by Attica Locke
In the kitchen, Bernie is counting a roll of bills stashed inside a cleaned-out tub of Parkay margarine. She folds the money back Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 141
into its hiding place, seemingly satisfied that it’s all there. She closes the refrigerator door and walks to the wall phone between the kitchen countertop and their three-piece dinette set. When she picks up the receiver, Jay panics. “What are you doing?”
“Calling the police.”
“Bernie, wait.” He takes the phone from her hand.
“Jay, we are calling the police. Just because we live on this side of town does not mean we don’t deserve to live in peace. I’m not having this in my house, Jay. I’m not putting up with it.” She shoves his hand out of the way, like she’s swatting at a persistent fly. She grips the phone receiver and starts to dial.
“Bernie. I did this.”
It’s the first thing that comes out of his mouth. He doesn’t tell her what he’s really thinking, his worst fear—that it was police officers, homicide detectives, who broke in here in the first place, possibly looking for information on him. The television, Ber
nie’s cash, even his checkbook, weren’t touched. This was not a burglary, that’s clear. The only thing missing is the .22. And he would be a fool to mention a missing gun to any beat cops who would show up at this hour, reporting a gun for which he has no permit. He presses his finger on the hook, hanging up the line.
“The mess in the bedroom, B, I did that.”
“What are you talking about?”
There’s a rap on the front door. Two times, then again, louder.
Jay makes sure to get to the door first. All the noise they’ve been making, someone might have already put in a call. If these are cops at the door now, he wants to do the talking. He turns to his wife before opening the door. “I did this, Bernie. Okay?” He waits for her to agree with him. Her face is completely blank. She stares at him as if he’s a stranger, the true intruder in her home. Jay opens the door, pulling it just a crack.
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The eyeball on the other side is red-veined and rheumy about the insides.It’s Mr. Johnson from downstairs. “Mr. Porter, y’all doin’ all right?” he asks, scratching at his gray beard, trying to peer past Jay and into the apartment. “I heard your wife scream
ing. Somethin’ not wrong, is it?”
“Bernie saw a rat is what it was.”
“You get him?”
“No, sir. He made it out the back door.”
“Lord, don’t tell me that. My wife hear about another rat running around, and she’s gon’ keep me up all night about it.”
He chuckles, wanting to share a husbandly laugh with Jay. But Jay just stands there, saying no more than he already has. “And you’re sure that’s all it was?” Mr. Johnson asks.
“Yes, sir,” Jay says.
He mumbles a curt good night to his neighbor and quickly shuts the door.
“What in the world, Jay?” his wife says.
“I don’t want that man in our business, B.”
“I’m talking about that mess in the bedroom.”
“I’m sorry, B,” he says, talking too fast. “After I dropped you off at Evelyn’s, I realized I forgot something back here, some
thing I needed for the interview. It was a good thing I remem
bered too, before I got all the way out to Pasadena. I tore the place up, in a hurry, you know. And I’m sorry.”
He walks past her calmly, into the bedroom, as if he does this sort of thing all the time, tearing up her things, scaring her half to death. He starts picking through the mess in the room. Ber
nie stands in the open doorway, leaned against the wood frame, watching him. “What was it?” she asks.
He looks up. “Pardon?”
“What was it you were looking for?”
“A sheet of questions, names my client told me to look into.”
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 143
“I don’t remember seeing it,” she says. Then, “Where’d you find it?”
“Hm?” he says, stalling.
“Where did you find it, Jay?”
“That’s the funny part. It was in my car the whole time.”
He smiles. She does not smile back.
“Come on, Bernie. If anybody really broke in here, they would have taken the TV, the radio or something. Your ’frigera
tor money’s still there, ain’t it?”
Softly, he adds, “You got no reason to be scared, Bernie.”
“I’m not scared. I’m thinking.” She runs her finger inside the doorjamb, fingering the cheap, pulpy wood. There’s a lot he’s not telling her, and she seems to know it by the look on his face.
“I’m sorry about the mess,” he says, putting the dresser drawers back. Bernie watches him for a while, then slowly joins him in the cleanup, repacking her flowered suitcase piece by piece. About an hour before dawn, he’s still up, sitting on the living room sofa, a tool chest at his feet and a can of beer in his hand, trying to think of how they got inside. He checks the front door and the one in back, where the hinge is still hanging loose from when he pushed his way into the apartment. He wonders if that was the point of entry, if they kicked the door in and then slop
pily tried to repair the damage, replacing the hinge. But as he hunches on his knees, refastening the screws on the brass-plated hinge, he considers what little sense that makes. Why would anyone bother? Why tear the place apart, make a show that you’d been there, then take the trouble to cover your tracks? No, somebody wanted him to know they were here. Which is why he can’t sleep now.
’Cause the more he thinks about it, the more a nagging feel
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ing starts to sink somewhere in the back of his mind, like dirt and debris settling after a hurricane. At this late hour, the air finally still, he can, at last, see things clearly. It was not a cop who broke in. He’s almost sure of it now. Jay used to have break-ins all the time. His dorm room, the duplex on Scott Street where he stayed sometimes, even his first apartment after his trial, a one bedroom rattrap in the Bottoms in Third Ward. The feds and local law enforcement often came and went as they pleased, going through his things, bugging the phones. But they never left more than a faint trace: a lamp out of place, a phone book moved a few inches to the left of where it had been, or his papers rearranged in a slightly different order than before. Everything else was exactly the way he’d left it, down to the cigarette butts in the ashtrays and the dirty dishes in the sink. The only firm clues that someone had been in his place were the tiny recording devices he used to pull out of his phone receivers.
He’s already checked the kitchen phone tonight. In a fit, he took the whole thing off the wall and tore it apart, laying the pieces across the dinette table, studying them under the light. When he didn’t find anything, he tried to put the thing back together and couldn’t, and he got so frustrated that he started to laugh out loud, a dark, bitter sound that led to tears. You’re not right, his wife had said. You’re not right. It’s been almost a week since Bernie’s birthday dinner, since he helped a stranger out of the bayou, a woman he doesn’t even know for a fact to be a murderer. No cops have come beating down his door; no one’s even called to ask him any questions. He’s done nothing wrong. And yet here he is, three o’clock in the morning, sitting over his dead phone, what he broke apart with his bare hands.
This is what his life has done to him.
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 145
He looks at his wedding picture on the coffee table, the one that was turned facedown. He thinks of the mess they made of his wife’s things and knows this was meant to intimidate him. Someone wanted him to know how easy it would be to get to him. Into his apartment, into his bedroom, the deepest part of his marriage. He doesn’t know why someone would have taken the gun. Except that taking it would rattle his nerves, which, in fact, it has.
Jay runs through a list of clients in his
head, ones who might be disgruntled enough to pull a stunt like this. But his mind keeps coming back to the longshoremen, the strike, and the vio
lence that’s erupted over the last few weeks . . . and the fact that he let himself get pulled into a very public fight. He thinks of the black Ford and the white driver and begins to wonder if he hasn’t been reading this whole thing wrong from the get-go. He remembers the car tailing him on Market Street a couple of nights ago, how quickly it turned and sped off when they came upon the lights of police squad cars. What if it was never a cop following him, he thinks, but someone aligned with the ILA, the faction that’s against the strike? What if their new tactic is to come after him?
He opens his eyes at about a quarter to six. Bernie is standing over him, pushing at his left shoulder to wake him. He’s laid out on the couch, where he must have nodded off sometime during the night. He does not remember how much of it was a dream. The darkness is gone, and he feels washed clean. He follows the smell of coffee into the kitchen. Bernie sets a steaming cup for him on the table. The phone is still there, bro
ken into a dozen pieces. She does not ask him about it, probably knows she wouldn’t get the truth if she did.
C h a p t e r 1 2 Two days later, not even a full forty-eight hours after he told his father-in-law he didn’t want to get involved, Jay is standing on the docks at the Port of Houston, an hour before the dock
workers union is set to vote on a strike. He waits on wharf 12, next to a roach coach that smells of coffee and fried bologna and pork tamales. He lights a Newport and keeps his eyes peeled, on the lookout for a white man in his forties with a buzz cut and sunglasses, the one driving the black Ford, and the one he now suspects broke into his apartment.
Wharf 12 is a public dock run by the port authority. It’s sand
wiched between two other docks that are considerably larger and move a lot more inventory in a day. Over the years, wharf 12 has become a kind of de facto break room for longshore
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 147
men working up and down the Ship Channel. Here the ones who didn’t get a work assignment for the day wait around to see if their luck might change; they gather to get a bite or call home or play cards. The doors of the pier’s warehouse are open, and a group of men sit inside, taking advantage of the shade. It’s a half hour to dusk, and still, it’s nearly ninety degrees outside. For Jay, the sun and the salt water at the port, the smell of fish tails caked up on the shore and the fuel from the barges all mix into a heady cocktail. He feels dizzy and hot. He tosses his ciga
rette and buys a grape Nehi from the food truck. Standing in the shade of the warehouse, he watches ships in the distance. There are men in motion everywhere, up and down the Channel, dressed in coveralls or Wranglers, lifting bags of pure cane sugar, bales of cotton, and boxes of computer chips. They load and unload fan belts and air-conditioning units and sacks of grain, baby dolls and skis and grain mustard, doing the work by hand, in teams of two, lifting and loading, their backs bent at a harsh angle. They labor in near silence save for the grunts of their breath.
A few of the wharves operate by forklift. Two or three men work the machines, which load goods mechanically into long rectangular metal containers that look like boxcars on a train. The containers are then transported onto the ships by even big
ger machines. Even at a distance, Jay can see it’s an infinitely more efficient way of going about things, easier and faster too. In an instant, he gets a clear picture of how labor problems might be solved in the future: machines.
At a quarter to seven, the kid shows up. He’s alone, his arm still in a sling.
His name is Darren. He’s nineteen, as Jay guessed. He grew up on the north side, went to high school out in Kashmere Gardens, a rough neighborhood north of the Loop, full of Sec
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tion 8 housing and street toughs. He likes football and Michael Jackson (the new stuff ) and is thinking about taking a few classes at a community college in the fall. “I need a job I can work if both my arms are broken.” Smart boy, Jay said to him over the phone.
Jay offers to buy the kid a soda. Darren says no, that he doesn’t want to bother Jay with anything. But Jay insists. Ten minutes later, he leaves the food truck with two sodas, plus a hot dog loaded with mustard and onions and a bag of Fritos, all for the kid. They sit on a couple of empty crates inside the warehouse while Jay watches the boy eat. His lip’s healed, and the bruises have faded along his jawline. The thought actually crosses Jay’s mind: did someone get pictures, some physical record of the injury, something besides the arm sling?
He shakes the thought and reminds himself that this is not a real case.
He’s going to help the kid, sure. If Darren can identify the guys who jumped him, if he can provide a name or two, Jay will pass it along to the mayor. Beyond that, it’s out of his hands, and he’ll carefully advise his “client” that pursuing this any further than that is foolish. In the meantime, the kid gains him entry into ILA headquarters, and maybe Jay gets to make an ID of his own. Since the break-in last night, he’s wondered more than once if the man in the black Ford and the guy who jumped Darren are one and the same, and he’s ready to tell the man, in no uncertain terms, to think twice before he crosses Jay again.
“You look good,” Jay says, nodding at the healed cuts on the kid’s face.
Darren nods, stuffing Fritos into his mouth. “I’ll be all right.”
He wipes grease and salt on his pants leg. “I get one of those?”
he asks, pointing to Jay’s cigarettes. Jay passes the kid his Newports, watching him fire one up, which the kid does with ease Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 149
and grace, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth. “So, I guess you want to know how it happened, huh?”
“You told your father and the rest of them that you were com
ing home from a meeting at the ILA headquarters,” Jay says.
“It was a week ago, about,” the kid says. “The union was just getting into this thing serious. Some of the Brotherhood camp was making their case about the wage discrepancy.” He trips over the word, as clumsily as if he were wearing too tight shoes. Jay finds himself nodding along, encouraging him. “How many people were at that meeting?” he asks.
“A couple hundred, maybe more,” Darren says. “It was the first time some of the white ones came out and said they gon’
stand with us if we walk.”
“What time did you leave that night, Darren?” Jay asks.
“I cut out early, before nine o’clock. That’s when my shift at the bakery starts.”
Jay scratches his chin. “So you think they actually followed you out? Watched you leave, then cut out after you?”
“Looks that way, don’t it?”
“You speak up at the meeting, say anything, for or against the strike?”
“No, sir. I only been in the union a year now. I can’t even remember when there was a Brotherhood. It’s only ever been one union, far as I’ve known. This ain’t a black or white thing for me. I just want to get a little extra money in my pocket, you know, hold on to a girlfriend for more than a couple of weeks.”
Jay nods, as if he completely understands, as if these were his only concerns when he was Darren’s age. The kid starts in on his second Dr Pepper.
“And you saw them at the meeting, the men who jumped you?” Jay asks.
“One of ’em at least. He was standing right outside the hall, in 150 Attic a L o c ke
the doorway, catching a smoke. I remember ’cause he looked at me kind of funny when I was walking out to my car.”
He runs down the rest of the story for Jay:
He left the meeting, must have been about a quarter to nine because he remembers thinking he was going to be late clock
ing in at the bakery—it’s almost thirty minutes to get out to his second job at the Meyer Bread factory. He was heading west on Harrisburg. He was gon’ pick
up 59 and carry that to I-45. But of course, he never made it that far.
There was a pair of headlights in his rearview mirror, not even a couple of blocks from ILA headquarters. He says he knew right away that he was being followed. How, Jay asks. Just a hunch, a feeling, the kid says. He tried to duck the car, speeding up, then slowing down, but the lights were right on his tail the whole way. Jay nods; all of this sounds eerily familiar. The kid admits he made a pretty big mistake. He took a sharp turn down a side street, thinking he could lose them that way. But he ended up at a dead end. The car behind him, a truck, it turned out—A truck, Jay asks twice. You sure it wasn’t a car? A sedan, like a Ford?—the truck pulled sideways and parked across the road, so that when the kid turned around trying to get onto Canal Street, they blocked him in. Two of ’em jumped out with baseball bats. The one driving stayed behind the wheel. Darren locked both his doors, but the men broke his driver-side window, yanking him out. Looking at Darren’s lean frame, Jay acknowledges that this was possible, but still the kid must have been cut up some
thing awful.
Yes, sir, he says.
He never got up after the first blow, a mean lick across the back of his neck. It was two against one, plus the dude in the cab of the truck. One of the men yanked Darren’s arm behind his back, pinning it there with his boot, which is how the bone Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 151
broke. The other one made a few kicks at Darren’s face, spit
ting at him the whole time about how a vote to strike would mean trouble for him and his family. From the ground, Darren couldn’t see much but tar and concrete. There were lights on inside some of the houses on the street, but no one dared to come outside. He doesn’t know if there were any witnesses. Except for the dude sitting in the truck.
He was behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette out the win
dow, watching the whole thing, sometimes offering direction to the other two. “Telling them to twist my arm a little harder. He seemed like the ringleader,” Darren says.
