Black Water Rising (12 page)

“What are you doing here, Jay?”

There's no simple answer to the question of why he came all this way instead of talking to her on the phone. It was a test, maybe, just to see if he could. “There was a shooting a couple of nights ago, out on Market Street,” he says, sticking to the script he was given. “That's on the north side of Fifth Ward.”

“I
know
where it is,” she says. “Anyway, I heard about it.”

“You read it in the paper?”

Cynthia shakes her head, blowing a thin stream of smoke through her lips, then stubbing out her cigarette after just a few quick puffs. She points to a stack of papers on the corner of her desk. “I get briefed by the police chief every morning. Every armed robbery, every rape, every shooting, I hear about it.”

Jay looks at the typed briefs on her desk. There must be fifty or so, going back a couple of months. Somewhere in that stack of papers is a report about the body by the bayou, maybe even word about the investigation. He wonders how much the mayor
knows about the case or if Jay's name is on one of those pages. The news this morning about Jimmy's cousin means Jay has no way of knowing what, if anything, the old man might have told police detectives about Saturday night.

“Crime's a big topic in this city,” Cynthia says, zipping up her purse. “The worst thing is to be at some function, a ribbon cutting for a grocery story or something, and have a reporter ask me about a couple of dead bodies somebody found the night before, and I don't know a thing about it. Let me tell you, it don't look good. I almost didn't make it into office on the crime issue alone. People think a girl can't keep things under control.” She walks from around the back side of her desk, motioning to Kip that it's about time to go. “Fifth Ward is one of our hot spots, so, yeah, I heard about it. Why?”

“The dockworkers, the ones talking about a strike…they think the ILA had something to do with it.”

Cynthia's blue-gray eyes widen slightly. She seems to instantly comprehend what this means, the trouble it brings. “Jesus.”

“To the Brotherhood, it's an act of war.”

“The cops told me they don't know who did it,” the mayor says, hopeful.

“The Brotherhood has reason to believe this was stress over the strike. It wasn't that long ago when some of the ILA beat up a nineteen-year-old kid coming home from an organizing meeting.”

“What?”

“It was three men. The kid says he'd seen them at the ILA meeting the night he was attacked.”

“Well, give me their names. I'll take them to the chief of police myself.”

She reaches for a notepad on her desk. Jay shakes his head. “The kid already tried talking to the cops. He drove himself to
a station with a busted arm, somewhere on the north side. Cops there wouldn't even take a report.”

Cynthia rolls her eyes.

“Those unions bowl together, you know,” she says. “The Policemen's League and the ILA. The boys in blue are pretty protective of their buddies at the port.” She goes to run her fingers through her hair, a nervous habit, he remembers. But she's forgotten the amount of hair spray her groomer encased her in. Her fingers get stuck a few inches above her ear. “This is a goddamned mess. If the city council would go my way in terms of who we seat on the port commission, then maybe I can push this strike situation in the right direction.”

“What about Cummings?” Jay can't help asking.

“He's part of the problem, you ask me. It's the port commission that started this trouble in the first place.” She goes on to tell Jay that the labor crisis actually started several months back when the port commission cut deals with some of the major shipping companies, allowing them to berth, or dock, their ships several hours earlier than has been customary for twenty years. Starting earlier means more ships docked in a day, more goods unloaded and loaded, more business. It also means extra hours of work for the dockworkers, most of whom don't get overtime, a point on which the stevedoring companies refuse to budge. They're already paying plenty of overtime to their foremen, who get compensated for the extra responsibility they take on. To management, this pay scale is based on a time-honored hierarchy. The problem, Jay knows, is that the hierarchy falls along racial lines. The foremen, the men supervising, holding clipboards, dipping into air-conditioned trailers for doughnuts and coffee anytime they want to, are disproportionately white. The ones doing all the manual labor, the lifting and loading, are almost all brown. And the stevedoring companies are slow
to promote blacks, and especially Latinos, to the more lucrative positions.

“I'm all for equal rights and equal pay,” the mayor says. “But now is just not the time for this kind of fight. There's a time and place for everything, Jay.”

“Ten years ago you and I would have laughed if somebody told us we ought to wait patiently for our civil rights.
Wait
is just another word for
no,
and you know it.”

“Look, Jay,” she says firmly, almost like a schoolteacher scolding a mouthy pupil. “There's not a goddamned one of us can afford a strike right now. This is the second-biggest international port in the country. You know that? You got any idea how much money floats on that water? Not to mention the oil. The
oil,
Jay. Those petrochemical workers go on strike too, and this whole country's going to feel the effects of it. I got people calling me left and right. Business leaders, oil and gas folks, the unions. People are starting to panic, Jay,” she says, shaking her head gravely. “This just isn't the time.”

“They're talking about suing the city, Cynthia. The kid's family.”

“For what?”

“Their position: the Houston Police Department and the city that funds and manages said department both failed in their duties to protect a law-abiding citizen and to carry out the law to the fullest extent of their abilities.”

Cynthia stands perfectly still, her high heels dug in the blue carpet, staring at him with those pale blue-gray eyes, hot pink flushing across her cheeks. For the first time, she actually looks angry. “You're not taking the case, are you?”

“They asked me to talk to you, that's all I'm doing.”

“Because you
can't.
” Then, catching herself, she says, “Not that I'm in a position to tell you what to do—”

“So long as we're clear about that,” he says.

“I'm just saying, you don't have to do this, Jay, just to punish me.”

She waits for him to say that's not what this is, not the reason he came all this way. “Why would I want to punish you, Cynthia?” he asks pointedly.

“Don't do this to me, Jay.”

“I'm not doing anything to you, Cynthia.”

“That's not true,” she says warmly. “You're here, aren't you?”

She gives him a wistful smile. It betrays a weakness he didn't know was there, an acknowledgment that his presence holds some power for her as well. “You telling me you came all this way to talk to me about a union? Really, Jay?”

He looks into her eyes and tells the truth. “I don't know why I'm here.”

The answer seems to irritate her in some way, and she makes a quick, rather graceless switch from sly courting to an outright plea for mercy. “Look, I'm in a struggle with this police department as it is, and everybody in this goddamned city knows it. I'm only eight months in. I cannot have a
lawsuit
against the police department. It'll be an indictment against me, proof that I can't control those men. They'll hang me, Jay.”

“The Brotherhood just wants protection,” he says. “In the very likely event there's a strike, they want to know that they'll be safe on the picket line.”

“You sure sound like you're representing them.”

“Just doing a favor, that's all. The only outsider they're taking any real cues from is Reverend Al Boykins, the minister over at First Love Antioch.”

“Your father-in-law?”

This stops him, completely unnerves him. He had no idea
she knew he was married, that she knew anything about his life anymore. “Just talk to the chief, okay,” he says. “They're going to strike. It'll be a hell of a lot better if no one gets hurt, and it ends quickly. For them and for you.”

He turns and starts for the door.

He hears her voice behind him, his name landing softly at his back. “Jay.”

He turns to look at her, wondering if she'll finally say it, here and now.

“If you get me the names of the men who hurt that boy,” she says, her voice cool and businesslike. “I swear I'll do everything I can.”

“'Preciate that.”

He nods to Kip on his way to the door, stealing a final glance at the first woman mayor of Houston: the fruity suit, the stiff black shoes, the helmet hair; the American flag and Reagan watching over her shoulder. He looks at Cynthia and thinks of the girl he once knew…and tries to guess which one is the lie.

He doesn't remember when he stopped loving her. It would be neat and tidy to say his arrest. Those frantic and confused days after he turned himself in, long hours spent in lockup, trying to explain to his court-appointed lawyer what exactly had happened, trying to understand it himself…all the while waiting for her to call, to prove his worst fears wrong. He doesn't remember when he stopped loving her, or when exactly he started. They never called it anything or gave it a name. In the beginning she was just a scruffy kid who started coming around to meetings. He was the one who had been appointed to tell her, as forcefully as need be, to stop. They didn't want her help. Her political awakening was on her own time, not theirs. Besides, in those days, the sisters were still frying chicken and going on
beer runs for the meetings, walking ten feet behind the men at campus marches. If the brothers hadn't run her off, the sisters surely would have. No way a white girl was gon' get in line first.

He went to tell her in person, even though he didn't have to. He could have waited until she showed up at the next meeting at the duplex on Scott Street, where they spent most of their days—organizing marches, skipping classes, eating whatever somebody's little paycheck could scrounge up, drinking beer and fooling around with women, whoever was in the building at the time. He could have waited and made a show of the whole thing, putting down the white girl in front of everybody. But he had no desire to be cruel. This movement wasn't about keeping score or getting even, at least not for him. He really believed they could change things. And he didn't see any reason why whites shouldn't be a part of that too. Hell, they had made this mess of racial inequality in the first place; why shouldn't they have a hand in cleaning it up?

His comrades though, his brothers-in-arms, were, for the most part, leery of white folks. They didn't fool with hippies—white kids who didn't wear shoes and were always telling people to relax—and they were even more suspicious of the whites who showed up in pressed khakis and Top-Siders, who joined SNCC and Students for a Democratic Society, who talked the talk. Their anger was some days focused as much on pissing off their parents as it was on the president or voting rights or racist cops across the South. But, hey, Jay thought, at least they showed up. They went to campus marches and organized their own. Cynthia Maddox was all right in Jay's book; she got credit for just showing up.

So Jay went out of his way to tell her to please
stop
.

She took the news well.

After calling him a racist and a chauvinist, a word he had to look up when he got home, she told him she thought he was the
only one in his group who had any sense. She asked him if he wanted to join her for dinner, her treat.

Jay, who had holes in his coat and was working on a few in the soles of his shoes, was quite grateful for the offer.

They went to a barbecue stand on Telephone Road, her choice. She ordered chicken and mustard greens and pushed him toward the hot links and potato salad since she had never tried those before. Halfway through the meal, she was reaching across the table every few minutes to pick at his plate.

All through dinner, she ran through a laundry list of things she'd been saving up, stuff she would have said at the meetings if they'd ever let her talk. How they should work the system from the inside, plant one of their own on the school's admin board, or even better, the city council. “Infiltration,” she said, chomping on an ice cube soaked in Big Red soda. “The FBI ain't all crazy.”

She thought they could pull it off too.

But they would need somebody unassuming, somebody the establishment would never suspect. She licked the corners of her mouth and smiled, an indication that she knew such a person, maybe someone sitting across the table from him right now. “You may need me more than you think you do.”

And she had more to say too.

She claimed their meetings were disorganized, too much eating and smoking and not enough focus. She also thought the Panthers were on to something with their uniform look. “Have y'all ever thought about getting matching outfits? Something jazzy, like with rainbows on the back.”

By then, Jay had heard enough. He mumbled something about a paper he had to write. He thanked her for the meal and hitched a ride back on his own.

He, frankly, didn't think he'd ever see her again.

But Cynthia Maddox was insatiable and full of ideas. She was on a full scholarship and making straight As; she had a lot of time on her hands. She stopped coming by the house on Scott Street and starting calling him up at his dorm, on the hallway phone, all time of the night, wanting to run her ideas by him. She was a member of SNCC by then, a group she'd finally talked her way into, and was starting up one of the few SDS chapters in the state. She wanted to know what he thought about this or that. Would he look at a draft of a press release she was writing, urging a boycott of the student union cafeteria (because they bought canned peas and tomatoes from a plant that didn't hire blacks or Mexicans)? Could she get him to agree to give her a heads-up about any marches he had planned so she could coordinate something with her groups and present a unified front to the school, the city, and the local press? And what did he really think of nonviolence? “I mean, really, don't you think we're past all that?”

Finally one day, just to shut her up, he asked her where she was from, where she'd gone to high school. She grew up in Katy, she said, out west, off the I-10 freeway. She'd come to college late, already in her twenties, and before that, she'd spent her entire life within a fifteen-mile radius. To Jay, it explained a lot. She was like a spring chicken that'd been running around in a too tight cage and had finally been let loose. It was an energy he recognized in himself. They were both kids who'd grown up in the dirt in rural East Texas, itching to get past the social confines of all that open, lawless space. They kind of got to be friends that way, talking about home. Turns out Cynthia (Cindy to everybody but him; he didn't like the name, didn't think it suited her much) didn't know her daddy either. She had a bastard stepfather
too, a guy not even ten years older than she was, who used to look at her funny when she was coming out of the bathroom.

It was weeks before Jay would tell her his story.

The soft footsteps he used to hear in the dark, his stepfather padding past, on the way to Jay's sister's room. He'd always hear his mother next, shuffling on the same worn carpet in the hallway, walking into her daughter's room to stop whatever had happened or was about to. Jay, who was just a boy then and scared to death of his stepfather—the beatings that sprang up like hurricanes on the Gulf, with no advance warning and no time for retreat—never did a thing to stop him. The next morning they'd all sit around the breakfast table like nothing had happened, like there wasn't a snake sitting right there at the table, sipping Sanka and sopping up his eggs with a biscuit. His mother was still married to the guy, wondering why Jay never came home for Christmas.

He'd tried to tell his buddies once. He and Bumpy Williams and Lloyd Mackalvy were sharing a bottle of Jack on the front porch of Bumpy's mother's house in Third Ward one night, long after a card game had broken up. Jay tried to talk to them about his family, what tore it up. He tried to talk about what it is to be a man, to feel such a need, a call really, to protect the ones you love, and the hollow, gnawing pain of being unable to do so. But his friends weren't interested in personal tragedy; they were out to save a race of people. There was a war going on; this was no time for baby sisters and family squabbles. Plus, they were slow to condemn Jay's stepfather. In their eyes, a brother could be forgiven anything. Hadn't they all been through enough as it was?

But Cynthia listened.

She said it wasn't his fault.

“You should call her,” she said, meaning his sister.

Their phone calls started to stretch so long that some of the
boys on his floor complained, and he and Cynthia took to meeting off campus. Beer joints and taco stands, sometimes sneaking off to the movies, something he never did with Bumpy or Lloyd. And they hit every blues hall in Third Ward. Once they saw Lightnin' Hopkins play at the Pin-up Club. Cynthia nearly fainted from the heat, the stench of sweat and perfume, and the shots of hooch she kept accepting from a group of sisters who were having a little fun with her, playing like they were her friends, laying out sly compliments about her stringy hair and laughing at her behind her back. Jay ended up having to drive her home. It was too late to try to sneak her into the girls' dorm, so he drove in circles around town, Cynthia laid out across his lap in the front seat of her green Ford Econoline truck, waiting for her to sober up. Near dawn, he settled into the parking lot of an elementary school out in the Heights. It was Sunday morning by then, and no one was around. Cynthia came to around dawn. She sat up and looked out the window and asked where they were. Jay had taken his coat off at some point. He'd rolled up his sleeves and was smoking a cigarette out the window.

Cynthia turned and looked at him.

He can still see her now.

Her hair was messed up and tangled…and it
was
stringy.

She had mascara smudged under both of her eyes.

Still, she was beautiful, a fact he finally allowed himself to admit.

And she was, at that moment, probably the best friend he had.

“I like you, Jay,” she whispered.

He felt something flutter in his stomach then, and he was suddenly, terribly aware of how hungry he was, how empty he'd been for years.

“I like you,” she said again.

There was no way he would make the first move. She seemed to know this without anything needing to be said. When she finally kissed him, the taste was big, meaty and warm and kind of bitter, like blood. He couldn't restrain himself any longer. He put his hands everywhere, cupping her doughy flesh, wanting to fill what he could with her. Before long they moved to the bed of the truck, lying on top of Jay's ratty coat, his backbone pressed against the metal bed, as she (of course) insisted on being on top. There, on his back, eyes stretched past the ponderosa pines to the starlit sky above, Jay held his breath.

There were many other times. In the truck, in the basement of her dorm, and once on top of a picnic table after midnight in MacGregor Park, one of the stupidest thing he's ever done. He never told his friends, and she never told hers. It was just between the two of them. They met in silence most nights, reaching for each other like a salve, slick, wet kisses to wash away everything past the reach of their young arms. By the time the feds killed those boys in Chicago in the winter of '69, everyone was on the lookout for rats. The administration was cracking down. There were cops on campus, cops everywhere, it seemed. The FBI and local law enforcement had moved on to new strategies. They'd grown tired, it seemed, of billy clubs and water hoses. They were just flat out shooting people now. What had started some fifteen years earlier with peaceful sit-ins and boycotts had disintegrated into guerrilla warfare. Something ugly was happening around them. Dark clouds were moving in, marching in martial formation, threatening to break everything wide open.

King was dead by then, Malcolm and two Kennedys.

Death was everywhere.

Cynthia asked him once about getting a gun.

He feigned ignorance and told her to watch herself. He didn't want her getting hurt. SNCC was falling apart, Cynthia was
spending more and more time trying to get attention for her fledgling SDS chapter, getting deeper and deeper into her own rhetoric, her ideas that they should meet fire with fire. She started speaking around campus more and more, standing on classroom chairs outside the administration building, screaming until her throat was raw, always quoting Malcolm, as if the rest of them had never heard of him. She got her name in the school paper, but the
Post
and the
Chronicle
mostly ignored her, treating her as little more than a groupie, a white girl caught up in nigger fever, as sure as if the Temptations had come to town.