps from the moving van. He waited until they had all wiped their feet on the mat and gone in, then he rubbed his knees and sighed. Unaware that he was being observed, he planted his hands on the small of his back and twisted to work a crick out of his massive body. Then he turned in the direction of the carriage house.

“Too old for the work,” the housekeeper mused, watching the big man walk away. “And too hip for the room, as they say.”

The big man set his heels down hard on the walk so the guests would know he was coming. No telling what they were doing in there with their charts and maps and movie equipment. An election of some sort? They seemed to be casting ballots. Not secret ballots; they openly conferred. A guessing game, he decided, when several screwed up their faces. The stakes were high. There was no mistaking their seriousness. When a woman in a batik dress looked his way, he lifted one of the doors out of the bed of bluebells and set it in place, disguising a grunt with a cough. He took a look at a list taped to a portable blackboard. Families … a list of families.

He shoved the second door in place and, shielding himself, spied through the crack between the jamb and the hinge. At the far end of the room was a lineup, women’s favor. The men were in for it, if it was one of those man-woman speak-outs.

He leaned over and hammered in the linchpin with his fist. He would need the ladder again to put the top pins in the hinges. Not that anyone in the main house would mind if the doors hung aslant. No one inside the carriage house seemed to.

The grass was still moist from the morning shower, and the air held the fragrance of damp earth and blooming flowers. The raw-boned man chuckled to himself as he moved across the yard. No less than five people had expected him to use the side entrance to the main house. They would have to race to the front hall now if they planned to intercept him for a report. He moved toward the eastern end of the estate, drawn as much by the clonking of stones thrown against a tree as by curiosity to see what the main foyer looked like. Loose grass collected on his shoes and muffled his steps. When he came up behind three children, they didn’t turn around.

A boy in a sky-blue parka was putting his feet together on the sharp shadow line of a security alarm sign stuck in the front lawn. He took aim at a dogwood flowering pink and white. A girl, smaller, was not interested in target practice. She was prancing through the hyacinth and the crocuses. An older girl, her hands shoved in the pouch pockets of her sweatshirt and her knees hugging a poster roll, kept her eye on the two youngsters. Her vigilance made the big man rethink the carriage-house group.

It had something to do with the child killings. He was sure of it. Five days in Atlanta, waiting to pick up a job that would take him back
home, was enough to know that it took heart to even get together, what with everything jumping. He’d heard more about the police moving on community groups than he had about the investigation itself. He stepped into the marble foyer of the Webber home. Whatever the game plan of the people inside the carriage house, Ed Bingham of Trans-America Movers tipped his cap to them.

“I want to say one thing.” Dave turned slowly around in his chair and waited for the others to look up. “Let’s not be stupid when we get out there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the map on the wall. “We get stupid, somebody gets killed.”

Mason leaned across the table with a cigarette in his mouth.

Lafayette flicked his lighter and lit it. “Too true,” the vet said, running his hand over his scalp, glad that someone had broken the silence. “We can assume that many of the victims were dusted to cover the killers’ tracks. Since so many knew each other, it’s a reasonable guess. No telling who might be watching us. So like Dave said, let’s not be too anxious to question people along the route. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has the feeling that the cops, the investigators, and reporters too have been careless about witnesses’ safety.”

“I second the motion.” A brother in a white crocheted cufi stood up, and several people groaned. Dave was heard to mutter, “Here comes another ‘prison letter.’ ” But the brother in the cufi would not yield the floor. “ ’Cause it’s been open season on the Black man all along. Ever since we were brought here from the motherland in chains, the Black man has been an endangered species. So while we’re out there reconnoitering, we need to cool it, like the brothers said, because the Black man—”

“Write it,” the schoolteacher snapped. “That’s what the paper is for.”

Several people seconded that motion. Earlier, when discussion had threatened to degenerate into slogans and lectures, the teacher had made the suggestion that people put their positions on paper, then let Mason do a summation.

“While we’re at it,” Lafayette said, “I’d like to volunteer as an advance scout.”

“Good idea,” several murmured, for Lafayette had more than once demonstrated his ability to move swiftly and to stay on the case.

Mason got up from the table and went to the blackboard. From the sash of his white kung-fu jammies he withdrew a piece of chalk. He wrote the vet’s name alongside “Roy Innis and Company” under a listing of people to contact. The word was out that the CORE splinter group had moved from the Hyatt to the Americana and had then checked out to the Atlantan Hotel. It would take someone like Lafayette to track Innis down for the story on the witness in CORE’S protective custody.

“Well, good people, since we’re taking time out, maybe we should distribute the papers Brother Spencer had copied for us.” Speaker waited until he got the nod from Zala before he passed out the contents of a manila envelope.

“Make sure you get both packets,” Speaker instructed. “The top sheet of the first pile is National Security Council Memo number 46, dated March 17, 1978. You’ll notice that it’s addressed to the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, and the director of Central Intelligence. It talks about the whys and ways to keep African people of the Americas separated from African people on the Continent. The documents stapled to it are also top secret. Local version,” he added. “They speak to our situation—namely, to the isolation and muzzling of the community voice.” He paused long enough, for the group to react to the “Confidential” stamped across the security memoranda before he handed out the next batch.