Those Bones Are Not My Child (7 page)

Zala released the clamp and dragged the sleeve into her lap. The seam was zigzag and puckered, the tension too tight. Already a day late with the robes. She wondered if the choir had sung at morning service in their street clothes. It was the first Sunday she’d ever missed church. “Pressure,” she murmured, as though her pastor was demanding an explanation. She searched among her sewing things for the seam ripper while her across-the-way neighbor horsed around in the kitchen with the children. It was noon. She’d promised her sister-in-law she’d return the machine by dusk. But who would take it over there? The kids had been looking forward to riding the new MARTA train with Sonny.

“The elastic’s not supposed to go under your chin,” Paulette was saying between sips of ice water. “You’ll cut your own neck off.”

“Then how I keep it on?” Kenti was using her baby voice. It was getting on Zala’s nerves.

“Try combing your hair,” Kofi said, sounding like Sonny.

“Mama,” Kenti called out as Zala grabbed up the scissors. “We gonna do our hair now?”

“Sure could use it,” Paulette cracked, coming up behind Zala’s chair. She picked at her braids. Zala stabbed at the seam with the point of the scissors.

“Look here,” Paulette said, coming around the chair. Smoothing yards of creamy silk under her, she bent down by Zala.

“What is the matter with you? You look like hell. No wonder, I guess. I’d be scared to death too, what with these kidnappings and killings. Want to take my car?” She patted herself down and found the keys. “I’ll hang here with Stuff ’n’ Such while you go get His Nibs.”

“What killings?” Kofi and Kenti came in.

“Somebody killing somebody, Mama?”

“Go change your clothes,” Zala snapped. “I don’t work like a dog for you two to play in good clothes.” They retreated and Paulette reached for Zala’s hand.

“Now look, if you’re tuning up to sing the working dog miseries, kindly do me the favor of putting your feet together, Marzala. I’ve only got one nail left.”

“Very funny,” Zala said, pulling away. She could hear Kenti giggling in the hallway. Kofi yelled “Kee-yagh!” and kicked the bedroom door open.

“Don’t you think we should go look for him? All kidding aside, girl, there’s a lunatic out there grabbing children. Where’d they go anyway, the camp group?”

Zala ripped open the seam and tried to focus on what Paulette was saying. “I don’t even know where they are. Spence’s sister couldn’t find the slip.”

“Couldn’t find, my behind.” Paulette stood up and flounced out her dress. “Too busy entertaining to go look, you mean.”

“Yeah, well.”

“Or looking for more real-estate suckers.” Paulette poked her. “Call her back. I’ll talk to her. This could be serious.”

“Paulette, I’ve got a pile of work to do here.”

“To hell with these robes. What’s the matter with you?”

“Four mouths to feed is the matter with me! Rent overdue, two incompletes, and I may be fooling myself about this whole college thing I let you talk me into. I’m worn out and you’re giving me a headache. That’s what’s the matter with me. How are things with you?”

“I don’t believe this. Marzala, you were sitting right there on that broke-ass couch same as me when the women came on TV.”

Paulette tugged on her arm as though she intended to drag her to the sofa to make her remember.

“They were talking about the child killings, remember? Kids disappearing in broad daylight and turning up dead. Don’t give me that glazed-over look, girl, you ain’t that drunk. Roll your eyes all you want, it don’t faze me, ’cause this ain’t about you. I’m talking about Sonny, ’cause I know you heard them. You must’ve seen it in the papers. And I know damn well they had to be talking it up in the barbershop. The child murders. Would you wake up?”

“Would you stop pulling on me, please?”

“There’s nothing clean to put on,” Kenti said, slouching into the room. “Everything’s dirty.”

“Well, don’t whine about it.” Zala threw the scissors down.

“No problem,” Paulette cut in. “Gather up the laundry and we’ll stick it in my washer. Now look—” she was tugging again—“I’ll hunt up the newspapers. Maybe that’ll—would you put that sewing down and listen to me? I know how you hate people getting in your business, but you better get the police over here. I’ll drive over to Campbellton Road and see if I can find Spencer.”

“Oh, you know where Spence hangs out.”

“Would you stop. Sonny’s been out all night and you’re sitting here calmly sewing with a child murderer on the loose? I don’t get this. I really don’t. Explain it to me. Tell me something. I’m a quick study.” Jangling the car keys, Paulette crossed to the couch and sat down on the edge of the cushion. “I’m listening.”

Zala rubbed her eyes. They felt like sandpaper. She knew Paulette wouldn’t remain seated too long. And since the Ted Bundy case was her notion of light summer reading, she was bound to start slinging gore on the walls with the latest from the
National Inquirer
.

“So school me, madame. Tell me how come Maynard ordered a special
police force to look into these kidnappings. And I want to hear how the
Journal
and the
Constitution
are being silly for printing stories about it if I’m talking off the wall.” She was up again, tapping her foot. The shoes were new, Zala noticed.

“But while you’re at it,” Paulette went on, once again at Zala’s chair, “don’t give me that downtown crap about gang wars. Some of those kids that disappeared were seven and eight years old. And spare me the wild-marijuana-party angle too. Seven-year-old kids at wild parties? A joint won’t stab a kid or strangle him or shoot him. Am I reaching you yet? Do you want me to hunt up the newspaper so you can read it yourself?”

Zala was no longer listening. She was trying to piece together what she’d heard at Simmons’s barbershop. She usually tuned out the checker players’ arguments, the bootblack’s state-of-the-race speeches, the customers’ gossip. But she did remember talk of kidnappings. And she did remember a boy being found dead in an abandoned school building.

“I thought that was in … I dunno, Alabama?”

“No, girlfriend, wasn’t in Mississippi or Arkansas either. Right here,” Paulette said, tapping the machine with a tuck comb fallen loose from her hair. “Don’t be the complete fool, you idiot, call the police.”

“And you’re going to stand over me calling me names till I do?”

Paulette drew herself up from the waist. Zala felt two holes being bored through the top of her skull.

“You know, this ain’t about your silly ass, Marzala. This really and truly is not. But let me tell you this one thing, see. It’s like I tell the patients down at Grady. You can bite my head off if you want to, but getting upset with me won’t change the X-rays. Hear? You can hide the pills under your tongue, spit them out in the toilet, whatever you want to do, hey, you grown, and I don’t give a good goddam, ’cause it ain’t me. Okay?”

“No, it ain’t you.”

“You are one stupid bitch, Marzala Spencer, you know that? One sorry-ass, silly bitch.”

When the door slammed, Kenti dropped the pillowcase on Kofi’s foot and tiptoed into the living room. She bumped against Zala’s chair.

“What’s Aunty Paulette so mad about?”

“Her?” Zala thumped her chest till her skin hurt. “What about me?”

The air was heavy with barbecue smoke. Porch gliders squeaked to the
twit-twit
of lawn sprinklers. Two doors up toward Ashby Street, an elderly couple stepped out and looked at the trio talking by the patrol car. The man diagonally across from the Robinsons’ hauled a bucket out to wash his car. The two officers looked his way and stopped talking. Then they passed Sonny’s snapshot back and forth until Zala handed over a second one. She turned from one to the other, answering their questions. Her head wrap began to slip down around her ears.

An ant carrying a speck of pollen crawled over the red ridge in the brick step near Kofi’s foot, then disappeared down a hole in the grout.

“All of a sudden everybody got something to do outside,” Kenti said. She rubbed her head through a towel, holding her elbows in so as not to drop the funnies. She sat down on the top step and shook out the paper. “I wish they’d get going and find Sonny.”

“Waiting on Bobby.” Kofi watched her for a minute to see if she was trying to make an airplane. But she was only pleating the paper into a fan. He saw lather on the back of her neck, but he didn’t say anything. Paulette had made him rinse Kenti’s hair twice.

“All they do is talk, talk,” Kenti said, looking up at him standing on the hump of the stoop.

“Well, don’t blame me.”

The white cop was leaning back against the car like a board, his heels caught on the edge of the gutter. He said something to Zala and smacked a flashlight in the palm of his hand. “Well, ma’am, what about the boy’s father? Do they all have the same father?” Kofi could see how she looked. When she looked like that, the answer was going to be real chilly or real hot.

The Black cop was standing on the strip of grass where Kofi had rolled the Herby Curby for garbage pickup. “And you’ve contacted both sets of grandparents, Mrs. Spencer?” He nodded at whatever she answered and mashed his lips together while she said some more. Then he hitched up his pants leg and put his foot on the water meter. Kenti looked up when the metal plate clinked.

“The streetlights’ll be on in a minute,” she said.

“So what?”

Kenti stopped fanning. “Then she’ll make us go to bed, stupid.”

“You got soap on your neck. There’s some in your hair too. You’re going to have dandruff.”

Kenti cut Kofi off. “Everybody’s looking at us.”

“I got eyes.”

He had spotted Aunt Paulette’s boarder watching through binoculars from his room on the third floor. The window was empty now, but the shade pull was swinging. A big moth was plastered up against the boarder’s screen. There were moths and dark bugs flitting around the streetlight too, and it wasn’t even on yet. He saw a dragonfly nosedive into the bed of crispy brown petals on the Robinson walk. Mean Dog was looking across the street at everybody, panting with his tongue hanging out to one side.

“You don’t think he might have gone for a swim, Mrs. Spencer, when he couldn’t locate the campgrounds?” The Black cop took the flashlight away from his partner and shoved it into one of the loops in his belt. Then he leaned down on the leg resting on the water meter. Kofi looked at the bulge in the holster. And when the cop turned, hopping a little on one foot to do it, Kofi could see the handcuffs. The sight of them made his mouth taste funny, like drinking milk from a tin cup.

The cops hadn’t come in the house to search up in the eaves or down in the basement, like they had. “Before I start making phone calls, let’s look,” she had said, when what she really meant was, “Before you go across the street and have a good time, let’s work.” The police didn’t knock next door to question the Griers. They just took her word that Sonny was not on the premises and not with a neighbor or friend.

Kofi took a good look at the handcuffs. He slipped his wrist in the lock of two fingers. Those handcuffs couldn’t hold a boy or a small woman or even a man if he was skinny.

The Black cop made the water meter clank again. The brass in Kofi’s mouth was worse. He could’ve told them a few things. Like how Sonny took Mama’s stitch ripper on his way out, like he was going off to have a fight with somebody. Kofi wasn’t trying to hide it. He wasn’t saving it to tell at a special time, either. He just forgot. And if he told now, he’d get yelled at. She’d been yelling so hard in the basement, Mr. Grier had to come down the cellar steps to see. The basement was spooky, like a mine that people had quit digging at once they found
gold. She kept saying she’d dreamt about the basement. So she made them look around.

Kenti yanked on Kofi’s pants leg. But he didn’t see why until the car rolled over second base and the manhole cover rattled. The car was coming slowly down the middle of Thurmond Street. A big dark-green Buick. It looked like one of the cars their Uncle Bryant loaned Dad sometimes to show people houses. The driver slid the windows down and stuck his elbow out, then his head.

“Not Daddy,” Kenti said.

She sat back down. That close to the house, Daddy would whistle. A woman leaned across the man to get a good look when the car slowed up. She was holding flowers done up in plastic like they do for running down the aisle at a concert.

“So nosy. And that funny-looking baby too.”

In the backseat, a baby sat in what looked like a high chair to Kofi, feeding herself. She banged on the tray. She tipped over her bowl. She smeared food all over her clothes and clapped her hands. Then she tried very hard to pick up something to eat from the tray. Her fingers were fat. The spaghetti sauce slippery. It wore Kofi out to watch her keep trying.

“Stupid child,” Kenti said.

“She’s just a baby, Kenti.”

“A fat ole nosy baby.”

“Who’s talking?”

Kenti tossed her head and swung the towel like hair. Then she crossed her leg high and fanned herself. When the car picked up speed and the baby bucked and let out a wail, Kofi thought she was going to call the parents some names, but she went on fanning. He roamed around the house in his mind, wondering where Sonny had stashed his cigar box. It was a better box than the one Kofi had.

Mama once threatened to throw his out, calling his stuff junk. He kept his baby teeth in it, some seashells, and a few magic things, along with the foil packs of Aqua Pura that Mr. Lewis at the Boys’ Club had given him. Dad stepped in and made a big speech about privacy. On account of he once had a cigar box for his things. The box he gave Sonny was a Primo. Kenti spoiled hers the same day, trying to make it papier-mâché the newspaper strips sopping wet, more water than flour. The skinny doll she stuck in it anyway was mushy and blurred.

“Where you think Sonny at?” She was talking behind her fan and interrupted his thoughts of the crawl space. He’d been so sure Sonny’s box was buried up there in the loose-fill insulation.

“You keep scratching, you going to get sores,” Kenti said. “Mama told you to put on long sleeves and smear Vaseline on your face before you climbed up there. You a hard head, Mr. Kofi.”