Those Bones Are Not My Child (22 page)

“Your friend? The one that sent you here? How I know y’all don’t carry bones?”

“Who am I gonna carry bones to? Look, nobody’s got to know I’ve even been here.” Spence squatted down and gave Gaston more light. He watched while a shiny new piece of piping was expertly inserted.

“Then you gonna want me to go to court.”

“No, man. I swear. Just tell me how to find those guys and I’ll forget I’ve ever been here. Who’ll know?”

Gaston leaned away from the pit and rubbed his hands on a piece of
terry cloth. He was looking toward the street again, this time at that part of Spence’s limo that was visible behind the tow truck.

“What work you do?” He looked at Spence’s smooth, soft hands, then back toward the limo.

“I drive them wheels and do a little real estate. Look, I can pay you.”

“What work your friend do?”

Spence jumped over Webber and came up with Dave, though Dave hadn’t thought much of the revenge theory. “He’s a youth worker. Works with kids.”

Gaston looked at him for a moment, then set the terry-cloth rag down by the shoebox. “Like them social workers. Carrying bones is they business.” He returned to his work.

Spence lowered his head and massaged his chin, missing the reassurance he used to find raking his fingers through his mustache. He looked down into the pit. There was a vinyl-covered cushion from a porch glider that had once been floral yellow, an open cooler with cans of juice suspended in icewater, a half-eaten sandwich curled on top of an empty apple juice can, and a Bible. When he surveyed the pit again, he noticed one of the corners of the cushion was hiked up. Pistol, Spence thought. His eyes slid back to the Bible.

“As God is my witness, Mr. Gaston, I won’t involve you with no police, no social workers, and no courts. I swear on my children’s heads and my mama’s soul.”

Gaston laughed again. It was the tee-hee falsetto that dropped down and trailed off in a sigh sort of laugh Spence had always called “country” when he didn’t say “swamp.” Gaston looked at the flyer by his side then rubbed his hands up and down his legs.

“You gonna need plenty backup, Spencer. That your name?”

“Yeah. Sorry.” Spence extended his hand. “Glad to know you, man. You don’t know how glad,” he added, hanging onto the rough, crusty hand.

“Think you know how to jack this crate up, then down again when I give the signal?”

“Sure thing.” Spence moved quickly to the hydraulic, remembering at the last minute to step over the trip wire. He heard Gaston chuckle again behind him.

“You’s in ’Nam, Spencer?”

“Da Nang, 1970. You?”

“Was a powder monkey.”

“That right? Keep dynamite on the place?”

“Whatchu think?” He was sporting his filed teeth again when Spence faced him, one foot on the pump, one hand on the bar.

“I think you probably got a big surprise for them clowns if they come again.” Spence pumped the car up on Gaston’s signal, taking in the wheeze, the hiss, the dusty air, and the grunt as Gaston slid down into the pit. The prospect of standing there gripping cold steel in the midst of chaos for hours waiting on the next signal didn’t make him uncomfortable. He felt hopeful.

“Da Nang?” There was knocking of iron on iron against the car’s underbelly. “Guess that make us brothers,” Gaston said. Then he signaled, his rough hand waving, like a man used to handling weight on his head.

En route to the airport to pick up the buyers that morning, Spence had avoided rush-hour traffic by going the back way along Sylvan Road. Just past the trucks on Murphy, seeing the day laborers, men of twenty-five, thirty-five, fifty, standing around waiting to be called over to the loading platforms if the foreman found himself shorthanded, he’d taken up the pencil, turned Kenti’s drawing over on the clipboard, and written himself a memo to locate the other spot, somewhere along Hightower Road near Baker, where domestic workers gathered should someone require a cook, laundress, or yard man for the day. At the rate things were going he might have to hire a few helpers; or as Dave put it, relating how a phone call from the high command had canceled out eyewitness accounts to the Jones boy’s murder, he’d have to raise an army and navy.

After delivering the three women to the Ritz-Carlton for the bridal show and opera collection, he’d driven from Buckhead to Hollywood Road, where the Jones boy was found on Thursday. Not that he doubted Zala’s word, but he wanted to see for himself. Now, having dropped them off at Lenox Square for the Geoffrey Beene trunk show, Spence was heading for Moreland and Constitution, where the Wyche boy had been found back in June. He no longer knew what he expected to find at any of the sites—maybe Dave walking around with co-workers from Youth
Authority questioning witnesses rumored to have fingered the murderer, or the bastard already manacled and the key to the kidnap shack in the arresting officer’s hand; Sonny was evidently too much to hope for—but he kept on pushing, the pencil grafted to his hand since morning, a spare index finger that pointed out the urgency of the list, the box of flyers, his worksheet, and other items on the front seat.

He went over his work and personal schedules. There was a lot to cram in. He had only an hour before the pickup at Lenox and the buyers’ reception at the downtown Hyatt Regency; then two hours after, he could escort the women to their rooms in the Peachtree Plaza. Luckily, Carole had packed him a lunch in a thermal container. So all he had to do was resist distractions, stay focused on the front-seat memos, and keep on pushing. Slipped between the pages of his Atlanta street guide was Gaston’s name and address. Judge Webber had relayed the lead in a roundabout way, the old geezer a master at laundering info. The drawing-memo was slid under boxes of flyers, and a copy of Sergeant Greaves’s list was tucked under the rubber band around the jumbo map rolling across the width of the seat.

When he’d gone to his regular newsstand for his early-a.m. coffee and the biggest map on hand, the man had paused over the cash drawer—should he take out for the morning edition? Three days in a row, though Spence still ordered his coffee, he’d felt no impulse to pick up a paper. What that old habit since high school had been about anyway was a total mystery to him now. What news had he been looking for all those years, what word so important he braved blizzards till the delivery? What had he thought news was then? Disasters, celebrity divorces, the demented drivel of war-monger industrialists. When word came, it wouldn’t come through the press two beats behind the police, the police ten paces behind STOP’s volunteer investigators, the VIs miles behind the murdering, and the general populace sleepwalking on a blind road.

He’d almost let the women become a distraction. The sleek one in very high heels and severe ballet hair referred to him as “the, ahh, driver” and seemed hell-bent on picking a fight about his being out of uniform—he was “theirs” nonetheless for the day, she’d emphasized, so synchronize the watches. The nubby one in a raw-silk coat dress, who tried valiantly to countervalance her companion’s flintiness by being down home, would lean forward to mention her childhood in Waycross,
Georgia, and all the wonderful things she’d heard about Spence’s city. The third one, born in Atlanta but now a London–Paris–Hong Kong–New Yorker, spent most of her time in the car adjusting a summer silk dress cut by Vidal Sassoon apparently, sprinkling talcum on her feet and patting her stockings, sending clouds of dust in his rearview, and snapping her head around to pronounce various billboards X-rated, evidence of how dangerously sleazy the States had become. He’d been stung with resentment at first, so haute couture, Mont Blanc pens and leather appointment books in their laps, exuding perfume and a passion for the high-tensile-strengthened threads of Bangkok tailors. Not much older than Zala, but so confident, unentangled. Then he’d found himself relishing the sting, listening assiduously for more to envy as they chattered on about wine cellars, the swing and drape of French crepe, their favorite runway models, the utter baroque of nouvelle cuisine, flirty princes and yacht weekends, predictions of Hong Kong hegemony in fashion, and the shit they put up with as Black women. Anecdotes on the last item sliding them into a brooding silence, one staring out of the window, another scribbling in her book, the third bent over powdering her toes, his foot going to sleep on the pedal. And in the lengthening quiet he’d felt a sharp hunger for corns, burning blisters, an all-out knockout fight about his abridged uniform—anything but the dreariness that threatened to envelop him whenever he slowed down.

Approaching the light along Moreland, Spence’s eyes fell on the untanned ass of a curly-headed infant, half the Coppertone ad hidden by a building, the dog pulling the baby girl’s panties down out of view. He tried to imagine what the crimped-hair woman would say about that. It had been a thigh-to-navel briefs ad that had originally set her off. Then, near an elementary school, a blonde sprawled across the roof of a Buick with her legs cocked in the direction of the schoolyard provoked a tirade about the sex-charged environment of infantilized America. Climbing out of the limo at Lenox, she’d vowed to get off a hot letter to Calvin Klein about his jeans ads as she scowled up into the crotch of Brooke Shields. Ahead, at the far end of the five-lane highway at Constitution, Spence saw the heavy-browed model/actress again smiling down from a billboard for
Blue Lagoon
—boy and girl cousins marooned on a South Seas island grow to puberty teasing the audience panting for the approaching hot moment. Disney porn. Spence recalled an earlier film of
hers and the reviews Sonny quoted as part of his argument that Spence was a drag—“tasteful.”
Pretty Baby
—a preadolescent prostitute in a New Orleans whorehouse becomes the obsession of an adult scopophiliac. Sonny. “I’m old enough.” “No way.” The memory of another child whore in the disturbing movie about the crazed Viet vet,
Taxi Driver
, still a little too vivid for comfort. A child actress, Jodie Foster, playing a twelve-year-old whore. Where the hell were people’s heads at?

Spence drove slowly over the expanse referred to as a “railroad trestle” in the police report. Lanes of traffic, sloping abutments on either side, one could believe in a whole continent as concrete, but “railroad trestle” was what the report said. He hooked a turn and drove by the underpass, got out to examine the bushes and trees for two-month-old signs. Under which tree had the Wyche boy been found clutching leaves? Had the crime-lab techs confirmed that the leaves matched those in the vicinity? He stepped back and looked up at the overpass that had felt like nothing more, driving along it, than a widened extension of the smooth-graded boulevard. The cylindrical railings above the chest-high embankments of concrete seemed hardly inducive to acrobatics, most especially not for a small boy frightened of heights. Horseplay, they figured. No way, his family had said. Running from a maniac, the boy might have risked the climb, Spence thought, shading his eyes and trying to conjure the scene. Most likely thrown. But the case wasn’t on the Task Force’s list. “Probable accident,” though the patrolmen originally had penned in “suspected foul play.” Spence tried not to think about going down to the station and arguing his citizen’s right to see the files.

By six o’clock he realized that each time he’d returned from a site to pick up the women, he cherished the reunions in an excessively sentimental way. They worked so hard, looked so good, moved so well among the crystal and ermine, smiling their smiles, making their deals, working their show with those Mont Blancs, tapping a bony shoulder for a swivel turn to see how the cape flared. So good that Spence forgot himself and the forgetfulness felt good, and he began to make up things about the four of them: cousins at a family reunion. Through glass, through openings in drapes, from behind lucite easels holding featured designs, he watched them, cherishing them, faces in the family album, characters in a yearbook. He let himself be talked into rushing them from the reception midway through the first setup of champagne to take
in a bit of the trunk show at the Promenade way out on Cobb Parkway, miles from the Memorial Avenue address he’d planned to follow up on in that time slot, then doubling back to the Hyatt before the swan centerpiece melted and the crudités underwent transmogrification.

Earlier, before he pushed cordiality toward the familiar—the three women seemingly as glad to see him, as a rescuer who whisked them away from ascots, crisp linen jackets, and all that sucking in, to collapse in the backseat freshly vacuumed each time and the upholstery plumped, ashtrays gleaming, covers removed from the drop-leaf tables so they didn’t have to interrupt their postgame analysis to hunt for the release catch—he would have found a way to discourage their going so far from the metro area. But the flinty one had mugged in his direction when a bronze-gelled man she’d been talking to turned away for a moment to cough into his handkerchief, transforming the peach-colored square into an iodine rag, and that fleeting drop of the mask revealing a cutup from elementary school chastened him; he was, after all, out of uniform, which could be misinterpreted as disrespect, an unwillingness to do the whole chauffeur number for sisters. Then Edie had slipped in the middle of an anecdote about some woman with a chocolate jones who’d been astonished that Edie too could afford Godiva, and called him “girrrrrl,” but didn’t backstitch to alter it, trusting him to translate it as “friend.” So he suggested a mini-tour of Auburn later, feeling very generous about his time. Then, too, Deidre had squashed herself in the corner of the elevator, digging her elbows into the carpeted walls trying to hike herself up out of her shoes, and he’d wanted to bend down and gently remove them but instead made his body available to lean on, neither coming on nor making more of the moment than it was, her turning suddenly and asking if he was as nice as he seemed because she couldn’t tell, her face so wide open. He answered quietly that yes he was a nice man, certain that careless others had stepped into the opening without removing their shoes. He would have agreed to go anywhere she had her heart set on going.