Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  “Wait a minute. You’re married?” Wash asks.

  Jay turns up the volume.

  “You ain’t tell the people that part. How old are you, girl?”

  “I’ll be thirty come October.”

  “Oh, Looo-rrd!” Wash whistles into his microphone. The phone lines are lit up for this one. The first caller to get through is a cat calling himself Mellow Yellow. “That girl gon’

  have to clean this mess up herself,” he says. “She married and grown. She oughta known better.”

  “Yeah, Wash, this is Smokey here. And it’s not all that girl’s fault. Her mama need to look at what she ain’t been doing to hold on to her man.”

  “You see, Wash, you see how they do us?” the next caller asks, a woman, a frequent caller named Sunshine. “The men always putting it on us.”

  And on and on they go, one call after another, turning this gal’s very personal, very particular problem into a forum for all manner of grievances men and women have against each other. Before long, the conversation descends into talk about how cheap black men are. To which one caller replies, “Y’all ladies got bet­

  ter jobs than us half the time, shoot. Y’all oughta pay sometime too.”

  Wash goes to commercial break, playing a Betty Wright song as the out.

  Jay is a couple of blocks from home when the DJ comes back 162 Attic a L o c ke

  on the air, claiming to have the girl’s lover and future stepfather on the line.

  Jay parks in the alley behind his apartment building. On the radio, Dark ’n’ Lovely tells the old man to keep his thing in his pants, to leave the girl and her mother alone. Solid Gold takes the men’s side, turning on her fellow sister, saying gals like that “give the rest of us a bad name.”

  Colt 45 wants to know who was better in the sack. The future stepfather says Mom’s got some skills, “but twenty-nine-year-old hips are hard to beat.”

  Jay snaps off the radio. He sucks his Newport down to the head, then tosses it out the window, catching a glimpse of some­

  thing moving in his side-view mirror; it’s just a flash, gone before it even registers. He looks out the window, down the length of the south side of the alley, but doesn’t see anything unusual. He checks in the other direction. Beyond the lone bulb on the back side of his building, the alley is dark. From his vantage point, nothing seems out of the ordinary. Not the trash Dumpsters or the broken TV that’s been there for weeks or Mr. Johnson’s Pon­

  tiac. Jay rolls up the driver-side window. Then he leans across the front seat, reaching for the window handle on the passenger side. A hand, pale and hairy, reaches into the car, pressing down on the glass.

  Jay stops cold. He looks up and sees a man standing on the other side of the passenger door, a man in his late forties proba­

  bly, hair cropped close on the sides. He’s wearing a white buttondown and a sports coat, the start of tomorrow’s beard growing at this late hour. He lifts his pinky finger up and down, tapping the glass with a rather large gold ring. “I want to talk to you.”

  He’s not dressed like the longshoremen Jay came across tonight, or any he’s ever seen, frankly, and the thought flashes across his mind: this guy is a cop.

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 163

  Jay clears his throat. “You want to tell me what this is regard­

  ing?”

  The man looks up and down the alley, then leans his impres­

  sive torso inside the car. Jay can smell liquor on his breath, scotch probably, and the faint hint of tobacco and mint. “I’d rather we get someplace private,” he says.

  “You got some identification on you . . . sir?” Jay asks. The man from the black Ford smiles. “Sure.”

  He stands tall then, pulling back the side of his sports coat, revealing a holstered pistol, a .45 as far as Jay can tell. He makes sure Jay gets a good look at it, that he’s made himself perfectly clear: this is all the identification he needs. Jay feels his stomach sink. This is dirty.

  Nothing about this feels right. The fancy threads, the gold ring, the scotch. “You’re not a cop . . . are you?”

  The man shakes his head.

  Jay makes a dash for the .38 in his glove compartment. He barely gets a hand on the weapon before the man from the black Ford cocks his .45. It’s a horrible sound, sharp and threatening. The power of the gesture pushes Jay back in his seat. “Don’t be stupid,” the man says. “I just want to talk to you.”

  He keeps the gun on Jay and nods for him to get out of the car.

  “Not here,” Jay says, almost a whisper. “Not in front of my wife.”

  The man from the black Ford runs his hand along the inside of the door. He unlocks it, then opens the car door and slides in next to Jay. He props a foot against the glove compartment. Boots, Jay notices. Alligator, with gold stitching.

  “Drive,” he says.

  Jay holds his hand over the key in the ignition. He thinks of his wife in the apartment upstairs, above them. He thinks of his 164 Attic a L o c ke

  baby. And he has a sudden, overwhelming desire to do whatever this man asks, whatever keeps Jay alive and unharmed from this moment to the next. He pulls out of his parking space.

  “You know, I could drive this car straight to a police station,”

  he says.

  The man from the black Ford settles into the torn fabric of the passenger seat. “I got a nickel-plated twenty-two in my pos­

  session says you probably won’t.”

  Jay remembers his stolen gun, the one missing from his bed­

  room.

  An unlicensed weapon with his fingerprints all over it. It’s the final clink in the trap.

  “Where are we going?” Jay asks.

  “Just drive.”

  Part II

  C h a p t e r 1 3 He has Jay pull into an abandoned rail yard, instructing him to park on the tracks, across from a busted-out trailer with broken windows and a missing door. Jay does as he’s told, then places his hands, clearly visible, on top of the steering wheel, awaiting further instruction. The man in the passenger seat reaches for Jay’s car keys. He kills the engine. In the silence that follows, Jay hears the man’s heavy, even breath and the almost musical jingle of metal on metal as he slides Jay’s keys into the pocket of his sports coat.

  Jay is careful not to move. The mouth of the gun is still pointed in his direction. His captor shifts several times in his seat. Out of the corner of his eye, Jay sees him reaching under­

  neath his sports coat for something in his waistband. 168 Attic a L o c ke

  It’s a large manila envelope folded in half.

  The man lays it on top of the dashboard, motioning for Jay to pick it up, which Jay is not the least bit eager to do. The man in the passenger seat fishes a cigarette out of his coat pocket, his hand still on the .45. He pops in Jay’s car lighter and once more motions for Jay to pick up the envelope, which Jay, finally and reluctantly, does. He’s surprised by the weight of it, like a brick in his hands.

  “Open it,” the man says.

  The car lighter pops out. Jay jumps in his seat. The man smiles, enjoying this. He lights the cigarette. “Open it.”

  Jay unfolds the envelope in the darkened car, fumbling with the fastener. Inside, he sees stacks and stacks of one-hundred­

  dollar bills, each bound neatly by a rubber band. “It’s yours,” the man says. “Twenty-five.”

  Jay stares at the pile of money in his lap.

  “Thousand,” the man adds, as if he needed to clarify. It’s more money than Jay made last year, more than he’s ever held in his hands at one time. He feels light-headed at the thought.

  “What is this?”

  “Consider it a business proposition, an exchange of sorts,” the man says. “The money is for your . . . discretion.”

  Somewhere in the distance, Jay imagines he hears the rumble of a freight train. He glances over the man’s shoulder, out the window and down the long length of railroad tracks. He wonders if th
is is still a working line.

  To the stranger, he says, “I’m not sure I follow you.”

  The man shifts in his seat, refreshing his grip on the gun. He sighs, as if he’s searching for the right words, the right way to put this. “August first,” he starts, looking at Jay. He pauses then, waiting for Jay to catch up.

  August first, Jay thinks, the night of Bernie’s birthday. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 169

  “You didn’t see anything, understand?” the man says, lifting the gun slightly. “You follow me now?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Good,” the man says. “The money is just a show of my appre­

  ciation.”

  “I can’t take this,” Jay says. He folds the envelope in half and lays it back on the dashboard. “I don’t want it.”

  The man from the black Ford laughs.

  Again, Jay is sure he hears the rumble of a train on the tracks.

  “Twenty-five thousand dollars is a lot of money, Mr. Porter,”

  the man says. “But I suppose if I have some show of good faith from you, if I find I can trust you, I suppose there might be more down the line.”

  “I’m not negotiating, ” Jay says. “I don’t want the money.”

  His voice cracks on the last word, a sour note hit so strongly that it echoes inside the car. It betrays a feeling he didn’t know was there. How good the money felt, the weight of it in his lap, nestled so securely there.

  “Who are you?” he asks.

  “Not important.”

  “Why should I go along with this, I don’t even know who I’m talking to?”

  “I think the why is fairly obvious,” the man says, gun still in hand.

  Over the man’s shoulder, Jay can see a pinpoint of light down the tracks, maybe a half a mile in the distance. It could mean only one thing: a train coming.

  Jay holds out his hand. “Give me the keys.”

  “I need some assurance that I’ve been heard here,” the man says. “Do we have an agreement, Mr. Porter?”

  “Give me the keys now!”

  170 Attic a L o c ke

  “Relax, Jay. I’m not trying to hurt you. I believe this is a solu­

  tion that benefits you greatly. You could have gone to the police already. But I know for a fact that you haven’t. I’m offering to pay you to stay out of something you don’t want to be involved in anyway. I’m not sure I see what the problem is.”

  The train is coming from the northeast, headed right in their direction. Still only a light in the distance. There’s still time. Jay puts his hand on the door handle. He pulls the lever, ready to jump. The man in the passenger seat grabs his arm, twisting the skin, making it burn. “Do we understand each other?”

  The light of the train is growing brighter by the second, com­

  ing closer.

  Jay tries to reason with the man. “If the cops were to ask me anything—”

  “They won’t,” the man says. He doesn’t even flinch at the roar over his shoulder, the vibration on the tracks.

  “How can you be so sure?” Jay asks.

  “I wouldn’t propose a deal to you, Mr. Porter, if I didn’t have my end of it squared away. Your part is simply to keep your mouth shut.”

  She must have told him about the boat, Jay realizes. She must have told him everything: the late-night rescue, Jay and his wife out on the water. He wonders if the guy posed as a cop . . . and thinks how easy it would have been to get Jay’s name and address from the boat’s captain.

  My God, he thinks, suddenly remembering the car accident. He gets a sickening image of Jimmy’s cousin lying in a ditch, his body twisted in the wreckage. Jay’s legs go stiff and heavy. He’s almost paralyzed by the realization of the true danger he’s in, at the mercy of the armed man sitting next to him. He manages to speak, his voice low and etched with fear, the words a near whisper.

  “The captain from the boat?”

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 171

  “I offered him the same deal,” the man from the black Ford says with unnatural repose. “But I didn’t feel I could trust him

  . . . not to my satisfaction, at least.” He takes a puff on his smoke.

  “So we worked out another arrangement.”

  “He’s dead.”

  The man gives Jay an affable smile, as if he’s only trying to be helpful, considerate even. “Take the money, Mr. Porter, buy your wife something nice.”

  Jay goes hot at the mention of his wife. “Leave her out of this.”

  “I don’t want to see anyone hurt, I really don’t, Mr. Porter. You and Mrs. Porter are the only two people who know what happened that night . . . and I’d like to keep it that way. You keep your mouth shut and everybody wins.”

  “Where’s my gun?” Jay asks, remembering his missing .22.

  “I’m going to hold on to that,” the man says. “For a little insurance.”

  “Where is it?”

  “Don’t worry. I plan to keep it safe. I’d hate to see it get in the wrong hands. I wouldn’t want the police to get the idea that you’ve got something to hide about the shooting or that, God forbid, you were in any way involved.”

  The threat lands across Jay’s chest with an unbearable heavi­

  ness. The air in the car is thick with smoke and musk. The light of the locomotive is a perfect circle now, just over the man’s right ear. A few hundred more yards and it’s a bullet or the train. Jay has to decide.

  “And if I don’t take the money?”

  The man shrugs. “Shame to see it go to waste.”

  He looks over his shoulder, as if he’s just noticed the train for the first time. “Either way,” the man says, “if anything goes wrong with our agreement, you can bet I’ll be in touch.” He 172 Attic a L o c ke

  reaches into his right pocket for Jay’s car keys, dropping them on the dashboard, right on top of the manila envelope. He opens the car door and is gone in a flash, jumping across the tracks, leaving Jay alone with the train and the money. The white light of the train’s front car has encircled the Buick, burning across Jay’s face. His arms are leaden with terror, his fingers numb and thick. He fumbles with his car keys, nearly dropping them before he manages to get them in the ignition. The train sounds a horn, a shrill warning. Jay makes a quick decision to dump his car and save only his life. He pushes open the driver-side door, moments from the greatest leap of his life. But he can’t bring himself to leave the money behind. He glances back at the envelope on the dashboard and makes a quick grab for the money, pulling the envelope by a corner. It unfolds in the middle, sending the money, stacks of $100 bills, spilling across the floor of his car and rolling underneath his seat. Jay feels along the carpeted floor for the money. He looks up at the coming train and makes an impulsive decision to start the car. The engine coughs and starts on the first try, an unimag­

  inable blessing. Jay throws the Buick in reverse, backing it over the tracks at fifty miles an hour, getting only a few feet to safety before the train rumbles past, shaking Jay’s car like a leaf in a late-summer storm.

  He’s halfway home before he stops the car, pulling into the park­

  ing lot of an all-night food mart. There are two brothers sitting on milk crates out front, one of ’em shaking something in his hand that Jay takes for dice. His heart still racing, Jay locks the doors, then bends over to scoop up the money. He stuffs it back into the envelope, fastening the clasp, folding it over again in half. He knows he can’t keep it. But he can’t bring himself to get Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 173

  rid of it either. In this envelope is Jay’s first house. A down pay­

  ment, maybe, with money left over to pay off his car and the loan he took out to start his practice. In this envelope is a front yard for his baby and money so Bernie won’t have to go back to work in a couple of months. It’s a way out of the tight spot he’s in. All just for keeping his mouth shut . . . which, hell, he was planning to do anyway.

  But it’s a fool’s dr
eam, he knows.

  There’s no way he can spend this money.

  Or turn it over to the cops.

  Like it or not, he’s stuck with $25,000.

  He’s too skittish to stash the money in the apartment. So he buries it in the trunk of his car, beneath a box of legal pads. Then he covers the whole thing with a rusted tire iron and dirty oil rags and walks up the back stairs into the apart­

  ment, where his wife is so caught up in a late-night showing of Cooley High on channel 11 that she does not seem the least bit concerned about where he’s been for the last hour and a half. On the couch, she lifts her lips to meet his when he says hello, but never takes her eyes off the television screen, never gets a good look at the fear on her husband’s face. Jay walks alone down their narrow hallway to the bathroom. Inside, he locks the door. He lifts the porcelain lid to the toilet’s tank, laying its heavy weight up against the bathroom door. Inside the tepid water, he keeps a pint of Ezra Brooks whiskey. He stands over the sink, the cap to the liquor bottle rolling around the mouth of the drain, and finishes the bottle in two clean swallows.

  He catches a startling glimpse of himself in the mirror. His tawny skin has gone a flat, ashy gray. His eyes are red-rimmed and veiny, and the cut on his cheek has left an unsightly mark. 174 Attic a L o c ke

  He fingers the ugly scab, thinking of the new wounds that have opened up tonight, the new questions . . . about the money in his trunk, the man from the black Ford, and the woman on the boat.

  Her face comes to him at once. Almond-shaped and pale, eyes dark like her hair. He remembers the way she looked at him on the boat—her fear, which Jay now realizes he misread at first. His own racialized disposition, his sensitive, almost exquisite sense of the world as black and white, mistook her fear as a fear of him—a fear that he might snatch her purse or pull her hair or harm her in some way. But he had missed the whole picture, the subtle shade of gray. She was not afraid of him because he was black or even a man . . . but because something in his countenance that night must have told her that he was not convinced, even then, that she was a damsel in distress. What he saw that night was a woman on the wrong side of town at the wrong hour and for all the wrong reasons. And whatever this woman’s secrets, she’s apparently willing to kill for them.