by Attica Locke
Jay and Ainsley look up at the same time.
Dot, Ainsley’s wife, is standing inside the house, in front of a window, a somewhat grave expression on her face. She taps the glass, pointing at something over their heads. Ainsley is the first one to turn around.
“Here we go again,” he says.
Jay turns and sees it too.
Just over the fence line, on Industry Road, between Ainsley’s backyard and the old factory, there’s a black Ford LTD parked in the middle of the street. The man in the driver’s seat is smoking a cigarette, watching the house.
Jay is over the fence in a matter of seconds. He lands hard in a muddy ditch on the side of Industry Road, his ankle turning underneath him. Still, he runs. He pulls the .38 from his jacket. Behind him, he hears Ainsley hollering but can’t make out the words. He thinks the old man is yelling for him to stop. The man in the black Ford lets Jay get within a few feet of the car. “You’re a fool, Porter,” is all he says before swinging the car in a wide arc, turning it around in the middle of the street. Jay has to leap off to the far right side of the road to keep from getting run over. He ends up in the ditch on the factory side of Industry Road. The bones in his knees crack and moan. He scrambles up the small incline, slipping in the mud more than Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 319
once. By the time he’s back on his feet, on top of the hot asphalt, the Ford is a good thirty yards down the road. Jay points his gun at the back of the car, his finger on the trigger. Sweat drips into his eyes, stinging and blurring his vision, fucking with his aim. He shoots wildly, shattering the Ford’s back window in a crystal rain of glass that scatters across the pavement. The car swerves, its back end swishing left and right like an animal’s tail. But the driver never stops. Jay watches the car turn back onto FM 219, heading toward downtown High Point and Baytown. He hops across Industry Road, back to Ainsley’s house. He cuts his right hand on the fence and tears a hole in the seat of his pants. He runs through the old man’s backyard and through the back of the house, past Dot and the television room and Tic Tac Dough. He runs all the way to his car, Ainsley at his heels. Dot peers out from behind the curtains in the kitchen window. Ainsley hisses at her to get back inside, to shut the windows and lock the back door.
“You know that man?” Jay asks.
“He started coming around a while back, letting me know he’s kind of watching things.” The old man is breathless from the run, coughing every other syllable. “He’s come up on me only once, out back while I was in the yard. He told me to stop talking to newspapers, looked me in my eye and said it.”
Jay thinks he can catch the Ford on the highway, maybe find out where the man’s going or where he came from. Jay struggles to open his car door. The car keys slip in his bloodied hand. By sheer force of will, he gets the door open.
“You coming back?” the old man asks.
Jay starts the car. Ainsley wisely steps back to the curb. At sixty miles an hour, Jay tears down Forrester Road. 320 Attic a L o c ke
Down I-45, halfway to Houston, Jay has a sudden panic about his wife, at home alone, remembering that he never called her from the café like he said he would. He never told her where he was going. He pulls off the freeway and into a Shell gas station to call home. He’s relieved to hear Bernie’s voice. She actually sounds chipper this afternoon, telling Jay she’s going to roast a chicken for dinner and wanting to know would he pick up a bag of white rice.
“B, listen,” Jay starts. “I want you to hang up the phone now and go make sure the doors are locked, the windows too. And I don’t want you to answer the door for anybody but me.”
“We went over all this, Jay.”
“Just do it, okay?” he says firmly. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. If you have any problems, somebody tries to mess with you or get in the apartment, I want you to call Rolly Snow. He can get there faster than I can.”
“Why in the world would I call him?”
“Then call the police, B.”
Bernie’s voice comes back soft, frightened. “Jay?”
“Don’t argue with me, B. Just do it.”
“Jay . . . there’s a police officer here right now, sitting in the living room,” his wife says. “He said you called the station, want
ing somebody to come out and check on me. He just got here. I mean, not two minutes before you called.”
Jay feels his knees give. “Bernie, I never called any cop.”
“But he’s sitting right—”
Her words stop short.
Jay can picture his wife in the apartment, on the kitchen phone, turning her pregnant body to take a second look at the white man in her living room, realizing that something is indeed off about his appearance. The suit that’s just a little too nice for city work, the gold on his finger, and the scotch on his breath. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 321
Over the phone, Jay hears his wife whisper, “Oh, God.”
“Are you on the kitchen phone?”
“Yes.”
“His back to you?”
“Yes.”
“Then get out of there, B.”
“Should I call—”
“There isn’t enough time.”
“What is this, Jay? What’s happening?”
“Just hang up the phone and walk out the door and don’t look back.”
He tries hard not to picture his life without her. As he pulls into the alley behind his apartment building, Jay tries to convince himself that there’s still a life before him that’s worth living, a life with Bernie in it. A few feet from his building, he jumps from the car with his .38, leaving the engine running. He ducks under the carport and races for the stairs. The back door is open. It’s the first hint that maybe, just maybe, his wife got out okay. The sun has set by now, and the apartment is dark. Jay steps inside, hardly able to see more than a few inches in front of him. He moves blindly through his apartment, feeling along the walls, calling his wife’s name. The silence is unsettling. The stillness in here is all wrong. Jay feels a terrible ache, down to his bones, a painful pre
monition that behind the cloak of darkness that surrounds him, something awful awaits. It’s then that he hears his wife, her voice a soft, gurgling whimper, a sound choked with tears. Jay turns and flips on a switch in the hallway. A path of light falls into the living room, where Bernie is curled up on the floor, her back against the wall. He flies to her side.
“Bernie!”
322 Attic a L o c ke
She is staring blankly across the room.
Jay reaches over her, turning on a lamp by the couch. The barrel of the .45 catches the light first.
Jay sees the gun, is able to comprehend it, before he sees the man’s face. He quickly raises the .38 in his hand. But the man from the black Ford shoots first, taking out a chunk of plaster just a few inches from Bernie’s head before aiming the weapon at Jay.
“Drop the gun,” he orders.
Jay refuses. The two armed men stand face-to-face.
“Don’t be stupid, Porter,” the man says. He aims the gun at Bernie again, daring to take a step closer. On the floor, Ber
nie stuffs her hands over her mouth, stifling a scream, tears streaming down her face. The man from the black Ford looks at Jay. “You really think I’d miss twice? Drop the fucking gun!”
“Let her go,” Jay demands.
“You’re fucking this up, Porter,” the man says, his words clipped, as if he’s out of patience, and Jay is out of time. “I like to keep things neat, understand? That’s my job. Now you’re mak
ing two more problems for me to clean up.”
“You got me. . . . let her go.”
“Drop the gun.”
“Let my wife go, and I’ll do whatever you want.”
The .45 is still aimed at Bernie’s head.
The man from the black Ford looks between her and Jay and Jay’s .38.
Then, deciding something, he looks at Bernie and barks, “Get up.”
Bernie l
ooks at her husband. “Jay?”
Jay steels himself when he thinks of what he’s about to do, the Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 323
script he’s already written in his head. He looks into his wife’s eyes. He wants her to understand what he’s asking of her, that he needs her to trust him completely. He wants her to see the way out. “Go on, B, get up.”
The man from the black Ford orders her to stand next to him, on the other side of the room.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Bernie says weakly.
“You’re not going anywhere,” the man says.
“She’s eight months’ pregnant, man. Let her go to the fucking bathroom.”
Jay lowers his gun finally, placing it at his feet. He kicks it across the matted carpet toward the man from the black Ford.
“Let her go.”
The man picks up Jay’s .38, a gun in each hand now. He nods to Bernie, who takes one last look at her husband. She looks frightened, unsure of herself and what comes next.
“Jay?”
“Go on, B,” he says.
He watches his wife shuffle slowly out of the room. The man from the black Ford calls after her, “And leave the door open so I can hear you.” Then he turns to Jay, who raises his arms in a grand show of surrender, counting the seconds in his mind, how many steps to the closet door.
“I’m losing faith in you, Porter,” the man from the black Ford says. “You got about five seconds to tell me why I shouldn’t shoot you right now.”
Out of the corner of his eye, Jay sees her enter the room, lead
ing with the long nose of his shotgun, the rifle he keeps in the hall closet. He tells her to shoot and don’t think. The man from the black Ford sees Bernie and the rifle and reacts quickly, point
ing his .45 at her. Bernie holds her breath and shoots. 324 Attic a L o c ke
The blow knocks them both to the floor, the kickback push
ing Bernie into the wall behind her. The man from the black Ford falls to his knees, blood oozing from the place where his right hand used to be. The stump at the end of his arm is almost unrecognizable as a feature of the human body. Bernie, aiming God knows where, blew the thing clean off. The man, howling in pain, raises Jay’s .38, shooting weakly with his left hand. The bullet whizzes past Jay’s right ear, but misses him completely. Jay grabs the shotgun from his wife, slides a bullet into the chamber, and points the barrel of the rifle at the intruder. The man sits up at the waist. Jay has a clean shot at the center of his forehead.
“Jay!”
The sound of his wife’s voice ricochets inside his skull, lighting up the place where his reason still has a hold. A breath away from pulling the trigger, he moves the gun six inches to the left and shoots a hole through the man’s right shoulder. The man’s eyes go blank. The .38 falls from his one good hand, and he collapses completely, his body crumpling onto its side. For a moment, the air in the room is perfectly still, nothing moving but gun smoke winding in the air.
“He’s still breathing,” Bernie whispers.
“He passed out.”
Which means they don’t have a lot of time.
“Is Mr. Johnson home?” he asks.
Bernie stares at her husband, confused by such a simple ques
tion. “Not yet, I don’t think,” she stutters. “His wife doesn’t get off work until nine.”
Jay sets the gun against the television.
The sight of this man incapacitated on his living room floor does not relieve his fears about the mess he’s in. This guy was only ever a messenger, moving on instructions from someone else. This is not the end of anything, Jay suspects. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 325
He turns and looks at his wife. “You’ll have to help me move him.”
They drive to Riverside in silence, listening to the whistle of the man’s breath in the backseat. Bernie rests her head against the passenger-side window. Jay stares straight ahead through the windshield, following every traffic law of Harris County, Texas, to the letter. When they get within spitting distance of the hos
pital, Jay turns off his car lights and puts the Buick in neutral, coasting in darkness to the rarely used service entrance around back.
Riverside is a county hospital, its patients mostly black and poor. The hospital staff is used to treating gunshot victims, and they are not known to ask a lot of questions. Jay leaves the man from the black Ford on his knees, a few feet from the service door. As they pull away from the hospital, Bernie starts to cry again. Jay reaches for his wife’s hand and trains his eyes on the road ahead.
C h a p t e r 2 4 Jay lost track of Cynthia sometime after his trial. She simply vanished from his life, disappearing without explanation or apology, without a word to him or even a kiss good-bye. She was just gone.
The rumors on campus were rampant:
Cynthia Maddox was a fed.
No, she had gotten picked up on drug charges in Matamoros, Mexico. LSD, somebody had heard.
No, she was living on a commune in Oregon. Or she had run off with a married sheriff’s deputy and was living down in Corpus.
Somebody said she had transferred to George Washington University.
Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 327
Somebody else said it was UT.
He waited for her to come back. He quietly finished out his final semester, skipping meetings at the Scott Street house and dropping his global equality crusade. He kept his head down, got a job somewhere. He took his old room at Miss Mitchell’s board
inghouse, renting by the week. Most nights, he played cards by himself in his room, listening to the radio. And he waited. One month passed, then another. She never came. She never called.
Every hour he waited was just another brick in the wall he was building at his feet, to shield himself from what he could no lon
ger deny: Cynthia Maddox had betrayed him, plain and simple, one way or another. If she had not sold him to the feds, then she had loved him and left him—if she had loved him at all. He still longed for her in a way that made him sick to his stomach.
How could he love someone he hated, or hate someone he loved so completely?
So he decided he would do neither. He would neither love her nor hate her. He would simply put her away. It was a begin
ning for him. He learned that other things could be put away too; whatever hurt could be hidden, if only he willed it so. He set about quietly packing up his life, piece by piece, like heavy luggage, trunks put in storage. Until, slowly, he remade him
self.
In July of 1970, the Houston Police Department’s Central Intelligence Division shot and killed Carl Hampton, shot him dead from the roof of a Baptist church. When Bumpy Williams, Jay’s oldest friend, was killed a month later, Jay walked away from the movement for good. He never looked back.
He went, of all places, to law school. It kept him out of Vietnam (that, and his felony arrest record), and it gave him 328 Attic a L o c ke
hope. There could be a life on the other side. He got married, and he pretended to forget all about Cynthia Maddox. She didn’t start showing up again until sometime in the sum
mer of 1976, campaigning for Senator Bentsen. She was running the senator’s Houston office, and the Post did a big spread about the little gal from Katy who wanted to put Lloyd Bentsen in the White House. Jay had stumbled across the article by accident. Someone had left a newspaper behind in one of the orange vinyl booths in the cafeteria at South Texas College of Law, where he was in his second year. The day Cynthia came back into his life, he’d been in the cafeteria for hours, reading contract law for so long that his eyes were starting to cross. He had picked up the discarded newspaper as a mere distraction during lunch. Her picture was on page three. A girl he once knew. He pushed his sandwich across the table, left his coffee to get cold.
The article listed Cynthia Maddox as a graduate of George Washington University and an aide in Bentsen’s D.C. office, working closely with him on legislation he was dra
fting in the Senate’s Economic Growth and Transportation Subcommittees. There was no mention of her time in Texas—her years at the University of Houston or her early, more radical political activ
ism—other than to say she was born and raised in Katy, a local girl. She had remade herself as well.
Jay spent that summer on edge. Just knowing she was in the city was a terrible imposition, a burden on his soul. It interfered with his ability to study, to sleep, to even eat some days. Every
thing in his life had come to a sudden stop.
Somewhere deep down, he was still waiting.
She never came to him, though. She never called. In the end, Bentsen lost his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. His campaign office downtown was Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 329
closed by the fall, and Jay went back to his studies. Cynthia, pre
sumably, went back to D.C. By the time she returned for mid
term elections in ’78, this time running her own campaign for local office, she was a stranger to him. The hair was blonder, the clothes stiffer, the politics, save for a few perfunctory nods in the general direction of equality and justice, were unintelligible to him. He found he could see her picture daily in the newspaper without a quickening of his pulse. It no longer mattered that she was in his city. He was no longer waiting.
He might have left it at that. If his father-in-law hadn’t called on him to get involved with the mayor again, to break their ten years of silence. If he hadn’t needed to get his hands on informa
tion about the shooting by the bayou. And if he hadn’t stayed up ’til two o’clock in the morning last night cleaning blood off his living room floor, trying to make sense of Erman Ainsley’s rant against the government. He might have left Cynthia Mad
dox alone for good. But the mess he’s in now is bigger than his past, bigger than his aging feelings for a woman he hardly knows anymore, a woman he may have never known.
He showed up at Cynthia’s office this morning, unannounced. There were no smiles from the mayor’s secretary this time. She has, in fact, spent most of the forty-five minutes Jay has been waiting with her eyes to the closed double doors that lead into the mayor’s private suite, where Kip is standing, likewise wait
