Those Bones Are Not My Child (12 page)

“Are you psychic?” The woman’s knees bumped hers. “I would imagine you are.” Zala pushed her chair back a bit from the manicure table, more fully in the draft of the fan. “I can tell by your eyes.” The woman lifted her left hand from the soak dish to point. Zala pushed it back down into the sudsy water and continued filing and shaping the woman’s right hand. “Very deep-set eyes, piercing. Scorpio?”

“Libra, I think.” She hadn’t meant to encourage conversation just when it felt peaceful in the shop at last. Ten minutes ago, there’d been a wreck at the Cascade-Gordon intersection, but things had quieted down and she wanted to drift. Her mind hovered in the vicinity of her front walk. If Spence dropped Sonny off at the house, would they realize that her car was parked there because it needed a can of oil; or would Sonny, ringing the bell because he had no keys, think she was mad at him and not letting him in?

“Ah, a Libra,” the woman said, scooching around in her chair. “That’s interesting. Libras are misunderstood in such a particular way. For example, people think that they’re highly susceptible to suggestion because they don’t generate their own self-image or have an agenda of their own. They seem not to. Do you find that true?” She shifted again, throwing her legs to the side and crossing them. The loungers looked up from their magazines to examine the woman’s legs, shapely and slender, though she was otherwise rather squat.

“Not really.” Zala worked cuticle gel around the woman’s nails and
restrained the impulse to stab deeply with the orangewood stick. Out of the side of her eye she caught Preener grinning at her in the mirror as he slapped on aftershave, slapping sympathetically, she thought, so she smiled. She removed the woman’s soaked hand and laid it down on the towel with exaggerated gentleness.

If Spence took off, she was thinking, leaving Sonny at the door to fend for himself, would the boy figure out where she was and take the bus? Did he have his bus pass on him? She reviewed the awful night before, going through his pockets, listening to his rehearsal tapes for the names of his friends, upending his gym bag, looking for clues. She rubbed the woman’s nails dry, then massaged her hand briskly with a sassafras oil she had concocted years ago for Spence when he would awake chilled and tangled in the sheets. She would be too glad to see Sonny, she smiled to herself, to scold him right away. She’d fall all over him, muss up his hair, embarrass him in front of the men. He would try to fend her off, would slouch away to the counter to find a comb to repair his do. She could hear him as she came up behind him, unable to keep her hands off: “Aw, Ma, quit.”

“In any case,” the mouthy woman was saying, “I’m grateful for this meeting. Paulette Foreman’s been promising for the longest time to introduce us. Besides those macramé curtains of yours that I’ve been coveting, I wanted to ask if you’d be interested in a dream workshop or an astrology group I’ll be conducting in a few weeks.”

“Would you look at this!” Barber Simmons mashed the pushbroom down on the floor and pointed in disgust to the TV. All heads except Zala’s swung toward the screen. “Bad enough that Ramey fool put the sign up there like that for the whole world to see, but that don’t mean the TV gotta keep playing it up. Dammit to hell. ’Scuse me, ladies. But just look at that.” He banged the pushbroom a few times and the neat pile of hair clumps, butts, and elastic-tissue collars scattered.

Zala’s customer grunted, then fished from her bag a packet of yellow business cards that she passed around while the barber fussed and fumed. The lounger nearest the manicure table stood up, took off his golf cap, wiped the sweatband with a handkerchief, adjusted the cap at an angle, and asked the Reverend Mattie Shaw, Reader & Advisor, if she could tell her which numbers to box? The heavyset man in the high chair cracked his knuckles and read aloud the sign on the TV screen, as if there were anyone in the shop, anyone in the whole city, who didn’t
know the notorious downtown billboard by heart:
WARNING! YOU ARE IN ATLANTA!! WHERE THE POLICE ARE UNDERPAID UNDERMANNED UNDEREQUIPPED—USE EXTREME CAUTION WHILE HERE
. On the bottom line, grouped together under the rubric
ATLANTA FACTS
, were ever-changing figures indicating
MURDERS, RAPES
, and
BURGLARIES
.

“They just won’t quit,” one of the checker players said, slamming his king around the board and collecting the fallen. “Anything to make the Black administration look bad.”

“When in point of fact,” Simmons said, warming to his favorite topic bar none, “the crime rate’s gone down since Maynard took over as mayor and outfoxed Chief Inman.” Golf Cap broke into “I Shot the Sheriff,” bouncing at the knees. Simmons chuckled. “Yeah, outfoxed him and slid Reggie my main man Eaves over that sucker’s head.

“But too bad my man Reggie didn’t cover his ass,” Simmons went on. “Scuse me, ladies. He should of known they’d be laying for him.”

Zala swung the lazy Susan around slowly for Reverend Mattie to select a polish. The topic on the floor was good for at least a half hour of horseplay, a side bet or two about some disputed fact, and maybe even an argument or a throwdown—nothing heavy, the battlers could depend on being separated before a punch was thrown. She slathered on Carnival Red while the men told each other what they already knew: namely, that damn near every Black mayor elected in the South had to go through an OK Corral duel. The high sheriff wouldn’t surrender up the keys or the roster or the requested letter of resignation, and/or he’d threaten to arrest, tar and feather, or lynch the duly elected Blood if he or she showed up to take the oath of office or insisted on appointing a new police chief. Zala’s next customer climbed down from the high chair to re-enact a high sheriff calling in SWAT, or the Klan, or the National Guard to lay siege on the burrhead in City Hall.

“Don’t forget how they trot out some handkerchief head too,” the loser at checkers called to him.

“So now it’s a draw, but in our favor, I’d say.” The heavyset man climbed back up the bootstand as he summarized. “We have virtually two police forces: the Fraternal Order, or whatever it is—what’s it called, Otis?” addressing a magazine reader who hadn’t yet spoken. “Whatever it’s called,” the heavyset man continued without waiting for an answer, “and the Afro-American Patrolmen’s League. Now, some people might regard that as unfortunate.” He looked Barber Simmons
dead in the eye. “But that’s history. That’s history’s weight, or rather its wedge.” He planted his feet once again on the metal treads and leaned back.

The two checker players picked up the thread, telling Otis the Silent what would have happened in ’73 if the likes of them had put up a billboard downtown listing Blacks gunned down under Chief Inman’s reign of terror. Golf Cap strained into falsetto. “Every time I plant my seed,” he sang, “he say, ‘Kill’m ’fore they grow.’ ”

“That would’ve been something,” the losing checker player said, watching his men disappear off the board. “A memorial billboard.” His voice was flat, dispirited. “Maybe we should’ve done it.”

“I know that’s right,” Preener said from the mirror. He cocked his head as if listening for the TV over the whir of the fan, the clunk of the wooden checkers on the board, the liquidy slap of the nail-polish brush against nail, then strolled over to the manicure table and bowed slightly when Zala looked up. “Next time you and your old man have a gumbo party, put my name in the pot if you please.” He swiveled on the balls of his shoes, bowed to the rest of the people, and was out the door.

How long had it been since she and Spence had done gumbo together? Sweaty afternoons playing hooky from work, doo-wah nights with the sheets thrown back, trading recipes as the sun rose. The pot washed and ready. A quick trip to Municipal Market for shrimp, clams, and crab. Friends over, card games, dancing in the yard, nobody minding that the food tasted of citronella. Zala reached for the seal coat and sighed. Those were the days, before Spence had been bitten by the Atlanta bug and started running around in business suits big-deal bragging, bar hopping, back slapping, power lunching with potential policyholders or real-estate investors at pretentious restaurants that featured seafood menus as bogus as the fishnet drapery and the cork-buoy centerpieces in landlocked Atlanta. As fraudulent as all the hail-fellow-well-met foolishness among men who in the sixties had called each other “brother” not “doctor” or “chief” or “admiral.” Black men acting like white men, corny white men. It scared her.

Zala smiled wanly at whatever Reverend Mattie was saying to recruit her in an argument with Barber Simmons. She watched Preener through the slatted window as he paused just outside the door, raking his mustache with his fingers the way Spence did, looking across the three-lane traffic to the sidewalk opposite that dipped down into the
Cascade-Gordon shopping mall. She watched him hug his pelvis with balled fists, as most men did coming out of the shop, to announce their presence on the block, then stride off down the street. Preener was walking that walk that said, “Ain’t going for the okeydoke.”

Simmons knocked the broom handle against the manicure table to rouse Zala’s support in his argument with Reverend Mattie about how the city should be run. Go ask Kofi, she wanted to tell them both. That was his class’s term project, “The Running of the City,” and she was totally drugged with the topic. Preener had crossed the street and disappeared into the shopping mall. How, she wondered as she applied a coat of sealer to Reverend Mattie’s nails, did some people manage to be immune to the bug while others were so susceptible?

“Bite me,” Spence had said to the Atlanta bug. At least that was what she’d thought and what she’d called it: the talking jags, the anxious pacing, punching the hand-held calculator with the eraser head, the sweating, the feverish race to plug in with the old guard or the new. But then the nightmares had begun again. In ’75, when the fall of Saigon appeared on TV, his army buddy Teo had come so unglued, Spence had pulled himself together to help. Then, in November of 1978, when he saw the footage of all those bodies in the jungle clearing at Jonestown, something had snapped, and Spence came unraveled in her arms.

The official version of the situation didn’t acknowledge the realities of shell shock or battle fatigue. At best back then it was “acute situation reaction,” warranting a hit of Thorazine and back on the line. Later it was “posttraumatic stress disorder,” justifying some stingy funds for readjustment counseling.

So in the spring of ’79, Spence, Teo, and forty-three other Vietnam vets from Atlanta’s Black, white, and Hispanic communities were rounded up by George McClintock, a counselor at the EOA Center who’d managed to secure some Operation Outreach monies for an encounter group. “Trip-wire syndrome,” he told the wives—what few hadn’t already thrown in the towel, what few could be cajoled into coming by Celia Hernandez, a combat nurse who’d done two tours in Da Nang and worked out her readjustment talking to wives at the EOA Center in the Southwest and organizing get-togethers for Latino vets through
Mundo Hispanico
, the Spanish-language newspaper.

McClintock had explained his role and the wives’ role too by playing parts of the taped sessions he’d had with the men. He had to get three groups into one, and race and ethnic considerations were nothing compared to other differences, he maintained. First there were the vets who’d been shipped back with no breathing space in between the free-fire zone and home sweet home. These men and women went about in battle fatigues, bivouacked on the curb in front of the army-navy surplus stores on Pryor Street, eating C-rations with penknives, creating disturbances wherever they went, most especially in movie houses where
Taxi Driver, Coming Home
, or
The Deer Hunter
played. In and out of jail, in and out of drug-abuse centers whether drugs were the problem or not; two of the women committed by their husbands, one of the men sent to the state asylum at Milledgeville by his folks. Fourteen wound up in Mac’s office, their recorded voices halting and breathless.

The second group had come home mute, sullen, bottled up, then took to the hills. Reported missing by their families, these vets were tracked down not by Missing Persons but by other vets who knew what to look for, knew how to trail civilians who thought they were still on patrol—the bark dishes, discarded buckskin clothing, makeshift shelters, half-dug bunkers, booby traps, cooking fires. Of the fifteen brought back, ten said they were interested in being with other vets in an encounter group. But except for a flurry of monosyllabic mutterings when someone brought in a case of Carling Black Label beer, the only voice on those tapes was Mac’s.

The group Spence and Teo were in talked nonstop. They hated Carling, hated the woods, would not wear any shade of green. Guns shot off on the Fourth of July and New Year’s Eve were rough on their nerves. And yes, they slept with their necks covered by their arms; and sure, anybody attempting to wake them up took their life in their hands. But they’d been doing all right on the job, in school, in their marriages. They knew of other vets suffering from addiction, depression, impotence, headaches, loss of hair, low sperm count, birth defects among their children—none of which, of course, was service-related, they’d all laughed raucously on the tapes. They’d heard the official response, for example, to the Agent Orange Vets, no different from the official response to the Atomic Vets: “Agent Orange effects? Well, maybe a little acne, but nothing to get hysterical about.” But they were okay, or rather
had been doing all right, until … until summer ’75, or until the Travis Bickle character in the Scorsese movie, or until a daughter was born with a cleft palate and half a brain, or until the Jonestown massacre, divorce, someone trying to sell them a Vietcong skull souvenir, a death in the family. They couldn’t stop talking—napalm, fragging, race riots, AWOL, desertions, defections, a loaf of jane laced with opium for ten dollars, the shelling. Couldn’t stop talking. Couldn’t stop shivering. Couldn’t stop crying.

The wives trying to sidetrack Mac from his be-a-helpmate talk long enough to discuss what they’d been burning to discuss: that the behaviors they were living with had to do with dioxins that no one, certainly none of the government agencies, wanted to talk about. Agent Orange and other chemicals had deranged the minds and deranged the genes and had caused, two of the women argued before quitting the group, multiple miscarriages, deformed births, or no pregnancies at all.