Those Bones Are Not My Child (87 page)

Kofi’s buddies, sullen, stared out the window wishing themselves to Orlando’s Sea World like they’d voted for back in September, half the class eager to go see the dolphins zip around on roller skates. Kofi, silent in his own wish, adjusted his helmet as he climbed into the cockpit at the Huntsville Space Center in Alabama, a suggestion that had received twelve votes in the class election. But every year the same phony election was followed up by the tried-and-true trip to the planetarium he used to love. Disappointed, he looked out the bus window at aliens.

For it was that time again when doors were opened to vampires, buccaneers, and moon men come for the loot. Grown-ups also dressed up and gasped in mock terror. A rubber knife, a water gun, hands up, your house, your life. The very masquerade a sign of harmlessness, this time. Officialdom had erased the terror of months before by planting the “no more listed” equals “no more killed” equation in the public mind, the official silence about fresh kills as fraught with danger as the babbled din before when all houses in Atlanta were haunted and everyone was suspect. Memory was being rubbed out by the official erasure as gray settled in all over the city.

Gray dead moths swept up in the dustpan in the room over the
bookstore where Inquiry planned to meet. Gray clumps of hair on the floor of the barbershop, where Preener and Bible Man prepared to go meet the others. Gray dust and fibers matted in the bag of the vacuum cleaner down at headquarters, where Do well read over the reports on the police search of Williams’s family home: closets ransacked, attic tumbled, drapes and carpets butchered, lawn trampled and trashed, life totally disrupted for one more family while the rest of Atlanta’s citizens were urged to return to forgetfulness, to the tranquil gray, as after a hellish war.

It was that time again too when sound trucks blared through the neighborhoods. Andy Young running for mayor. State rep Mildred Glover also a candidate, and becoming more and more drawn to the case and the upcoming trial. Former Public Safety Commissioner Reggie Eaves the only candidate speaking out on public safety; the people turning a deaf ear. Maynard Jackson was chided for calling Black backers of Sidney Marcus “handkerchief heads” and for introducing race, a dead horse, into the campaign. The Missing and Murdered case pulled through the gray, but only to point out that the suspect was Black. Except that in the paper Spence read at the red light, it said “killer,” “mad killer,” “child killer,” “mass murderer,” “fiend,” “serial murderer,” “beast,” not “suspect.”

Spence folded down the page where Leah and Speaker appeared in a crowd protesting an expeditionary force flexing its muscles to encourage enemies of freedom in Central America and the Caribbean. Operation Amber, launched from a base in Puerto Rico, was being protested by Nicaragua, Cuba, Grenada, and the independence fighters in Puerto Rico, in demonstrations from Atlanta to Orlando. He didn’t know why he felt a connection between Operation Amber, 6 Star, the explosion at Bowen Homes, the Missing and Murdered. He turned down another page where the support gun-control acquaintance of Teo and Sue Ellen appeared in a Police Appreciation Day photo. He then turned to the continuation from page one on the upcoming trial that he would tear out now that Zala had abandoned her news-clipping file and no longer cared to discuss the case.

The trial, to have begun before Halloween, was rescheduled for late December. No two quoted sources agreed on the number of charges: the murder of twenty-eight or twenty-nine; or two of twenty-eight; or two adults with ten, maybe twelve, maybe fourteen other cases attached.
But the accused was a Black man. Not the Klan but a Black man, not a crazed white or a rotten apple in the police barrel but a Black man. At the next light Spence read on, the papers linking the names Wayne Bertram Williams and Marcus Wayne Chenault to further insinuate that Black men were the dangerous menace to the Black community. The mention of Chenault, killer of Martin Luther King Jr.’s mother three years before, was justified several lines later by the reminder that DA Slaton’s last homicide prosecution was the Chenault case.

The car behind Spence beeped. He was trying to remember the cult rumor at the time of Chenault’s arrest. Might it be the same one that figured in the Innis-McGill testimony the authorities had dismissed and the media had since ignored?

The coupling of the two Black men who shared more than the name Wayne caught Sonny’s eye as he scanned the papers. Not interested in tricorner hats or papier-mâché masks or the costume his cousin Gloria wore going out the door, he was looking for the events-of-the-week section. There was to be a Halloween dance at the community center following the Careers Day Fair. He paused for only a minute when he recognized two of his parents’ friends in the paper. She wouldn’t care about that. All she did was watch him and booby-trap the house when she thought he wasn’t looking. He’d seen her slip bits of paper in the door or leave a match stem on the floor. She continually grilled him without actually asking him anything.

Kenti set the damp eraser on the windowsill and walked back to the blackboards. Marva lingered at the window to watch three children from the middle school near Gordon that was going to close down before she even got out of elementary school. The three were pulling the stuffing out of the porch glider cushions and slinging the cushions all over the yard. When they ran out of the yard, she joined her friend at the blackboard.

Kenti liked washing blackboards. What she liked even better than washing away the numbers and letters was watching the slate dry. It dried like sky, the wet disappearing like clouds drifting away. The whole board turned pale and even again. With Marva standing beside her, she didn’t feel lonely like at home. They measured themselves against each other, hiking the inside shoulder up, cheating and laughing about it. Then they rushed forward and threw their arms up all over the blackboard, so clean they wanted to hug it.

Across the lane at the community center, people were screaming hello to each other. Adults carried folios like the one gathering dust on the TV table in Kenti’s house. There were busloads of little children. High-school children and college students came on foot. Neither Kenti nor Marva wanted to go over there to be chucked under the chin by a grown-up and told how cute, I want to gobble you up, I want to snatch you and take you home. Each was waiting for her daddy to come bring her costume to wear to the program. They held hands and looked toward the window, one side of the flagpole going dark, the side facing the light looking greased. They looked at each other waiting to see who’d say it first. Let’s wash the blackboards again, ’cause gray slate wasn’t as pretty as shiny black.

“Think them killers are after you all?” The velvety beads around the brim of Andrew’s gaucho hat swung when he turned from Kofi to make a face at the driver. Andrew pushed Kwame up the aisle and both boys did their best to fall all over their classmates bouncing on the seats as the school bus rumbled over the train tracks. They cracked on the driver, a creep. No stops in between, even though he had told them they’d be going right past Kofi’s house.

Kofi’s ship headed into a nose dive and he gripped the controls. His spacecraft was rattling and coming apart. Once wrecked and moving through alien territory in his bubble suit, could he read enough of the sky to guide himself safely to Grady? What if, shook up and stumbling along the highway, he couldn’t find his way to a hospital, the way Sonny had? The train was passing, the smooth metal skin of a storage tank marked ‘Propellant’ like an enemy craft.

“Aaaaarghrghhh.”

Kwame and Andrew piled on top of him, and Bestor Brooks’s little brother led the raid from the back of the bus. Kofi was trapped in the mangled mind center, with more trouble in the engine room.

The broken white arrow in the newspaper picture his mama tucked in her diary had showed how far the train had dragged the car along when they crashed. An iron fist had smashed the nose of the car in. The roof came down over the windshield. The sides crumpled, and the whole front seat was torn out and thrown on the ground. Two wheels
had come off the car. One on its side in the middle of tiny white dots for the broken glass. The other wheel was on the far side of the track, hunks of rubber all over the place. Next to a white outline of somebody taken away already dead was a shoe. It wasn’t Sonny’s. He’d been down on the floor in the back and had gotten away.

“Shove over, Kofi.” Andrew opened the window and the wind gusted up homework and picked at the papery Woolworth costumes.

The children were yelling, the bus driver too, and Kofi was trying to remember how many names. Seven. Two from the car, five from the train. That’s what the newspaper his mama had sneaked from the library said. Just like Sonny had told them, except he had the day wrong and the place wrong, and he said there were three men in the car, one driving and two in back holding him down on the floor. “I’d never seen dead bodies before,” he’d said, pouring syrup, and before Kofi could recover from the way Sonny said it, Kenti had stabbed the last piece of French toast for herself.

Sonny pulled the blanket across his right shoulder and Zala tacked it, smelling Noxzema on his neck when she leaned down to bite off the thread. He backed up till the table stopped him. The TV shook and the Coffee Papers fell over. She moved so he could see himself in the mirror. He stood up straight and held the staff away from his body.

“I should shave my head,” he said. “Like Lafayette. That would really be kicking, hunh?” He couldn’t remember what he’d originally been designing when Aunt Paulette gave him the blanket, but when he’d draped it around himself and she started calling him the Prophet, that did it.

He looked down at his sandaled feet. “How would socks look?” It was blowy outdoors already. And after the fair and the Halloween dance, it might really be cold. “Ma, would socks look stupid?”

Zala piled the bolsters on the back of the sofa to cut off the view from the window. Powerful spotlights had shone on their house their first week back in Atlanta, out-of-town journalists covering the September 9 rally mostly, and the curious, to see how near the fire the Spencers had come.

“Let’s go, Sonny.”

“Ma, my feet.”

“Look at me—look at me—
lookatme!
Socks. Yes, wear socks.”

The same two-toned Seville was going past the house. The landlord, it looked like. No place to park. The Robinsons were hosting a Halloween party for their grandchild’s Girl Scout troop. Mean Dog, chained in the yard, was barking; the Seville moved on. Zala had wanted to argue for a new stove. But so far the repairs were holding. It was best to find a new place anyway. Paulette hadn’t decided whether to sell or to rent her house after she married. But her boarders had given notice. Zala thought about the spacious second floor with its own sun-porch.

“Let’s go, I said.”

Sonny sat down in the chair, shoved the Coffee Papers folio out of the way, and smoothed out his socks with his fist. “Somebody needs to kill that dog.”

A skeleton, a cowgirl, and a boy with padding under his green sweats under ripped jeans and wearing a dusty wig were going up the walk, Mean Dog panting but quiet as they rang the bell. Their shopping bags were heavy. Mrs. Robinson dropped in boxes of animal crackers and they skipped off, jumping to the side when the dog yanked on his chain. They ran off with their booty—to the neighborhood inspection center to X ray the goods, Zala supposed. But what could the machine detect besides razor blades? Poison wasn’t part of the pattern. But then, since the pretrial hearing, “pattern” referred only to fibers. Not that anyone discussed the case anymore. The city had voluntarily taken as law Judge Cooper’s gag order, and she couldn’t care less.

“Let’s go, Sonny.” She threw his jacket across the room.

He took his time turning his jacket inside out. He planned to wear it on the shiny side. He’d warned Kofi about his school sweatshirt and warned Kenti about her birthday barrette from Nana Cora with her name on it. He’d argued so loudly with the coach about the sports jackets, she’d gotten a call from school recommending a psychologist. But he’d been right. Wearing your name in plain view of strangers was stupid.

He bent down and buckled his shoe. She wondered if he knew and was stalling. She’d not put much store in his descriptions at first. But when she spoke to his former principal, a woman who’d volunteered
back in May and a friend she’d recommended for an assembly program had both fit the descriptions.

“You can go ’head, Ma. The party’s not gonna start till you grown-ups clear out anyway.”

“We go together. Wouldn’t hurt you to find out something about college scholarships, Sonny.”

“But I’m going in the army, Ma.” He looked up at her with a crooked grin.

“Don’t start,” she said.

He straightened, still grinning. “You can go on. I’m not gonna run away.”

“I’m tired. It’s late. Come on.”

“I tried to come home, you know. I really did.”

“I know. Get your keys.”

“You mad ’cause you think I didn’t want to.”

“I’m not mad with you, Sonny.”

“Yeah you are. I can tell.”

She sat down on the arm of the sofa, feeling his need to go over it again. Five minutes, no more. The boots, so long by the doorway she’d stopped noticing, fell over when she swung her leg. Those stupid boots he’d inherited from the previous owner of his locker had loomed so large in phony importance.

“I wasn’t going off nowhere. I was just mad.”

“I know,” she said.

The car had pulled alongside, a white Toyota Tercel. The driver, a woman, called out “Sonny” or “sonny” or “honey.” He’d walked a little faster to catch up and say hello. The car had pulled up six feet ahead of him at the service station at Mayson Turner. She got out. Brown knit dress, flashy glasses, olive complexion, dark wavy hair held back by a tortoiseshell headband. She rapped her knuckles on the top of the car and said something to him, talking softly. He had to lean forward and concentrate to hear. He thought he recognized the car from the school lot, parked next to the principal’s blue BMW. But then she said something about going by the club, so he moved the car to that lot and parked it near the snub-nosed bus. Then he attached her first to the director, then to one of the counselors at the Boys’ Club.