Black Water Rising Read online

  do,” he says. “But right now, I’m just trying to get my little girl home.”

  Jay sets his pen across his desk. By now, he’s onto the hustle.

  “If I could just get a little money,” the guy starts. “I’ll pay you back, I swear. Or you can just take it off my bill, soon as we win this.”

  Jay stands and shows him to the door.

  The hooker is the only bright spot on the horizon. He tries a couple of phone numbers Ms. Moreland scratched on the back of a gas station receipt, looking for the girlfriend who set up the date between his client and J. T. Cummings, the only person Dana can think of who can corroborate her story. The first number is disconnected. The other is the home of a Mexi­

  can woman who sounds to be about eighty. She’s never heard of Dana Moreland. Jay leaves a note on Eddie Mae’s desk: they’ve got to find the witness.

  He gets home late, after eight o’clock. Bernie is already in bed, snoring.

  She left a plate for him on the stove. Jay takes off his tie and eats in silence at the kitchen table. Afterward, he washes his plate and fork and leaves them in the rack to dry. He tries to clean up some, make himself feel useful around the house, but Ber­

  nie has already cleared and washed the pots and pans and wiped down the counter. He cleans out the refrigerator instead, pull­

  ing out leftovers from Bernie’s birthday two days ago: barbecued meat, dried and rubbery by now, old potato salad, and beer, a can of which he drinks standing up, holding open the door to the fridge. He burps and reaches for another to kill his lingering headache. He finishes the second beer standing over his stereo, 34 Attic a L o c ke

  flipping through his LPs, trying to find just the right one. He picks out an Otis record, his favorite, and sets the needle down on track number five.

  I want security, yeah, and I want it at any cost. Finally, he sits down with the mail, the bills he’s been avoiding, the kitchen calculator, and his checkbook. He runs the numbers two and three times and comes up short every time. He rear­

  ranges the bills, deciding which ones he has to pay now and which ones can wait. What’s left in the register seems hardly enough to eat on, let alone raise a family. He looks around their tiny onebedroom apartment, cramped as it is with mismatched furniture, law books, and borrowed clothes for the baby, and worries that they’ll never get out of here. Back against the sofa, his financial life spread across the worn carpet, he thinks through his caseload, the open files on his desk, like running lottery numbers in his head, trying to guess which cases to play, where to put his money and time.

  It’s become a game for him, a gamble.

  It didn’t start out this way. One of his first cases out of law school was a police brutality lawsuit against the city. A rookie cop had allegedly roughed up a sixteen-year-old black kid who was nervous and fumbling for his license. The way the boy told it, the cop dragged him from the car, yelled a few epithets, and knocked him to the ground, hard enough that it left bruises and a scar that was still showing by the time they made it to trial. Jay took the case pro bono, going head to head with the city attorney, a white man who had at least a decade of litigation experience over Jay. But Jay had, in so many ways, been preparing for that trial his whole life. His own legal troubles were not so far from his mind. He remembered what it was to sit at a defense table, remembered what it felt like to have his basic civil liberties up for debate. The anger was still with him then. And he let it guide him the whole Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 35

  way. He went after the cop with a vengeance, making the poor man stand in for everything that was wrong with a country and a government that applied the law willy-nilly. By closing argu­

  ments, half the jury was nodding along to his every other word, and Jay won the case.

  But it was a moral victory, not an economic one. What he made off the city’s meager settlement wasn’t enough to cover his expenses or to make up for money he lost by ignoring his other cases during the trial. His performance in the courtroom got his name in the papers, for the second time in his life, and before he knew it, he had folks lined up in his office, all asking for his help. They’d heard he took that boy’s case for free and wanted to know what he could do for them. Their problems were low rent, the stuff you find in any black neighborhood in the country: a son in jail or a cousin who’d been let go on his job or an ex-husband who wasn’t making his child-support payments on time. They never had any money, and Jay could hardly make his own rent. Practicing law, he would soon find out, is like running any other small business. Most days he’s just trying to make his overhead: insurance and filing fees, Eddie Mae’s meager salary, plus $500 a month to lease the furnished office space on West Gray. He, quite frankly, can’t afford his principles. He needs a win, a jackpot.

  And if it comes in the form of a prostitute with a neck ache, then so be it.

  He shoves the bills together into a messy pile, stuffing them inside his checkbook, and decides on another beer. He drinks it slowly, leaned up against his couch, staring at the boxes of baby gifts that have been piling up for weeks now. The long, flat box is from his wife’s parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Al Boykins. Bernie has asked him on more than one occasion to get a move on it.

  36 Attic a L o c ke

  Jay stands and crosses the room, using his car keys to tear into the cardboard. The crib spills out in pieces. Jay sets it on the floor and walks to the hall closet, hunting for his toolbox. Inside, beneath his screwdrivers and drill bits, he finds a crumpled pack of Newports. He supposedly quit when Bernie got pregnant, but he keeps a stash here and there, in his car and at the office. He pockets the pack of cigarettes and carries the toolbox into the living room.

  The whole thing takes him over an hour, but he manages to get piece A to fit with B, and B to fit with C, and so on. Before long, he has a crib. He lays the tiny, vinyl-covered mattress inside and runs his fingers along the handrailing. It’s white-painted plywood, cheap but sturdy. They’ll have to get some little sheets to go with it, maybe put up a mobile sometime, one that plays a melody. He tries to picture the little one who will sleep here soon, and wonders if she’ll have Bernadine’s dimples or her toothy smile . . . or if he’ll have Jay’s eyes, brown and wide and set in his face like two river stones, weathered and deep. He crumples the instructions, shoving them in the empty box. On his way to the back door, he pulls the trash from the step can by the kitchen stove and grabs a stack of old newspapers. He drags the whole mess down the back stairs.

  The waste bin out behind his building is overflowing with paper grocery bags full of chicken bones and black, moldy heads of lettuce, dead leaves and beer bottles and boxes of old clothes. The trash has a putrid smell, rotten and sickly sweet. There are flies buzzing over everything. It’s been sitting like this, untouched, for almost two weeks, what with trash pickup in Houston getting more and more sporadic. It’s one of the city’s dirty little secrets, that for all its recent economic prosperity—the fastest-growing city in the country two years running, the oil crises of the late

  ’70s a boon for an oil town like Houston—the city can barely Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 37

  keep up with its own growth. It is literally busting at the seams, its trashy insides spilling over everything. Sanitation workers put in overtime but can’t keep up with the new businesses and housing developments going up every week. Residents in tony neighborhoods like River Oaks and Memorial hire private com­

  panies to haul their shit away, but on streets like Jay’s in Third Ward, lined with cheap rental units and shotgun houses, work­

  ing people are at the mercy of the city. Jay dumps the empty crib box and his kitchen trash on top of the rotting heap in the bin. He tosses the newspapers next, watching as they dribble down the huge mound of garbage, landing back at his feet. Jay reaches for the cigarettes in his pocket and makes a seat for himself on top of a broken TV. He strikes a match on the concrete at his feet and lights the end of a bent Newport. He takes a drag and picks up one
of the old newspapers, killing time between this cigarette and the one he knows is coming next. Cole Oil Industries, the largest oil and gas company in the city, made the business page, along with some other big names in petrol, Exxon and Shell. Cole Oil is reporting a slowdown at their main refinery near the Port of Houston; a shortage in bar­

  rels coming in from overseas is listed as the cause. There’s some­

  thing lurking behind the words in print, a hint, a threat really, of another oil crisis on the horizon. Jay doesn’t think he can afford much more than he’s paying at the pumps now, up to $1.37 at the PetroCole station by his house.

  Below the fold is more on an ongoing story about labor prob­

  lems at the port, dockworkers threatening to strike over wage issues. Jay reads the article carefully, thinking of Mr. J. T. Cum­

  mings and his position on the port commission. Mr. Cummings, Jay knows, is up for reappointment to the commission, and a strike at the port could possibly hurt J.T.’s chances and help Jay in his civil matter. His job on the line, Mr. Cummings and his 38 Attic a L o c ke

  slick lawyer are likely to want to settle as quickly as possible, before word gets out about the hooker. Jay stores this informa­

  tion about the strike in the back of his mind. He takes a couple of short puffs on his cigarette and turns the page. And that’s when he sees it.

  The City Beat, page 2.

  Sunday morning, somebody found a body.

  A white male, shot twice, found in an open field in the 400 block of Clinton, near Lockwood Drive in Fifth Ward, not fifty yards from Buffalo Bayou.

  Police were called to the scene to investigate. They talked to a female companion of the deceased, at her home near Memorial. The dead man’s name is not mentioned, nor is hers, only the name of the groundskeeper who found the body, a part-time worker for Quartz Industrial, Inc., a broken concrete wholesaler whose warehouse is on Clinton. The whole bit is just five lines, something right out of a police blotter.

  Jay, transfixed, reads it two more times.

  Buffalo Bayou. Fifth Ward.

  White male, shot twice.

  His first thought is of her, the woman from the boat. He remembers the rock and roll of water beneath their feet, the screams and the gunshots, two, one on top of the other. He remembers the taste of the bayou water, bitter and foul. They’ve mentioned her only once.

  Sunday morning Bernie lay in bed and told him the dream she’d had the night before. They were on an island somewhere, riding around on a bus. The woman from the bayou asked the driver to stop. And when the driver said he couldn’t, she opened the nearest window and jumped out. They all watched her float out across the water, wave at them, and then dive headfirst into the ocean. Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 39

  Later, two cops came on the bus.

  “One of them was Mr. Hempnill, the one who runs the funeral home down by Daddy’s place. I kept saying, ‘Hi, Mr. Hempnill,’

  and he said he didn’t know anybody by that name.” Bernie turned to Jay, as if they were on the bus right then. “I said, ‘Jay,’ ” she whispered. “ ‘That’s Melvin Hempnill if I’ve ever seen him.’ And you shushed me. Well, then the cops turn to you. They looking at you now.” She smiled, enjoying her own story, the clever turns it was taking.

  It was early. Jay was on his side, facing the wall. He had not slept two consecutive hours all night. He slid a hand under his pillow and felt the .22 nestled there. This is his morning ritual, the way he greets the world.

  “So now the police want to know what you got to do with the whole thing,” Bernie said. “This woman jumping out a window like it’s nothing.”

  Jay sat up and swung his legs off the side of the bed.

  “‘We got some questions need answering,’ something like that.”

  Jay stood and started from the room barefoot.

  “Jay.”

  “I’m listening.”

  There’s only one bathroom in their three-room apartment, in the hallway between the bedroom and the kitchen. Jay left the door open. “So like I said, old Hempnill is looking at you, and everybody else on the bus is staring at you too. So you get up . . . and this is the crazy part . . . you get up and go out the same window she did. Only you don’t float at all. You drop like a bag of bricks.”

  He put the toilet seat down and walked back to their bed­

  room.

  “Ain’t that something,” she said. She was sitting up in bed, a 40 Attic a L o c ke

  paperback resting on her belly. Jay realized she’d been up for a while, that she’d waited before waking him. “You left me on that bus, didn’t wave back or nothing.”

  Jay found that amusing, the idea of him leaving her any­

  where.

  Bernie slid the paperback off her belly. “I told Evelyn about it.”

  Jay hiked his pants on over his shorts, keeping his mouth shut about his sister-in-law. “Maybe we shouldn’t have left her out there,” Bernie said softly.

  She fiddled with her paperback, sliding a bookmark back and forth between the same two pages. He saw she was upset, but in some way he didn’t recognize or understand. “We didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

  Outside, by the thin light of a nearby streetlamp, Jay reads the newspaper article again. The date at the top of the page makes his stomach turn. The article, he sees, is from today’s paper, which means the body was discovered yesterday, the day after their boat ride. He wonders if his wife read these same words, and if she did, why she didn’t say anything to him about it. Maybe she read the article and thought nothing of it. Hell, there must be a couple of shootings a week in Fifth Ward, Saturday night being the favored day for mischief making. The gunshots they heard on the water and the report of a shooting death in the area are surely no more than an uncomfortable coincidence. Still, the whole bit bothers him enough that he takes the time to tear the page from the newspaper, folding the article two, then three times, and sliding it into his pants pocket.

  Bernie’s awake when he comes into the apartment. She’s standing in her house shoes and a faded brown robe that won’t close over her belly. She stares at Jay standing in her Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 41

  kitchen, smelling of smoke, newsprint stained on his fingers. She looks him up and down, lingering about his face, trying to read his expression, why he’s breathing funny.

  “I heard you go out,” she says.

  “I was taking out the trash,” he says.

  Bernie nods. This makes sense to her, makes her feel better.

  “You gon’ put another bag in?” she asks.

  “I always do.”

  “No, you don’t, Jay.”

  He reaches under the sink and pulls out a black trash bag, snapping it open to make his point. “You gon’ fight with me about trash bags?”

  “I’m just saying. Sometimes you don’t.”

  She’s mad with him about something. He doesn’t know what, and he doesn’t think she knows either. They’ve been kind of short with each other since Saturday night, their nerves slightly on edge, their collective, unspoken anxiety masked as ill tempera­

  ment. Jay closes the lid on the trash can, deciding then and there he won’t tell her about the newspaper article. It’ll only upset her, and for no good reason he can think of. Besides, he’s still hoping it’s nothing.

  C h a p t e r 3

  Eddie Mae pokes her head into Jay’s office, where he’s been working since seven o’clock this morning. She leans against the door frame, kicking at a piece of carpet that’s coming up on the floor, holding a stack of pink message slips. Her wig is red today. Which means she’s in a bad mood. Or a drinking mood. Or she’s got a date to play dominoes after work. Jay can’t remember which, can’t keep up with Eddie Mae’s changeable temperament. He wants her to leave the messages on the left corner of his desk like he’s taught her to and leave him to his work. He does not want to give her the idea that he’s gon’ stop everything every time she walks into the room. Eddie Mae
is cheap labor—no paralegal training and not a day spent in secretarial school—but Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 43

  she’s costly in other ways. She won’t let him alone half the time, always checking up on him and henpecking about what he eats for lunch. She’s a black woman and a grandmother, no matter the tight polyester tops that tug against her chest, and she treats him like a son or a nephew. She seems to sense something in Jay that needs caring for.

  “Your father’s on the phone,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Mr. Boykins. He’s waiting on line two.”

  His father, right.

  Jay sets his pencil down. “You find the witness in the Cum­

  mings thing?”

  “I’m working on it,” she says, scratching at the wig’s scalp, getting to hers underneath. “I know where she work, but the dude at the club won’t give me her phone number, and she ain’t returned none of the messages I left.”

  “What club?”

  “The Big Dipper, out 45.”

  Jay nods, motioning for her to leave the message slips on his desk.

  Then he picks up the line. “Rev.”

  “You know I wouldn’t bother you at work unless it was some­

  thing,” his father-in-law says straightaway. His voice is hoarse this morning, overworked and strained. “Son, we got us a big problem.”

  Jay reaches for his pencil, thinking a kid at the church must have gotten himself in some kind of trouble. A bar fight or joy­

  riding or maybe petty theft. One time, a girl, barely sixteen, knocked the front teeth out of her boyfriend’s mouth. Jay gets these calls from his father-in-law several times a month, usually with somebody’s mama crying in the background. He searches 44 Attic a L o c ke

  for a clean slip of paper to write down the facts, the kid’s name and where they’re holding him, already weighing what a trip to the station will do to his afternoon schedule.