Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  shooting in the paper and the woman’s apparent involvement, would demand that she and Jay march down to the station this morning, which Jay is not the least bit inclined to do, not without another witness, preferably one he’s not married to. He wants someone other than his wife to testify to his fundamental inno­

  cence in this situation. Otherwise, how to explain his odd behav­

  ior? The fact that he’s waited four days since the shooting to say a word about it or, more important, why he was at the crime scene last night. He feels sick when he thinks about the traces of himself he carelessly left behind—the Newport he tossed out the window as he was coming up the dirt drive, his footprints and tire tracks, and the shoe he lost in the brush—all of it just sitting out there, waiting to be discovered. He could hardly sleep last night for imagining the groundskeeper talking to homicide detectives, telling them about the stranger out after dark, sneak­

  ing around their crime scene. Jay thinks all of it can be easily explained away, but he wants to talk to Jimmy’s cousin first. If the old man hasn’t done so already, maybe he and Jay can make a statement together.

  He opens the cabinet over the sink and pulls out a tub of Vase­

  line. He rubs jelly into the cut on his cheek, then uses one of Ber­

  nie’s compacts to cover the mark with bronze powder. He tries to make it blend in, to make himself look at least presentable and, at best, credible. When he’s done, he wraps a towel around his waist and picks up the .22 that’s resting on top of the toilet’s tank. Jay has three guns: a .38 in his glove compartment, a hunting rifle in the hall closet, and the nickel-plated .22 he keeps under his pillow, always within arm’s reach. He’s tried to break the habit of carrying it into the bathroom with him. But most days it’s right by his side. Some people, when they’re in the shower, imagine they hear the phone ringing. Jay imagines people break­

  ing into his apartment with guns drawn.

  66 Attic a L o c ke

  He lost a buddy that way. Lyndon “Bumpy” Williams had been Jay’s roommate his first year at U of H, when the dorms were still segregated. It was Bumpy who joined SNCC first, who took Jay to his first meeting. He was one of Jay’s oldest and clos­

  est friends. By the summer of 1970, the feds had some heavy intel on Mr. Williams, courtesy of COINTELPRO. They broke into his duplex on Scott Street while Bumpy was in the shower. He never heard them coming, never heard their orders to come out with his hands up. The first flash of movement behind the shower curtain, they shot him thirteen times. He was only twenty years old. Now, eleven years later, Jay still sleeps with his .22 and car­

  ries it into the bathroom with him. He also can’t take sudden noises and won’t sit with his back to the door, and several times a year, he catches himself, by rote, unscrewing the mouthpiece of his telephone, looking for bugs.

  Back in his bedroom, he returns the gun to its hiding place beneath his pillow and makes the bed by himself, a routine he and Bernie came up with in their first months of marriage. “I don’t like guns,” she’d said. “I don’t want to see a gun.” There’s an AM

  radio propped on the paint-chipped windowsill. It’s picking up bits and pieces of a local news show on 740. Jay dresses quickly, listening to a report about talks between the dockworkers and the shipping companies. As he slips on his shoes, he remembers his pledge to call the mayor.

  His clothes from last night are piled on a nearby chair, where he tossed them in the dark last night. On his way out, he scoops up the dirty, grass-stained clothes and rolls them into a tight ball, hiding the whole mess under his arm. When Bernie comes in from the kitchen, her robe open at her belly, she eyes the pile of laundry he’s got wadded under his arm. “What are you doing?”

  “Going to work,” he says simply, holding the soiled clothes as if they were an attaché case, a part of his usual uniform. He tries Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 67

  to pass her in the narrow doorway, but she does not move, block­

  ing him with her belly, waiting for him to say a proper good-bye. When he bends down to kiss her on the cheek, Bernie screws up her nose, pulling away from him and wiping at the side of her face. She looks down at her fingertips, staring at a glob of brown jelly.

  “Are you wearing makeup?”

  “No,” he says, turning away from her. “Of course not.”

  Outside, beneath the carport, he tosses the dirty clothes into the back of his Buick, which, he notices, is still covered with the reddish dirt from the open field by the bayou, the location of a murder. He stops at a car wash on the way to his office. With two dollars’ worth of quarters, he washes the Buick twice, rinsing any trace of the crime scene from his car. He uses the soiled clothes from last night to dry the soapy water. Then he pitches them into the trash.

  He arrives at his office late, his suit damp and wrinkled from the car wash. Eddie Mae has a message from Charlie Luckman, saying he wants to meet for lunch. This is settlement talk for sure, Jay thinks. But the relief he feels about the possibility of a quick financial resolution to the case is tempered by the morning he’s had. He knows he’s being paranoid—chucking his clothes, washing his car—but he can’t seem to stop himself or calm his racing nerves. He goes into his office and shuts the door, lights a cigarette at his desk and picks up the phone.

  He starts with a guy named Tim.

  Tim was Jay’s client a few months back, the one with the out­

  standing bill. Jimmy, Tim reminds Jay, was dating Tim’s sister. Fine, Jay says. He doesn’t care. He’s trying to get in touch with Jimmy’s cousin. It’s another half hour before he’s able to track down Jimmy, at a bar on Calumet. There’s loud music playing in the background, and it takes a while to make Jimmy understand 68 Attic a L o c ke

  who Jay is or why he’s calling. Jimmy, who frankly sounds drunk at nine o’clock in the morning, tells Jay he hasn’t seen his cousin in days.

  “You got a number for him, some way I can reach him?”

  “You might try his girl’s place,” Jimmy slurs. “He’s kind of in between digs right now.”

  “You have her phone number?” Jay asks.

  “Well, let me see if I can find it,” Jimmy says, as if he keeps a Rolodex right there on the bar top. “Here,” he says a moment later. “Try this one: 789-3123. Gal’s name is Stella.”

  “Thank you,” Jay says, jotting down the information.

  “You get ahold of him, you tell him I don’t appreciate how he left my boat. He left dirty dishes on the floor. Didn’t even bother to straighten up or nothing. It ain’t right,” he says. “You tell him I don’t appreciate it one bit.”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  Then Jay adds, “You know if he talked to any cops recently?”

  “About what?”

  “Nothing,” Jay says, thinking better of it. He hangs up the line.

  Stella’s number is busy the first five times Jay tries it. When he finally gets through, the line rings some twenty times before Jay simply gives up.

  He thinks of calling the cops on his own, but can’t bring him­

  self to do it.

  He remembers his own advice: Keep your fucking mouth shut. It’s a warning that lives under his skin, in his DNA. Keep your head down, speak only when spoken to. A warning drilled into him every day of his life growing up in Nigton, Texas, née Nig Town, née Nigger Town (its true birth name when it sprang up a hun­

  dred years ago in the piney woods of East Texas). A warning always delivered with a sharp squeeze from his mother’s hand Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 69

  before crossing the street or going to school, and especially before going out after dark.

  He’s not proud of his fears, but there they are, pinching at him from all sides like too tight shoes, restricting his movements, limiting his freedom. A shame, considering the real reason he marched so many years ago was to prove fear was dead, that it belonged to another time, to men like his father. Jay sits at his desk, thinking about Jerome Porter.
The same image always comes to him, like a well-worn photo­

  graph in his mind, a snapshot of another time. It’s an image of his mother, eighteen, sitting in the front seat of her daddy’s pickup truck, Jay’s father, twenty-one and strong, behind the wheel. They were newlyweds, the way Jay always heard the story. His mother, Alma, was just starting to show. They were riding on a farm road that ran behind Jay’s grandmother’s place, a barbecue joint and greengrocer, where his parents were both working the summer after they married. Jay’s father was driving his young wife home ’cause she wasn’t feeling too good on her feet. There was another truck on the road that day, riding their bumper and honking the horn, two white men in the cab and a loaded rifle rack in the back window. This was Trinity County, 1949, a lawless place for men like Jerome Porter. The police were white. The sheriff and the mayor. And they made it known that the countryside belonged to them. There had been a rash of poul­

  try theft that fall and winter, somebody (or bodies) sneaking onto people’s farms after dark, spiriting away valuable hens, some­

  times going so far as to slit a guard dog’s throat in the process. Wasn’t no way to tell who it was, but white folks got it in their minds that it was niggers’ doing. They set up vigilante groups, guarding property with rifles and axes, questioning folks coming in and out of the grocery store, even harassing little boys coming out of the colored elementary school. They stopped people on 70 Attic a L o c ke

  local roads, demanding to search their cars and making citizens’

  arrests if anything was out of order. And local law enforcement didn’t do a damn thing to stop them.

  Jerome, Jay Bird, as Alma called him, was careful not to go above thirty miles an hour. He didn’t want to give the men in the truck any excuse to stop the car, which it turns out they did any­

  way by pulling their pickup ahead and blocking the road. Jay’s parents were in Alma’s daddy’s truck, and she knew he kept a pistol in the glove box. She reached for it, but Jerome told her not to make it worse. He got out of the car, let the men have a look around, and asked them politely to let them go on their way. “My wife’s not feeling well,” he explained.

  Something about the self-satisfied way he said it seemed to set them off. Maybe they didn’t have wives or didn’t like the ones they had, but they got kind of rough then, poking around on the passenger side, near Alma, making Jay’s father understand that nothing in this world really belonged to him. It was all within their reach. His father was a tall man, taller than Jay. He stood up straight, looked the men in the eye, and said, “Y’all need to get away from there now. Leave her be.” The men turned to each other then, agreeing on something, an approach, some­

  thing choreographed from their repertoire. They were small and squat, and they charged at him like yard dogs, coming at him from two sides. Within the first couple of blows, it was clear they would not be satisfied by some regular beating, a few kicks in the dust. They were going for something else, scratching past his skin and bones, punching at his spirit. They had him near

  ’bout to the ground when Alma got the gun out of the glove box, a little .25-caliber pistol her brothers had taught her to shoot.

  “Your daddy took one look at me with that gun and said, ‘Alma, don’t you dare.’ ”

  As a kid, Jay listened to this story in disbelief. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 71

  It was nothing like the cowboy movies he watched on televi­

  sion. There was no explosion, no gut shot, no hero. Not his father anyway. Jerome Porter wouldn’t let his wife save him, afraid of what would happen to her if she pulled the trigger. There was no coming back from shooting a white man in Trinity County, 1949. If a mob didn’t get you, the courts would. It turned out the gun scared them anyway, it was shaking so in Alma’s hand. The men couldn’t be sure Jay’s mother would heed her husband’s instruction not to shoot. They ran back to their truck and took off. A red Ford was all anybody ever remem­

  bered. No license plate, no names.

  Jay’s daddy was beat pretty good about the head. He managed to get himself into the truck. He turned the engine over, but never got the car into gear. He turned to his wife and said, “Alma, I think you better drive.” He passed out a few moments after that. She pushed him over to the passenger side by herself, even in her condition. The nearest colored hos­

  pital was all the way to Lufkin. She didn’t think Jay Bird could make it that far, so she drove him to St. Luke’s Faith Memorial in Groveton. In the waiting area, the nurses went so far as to let Jay’s mother fill out all the paperwork, let her think her husband would be the next one in line. Alma sat with him, holding his hand, his head resting on her lap, wondering why they were let­

  ting other people go ahead of Jerome. It wasn’t until late in the evening, the waiting room empty and the two of them the only ones still waiting, that she understood what was going on, that this white hospital had no intention of treating her husband. She laid his head softly on the bench, then got up and called over to her parents’ place. Somebody needed to run up to Jerome’s mama’s house, she said, and let Mrs. Porter know her boy was in trouble, that it looked bad. She asked her brothers to drive down, to help her get her husband all the way to Lufkin. 72 Attic a L o c ke

  They got him out of St. Luke’s and into Alma’s brother’s Dodge so Jay’s father could lie out in the backseat. He came to at least once, but he never said a word. Just looked at Alma and kind of smiled. He died somewhere between Groveton and Lufkin. That was December. Jay was born five months later. He would never be like his father; he’d decided that a long time ago. He was going to live to see his son. Or a little girl. Two maybe. The world would be different for him. As a kid, he watched King, Bayard Rustin, and the others, watched the boys in clean sweaters and pressed pants at the lunch counters in North Carolina, getting spit on and pushed around. And even then he thought they were missing the point. Even then he thought he’d shoot a motherfucker before he’d let them spit on him. He wanted something more than the early movement’s fight for legal equality and freedom in the streets. Jay’s dream was for freedom in his own mind, liberation from the kind of soul-crushing fear that took his father’s life. So he marched and wrote speeches and armed himself for a coming revolution . . . until they arrested him and locked him in a jail cell, threatened to take his life away, holding him to answer on shaky evidence and flat-out lies. It was a courtroom instead of a country road. Still, they killed his spirit.

  He’s older than his father now. His daddy is somewhere, still twenty-one.

  Jay thinks about that fact every day, thinks of what he has to live for now, the family he wants to protect, and how, in his own way, all these years later, he’s become just as conservative as his father’s generation. He is just as afraid.

  C h a p t e r 6

  Charlie Luckman keeps an eye on the black girl, the one on the right side of the stage. Her ass is hanging out of a little burgundy number, her long, pointy nails painted to match. She ducks coyly behind the pole, wrapping one leg around it, then the other, as she makes a graceful dive backward, until she is practically hanging upside down, dark nipples spilling out of her costume.

  Jay looks down at his watch.

  He’s been fidgety and unfocused through most of lunch, bumbling through the appetizers and small talk, feigning inter­

  est in the girls onstage, all the time thinking about police detec­

  tives combing the crime scene by the bayou.

  The black girl arches her back, sliding down the pole like a cat. 74 Attic a L o c ke

  Charlie, fascinated, can’t take his eyes off her. J. T. Cummings, the port commissioner, is on the other side of the table, halfway between Jay and Charlie. He’s sweating, hunched over the remains of a filet he’s too nervous to finish. He’s been sucking on a roll of Tums for the past twenty minutes.

  “We get down to business already?” he says, rolling an antacid around his tongue. “My whole goddamned political ca
reer is on the line here, and I’d just as soon get this over and done with before I’m back at the office.”

  Charlie glares at his client. Whatever script they worked out before Jay got to the table, J.T. is decidedly going his own way, making no secret of the fact that he’s worried about a trial. Charlie, on the other hand, is trying to act casual—the reason for meeting in this place, Jay realizes. Or maybe it was meant to throw Jay off his game. It’s a certain kind of man can look at pussy while he eats, never mind talking business at the same time. “Did you know,” Charlie says, “that there are more gen­

  tlemen’s clubs, or titty joints, depending on your preference or income level, per capita in Houston, Texas, than there are in any other city in the state? The whole nation, in fact.” He plucks a pearl onion out of his glass with his thick pink fingers and pops it into his mouth, practically swallowing the thing whole. “And lord knows I’ve been to my fair share. I consider myself some­

  what of an expert on the local industry. And let me tell you what I know for sure . . . I have never seen a girl like that in a place like this.”

  He’s pointing to the black girl.

  “Maybe at the Boom Boom Room or the Wet Bar or Pussy­

  cats, you know, joints off the freeway. But not an upscale place like Wynston’s.”

  “I wasn’t aware this is a whites-only establishment,” Jay says, his voice rising, Charlie’s casual insult getting the better of him. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 75

  He’s had a couple of drinks with lunch. Not his usual habit, but then again neither is steak at lunch.

  “Well, there’s no sign on the door, nothing crass like that. But the price list here alone . . . I wouldn’t think most blacks and Mexicans could afford this kind of establishment, right?” Charlie says, directing his question to Jay, the expert. Jay looks around the posh club, peppered with business­

  men and city officials. He is, in fact, the only black man in the room. Money, it turns out, is the new Jim Crow. Jay looks at Charlie, feeling a heat spread beneath his collar, imagining yet another motive for bringing Jay to this place, with its creamy leather chairs and sterling silverware, the twenty-dollar steaks and Kenny Rogers pumped through hidden speakers. Around the dining room, Jay counts at least three sitting judges, several of whom have nodded Charlie’s way or come by the table to offer regards and well wishes. This is all to let Jay know how well con­