Those Bones Are Not My Child (89 page)

“I’ve seen you somewhere,” Zala persisted. “I keep thinking it was a school. Do you know Maisie, or maybe it’s Mazeen? I never can get her name straight. She’s a friend of … ahh …” She motioned toward the equipment.

“Mr. Haynes?” The woman shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m new. I found this job through the placement office. It’s just for two weeks.”

“The placement office?”

“At Atlanta Junior College. Maybe that’s where you’ve seen me? I work in the bookstore there.”

“Is Mr. Haynes’s wife named Maisie?”

“You can ask him.” She looked at her watch. Kmart. Maybe Sears.

“You don’t hear that name much anymore, do you? I once knew a nurse named Maisie when I was in kindergarten.”

If she’s Maisie, she gets first prize, Zala was thinking when she heard familiar footfalls behind her in the hall.

“For some people,” the Victims Aid attorney was saying to Spence, “no lamp shades, no anti-Semitism. Either show them the lynched body or shut up about mistreatment of Blacks.” She scraped one of the folding chairs out of formation and sat down.

“But the evidence—”

“Evidence? Unless you can put the killers on the stand to confess in open court, forget it. They’ve got their man.”

“They’re going to go with Williams, then?”

“That’s right. The defense team’s efforts to introduce another …”

She held up two fingers, forming a zero. “Zilch. What goes on here?”

The assistant was about to answer but instead stood up. Zala turned but missed the entrance of the glass man, Haynes, who came in talking and handing out his cards. More importantly, she missed any look of recognition that might have passed between him and Sonny, who was standing in the hall pointing her out to Jonesy. She glanced down at the card Spence passed across the aisle—
CHARLES A. HAYNES, LIGHT DESIGNS, INC
., a PO box in Decatur—while Jonesy told her something about a call he’d gotten from Dave.

“If you’ll form a semicircle,” Haynes instructed, motioning the youngsters jammed behind Zala to sit on the floor up front, “I’ll begin.”

Tall, slender, dancerlike in a sky-blue jumpsuit with many zippered pockets, Haynes didn’t look like a man who crouched behind seats and made threats. A charmer, he held a gold-tipped cigarette in one hand and an industrial igniter in the other, and he didn’t spit as he talked. She turned to look at Sonny as the man lit the torch and gave the frowzy assistant instructions.

Sonny was standing in the hall next to Bestor, who was dressed as a pirate. They leaned against each other looking in. Their arms folded across their chests, they wore expressions of mild interest. Older students stood behind them. From somewhere Sonny had found a strip of leather with a cowrie shell. He wore it tied around his head, the shell centered on his forehead. Zala studied Haynes. Spanish or Seminole in the ancestry maybe, or Luzana Creole, he was closer to the description of Maisie. She listened carefully to his voice.

“Next to being a movie star,” he smiled, “being a neon glass artist is the quickest way to get your name up in lights.”

His audience laughed appreciatively as he pulled on a pair of shiny white gloves.

“The job requirements are minimal,” he continued. “An ability to work with your hands, and a desire to manipulate and to mold.”

His aide held up two halves of a mold, boardlike pieces with a hole at the end for inserting the glass. Zala and Spence exchanged looks.

Addressing those at his feet, Haynes went on in a light baritone. “A glass designer can earn anywhere from ten to twenty dollars an hour, depending on the kind of firm you work for. Advertising agencies, for example, that furnish stores and other businesses with signs, frequently contract designers such as myself. I consider myself more of an artist than anything else,” he said. He picked up one of the blue tubes and slid his hand over it caressingly.

“I prefer working in homes with an interior decorator. I design special things to hang over people’s bars. People’s names usually.” He held up a sample. “Sometimes in this line of work, you have to be outdoors, though, to make sure your piece is hung correctly on a motel or a restaurant.”

The Victims Aid attorney, bored, got up and squeezed past those crowding into the booth.

“I should mention that a fun part of the work is playing with fire.” He leered as he twirled the tube in the flames, and the children laughed. “Ahh, you like to play with fire?” he asked one of Kofi’s classmates. “You apply heat to soften it up so it can be shaped as you desire.” He held the tube to his mouth and blew, continually turning the glass in the flame. “A little hot air to keep the game going. We don’t want the thing collapsing before we’ve had our fun, do we?”

“Noooo,” the children up front said.

“This can be done orally, with your mouth,” he explained, “or with a pump.” He fitted a length of rubber hose around the end of the glass tube while his aide squeezed the accordion bellows.

“With experience,” he said, selecting more tubes, “you can handle several at once. You develop a sense … how much heat … to soften things up … when to blow … and when it’s time to bend them to your will. I’ll need a volunteer.”

Hands shot up. But Haynes continued blowing and rolling, closing his eyes each time he placed his mouth on the tube’s opening. His lashes seemed long and thick for a man. Zala outfitted Haynes in a silk knit,
expensive pumps, and a tortoiseshell headband. His hair was dark and wavy, his skin smooth, his shoulders narrow. When he’d fitted the glass rods to the pump he looked toward the back in Sonny’s direction.

“We’ll need a name. And we’ll need a few volunteers to bend the tubes.” He held up pairs of gloves and swung them, still looking toward the rear of the booth.

“Valerie!”

It was Bestor Brooks supplying the name, Sonny beating him on his back and trying to muzzle him with his hand. But three of the younger children up front jumped up and grabbed the gloves.

“ ‘Val’ will be fine for our demonstration,” Haynes said, helping a robot volunteer push the silver-sprayed boards off his arms so he could bend the pink tube into a V. Cinderella twisted the blue tube into a cursive L. A gangster in white suspenders twisted the green tube into a cursive A.

Several children supplied grunts. The older students hummed the
Superman
theme as the boy in the robot suit played to the audience. There was a scatter of applause when he bowed and sat down, wolf whistles when Cinderella curtsied, and stamping of feet when the gangster gave up his tube and shook his own hand over his head.

“And now we’ll fuse them together,” Haynes said, twisting the nozzle of the torch and directing the thin flame to the bent tubes. His aide stood by with a sticky jar with its brush cap lifted. “Manipulating is a matter of knowing when to apply heat and when to let things cool off. That’s how you stay in control of what you’re doing. Hands on, hands off. It’s an art.”

He picked up a pink tube and a tool and with one crack lopped three inches off one end. “Just to cut it down to size,” he explained. From the jar he brushed on a substance that looked like mud and directed the flame at the bottom of the letters that now lay on the table.

“How’d you learn this? Did you have to go to school?”

“The best way to learn this art is from a master. There are books you can read and courses you can take. But I recommend finding someone to study under. And this is one skill you don’t have to worry about the robots taking over,” he smiled. “It needs the human touch. A special touch.” He inserted the sticky piece against the bottom of the letters, played the flame over it for a second, then turned off the torch.

“Do you have to know how to draw?”

“All you have to know how to draw is people—draw people to you. If you can attract customers,” Haynes said, peeling off his gloves, “you’ll do all right. Neon is the sign of the times. People like to see their names in lights.” He held the piece up. It spelled “Val” in script with a slash running underneath ending in a finlike tail. The applause was hearty.

“And this is a skill you can travel with. As you can see, it’s portable.” He kicked the locker, then strode toward the hallway with the finished piece.

“Where have you traveled? Go to Smyrna much, or Florida?”

Haynes stopped by Zala’s chair and gave her a quizzical look, then moved on, answering one of the questions a parent asked about colors. “I work in a range of forty to fifty different colors. Most people limit themselves to twenty. But I have lots of helpers to prepare my own tints.”

“Might Maisie be one of your helpers? Or do you tend to use children?”

Spence stood up when Zala did. No one else seemed to find her questions odd or her tone peculiar. Most people were oohing and ahhing and getting up to see where Haynes was going. Bestor Brooks was holding his arms out to receive the piece, but it was to Sonny that Haynes presented it. Spence moved quickly and grabbed Zala by the belt of her dress.

“Where do you get your helpers from, Mr. Haynes?” She fairly growled it.

“Volunteers. As you can see,” Haynes smiled amiably. Already children were rushing him, waving their Careers Day flyers under his nose for his autograph.

Kofi joined the others crowding around the glass bender. He didn’t know whether to ask for the name of a book to learn from or for the man’s phone number, but he couldn’t take his eyes off the glass bender’s hands. He was like a magician. One minute he had a gold-tipped cigarette in his hand, and then it vanished and he was unscrewing the cap off his pen. The pen had a glass nib just like the one in Grandaddy Wesley’s dresser drawer.

“That’s neat,” Kofi turned to tell Sonny, but Sonny was hunching over the piece named after his girlfriend and his father was arguing with
his mother about something. Kofi moved around to the other side where the bigger kids were asking the glass bender about classes.

“Don’t start that again, Zala.”

Kofi heard it. It made him shrink up inside. They would come in the house together and she would stop them and make them listen. Maybe there’d be scratchy noises in the ceiling, but that wouldn’t be it. She’d say she’d left the TV on and now it was off. Or she’d say the circus poster or the African picture was slanted like somebody bumped into it. Or she’d say her book was on the wrong page, pointing to her notes that said
this page
and then to the book opened to
this page
and
this page
. Then she’d make Daddy check the windows and doors and say the locks had to be changed and she’d pick up bits of paper and say somebody had stepped on them while they were out. Then he’d say, “Don’t start that again.”

Kofi went to the fountain and let water splash on his face. It scared him the way his father said it. He would say it to him too. But Kofi kept on hearing a prowler around the side of the house at night. The wheels of the Herby Curby would squeak. Buster the cat wasn’t big enough to do that. And if it was a dog, a dog would make noise. Then he’d hear footsteps on the roof. But he’d be too scared to move or call out. And then it would get light. But when Sonny climbed down from the upper bunk and shook him awake, there was nobody out there sloshing gasoline up against the house or trying to dig a hole through the roof to drop a bomb through. He stopped telling his father about it ’cause he would say, “Don’t start that again, Kofi.”

Kofi saw his mother tear away and rush up the hall with one of Uncle Dave’s boys. It looked like she was after Sonny, ’cause he was running ahead. And now his father was leaving without him, like he’d forgotten all about him and Kenti. Kofi weaved through the students talking to the glass bender and ran after his father.

“Stick close, Kofi. Where’s your sister?”

“Eating. She’s always eating. Trying to grow.”

Kofi adjusted his helmet and checked the buckles holding his oxygen tank in place while his father stood there raking in his mustache and sweating.

“What’s going on?” Kofi followed his father’s eyes and found himself looking at the glass bender who was looking up the hall at them for
a moment before he turned his back and talked with the big kids and some of the parents.

“Kofi, this may sound a little peculiar, but could you picture that guy passing himself off as a woman?”

“The glass bender? Oh yeah?”

“I’m asking, do you think he could convince you that he was a woman?”

“Guess so. I mean, he’s not very muscular or nothing.”

“You were standing in back. Did you get the impression he and Sonny knew each other?”

Kofi concentrated. The more he pressed himself for details, the heavier the oxygen tank seemed on his back. “I don’t think I was paying attention.” And he was sweating too. His father threw back his head and put his hands on his chest like he was having a heart attack, so Kofi thought some more. “Why don’t we just ask Sonny?” But when he headed for the gym, his father clapped his hand on Kofi’s helmet and stopped him.

No streetlights, no bus-stop posts, no mailboxes. The neighborhood was devoid of color too. Mouse-brown bushes, gunmetal strips of sidewalk.

“How far, Jonesy?”

“We’re almost there.”

A gust of wind stung the cab windows with grit. Crickets were loud. Moths beat against tufts of spiky grass in the scraggly yards. In the headlights, white was sprinkled around a cinder-block doorstep. Too generous to be soap powder, too early for snow, but then the area seemed to exist outside of the seasons. Borax for ants and roaches, she supposed.

Jonesy leaned forward and tapped the driver. “Right up there.” He pointed to where houses slanted uphill fifteen yards to their right.

“The street ends here,” the driver said.

“You can go up. It’s not much of a hill.”

“You talking circus talk, T. J.”

She looked around wishing she’d been in when Dave called. “What sort of people are they?” What kind of lives were lived around here?
What sort of work did people do—sell poor whiskey, hot clothes, mean dogs?

“They’re cool.”

“I can wait here,” the driver said, leaning back and plopping his cap on his face. “Or I can go find me some coffee and be back in twenty minutes. Which?”