Leaving Atlanta (13 page)

You are in sight of the bus stop when you become aware of the regular thump of footsteps on cold red clay. The earth absorbs
the sound but you feel the tremors through the thin soles of your loafers. Sister, looking for her reflection in a lollipop,
doesn’t notice. You take her hand. Lining the street are small wooden houses in need of paint. Should you run onto one of
the porches? Maybe not. Officer Brown is right: If you don’t know who it is, you don’t know who it’s not. The noise of running
feet behind you is more urgent. Sister looks up at you with a question on her heart-shaped face.

“Don’t look back,” you tell her.

The only choice is to flee on foot, although you are the second-to-the-slowest boy in the entire fifth grade. Some even say
that you run like a girl; poor Sister runs like a
little
girl, but you’ve no other recourse.

“Sister, we have to—”

The hand on your neck is not as heavy as you imagine the hand of death to be. Nor is it particularly clammy.

“Rodney! Wait up.”

You turn around to see Leon smiling broadly. Although the air is cold enough to turn his panting breaths white against the
gray day, Leon’s jacket is open; little drops of sweat stand out on his face like beads of water on the waxed hood of Father’s
car. His skinny ankles poke beneath his too-short trouser legs before disappearing into huge sneakers.

“That was you behind us?” You are relieved enough to weep.

“Yeah. Who you thought it was?”

He looks at your faces and knows. Leon looks at his big shoes for a respectful and apologetic moment. Then he abruptly announces
the reason for his intrusion.

“Say,” he says. “Ain’t you going to give me some of that what you got?” Leon leans closer and speaks almost without moving
his lips.

“Huh,” you say.

“You should give me some of that candy seeing as I’m the one who kept that lady busy while you was handling business.”

He speaks cryptically for Sister’s sake. You appreciate his discretion.

“But—” you begin, meaning to inform him that you take candy from Mrs. Lewis’s store at least thrice weekly without any help.

“What?” Leon says. “You mad ’cause of what I said to Octavia today? I was just messing with her. She live down the street
from me. Where you stay at?”

“Over by Mosely Park,” you say, pointing west.

“All the way over there?” Leon is incredulous.

“It’s just a little while on the bus,” Sister tells him. “We get home right before
Family Feud
.”

“That what I’m talking about,” Leon says to you. “All the way over there, you don’t know how we do it over here. Octavia know
I was just fooling with her. Both of us, we just stay around the corner from here.”

“She—” You want to say something on her behalf.

“Anyway, I was just trying to look out for you. You don’t want people going around saying that you going with the Watusi.”

“She’s not—”

“I
know
she not your girlfriend. That’s what I’m saying. Anyway, she’s mean. Maybe even crazy. Look at my ear where she chunked that
rock at me. That hurted.”

“She’s nice.” This is inadequate but it is all you can muster.

“That’s what I’m
saying
.” Leon gestures toward your bag. “We gonna be friends or what?”

This is quite a proposition. You have never had a friend before, at least not one formally declared. What would this alliance
involve? You are not sure that you even
want
a running buddy. Will Leon approach you at recess while you are working on your drawings, putting his salty, sweaty arm around
your shoulder declaring you to be his “ace boon coon”?

“Man,” Leon says, turning with an angry flourish. “I can’t believe you gonna do me like that.” He kicks the brown leaves as
he heads in the other direction.

“Wait,” you say. “Get whatever you want.” New friends are much easier to accommodate than new enemies.

“Dang!” Leon exclaims, opening your bag. “Did you take the whole store?” He is easily impressed. “Mike and Ike’s, Bit-O-Honey,
Gobstoppers. You got
everything
.” He unwraps a blow-pop and puts it between his teeth and cheek. It juts from his face like a tumor. “That old lady so busy
watching me that she let you clean out the place.” Leon shakes his head. “Don’t know why she thinks you don’t like candy as
much as everybody else.” Leon makes a basket out of his shirttail. “She even makes
girls
leave their bags up front.”

This bit of information smarts, but you don’t comment. The implication hangs in the air like smoke.

Leon has taken more than his share, but he still digs through your bag. “Where the candy corn?” He looks at you, annoyed.

You didn’t realize that you had been filling an invoice. “There might be some in there.”

“No it ain’t. I looked. I can’t believe you forgot the candy corn.” He ties the ends of his shirt together, securing his haul.
“Don’t worry,” he says brightly. “We’ll get some tomorrow.”

You have heard of an epidemic of disappearing black fathers, but you know you will never be as lucky. Yours comes home
every
evening from a long day spent lying on his back underneath malfunctioning automobiles.
I’m my own boss,
he likes to boast. If he were someone else’s boss, perhaps he wouldn’t get so dirty that dinner can never be served until
he has spent most of an hour in the bath removing the evidence of his unsupervised labor. The meal overcooks in aluminum pots
as his voice from the bathroom sings, “Take my arms, I’ll never use them.”

By the time he gets to the table, he seems incapable of song. He approaches your mother’s cooking with a resigned martyrdom.
Mother switches on the television. Father looks at the screen and says simply, “Bastard.”

“Claude L!” Mother is always shocked by bad language.

Your designated chair is not situated to provide a view of the black-and-white television. You can only wonder which bastard
he is talking about. Perhaps it is the president. You twist your body counterclockwise and crane your neck to see what looks
like Mayor Jackson sitting before a table heaped with money.

“Excuse my French,” Father says, as he mercilessly rips a corn muffin in two. “I can’t stand to see that yellow bastard up
there acting like he care about black children. It makes me sick to my stomach.”

You take a muffin and pull it apart carefully, searching for bits of eggshells. You see a white fleck and gingerly dislodge
it.

“He didn’t care nothing about Joe’s kids when Joe and them said they didn’t want to work for free. He didn’t want to give
them a decent wage to feed their family. But he’s acting like he is so worried about the children.”

Your Uncle Joe nearly lost his house last spring when the sanitation workers went on strike. Your mother baked improbable
casseroles and took them to your cousins once a week. Father slapped a green-and-white sticker on your notebook that said
THE MAYOR’S WORD IS GARBAGE
.

Your mother takes in a sharp breath. Double negatives inflate her blood pressure.

“What’s all that money for?” Sister asks.

“It’s reward money,” Mother explains. “If someone can catch the bad man who is taking the children, Mayor Jackson will give
them the money.”

“Don’t say that SOB’s name in this house. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit to find out that money ain’t worth the paper it’s
printed on,” Father pronounces, sawing angrily at a fried-hard pork chop.

“Claude L! Your language!” For Mother,
ain’t
is a worse word than
nigger
. Her freshly straightened hair trembles with outrage.

You cut your pork chop into salty bits and scatter them all over your plate.

“Officer Friendly came to our class today,” Sister says.

“Did he?” Mother replies.

“He taught us a song. Want me to sing it?”

No one answers. Father still mumbles under his breath. You listen to the disembodied voice of the first black newscaster ever
on Atlanta TV. She announces that another child’s body has been found.

“Wanna hear me sing the Safety Song?” Sister asks again. Without waiting for permission, she begins.

“Kids don’t go with strangers … They never go with strangers …”

“Did they say whose body it was?” you ask, loud enough to be heard over Sister’s warbling.

There has been much conversation lately about finding bodies, as if a person’s physical self could be misplaced as easily
as a catcher’s mitt. As if Jashante might say
You found my body? Where it was?
Would he pull it on like a sweater or step into it like a pair of pants? But you know better. Bodies are like the turnstile
at Kmart: Once you pass through you can’t change your mind and go back the other way.

Sister is still singing. “Kids don’t go with strangers, that’s a fact. Get back, Jack!

“You want me to sing it again?”

“That’s alright, baby,” Mother says with her hands covering her mouth as she watches the television. Father shakes his head
and closes his eyes. “This don’t make no kinda sense,” he says.

Sister sings, “Kids don’t go with strangers.”

That night, you lie in bed trying to remember the time before you were born. Father said once, “Boy, we talking about things
that happened before you were even
thought
about.” This is the time that you want to recapture. You are curious about the state of not being, because this is certainly
where people go when they leave their bodies in the woods for the police to find.

Mother claims that people are baby angels before God dispatches them to some family. But you aren’t sure if you believe that
such an impractical concept as the angel system could be the product of a divine mind. If Mother’s theory is true, heaven
would be crowded with all the people that are already dead and those waiting for their turn to be born. And why aren’t baby
angels the little ones who die in their cribs, like your two baby aunts Grandmother says she lost?

You lie there hoping for a peaceful prenatal memory to assure you that death is nothing to fear. That you shouldn’t be afraid
to go to the mailbox after dark because the worst thing that could happen would be that you would be returned to the place
that you were. That you would be sent back to a condition where there is no father, no mother, no candy or school. But you
still wonder about the process of leaving the body behind, dying. Monica Kaufman said that the missing children had been asphyxiated.
Your children’s dictionary (which you hate) does not include this important word, so you consulted the real one in the family
room. Asphyxiate is to smother, which is almost the same as drowning.

You nearly drowned when you were about four. Mother’s stomach was large with Sister. Her belly button protruded. Father held
his large hands under you as you lay, trusting, near the surface of the cool, chlorinated water.

“Kick,” he commanded, and you did.

He laughed. “Look, Beverly,” he shouted over his hairy shoulder. “This boy might be ready for the Olympics in seventy-six!”

He took his hands away. “Keep on kicking.”

You sank. The water in the motel pool closed over your head like a glass elevator door. You tried to remember the lessons
you had just learned.
Kick your legs. Cup your hands. Blow bubbles. That’s my boy
. But the fake blue water rushed in your nostrils, setting fires in your sinuses, and there was no air with which to cry.

Powerful hands with calluses softened by cool water lifted you through the blue glass. You twined your legs around Father’s
waist. Wiry chest hair scratched your trembling stomach.

“What happened?” he asked, prying you from his torso so that your faces were level. “You were swimming good until you saw
that my hands were gone. Then you went under like a lead balloon.”

He laughed a little bit, but you cried. “Oh, come on.” Father gave you a rough shake. “Don’t act like a little girl.”

You looked to Mother, who struggled to rise from a green-striped pool chair. “Claude L, is he alright?”

“He’s fine. We gonna try it again.”

“He looks cold,” Mother noticed. “Bring him over here so I can dry him off.”

“Beverly, you gonna make this boy into a sissy,” Father said, but he delivered you to Mother, who rubbed the tiny chill bumps
on your arms with a yellow beach towel that was heated by the sun-warmed concrete. You wanted to climb on her lap, but her
huge stomach rested on her thighs, leaving no space for your narrow bottom. Even hugging was awkward, so she held your hand
and kissed your forehead.