Black Water Rising (14 page)

“Angela?”

“No.”

“Ellen?”

“Maybe.”

They're playing a string of Sam Cooke songs on 1430 AM.
At first I thought it was in-fatuation, but ooh it's lasted so long.
Jay turns up the volume. “Don't you have any boy names?”

“Well,” she says. “I was thinking Jerome…for your father.”

He's always thought of his father as gone. It never occurred to Jay that his daddy might come back again, in some small, wholly new way. “Yeah…okay.”

In the dark, across the torn front seats, he reaches for her hand.

When they arrive at their apartment building, Jay lets his
wife up the back stairs first, following behind, providing a buffer between her and the hard concrete, in case she should lose her balance. She goes into the apartment first, heading toward the bedroom. Jay stops in the kitchen and grabs the trash out of the step can. Alone, he walks it to the Dumpster in the alley out back.

Over his shoulder, he hears his wife scream.

Jay turns, dropping the bag at his feet. It splits open like a cracked egg, spilling coffee grounds and chicken bones. A light comes on in a neighboring apartment as Jay races up the stairs to his building. At the back door, Jay pushes his way into the kitchen, tearing the hinge loose from the wall. He runs to his wife, in their bedroom, in a panic over what he might find.

Bernie is standing in the middle of the tiny room, staring at the bed.

Jay immediately goes for his gun.

He slides his hand under his pillow, feels the cool fabric beneath it but does not find his .22. He looks under the mattress and under the bed. But it's gone. The look he gives his wife is ice cold. He's furious with Bernie, thinking she moved it, taking it from him when they need it most, when
this
is what it's for.

He grabs a broken-off broom handle he keeps under the bed, gripping it like a baseball bat. He checks the bathroom, the hall closet, and the living room.

His worse fear—an intruder, someone lying in wait—passes.

There's no one in the apartment but the two of them.

Bernie calls out his name, calmly this time, as if she were calling him in to dinner. Jay walks back to the bedroom and sees his wife standing stock-still, where she was. He stares at her, not comprehending. “What is it, Bernie?”

She points to the bed, her hands shaking. He is looking so hard for a spider or a rat, what he's by now suspected is the root
of the problem, that he misses the bigger picture. It takes a moment for him to see the room clearly, like eyes adjusting to bright white sunlight after stepping out of a cool, dark shade. A few seconds, then finally everything comes into focus. On the bed, Bernie's suitcase, the one she's been packing carefully in bits and pieces for the last few days, is turned over, upside down, the clothes strewn across the bedspread and spilling onto the floor. Someone has gone through every piece of it, her panties and nightgowns and every magazine; they even opened an envelope with the doctor's instructions in it, the name and address of the hospital.

The dresser drawers are open. So is the drawer on his nightstand; a bottle of aspirin and a tin of hair grease have been fished out and thrown across the bed, along with his AM radio. The nightstand drawer on Bernie's side has been pulled clean out of its socket. It's sitting on the floor, along with paperback books and a spiral notebook that Jay didn't even know his wife kept by the bed. Bernie looks at her husband. He's sure she's about to cry. He glances over at his side of the bed and sees his overturned pillow and the empty spot beneath it. It's clear now that his wife didn't move his gun. Someone came in here and took it.

Bernie walks out of the room first, carrying her notebook.

He finds her in the kitchen, checking the refrigerator of all things. His checkbook is still sitting on top of the stereo speaker in the living room. The television is there. And their books. Even a basket of folded laundry Bernie'd left on the couch. All of it untouched. The only thing he finds out of place is his wedding picture, one he had framed for their first anniversary. Someone has turned it facedown on the coffee table, pressing their noses to the glass.

In the kitchen, Bernie is counting a roll of bills stashed inside a cleaned-out tub of Parkay margarine. She folds the money back
into its hiding place, seemingly satisfied that it's all there. She closes the refrigerator door and walks to the wall phone between the kitchen countertop and their three-piece dinette set. When she picks up the receiver, Jay panics. “What are you doing?”

“Calling the police.”

“Bernie, wait.” He takes the phone from her hand.

“Jay, we are calling the police. Just because we live on this side of town does not mean we don't deserve to live in peace. I'm not having this in my house, Jay. I'm not putting up with it.” She shoves his hand out of the way, like she's swatting at a persistent fly. She grips the phone receiver and starts to dial.

“Bernie.
I
did this.”

It's the first thing that comes out of his mouth. He doesn't tell her what he's really thinking, his worst fear—that it was police officers, homicide detectives, who broke in here in the first place, possibly looking for information on him. The television, Bernie's cash, even his checkbook, weren't touched. This was not a burglary, that's clear. The only thing missing is the .22. And he would be a fool to mention a missing gun to any beat cops who would show up at this hour, reporting a gun for which he has no permit. He presses his finger on the hook, hanging up the line. “The mess in the bedroom, B, I did that.”

“What are you talking about?”

There's a rap on the front door. Two times, then again, louder.

Jay makes sure to get to the door first. All the noise they've been making, someone might have already put in a call. If these are cops at the door now, he wants to do the talking. He turns to his wife before opening the door. “I did this, Bernie. Okay?” He waits for her to agree with him. Her face is completely blank. She stares at him as if he's a stranger, the true intruder in her home.

Jay opens the door, pulling it just a crack.

The eyeball on the other side is red-veined and rheumy about the insides. It's Mr. Johnson from downstairs. “Mr. Porter, y'all doin' all right?” he asks, scratching at his gray beard, trying to peer past Jay and into the apartment. “I heard your wife screaming. Somethin' not wrong, is it?”

“Bernie saw a rat is what it was.”

“You get him?”

“No, sir. He made it out the back door.”

“Lord, don't tell me that. My wife hear about another rat running around, and she's gon' keep me up all night about it.” He chuckles, wanting to share a husbandly laugh with Jay. But Jay just stands there, saying no more than he already has. “And you're sure that's all it was?” Mr. Johnson asks.

“Yes, sir,” Jay says.

He mumbles a curt good night to his neighbor and quickly shuts the door.

“What in the world, Jay?” his wife says.

“I don't want that man in our business, B.”

“I'm talking about that mess in the bedroom.”

“I'm sorry, B,” he says, talking too fast. “After I dropped you off at Evelyn's, I realized I forgot something back here, something I needed for the interview. It was a good thing I remembered too, before I got all the way out to Pasadena. I tore the place up, in a hurry, you know. And I'm sorry.”

He walks past her calmly, into the bedroom, as if he does this sort of thing all the time, tearing up her things, scaring her half to death. He starts picking through the mess in the room. Bernie stands in the open doorway, leaned against the wood frame, watching him. “What was it?” she asks.

He looks up. “Pardon?”

“What was it you were looking for?”

“A sheet of questions, names my client told me to look into.”

“I don't remember seeing it,” she says. Then, “Where'd you find it?”

“Hm?” he says, stalling.

“Where did you find it, Jay?”

“That's the funny part. It was in my car the whole time.”

He smiles. She does not smile back.

“Come on, Bernie. If anybody really broke in here, they would have taken the TV, the radio or something. Your 'frigerator money's still there, ain't it?”

Softly, he adds, “You got no reason to be scared, Bernie.”

“I'm not scared. I'm thinking.” She runs her finger inside the doorjamb, fingering the cheap, pulpy wood. There's a lot he's not telling her, and she seems to know it by the look on his face. “I'm sorry about the mess,” he says, putting the dresser drawers back. Bernie watches him for a while, then slowly joins him in the cleanup, repacking her flowered suitcase piece by piece.

 

About an hour before dawn, he's still up, sitting on the living room sofa, a tool chest at his feet and a can of beer in his hand, trying to think of how they got inside. He checks the front door and the one in back, where the hinge is still hanging loose from when he pushed his way into the apartment. He wonders if that was the point of entry, if they kicked the door in and then sloppily tried to repair the damage, replacing the hinge. But as he hunches on his knees, refastening the screws on the brass-plated hinge, he considers what little sense that makes. Why would anyone bother? Why tear the place apart, make a show that you'd been there, then take the trouble to cover your tracks?

No, somebody wanted him to know they were here.

Which is why he can't sleep now.

'Cause the more he thinks about it, the more a nagging feel
ing starts to sink somewhere in the back of his mind, like dirt and debris settling after a hurricane. At this late hour, the air finally still, he can, at last, see things clearly.

It was not a cop who broke in. He's almost sure of it now.

Jay used to have break-ins all the time. His dorm room, the duplex on Scott Street where he stayed sometimes, even his first apartment after his trial, a one bedroom rattrap in the Bottoms in Third Ward. The feds and local law enforcement often came and went as they pleased, going through his things, bugging the phones. But they never left more than a faint trace: a lamp out of place, a phone book moved a few inches to the left of where it had been, or his papers rearranged in a slightly different order than before. Everything else was exactly the way he'd left it, down to the cigarette butts in the ashtrays and the dirty dishes in the sink. The only firm clues that someone had been in his place were the tiny recording devices he used to pull out of his phone receivers.

He's already checked the kitchen phone tonight.

In a fit, he took the whole thing off the wall and tore it apart, laying the pieces across the dinette table, studying them under the light. When he didn't find anything, he tried to put the thing back together and couldn't, and he got so frustrated that he started to laugh out loud, a dark, bitter sound that led to tears.

You're not right, his wife had said.
You're not right.

It's been almost a week since Bernie's birthday dinner, since he helped a stranger out of the bayou, a woman he doesn't even know for a fact to be a murderer. No cops have come beating down his door; no one's even called to ask him any questions. He's done nothing wrong. And yet here he is, three o'clock in the morning, sitting over his dead phone, what he broke apart with his bare hands.

This is what his life has done to him.

He looks at his wedding picture on the coffee table, the one that was turned facedown. He thinks of the mess they made of his wife's things and knows this was meant to intimidate him. Someone wanted him to know how easy it would be to get to him. Into his apartment, into his bedroom, the deepest part of his marriage. He doesn't know why someone would have taken the gun. Except that taking it would rattle his nerves, which, in fact, it has.

Jay runs through a list of clients in his head, ones who might be disgruntled enough to pull a stunt like this. But his mind keeps coming back to the longshoremen, the strike, and the violence that's erupted over the last few weeks…and the fact that he let himself get pulled into a very public fight.

He thinks of the black Ford and the white driver and begins to wonder if he hasn't been reading this whole thing wrong from the get-go. He remembers the car tailing him on Market Street a couple of nights ago, how quickly it turned and sped off when they came upon the lights of police squad cars. What if it was never a cop following him, he thinks, but someone aligned with the ILA, the faction that's against the strike? What if their new tactic is to come after
him
?

He opens his eyes at about a quarter to six. Bernie is standing over him, pushing at his left shoulder to wake him. He's laid out on the couch, where he must have nodded off sometime during the night. He does not remember how much of it was a dream. The darkness is gone, and he feels washed clean.

He follows the smell of coffee into the kitchen. Bernie sets a steaming cup for him on the table. The phone is still there, broken into a dozen pieces. She does not ask him about it, probably knows she wouldn't get the truth if she did.

Two days later, not even a full forty-eight hours after he told his father-in-law he didn't want to get involved, Jay is standing on the docks at the Port of Houston, an hour before the dockworkers union is set to vote on a strike. He waits on wharf 12, next to a roach coach that smells of coffee and fried bologna and pork tamales. He lights a Newport and keeps his eyes peeled, on the lookout for a white man in his forties with a buzz cut and sunglasses, the one driving the black Ford, and the one he now suspects broke into his apartment.

Wharf 12 is a public dock run by the port authority. It's sandwiched between two other docks that are considerably larger and move a lot more inventory in a day. Over the years, wharf 12 has become a kind of de facto break room for longshore
men working up and down the Ship Channel. Here the ones who didn't get a work assignment for the day wait around to see if their luck might change; they gather to get a bite or call home or play cards. The doors of the pier's warehouse are open, and a group of men sit inside, taking advantage of the shade. It's a half hour to dusk, and still, it's nearly ninety degrees outside.

For Jay, the sun and the salt water at the port, the smell of fish tails caked up on the shore and the fuel from the barges all mix into a heady cocktail. He feels dizzy and hot. He tosses his cigarette and buys a grape Nehi from the food truck. Standing in the shade of the warehouse, he watches ships in the distance.

There are men in motion everywhere, up and down the Channel, dressed in coveralls or Wranglers, lifting bags of pure cane sugar, bales of cotton, and boxes of computer chips. They load and unload fan belts and air-conditioning units and sacks of grain, baby dolls and skis and grain mustard, doing the work by hand, in teams of two, lifting and loading, their backs bent at a harsh angle. They labor in near silence save for the grunts of their breath.

A few of the wharves operate by forklift. Two or three men work the machines, which load goods mechanically into long rectangular metal containers that look like boxcars on a train. The containers are then transported onto the ships by even bigger machines. Even at a distance, Jay can see it's an infinitely more efficient way of going about things, easier and faster too. In an instant, he gets a clear picture of how labor problems might be solved in the future: machines.

At a quarter to seven, the kid shows up. He's alone, his arm still in a sling.

His name is Darren. He's nineteen, as Jay guessed. He grew up on the north side, went to high school out in Kashmere Gardens, a rough neighborhood north of the Loop, full of Section 8
housing and street toughs. He likes football and Michael Jackson (the new stuff ) and is thinking about taking a few classes at a community college in the fall. “I need a job I can work if
both
my arms are broken.” Smart boy, Jay said to him over the phone.

Jay offers to buy the kid a soda. Darren says no, that he doesn't want to bother Jay with anything. But Jay insists. Ten minutes later, he leaves the food truck with two sodas, plus a hot dog loaded with mustard and onions and a bag of Fritos, all for the kid. They sit on a couple of empty crates inside the warehouse while Jay watches the boy eat. His lip's healed, and the bruises have faded along his jawline. The thought actually crosses Jay's mind: did someone get pictures, some physical record of the injury, something besides the arm sling?

He shakes the thought and reminds himself that this is not a real case.

He's going to help the kid, sure. If Darren can identify the guys who jumped him, if he can provide a name or two, Jay will pass it along to the mayor. Beyond that, it's out of his hands, and he'll carefully advise his “client” that pursuing this any further than that is foolish. In the meantime, the kid gains him entry into ILA headquarters, and maybe Jay gets to make an ID of his own. Since the break-in last night, he's wondered more than once if the man in the black Ford and the guy who jumped Darren are one and the same, and he's ready to tell the man, in no uncertain terms, to think twice before he crosses Jay again.

“You look good,” Jay says, nodding at the healed cuts on the kid's face.

Darren nods, stuffing Fritos into his mouth. “I'll be all right.” He wipes grease and salt on his pants leg. “I get one of those?” he asks, pointing to Jay's cigarettes. Jay passes the kid his Newports, watching him fire one up, which the kid does with ease
and grace, blowing smoke out of the side of his mouth. “So, I guess you want to know how it happened, huh?”

“You told your father and the rest of them that you were coming home from a meeting at the ILA headquarters,” Jay says.

“It was a week ago, about,” the kid says. “The union was just getting into this thing serious. Some of the Brotherhood camp was making their case about the wage discrepancy.” He trips over the word, as clumsily as if he were wearing too tight shoes. Jay finds himself nodding along, encouraging him. “How many people were at that meeting?” he asks.

“A couple hundred, maybe more,” Darren says. “It was the first time some of the white ones came out and said they gon' stand with us if we walk.”

“What time did you leave that night, Darren?” Jay asks.

“I cut out early, before nine o'clock. That's when my shift at the bakery starts.”

Jay scratches his chin. “So you think they actually followed you out? Watched you leave, then cut out after you?”

“Looks that way, don't it?”

“You speak up at the meeting, say anything, for or against the strike?”

“No, sir. I only been in the union a year now. I can't even remember when there was a Brotherhood. It's only ever been one union, far as I've known. This ain't a black or white thing for me. I just want to get a little extra money in my pocket, you know, hold on to a girlfriend for more than a couple of weeks.”

Jay nods, as if he completely understands, as if these were his only concerns when he was Darren's age. The kid starts in on his second Dr Pepper.

“And you saw them at the meeting, the men who jumped you?” Jay asks.

“One of 'em at least. He was standing right outside the hall, in
the doorway, catching a smoke. I remember 'cause he looked at me kind of funny when I was walking out to my car.”

He runs down the rest of the story for Jay:

He left the meeting, must have been about a quarter to nine because he remembers thinking he was going to be late clocking in at the bakery—it's almost thirty minutes to get out to his second job at the Meyer Bread factory. He was heading west on Harrisburg. He was gon' pick up 59 and carry that to I-45.

But of course, he never made it that far.

There was a pair of headlights in his rearview mirror, not even a couple of blocks from ILA headquarters. He says he knew right away that he was being followed. How, Jay asks. Just a hunch, a feeling, the kid says. He tried to duck the car, speeding up, then slowing down, but the lights were right on his tail the whole way. Jay nods; all of this sounds eerily familiar. The kid admits he made a pretty big mistake. He took a sharp turn down a side street, thinking he could lose them that way. But he ended up at a dead end. The car behind him, a truck, it turned out—A truck, Jay asks twice. You sure it wasn't a car? A sedan, like a Ford?—the truck pulled sideways and parked across the road, so that when the kid turned around trying to get onto Canal Street, they blocked him in. Two of 'em jumped out with baseball bats. The one driving stayed behind the wheel. Darren locked both his doors, but the men broke his driver-side window, yanking him out. Looking at Darren's lean frame, Jay acknowledges that this was possible, but still the kid must have been cut up something awful.

Yes, sir, he says.

He never got up after the first blow, a mean lick across the back of his neck. It was two against one, plus the dude in the cab of the truck. One of the men yanked Darren's arm behind his back, pinning it there with his boot, which is how the bone
broke. The other one made a few kicks at Darren's face, spitting at him the whole time about how a vote to strike would mean trouble for him and his family. From the ground, Darren couldn't see much but tar and concrete. There were lights on inside some of the houses on the street, but no one dared to come outside. He doesn't know if there were any witnesses.

Except for the dude sitting in the truck.

He was behind the wheel, smoking a cigarette out the window, watching the whole thing, sometimes offering direction to the other two. “Telling them to twist my arm a little harder. He seemed like the ringleader,” Darren says.

“What'd he look like?”

“A white guy, 'bout your age, I guess, maybe older.”

“Blond or brown hair? Was he wearing it short or long?”

Darren shrugs. “He was wearing a baseball cap…and glasses.”

“What kind of glasses? Like sunglasses?”

“No, like regular glasses.”

“And you're sure it was the same guy you saw at the meeting? Even though it was dark out, and he would have been at least a couple of yards away from where you were laid out on the ground?”

“The one who was looking at me funny when I left the union hall, that guy was wearing a baseball cap too, just like the dude in the cab of the truck. It was red on white…just like the dude in the truck.”

“If you see him tonight at the meeting, you point him out to me, all right?” Jay says. “Let me handle the rest.”

“Yes, sir,” Darren says, smiling through his chipped front tooth.

 

They leave the port in different cars, agreeing to meet in front of the union hall a few minutes before eight o'clock. The ILA parking lot is overflowing, and Jay sees at least two press vans parked by the curb out front. At a pay phone by the doors, he calls over to Evelyn's and asks to speak to his wife. Without making a big thing of it, he had asked Bernie to stay out to her sister's for the night. After what happened the other day, he doesn't want her home by herself. Of course, the story he cooked up for her had something to do with a concern that she could go into early labor and he wouldn't be anywhere around. Bernie agreed. But now, on the phone, she sounds tired and ready to go home. In the background, Jay can hear Evelyn cackling at George Jefferson on television. He asks Bernie to hold out for a few more hours. He'll come get her before ten.

Darren shows his union card at the door, introducing Jay as his lawyer; they let Jay in without a fuss. The hall is already at full capacity. Some of the men are starting to spill out through the double doors. Jay squeezes through a wall of bodies to get inside. The room is hot and packed, the air thick with cigarette smoke and the stench of grown men's fears, men who have families to feed, rents and mortgages to pay. They are at least four hundred deep in the hall, black and white and a few brown, their skin tight and leathery, cured by the sun and the salt of the Gulf. They're chain-smoking cigarettes and sipping free coffee and nibbling at iced cookies wrapped in paper napkins, their work caps tucked under their arms. They stand idle, staring at the stage, where a lone microphone waits.

Jay follows Darren to the black side of the room, over to the left. He recognizes some of the faces. Men from the church meeting, men he met on the night of the shooting on Market Street. They pat him on the back, offer extended hands in his direction. Donnie Simpson is standing against the back wall,
drinking black coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. Jay asks about his family, how the kids are holding up. Donnie says the kids are fine, but his wife hasn't slept good since the shooting. It's a couple more paydays before he can fix the broken window, and in the meantime they're sleeping with a thin sheet of plywood between them and the outside world. He offers to get Jay a cup of coffee. Jay waves him off, says he'll get it himself. Can he get Donnie a refill?

He takes Donnie's empty cup and cuts across the room, scanning every face, looking for one that's familiar to him. Through the smoky air, he studies every beard and mustache, every haircut, the cut of everyone's collar. He cannot picture any of these men behind the wheel of a black Ford LTD. And didn't Darren say his guy was driving a truck? And wore glasses?

The coffee station is a handful of thermoses lined up on a card table. There's a photographer hovering nearby. He's wearing khakis and Top-Siders and a
Washington Post
press badge around his neck. Apparently, this isn't the only economy sweating over the outcome of one hot, smoky meeting in South Texas. The rest of the country waits too.

Just then, the double doors to the union hall slam shut.

Jay hears footsteps on the plank wood of the stage. They belong to a white man in his fifties, who's graying about the temples in two patches that shoot out like tusks. He's wearing a checkered button-down shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows and carrying a clipboard, a name tag pinned to his chest. He taps on the microphone twice then points to the crowd of men. “Somebody oughta push those doors back open. Otherwise we like to suffocate in here.”

He waits for two obedient young men at the back of the hall to prop open the double doors using a folding table and a couple of chairs; then the man onstage continues, leaning into the micro
phone. “Brothers of the International Longshoremen Association,” he says. “I just got off the phone with—”

“Name please!” a reporter yells.

“Pat Bodine, B-O-D-I-N-E. President ILA, Local Fifty-six, Houston, Texas.” He waits, making sure the press gets it right. Then he smiles and says, “I just got off the phone with Wayne Kaylin, president of OCAW, Local One-eighty, not fifteen minutes ago. If we walk, gentlemen, the oil and chemical workers walk with us.”

The whole black side of the room erupts in applause, plus a good number of whites in attendance. If Jay had to guess, he would put the glee at a little over 50 percent, a thin but real majority. The other men in the room, the ones not clapping, hooting, or hollering, are shaking their heads to themselves or cutting eyes at each other. One of the men down front shouts, “What about the Teamsters!”