Black Water Rising (11 page)

Its headlights snap off.

Jay can finally make out the shape of the car, its long, boxy silhouette. It's a Ford LTD for sure, black as the night on all sides. The driver starts to back away from the house, away from the cops and the scene on the street, pivoting on the narrow road, almost dipping into the ditch on the left side to make the turn. The driver heads east, back toward Lockwood Drive, picking up speed. Whatever his business with Jay, he does not want to handle it here, in the company of others. This only deepens Jay's apprehension, the nasty feeling in the pit of his stomach that the man in the black Ford means nothing but trouble.

He parks in front of the gray house, leaving his .38 in the glove box, and steps into the red-and-blue swirling haze of the
cop cars. He recognizes some of the union men standing in the front yard. They're smoking cigarettes and drinking out of mismatched cups. Somebody took the time to make coffee, to pass it around. This is union business now. Kwame Mackalvy is standing on the cracked driveway, arms folded across his chest. He's talking to a young Hispanic woman who's scribbling Kwame's every word onto a notepad.

He called the fucking press, Jay thinks.

As he steps onto the grass, walking toward the front door of the house, a cop puts out a hand to stop him, landing a firm shove in the center of Jay's chest.

“Who the hell are you?” the cop asks.

He's a kid, black. Jay's got ten years on him, at least.

The black cop cuts a look at his white partner, showing off. “I asked you a question,” he says, digging his finger into Jay's sternum.

Jay is slow to answer the cop, resenting the need to justify himself to a kid who wouldn't even have a job on the police force if it weren't for the civil rights Jay's generation marched and died for. “You want to take your hand off me?”

“What did you just say?” the cop barks.

Reverend Boykins crosses the patchy lawn. He's in a suit and tie, impeccable, even at this hour. “This is Jay Porter, Officer. He's a lawyer.”

These are the magic words. The cop releases Jay without another word.

Kwame Mackalvy waves Jay over to his spot on the driveway. “I got Sylvia Martinez from the
Post
here. You want to make a statement, bro?”

“No,” Jay says bluntly and without breaking his stride.

He walks up the cinder-block steps and into the house. Inside, the air is a good ten degrees hotter than it is outside, more humid
too. There must be thirty people piled into the tiny house. Union men, neighbors, kids up past their bedtime. There's a woman in a cotton nightgown crying on the couch, a man kneeled in front of her, holding her hand. He's wearing nothing but blue jeans and house shoes. Jay walks to the family, speaking to the woman first. “You okay?” he asks.

She doesn't look up or acknowledge where the voice is coming from. She simply nods, her eyes glazed over as she stares blankly through the hole in her front window, watching police officers pick up shotgun shells from her yard.

“Mr. Porter.” The man, young for a husband and father, stands, still gripping his wife's hand. Jay recognizes him from the church meeting a few nights ago. “Donnie Simpson,” the man says. “'Preciate you coming out here.”

Jay nods, shaking the man's hand. “What happened?”

“Three shots, right through that window.”

“Nobody was hit?” Jay asks.

“No, sir. The kids was sleep in the bedroom with us.”

Across the room there are two little girls and an older boy in T-shirts and pajamas, sitting at a card table with a bowl of plastic fruit resting on top. They're eating Frosted Flakes out of the box, the older boy doling out equal portions to his sisters. The girls are watching the cops, the excitement in the house. None of the kids is more than ten years old, all of them tall and lanky like their father.

“They stay out here on the let-out couch usually. But late summer like this, we keep them in the back room with us, where the window unit is.”

Jay nods, looking at the kids, thinking the same thing as Mr. Simpson.

“If they had been out here…” Donnie says, his voice low.

“You see who did it?”

“No, sir. We was sleep.”

“How do you know it was ILA?”

“Like I told them,” he says, nodding toward the cops. “The ILA been calling my house all week, man, talking about I better not vote to strike. And I'm not the only one neither. Other brothers been getting the same phone calls, all time of the day and night. They trying to shut us down, Mr. Porter.”

Reverend Boykins and the two police officers step inside the house. The bare bulbs on the ceiling catch them in a harsh light, throwing deep shadows beneath their eyes, lighting up the greasy sweat running down their necks. The reverend wipes at his face with a handkerchief. “Come on, now,” he says, waving a hand out across the room, trying to get the men's attention. “Let's let the gentlemen talk now.” He steps to the side, giving the cops the floor.

“All right, all right,” the white cop says.

Kwame Mackalvy and the brothers outside crowd onto the front porch, trying to listen in through the open front door. June bugs and mosquitoes wiggle past them, into the funk and sweat and feast of human flesh in the house.

“We got a lot of information tonight,” the cop says. “I want you to know we take seriously what's happened here.”

“Then what you gon' do about it?” one of the men on the porch asks.

“Let the man finish now,” the Rev says.

“We'll take the information we have here and file a report at the station.”

“A report?” the man on the porch says.

“That's it?” Donnie asks.

“You gon' have to do better than that, brother,” Kwame says, looking at the black cop, holding him, especially, accountable.

“There's no eyewitness to the shooting,” the white cop says.

“We
told
you who did this,” Donnie says.

“ILA motherfuckers, that's who,” somebody in the room says. “They beat up a kid last week.”

“The ILA is a big union with a lot of members, some of whom support you boys,” the white cop says. “Now, you want to tell me specifically who shot a gun through this house, who's been calling you…I'll go talk to 'em myself.”

“What if we got you a list of names?” Donnie says, turning to the other men. “Come on, y'all, we all at the same meetings. We know the ones that get up in front of everybody, trashing the strike, saying what they gon' do to stop it.”

“Now I want to be clear here,” the white cop says. “I'm not gon' go around accusing folks without some kind of real evidence.”

“Isn't that your job, to
find
the evidence?” Kwame says.

“You get us a list, we'll be sure to put it in the file,” the cop says.

“That's it?” one of the men asks.

“Man, get the hell out of my house with that shit.”

“Donnie, that's enough,” Reverend Boykins says.

“Hey, we're just trying to do a job here,” the black cop says.

Kwame clucks his teeth, shaking his head at the kid.

The white cop passes his business card to Reverend Boykins, who passes it to Jay, who doesn't know why he's the one suddenly in charge of the thing.

“Call us if something changes,” the white cop says to Jay.

 

By four o'clock in the morning, the men are still working on their list, calling out names to each other across the room, going over any beef they've ever had with any member of the ILA. Donnie's wife is in the back room now, trying to get the kids down for what's left of the night.

Jay turns down the third cup of coffee he's been offered. He stands alone by the door. He doesn't know what more they need from him, why he even got out of bed for this. He pulls the cop's card from his pants pocket and turns it over to Donnie. “You tell your wife I'm real sorry,” he says on his way out.

“Wait a minute now.” Donnie looks at the Rev and the other men in the room. “We're ready to move on to the next step with this thing…right?”

Jay turns to his father-in-law. “What's he talking about?”

The Rev takes a deep breath and a step toward Jay. “We think Kwame was right, son. We think a lawsuit may be our best chance to be heard.”

Kwame, on the other side of the room, stands with his hands clasped behind his back, firing up a speech. “The police department is not doing enough to protect these men. As we move forward with a strike, we need to know that the city and the mayor back their right to peaceably assemble.”

Jay sighs to himself. He's been here before. The late-night strategy session, the caffeinated rhetoric. He is suddenly very tired and wants to go home to his wife. “Lloyd,” he says to the man Kwame used to be, “the cops came, they did their job. You know who did this, it's a different story, but—”

“Not
this.
Forget this,” Kwame says. “We're going with the kid.”

Jay looks around the room, not immediately understanding.

“Darren Hayworth, son,” Reverend Boykins says. “The young man with the busted arm. You met him and his father at the church.”

“They beat the shit out of that kid,” one of the men says.

“He was coming home from a meeting, you remember,” the Rev explains. “He was headed to a second job when they cornered him out Canal Street, near the tracks. After they left him out
there, bleeding all over, the boy drove himself to the north side station, not even half a mile from the ILA headquarters on Harrisburg. The cops there wouldn't even take his statement.”

“And he said he seen the ones who did it,” Donnie says.

“He's got names?” Jay asks.

“Naw, but he say they was at the meeting that night.”

“As far as we're concerned, the Houston Police Department failed in its duties to protect one of its citizens, to see the law carried out,” Kwame says. Then, writing the press release in his head, he adds, “He's a good-looking kid, hardworking…just the kind of message we want to send.”

“You talk to the mayor yet?” his father-in-law asks.

“I'm working on it.” A lie to a man of God, and family to boot.

“Well, tell her a lawsuit is coming. That'll get her attention,” Kwame says.

“Look,” Jay says, trying to think of a way to slow them down, a way he can get out of this. “I don't even know what kind of case you'd have, and second, I'm not sure I'm the right guy. I can't really take on something of this magnitude right now. I do have other cases, other…obligations.”

The Rev nods to some of the men across the room, one of whom pulls a brown paper sack out of a metal lunch pail sitting on the kitchen counter. The man, in faded Levi's and mud-crusted work boots, walks toward Jay in the center of the room, handing him the paper sack. Inside there are bills: $20s and $10s mostly, some singles and loose change. “The Brotherhood ain't a real group no more, not legally,” the man says. “We don't have our own funds. But we got this together since just last week. We'll try to get you some more soon.”

Jay looks at the men in the room, men who work just as hard as he does for what little they have. He hands back the paper bag. “I can't take this.”

The men in the room look at each other, not sure what this means.

“I'll get in to see the mayor this week,” Jay says. “She'll take my call.”

He knows it's true as soon as he says it. He's always known she would see him if he pushed. And maybe that's why he's never tried. “I'll talk to her.”

The morning of, Bernie lingers a bit longer than usual in the bathroom, watching him shave, the way he combs his hair, the extra time he's taking to groom himself. She's taking note of everything, filing it away. In the bedroom, Jay makes a show of
not
choosing his best shirt and tie. Bernie sits on the bed, rubbing at the underside of her belly. “You coming by the church after?”

“I got some stuff I have to get to at the office.” He slides on his shoes.

“I promised Daddy I'd finish up the programs for Sunday this morning. I thought you could meet me at the church later.”

Jay looks up at his wife, not immediately following.

“The doctor's appointment, Jay?” she says. Then, seeing the blank look on his face, she sighs. “If you can't take me, I'll get
someone at the church to drive me.” She's pouting a little, cupping her belly like a schoolyard ball, turning away from Jay, as if to let him know, this is mine, not yours. She's aiming to hurt him, it seems, and he resents her for it. He didn't ask to go talk to the mayor. This was her father's idea. “Just tell me what time, B,” he says.

The phone rings in the kitchen. Bernie shuffles out of the room first.

When Jay comes into the kitchen, his suit jacket folded over his arm, Bernie is holding the phone receiver, pointing it in his direction. “It's for you.”

He takes the phone from her hand. “This is Jay Porter.”

The voice on the line is gruff and slow. “Marshall's dead.”

“Who?”

“My cousin.” It's Jimmy calling.

Jay lays his jacket across the kitchen countertop. He glances at his wife, who is buttering a slice of bread at the table. Apparently, Jimmy didn't share this news with her. His wife probably had no idea who she was just talking to.

Jay lowers his voice anyway, turning away from her. “What happened?”

“They found him in a ditch on Elysian,” Jimmy says, his tongue thick and uncoordinated this early in the morning. Jay can't tell if it's grief in his voice or Jack Daniel's. “He must have run off the road is what they're saying, fell asleep or had a heart attack, a stroke or something, just run right off the road. They saying he mighta been out there two or three days.” Then a sigh. “My God.”

“I'm sorry to hear it,” Jay says, because he can't think of anything else.

“You saw him Saturday night,” Jimmy says. “He look all right to you?”

Jay glances at his wife again. “Uh, yeah.”

“Well.” Jimmy sighs again. “That's what it is, what I wanted to tell you.”

He asks Jay for the name of a good funeral home, one that might work out some kind of payment plan. Jay claims ignorance, mainly because he wants to get off the phone as quickly as possible. He feels mildly sick to his stomach. He's nervous about going to the mayor's office, for sure. But the phone call, the news from Jimmy, has also left him feeling unsettled. It's not exactly sadness he feels for Jimmy's cousin, but a vague sense of dread. When he hangs up the phone, Bernadine is looking at him, the buttered toast half-gone in her hand.

“The doctor's appointment is at three, Jay.”

He nods. “I'll be there after lunch.”

 

The mayor's office is on the third floor of city hall, a squat limestone building dwarfed by steel and glass on all sides, high-rises that have come to dominate downtown Houston. In 1939, when city hall was built, the city's dream for its future didn't reach past eight stories. The state flag sits on top of the government building; it is several feet wider and longer than the Stars and Stripes flying alongside it. There's a reflecting pool in front of the building, on Bagby. And across the street is a gilded archway leading to Cole Towers, twin office buildings that house the headquarters for Cole Oil Industries. The Cole name, in huge block letters, crowns the two towers, casting a heavy shadow across city hall, falling, at this hour, right into Jay's lap. He sits beside a large window just outside the mayor's private suite, where's he's been waiting for over an hour.

He folds and refolds his hands across his lap, trying to keep them still, passing the time staring at the framed photographs
lined end to end on the beige walls of the anteroom: pictures of the mayor with Vice President and Mrs. Bush; Governor Clements, the state's first Republican governor since Reconstruction; even a snapshot of her with Congressman Mickey Leland, a Democrat and former political activist. Jay can discern no political rhyme or reason to the images on the walls. In picture after picture, in one pastel-colored suit after another, Mayor Cynthia Maddox is shaking hands with Democrats
and
Republicans, Teamsters
and
members of the Business League. Everyone has a hand on her in the photos, laying their claim to a woman who ran as a Texas Democrat, but garnered nearly 30 percent of the Republican vote, a woman who spoke vaguely on the campaign trail about her commitment to civil rights but still managed to reassure moneyed conservatives that she could keep their neighborhoods lily-white. In Mayor Maddox, people see what they want to see.

Jay looks at his watch for the third time. The mayor's secretary gives him a tiny shrug. “I'll let 'em know you're still waiting,” she says, pressing a button on the intercom. Then, hearing something, she twists her torso around to look at the mahogany-stained double doors leading to the mayor's suite. She lifts her finger off the intercom button. “Oh, here…I think they're coming now.”

It's not until the doors open that the weight of the moment finally hits him. His face is suddenly flushed with heat…and also the bitter sting of shame. He's embarrassed to be undone by her still, all these years later. He bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes his own blood, until he remembers what senseless pain feels like, until he remembers what this woman is capable of.

It's not the mayor at the door anyway, just another secretary or aide of some sort, a boy in his twenties with a clipboard tucked under his arm and a tie that comes up too short of his waist. He
waves at Jay impatiently, as if they've been waiting for
him
all this time. Jay stands and straightens the front pleats of his pants. Slowly, he makes his way through the double doors, dragging his feet as if he's walking through sand. The boy with the clipboard leads Jay down a short hallway. “Her conference call ran over,” he says. “She's got about fifteen minutes before she has to be at a luncheon across town. I'd make it quick.”

The boy opens another set of doors at the end of the hallway.

A rush of cool air, crisply air-conditioned and sweetened with rose water perfume, hits Jay in the face, along with a lingering hint of cigar smoke, a reminder that this room, the inner sanctum, was once the domain of men.

The current mayor is leaned up against the front side of her desk, dressed in a plum-colored suit, a bloom of frilly white fabric knotted at her throat as if she couldn't decide between a lace scarf or a man's necktie. At the base of her legs, covered with thick, nude-colored panty hose, she's wearing Keds.

“The car's waiting downstairs,” the boy says.

The mayor waves in his general direction, her head tilted back.

There's a makeup artist, a woman in her sixties wearing a green lamé top and matching eye shadow—whom Jay would probably not trust to put on the face he shows the world—sweeping a pencil across the mayor's left eye.

It's quiet a minute, and Jay wonders who will speak first.

“I want to thank you for coming,” Cynthia says.

Jay looks down at the thick carpet, fingering the change in his pockets.

“Your support means the world to me,” she goes on.

The presumption irritates him. He's about to correct her, to explain that she's misunderstood his reason for coming. He is not here to let her off the hook.

Cynthia keeps her eyes closed while the makeup artist pats
powder the color of corn silk onto her nose and cheeks. “What's the next part, Kip?”

There's a typewriter going behind Jay.

The boy, Kip, types another line then rolls the paper to the top of the page. “‘As this city enters the golden age of its greatest opportunity,'” he reads flatly.

“‘ As this city enters the golden age of its greatest opportunity,'” the mayor repeats, with some romantic flourish. “‘It's organizations like yours—'”

“You're jumping ahead. That line goes after you say the part about Houston being the fastest-growing city in the nation, the hope of a new decade.”

“I want to open with that. ‘Houston is the fastest-growing city in the country…' blah blah blah…‘and it's organizations like yours, the Daughters of the Texas Revolution, who maintain our heritage and tradition, our precious link to the past.' That's enough, Marla,” she says to the makeup artist.

Cynthia stands upright then, finally opening her eyes. Jay's is the first face she sees. The smile starts somewhere behind her too-made-up eyes, slowly, like a neon sign kicking on at dusk…a few sparks, then light. “How do I look?”

To tell the truth, if it weren't for her name on the door, he would hardly recognize her. The suit is square and covers nearly every inch of the body he once knew so well, as if she is well aware of its liability in public office.

He cocks an eyebrow. “Daughters of the Texas Revolution?”

Her smile broadens, a spot of mischief behind her docile, coral-colored mouth. It's
this
face he recognizes. She angles her head to one side. “Oh, Jay,” she says. Remorse maybe, or else pity, for him, the things he still hasn't learned.

“Touch it up once before you get to the podium,” Marla says, lugging an alligator makeup bag on her way out the door.

Cynthia nods, waving her off. Then she says to Jay, “I'll have you know, those ladies gave me five thousand dollars during the campaign.” She crosses behind her desk and plops into an oversize leather chair. Jay can't help thinking she looks like a kid playing dress up in her daddy's office. “'Course, they gave the other guy ten…but I can't afford to hold a grudge.”

The other guy was Buddy McPherson, the mayor's challenger in the general election. A former sheriff and county commissioner, the Big Mac ran a particularly nasty campaign, one that ultimately backfired. Sure, Cynthia Maddox
was
probably too young to be mayor, with too little political experience—a few years as Senator Lloyd Bentsen's aide in D.C., then home to serve a year on the local school board and on to the comptroller's office—but the Mac's very public attacks on her intelligence and maturity (repeatedly referring to her as “that gal”) and his frequent remarks on her mannish affect (“Something my granddaddy always said: ‘Son, don't ever trust an unattractive woman; they got way too much to prove'”) didn't go over well with the public. And the fact that on the campaign trail, Mac repeatedly brought up the news that Cynthia Maddox had never married was universally regarded as being in poor taste.

Cynthia picks up the can of Tab on her desk, drinking it through a straw so as not to mess up her lipstick. She looks at Jay and shrugs. “The DOTR are having their annual in Houston this year, and they asked me to speak at the luncheon,” she says, picking up a plastic fork and stabbing at a boxed salad on her desk. “They're not all Republicans, you know. They didn't all vote for Reagan.”

“Did you?”

She looks up at Jay, mouth full of lettuce, and shakes her head. Not an answer to the question so much as a reprimand for asking in the first place.

“Nice picture,” he says, nodding over her head at the two oil portraits hulking on the wall behind her, between the Texas and American flags. One is the governor, William P. Clements; the other is Ronald Reagan.

Cynthia doesn't even bother to turn around. “They came with the office.”

“We have to get these remarks down before lunch,” Kip says.

“You finish up,” she says.

“You want me to leave?”

“No,” she says quickly. “We're not going to be long, are we, Jay?”

Kip goes back to typing, reworking her speech. Jay goes back to fiddling with the change in his pocket, turning nickels over in his hand. He turns and looks out the wall of windows on the northwest side of the office. The mayor's suite is on the third floor of city hall, not a grand view, but high enough that Jay can see a swatch of the 45 freeway from here. It's under construction, as usual, as is almost every pocket of the city; this is a restless, adolescent city, forever picking at its pimples, never satisfied to leave well enough alone. Below the I-45 overpass are Allen Parkway and Buffalo Bayou. Jay can just make out a piece of the water from here. In the afternoon light, it looks chocolate brown, as inviting as a cup of coffee, completely harmless. He thinks of the woman on the boat. Her face comes to him, as uninvited as the night his path crossed hers. That, and the mystery of the black Ford, the man behind the wheel.

Cynthia lets out a soft belch. “Pardon me for all this,” she says, dumping the rest of the salad into a trash can at her feet. “But I stopped eating in public after
Texas Monthly
described me as ‘stout' in their winter profile. You read that shit? I swear, I can't win. I put on weight just to stop people harping that I got in on my looks. Now, I got half the city talking about
my thighs. Everybody's got some fucking thing to say.” She shakes her head in disgust, leaning down to open a bottom desk drawer. She pulls out a pair of black pumps, kicks off her Keds, and slides on the high-heeled shoes. “Kip, make sure that door's closed.”

“It's closed,” he says without looking up from the typewriter.

Cynthia reaches for a purse resting on a sideboard behind her desk. She pulls out a pack of Vantage 100s. She slides one out and lights it, then exhales, waving the smoke away from her hair, which is teased to hell in a round dishwater-blond helmet. She used to wear it long, Jay remembers. He used to have a goatee. And back then neither of them would have been caught dead in a suit. And yet here they are. Cynthia looks at him through the smoke, maybe thinking the exact same thing.
So here we are.