No Place Safe

by Kim Reid

  “He was last seen in Southwest, but closer to us, only six miles away.”

  “Anyone see anything?”

  “Nothing. His mother had sent him to the corner store to pick up something for her neighbor friend, and he just didn’t come back.”

  Like the boy from the skating rink, I wondered what this boy was thinking, what he was doing, before he was taken. He’d probably run the same errand so many other times before. Was he hoping he’d have enough change left over to buy some Pop Rocks? Did he plan to stop off at a friend’s house before returning home to pick up the football he’d loaned him? I wondered what his last thoughts were, what his last happy act was, and hoped it gave him something sweet to hold on to.

  Chapter Six

  Ma threatened to keep me from going downtown on the weekend with Cassandra and some other kids to watch a kung-fu movie at the Rialto. The Rialto was one of those old-time theaters that had been around forever and couldn’t compete with the wider screens and armrest drink holders of the newer shopping mall theaters. Downtown Atlanta didn’t make it the most attractive location either, since people with the most discretionary income spent time downtown only Monday through Friday, nine to five. After their weekday, they beat it out of there, packing cars onto I-75 or I-20, heading for the suburbs in every direction.

  The Rialto understood its weekend audience—young black folks who needed a theater on an easily accessible bus route—and ran the movies we wanted to see, sometimes a picture with black actors in it, but usually an old Bruce Lee movie, or some kung-fu flick that tried but never matched the style of the old Bruce Lee movies. It was where all my friends went, and I always took the bus down there with no flack from Ma, but when children started dying and disappearing, she was all of a sudden worried.

  I was sitting at the kitchen table, Ma standing behind me while she applied permanent relaxer to my hair and cancelled my weekend plans. I wondered how far I should push the matter. Ma didn’t much like being questioned, and at that moment, she was applying lye to my head. Putting up a fight just then would be foolish, not because Ma would do anything to hurt me, but once I set her off on a lecture, she might have forgotten how long the chemicals had been burning into my scalp. But I did it anyway.

  “Those boys were found in Southwest—I won’t be anywhere around there. I’ll be downtown.”

  “One of the missing boys, the one that might be the unidentified body laying in the morgue right now, was on his way downtown to the movies the last time anyone saw him alive.”

  “There’s more than one theater downtown. He was going to the Coronet, not the Rialto.”

  Ma didn’t hear me, and only said, “The other boy was last seen leaving the same skating rink you go to sometimes.”

  “What’s that got to do with the Rialto downtown? I don’t want to go to the skating rink.”

  “Watch your tone, girl. You can’t go because it’s too close, and because I said so.” As usual, the reasonable logic she applied to her cases, the weighing of facts, had no place in our house. In our house, everything came down to because I said so.

  I tried again because her tone hadn’t yet changed from I’m mildly peeved to you’ve gone too far. “The skating rink and the Rialto are miles apart.”

  “I don’t mean too close in proximity. I mean too close to you. The same skating rink? You might’ve skated right past that boy once. You could have been there that night and they picked you instead.”

  I knew then it was useless to fight. When something happened to a child, that child became any child, all children, to Ma. In her mind, she could easily substitute me or my sister with the kid who had been kidnapped, or raped, or beaten up in whatever case she was working. No more logic in the discussion. I shut up about it and hoped that by Saturday, either the case would be solved and have nothing to do with my world, or the dead boys would have been pushed out of her mind by some other terrible thing. In a city considered the murder capital of America, this last option was not at all impossible.

  *

  They say bad things come in threes, but in this case, there was one extra. In November, Milton’s and Yusef’s bodies were found, bringing the number dead to four. The mother who’d sent her boy on an errand for her neighbor was angry and made herself heard; we saw her on the news, read about her in the paper. People began paying attention to what she was saying, instead of comforting themselves with the idea that it was all just a coincidence. She said in the news what Ma had been thinking, what other cops had been thinking but what the city denied—that the boys’ murders were related. People started to talk about it wherever you went. There were even rumors that the Klan was behind it, and how we might see race riots like they did up north and in Los Angeles in ’66 and ’67. When I asked Ma what she thought about the Klan theory, at first, she waved her hand to dismiss it, but then she said, “You never know.”

  At the time, the only thing I knew of the Klan was what I’d seen on TV, or the stories told to me by my grandparents and my great-grandfather. They grew up in a time when black folks knew more about the Klan than they’d ever wanted to, mostly about how to stay out of the Klan’s way. I’d yet to have rocks thrown at me by men in hooded robes, or hear my white friends called nigger-lovers by the same men (and women and children)—something I experienced seven years later during a march in Forsyth County, Georgia, where black people were outlawed from owning property simply because they were black.

  But in 1979, Klan involvement wasn’t impossible. The Klan was still burning crosses with regularity on Stone Mountain, in a suburb of Atlanta and official home of the Ku Klux Klan’s national organization. Stone Mountain is Georgia’s answer to Mount Rushmore, with its carving of Confederate leaders. The fact that the carving was officially completed only seven years earlier, and that the Klan used it as its base of operations well into the 1980s, should disabuse anyone of the thought that the Old South and its slave heritage was hundred-year-old history. Its roots wound deeply through Georgia clay. The weekend before the last two boys were found, the Klan had killed five Klan protestors in North Carolina. It wasn’t at all unlikely that they could have something to do with the boys.

  As a child uninitiated in the ways of the Klan, I tried to imagine a Klansman in his white hood, driving down Campbellton Road in Southwest, past Wingo’s Restaurant with its loud rainbow-colored sign and the best chicken in the world, looking for a fourteen-year-old black boy to steal. He would sit behind the wheel, moving slowly down the street populated by black folks going about their day while he tried to figure out which life was most valuable, would be held more dear, once the people on the street got word that it had been taken away. Taking which life would cause the most fear, the most panic?

  It could never happen if he was wearing a hood. So I imagined him without the hood, looking like any other white man in Atlanta, and I still couldn’t see it happening. Most black folks, at least in the 1970s south, came out of the womb mistrusting white folks, and one as racist as a Klansman? Any black person could probably tell you—no hood is needed to see the truth in people who hate a race for simply being. The danger just rises from them like steam from just-rained-on asphalt in summer. I just couldn’t see those boys getting into the car of one. But maybe they were too young, especially the nine-year-old, to know any better. At nine, you still trust everyone.

  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 a
s 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?” hi
s 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.

  Chapter Seven

  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.