Black Water Rising (23 page)

Unlike the prim, buttoned-up clothes she wore earlier today at the courthouse, right now she's wearing jeans and what appears to be a man's undershirt. Her nipples and the bones of her rib cage poke through the thin white cotton. She's smaller and a lot younger looking this close up, under the bright white overhead lights in the unfurnished condo. Here, she's open, completely exposed. Beneath the soft putty of her chin, Jay can see thin, ragged rings around her neck, fading bruises that are still visible almost a week after their first meeting on the boat. The colored scars against her white skin startle him. And all at once, he hears her screams again. That night on the boat. The words,
Help me.
He remembers the shrill desperation of it, the I-don't-want-to-die of it. Looking now at the bruises on her neck, he
gets the clearest picture yet of just what happened in that parked Chrysler by the bayou, in those few moments before gunshots tore through the night air.

She stares at Jay, the bottle dangling between her thin fingers.

“Whatever you're thinking about me,” she says, “you got it all wrong.”

Jay can hear the Galena Park coming out, rounding out her vowels, roughing up the ends of her words. Elise takes another lusty swallow from the liquor bottle, then wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Jay can imagine her as a girl, growing up in that rough-and-tumble neighborhood. He can see her dusty bare feet, toes dug in the dirt, can picture her begging a quarter from some boy to run up the street for a snow cone or a cherry pop. She has the bony disposition of an alley cat, a wayward thing, hunting for scraps she can use. And like a feral cat, there is the hint of a hulking strength beneath her tiny frame. It's in the way she cuts her eyes at you. If cornered, she will come out fighting.

“He do that to you?” Jay asks, nodding at the marks on her neck. “Dwight Sweeney?”

“I don't know who the hell that is,” she says.

Jay stares at her, confused. He thinks she's playing games with him.

“He told me his name was Blake Ellis,” she explains.

“He put his hands on you like that?” Jay asks.

“I'm not supposed to be talking about this.”

“Your lawyer know he attacked you?”

She shakes her head. “I can't talk about it.”

“I don't understand,” Jay says, softening toward her in a way he doesn't like or even completely understand. “We dropped you at a police station,” he says. “Why didn't you just go in and tell
them what he did to you?” He can't help thinking this whole thing might have gone so much differently for all of them. “If this man attacked you, tried to kill you—”

“You never panicked?” Elise asks, her voice rising sharply. “You heard that lawyer in court. I got a record.”

The irony is not lost on Jay. He would laugh out loud at the peculiar similarities between their two states of mind if it weren't for the feelings of confusion they engender. He feels a sudden headache coming on, a white-hot point of pressure behind his eyes. He had not been prepared to feel anything but rage toward her. “Who was he?” he asks. “The guy?”

“How the hell should I know?” she says. “We met in a bar. He asked me on a date, took me to some Mexican joint out north. After, he wanted to park a little, which I was all right with.” Her words slow to a crawl. “Then he got kind of rough with me and…” She looks up at Jay suddenly, the brown color of her eyes going as flat as a puddle of mud. “And that's all I'm gon' say about it.”

He can tell by the look on her face that she's decided something just then, decided that he's not entitled to know every goddamned thing about her.

“Look, we don't have a lot of time,” she says abruptly, setting the bottle of scotch on the floor next to the telephone. “So why don't you tell me what it is you want, why you're here.” She glides across the floor in Jay's direction. “If you wanted to rat me out to the cops, you'da done it by now. So there must be something else you want.” She takes another step closer to him, close enough that he can smell a musky sweetness coming off her skin. Remembering her one-time profession, her often enterprising way with men, Jay gets the very strong sensation that she is making him an offer. She has her face tilted up to his suggestively…waiting. He might be insulted by the gesture if the whole thing
weren't so profoundly sad. “I want you to call him off,” he says, pushing her away from him. “I want you to tell him to stay the hell away from my family.”

Elise stares at Jay, her eyebrows pinched together. “I'm not sure I know what you're talking about.”

“The guy in the Ford…the money,” he says. “You made your point.”

“Is that what this is about? Money?” She actually sounds relieved. “You want money?” She makes a move toward the Louis Vuitton bag.

Jay grabs her by the arm, holding on like a kid who's caught a cat by the tail.

He catches a flash of fire in her eyes, a signal, a warning, even.

“I don't want a goddamned thing from you,” he says. “I'll give it back, okay? The money? I'll give it all back. Just call your guy off.”

She looks utterly confused. “What are you talking about? What guy?”

Jay doesn't understand where she's going with this, why she would deny it here, now, the two of them alone. He can't follow the game she's playing.

“You telling me you didn't send a guy after me, to pay me off?”

“I don't even know who you are,” she says.

“What about the old man on the boat? The captain?”

“What about him?”

“He's dead.”

“What are you talking about?” she asks, her voice rising in fear.

“You telling me you don't know anything about it?”

“You're hurting me!”

Jay looks down and realizes he's still holding on to her arm, his fingers digging into her flesh. He feels himself losing control. The pain behind his eyes spikes. The light in the room seems unnecessarily bright. “Where is it?” he asks.

“Where is what?”

“My gun.”

Elise shakes her head slowly, as if she's not sure he will understand such a simple gesture. She seems to regard him now as she might a small, highly imaginative child. “I don't know what you think is happening here,” she says. “But I'm not trying to get you in any trouble. If anything, I owe you. I know that. You saved my life, and I don't even know your name.”

The words have an airy lilt of a question, an invitation maybe. A suggestion that under different circumstances they might have been friends. Her manner seems purposely disarming, almost ingratiating. And it infuriates him as much as it frightens him. The power of it, the pull. Her convincing denial.

It's a trick, he tells himself.
Don't trust it.

“How do I know you're not going to turn it over to the cops?”

“Turn what over to the cops?”

“My gun,” he says, watching her eyes for a flicker, a tell.

“Listen to me, the cops don't know a thing about you. And frankly, I'd like to keep it that way. I was never at the scene. You understand?” she says, wanting to wrestle some cooperation out of him. “The cops don't know a thing.”

“Somebody knows,” Jay says, raising his voice into a ball of thunder. “He went after the old man on the boat, and now he's coming after me and my wife!”

There's a sudden knock at the front door.

Jay turns and sees the doorknob twisting back and forth, someone trying to get in from the outside. Jay curses himself for coming in here unarmed. He wishes he'd worked out some kind of signal with Rolly, a backup plan in case shit got rough. Elise starts for the front door. Jay tightens his grip on her arm.

“It's the neighborhood security guard,” she explains. “He knows I'm out here alone. He comes by every hour or so to check on me. I asked him to.”

Jay is slow to let her go.

“It'll be worse if I don't answer,” she says.

When she finally opens the front door, there's a short, stocky man in a red-and-black uniform on the other side. He's wearing riding boots and a pistol on his belt. Elise glances back at Jay. She seems to want him to see that she was telling the truth. The security guard eyes Jay closely, a black man loose on the plantation. “Everything all right?” he asks Elise. “He a reporter or something?”

“He was just leaving,” she says, looking at Jay. She seems thankful for the interruption, which, Jay now realizes, she knew was coming. She holds the front door open for him and, in a show of Southern hospitality, steps out onto the tiny front porch, walking him to the little gate, just beyond earshot of the guard. “I'm not trying to hurt you, Jay,” she says.

“I thought you said you didn't know my name.”

“You just told me,” she says, tilting her head to one side. “Inside.”

But he didn't…
did
he?

He can't remember. His head is starting to ache again.

“I just wish you wouldn't go to the cops about anything, is all. They don't know a thing about you,” she says. “I'll give you
whatever you want, I swear.”

“Why should I trust you?” Jay asks.

He still doesn't understand the man from the black Ford, her insistent denials, or his missing gun. “How do I know you're not trying to set me up?”

“I told you,” she says. “I don't even know who you are.”

He told her he believed her. She put a hand on his knee and asked him what he planned to do. They were laid out in the bed of her truck, parked behind an abandoned fairground, next to a faded red barn and a row of sunken bleachers. Underneath a crescent moon, they lay side by side, watching lightning bugs, early for this time of year, dance in the shadows of the pines. Cynthia had walked the grounds earlier, playing on an old swing set while Jay sat smoking cigarettes, watching from the bleachers. She smelled of grass and clay. There were pine needles stuck in her hair. Jay kissed her lips in the back of the truck. She put her hands on the small of his back, inching toward him.

The sex was awkward.

It started too fast and never arrived anywhere. Cynthia kept
fidgeting, too much in a hurry and getting in her own way. Eventually, Jay rolled off to one side and pulled up his pants. He lay on his back, listening to Otis Redding crackling on the Ford's tinny radio.
Sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time…

Cynthia asked again about Roger. What was Jay prepared to do?

The cops had raided Bumpy's girlfriend's place the week before. Cynthia had found Jay coming out of a Spanish lab on the south side of campus and told him he needed to see Bumpy right away. Something big was going down.

Bumpy had been seeing a freshman that spring, a gal studying biology over at TSU. She was living with an auntie in South Park, and against Jay's strident objections, Bumpy had started holding meetings at her place, arguing that they needed to take some of the heat off the Scott Street duplex. They played cards out on the front porch, and sometimes Bumpy's girl would cut hair or let them smoke a little weed if her aunt wasn't home. But they kept no files at the house, no phone sheets or mimeographed flyers. So Jay was more than a little surprised and upset to find that the police had discovered a small arsenal of guns stashed in paper bags under the house. The deputies had made a beeline for the guns within a few minutes of storming the house…as if they'd known just where to look. Which could mean only one thing: somebody had snitched.

They had all initially suspected Bumpy's girl. How well did he know her and all that. If she wasn't the rat, it was at least assumed that the girl's aunt, sick of fist-pumping boys coming around her house all time of the day and night, had called the cops. But this assessment didn't hold much weight, especially not after the sheriff's department threatened to arrest the girl
and
her aunt too.

Bumpy went a little crazy over the whole thing. His girl
wouldn't talk to him, and he wanted someone to blame for that, and for his missing weapons, which had been one of the most valuable assets AABL had; the guns were for protection, yes, but they were also a source of income. Bumpy called an emergency meeting at the Scott Street place. Founding members, newcomers, anybody who'd ever made it to even one meeting or showed their face at a rally. He billed it as a rap session, had some of the girls fry up a plate of chicken, made it sound like a party. When the place was filled to capacity, Bumpy shut the door and turned the key, locking everybody inside for almost twenty hours. Lloyd Mackalvy and Roger Holloway were assigned to guard the doors, each armed with a .38.

Bumpy interviewed everybody one-on-one, seeking a second opinion from Jay from time to time, but also grilling Jay when he got the chance, asking if he was talking to anyone outside AABL about the inner workings of their organization. Besides his buddies in AABL, there was only one person Jay talked to, period. And there was no way he would have told Cynthia about the guns.

Jay kept an eye on Roger from across the room. For a soldier on guard, Roger seemed to be having a royally good time. Always a piece of chicken or a beer or a girl in hand, he kept himself far across the room from the heat of inquisition. By the time the sun was coming up the next day, Bumpy had exhausted himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his mouth dry. He had a couple of beers and went to bed before he ever got around to talking to Roger. So Jay took it on himself to ask Roger if he had known about Bumpy's stash in South Park.

“Naw, man,” Roger said, picking chicken meat out of his teeth. He wasn't exactly looking Jay in the eye. “I don't even like guns, man. You know that.”

“Naw, Roger, that's the thing,” Jay said. “I don't know that.
Matter fact, I don't really know a thing about you, man, not really.”

“I'm Roger, man,” he said, smiling broadly. “Just Roger.”

It was an odd, indirect answer. And it kind of sat with Jay funny.

Cynthia was furious about the whole thing and furious with him for not ousting the dude on the spot. She needed no more convincing that Roger Holloway was a snitch. Laid out in the back of her truck, she kept saying over and over that the feds couldn't get away with it. This was
their
government after all, a point he was too tired to argue. He hadn't come out here to talk about Roger, to be lectured by her about whose government it was. Some nights he hated to be reminded of how different they were, how much separated their two views of the world. He wanted to kiss her, to bring her closer. But he felt her slipping away, pulled into some corner in her mind, pouting there like a petulant child. She wanted Roger dealt with. She wanted some show of aggression from him, when all he had was fear and apprehension, and the true knowledge of what
his
government would do to him if he wasn't careful.

Cynthia rolled over flat on her back, pulling her skirt down, covering her knees and every inch of open skin. The silence was there again, popping up between them like mushrooms after a hot spring storm, until there was nothing left except the sound of Otis whistling, and even that faded after a while.

 

Given the circumstances, the police raid and his growing suspicions about a mole in their midst, Jay had half a mind to cancel the African liberation rally, which was only a couple of weeks away. Stokely, on a swing back from Guinea, was planning to make a speech, and somebody's heard a rumor the
New York
Times
was sending a reporter to cover the event. It was turning into a very big deal. Jay was already worried about drawing any more attention to himself. He knew the feds were watching him closely. The few times he'd traveled out of the state to deliver a speech, he'd been followed on the road, one car clipping the bumper of the borrowed truck he was driving, almost running him into a ditch. Another time, two highway patrolmen pulled him over. They searched his car and made him spend a night in lockup because his right taillight was out. He knew the government was looking for any reason to trap him, and he was afraid of the lengths to which the feds would go to silence him.

Plus, there was no way of knowing if Roger was the
only
government informant on campus. Any fool would guess he wasn't. As Cynthia had taken pains to point out, this was something that affected all of them. Political organizing, free speech, the whole goddamned Constitution. None of it was safe. And if Jay canceled the rally, she said, then they all might as well turn their tails in the air; they deserved every ass-fucking rape of their civil rights the government had in store for them. She said it would be a disgrace if he canceled.

Other than the general principle of the thing, he didn't understand why Cynthia was so worked up, why she cared so much about one rally. He didn't think Cynthia's group, Students for a Democratic Society, nearly blinded as they were by their collective rage over Johnson's bullshit war, gave two shits about Africa. And he didn't want them at his rally no way. The local chapter of SDS was rancorous and full of infighting and prone to gross theatrics. They had once doused the university's provost in pig's blood as he was coming out of a staged production of
My Fair Lady
at the school's performance hall. In an article claiming responsibility for the prank in the next day's edition of the
Daily Cougar,
a senior officer of SDS said they felt they needed to
get people's attention any way they could, that marches and rallies weren't making the deaths of American soldiers real enough to folks. Jay didn't understand what the university's provost had to do with Vietnam, or what drowning him in pig's blood was going to do except piss him off and make it harder for everybody else to be heard.

But he did see their point about the fading power of speech.

The sight of kids chanting and marching through the streets with fists raised was getting more and more common. On its face, it was no longer enough to shock, to wake up the masses, and, more important, the powers that be.

Jay was ready to try something new, a different tactic altogether.

Economic boycotts. Or “consumer sanctions,” he called them.

He had already leaked the idea to the papers. But at the rally, he would make it official. He planned to call for a nationwide boycott of some of the biggest corporations in America, companies that were continuing to benefit from a history of colonial and economic oppression of brown people, that made money off the continent of Africa and its people. He would name names.

Coca-Cola and Johnson & Johnson.

Shell and Gulf Oil.

The big petroleum companies sucking the Congo dry.

He supposed Cynthia knew what all this meant to him, this push for global uplift, and he liked to think that was the reason she was behind the rally, why she kept pushing for him to protect it, to move forward with his plans.

 

He had no real proof of Roger's wrongdoings. And he was afraid to get into it with Bumpy for fear of what Bumpy might do to the
kid if Jay even floated the idea that Roger was on the wrong side of things. Jay needed everybody to keep a cool head. If the kid was an informant, laying so much as a scratch on his back was a colossally bad idea. And Bumpy was still fuming about his guns.

So Jay kept his fears to himself and vacillated about what to do with the rally. Up until the last thirty-six hours, he was on the fence. He kept running through the evidence against Roger in his head, all of it circumstantial:

1. Roger wasn't even a student on campus.
   
2. No one was really sure where Roger lived.
   
3. He had offered to help Jay with the rally, offered to type up copies of Jay's speech, his outline for corporate boycotts, and the call for global unity.
   
4. He'd also cozied up to Alfreda Watkins, and in the process gotten a good, long look at AABL's fund-raising roster, the names and addresses of people in the community who'd given what little money they had.
   
5. He'd been hanging around the duplex for months and had occasionally been by Bumpy's girlfriend's place out in South Park. If Roger had been snooping around, he could have easily found the guns there on his own.
   

Added together, it didn't look good, and Jay had to make a decision about the rally before Stokely got on a very expensive flight from Oakland to Houston.

Because of the bugs crawling all over the Scott Street duplex, Jay made the call from Cynthia's place. She was off campus by then, in a one-room shotgun shack in the Bottoms in Third Ward. He needed a place where he could camp out for a while. It would take hours to track down Stokely, who was back in the country by then, reportedly on the West Coast. Jay needed a
secure line where Stokely could call him back if Jay had to leave a message for him. Cynthia made a pot of coffee, rubbed his shoulders while he waited. When the call came, she left him alone. She kissed his forehead and walked out of the house.

Jay lit one cigarette after another and ran it down for Brother Carmichael.

The cops, the guns, the raid.

Maybe, baby, I'm just tripping out on the vibe down here.

Tell me I'm just seeing things.

But if he was looking to Stokely to cool his paranoia, he'd picked the wrong dude. Talking to a Panther about a fed in their midst was like dropping a match in a pool of black oil. The shit was gon' blow. “This is the most elemental expression of fascism in its purest state, my brother,” Stokely said, his voice cracking like lightning. “What they cannot silence, they will exterminate. You need to open your eyes to the truth of this thing. They trying to kill us, brother.”

The words poured out of the phone like tear gas, filling up every space in the room, burning, stinging, gobbling up Jay's breath. “This ain't no game,” Stokely said. “If you got even a hunch about this dude, get rid of him, push him out now. We in a war, brother. You got to get them before they get you.”

He was talking fast, moving at a dangerous clip.

Jay shook his head. “But that's exactly what they want, man. We start kicking people out left and right, until there's nothing left. And they sitting back somewhere laughing, watching us tear ourselves apart.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the phone.

Stokely came back soft, somewhat reflective. “Fred Hampton, man,” he said. “How much more you need to hear to know these cats mean business?”

Now it was Jay's side of the line that went dead silent.

He sat there for a long time on Cynthia's floor, running his fingers through the fringe of a Navajo blanket that was covering the concrete floor. He thought about those boys in Chicago, and he had a clear, sudden image of his mother at his own funeral. She would bring him back to Nigton, he knew. Back to Nig Town. Nigger Town. She would bury him right where he was born, and it would be done and over with, like he'd never even been here, like nothing had even changed. She would bury him right next to his twenty-one-year-old father.

No, he had to fight. But he wanted to do this right.

“I don't know shit about this dude, man,” Jay said, meaning Roger. “I don't know nothing for sure. Maybe I ought to talk to him first, you know.”

“They not teaching our boys over in Southeast Asia to stop and
talk
to the Vietcong. No, they tell those boys to shoot first, ask questions never. And that's how we need to do things.” He said it again. His new catchphrase. A slogan for the new decade.
Shoot first, ask questions never.
“You hear me, brother?” he said.