Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  416 Attic a L o c ke

  “Daddy’s up in the office, on the phone right now. I know he wanted to say something to you about it.”

  “Not now,” Jay says, feeling her belly close to his. “Let’s go home.”

  He steals her away then, carrying her purse for her to the car. They leave without a word to anybody, ride the whole way to Third Ward in silence.

  When they get to the apartment, Bernie takes a pair of chicken breasts out of the freezer for a late lunch. She lays the raw meat in a shallow pool of water in the kitchen sink. Jay takes off his jacket and tie. He lines up two beers on the dinette table, down­

  ing the first in a matter of seconds. Bernie, never one in favor of daytime drinking, watches him without saying much of any­

  thing. She keeps an eye on the chicken thawing in the sink, and when she gets bored with that, she shuffles across the kitchen floor, taking a seat across from her husband at the table. Finally, Jay tells her what he’s thinking about doing next.

  “Leave it alone,” she says, speaking softly to him, as if the baby were already here, already sleeping in the other room. “It’s over, Jay.”

  “They brought this to my doorstep. They did this, not me.”

  He raises his voice in a way that makes her wince. He realizes she has never seen this side of him, that she came into his life long after he thought his anger had run out. He stares into the liv­

  ing room, his gaze falling on the bleached-out spot on the floor, where he scrubbed blood with his bare hands. “They came into my house, Bernie.”

  “I was here, Jay, alone,” she says. “This has to do with me too.”

  “They came into our house,” he says. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “Then walk away.”

  He shakes his head slowly. “They’re stealing from people, B. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 417

  People like me and you. People like your daddy, your sister, the ladies at your church, working people. We’re paying more at the pump, paying more for our clothes, the shoes on our feet, the food the grocers pick up from their suppliers in those big, gassy eighteen-wheelers. This oil thing touches everything. You’re paying an extra fifty cents on that chicken breast for the cost of the plastic it’s wrapped in. That’s made from petroleum too,” he says, looking at his wife under the dim white light of the overhead bulb. “They’re cheatin’ people every which way. And I’m not gon’ be pushed into keeping my mouth shut about it.”

  Bernie, listening to all this, bites her bottom lip. Jay sets his beer can down, pushing it away.

  There was a man, he says, a man who used to come around his granddaddy’s place, a little restaurant the family had up in Nigton. The man was a soldier, a vet, and a drunk. He used to come in every day in his old uniform, which was coming apart at the seams. He never had any money. And sometimes Jay’s mama would pay him a quarter to sweep up out front and get himself a little lunch. Mostly the man would just sit for hours at a stretch at one of the tables. He would stare out the window kind of mum­

  bling to himself. And sometimes he would cry for no reason. He wasn’t all right in his head. Shell-shocked, the old folks called it. The man used to grab hold of Jay sometimes, used to grab him by the shoulders real hard and look the boy in the eye. He spoke in short, broken-off sentences, barking, kind of, like he had something caught in his throat. Same thing make you laugh make you cry. The quinine rooster was a purly-curly, you hear me, boy? Then he would shake Jay by his shoulders until the boy’s head hurt. You hear me now . . . they coming to get you too. Jay looks up at his wife.

  “I don’t want to be that man, B. An old soldier, a man who can’t hardly talk. I can’t walk through this life like that.” He says 418 Attic a L o c ke

  this last part as an apology, for revealing to his wife, this late in the game, the man he truly is. “I just can’t.”

  Bernie studies his face for a long time, the shadows beneath his eyes.

  Finally, she gets up and walks to the sink. With a wooden spoon from the drain board, she pokes the chicken breasts encased in plastic wrap in the sink.

  “I need you to be safe, Jay. I need that, understand?”

  “I know.”

  “I mean, they came after you once, Jay, what makes you think they won’t do it again?”

  “I’m taking it right to the courts, B,” he says. “I’m taking it right to court.”

  That night, sometime between The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas, the dishes put up and his wife asleep in front of the television, Jay stands over the kitchen counter. He picks up the phone and calls the old man in High Point.

  “You still looking for a lawyer?” he asks, after introductions are remade.

  The old man is silent for a long stretch on the phone. Jay can hear his phlegmy breathing, a rattle and a rasp. There’s a television playing somewhere in the background. Jay thinks it’s tuned to the same station. He hears the same beer commercial that’s playing in his living room coming through the phone line as well. He pictures Mr. Ainsley’s wife sitting in the blue light of their television screen, a pile of knitting yarn in her lap. He thinks of their white A-frame house. The yellow curtains in the windows, the American flag hanging limply out front.

  “I understand you got some encroachment onto your prop­

  erty,” Jay says, using the same tone of voice he uses with all his Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 419

  prospective clients, one that’s gentle and encouraging. “Seems to me somebody ought not get away with it. Somebody ought to be made to answer for that, Mr. Ainsley.”

  The old man is quiet still.

  The laughter on their televisions raises to a high pitch. Ainsley clears his throat. “You that black fellow that come by the house?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The old man makes a humming sound, like he’s pausing to catch his breath . . . or think. “I don’t have a lot of money to pay you,” he says.

  “You let me worry about that,” Jay says, already counting, in his mind, the $23,200 he’s got stuffed in the lockbox in his office. He thinks it may be enough for at least one expert witness . . . and enough to pay Eddie Mae overtime.

  C h a p t e r 3 0 The day he files the papers, Bernie goes into labor, some two weeks early.

  Jay races home to find his wife bent over the kitchen table, her face screwed up in pain, the packed suitcase at her feet. They make it to Ben Taub Hospital in a record eleven minutes. He holds her hand for the first hour in the waiting room. Once they’ve been assured the doctor is on his way, Jay does every­

  thing he can to make his wife comfortable, fluffing up the pil­

  low she brought from home and offering her a can of soda from one of the machines. Then he has a smoke outside and starts making the calls on her list: her mother and father, her sister, some of the ladies from the church.

  Jay doesn’t have a list, not a soul he can call. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 421

  It kind of eats at him a little, not for the first time, and not the last.

  Back at his wife’s side in the waiting room, he chews his nails to the bone, picks up one magazine after another, even starts flipping through one of Bernie’s romance novels, one with a field of corn and a nearly naked lady on the cover. By the time Bernie’s family starts to trickle in, the doctor has already come and gone. False labor, he called it. Not at all uncommon, but a sign they’re getting close. The doctor said he couldn’t check them into the hospital this early, nor did he believe they’d want the extra expense. His best advice was to send them home and tell them to be alert for the real signs: contractions that grow longer and stronger, any mucus or discharge, and certainly if Bernie’s water breaks, they should come back in. It could be anytime now.

  Jay and Bernie wait around to make sure her whole family gets the news. Then they all make a caravan back to Jay and Bernie’s apartment. Evelyn and Mrs. Boykins get into the kitchen right away, doctoring up a couple of cans of chicken soup, throwing in fresh onion, garlic
, and salt, and toasting up half a loaf of white bread. Reverend Boykins sits on the couch with his baby girl. Jay brings his wife a cool glass of water. He tells her he’s got to run by the office for a bit, that he won’t be gone more than an hour.

  “I’ll be all right here,” she says, patting a hand on her daddy’s knee.

  Reverend Boykins looks up at his son-in-law. They haven’t spoken about the court case, but Lonnie’s article about Jay’s civil suit against Cole Oil Industries made the front page of the Chronicle this morning. The story is officially out. Reverend Boykins gives Jay a nod of approval. “Go on, son.”

  It’s not until he’s out of the house that Jay realizes how hard it was for him to breathe in there, how much being around Bernie’s 422 Attic a L o c ke

  family makes him pine for something he thought he’d long ago given up on, the someone he thought he’d lost. When he arrives at the office, Eddie Mae has a stack of pink message slips for him, more than triple the amount of calls he usu­

  ally gets in a single week. There are calls from newspaper report­

  ers and at least one magazine, and three calls from the same law firm claiming to represent Cole Oil and Thomas Cole personally. Jay takes the message slips into his office and shuts the door. He picks up the phone and calls, of all people, Rolly Snow. He pictures Rolly behind the counter at Lula’s, bare-chested beneath his black vest, as, even in the first week of September, the thermostat hit ninety in Houston today. Jay pictures Rolly plucking a stubby pencil from behind his ear, jotting notes on any little slip of paper he can find, a bar tab or a parking ticket. Jay gives him all the information he has. His sister’s maiden name, different from his own. The neighborhood in Dallas she called home more than a decade ago. And a loose description. Hair, rust-colored. Her skin, fair, with a mess of freckles across the bridge of her nose. “Tell her I’m having a kid.”

  There’s a pause on the line.

  Then Rolly’s voice, coated in nicotine. “Man, I’ll do every­

  thing I can.”

  Jay spends the rest of the time at his office tying up loose ends, calling several prospective clients to let them know that he won’t be able to take their cases after all, that his dance card is full. For the open files on his desk, he draws up paperwork for some of the smaller civil suits, requesting extensions.

  The last call he makes is to the hooker, Dana Moreland. He tells her he can get her $5,000 from J. T. Cummings, can have a check drawn up as early as this afternoon, in fact. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 423

  But if she wants to take Cummings and Charlie Luckman to court for more, she’s going to have to do it with someone else. He, unfortunately, cannot represent her in this matter any fur­

  ther.

  As Mr. Cummings had originally (and accurately) guessed, the girl jumps at the money and wants it in her hot hands as soon as possible. She has, since they last spoke, broken up with the mechanic from Corpus and is no longer interested in real estate or oil. She’s thinking about getting into the cosmetics game now, selling door-to-door, for which she will need a new car. She’s got her eye on a two-toned Pontiac Grand Am at a dealership out by AstroWorld.

  One phone call and it’s over and done with.

  He’s got at least one satisfied customer.

  Sometime after four o’clock, he’s clearing up the scattered paperwork on his desk when Eddie Mae pokes her head in the office, her eyes as wide as milk saucers. It’s a moment or two before she can get any words out, and Jay sighs, thinking this is Eddie Mae working up her nerve, readying herself to ask him if she can cut out a little early today. He tells her he needs her to stick around until at least five o’clock from now on. He reminds her that’s the deal they made.

  “Somebody’s here to see you, Mr. Porter,” she says. When his office door opens all the way, Jay sees Cynthia Mad­

  dox standing on the other side. She’s come alone, in a dark blue suit. She smiles at Jay, then briefly, shyly, looks down at the tips of her black shoes. She’s waiting to be invited past the threshold, into his private space. He, admittedly, feels a flutter in his chest at the sight of her, but whether it’s a longing that may haunt him the rest of his life, or just a lingering rage that flares up from time to time, he can’t tell. And anyway, like almost anything, it starts to fade after a while.

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  “Can I get you something, Miss Mayor?” Eddie Mae asks.

  “No,” Jay says, answering for Cynthia. “Just leave us alone.”

  “Oh, surely, Mr. Porter,” Eddie Mae says.

  She raises a single eyebrow before shutting the office door. There’s nowhere for Cynthia to sit. Jay’s papers and files and two phone books cover the only available chairs. He makes no effort to clear a space for her to sit, and she is maybe too prideful to ask. “This is a surprise,” he says.

  “There’ve been a lot of surprises today, Jay.”

  She looks around the tiny office. For the first time, he sees the place through Cynthia’s blue-gray eyes: a cheap strip-center rental with bad flat carpet, stained in too many places, and yel­

  lowing blinds on all the windows. A long, long way from the mayor’s office. “What do you want, Cynthia?”

  “I read the paper this morning,” she says.

  “And you came all the way down here to tell me that?”

  “I came here to see if you really know what you’re doing, Jay.”

  “Cynthia, this doesn’t have a thing to do with you.”

  “It’s happening in my city, it has everything to do with me.”

  Then, taking a step toward him, she asks, “What are you trying to prove here, Jay? I mean, think about who you’re taking on. This thing is much bigger than you.”

  He shrugs. “It’s just a little property dispute, that’s all.”

  “You won’t win.”

  “It doesn’t matter, not really. It only matters that I remember to speak up.” He looks at Cynthia, looks her right in the eye.

  “Isn’t that what you said?”

  “Oh, Jay,” she says, her voice a near whisper. She seems disap­

  pointed in him, or else exasperated, as if he grossly misunder­

  stood her. “I’m asking you to reconsider,” she says. “Think about your practice, your family, and reconsider.”

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 425

  He resents the mention of his family. He thinks he knows why she’s really here. “How much did you get from Cole for your campaign last year?”

  “Listen to me, Jay,” she says. “These people do not fuck around.”

  “How much?”

  “Oh, please, Jay,” she says, waving away the thought with her hand.

  “No, really, I’m asking,” he says. “How much?”

  “My god, Jay,” she says faintly, kind of shrunk down in her clothes, looking as if he had struck her with his hands, as if he’d deliberately set out to hurt her. “Did it ever occur to you that I might be here ’cause I care about you?”

  “No.”

  The light in her eyes changes them from blue to gray, then back again. “You don’t think much of me anymore, do you?”

  It’s a ridiculous question, one they’re long past. Jay stares at Cynthia, across the room, thinking this is what it must feel like to sit with a loved one in their final hour, the body sometimes twisted and bloated to an unrecognizable degree, when there is an often childish wish to turn back time, to remem­

  ber the person the way they once were, at their very best.

  “Come on,” she says. “Let’s take a walk.”

  “Cynthia,” Jay says, shaking his head.

  “Come on . . . one last time.”

  Outside, they make the block around his building in silence, ending up at a small park to the left of a barbecue restaurant and an office-supply store. Somewhere near a rusted swing set, Cyn­

  thia stops, kicking the toe of her high-heeled shoe into the trunk of a nearby tree. She looks softer in the shade.
/>   “I didn’t do what you think I did,” Cynthia says to him finally, what she dragged him all this way to say. “I just want to get that 426 Attic a L o c ke

  straight right now.” Her voice is shallow, not quite shaking, but damn near. “I didn’t set you up, Jay.”

  He’s standing a few feet from her, his back against one of the metal posts of the swing set. He nods in her direction. But it doesn’t mean anything. What she said doesn’t change a thing. “What if you did, Cynthia?” he says. “What if you were working both sides? What if you put the bug in your phone that day? Then used your government connections to get a post in Lloyd Bentsen’s office up in Washington, used my arrest to jump-start your political career? I mean, what if, Cynthia? Would you really tell me the truth now?” He stares at her. “Be honest.”

  She thinks about it for a long time. Then, softly, she says,

  “Probably not.”

  “Well then,” he says. “You see my dilemma.”

  “I was a kid, Jay. I was a scared kid.”

  “So was I,” he says. “The difference is . . . I was in a jail cell.”

  When she looks up again, their eyes meet only briefly. She turns and looks over her shoulder toward a black Lincoln Town Car parked across the street. A driver, in uniform, tips his hat to the mayor. The walk was choreographed, Jay realizes, for them to end up here, for her to have a safe out. She lingers for a few moments by the tree trunk, crunching pine needles underfoot. “You really going to do this thing?” she asks, meaning the lawsuit.

  “Yes.”

  Cynthia nods.

  Before she turns toward the waiting Town Car, before she says her final good-bye, she regards him for a good long while, a faint smile on her lips. She is remembering him too, maybe, remembering Jay Porter at his very best.

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  When he gets home, Evelyn is the last of the family left at the apartment. She’s looking at the news on channel 2, eating a slice of buttered bread and drinking one of his beers. She nods at Jay and tells him his wife is lying down in the bedroom. He peels off his jacket and tie on his way to her.