Black Water Rising (13 page)

The report to his father-in-law goes something like this: the mayor has expressed tremendous concern for labor instability at the docks, as well as compassion and understanding for the longshoremen's wage struggles; she will speak to the chief of police about getting adequate protection for the dockworkers in the event of a strike; she passes on words of sympathy to the kid and his family; if he can ID the ones who jumped him, she'll do all she can to see that charges are brought. In all, the mayor is a friend to labor.

It's only marginally true. But Jay can see no reason to escalate the situation by repeating verbatim any of the things she said. He played his part as the messenger boy. The end of it, as far as he's concerned.

“Now wait a minute, son. We still need you on this thing.”

“Rev, with all due respect, I'm not sure you have much of a lawsuit here. You got the mayor herself saying she'll make sure the men are caught. The problem is, you're saying the boy doesn't really know who did it.”

“Not by name, but he
saw
them, Jay. Well, one of 'em, at least.”

Jay sighs. The story seems to keep shifting.

“Meet with the boy again, hear him tell it, what those men did to him.”

“I can't afford to take any more time away from my business.”

“I understand, son, but they're going to vote on the strike, this week maybe. They're going to call it. Come out to the union meeting and let the boy point the man out. We'll get his name, then take it to the mayor's office—”

“You don't need me for that.”

“You're the one who has her ear. Now look, the lawsuit was just a tactic. The main thing is, we need her on our side, get the whole city behind us.”

Jay sighs, feeling again that the rules keep changing.

This is not my fight, he wants to say.
This ain't my deal.

“I got a baby coming, sir,” he says. “I have to work.”

“How did it go with the doctor?” the Rev asks.

“He says Bernie's looking real good, doesn't expect any complications.”

“Well, we'll pray on that, son, that's for sure.”

“Yes, sir,” Jay says.

He's about to hang up the phone when his father-in-law pipes up again.

“Think about coming to the meeting, son. This is history, you know.”

 

He's been stalling on the hooker case. Between the union drama and his anxieties about the shooting death in the newspaper, he's let his work slip. And time is not on his side. It was two days ago that he promised Mr. Luckman he would present the settlement offer to his client, but in truth, Jay's been avoiding her altogether—not returning her calls and telling Eddie Mae to inform her he's out of the office if she should drop by unexpectedly. He doesn't want his client to know about the offer. Dana Moreland would probably think $7,500 was enough to retire on. Jay is still holding out for more. If he can come up with a witness who saw J.T. and the girl, he thinks he can scare five digits out of Cummings and Charlie Luckman. That in mind, he heads out to Gilley's after sundown, this time dropping Bernie off at her sister's, going it alone. It's safer this way, he reasons, remembering the black Ford on his tail just two nights ago.

And anyway, Pasadena, Texas, is not exactly a pleasure destination.

There's a sign on Red Bluff Road as it crosses Highway 225, the major artery in and out of Pasadena, Texas. It's a homemade billboard, white with hand-painted black letters. It's been there for more than a decade. A relic, some could argue. A holdover from another time. The sign has faded some, taking a beating from hundreds of South Texas storms. But cruising along at a cautious speed on Highway 225, Jay can see the words quite clearly from his car window:

PASADENA, TEXAS

“PROUD HOME OF THE KU KLUX KLAN”

Nearly every citizen in town, every cop and city official, including Pasadena's mayor and the police chief, drives by the sign maybe two, three times a day, Jay thinks. On the way to the
grocery store or work or taking their kid to the doctor. You can hardly get to city hall without driving past it. Folks on their way to church Sunday mornings see this sign every week, rising some fifty feet in the air, high above the buildings and trees. There has never been a campaign launched to tear the sign down, no arguments made in the local newspaper that perhaps this is no longer the time for such unapologetically racist fare, at least not broadcast so loudly. Hell, the city could just come in and break the sign down in the middle of the night if they were moved to. And yet here it is, lit eerily from below by city streetlights, the white of the billboard stark against the black sky. It still stands on high as the unofficial town welcome.

Make sure you know where you are, boy.

In an odd way, Jay finds the sign comforting. He has come to appreciate these kinds of visual clues. To see a Confederate flag flying outside someone's home or in the back window of a pickup truck is about as accurate a warning system as a man could hope for, like the engine light coming on in your car a few miles before something may or may not blow up; it's a caution before trouble starts, offering a clean window of time in which to make a run for it.

He would not be out here now if weren't for business. There's nothing appealing about Pasadena, Texas. It's flat land, cow pastures and overworked strawberry fields turned over for cheap housing, strip malls and liquor stores, gun shops and honkytonks. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a small-time country singer opened the world's largest nightclub, capable of holding more rednecks in one location than Jay ever wanted to encounter in a lifetime. Mickey Gilley's place made the city of Pasadena, Texas, famous.

The dance hall sits on several acres, including the parking lot, which, at a quarter to ten, is filled with dozens of Chevy and
Ford pickup trucks, most of which have a red-and-white Gilley's bumper sticker above their tailpipes or pasted in the back windows of their cabs. There must be dozens of people huddled in groups outside the club. They're getting an early buzz on, drinking beer out of coolers propped up in the beds of their trucks, listening to Waylon Jennings or the Charlie Daniels Band on their car stereos. At the front doors, there's a group of girls waiting in line, their hair feathered up to the brims of their pink-and-white cowboy hats. They're popping gum and sharing a can of hairspray. They glance in Jay's direction, nudging each other as he drives through the parking lot, where all eyes are on him: a black man in a crisp white button-down, no pearl buttons or tassels, no beard on his face or even a mustache, driving a Buick Skylark no less. He is clearly not one of them.

Jay parks at the far end of the lot, the front end of his Buick tipping dangerously over the edge of a steep ditch that separates the gravel lot from the cars passing by on Spencer Highway. He has a sudden, bothersome thought of Jimmy's cousin, an image of the old man driving off the side of the road, his body discovered in a ditch, just like this one. And he wonders, not for the first time, why Marshall told his girl he'd be home after cleaning the boat, but when Jay spoke with Jimmy, he complained that his cousin had left it a mess.

He is about to open his car door when something hits the glass on the driver-side window, right by Jay's ear. He jumps, thinking it's a rock, that somebody is throwing stones at his car. He turns and sees a couple of roughnecks standing outside the driver-side door, one with his arms folded across his substantial chest, the other motioning for Jay to roll down the window. The man taps the window again with his pinky ring, a turquoise stone the size of a small biscuit. When Jay doesn't respond fast enough, the one with the chest pushes his friend out of the way and taps on the
glass harder. Slowly, Jay rolls down the window halfway. He can immediately smell the liquor on them, the sweat from a good day's work. The one with the chest says, “You lost, boy?”

Jay rolls down the car window a little more, far enough so the men can see the .38 sitting in his lap, where he laid it about a half mile outside Pasadena's city limits. He puts a hand on the butt of the weapon. “I believe I'm all right…
boy
.”

The one with the chest backs away first, pulling his friend with him.

Jay keeps one hand on his gun, watching their retreat in his side-view mirror. He takes his time getting out of the car, lighting a cigarette. Then he makes the long walk across the parking lot, keeping his eyes straight ahead.

At the front doors, there's no one on duty who goes by the name of Clyde, and no one who'll tell him if Clyde is anywhere on the premises. Inside, the club is as warm as a midday barbecue, even with air-conditioning going and ceiling fans whirling overhead. The dance floor, seemingly half a mile of parquet wood flooring, is a sea of cowboy hats, ducking and swaying. Jay can hear the thump and shuffle of boots across the wood floor. He counts three bars under the pitched roof, each with a line of cowboys gathered, dollar bills folded lengthwise in their hands, waving at the girl bartenders for 75-cent longnecks of Lone Star.

Jay stands in the entryway, wishing he'd at least put on some jeans or a pair of boots and pretended to be some long-lost descendant of Charley Pride.

People are starting to stare.

He decides to start with the bar on his left, working his way to the front of the line. The gal behind the bar gives him a can of Gilley's beer even though he ordered a Michelob. He imagines she didn't hear him over the music, that or she's fucking with him, or maybe Mickey makes all the girls push his brew.
She pops the top for him, twirling the cap on her pinky finger, motioning to the next man in line. Jay sips at the beer; it's thin and not to his taste. He pulls out a $5 bill and orders a Michelob, louder this time. He tells her to keep the change. She looks at Jay anew, raising an eyebrow. From the cooler behind the bar, she pulls out two sweating bottles of Michelob. She opens one and slides it to Jay, pops the cap on the other and takes a sip herself. She leans across the bar. “I don't drink the shit either.” She winks at him, pocketing the rest of his change.

He watches her work for a while, thinking he's got an in.

She moves with grace, able to fill one order while she's taking the next, making sure the women in line get served first. Her hair is stick straight and dirty blond, and she wears it straight down her back like Crystal Gayle. She's older than the other barmaids at her station. There's a weariness in her hips; too many years on her feet, he gathers. This is career work for her. He bets she's in here at least five nights a week. The next time she's down at his end of the bar, he asks her about Clyde. “He's off tonight,” she hollers above the music, moving back and forth between the bar top and the cooler of beer. Jay orders another Michelob. “You got a phone number for him or something?”

“Depends on why you're asking? You're not a cop, are you?”

From his back pocket, Jay pulls out a Polaroid picture of his client, one he took the first day she came into his office. He lays the picture of Dana Moreland on the bar top, along with another $5 bill. “You seen her in here before?”

“She a friend of yours?”

“Something like that,” Jay says.

The bartender nods at Jay's wedding ring. “Your wife know you're friends with a girl like that?”

“So you know her then.”

“I know what she and Clyde are up to, if that's what you mean.”

The line behind Jay is getting rowdy, pushing up against him.

The bartender finishes the rest of her Michelob in two clean swallows. She goes back to taking one-dollar bills, pulling beers, popping tops. Jay tries to talk to her over the noise. “You seen her in here with him?” he asks, pulling out a smudged newspaper photo of Mr. Cummings, a shot of him with the other port commissioners standing on one of the public wharves. The bartender snatches the picture from Jay on her way to the cash register.

“Maybe,” she says.

“He wasn't one of Clyde's customers, if that rings any bells.”

“I said ‘maybe.'” She pulls the tab off two cans of Gilley's beer, slides them down the bar to a couple wearing matching black-and-silver cowboy shirts. She crosses back to the cash register, studying the smudged newspaper photo, holding it next to the Polaroid of Dana Moreland. “Yeah, all right,” she says.

“Are you sure?” Jay asks.

“This one looks real familiar,” she says, pointing at Cummings's picture. “I remember him not wanting to leave so early, getting huffy with Clyde.”

“On the night of June twenty-ninth?”

“That sounds about right.”

“You saw these two people together?”

“I guess so,” she says, not sounding as sure as she did a moment ago.

“And what about Clyde? You got a number for him or something?”

“Why? What's this all about?” She leans over the bar top, smiling, her breasts mashed together under a pink-and-red Gilley's T-shirt. “What'd she do?”

Jay puts another $5 bill on the countertop. He hopes she won't ask any more questions. She pockets the extra money and reaches for a matchbook on the bar top. From somewhere in her waterfall of hair, she pulls a stub of a pencil and jots something on the inside flap of the matchbook. “Clyde's number,” she says. Then, smiling, she adds, “And mine.” Jay actually feels himself blush.

 

It's after midnight by the time he picks up Bernie at Evelyn's house. He's whistling, in a good mood, and Bernie catches his spirit. She's on the baby now, day and night. Since the last doctor's appointment, she's started packing her suitcase and scribbling baby names on the back of any piece of paper she can get her hands on—takeout menus and circulars from the paper, even paper napkins.

“What about Donna?”

He shakes his head, making a face.

“Gayle?”

“No.”