Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  “I got some stuff I have to get to at the office.” He slides on his shoes.

  “I promised Daddy I’d finish up the programs for Sunday this morning. I thought you could meet me at the church later.”

  Jay looks up at his wife, not immediately following.

  “The doctor’s appointment, Jay?” she says. Then, seeing the blank look on his face, she sighs. “If you can’t take me, I’ll get Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 109

  someone at the church to drive me.” She’s pouting a little, cup­

  ping her belly like a schoolyard ball, turning away from Jay, as if to let him know, this is mine, not yours. She’s aiming to hurt him, it seems, and he resents her for it. He didn’t ask to go talk to the mayor. This was her father’s idea. “Just tell me what time, B,” he says.

  The phone rings in the kitchen. Bernie shuffles out of the room first.

  When Jay comes into the kitchen, his suit jacket folded over his arm, Bernie is holding the phone receiver, pointing it in his direction. “It’s for you.”

  He takes the phone from her hand. “This is Jay Porter.”

  The voice on the line is gruff and slow. “Marshall’s dead.”

  “Who?”

  “My cousin.” It’s Jimmy calling.

  Jay lays his jacket across the kitchen countertop. He glances at his wife, who is buttering a slice of bread at the table. Apparently, Jimmy didn’t share this news with her. His wife probably had no idea who she was just talking to.

  Jay lowers his voice anyway, turning away from her. “What happened?”

  “They found him in a ditch on Elysian,” Jimmy says, his tongue thick and uncoordinated this early in the morning. Jay can’t tell if it’s grief in his voice or Jack Daniel’s. “He must have run off the road is what they’re saying, fell asleep or had a heart attack, a stroke or something, just run right off the road. They saying he mighta been out there two or three days.” Then a sigh.

  “My God.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” Jay says, because he can’t think of any­

  thing else.

  “You saw him Saturday night,” Jimmy says. “He look all right to you?”

  110 Attic a L o c ke

  Jay glances at his wife again. “Uh, yeah.”

  “Well.” Jimmy sighs again. “That’s what it is, what I wanted to tell you.”

  He asks Jay for the name of a good funeral home, one that might work out some kind of payment plan. Jay claims igno­

  rance, mainly because he wants to get off the phone as quickly as possible. He feels mildly sick to his stomach. He’s nervous about going to the mayor’s office, for sure. But the phone call, the news from Jimmy, has also left him feeling unsettled. It’s not exactly sadness he feels for Jimmy’s cousin, but a vague sense of dread. When he hangs up the phone, Bernadine is looking at him, the buttered toast half-gone in her hand.

  “The doctor’s appointment is at three, Jay.”

  He nods. “I’ll be there after lunch.”

  The mayor’s office is on the third floor of city hall, a squat lime­

  stone building dwarfed by steel and glass on all sides, high-rises that have come to dominate downtown Houston. In 1939, when city hall was built, the city’s dream for its future didn’t reach past eight stories. The state flag sits on top of the government build­

  ing; it is several feet wider and longer than the Stars and Stripes flying alongside it. There’s a reflecting pool in front of the build­

  ing, on Bagby. And across the street is a gilded archway leading to Cole Towers, twin office buildings that house the headquar­

  ters for Cole Oil Industries. The Cole name, in huge block let­

  ters, crowns the two towers, casting a heavy shadow across city hall, falling, at this hour, right into Jay’s lap. He sits beside a large window just outside the mayor’s private suite, where’s he’s been waiting for over an hour.

  He folds and refolds his hands across his lap, trying to keep them still, passing the time staring at the framed photographs Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 111

  lined end to end on the beige walls of the anteroom: pictures of the mayor with Vice President and Mrs. Bush; Governor Clements, the state’s first Republican governor since Recon­

  struction; even a snapshot of her with Congressman Mickey Leland, a Democrat and former political activist. Jay can dis­

  cern no political rhyme or reason to the images on the walls. In picture after picture, in one pastel-colored suit after another, Mayor Cynthia Maddox is shaking hands with Democrats and Republicans, Teamsters and members of the Business League. Everyone has a hand on her in the photos, laying their claim to a woman who ran as a Texas Democrat, but garnered nearly 30 percent of the Republican vote, a woman who spoke vaguely on the campaign trail about her commitment to civil rights but still managed to reassure moneyed conservatives that she could keep their neighborhoods lily-white. In Mayor Maddox, people see what they want to see.

  Jay looks at his watch for the third time. The mayor’s secre­

  tary gives him a tiny shrug. “I’ll let ’em know you’re still wait­

  ing,” she says, pressing a button on the intercom. Then, hearing something, she twists her torso around to look at the mahoganystained double doors leading to the mayor’s suite. She lifts her finger off the intercom button. “Oh, here . . . I think they’re coming now.”

  It’s not until the doors open that the weight of the moment finally hits him. His face is suddenly flushed with heat . . . and also the bitter sting of shame. He’s embarrassed to be undone by her still, all these years later. He bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes his own blood, until he remembers what senseless pain feels like, until he remembers what this woman is capable of. It’s not the mayor at the door anyway, just another secretary or aide of some sort, a boy in his twenties with a clipboard tucked under his arm and a tie that comes up too short of his waist. He 112 Attic a L o c ke

  waves at Jay impatiently, as if they’ve been waiting for him all this time. Jay stands and straightens the front pleats of his pants. Slowly, he makes his way through the double doors, dragging his feet as if he’s walking through sand. The boy with the clipboard leads Jay down a short hallway. “Her conference call ran over,”

  he says. “She’s got about fifteen minutes before she has to be at a luncheon across town. I’d make it quick.”

  The boy opens another set of doors at the end of the hallway. A rush of cool air, crisply air-conditioned and sweetened with rose water perfume, hits Jay in the face, along with a lingering hint of cigar smoke, a reminder that this room, the inner sanc­

  tum, was once the domain of men.

  The current mayor is leaned up against the front side of her desk, dressed in a plum-colored suit, a bloom of frilly white fab­

  ric knotted at her throat as if she couldn’t decide between a lace scarf or a man’s necktie. At the base of her legs, covered with thick, nude-colored panty hose, she’s wearing Keds.

  “The car’s waiting downstairs,” the boy says.

  The mayor waves in his general direction, her head tilted back. There’s a makeup artist, a woman in her sixties wearing a green lamé top and matching eye shadow—whom Jay would probably not trust to put on the face he shows the world—sweeping a pencil across the mayor’s left eye.

  It’s quiet a minute, and Jay wonders who will speak first.

  “I want to thank you for coming,” Cynthia says. Jay looks down at the thick carpet, fingering the change in his pockets.

  “Your support means the world to me,” she goes on. The presumption irritates him. He’s about to correct her, to explain that she’s misunderstood his reason for coming. He is not here to let her off the hook.

  Cynthia keeps her eyes closed while the makeup artist pats Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 113

  powder the color of corn silk onto her nose and cheeks. “What’s the next part, Kip?”

  There’s a typewriter going behind Jay.

  Th
e boy, Kip, types another line then rolls the paper to the top of the page. “ ‘As this city enters the golden age of its greatest opportunity,’ ” he reads flatly.

  “ ‘ As this city enters the golden age of its greatest oppor­

  tunity,’ ” the mayor repeats, with some romantic flourish. “ ‘It’s organizations like yours—’ ”

  “You’re jumping ahead. That line goes after you say the part about Houston being the fastest-growing city in the nation, the hope of a new decade.”

  “I want to open with that. ‘Houston is the fastest-growing city in the country . . .’ blah blah blah . . . ‘and it’s organizations like yours, the Daughters of the Texas Revolution, who maintain our heritage and tradition, our precious link to the past.’ That’s enough, Marla,” she says to the makeup artist. Cynthia stands upright then, finally opening her eyes. Jay’s is the first face she sees. The smile starts somewhere behind her too-made-up eyes, slowly, like a neon sign kicking on at dusk . . . a few sparks, then light. “How do I look?”

  To tell the truth, if it weren’t for her name on the door, he would hardly recognize her. The suit is square and covers nearly every inch of the body he once knew so well, as if she is well aware of its liability in public office.

  He cocks an eyebrow. “Daughters of the Texas Revolution?”

  Her smile broadens, a spot of mischief behind her docile, coral-colored mouth. It’s this face he recognizes. She angles her head to one side. “Oh, Jay,” she says. Remorse maybe, or else pity, for him, the things he still hasn’t learned.

  “Touch it up once before you get to the podium,” Marla says, lugging an alligator makeup bag on her way out the door. 114 Attic a L o c ke

  Cynthia nods, waving her off. Then she says to Jay, “I’ll have you know, those ladies gave me five thousand dollars during the campaign.” She crosses behind her desk and plops into an over­

  size leather chair. Jay can’t help thinking she looks like a kid playing dress up in her daddy’s office. “ ’Course, they gave the other guy ten . . . but I can’t afford to hold a grudge.”

  The other guy was Buddy McPherson, the mayor’s challenger in the general election. A former sheriff and county commis­

  sioner, the Big Mac ran a particularly nasty campaign, one that ultimately backfired. Sure, Cynthia Maddox was probably too young to be mayor, with too little political experience—a few years as Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s aide in D.C., then home to serve a year on the local school board and on to the comptrol­

  ler’s office—but the Mac’s very public attacks on her intelligence and maturity (repeatedly referring to her as “that gal”) and his frequent remarks on her mannish affect (“Something my grand­

  daddy always said: ‘Son, don’t ever trust an unattractive woman; they got way too much to prove’ ”) didn’t go over well with the public. And the fact that on the campaign trail, Mac repeatedly brought up the news that Cynthia Maddox had never married was universally regarded as being in poor taste. Cynthia picks up the can of Tab on her desk, drinking it through a straw so as not to mess up her lipstick. She looks at Jay and shrugs. “The DOTR are having their annual in Houston this year, and they asked me to speak at the luncheon,” she says, picking up a plastic fork and stabbing at a boxed salad on her desk. “They’re not all Republicans, you know. They didn’t all vote for Reagan.”

  “Did you?”

  She looks up at Jay, mouth full of lettuce, and shakes her head. Not an answer to the question so much as a reprimand for asking in the first place.

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 115

  “Nice picture,” he says, nodding over her head at the two oil portraits hulking on the wall behind her, between the Texas and American flags. One is the governor, William P. Clements; the other is Ronald Reagan.

  Cynthia doesn’t even bother to turn around. “They came with the office.”

  “We have to get these remarks down before lunch,” Kip says.

  “You finish up,” she says.

  “You want me to leave?”

  “No,” she says quickly. “We’re not going to be long, are we, Jay?”

  Kip goes back to typing, reworking her speech. Jay goes back to fiddling with the change in his pocket, turning nickels over in his hand. He turns and looks out the wall of windows on the northwest side of the office. The mayor’s suite is on the third floor of city hall, not a grand view, but high enough that Jay can see a swatch of the 45 freeway from here. It’s under construction, as usual, as is almost every pocket of the city; this is a restless, adolescent city, forever picking at its pimples, never satisfied to leave well enough alone. Below the I-45 overpass are Allen Park­

  way and Buffalo Bayou. Jay can just make out a piece of the water from here. In the afternoon light, it looks chocolate brown, as inviting as a cup of coffee, completely harmless. He thinks of the woman on the boat. Her face comes to him, as uninvited as the night his path crossed hers. That, and the mystery of the black Ford, the man behind the wheel.

  Cynthia lets out a soft belch. “Pardon me for all this,” she says, dumping the rest of the salad into a trash can at her feet.

  “But I stopped eating in public after Texas Monthly described me as ‘stout’ in their winter profile. You read that shit? I swear, I can’t win. I put on weight just to stop people harping that I got in on my looks. Now, I got half the city talking about 116 Attic a L o c ke

  my thighs. Everybody’s got some fucking thing to say.” She shakes her head in disgust, leaning down to open a bottom desk drawer. She pulls out a pair of black pumps, kicks off her Keds, and slides on the high-heeled shoes. “Kip, make sure that door’s closed.”

  “It’s closed,” he says without looking up from the type­

  writer.

  Cynthia reaches for a purse resting on a sideboard behind her desk. She pulls out a pack of Vantage 100s. She slides one out and lights it, then exhales, waving the smoke away from her hair, which is teased to hell in a round dishwater-blond helmet. She used to wear it long, Jay remembers. He used to have a goatee. And back then neither of them would have been caught dead in a suit. And yet here they are. Cynthia looks at him through the smoke, maybe thinking the exact same thing. So here we are.

  “What are you doing here, Jay?”

  There’s no simple answer to the question of why he came all this way instead of talking to her on the phone. It was a test, maybe, just to see if he could. “There was a shooting a couple of nights ago, out on Market Street,” he says, sticking to the script he was given. “That’s on the north side of Fifth Ward.”

  “I know where it is,” she says. “Anyway, I heard about it.”

  “You read it in the paper?”

  Cynthia shakes her head, blowing a thin stream of smoke through her lips, then stubbing out her cigarette after just a few quick puffs. She points to a stack of papers on the corner of her desk. “I get briefed by the police chief every morning. Every armed robbery, every rape, every shooting, I hear about it.”

  Jay looks at the typed briefs on her desk. There must be fifty or so, going back a couple of months. Somewhere in that stack of papers is a report about the body by the bayou, maybe even word about the investigation. He wonders how much the mayor Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 117

  knows about the case or if Jay’s name is on one of those pages. The news this morning about Jimmy’s cousin means Jay has no way of knowing what, if anything, the old man might have told police detectives about Saturday night.

  “Crime’s a big topic in this city,” Cynthia says, zipping up her purse. “The worst thing is to be at some function, a ribbon cut­

  ting for a grocery story or something, and have a reporter ask me about a couple of dead bodies somebody found the night before, and I don’t know a thing about it. Let me tell you, it don’t look good. I almost didn’t make it into office on the crime issue alone. People think a girl can’t keep things under control.” She walks from around the back side of her desk, motioning to Kip that it’s about time
to go. “Fifth Ward is one of our hot spots, so, yeah, I heard about it. Why?”

  “The dockworkers, the ones talking about a strike . . . they think the ILA had something to do with it.”

  Cynthia’s blue-gray eyes widen slightly. She seems to instantly comprehend what this means, the trouble it brings. “Jesus.”

  “To the Brotherhood, it’s an act of war.”

  “The cops told me they don’t know who did it,” the mayor says, hopeful.

  “The Brotherhood has reason to believe this was stress over the strike. It wasn’t that long ago when some of the ILA beat up a nineteen-year-old kid coming home from an organizing meet­

  ing.”

  “What?”

  “It was three men. The kid says he’d seen them at the ILA meeting the night he was attacked.”

  “Well, give me their names. I’ll take them to the chief of police myself.”

  She reaches for a notepad on her desk. Jay shakes his head.

  “The kid already tried talking to the cops. He drove himself to 118 Attic a L o c ke

  a station with a busted arm, somewhere on the north side. Cops there wouldn’t even take a report.”

  Cynthia rolls her eyes.

  “Those unions bowl together, you know,” she says. “The Policemen’s League and the ILA. The boys in blue are pretty protective of their buddies at the port.” She goes to run her fin­

  gers through her hair, a nervous habit, he remembers. But she’s forgotten the amount of hair spray her groomer encased her in. Her fingers get stuck a few inches above her ear. “This is a goddamned mess. If the city council would go my way in terms of who we seat on the port commission, then maybe I can push this strike situation in the right direction.”

  “What about Cummings?” Jay can’t help asking.

  “He’s part of the problem, you ask me. It’s the port commis­

  sion that started this trouble in the first place.” She goes on to tell Jay that the labor crisis actually started several months back when the port commission cut deals with some of the major shipping companies, allowing them to berth, or dock, their ships several hours earlier than has been customary for twenty years. Starting earlier means more ships docked in a day, more goods unloaded and loaded, more business. It also means extra hours of work for the dockworkers, most of whom don’t get overtime, a point on which the stevedoring companies refuse to budge. They’re already paying plenty of overtime to their fore­