Those Bones Are Not My Child (45 page)

“Please,” the thermos woman said, going to her. “Get up, baby. Get on up off your knees.”

Paulette trotted from Emergency to Pediatrics to the twelve-by-ten windowless room where people waited for news about the casualties. Leah, at her heels, having helped to bring in the wounded and the prostrate, had been using a miniaturized transistor recorder to pick up comments from the hospital staff, the police, the media, and parents outraged that so many children had been denied treatment at the site and ambulance rides to the hospitals. Paulette took a deep breath.

“They’re still coming in. But so far, six are here with serious injuries, two in critical condition with third-degree burns and a skull
fracture.” That was all she would say in exchange for five minutes’ peace to talk with two families alone.

Kofi, at the blackboard drawing the connected boxes of city government, was just turning to answer Bernie Parks, Mrs. McGovern nowhere in sight, when he saw his father in the doorway, holding his sister’s hand and looking at him funny. Lots of parents were in the hall, crowded around the vice-principal and talking in hoarse whispers.

All morning the class had been so caught up in the excitement of fire engines clanging past, raising their voices with the police-car
wee-ahh
and the dogs, they hadn’t noticed when the teacher stepped out, their attention on the window, the streets, the wild goings-on beyond the flagpole. And Kofi, the chalk in his hand, none of his boxes complete figures, for he too was impatient with the closed-in, left-out feeling, was already jumping out the window, running the streets after a hook-and-ladder, free to go anywhere, reckless and happy, though he knew sirens didn’t mean circus or rodeo or tent revivals. Even though he knew sirens were nothing to be glad about, he was excited and wanted to be part of whatever it was. Till he saw his father in the doorway looking like that. His excitement fisted and turned on him, for whatever was wrong had come to get him and there was nowhere to go except up against the cold blackboard. A small boy, he’d meant no harm, he wanted to tell his father, already denying inside his clothes that he’d ever thought about running away, ever wished for anything more exciting than putting his part of the project on the board. He was caught. Found out. So when his father reached for him looking like he was looking, looking like he was looking through him, Kofi raised his arms to ward off the blow or whatever it was coming to him.

From the moment the two motorcycle cops had pulled on their gauntlet-style gloves and revved up, cutting a swath for the police cruiser to leave, rumors of what had been surreptitiously removed from the scene spread across the slopes like grassfire. A fuse, a detonator, fragments of plastique, an unexploded grenade, bomb, or stick of dynamite? Lafayette, a bullet-headed trajectory, outdistanced Speaker winging
through the crowd last numbered at two hundred and found finally the man he was looking for. A drab, flat-faced man who’d been mistaken earlier for someone from the coroner’s office, he’d been allowed through the cordon with the techs from the mobile crime lab unit. Barely whispering, his arms hanging straight down, his right encumbered in the telling by the black bag he carried, his left extended an additional eight inches by the magnifying glass he held, he told it simply—“A black metal box, so big, so high. It caused a lot of excitement. They flew out of there like a bat out of hell.”

“Well, of course,” the young reporter in the tie said. “They took it to the crime lab to dust it for prints.”

“Maybe,” Lafayette said. “But didn’t you notice that a lab unit was already on the scene? Are you covering this story? How come you didn’t follow the patrol car?” Lafayette rubbed his scalp until the reporter picked up his cue and hurried off, but only as far as the ropes to ask one of the police where the crime lab was that the metal box had been taken to. “Reid,” Lafayette said to Speaker, blowing through his teeth, “do you believe this guy?”

Speaker pulled the reporter aside and learned that he’d gotten nowhere with his questions. Speaker offered to help him track the police cruiser, pulling him through the crowd, cheek by jowl, toward the house back of the fire station. Reluctant to leave now that Maynard Jackson was present, the young reporter resisted.

“What makes you think they’d try to bury evidence?”

“Come, African,” was all Speaker would say, lining up the phone calls he would have to make to locate the cruiser.

Gaston’s wasn’t the only tow truck circling in the vicinity, simply one of the late arrivals and one of the few who knew from the giddyap that it wasn’t a wreck he was heading toward for business because one of his part-time helpers had come crashing into the shop, triggering two of the three booby traps and barely escaping getting maimed, and told him. And Gaston, pulling clear of the pile-up of garbled words two things—“children” and “dynamite”—snapped the padlocks shut and hurried to the Ford wrecker, not stopping for his toolbox, only the pliers he needed to tune his sometimey CB, the helper still talking at him
about fifty to a hundred pounds’ worth of dynamite damage done to a school out at Bowen Homes.

Buses, delivery trucks, and cars double-parked, triple-parked in some of the side streets left Gaston no alternative but to pull up in someone’s yard, knocking over a row of tin cans and upsetting the plants. He slipped his card between the cushions of the porch glider by way of saying he’d be responsible for the mishap and lumbered down into the crowd, not sure where he was going, but sure that he could help out in some way. Everywhere he moved he heard people damning somebody’s worthless soul to hell, then saying in the next breath not to let this outrage provoke. He looked in vain for wide-shouldered Spencer and his wife with the deep-set eyes.

The corps of bodyguards was posted around the makeshift platform, and Mayor Maynard Jackson took up the bullhorn. But the crowd did not settle down immediately. It seemed too soon, a mere half hour on the scene commiserating with parents and staff, for speaking lines. Time out while blood-pressure medication vials were popped open. Time. The trees flayed to the pith, dust still spiraling from the rubble of bricks, a fine mist in the air as the fire brigade wrapped up the hoses, bits of twine being plucked from clothes that had been pressed by the swell up against the ropes. Time. The enormity of it all hadn’t been parceled out yet to be shouldered by the many lest it land on too few. There were still those hum-talking about the evil of this world, girl, the evil of this world, to restore, hopefully, their equilibrium. And those who latched on to every event as a sign of the Final Days weren’t finished arguing against those of the seize-the-time persuasion. And those well-trained to expect no inheritance other than more bitter bread were caught in between. Youths, glancing shyly at each other when their parents interrupted their weeping to issue dire threats, made plans for day-night vigils and clever diversions to protect their parents from jumping a meter reader or dusting a social worker doubling back to check on ADFC eligibility. For others, though, it was time to get it on.

“If he’s the Maynard I know,” a man shouted toward the front of the crowd, “he won’t dillydally about this, ’cause he knows we’re not prepared to swallow nonsense. And if he says ‘Let the trenches be dug,’ I’ll
be the first to pick up a shovel,” drawing a scatter of applause here, harrumphs there, loose talk of picking up other things, and questions the mayor began trying to answer, saying that the evidence so far, so far, so far …

“Hold it down. What did he say?”

“What the hell you expect him to say? He’s the mayor. What other recourse he got?” A shove in response to this outrage—raising a leg on the mayor. Others agitated by mothball fumes, stale coffee, bay rum, nicotine, sweaty Noxzema, bad breath, and thoughts of actions they were pretending might not be necessary in order to live with themselves with honor, shoved back.

“Tell the truth, Maynard!” a woman shouted. “ ’Cause we know the devil is never at just one door. Have bombs gone off anywhere else?”

Something visibly faltered in Jackson’s face. And for a split second he waffled, first to the right as though to confer with a police official, then to the left as though to signal the corps to get him the hell out of there. But he was only trying to find his footing on the shaky platform, several members of the crowd assured each other as Jackson confidently raised the bullhorn again.

“Let him talk, for crying out loud!”

“I second the motion!”

For this, after all, was no bow-bent grin-the-vote-in politician, no shade-tree fixer, no jackleg hustler or despoiler. This was Himself, the Mayor, Big M, His Honuh Bruthu J, the Chief, the Silver-Tongued Emperor who knew just how to enliven dull newsprint, telling the good ole boys of big biznis to kiss his royal yellow behind while he ushered in the Second Reconstruction. And yeah, sure, people reminded each other, he’d messed up on occasion, the man’s human and give me a break, like his handling of the garbage workers’ strike, yeah, yeah, but chalk that up to that diet Dick Gregory put him on without adding the postscript that in case of emergency brainwork to grab a fish sammich, un-huh, that ain’t gonna git it but okay. They became a collective ear. Some because they remembered Big M’s father, most likable gent in memory; others because they had a vested interest, having put His Honuh in office and admired his regal ways, and had never had cause to think their trust in the Emperor misplaced; and some because they wanted this scenario over and done with. Silence, cameras rolling,
a zoom-in on the mayor’s black armband as the bullhorn was lifted once more.

“There is no evidence of foul play. I repeat. There is no evidence of anything other than an accident, a tragic accident.”

Relieved, betrayed, nonplussed, hard of hearing, groans and curses mingled with amens and questions. Then jeers, boos, hoots, and hissing roared up higher than the media voice-overs—“Opinions are sharply divided here today.…” The mayor’s eyes, fixed for a moment, overbright, on a spot midway between the front of the crowd and the first straight-ahead camera, wavered, then retreated into the gloom as Mason, hoisted on Lafayette’s shoulders, challenged.

“That’s not what the fire inspector said. Among other evidence of foul play there’s the safety valve that was rigged not to work.”

“That’s not what the inspector said,” the tall man in the slicker countered. “He said that the triggering mechanism that regulates the steam was defective. That is, the safety valve wasn’t working properly.”

The overwrought seized on triggering, while Tattersall, straining to inform the crowd that Slick hadn’t exchanged more than two or three words with the inspector, gave up and lunged, his attack plan thwarted by the overwrought shoving to get closer to Slick to have him repeat. Mason slid down and tried to grab Slick’s lapels, but the rubbery fabric repelled him.

“Man, don’t play expedient politics at a time like this,” Mason pleaded. “People have died here today.” He searched the crowd for the tape-recording sister who might have caught some of the conversation he’d had with the inspector before he left; or failing that, if the recorder was at least present, perhaps Mason could finesse an admission from Slick.

“What about the jacket casing the police raced off with?” someone challenged.

Perhaps Lafayette was pushing people to form an aisle so witnesses could move down front and speak. Police reporters, huddling with the uniformed, muttered that even if it was only a corroded boiler, there was still the problem of “race paranoia.”

“I caution you as your mayor,” the familiar voice broke out over the heads of those who’d moved up to the platform—the vets, the brother in sweats, the man in the plaid flannel lining, the woman in the apron,
the man with the black bag and glass, “do not engage in spreading rumors. If you know something factual, tell the police.”

“Bullshit!” Dave jerked his thumbs in the direction of the high street, and several men and women began moving off.

Most people stayed to question, to argue, to demand to hear the testimony, to try and mend what seemed irrevocably shattered, urging those splintering off to come back, to not form factions. A few stepped away, bowed by a double bereavement; others to privately piece together what they would say and how they would say it at work, at home, to neighbors, to friends on the phone before some bland man with media sheen in his hair robbed the event of its valence. Stepping away from the noise, stepping over the stains on the ground sluiced by a basin of sudsy gray dishwater, they attempted to shape the story.

To be told right, lest it dishonor those who’d lived through it and those who hadn’t, it had to have a particular beginning. A small, quiet, personal thing was called for—the evil iron that had scorched a collar that morning, exact change lost through a hole in the clothes. Insignificant in the scheme of things, it would be offered as a sign of the teller’s humility, as confirmation that cataclysms do give warnings, for there’s an order to the knowable universe, and too, to signal that the teller would not distance himself or herself from communal disaster. The freakishness of the event itself defied description. So, hearing at their backs the announcement of an evening meeting where testimony from the residents and the authorities would be compared, the storytellers jumped over the muddled middle to compose a possible ending. Given what they’d heard so far and sensed, they composed the capture scene. A citizen’s arrest, one Blood was thinking, looking at those racing to follow the broad-backed man muscling his way to the streets, a man possessed, a Popeye Doyle pushing through trains, through airports, through traffic, fixated, no eye for danger, no ear for caution, hellbent, in hot pursuit of the death merchant.

Outside the Fulton County Morgue, Lieutenant John Cameron broke the news to the television audience. Nell Robinson, fifty-eight-year-old teacher of the Bowen Homes Day Care Center, was dead. Ronald Wilcoxin, three-year-old preschooler of Wilkes Circle, was dead.
Andrew Stanford, three, of Chivers Street, was dead. Terrence Bradley, three, of Wilkes Circle, was dead. Kevin Nelson, three, of Wilkes Circle, was dead.