Those Bones Are Not My Child (43 page)

Dave heard the dogs, the sirens, the car horns, and stepped out to the stoop of the Job Corps Center at Westlake and Ezra Church. A scooter cop was wheeling around in the street, dragging his feet, holding up traffic, trying to get his walkie-talkie to work. Dave stood on the steps and looked up and down Westlake, cocking his head to pinpoint
the crisis. Traffic followed the motor scooter toward Hightower, though the dogs seemed loudest in the direction of Bankhead.

“What is it, Mr. Morris?” A youth in a wine-red ski jacket came out of the building as Dave jingled change in his pocket and tried to get straight the seven numbers scrambling around in his head.

“Whatever it is, it ain’t far. Listen up, Jonesy—I’ll be right back. Don’t blow your appointment. Get back in there in the line.”

“A line? A damn line? Hey, Morris, I can’t relate to no line,” the youth drawled, swaying on rubbery legs, his hands making duckbill passes in the direction of his youth worker’s back. “Dig it. A line is a Western concept and I’m an Afrikan. Dig yourself, imposing a white man’s concept on a Black man’s mind. Wow. That’s deep. That’s cold, is what it is. Yeah, in line, keep in line. Wow, that’s some cold shit, Morris.”

Dave left the youth weaving and jabbing on the steps and ran down to the corner of Simpson. Cars were U-turning in the lot of the Smoky Pit, then speeding off in the direction of Bankhead.

“An explosion over at Bowen Homes!” he heard the druggist shout across to the peddlers who had paused in their stacking of jeans, tapes, and ceramic tigers on tables lined up in the Pit’s lot. “The day-care center, he says.”

Dave reached the phone as the druggist bent toward his informant, tuning the dials on a shortwave radio.

“Holy shit,” the druggist’s informant said. “Bomb threats are coming in over the wire so fast, the cops don’t know where to go first. It’s Code One all over the place. Wait now.” He shushed the druggist, who in turn held his hand up in the direction of the peddlers to put them on alert for the next bulletin.

“The dispatcher just told them to go on silent band. I think they’re going to scramble the rest of us.” He pulled the aerial up as far as it would go.

Dave yanked the phone off the hook, remembering how they’d used scrambling devices to delay the news of King’s assassination. But the word spread from Memphis to the place he’d called home in a matter of minutes anyway. He slammed coins into the phone, one ear cocked in the direction of the two men standing in front of the pharmacy glued to the radio. There was crackling static, then a sudden burst of messages of numbers. He turned aside and got his own numbers together, already
cursing Teo and Beemer, the two gray boys Zala’s ole man had such faith in, doubting beforehand whatever they’d say if they couldn’t name names, license plates, and precise room numbers of the hotel out in Cobb County.

Speaker directed the student to let him out near the church and then to get back to his frat brother at the Radio Shack who’d first called in the news to the campus. He followed on foot the crowd that ran into the firehouse. Finding all lanes empty, the rig, pumper, and the rescue wagon gone, the crowd about-faced and ran down the slopes to Bowen. From the steps of a house back of the station, a woman in a shower cap beckoned to Speaker.

“Here now,” she said, holding out a dishpan of ointment jars, Band-Aid cans, and wads of cotton batting. “Take this along,” giving him the load, then turning to take up a quilt folded on her porch glider. “They’ll need this too.” She came down the steps sideways, piling it on top of the pan and backing Speaker out of the yard. Slow and easy but not weary or old, the woman was the essence of calm.

“Did they catch anybody?”

“Catch?” She crimped her mouth and moved around to the side of the house, where a rooster, cockade wilted, was dragging his tailfeathers in the dirt. A white hen was moving around the yard in circles, its pale yellow feet spattered with shit. “When you find that out, baby, you come tell me,” she said, then turned away, calling out to someone round back to take the coffee off the burner.

“Then no one’s been arrested?” Speaker stepped between a row of plants standing on end in tall tin cans to follow the woman.

“You know better than that,” she said, sticking two fingers up under the cap’s elastic to scratch her head. But before he could ask about that, she began talking again. “I was sewing on my quilts when I heard it. It sounded like someone was rending fabric. Except it went on too long. You know? No fabric in the world tears like that.” She looked past him—the apartment complex, a terra-cotta bowl set down in a hollow of green, had had a fist thrust through the side of the clay and was crumbling. “Ain’t satisfied killing them one by one—now they feel they gotta blow ’em all up at once. Want coffee?” she added, before he could ask about “they.” “May be your last chance to get something hot in your
system.” She hugged her jacket around her and continued moving toward the rear of the house.

“I’d better get these things down there,” Speaker said, conflicted. “What have you heard so far?”

“Heard? What’s to hear?” The woman turned and looked at him, seeming to age suddenly. Her gaze was quiet as two hens waddled near her legs. “My father use to ask me, bless his soul …” She laughed huskily and the hens moved away. “Ever notice how chicken mess is gray and white? Whatchu think the white is?”

Speaker lifted his brows till they met the edge of his knit cap.

“The white is chicken shit too, baby. It’s chicken shit too.” she said, heading round toward the back and talking over her shoulder. And then she was gone, a screen door swinging open on squeaky hinges, then bamming shut.

Speaker stepped back through the row of tinned plants. He carried the load carefully down onto Yates, dizzy with the attempt to take it all in and not lose the quilt. Leah’s van was parked on the grass by Chivers, men in army-green parkas were giving first aid, the rescue medics daubing with gauze pads on tongs, people bundling children, one child’s arm wrapped in a towel with an apron sash as a tourniquet, staff racing back and forth doing a head count. Speaker spotted Lafayette’s shaved head among those tending the children, and he headed for him, the vet who’d suggested that the caravan patrolling the killers’ route stop by the state police to request the help of the K-9 search team. Lafayette was applying Mercurochrome to the face of a little boy. Speaker caught a glimpse of another vet, Mason, who always wore a hachi-maki headband and had nunchaku sticks stuck in his back pocket. Heading toward him, Speaker saw Leah and Zala recording and paused just as Mason ducked into the wrecked building.

“I heard the wind screaming and screaming,” a woman cracking ice trays against her front steps was saying. “But I told myself it’s not the season for tornadoes and hurricanes now, is it? But who’d’ve thought …” she began and could go no further. She handed ice cubes packed in dish towels out to neighbors who passed them down the line to those administering first aid.

“Taste it? You can still taste it,” a man in a bathrobe was saying to those clustered around him. “A sour taste in the air. I first thought tear gas, then I thought Three Mile Island. Remember last spring on TV? A
taste in the air, they said.” He moved around the recording women when the school crossing guard ran up to disperse them again.

“What’s the matter with you people? Help pass out these blankets and try to find more antiseptic. Can’t you see this is an emergency?” She reserved her hardest look for Leah, who was wiping her glasses with the hem of her dress. “Put that damn thing down and pitch in!” she ordered before she sprinted off, yelling to people in doorways to get more ice and not to tie up the phones.

“Don’t think for a minute, sister, that this isn’t important.” Leah fitted the electric-blue glasses back on. Zala nodded, looking around at the wreckage. “And don’t get squeamish,” Leah added, retrieving the mike from between her knees. She angled it toward a brother in sweats unwrapping a cartridge of film.

“Somebody’s got a lot to answer to,” he said, loading an Instamatic. “A helluva lot.” He glanced at Speaker, muscles taut in his jaw, then headed in the direction of the playground to document.

Speaker shook out the quilt and draped it around the little boy Lafayette was attending, mostly clowning around now with his khaki cap on funny, trying to distract the boy from his pain. The welts that ran down the boy’s face and neck crinkled when he decided that Lafayette was a sketch, bald head and all, and smiled a tentative smile.

“See about that guy,” Lafayette said quietly to Speaker, motioning his chin in the direction of the man in the tattersall vest carrying a child in his outstretched arms. Part of the boy’s head had been blown away. “Wh-where the fuck the police?” the man kept saying as one of the rescue medics tried to get a pulse, then tried to take the child from the man. He resisted, still stammering the question. Two medics worked on the child.

“Let me have him, brother,” Speaker said gently.

“Wh-where the fuck the police?”

“We called them. Didn’t I call?” A woman in a floral apron was talking into the mike. She shook the arm of the man standing beside her holding a crock pot rapidly being filled up with bloody gauze. “He saw me,” she told Leah. “He can tell you. A neighbor lady up the way rang me up and told me to look out the window. Must have been five or so this morning. Still darkish, but it was plain as could be what she was talking about.” She pointed toward a building near the day care. “Two white men on that roof just like she said. Sure as I’m standing here, two
white men were on that roof. So I called the police. Didn’t I call?” She tugged at the man’s sleeve again. “Woke up my husband and told him, then went right to the phone, ’cause what white men doing around here except on Sundays, when you see a few up at the old church on Bankhead? But did the police come?” She elbowed her husband.

The paramedic dropped a gauze pad in the pot, and the woman’s husband eased the quilt-draped boy toward a chair two young women had dragged to the walk from their apartment. “That’s right,” he said, tucking a blanket around the child. “That’s exactly right,” he said again when Leah held the mike toward his mouth, tugging the cord for Zala to follow.

Spence rode the bumper of an ambulance, then parked the limo at Hightower Place behind Dave’s station wagon. The ambulance continued on, lurching down the slope and across the grass toward the cordon, attendants jumping from the vehicle even as it moved, gurneys clanging to the pavement. He could hear the police roping off the area to preserve the scene for evidence, and the fire department hosing down the dust, issue stern injunctions to staff, parents, tenants, and the vets not to cross the line. He’d heard nothing yet about the bombers since the fleet owner had come roaring over the limo radio, reception murky, for in the background the owner had his CB up high, encrypted police calls vying for Spence’s attention. He made his way through the band of people ringing the hillside, then down into the area, his ears like radar. Had the bastards been caught? Had the ringleader talked? Did they now know where the missing children were?

He spotted Mason, the munitions expert in the karate headband, inside the cordon arguing with a tall man in a slicker who was apparently ordering Mason off. Mason took a long drag on his cigarette, then field-stripped it, holding the pinched-off coals in his hand, but refused to leave. That was the man who would know something, Spence thought, moving through the crowd, listening: Who would kill little children? Keep the faith, we don’t want to give in to hate. But I heard that. Leave off rumor mongering. But … Things ain’t bad enough? Who would kill, keep the faith, I heard, hang on now—the words chased around in his head, offering nothing. Spence pressed his way past two women in heavy sweaters recording people and tried to keep his
eyes on Mason, who was inching backward toward the building, ignoring the tall man in the slicker, who gestured but made no move to stop the vet or to follow.

“I didn’t understand what was happening,” one of the staff was reporting when Zala turned around but got no look of recognition from her husband. At the first concussion, the woman explained, she’d been slammed against the extra cots stacked against the wall, a rain of plaster clouding her vision. “All I could think of was, where’s the broom? Where’s the broom? Can you imagine that? That’s what I was thinking when I heard little Andre scream and saw Nell running toward me. How are we ever going to clean this place up?” The woman clutched her face and wheeled around. “Where’s Nell Robinson? Did Nell get out?” She stumbled toward the building and was stopped by chest-high ropes and heavy hoses at her ankles.

“Wh-where the fuck the police?” An attendant took the child from the man in tattersall and used his shoulder to prevent a woman from climbing into the ambulance.

“His shoe,” the woman whispered. “Where’s his other shoe?” The man in the bathrobe held her from behind.

“That’s right,” a man in a dark flannel lining from a topcoat said. He cleared his throat and moved closer to the mike. “I called the police twice in one day. I was out walking the dog along Jackson Parkway this morning.” He pointed toward the hole in the fence back of the nursery, then slapped his leg with a rolled-up newspaper. “I saw two white men skulking around by the fence there. Maybe five o’clock or five-thirty, I didn’t have my watch on at the time, but that’s generally when Prince gets me up. Now, you can ask any of the community workers around this way and they’ll verify that not two weeks ago we had to run off some bigots come around here with their hate literature. Pretty brash, wouldn’t you say, handing out hate sheets to us? To
us!
” He smacked his leg with the newspaper bat.

“And you called the police?” Leah asked.

“That is correct. I called them as soon as I got back to the house. As a matter of fact, I cut the walk short to do that. Reported two prowlers to the police and gave their descriptions. I called again when the dishes started rattling in the cupboard not a half hour ago. I knew it wasn’t nobody’s earthquake. My wife kept saying it was an earthquake. But I knew it was something just like it was. I’d been feeling uneasy ever
since I walked the dog and saw them. But do the police come when you need them? They come pretty damn quick when you’re getting put out the clinic for having the nerve to think health is your right. Come mighty quick then,” he concluded, swatting his leg, the anger he vented as much self-distraction from horror as commentary on the police.