No Place Safe (21 page)

It was strange to me that his mother waited until she heard the radio news before she reported him missing. How could it be that after a year and a half of murders, parents would still wait to report a missing child? My friends knew they couldn’t be late getting home from anywhere, and if they were going to be, they’d better call home and let someone know about it, because parents were ready to call the Task Force if a child was just a few minutes late showing up wherever they were meant to be. If a parent couldn’t escort a child personally, they’d take him as close to the destination as possible, then arrange for their child or some adult on the other end to confirm that he’d arrived.

So when I heard that this mother had waited until the following day to report her child missing, and then only after she heard his description on the radio, I wondered what could make her wait so long. When I found out she had eleven other children at home, I thought maybe it was just too hard to keep up with them since Ma had a hard time trying to spread herself around with just two. Maybe she thought it wouldn’t happen to her kids even while she watched some mother on the evening news saying, “Why? Why my child?” as if they too believed it could never happen to them. I also wondered if the grief in that family’s home, with so many people to mourn for the dead boy, was more than their house could hold.

*

“Didn’t Ma say she didn’t want you messing around with that?”

“She won’t know if she isn’t here to see it, and if you don’t tell. You owe me one, remember.”

I was heating wax on the stove, getting ready to batik some cloth, a craft I learned during a Cleveland summer. The last time I batiked, I got hot wax everywhere, melted crayons and paraffin that hardened on the countertops and floor that took forever to clean up. After that, Ma told me not to do it again. Most times I did what she told me unless I was absolutely certain I could get away with it. It was early morning when she left for work, and I knew she wouldn’t be back until late, giving me plenty of cleanup time. Besides, as much as she was away lately, I felt like I ran the house.

I left the wax heating on the stove to go dig through my closet for the cloth I planned to use, which must have taken longer than I’d expected because I still hadn’t found it when I heard Bridgette scream my name. I ran to the kitchen to find the pot of hot wax on fire. Bridgette was holding a pot of water and before I could stop her, she threw it on the flames, which only angered them.

“Get out, get out,” I yelled at Bridgette.

“Call the fire department!”

“Just get out, in the yard.” I gagged on the smoke that yelling at Bridgette made me inhale in gulps.

The flames were still contained over the stove, and I was afraid to call for help, afraid Ma would kill me if she found out a fire truck had been to the house. I threw dish towels over the flames, then ran to the pantry where we kept big boxes of baking soda, our poor man’s substitute for raising alkalinity in the pool water. I ripped open box after box of soda and threw it at the fire, certain it would never work before I ran out of soda, and that I’d have to call the operator. But I started getting the better of it by the second box, and had put it out by the fifth.

I realized then that Bridgette had never gone into the yard as I’d told her, and had watched me from the front door.

“Why didn’t you leave?” I yelled, my fear and frustration misdirected.

“You might have needed my help.”

I looked at the mess on the stove—the ruined pot, the blackened hood and singed cabinets—and I began to cry. The tears were probably long overdue from so many other things, but there was something fresh in them, too. Fresh guilt because I was the responsible one and could have killed Bridgette and burned down the house. Fresh fear because although Ma hadn’t whipped me in a long time, I remembered well when she did, could feel the sting on my thighs and the red warmth spread across my skin. And I never knew what mood she’d be in anymore, it didn’t take much for Ma to get mad lately. So I cried while I filled a cardboard box with the ruined pot and wax pens, and while I buried the box at the bottom of the Herbie Curbie trash can. I was still crying, low and quiet, while Bridgette swept baking soda from the floor and I opened every window in the house, trying to get rid of the smell.

We worked for hours to scrape up hardened wax, but there was nothing to be done about the stove hood and cabinets. When I heard Ma’s car pull in to the driveway, I readied myself to take whatever came. Bridgette waited in the kitchen with me, and together we listened to her key turn in the lock, the door open, her first words.

“What the hell…”

Before I could say anything, Bridgette ran to her. “Don’t be mad, Ma. All I tried to do was cook some fries and the grease caught on fire.”

“Are you all right?” Ma’s anger abated to worry.

“I’m okay. I remembered what you said about putting baking soda on a fire.”

“That was smart.” She turned to me. “And where were you? You know better than to let this girl near hot grease. Why didn’t you cook the fries?”

I was about to explain that there weren’t any fries, but Bridgette stopped me.  “She was studying in her room, so she didn’t know until the fire started.”

Ma went into cop mode then, beginning to question the story. She looked at the singed cabinets, opening them as if the truth lay inside. Would she notice the oil can still full or the unopened bag of fries in the freezer? But those clues would be useless to her because she hadn’t cooked much lately. Could she smell burned wax in the air?

“All this from a little grease fire? The flames must have gone pretty high. Why didn’t you call the fire department? And how long did it take you to realize the house was damn near on fire?” These questions were for me.

“I threw water on it before I remembered about the baking soda,” Bridgette said.

“Good Lord. Can I not leave y’all here alone anymore? Isn’t it enough I have to worry whether you made it home okay, now I got to worry about you once you get home? Kim, I’m holding you responsible for this. You’re the oldest.”

Usually I hated hearing that line, but in this case, she was right. I deserved whatever I’d get, and I knew how bad it would have been if not for Bridgette taking the rap.

Ma took a beer from the refrigerator. “If it’s not one thing, its another. I’ll think of something good for you, but for now, you don’t leave this house except for school and work. And don’t think you’re getting off, either, Miss Bridgette. You know better, too.”

When she left the kitchen to put away her gun and change out of her clothes, I knew the worst of it was over. She wasn’t going to resurrect the whipping belt.

“Why’d you do that?” I asked Bridgette, grateful for once that she was still treated like the baby.

“Because she would have given you the belt. And I owed you. Now I’m paid up for a long time.”

A few days later, Ma told us she’d quit night school. She said it was so she could be home one more evening a week, giving us fewer opportunities to burn down the house and more together time. But I knew that extra evening would just be spent looking at case files. She was letting go of her old life, the person she was before the Task Force, a piece at a time.

*

Ma told me about an interview she had with a boy who was trying to thumb a ride the summer before. Someone stopped for him, and the boy got into the car because he recognized the man behind the wheel as a gypsy taxi driver who hung around the A&P in the West End. The boy sometimes delivered groceries to cars for tips at the same A&P, as did the victim in Ma’s first case. When the boy reached the place he wanted to go, he asked the man to let him out, but the driver wouldn’t stop the car. The kid asked again and again to be let out, but the driver wouldn’t say so much as boo to him, and kept right on driving. The boy got scared and jumped from the car when it slowed down enough. He was afraid the man would come back for him, but he never did.

Ma went to check out the boy’s story with the manager of the A&P and confirmed what she could, the part about the gypsy taxi driver. In the summer of 1980, sure enough he’d hung out in the parking lot selling rides to people loaded down with groceries looking for a lift home. The manager didn’t know the man’s name, but he hadn’t seen him since last summer because he’d had to run him off for stealing groceries from his store. The manager didn’t remember much about the driver, other than him being a little strange, soft spoken, and mild-mannered. And black.

This last description was the one that stuck with me. I knew that Ma and the cops were looking at everyone, had to look at everyone, but like so many other black folks in town, I believed in my heart it was a white man doing the killing. Especially after the Sigman Road caller. Even without all the scientific talk I’d overheard at the Task Force and on the news about most serial killers being white men, it just never really flew with me that a black person would do this to so many of his own, especially children.

I’d long ago let go of the silly idea of a hooded Klansmen coming down from Stone Mountain, or driving in from Douglas County and going unnoticed cruising through all-black neighborhoods picking kids off, but I still believed it was a Klansman. The quiet type who didn’t wear his affiliation where you could see it. The dangerous kind no one paid much attention to when he drove utility trucks into black neighborhoods, delivered mail, painted project apartments. I suspected the smarter breed of racists, the closet-racists I later learned to detect as an adult, those who worked next to me every day, smiling and asking about my weekend, all the while wishing I worked somewhere else.

*

One day after school I was waiting at the bus stop wondering if the creek that bordered the school was going to flood its banks again and turn the soccer field into a marsh, which always happened after a good rain. A man drove past slowly, looking at me hard as if he knew me, but we both knew he didn’t. He was white and not one of the teachers from school, so I knew we didn’t know each other. But I wasn’t afraid of him or the way he slowed when he drove past me, not the way I was afraid of the black man on my street who’d done the same slow drive-by. For one thing, the man on my street didn’t scare me until he came back around again, because I thought he was just making some play on the first pass, the way men do when they call to a girl from passing cars:
What’s up, shorty?
or
Hey, slim
. And in the moment I saw that man’s car crest the hill to make the second pass, I thought of the killer and how his victims didn’t live so far from me.

But the killer didn’t come out to this part of town; it was far away from his hunting ground. If the killer was black, he’d be an easy mark around here. And if he was white, he’d know that black kids who needed to hustle for the day’s dinner and were willing to get into a stranger’s car were scarce in Ashford-Dunwoody. I knew right off that this man was watching me because he wondered what I was doing in his neighborhood where the only black folks were gardeners and twice-a-week maids. I knew he’d move on once he took in my uniform and realized I was no menace, just buying a piece of his world for eight hours of the day. He’d notice that I was standing at the bus stop on the side of the street that took me away from his neighborhood and not further in. Then he’d speed up and drive on. And I was right, because that’s just what he did.

*

In late January, Ma told me that the Task Force was going to be doing surveillance of certain shopping centers around Atlanta, looking for cars driven by black men with black boys riding with them, or being picked up by them.

“I thought the killer was a white man. What about the white man who claimed he killed that boy in Rockdale County?” I asked. Had my guard been up against the wrong people all this time?

“That didn’t turn up anything concrete, but we’re still looking into it. We have enough witnesses who last saw the boys alive in the company of a young black man.”

“Can you believe these witnesses?”

“Right now, it’s all we’ve got.”

The shopping centers to be watched were places where some of the boys had disappeared from, or visited, or tried to make a little money at, or had been found dead. There were several victims who fit into one of these categories, and just as many shopping centers. These were run-down strip malls with vendors providing services and selling products that the people in the neighborhood needed: grocery stores that took food stamps and WIC coupons; beauty supplies so a relaxer and manicure could be done on the cheap in the kitchen instead of the beauty salon; payday check cashing and money orders, both of which lessened the sting from the difficulty of opening a checking account when you never had enough for the minimum required deposit, or because the only jobs you could get didn’t last long enough to create an employment history. Ma told me the place on Moreland Avenue where I bought my hair supplies was on the list, and now I couldn’t go anymore unless she was with me. I knew that meant I’d never be going to any of the places on the list because Ma and I hardly went anywhere together anymore. It seemed she never had time.

On top of watching boys in front of shopping centers, the Task Force enlisted the help of boys who fit the victim profile, using them as decoys at the shopping centers in an attempt to catch the killer while surveillance officers sat in cars watching the boys just a few feet away. This stirred up all kinds of controversy among citizens and police alike and so didn’t last very long. The mayor also made the curfew from the previous fall permanent on the first day of February. He may have had good intentions, but in the few months the curfew had been in place, it still hadn’t stopped the killer. Five more children had either been killed or abducted. We kids figured it didn’t matter whether we were off the streets by dark or not. If the killer really wanted to get us, the curfew wasn’t going to stop him, even in broad daylight.