Black Water Rising (6 page)

“Wait a minute. You're not talking about a lawsuit, are you?” Jay asks.

“A lawsuit is just the thing we need,” Kwame says. “Blow this issue wide open in the courts, drain the city's resources, make 'em know we mean business.” He stands suddenly, getting pumped by his own rhetoric. “We got to take charge of this opportunity, shut the motherfuckers down if we have to.”

Kwame has badly miscalculated his audience and forgotten he's in a house of the Lord. Reverend Boykins shoots him a look of disapproval. Even the sweat-stained dockworkers seem turned off by the sudden outburst. They don't want a revolution. They want a bigger paycheck. “Well, now, let's hold on there, Mr. Mackalvy,” the Rev says. “Let Jay talk to the mayor first.”

“You'll do that for us, Mr. Porter?” the janitor asks, a hand on his son's one good shoulder. Jay looks at the boy's father, then
at the Rev, the closest thing to a father he's ever had. He nods without thinking. “Yeah…I'll do it.”

The meeting moves on after that to talk about strategies for the strike, getting the word out to black day laborers that they are not to cross the picket line, should it come to that, and deciding whose wife or mother will make sandwiches or some chicken while they're on the line. Jay tunes out most of it. He can tell they've finished with him, but there isn't any way to leave without him seeming rude. A few minutes later, they end the meeting with an awkward prayer, the men fidgeting, uncomfortable holding hands. Jay ducks out as soon as he can, nodding once as the Rev asks, “You'll call on her, won't you, son?”

Outside, Kwame stops him on the church steps, his face flushed with the heat and excitement of the meeting. “It's just like old times, huh, partner?”

Jay looks at Kwame's hand on his shoulder. “Don't touch me, Lloyd.”

He practically jogs to his car, hot to get out of there.

There's no way out of this thing, he knows. His father-in-law made him promise. And Jay, for the most part, is a man of his word. He has no idea how he's going to get to the mayor. What's he supposed to do, call her up after more than a decade? Just show up at city hall? He reaches into his pocket for his cigarettes, and the newspaper clipping slides out, fluttering briefly before sinking softly in the humid air, landing at Jay's feet. He stares at the scrap of paper, the facts of a murder laid out before him in black and white.

A moment later, he climbs into his car. Clutching the newspaper clipping in the palm of his hand, he kicks the engine in gear. Highway 59 to I-45 is the quickest route home, but Jay drives past the nearest on-ramp. He tells himself he's taking the long way home. But deep down, he knows. He's heading for the water.

Jay left home when he was fifteen. He took his summer earnings from working in his mother's shop in Nigton, up in Trinity County, and left. He was headed to Nacogdoches. That was his plan. But at the bus station he met a pretty girl who was headed south, toward the Gulf, and he changed his mind on the spot. He bought a ticket to Houston instead. If he was gon' do this, he was gon' do it big. He arrived in the city at dawn. He didn't know a thing about where he was, didn't know a soul. He spent half a day talking to a janitor at the bus station, asking about a place to stay. He ended up in Fifth Ward because it was black and therefore safe. He found a room on the first floor of Miss Mitchell's boardinghouse, where it was clean and there was always fresh coffee. His upstairs neighbor was a transves
tite burlesque dancer whose stage name was Effie Dropbottom. They sat up most nights, when Effie wasn't performing, smoking cigarettes and playing records. Wilson Pickett and Ray Charles and any Motown. Or they listened to the
True Confessions
show on 1430 AM.

He found a job at a bakery, cleaning ovens and sweeping up after hours. He scratched out a living and called home when he was ready. It was his sister he wanted to see about. He felt awful for leaving her behind. It was a cowardly thing to do, he knew. But he couldn't protect her from his mother's third husband—the nasty, sidelong glances and midnight gropes—and that fact alone had been more painful to a young boy trying to be a man than any guilt about leaving. They talked a couple of times, he and his sister. He sent her a postcard once. It was a picture of the Astrodome, the words “8th Wonder of the World!” scrawled in silver glitter across the top. Sometime after that, he heard she went to stay with her father, his mother's second husband, up around Dallas.

Jay never finished high school. But when the University of Houston was making noise about integrating, trying to head off at the pass any radical violence or government injunction, he went down to the admissions office without an appointment. He scored near 100 percent on the entrance exam, and they let him in without a diploma. He moved into a segregated dorm a couple of miles off campus and said good-bye to Fifth Ward for a long, long time.

Driving through the neighborhood now, Jay stares out of his car window, thinking how much Fifth Ward has changed. Down Lockwood Drive, fine-dining restaurants and clothing shops have been replaced by liquor stores and Laundromats with single women inside, folding clothes alone. There are boarded-up buildings on nearly every corner and empty fields thick with
weeds and flattened soda cans, shards of broken glass, trash and used furniture. Even the sidewalk in front of the Freedman's National Bank, the first black-owned bank in the state, has dead grass coming up through cracks in the cement. Jay remembers the neighborhood differently, remembers when it was a point of pride for black folks to say they lived near Lockwood Drive or had a little place on Lyons Avenue or went to Phillis Wheatley High School. He knows plenty of doctors and lawyers who came out of Wheatley. Fifth Ward was a place where black people thrived. People made a little bit of money, made a nice life for themselves. The neighborhood wasn't much, wasn't fancy or rich, but it was theirs.

And then, of course, came integration.

Black people suddenly had a choice, in theory at least, and the ones with any money almost always chose to leave Fifth Ward behind. Just because they could. Because wasn't that, after all, the very thing they had been fighting for?

Jay lights another cigarette and makes a right turn onto Clinton.

The newspaper said it was the 400 block.

He wants to see it for himself.

If only to put this whole thing out of his mind.

He drives parallel to the bayou, along Clinton, a narrow two-lane road, heading west. There are warehouses on the south side of the street, tall trees and brush behind them, and then the bayou, which Jay knows is there, but can't see in the darkness. There are no streetlights or even city signs on this stretch of road. Jay flips on his brights, taking a curve in the road, his headlights swooping past the warehouses, dark and deserted at this hour, past grain silos and steel machinery and yards of chain-link fence. A few feet ahead, there's a sudden turnoff in the road, a path of dirt and gravel to the left that winds around to the back
of a warehouse…and toward the water. Jay takes the left turn, slow and easy. He drives cautiously, maybe ten, fifteen miles an hour, tossing his cigarette through the crack in his car window. Dirt and gravel kick up a fine dust that swirls in the hazy white light of his high beams.

Around back of the warehouse, there's a locked gate.

Behind it, Jay sees the silhouette of small hills, mounds of broken concrete and quartz, finely crushed, like tiny sand dunes. A sign on the fence reads
QUARTZ INDUSTRIAL, INC
. Jay remembers the name from the newspaper.

In front of him, the dirt road ends abruptly.

Jay slams on his brakes, almost running into a thin film of yellow police tape. It's blocking off a large, burnt-up patch of grass, probably twenty-five yards wide. Jay shuts off the engine to his car, but leaves his headlights on, shining them past the field of dirt and grass to the hawthorn trees and bunches of scrub oak and Spanish moss on the other side. He still can't see the bayou from here. If he didn't know better, he would laugh if somebody told him there's water on the other side of those trees, running right through the middle of the city.

Part of the crime scene tape has come loose and is trailing in the dirt. It seems the cops have already come and gone, their business done, which makes Jay feel better about getting out of his car. He notices the white spray paint right away. Four
X
's in a rectangle mark a ghostly shape of something once there and now gone. Jay takes a careful step over the yellow tape to get a better look. Up close, he sees tire tracks. Somebody was parked here, he thinks. There's another mark in the grass, a misshapen oval of white police paint, indicating something that once lay beside the tire tracks.
White male,
Jay thinks,
shot twice.
At Jay's feet there's a dark patch of motor oil…or blood. He is too afraid to touch it, to have any of this on his hands. He backs up suddenly, overcome
with the feeling that this was a superbly stupid idea. He should never have come out here.

It's when he turns to leave, toward his car and the street, looking back the way he came, that he sees something in the distance, high above the trees.

The lights of the Freedman's National Bank clock:

9:37 78°

It's the same thing he saw from the boat Saturday night, the same image, the same angle. He turns and looks behind him, past the trees to the downtown skyline. It's all the same. He's standing on higher ground, some twenty or thirty yards above the surface of the water, but there is now no doubt in his mind:

This is where she must have been standing when they heard the shots.

The thought makes him ill, the fact that he carried that woman with his bare hands, spirited her away from what he now realizes was a crime scene.

There's a sudden flash of white light on the main road, a pair of headlights coming down Clinton. The car hits the same curve in the road, its lights momentarily streaking down the dirt path, hitting Jay in the chest. In an instant, he sees himself in the driver's eyes: a black man, after dark, standing inside police tape. For all he knows, it's a cop on the road. For all he knows, this is still an active crime scene. He watches the car's brake lights come on as it slows on the main road. If his eyes are right, the car is backing up toward him.

His first thought is to hide.

It's a few long strides to his car, the path to which is awash with the light of his high beams. It's much easier, safer, he reasons, to step backward, out of the light and into the thick brush. He moves quickly, crouching low, pushing his body through the trees. The branches pull at his clothes, grazing his face, digging
into his skin. He feels a hot sting on his cheek. Knee-deep in weeds and a fog of mosquitoes and moving by a thin stream of moonlight through the clouds, Jay tries to feel his way. His ankle turns on a piece of uneven earth and gravity seems to grab him whole. He slips feet-first down the embankment. He quickly reaches for the nearest tree branch, but it breaks off in his hand, causing him to slip again on the soft earth. He manages to turn onto his stomach as he hits the ground, clawing the dirt to keep from sliding all the way to the black bottom. He can hear the bayou whispering softly, kissing the sides of the bank below him. He remembers the sound of her falling, rolling into the water.

If you didn't know it was here, Jay thinks.

How easy it would be to make a mistake, a wrong turn.

He thinks of her. The screams, the gunshots. The confusion. A man dead, and her out here alone. Someone passes by, and afraid, she hides.

Just like he's doing now.

Jay reaches for another branch, clinging tightly. He looks through the tangle of trees, checking for the car on the street. Its taillights are already fading in the distance. The car is back on its course, up Clinton Road and far away from Jay. He doesn't know if the driver saw him, doesn't know who it was or if they're coming back, but he's not waiting around to find out. He wants to get back to his car, to the main road, to the freeway and home. Fingernails digging in the dirt, Jay drags himself through the choke of weeds, moving an inch at a time.

He hears something above him, some movement in the brush. For a tense moment, he fears a run-in with a bayou rat or a raccoon. Then he hears footsteps crunching dead leaves and twigs and knows he's not out here alone.

“I help you with something?”

It's a man's voice, no doubt about that.

Jay has no idea where he came from…or how long he's been watching.

Caught, Jay crawls through the brush, slowly, pulling himself out of the grass like a snake. He's lost one of his shoes, and his sock, soiled up to the ankle, is coming off at the heel. He scrambles to his feet, brushing dirt off his pants and what was once a clean shirt. The man, Jay sees, is older than he is, in his sixties maybe, and smaller, more compact. He's black, in coveralls smudged with motor oil and grass stains and cut at the sleeves. He's got a cigarette tucked behind his ear. He stares at Jay, his filthy clothes and missing shoe.

Jay opens his mouth to speak, faster than he can think of some reasonable explanation to come out of it. He stands in the dirt, mute and slick with sweat.

“You ain't supposed to be back here, you know,” the man says.

Jay thinks of making a run for his car, but doesn't want to make himself look any more suspicious than he already does. The man in the coveralls rocks back on his bowlegs, digging his heels in the dirt. He slides the cigarette from behind his ear and uses the head of the filter to pick something from between his two front teeth. He stares at Jay, eyeing his clothes, studying his every little move, trying to settle something in his mind.

“You a reporter or something?” he asks bluntly.

Jay is on the verge of correcting him, but stops when he catches the fleeting glint in the man's eyes, the flash of perverse excitement. For the first time, Jay notices a wheelbarrow parked by the chain-link fence, a shovel sticking out of it. He takes another look at the man's coveralls, coated in grass stains.

The groundskeeper, Jay remembers, the one from the paper.

And according to the news article, the one who found the body.

“Can I get one of those?” Jay asks, motioning to the pack of
Carltons peeking from the man's front pocket. He's stalling, of course, trying to buy himself some time, a moment to get his head around this. He wonders what the old man knows.

The groundskeeper purses his lips, upset that he's being held to answer to some unspoken code, between black men or smokers or both. He reaches into his coveralls and taps out a crumpled cigarette for Jay, tossing him a book of matches. In the man's side pocket, Jay spots the top of a liquor bottle.

The man catches Jay staring at his stained coveralls and fifth of Seagram's. “This ain't my regular gig, you know,” he says, as if he feels he needs to explain himself. “I'm just picking up a little extra cash right now, that's all. I come by a couple of times a week to clear out the trash, beer bottles and such. I'm keeping an eye on the place nights now…you know, since the shooting.”

“It was you, huh?” Jay asks carefully. “The one who found him?”

The man shakes his head to himself, whistling low.

“Man, I ain't ever seen no shit like that in my life, and I seen some shit, let me tell you.” He snatches his book of matches from Jay's hand, striking one to light his own cigarette. “You can quote me on that if you want to.”

He actually pauses, waiting for Jay to produce a pad and a pencil, to make sure he's getting all this down. So this is his big moment, Jay thinks, his little piece of fame. The man's name in the paper and everything. More than his mama ever dreamed for him, probably. Jay, playing the part, pats his pockets. “I must have left my notes in the car,” he says, trying to sound casual, jaded even, a beat reporter who's seen everything. “What happened out here?”

“Hell if I know,” the groundskeeper says. He takes a single, lusty pull on his cigarette, sucking it nearly to the filter. He stares out across the field at the police markings, the ghostly shapes
in the dirt. “It was early when I got out here Sunday morning, around eight, like I always do. I come up the walk here,” he says, pointing to the dirt road. “And I set my buggy over by the fence.” He points to the wheelbarrow resting against the fence now. “I stopped to get a little sip, you know, just to warm me up.” He reaches for the bottle now, reenacting the scene, pulling the Seagram's from his pocket. He takes a hearty swallow, nodding his head toward the field. “And that's when I seen the car. I mean, it was just sitting right there.” He nods toward the white markings in the grass.