Black Water Rising (24 page)

“Yeah, I hear you,” Jay said, though he was not sure he completely understood what Stokely was getting at, what he was really suggesting. Jay couldn't tell how much of this was the rhetoric talking—Stokely sped up by his own language, not able to stop himself—and how much of this was real.

Were they talking about an execution?

In theory or in practice?

“Y'all need to handle that nigger,” Stokely said gruffly. “Quick.”

“I'll take care of it,” Jay said. His last words on the phone.

 

In the end, Stokely never made it to the rally.

He claimed pressing business on the coast. Brother Huey
was still incarcerated at the time, and there was a growing beef between Carmichael and the Panther Party's leadership. Stokely said he was staying in California to keep the brothers and sisters down there on point, though Jay strongly believed that Stokely's absence was meant as a clear message to him.
Clean your house, brother.

It was a big blow.

They lost the
Times
. And the
Chronicle
only sent one photographer. Jay put him down front by the stage. He wanted a clean shot of the banner:
AFRICAN LIBERATION: GLOBAL UNITY, ECONOMIC

PARITY
.

Roger Holloway was not supposed to be there.

When Jay finally broke down and told Bumpy and Lloyd and Marcus Dupri about his suspicions and his conversation with Stokely, the founding officers unanimously voted on a course of action: Roger was not to be touched. In fact, they would act as if nothing had changed…and use this newfound information about Roger to their advantage. Two could play the spy game.

Lloyd was put on counterintelligence.

His job was to provide Roger with all the pussy and beer and weed he could handle, to make good friends with the boy, and, mainly, to find out where he lived. When the time was right, he was to break into Roger's place and confiscate whatever had been taken from them; he would destroy any incriminating evidence Roger was collecting against the members of AABL.

And
Lloyd was supposed to keep Roger away from the rally.

The morning of, Lloyd had Roger drunk and halfway to a cathouse west of Waco when Roger made Lloyd turn the car around. There was no way, he said, he was gon' miss the rally. It was his deal as much as Jay's. He found his way onto the stage in the main cafeteria at the student union, Lloyd right at his side, keeping a close eye on him. Bumpy and Marcus Dupri and
Alfreda Watkins were lined up on the dais, their backs against the north wall, underneath the banner. They were dressed in all black, arms clasped behind their backs. Jay was in an olive-colored dashiki, laced with bits of chocolate and amber and russet. He had an elephant's hair bracelet on his left wrist, a used Timex on the other. It was sometime after three o'clock when he stepped to the podium. He scratched his goatee and looked out across the crowd.

“Brothers and sisters,” he said, his voice echoing through the cafeteria. “Despite what our current administration would have the world think of us, we know the young people of this nation to be full of heart and grace, to be appreciators of human struggle and soldiers for justice.
We
are the true patriots.”

Jay's voice was strong, sure and focused. He felt at home onstage.

Delores Maxwell, one of Alfreda's sorors, was in the crowd passing out leaflets, glossy foldouts that had cost them fifty dollars at the printers. They listed the main points of the speech, the tenets of this new call for global unity.

“We gather here today out of complete and total necessity, for we know we cannot stand down. For the first time, we intend to hold the American political establishment
and
American corporations to the fire on the issue of global oppression, the continued raping of Africa's natural resources and oppression of its peoples. Injustice abroad is a threat to justice here at home.”

Jay watched Delores move through the crowd. Folks were nodding and clapping, flipping through the leaflet. The doors were open and his words were pulling in people from nearby buildings. More students, professors too. They were curious about Jay, this young man with the booming voice and big ideas.

“We have to take this to the next level, people. We have to let these folks know that we are prepared to exercise our power
beyond the ballot box or the bullet. We are prepared to exercise our political power as consumers. If big business wants us to buy, they gon' have to show some respect for the issues we got in our hearts and minds. They gon' have to come correct, you hear? From this point on, we take the fight for justice from the political to the economic.”

Some of the black cafeteria workers had stepped out from the kitchen. In white smocks and hairnets, they huddled at the back of the room. Jay waved them forward. Today, the floor was theirs. Delores gave them leaflets too.

Jay was just diving into the first of his ten points when he heard the other group come in. It was two dozen of 'em, at least. They came in through the back door, their feet heavy on the linoleum floor, their march exaggerated to get everyone's attention. Cynthia was at the head, her fist in the air.

At the sight of her, Jay lost his place in the speech.

Behind him, he heard Marcus whisper, “What the fuck are they doing here?”

Jay had told Cynthia to stay away. He had told SDS to stay out of it. He was sure this was another one of their stunts.

Cynthia climbed onto the dais.

Jay covered the microphone with his hand. He whispered, “What is this?”

She was wearing a man's vest over a ruffled, coral-colored blouse. She tugged at her shirt, smoothing it out. “This is our fight too, Jay.”

Our.

She yanked the microphone right out of his hand.

“Brothers and sisters.”

Bumpy grabbed Jay by the arm. “What the fuck?” he said, loud enough for the microphone to pick up the words and lob them across the room. Cynthia turned around to face Bumpy.
“We mean you no disrespect, brother,” she said, her voice dulcet, almost cheerful. “But this is something that affects us all.”

The spectators on the floor seemed confused. SDS had taken up positions along the walls. Jay, the organizer of the march, had seemingly lost control. The air in the room felt tight, in short supply. The cameraman from the
Chronicle
must have sensed the tension building. His lens cap came off for the first time.

Cynthia was now addressing her comments to the black folks on the floor. “We are here today not as rivals but as compatriots, partners in struggle,” she said. “Make no mistake, we appreciate the struggle for our people in Africa.”

OUR
people.

“But we have some domestic issues that need to be addressed first. Namely, the encroachment of the federal government and their systematic oppression of our right to peaceably assemble. They are infiltrating our groups, people, illegally tape-recording our phone conversations.”

Jay reached for the microphone. Cynthia shoved him back.

“We know your group has been hit,” she said, looking back at the men onstage, looking a little too long and hard at Roger. “And we stand here in solidarity with you, to say we're not going to take this anymore.”

She pointed a pale white finger in Roger's direction. “The rat must go.”

Jay grabbed her from behind, and the microphone dropped to the floor, a loud thump echoing across the room. One of the SDS boys yelled, “Let her talk, man. You guys don't own the cafeteria, you know.”

Jay had her firmly in his arms. He pressed his cheek against her neck. He whispered in her ear. “Stop this, Cynthia. Stop this shit right now.”

She was still glaring at Roger, calling him a rat, over and over.

Roger, a little guy to begin with, was only a few inches taller than Cynthia. He squared his shoulders and stepped to her, hopped up on the balls of his feet, peering down at her as best he could. “What the fuck you just call me?”

“I called you a rat, motherfucker.” She took her same white finger and poked him in the chest with it. Not once, but twice. Which was all it took. Roger hit her across the mouth with his fist, knocking her so hard that her head butted back and caught Jay across the chin. When Roger raised his hand to her again, Jay pushed Cynthia aside and clocked the man himself. He got Roger good across his cheekbone, and then once in the stomach.

There were flashbulbs going off every few seconds. The photographer was snapping away. Cynthia had tumbled to the floor of the stage. Jay squatted down and asked her if she was okay. He didn't see Roger behind him. But he felt a swift kick across his ribs and felt himself falling from the stage, dragging Cynthia with him. When he looked up from the cafeteria floor, Lloyd had Roger by the arms. Bumpy had a weapon drawn at his side, ready if need be.

A few months later, Marcus Dupri would testify on the stand that he saw what happened next from the stage. He saw the first chair get thrown. It was a white kid, he said to the judge and jury. It was SDS who started the worst of it.

But in the end, it didn't matter because, after that, all hell broke loose.

First, some of the SDS boys in the back overturned a table.

The rest of them rushed the stage.

The African liberation banner came down in someone's fist.

Marcus Dupri shoved one of the white kids tearing up the stage.

Somebody punched Lloyd across the mouth.

Lloyd let go of Roger and grabbed a member of SDS by the
back of the neck. He whacked the kid across the knees with the microphone stand.

The whole stage exploded into a ball of arms and legs.

Bumpy fired his weapon into the air.

In the back, the cafeteria workers ran.

Jay ducked, covering his head as the first window was broken.

He reached for Cynthia. But she was gone.

In the chaos, they were separated.

He crawled across the floor, staying low.

He was, foolish as it may seem now, looking for her.

It was the university police who showed up first. A huge tactical mistake. Only three officers to deal with two hundred or so riotous college students, some of them armed. They should have waited for the team of HPD officers who were only a few minutes behind them. Instead, the campus cops arrived, ill equipped and unable to stop most of the people from running for the exits.

Bumpy got out. Lloyd and Roger too.

Alfreda and Delores.

Jay was still on the floor when HPD stormed the building a few moments later. The cops lined them up in a paddy wagon, “niggers on one side, whites on the other.” The news photographer showed them his press pass, and they let him go, but not before confiscating his camera. Jay, his hands cuffed behind his back, watched as they kicked the photographer out of the van, slamming the door on him while he shouted on the street, going on about his rights.

At the station, the men were booked together, then segregated once again, into separate cells. By the next morning, they were released one by one.

All of them except Jay.

His lawyer tried to prepare him a few minutes before the
arraignment. The charge was inciting a riot. Jay said he wasn't guilty, so that was the plea. It was all cut and dry, he thought. Except the judge refused bail. They wouldn't let him go home. Then, a few days after his arraignment, they moved him from men's central to a holding cell at the federal courthouse downtown. He tried to rap with the officers who made the escort, but nobody would tell him nothing.

He asked to speak to his lawyer.

They sent a new guy. A kid not that much older than Jay.

They met in a dirty room with low light and no windows.

The kid had a folder tucked under his arm.

Jay said, for the dozenth time, that this was all a misunderstanding. He'd given a speech, which the United States Constitution, last he checked, gave him every right to do. He hadn't thrown one chair, hadn't destroyed any property or asked anybody else to do so. And he had the witnesses to prove it. It was a rally, he said, not a riot.

“That,” the lawyer said, “is the least of your problems.”

From his folder, he pulled out a black-and-white photo.

It was the rally. Jay onstage. A shot of him clocking Roger Holloway.

“The feds want to charge you with conspiracy to commit murder against a federal informant, Mr. Porter.”

It was official: Roger Holloway was a snitch.

Jay pushed the photo across the table. “This is bullshit,” he said. “I hit the guy 'cause he was being a punk, not 'cause I was trying to kill him.”

“They got you on tape, Jay.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Something about you, uh, ‘handling a nigger.'”

Jay shook his head.
No, man, you got it all wrong.

Then he remembered.

The phone call to Stokely. The call he'd made from Cynthia's house.

Jay's stomach sank, down past his knees.

It was nearly impossible for him to accept what he was hearing. For yes, it was conceivable that the federal government knew about his relationship with Cynthia, that they had bugged her place as well as his. But he also, in this moment, had to acknowledge the possibility that Cynthia—who had been the first to point out Roger's suspicious behavior, who had chided Jay for not doing something about it, who had shown up at the rally uninvited—had put the bug in the phone herself, had kissed his forehead and walked out the door.

He wakes up alone, about an hour before dawn, his wife somewhere way across town. He lies curled up on the couch, one hand lifted over his head, balancing a glass of whiskey on the arm of the sofa. His third, if you count the two he downed when he walked in the door tonight, before he collapsed on the couch into a few fitful hours of sleep, his dreams a disjointed parade of faces.

Lyndon “Bumpy” Williams and Marcus Dupri. Lloyd Mackalvy and Alfreda Watkins. Charlie Wade Robinson and Natalia Greenwood. Lionel Jessup and Ronnie Powell and M. J. Frank. Carl Petersen. Cynthia Maddox. He woke up thinking about them all, marveling at the difference a decade makes,
between then and now, between their dreams and where they landed. From death to prison to the mayor's office, and the many cramped spaces in between.

Of them all, Cynthia made the greatest leap.

By whatever means…Jay may never know.

The true pain of it really, the not knowing.

And the blinding confusion that brings.

Jay rolls over and stares at his water-stained ceiling. He rests the half-empty glass of whiskey on his bare chest, feeling the cool ring of its bottom against his skin. He remembers the promise he made to his wife. The promise to himself. Of a home. A man. One with moving parts. And a working heart.

 

Because he can't sleep, he pulls the wad of folded-up copier pages out of the pocket of his pants. They are newspaper articles and such, part of Rolly's full report on Elise Linsey. Jay glanced at them once in the dark cab of Rolly's truck. Now, alone in his apartment, he reads through the pages carefully for the first time, absorbing every detail of the life they describe. He reads about Elise Linsey's high school track team, her mother dying, and the arrests that made it into the back pages of the
Pasadena Citizen
and the
Houston Chronicle
and the
Post.

Slowly, though, as he continues to read, a picture of the new, improved Elise Linsey emerges in the printed pages. Over the last eight months, her name has been mentioned in both of the city's main newspapers as a contact for residential properties newly on the market. One of the real estate listings is for the empty condo at the Sugar Oaks Plantation. The pages give Jay a picture of her current professional life. It
is
entirely possible that Elise Linsey has made a good living selling high-end suburban homes, that she's turned her life around.

The only really curious bit in the stack of newspaper clippings is an article from the
Houston Chronicle
that Jay has to read twice before he understands it, or rather what, at all, it has to do with Elise Linsey. He runs his finger down the columns to find her name in print because he missed it the first time around.

The article is several inches wide, with a large photo in the center—a picture of a craggy-looking man in his early sixties, wearing a baseball cap and overalls, one side of them held up by a large safety pin. From first glance, Jay takes him for a working man, can almost see the dirt under his fingernails and smell the sweat off his back. In the picture, the man is standing on what appears to be his front porch. There's a Texas flag waving behind his head and limp petunias in a box planter hanging from a kitchen window. In his hands, the man is holding an oversize poster board, eight very distinct words printed on it:
JIMMY CARTER, GIVE ME MY DANG JOB BACK! JIMMY CARTER
has been crossed out with two dark lines, replaced by
RONALD REAGAN
, whose name has been scribbled in an arc over Carter's.

The caption beneath the photo reads:

Erman Joseph Ainsley, of High Point, returns from Washington, D.C.

The piece, from a Sunday
Chronicle
a couple of months back, is printed beneath a boldface heading called “Cityscapes,” where readers can find little tidbits of nonessential news, mostly local color and commentary. Stories highlighting a senior citizen beauty pageant or a preschool golf team or a dog somebody trained to barbecue brisket. Cute little stories about local eccentrics or pieces of neighborhood flavor. It's exactly the place you'd expect to find an article about Erman Joseph Ainsley, of High Point, Texas—a man who had, according to the article, just returned from his second one-man march on Washington:

Through the floorboards, Jay hears Mr. Johnson's television set come on.

A few seconds later, he hears the opening theme song to
AM Magazine,
a locally produced morning news show, which his neighbor often listens to at full volume. The song means it's half past six. Jay is still drunk. In a minute, he will get up, make a pot of strong coffee, and call his wife. For now, he remains sunk into the couch, staring at the article.

He doesn't know which is more interesting. The fact that Elise Linsey was, at one point, working for a well-financed real estate development company. Or the byline at the top of the page. The name catches his attention right away. It's familiar to him even before he can exactly place where he's seen it.

When it finally comes to him, the name, it pushes him up out of his seat.

Because the man who wrote the article about Erman Joseph Ainsley and the closed salt mine is the same man who left the note for Elise Linsey at her doorstep—the note that Jay found by chance, days before her arraignment, before her court case had even made the evening news.

 

By the time he makes it into work, there are two cops waiting for him.

Eddie Mae takes one look at Jay and, unsolicited, brings him a can of tomato juice from the vending machine by the parking lot. She sets the morning-after elixir on her desk. Jay downs it in a single gulp, his hand shaking a bit as he returns the empty can to Eddie Mae. He steals a nervous glance through the open doorway to his private office, where the cops are waiting. Detectives, he can tell by their dress, the starched shirt collars and clean-shaven skin.

“What in the hell happened to you anyway?” Eddie Mae asks, nodding at his bruised face. He knows he looks like hell, and his nerves are only making things worse. He dabs his damp forehead with a corner of his sleeve and straightens his tie. “Lock the door,” he says to Eddie Mae. “And don't let anybody in.”

“Mr. Porter?”

Jay buttons his suit jacket and walks into his office.

One of the cops, in his late thirties, is seated in front of Jay's desk smoking a cigarette, Jay's ashtray resting on his thigh. The other cop, the older one, is standing next to Jay's filing cabinet, a few inches from the stash of dirty money. Jay wonders how much they know, how much trouble he's already in.

The young one moves first, returning Jay's ashtray to his desk and moving quickly onto his feet. He shakes Jay's hand, the cigarette resting between his middle and ring fingers. “I'm Detective Andy Bradshaw, Mr. Porter. And this is Detective Sam Widman, my partner.” Widman is still lingering by the filing cabinet, his eyes scanning the stack of files on top. He appears to be reading the names on the labels. He glances at Jay and gives him a simple nod.

The blinds in Jay's office are open. He takes a measured stride across the room, aware that the cops' investigation began before he even walked into the room; they're marking his movements. He pulls a string to close the blinds, then bends to pick up a stray stack of files on the floor, walking them to his desk as if this is all a part of his morning routine. “What can I help you with, Officers?”

“What happened to your face?” Widman speaks for the first time. He's still standing by the filing cabinet, the heel of his shoe practically touching the drawer where the money is hiding. He's staring at Jay, waiting for an answer.

“I fell down some stairs,” Jay says.

Widman cocks his head to one side, eyeing the shape and color of the bruises on Jay's face. “You must have fallen pretty hard, Mr. Porter.”

“Can I ask what this is about, Detectives?”

“You know a man named Marshall Hennings?”

“Pardon?” Jay asks, because at first the name doesn't even register.

Widman's partner, Bradshaw, stubs his cigarette into the ashtray. “Mr. Hennings manned a boat you were on, Mr. Porter, the night of August first.”

So…here we go.

“Yes, that's right,” he says.

“Mr. Porter, Mr. Hennings died sometime shortly thereafter,” Widman says. “He was found in his automobile in a ditch along Elysian, north of here. It was more likely than not a car accident, but in the course of our investigation, some questions came up. And, you know, we have to look at every angle.”

“Sure.”

“That's why we're here,” Detective Bradshaw says.

“About Marshall?” Jay asks.

“Yes.”

Jay looks back and forth between the two detectives. “Marshall?”

“Did Mr. Hennings seem all right to you that night?” Widman asks. “Did he seem well?”

“Well, I'd never met the man before, but…sure, he seemed fine.”

“And there was nothing unusual about his behavior?”

“No.”

“Nothing unusual about that night at all.”

Jay pretends to consider this. “No, not that I can recall.”

Detective Bradshaw makes a note on a tiny pad he lifts from his shirt pocket. Widman watches him, then glances down at his right shoe, the heel of which he taps lightly against the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. “Jimmy Rochelle, a relative of Mr. Hennings, said something about you asking if Marshall had talked to any cops,” Widman says, looking up. “Why did you imagine Mr. Hennings would have been in touch with law enforcement?”

“Jimmy must have misunderstood me,” Jay says, frightened by how easily the words come, the lie leaping from his lips. “When Jimmy said Marshall hadn't been heard from, I believe I asked Jimmy if
he'd
called the police.”

“He says you called looking for Marshall.”

“Two of his lady friends also said you contacted them,” Bradshaw adds.

“Why were you trying so hard to get in touch with him?”

Jay doesn't want them to see him thinking. He goes with the first words out of his mouth. “My wife lost a bracelet. We thought it might be on the boat.”

“But you never spoke with Mr. Hennings?” Detective Bradshaw asks.