No Place Safe (8 page)

Four boys turning up dead only gave Ma more ammunition to keep me from hanging out like I used to, not that she needed any because I was scared enough of her to do what I was told in most cases. After the two boys were found, Ma said, “See, good thing I told you to stay away from the Rialto. From now on, no hanging around downtown between buses. There’s no reason for you to mess around in Five Points, going into McCrory’s and Woolworth’s. Whatever you need, I’ll take you to the mall to get.”

First off, it was never as easy as just saying I
needed
something. Because money was always tight, Ma had to first know why, understand why something we already had wouldn’t do just as fine, and
just because your friends have it doesn’t mean you need it, too.
And second, I didn’t see what the Rialto, or Woolworth’s and McCrory’s, had a thing to do with the boys being found miles away. Of course, I kept these opinions to myself.

*

“How far is six miles?” Bridgette asked me. We were raking leaves in the front yard, a job that took a month of weekends to complete and made me dream of having enough money to rent one of those riding lawnmowers that sucked up leaves in no time flat. When I suggested this to Ma, she said that if I ever had enough money to rent a lawnmower, we’d use it for something worthwhile like replacing the cracked pane in the kitchen window or fixing the rip in the screen door. We didn’t need to rent a lawnmower when Bridgette and I had two good arms and legs.

“Six miles from where?”

“That’s what I mean. Is it like from here to your school, or from here to my school?”

“Hold the bag open wider or I can’t get all the leaves in. My school is twenty miles away. More like here to your school, maybe closer.”

“How much closer?” Bridgette was nearly useless as a bag holder, and I dropped more leaves back onto the ground than into the Hefty bag.

“Why are you so worried about how far six miles is? You’re starting to get on my nerves. When Ma gives us the ten dollars for raking, you better believe I’m getting more than half.”

“That’s how far away from us that last boy went missing. Now he’s dead.”

 “Who told you that?”

“Ma. When y’all were talking about him going missing, she said it was just six miles from our house.”

“Don’t worry about that.” It seemed a patronizing thing to say even to a nine-year-old, but I had nothing else to offer. I decided I’d still give Bridgette five dollars even though she’d been no help to me at all.

“I think the saddest thing about dying would be not seeing your mother. I can’t imagine not being able to see Ma every day. Maybe you could see her from heaven, but it wouldn’t be the same.”

I reached the wet heavy leaves at the bottom, my nose startled by the rank smell of decay, and stopped to stretch my back. Maybe Ma and I shouldn’t talk about missing kids when Bridgette was around.

“Six miles is farther away than your school. I had it mixed up. It’s a good ways from here,” I said, but I don’t think she believed me.

*

My boyfriend Kevin was two years older than I, and this made him exotic to me. Before that first kiss during a game of hide-and-go-seek, I thought him exciting and out of reach because he’d ride his bike up and down the street, sometimes stop at the top of the driveway of the boys’ house where we’d all play basketball but never come down to join us. When I was feeling bold, I’d go up to him. We’d make small talk about what school I went to, or I’d ask him about his bike, but I could never convince him to join me and my friends. I’d tell him he didn’t have to play ball, that we also had fun just hanging out and watching whoever was playing. When he turned down my offers, that made him all the more interesting.

That’s why I was surprised when he finally decided to hang with me and my friends that night. I was glad I’d been wearing my favorite peach-colored shorts and the black T-shirt that was a little snug. Anytime he came near me, which he did often for no reason I could see, I hoped I wasn’t too funky after a day of basketball in the summer heat—broken up only by bathroom and Kool-Aid breaks and no attention to personal hygiene. When lightning bugs came out from wherever they go during the day, I wondered why he suggested hide-and-go-seek when the rest of us complained that it was a child’s game, and being twelve, thirteen, and fourteen, we had no use for children’s games. But he insisted, and later, crushed between yellow flowers and red brick, I found out why.

Every meeting with him after that first kiss was ripe with the tension of children wanting to play adult games. That was early summer, before two boys were found at Niskey Lake and Kevin fit a killer’s profile. Now our meetings were full of that same tension, but worry, too. I worried about him being the kind of boy the killer might want. He didn’t worry at all. That night, he was giving a house party and I was there to be his girlfriend, not to worry about killers.

The basement was mostly dark, illuminated by a mix of bare bulbs in blue, green, and red. We fast-danced to Donna Summer’s “Hot Stuff”
and
Foxy’s “Get Off,” the boys hoping the lyrics might give the girls ideas. Like every other girl at the party, I wore double-cuffed Levi’s and Candies, except my Candies only had a two-inch heel because Ma said any more than that was hookerish. And mine weren’t really Candies but knockoffs from Butlers. On my walk over to Kevin’s house, I applied lipstick stolen from my mother’s cache and opened another button on the shirt she made me wear over my glittered tube top. (
No child of mine is going out the house looking like a Stewart Avenue ho.)
Within an hour, the shirt was gone completely, and the tube top left little mystery. Kevin told me I was a fox, and I ate it up.

He was a thoughtful host, leaving me every now and then to check on his guests or run upstairs for more soda and chips. It seemed to me he checked on the girls more often than the boys, but I didn’t mind because he’d be coming back to dance with me. Kevin would stop his mother on the steps when she tried to come and check on things, not by pleading like most kids would, but with smooth talk. She never made it past the third step, which allowed the kids to continue whatever it was they were doing—kissing in a dark corner, dancing a little too close.
It works on her, too,
I thought.
She’s probably where he learned the skill.
I wondered if Kevin was ever a boy, whether he came out a man and was just waiting for his body to catch up. It occurred to me then that the killer didn’t know him the way I did, that the killer would only see a boy.

Kevin went around the room turning off some of the lamps, as if they’d been giving off much light in the first place. Things slowed down a bit when he put Rick James’s “Mary Jane” on the turntable, a nice bridge from fast music to the slow ballads that were sure to come as the evening progressed. When someone put on Peaches and Herb’s “Reunited,” our song after several brief breakups that year (mostly over my unwillingness to move beyond the feeling-up stage), I tried to push the killer out of my head.

“You worry too much,” Kevin said into the air above my black-girl version of a Farrah Fawcett flip, not a flip at all but a stiff curl still holding the shape of the sponge rollers I’d slept in the night before.

We were slow-dragging, my arms around his neck, his around my waist. One of my legs between his, one of his between mine. Hips dipping low and slow to match the beat.

“I know. But I can’t help it. You’re too much like the other boys.”

“I’m nothing like them.” I wondered if that was true. I wondered if the boy from the skating rink had a girlfriend, if they’d slow-dragged one night and felt certain they’d be slow-dragging forever. “Forget all that tonight. It’s my birthday party. We’re supposed to feel good.”

I listened to Peaches and Herb croon about how good it was to be together while I swayed slow and low against Kevin, certain I understood what they meant, thinking I was grown. I breathed in his scent, some cologne he probably borrowed from his father mixed with a little sweat that comes from the warmth of a basement full of teenagers dancing slow. I was in heaven. I forgot.

Later, when the last of the kids had gone home and I both anticipated and feared our inevitable moment on the sofa in his basement, we heard his father’s feet on the steps. I didn’t have to worry whether Ma’s warnings about getting pregnant would be enough to hold him at bay. I was both grateful and disappointed.

“It’s time to walk Kim home,” his father said. His voice made it clear there would be no sofa time.

“You mind driving us, Mr. Scott?” I hadn’t planned to ask, had looked forward to making the five-minute walk stretch into fifteen, but the words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. Kevin looked at me like I was crazy.

“Not feeling okay?” his father asked me.

“It’s just that it’s late, and I’d be worried about Kevin walking back alone.”

His father went to get his shoes and keys, and Kevin flopped down onto the sofa looking defeated. It wasn’t until then that I realized my worry for him was the same as asking whether he was a man. I tried to make it better. “I was worried about both of us being out so late.” I made it worse.

“I can look out for us.” He looked down when he said this, rubbing his hands on his Levi’s as if he could rub away my lack of confidence. But he looked straight at me when he said, “I can look out for
me.
”

When Mr. Scott drove me home, there were only two of us in the car.

It was Christmas break and we’d gone more than two months without any children turning up missing. Already people were starting to drop the dead kids from their conversations, although the boy’s mother who’d sent him on an errand was still letting folks know what she thought about the police and their silence on whether the deaths were related. Even Ma didn’t mention the cases anymore. She had plenty of other murdered peoples’ cases to investigate.

My fourteenth birthday arrived during the break, and Ma surprised us by saying we would have lunch and see a show downtown. The idea of it excited me more than the act, since Ma was never spontaneous about having fun, and it had been a long time since she’d taken us to a movie. We picked
The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh
because it was showing at the Omni and I loved hanging out there. Besides the theater, it was where the Atlanta Hawks played and wrestling matches were held, though I never went to the games or matches. There was an ice rink (where I watched Peggy Fleming skate the following year and decided I wanted to be a skater, but only briefly), a video arcade, a food court, and plenty of people-watching. Mostly it was a place for me and my friends to meet, easily accessible by bus. It wasn’t until we got there that I got worried about running into friends on my birthday with my mother and kid sister. But even that worry left quickly, I was so excited just to be doing something fun with Ma.

Usually her weekends were spent making extra money doing security and traffic detail for Braves baseball games in spring and summer, or concerts and ice skating shows at the Omni during the winter. For a while, she worked security at a high-end clothing store, mostly for the discount because it was hard to be fashionable on a cop’s salary, and my mother liked to look good. The owners were grateful because Ma figured out it was the store manager that was stealing from them, pretending she was taking out garbage in those big plastic bags. Sometimes I’d benefit from the discount if she thought an outfit didn’t look too grown for me. She worked a lot so we could have nice things, so I tried to understand her lack of spontaneity and good-timing. I never felt short-changed. Her presence was so big to me that even a small bit of it filled me up.

We arrived at the theater early enough to get the best seats since there were hardly any people in line.

She handed me two ticket stubs. “Take your sister in and get a seat on the aisle so I can find you. And not too close, or I’ll get a headache. I’ll get the popcorn.”

“And Goobers?”

“And Goobers.”

I tried to take Bridgette’s hand but she shook me off, saying, “Always thinking you’re somebody’s mother.” Inside the nearly empty theater, we found four seats on the aisle. Bridgette sat in the inside seat and I sat next to her, leaving the two outside seats empty, one for Ma and one for buffer. We watched the coming attractions for a few minutes when a man sat down in the end seat.

“That seat’s saved,” I said, immediately wary. A man sitting down one seat over when most of the theater was free set off alarms. The man didn’t say anything, just smiled at me funny. I pretended to stare at the screen, all the while trying to keep one eye on him. The man hadn’t done anything yet, and maybe I’d just look crazy making a scene over nothing. I hoped Ma would come soon.

Next thing I knew, the man had unzipped his fly and had his hand in his pants, still smiling at Bridgette and I, his hand working away. In the time it took me to figure out whether to take Bridgette and climb over the seat to the next row, or just scream, or try to cuss the man out like Ma would have done, there she was, her arm around the man’s neck as she leaned over him from the row behind us.

“I oughta kill you right here, but it’s my child’s birthday.”

She pulled the man from the seat and yanked both his arms back, and with no more words, she led him out of the theater. I was surprised he didn’t fight back, but I wouldn’t have fought her either. By the time she came back to us, the
Fish That Saved Pittsburgh
was nearly over. To this day, I couldn’t tell you much of what the movie was about, and I never asked what happened to the man. Some things I knew not to question, though I always figured she called a uniform and filed a report.

*

There was another occasion, just a couple of weeks after the movie, that’s as vivid for me now as it was then.

Ma, Bridgette, and I were at the Greenbriar Mall exchanging birthday/Christmas gifts. We were walking through the parking lot back to our car when we heard a woman cry out. At first, we didn’t see anyone else in the parking lot, but after another scream, we saw a man hitting a woman inside a car parked in the row across from us, two or three spaces down.