Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  “You think it’s so easy?”

  “Shit, man.” Rolly shakes his head, as if he’s sorely disap­

  pointed in Jay’s lack of faith. “ ’Course, I might need a little extra for it, you know.”

  Rolly, always hustling.

  “You find something,” Jay says. “I’ll make sure you’re taken care of.”

  “All right, man, cool.” He taps another Camel out of his pack.

  “What about the phone records from the girl’s place?” Jay asks, knowing that Rolly keeps an on-and-off-again girlfriend at Southwestern Bell who has come in handy on more than one occasion. “I’m working on it,” Rolly says.

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  Jay finally starts out of the car.

  Rolly leans across the seat. “You carrying?”

  Jay thought about going in with a gun. After all, it’s more likely than not that this girl shot somebody. But instinct told him to go a different way, that armed he might only cause more trouble for himself. Hell, what if the girl takes one look at him and calls the cops. Empty-handed, he can always say he just came to talk. He shakes his head, waving Rolly off, assuring him that he’s fine. But, of course, he doesn’t feel fine. His ribs ache and his face is still swollen.

  He slams the car door shut, then turns and walks down a peb­

  bled pathway and through a pergola archway that’s covered in stiff wisteria branches and thick blooms, which, on a closer look, Jay realizes are made of plastic.

  Each unit in the Sugar Oaks Condominiums has its own porch with a white ceiling fan and matching wicker furniture. The pool is kidney shaped and completely empty. Sugar Oaks is not yet operating at full capacity. Jay walks through the desolate courtyard, looking for unit 9B. The condo is tucked in a far cor­

  ner, on the opposite end of the courtyard from where he entered. The blinds are drawn, but there’s light poking through, casting thin streaks of yellow across the painted black slats of the front porch.

  He raises his fist and knocks.

  There are no footsteps. He hears no padding to the door. It simply opens without warning.

  There, on the other side, is the face he’s been chasing. She takes one look at Jay, takes him all in, head to toe. Then slowly, her mouth curls into a thin half smile. She looks almost reproachful, as if Jay were a tardy dinner guest who’s kept her waiting into the night. She does not seem in the least bit sur­

  prised to see him at her doorstep after dark. She seems, if any­

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  thing, to have been expecting him. If not on this night, then some other.

  “If it’s the same to you,” she says, “I’d rather do this inside than out.”

  He remembers the voice, rusty and sweet around the edges.

  “Why don’t you come inside?”

  He follows her inside the apartment, wincing ever so slightly when she closes the front door, locking them both inside. He doesn’t know this woman, only what she’s capable of, and he has no reason, as of this moment, to trust her.

  The condo smells of fresh paint. It’s completely empty except for a pair of tangled sheets and a Louis Vuitton duffel bag in one corner, a bottle of Cutty Sark in another. There’s a rotary phone on the floor, near the kitchen.

  Elise offers him a drink, making a show of fishing through empty cabinets in the kitchen before simply holding out the bot­

  tle of scotch. Jay shakes his head, wanting to stay sharp. Elise raises the bottle to her lips and drinks alone. Unlike the prim, buttoned-up clothes she wore earlier today at the courthouse, right now she’s wearing jeans and what appears to be a man’s undershirt. Her nipples and the bones of her rib cage poke through the thin white cotton. She’s smaller and a lot younger looking this close up, under the bright white overhead lights in the unfurnished condo. Here, she’s open, completely exposed. Beneath the soft putty of her chin, Jay can see thin, ragged rings around her neck, fading bruises that are still visible almost a week after their first meeting on the boat. The col­

  ored scars against her white skin startle him. And all at once, he hears her screams again. That night on the boat. The words, Help me. He remembers the shrill desperation of it, the I-don’t­

  want-to-die of it. Looking now at the bruises on her neck, he gets the clearest picture yet of just what happened in that parked 254 Attic a L o c ke

  Chrysler by the bayou, in those few moments before gunshots tore through the night air.

  She stares at Jay, the bottle dangling between her thin fin­

  gers.

  “Whatever you’re thinking about me,” she says, “you got it all wrong.”

  Jay can hear the Galena Park coming out, rounding out her vowels, roughing up the ends of her words. Elise takes another lusty swallow from the liquor bottle, then wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Jay can imagine her as a girl, growing up in that rough-and-tumble neighborhood. He can see her dusty bare feet, toes dug in the dirt, can picture her begging a quarter from some boy to run up the street for a snow cone or a cherry pop. She has the bony disposition of an alley cat, a wayward thing, hunting for scraps she can use. And like a feral cat, there is the hint of a hulking strength beneath her tiny frame. It’s in the way she cuts her eyes at you. If cornered, she will come out fighting.

  “He do that to you?” Jay asks, nodding at the marks on her neck. “Dwight Sweeney?”

  “I don’t know who the hell that is,” she says. Jay stares at her, confused. He thinks she’s playing games with him.

  “He told me his name was Blake Ellis,” she explains.

  “He put his hands on you like that?” Jay asks.

  “I’m not supposed to be talking about this.”

  “Your lawyer know he attacked you?”

  She shakes her head. “I can’t talk about it.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jay says, softening toward her in a way he doesn’t like or even completely understand. “We dropped you at a police station,” he says. “Why didn’t you just go in and tell them what he did to you?” He can’t help thinking this whole Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 255

  thing might have gone so much differently for all of them. “If this man attacked you, tried to kill you—”

  “You never panicked?” Elise asks, her voice rising sharply.

  “You heard that lawyer in court. I got a record.”

  The irony is not lost on Jay. He would laugh out loud at the peculiar similarities between their two states of mind if it weren’t for the feelings of confusion they engender. He feels a sudden headache coming on, a white-hot point of pressure behind his eyes. He had not been prepared to feel anything but rage toward her. “Who was he?” he asks. “The guy?”

  “How the hell should I know?” she says. “We met in a bar. He asked me on a date, took me to some Mexican joint out north. After, he wanted to park a little, which I was all right with.”

  Her words slow to a crawl. “Then he got kind of rough with me and . . .” She looks up at Jay suddenly, the brown color of her eyes going as flat as a puddle of mud. “And that’s all I’m gon’ say about it.”

  He can tell by the look on her face that she’s decided some­

  thing just then, decided that he’s not entitled to know every goddamned thing about her.

  “Look, we don’t have a lot of time,” she says abruptly, set­

  ting the bottle of scotch on the floor next to the telephone. “So why don’t you tell me what it is you want, why you’re here.” She glides across the floor in Jay’s direction. “If you wanted to rat me out to the cops, you’da done it by now. So there must be some­

  thing else you want.” She takes another step closer to him, close enough that he can smell a musky sweetness coming off her skin. Remembering her one-time profession, her often enterprising way with men, Jay gets the very strong sensation that she is mak­

  ing him an offer. She has her face tilted up to his suggestively . . . waiting. He might be insulted by the gesture
if the whole thing weren’t so profoundly sad. “I want you to call him off,” he says, 256 Attic a L o c ke

  pushing her away from him. “I want you to tell him to stay the hell away from my family.”

  Elise stares at Jay, her eyebrows pinched together. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.”

  “The guy in the Ford . . . the money,” he says. “You made your point.”

  “Is that what this is about? Money?” She actually sounds relieved. “You want money?” She makes a move toward the Louis Vuitton bag.

  Jay grabs her by the arm, holding on like a kid who’s caught a cat by the tail.

  He catches a flash of fire in her eyes, a signal, a warning, even.

  “I don’t want a goddamned thing from you,” he says. “I’ll give it back, okay? The money? I’ll give it all back. Just call your guy off.”

  She looks utterly confused. “What are you talking about? What guy?”

  Jay doesn’t understand where she’s going with this, why she would deny it here, now, the two of them alone. He can’t follow the game she’s playing.

  “You telling me you didn’t send a guy after me, to pay me off?”

  “I don’t even know who you are,” she says.

  “What about the old man on the boat? The captain?”

  “What about him?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asks, her voice rising in fear.

  “You telling me you don’t know anything about it?”

  “You’re hurting me!”

  Jay looks down and realizes he’s still holding on to her arm, Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 257

  his fingers digging into her flesh. He feels himself losing control. The pain behind his eyes spikes. The light in the room seems unnecessarily bright. “Where is it?” he asks.

  “Where is what?”

  “My gun.”

  Elise shakes her head slowly, as if she’s not sure he will understand such a simple gesture. She seems to regard him now as she might a small, highly imaginative child. “I don’t know what you think is happening here,” she says. “But I’m not trying to get you in any trouble. If anything, I owe you. I know that. You saved my life, and I don’t even know your name.”

  The words have an airy lilt of a question, an invitation maybe. A suggestion that under different circumstances they might have been friends. Her manner seems purposely dis­

  arming, almost ingratiating. And it infuriates him as much as it frightens him. The power of it, the pull. Her convincing denial.

  It’s a trick, he tells himself. Don’t trust it.

  “How do I know you’re not going to turn it over to the cops?”

  “Turn what over to the cops?”

  “My gun,” he says, watching her eyes for a flicker, a tell.

  “Listen to me, the cops don’t know a thing about you. And frankly, I’d like to keep it that way. I was never at the scene. You understand?” she says, wanting to wrestle some cooperation out of him. “The cops don’t know a thing.”

  “Somebody knows,” Jay says, raising his voice into a ball of thunder. “He went after the old man on the boat, and now he’s coming after me and my wife!”

  There’s a sudden knock at the front door.

  Jay turns and sees the doorknob twisting back and forth, 258 Attic a L o c ke

  someone trying to get in from the outside. Jay curses him­

  self for coming in here unarmed. He wishes he’d worked out some kind of signal with Rolly, a backup plan in case shit got rough. Elise starts for the front door. Jay tightens his grip on her arm.

  “It’s the neighborhood security guard,” she explains. “He knows I’m out here alone. He comes by every hour or so to check on me. I asked him to.”

  Jay is slow to let her go.

  “It’ll be worse if I don’t answer,” she says.

  When she finally opens the front door, there’s a short, stocky man in a red-and-black uniform on the other side. He’s wear­

  ing riding boots and a pistol on his belt. Elise glances back at Jay. She seems to want him to see that she was telling the truth. The security guard eyes Jay closely, a black man loose on the plantation. “Everything all right?” he asks Elise. “He a reporter or something?”

  “He was just leaving,” she says, looking at Jay. She seems thankful for the interruption, which, Jay now realizes, she knew was coming. She holds the front door open for him and, in a show of Southern hospitality, steps out onto the tiny front porch, walking him to the little gate, just beyond earshot of the guard.

  “I’m not trying to hurt you, Jay,” she says.

  “I thought you said you didn’t know my name.”

  “You just told me,” she says, tilting her head to one side.

  “Inside.”

  But he didn’t . . . did he?

  He can’t remember. His head is starting to ache again.

  “I just wish you wouldn’t go to the cops about anything, is all. They don’t know a thing about you,” she says. “I’ll give you whatever you want, I swear.”

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  “Why should I trust you?” Jay asks.

  He still doesn’t understand the man from the black Ford, her insistent denials, or his missing gun. “How do I know you’re not trying to set me up?”

  “I told you,” she says. “I don’t even know who you are.”

  C h a p t e r 2 0 He told her he believed her. She put a hand on his knee and asked him what he planned to do. They were laid out in the bed of her truck, parked behind an abandoned fairground, next to a faded red barn and a row of sunken bleachers. Underneath a crescent moon, they lay side by side, watching lightning bugs, early for this time of year, dance in the shadows of the pines. Cynthia had walked the grounds earlier, playing on an old swing set while Jay sat smoking cigarettes, watching from the bleach­

  ers. She smelled of grass and clay. There were pine needles stuck in her hair. Jay kissed her lips in the back of the truck. She put her hands on the small of his back, inching toward him. The sex was awkward.

  It started too fast and never arrived anywhere. Cynthia kept Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 261

  fidgeting, too much in a hurry and getting in her own way. Even­

  tually, Jay rolled off to one side and pulled up his pants. He lay on his back, listening to Otis Redding crackling on the Ford’s tinny radio. Sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time . . . Cynthia asked again about Roger. What was Jay prepared to do?

  The cops had raided Bumpy’s girlfriend’s place the week before. Cynthia had found Jay coming out of a Spanish lab on the south side of campus and told him he needed to see Bumpy right away. Something big was going down.

  Bumpy had been seeing a freshman that spring, a gal study­

  ing biology over at TSU. She was living with an auntie in South Park, and against Jay’s strident objections, Bumpy had started holding meetings at her place, arguing that they needed to take some of the heat off the Scott Street duplex. They played cards out on the front porch, and sometimes Bumpy’s girl would cut hair or let them smoke a little weed if her aunt wasn’t home. But they kept no files at the house, no phone sheets or mimeographed flyers. So Jay was more than a little surprised and upset to find that the police had discovered a small arsenal of guns stashed in paper bags under the house. The deputies had made a beeline for the guns within a few minutes of storming the house . . . as if they’d known just where to look. Which could mean only one thing: somebody had snitched.

  They had all initially suspected Bumpy’s girl. How well did he know her and all that. If she wasn’t the rat, it was at least assumed that the girl’s aunt, sick of fist-pumping boys coming around her house all time of the day and night, had called the cops. But this assessment didn’t hold much weight, especially not after the sheriff’s department threatened to arrest the girl and her aunt too.

  Bumpy went a little crazy over the whole thing. His girl 262 Attic a L o c
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  wouldn’t talk to him, and he wanted someone to blame for that, and for his missing weapons, which had been one of the most valuable assets AABL had; the guns were for protection, yes, but they were also a source of income. Bumpy called an emergency meeting at the Scott Street place. Founding members, newcom­

  ers, anybody who’d ever made it to even one meeting or showed their face at a rally. He billed it as a rap session, had some of the girls fry up a plate of chicken, made it sound like a party. When the place was filled to capacity, Bumpy shut the door and turned the key, locking everybody inside for almost twenty hours. Lloyd Mackalvy and Roger Holloway were assigned to guard the doors, each armed with a .38.

  Bumpy interviewed everybody one-on-one, seeking a second opinion from Jay from time to time, but also grilling Jay when he got the chance, asking if he was talking to anyone outside AABL about the inner workings of their organization. Besides his buddies in AABL, there was only one person Jay talked to, period. And there was no way he would have told Cynthia about the guns.

  Jay kept an eye on Roger from across the room. For a soldier on guard, Roger seemed to be having a royally good time. Always a piece of chicken or a beer or a girl in hand, he kept himself far across the room from the heat of inquisition. By the time the sun was coming up the next day, Bumpy had exhausted himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his mouth dry. He had a couple of beers and went to bed before he ever got around to talking to Roger. So Jay took it on himself to ask Roger if he had known about Bumpy’s stash in South Park.

  “Naw, man,” Roger said, picking chicken meat out of his teeth. He wasn’t exactly looking Jay in the eye. “I don’t even like guns, man. You know that.”

  “Naw, Roger, that’s the thing,” Jay said. “I don’t know that. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 263

  Matter fact, I don’t really know a thing about you, man, not really.”

  “I’m Roger, man,” he said, smiling broadly. “Just Roger.”

  It was an odd, indirect answer. And it kind of sat with Jay funny.

  Cynthia was furious about the whole thing and furious with him for not ousting the dude on the spot. She needed no more convincing that Roger Holloway was a snitch. Laid out in the back of her truck, she kept saying over and over that the feds couldn’t get away with it. This was their government after all, a point he was too tired to argue. He hadn’t come out here to talk about Roger, to be lectured by her about whose government it was. Some nights he hated to be reminded of how different they were, how much separated their two views of the world. He wanted to kiss her, to bring her closer. But he felt her slip­