Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  ered in cheap plywood. Jay has no trouble finding a parking spot right in front of the Hot Pot, which is sandwiched between a dress shop and a bait-and-tackle store with a handwritten sign in the window: we sell guns too.

  Erman Joseph Ainsley is not out in front of the Hot Pot res­

  taurant passing out flyers. That would have been too easy, Jay supposes. He shuts off the car engine and steps out of the car, feeding two nickels into the meter before walking into the Hot Pot café. Inside, he takes an open seat at the counter and orders from the pie case. A slice of lemon meringue and a cup of black coffee. He asks the woman behind the counter where he can get hold of a phone book.

  The directory, when it arrives, is thinner than a high school yearbook. Jay opens to the A’s, trailing his finger down the inky columns until he comes across an Ainsely, E. J. On Forrester Road. The house number is 39. He leaves a dollar on top of the cost of the pie and coffee and asks the way out to Forrester Road. The woman behind the counter pinches her eyebrows together.

  “You looking for Mr. Ainsley?”

  The question catches Jay off guard. “Why do you ask?”

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 309

  The woman scoops the bills and loose change from the coun­

  tertop, crumpling them all together and stuffing the money into the front pocket of her apron. “He’s the only one still left on For­

  rester, the only one left in that whole neighborhood, in fact. But I guess you already knew that,” she adds, taking particular notice of Jay’s suit and tie all of a sudden. She gives him a cool smile, letting him know that she’s on to him, country girl or not.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he says.

  “You ain’t out here tryin’ to get him to sell his place?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Hmph,” the woman mumbles, studying Jay. He can tell she hates to be wrong about things. “What do you want with Ainsley anyway?”

  Jay pointedly ignores the question. “Is there a map somewhere that I can look at?” he asks. “Or maybe you could point me to a gas station.”

  “Personally, I wouldn’t listen to a thing that man has to say, but some people are hardheaded, so . . .” She sighs and points out the front windows of the café, beneath the gingham cur­

  tains. “Take Main back to 219 and head south, like you’re head­

  ing to the water. The next exit you see, get off and go to your right. There’s a line of houses out that way, right off the highway. That’s where Ainsley stays. You can’t miss it,” she says. “He’s out by the old mine.”

  The exit sign for the Crystal-Smith Salt Company is still by the side of the highway. Its lettering is cheerful, red, white, and blue. And a contrast to the otherwise drab surroundings. There are tufts of weeds growing around the buildings at the salt factory, which Jay can see from the highway. The exit Wanda instructed him to take leads him onto a street called Industry. The factory, 310 Attic a L o c ke

  or what’s left of it—empty buildings and crabgrass and a couple of shabby-looking trailers—sits to the right. The mine itself, Jay understands, is belowground, beneath the black asphalt he’s rid­

  ing on now, deep below the earth’s surface where briny seawater sloshes inside underground caverns and rock salt practically grows on the walls. The salt caverns, or salt domes, as they’re sometimes called, are a natural part of the Texas coastline, where the Gulf and land meet.

  Just across the street from the old factory is a neighborhood of modest one-story homes. The houses are older white clap­

  board structures with pitched roofs and wooden porches. Jay imagines this is where the first workers at the Crystal-Smith Salt Company settled nearly a hundred years ago, and where Erman Joseph Ainsely has taken his last stand.

  Forrester Road is marked by a small street sign that looks like it was peeled off a tin can, rust creeping around the edges. Jay makes a right, taking note of the house numbers, counting down from 63. He passes empty driveway after empty driveway. Number 39 is the second-to-last house on the right, the only one on the whole street with curtains in the windows and grass clippings in the front yard. Jay recognizes the front porch from Ainsley’s picture in the paper. He remembers the American flag and the petunias in the box planter.

  Jay takes the .38 from his glove compartment and tucks it into his waistband at the small of his back, pulling down his suit jacket to cover the bulge. The window above the box planter is cracked open. Jay hears a television playing loudly inside the house, tuned to a game show, if he had to guess by the constant stream of canned applause. There are pale yellow curtains in the front window and a few oddly shaped tomatoes or apples resting on the windowsill. A Chevy pickup at least fifteen years old sits in the driveway, next to a station wagon. The homey feel of the Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 311

  place doesn’t sit right with Jay. For some reason it makes him uneasy. He wants to get this over with.

  Standing on the front porch, Jay wipes his slick palms on his pants legs, then pulls back the screen door, holding it open with his foot. He knocks on the front door, twice. Through a glass window cut in the wood, Jay tries to get a glimpse inside the house, cupping his hands against the glare of the South Texas sun and pressing his face against the glass.

  On the other side, he sees a pair of eyeballs staring back at him.

  Jay, startled, pulls back from the window. The screen door slips from behind his foot and slams hard against the door frame. Then the door to 39 Forrester opens. From behind the mesh wire of the screen door, Erman Joseph Ainsley pulls a baseball cap low over his weathered forehead, a hood over his cool blue eyes. He stares at Jay a long, long time, one hand on his hip, the other leaned up against the wooden door frame. Jay can hear a television behind him. Wink Martindale is calling for another X on the board. Ainsley keeps his hand on the door, protecting his property, his little piece of something in this world.

  “Who are you?” His voice is phlegmy, moist with age.

  “My name is Jay Porter.” He waits to see if the old man recog­

  nizes the name. “I’m an attorney, Mr. Ainsley, from Houston.”

  The old man moves in for a closer look, coming so close to the screen door that the bill of his baseball cap makes a line of indentation into the netted mesh. He narrows his blue eyes in Jay’s direction. “A colored lawyer?” he asks.

  Because it’s the easiest answer and because he doesn’t have time to rehash the entire civil rights movement on this man’s front porch, Jay says, “Yes.”

  The old man nods, as if this is perfectly acceptable to him. He pushes the screen door open in a wide arc, opening the 312 Attic a L o c ke

  house to Jay. “Well, come on then,” he says. “I guess you’re as good as any other.”

  He turns then, motioning for Jay to follow, before disappear­

  ing into the house.

  The darkness inside is disorienting. It takes a frightening amount of time for Jay’s eyes to adjust. He can make out Ains­

  ley’s shadow moving through the house, but little else. He doesn’t know where he is or what the old man has in store for him. Jay, on instinct, reaches for the .38 at his waist. He walks down a long hallway, wandering into the blue light of a television set. It’s streaming in from a nearby room where, to Jay’s surprise, a woman sits in a seashell-scooped armchair, a pile of yarn in her lap. She glances up from her knitting needles, studying Jay over the half-moons of her reading glasses. He angles the gun in his hand so that it hides in the shadows behind his back. Whatever she makes of Jay, this stranger in her home, her expression is impassive, or uninterested. She nods her head to the left. “He’s in the kitchen.”

  The applause on the television reaches a fevered pitch. The woman goes back to her knitting.

  Jay backs into the hallway, sliding his hand along the wall, feeling his way around to the other side of the house. In the kitchen, he finds Ainsley standing in front of the open door to the refrigerator. “I gu
ess you want some water, a glass of tea or something,” the old man says.

  The air in the kitchen is thick and un-air-conditioned. The room smells of Mentholatum and vanilla extract. There’s a can of Postum resting on top of at least a week’s worth of newspa­

  pers, spread out across an oval-shaped Formica table.

  “I’m fine,” Jay says, hanging in the doorway.

  The old man shrugs.

  From the plastic drainboard, he picks up an empty jelly jar. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 313

  He fills it with tap water, then empties the entire glass into his stomach in just a few gulps. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

  “How’d you find me?” he asks finally.

  There’s something in the old man’s demeanor that Jay doesn’t quite comprehend. From the time Ainsley opened his front door, he has seemed to Jay to be, well, relieved, as if he had been wait­

  ing for Jay to show up at his doorstep for hours, days, even. “I read about you in the newspaper,” Jay says.

  It’s just enough to set Ainsley off.

  “That idiot,” he barks. “I told that ding-dang reporter what the deal was, what’s really going on here. But, you know, some people got to have every goddamned thing handed to ’em. You see that piece of shit they put in the newspaper, you see how they lied on me? They gone and missed the whole story.” He shakes his head in disgust. His neck is the color of a mottled peach, dot­

  ted with sun spots and flush with color. “But you wait,” he says.

  “When this all comes out, they gon’ be the ones to have their asses handed to them.”

  Then he notices Jay’s gun.

  The muscles in the old man’s neck stiffen. His jaw rocks back and forth in its joint. He takes a sudden sharp gulp of air.

  “Boy, put that up,” he says.

  He crosses to the window over the sink, yanking on the cur­

  tains. “You better believe they got somebody watching.”

  The old man’s eyes are frantic. He is not making a lick of sense. Jay slides the gun into the pocket of his suit coat, tucking it away. “Mr. Ainsley,” he says calmly. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

  “Thought you said you was a lawyer.” He says it quite matterof-factly, as if he takes this to be the whole reason for Jay’s stop at his doorstep. The old man starts for the door. “Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”

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  He walks Jay along the fence line.

  Jay can see the old salt factory from Ainsley’s backyard. The old man rests an elbow on top of the metal fence and looks, somewhat wistfully, across Industry Road. “They let us all go in seventyseven,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper, as if he’s speaking of a death in the family. “The year after Carter started with that petroleum program. I didn’t vote for the man, personally,” he adds as an aside. “Ol’ Ford woulda been all right with me.”

  He takes off his cap and rubs the dome of his balding head, which is startling white. He feels around his skull with his fin­

  gertips, as if he’s looking for something he’s lost. “And this one they got up in Washington now,” which he pronounces

  “Warshington.” “He ain’t a whole hell of a lot better. All busi­

  ness, that’s how they do now. That’s all these fellas care about. That George Bush got people in oil. So you see how it works? They making hand over foot, crying OPEC this and market forces that, and all the while they got a shitload of black gold running right underneath your feet.” He settles his fingers into the rings of the chain-link fence. “I’m short a pension now. I got a wife in there, son. I got to eat.” He looks at Jay as if he expects him to do something about it.

  Jay, lost in this whole conversation, isn’t sure what he’s meant to say.

  His silence seems to anger Ainsley, or maybe embarrass him. The old man slides his worn baseball cap back onto his head and looks back at the buildings and run-down trailers on the other side of Industry Road. “I gave my life to the mine,” he says. “You have any idea what it’s like to work two hundred feet belowground, boy?” He eyes Jay’s suit and tie, then shakes Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 315

  his head to himself, answering his own question. “Hours at a stretch, in the dark, the air so tart it burns through your gog­

  gles, burns right through your eyes to the back of your skull. And that white salt dust, so fine, like a mist, getting everywhere

  . . . in your clothes, in your hair, in your lungs, so you can’t hardly breathe.” He nods his head in a slow, steady rhythm, as if he’s counting, one by one, each working day of his life, every hour spent underground.

  “I’m not trying to complain. I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s right, that’s all, to kill off a workingman so somebody else can make a dollar.”

  “Mr. Ainsley . . . what does this have to do with Elise Linsey?”

  “Who?”

  “The real estate agent from Houston,” Jay says, waiting for a flicker of recognition in Ainsley’s eyes. “Do you know who I’m talking about?”

  There is the faintest smile on Ainsley’s lips. He clucks his tongue. “Don’t think she ain’t in on it too. Buying the land, see, that’s just a cover.”

  Jay thinks of the empty building on Fountainview in Houston, where Stardale’s offices are supposed to be. The image comes to him unbidden. And once it’s there, he can’t easily get rid of it. It lends a sudden weight to this whole conversation, Ainsley’s con­

  spirational ranting.

  The old man steps back from the fence. He nods his head toward the back side of his house and waves one hand for Jay to come on. “It’s over here.”

  There are three short cement steps leading up to the back door of the house. Ainsley stands with his hands stuffed in his pockets and one foot propped on the bottom stair. He’s staring at something on the ground.

  “You ever have any contact with Ms. Linsey?” Jay asks him. 316 Attic a L o c ke

  “I mean, other than her coming around your place trying to get you to sell?”

  Ainsley’s eyes are firmly on the ground at his feet. “Take a look.”

  Jay turns to see what Ainsley is pointing at.

  It’s coming up around the foundation of the house, black, like raw sewage.

  Jay immediately takes a step back, wanting to protect his shoes. “Looks like you got a plumbing problem there,” he says, almost gagging at the thought.

  “No, sir,” Ainsley says calmly. “That’s crude.”

  Jay looks up at the old man. “Pardon?”

  Ainsley nods at the ground. “That’s oil, boy.”

  He stands back with his hands in his pockets, as if he’s dar­

  ing Jay to come take a closer look. Jay steps forward, bending at his knees. He touches the stuff with his right hand. It’s loose, but thick, like melted gelatin. It slips and slides between his fin­

  gertips. “They call it creepage,” Ainsley says. “Last year it was just a few spots, mostly places where the grass stopped growing. I had little bald patches coming up everywhere. My neighbors too. See, that oil down there floats on brine water, and when the water level changes for some reason only God can account for, the oil gets pushed up to the top, right up through the ground. It didn’t start to get this bad until the last month or so,” he says, pointing to the clumpy pool of oil and dirt. “If I had sold my house when everyone else did, I guess no one would have ever known about it, now would they?”

  Jay stands, still rolling the oil around on his fingers, rolling this whole thing around in his mind, trying to get a good hold on it. Elise acted as a liaison, getting people to sell their homes. But to whom? The federal government?

  “They’ve had explosions at petroleum reserve sites in Loui­

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  siana,” Ainsley says. “They don’t know if all this is really safe. They don’t even care. They just buy up the salt mines, buy off the people. But I’m making a
stink, you hear me?”

  Jay remembers the old man’s relief when he showed up at the front door. And it now dawns on him that Ainsley wasn’t waiting for Jay so much as he was waiting for someone . . . to come see this mess for themselves. “Did you show this to that reporter from the Chronicle?” Jay asks.

  “Not that I trust the press any more than a fox in a henhouse, but yeah, I called ’em when this come up,” he says, pointing to the oil. “I called everybody I could think of. The Department of Energy, even the goddamned White House.”

  “Did the reporter come back out?” Jay asks, thinking of the strange phone call with Lon Philips and Philips wondering if Jay was another journalist.

  “Yep,” Ainsley nods, his voice sour. “And I ain’t heard a word back since. The government telling me the whole time they can’t do nothing. But I know they trying to get rid of it now. You can hear the tanker trucks coming through in the middle of the night, always at night, just the way they brought it in. Dot used to couldn’t sleep through the night for hearing the trucks come through. See, they pump the oil in over at the old factory site, and now they’re trying to pump it out, always at night, mind you,” he says, lowering his voice. “And your tax money is paying for this, you understand. If this is government business, why ain’t it out in the open, huh? Well, I’ll tell you why, son, ’cause this is the cleanup part, the shit they don’t want nobody to know about. See, they know I’m watching now.” The old man nods his head toward the fence line. “It’s been real quiet over there, about a week or so now. Suddenly there’s no more trucks. Nothing com­

  ing in, nothing going out. They know somebody’s watching.”

  Jay still has the stuff all over his fingers.

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  Ainsley offers him a rag from the front pocket of his overalls. Jay wipes the oil as best he can, but finds that it coats his skin completely, covering his pores, clinging like a parasite that has found an unsuspecting host. He wants to go inside and wash his hands. He wants to sit down somewhere. He wants to know who exactly wanted Elise Linsey killed.

  There’s a knock on the back door.