Black Water Rising (26 page)

The whole table has come to a standstill, all eyes on Reverend Boykins.

“You okay, Daddy?” Bernie asks softly.

The Rev manages a smile. “I'm all right, Bernadine.”

“The plan is to take this fight all the way,” Kwame says, continuing his rant. “From downtown to the port commission meeting.”

“You're going to walk from downtown to the port?” Evelyn asks, sounding exhausted by just the thought of walking anywhere in August.

“The Rev and I are working with some local churches, to get busses downtown, something to carry everybody the rest of the way.”

“You got a permit for the demonstration?” Jay asks. “They'll nail you on that if you don't. They'll shut you down before you make it a block or two.”

How quickly it all comes back.

“I put in the application this morning,” Kwame says tersely. “I
have
done this before, you know.”

“Yeah,” Jay says, nodding.

He folds and refolds the napkin in his lap.

Kwame doesn't want his help anymore.

This, after all, doesn't have a thing to do with Jay.

Mrs. Boykins stands to collect their plates, carrying them into the kitchen. A few minutes later, she returns with a peach cobbler and a fresh pot of coffee. Kwame turns to Reverend Boykins. “You talk to Darren Hayworth about getting together before the port commission meeting?”

Reverend Boykins nods. “We're asking the president of ILA to arrange a sit-down with OCAW, to get this whole Carlisle Minty thing sorted out for good.”

“What happened with the kid?” Jay asks.

Kwame and Reverend Boykins, their voices stopping short, lips drawn tight, like heavy drapes, turn to look at Jay. His question, his very presence at the table, is treated with polite suspicion. Neither man answers right away.

“Darren…the boy in the sling,” Jay says, thinking he needs to clarify.

“What about him?” Kwame asks.

“What's going on with that? You moving forward on something?”

He looks back and forth between the two men, trying to follow what's not being said. But from his chosen place at the table, at such a distance, most of it is lost on him. “Is the kid okay?”

“Darren's fine,” Reverend Boykins says, laying his napkin across his dessert plate. “He's handled all this pretty well, if you ask me.”

“I think it's terrible what they did to that boy,” Mrs. Boykins
says, dabbing at crust crumbs gathering at the corners of her mouth.

Jay looks at Kwame. “So what's your next move?”

“Cleanup,” Kwame says.

“I don't follow,” Jay says, again looking between Kwame and the Rev.

“Well, your mayor came through with the police all right,” Kwame says.

“She did?”

“She did.”

And because Jay still doesn't believe it, he asks again, “She did?”

“Several officers have been assigned to investigate,” the Rev says.

“We got cops coming out the sky now,” Kwame says. “Suddenly, they're tripping over themselves to help.”

“They came to take a statement from the boy,” adds the Rev. “Even drove out to the scene with him.
And
they interviewed Carlisle Minty, went and stopped him on his job at the Cole refinery, out on the channel.”

“He denied everything, of course,” Kwame says.

“The policemen have said they're going to turn over every stone.”

“Cynthia did this?” Jay asks, with an uneasy mix of doubt and hope. His whole adult life, he's wanted nothing more than to be wrong about one woman.

“The problem,” his father-in-law says, “is now that the story's out, we're having a hard time controlling these men on the picket line. They feel lied to. They went into this thinking OCAW was backing them through and through.”

“What do you mean ‘now that the story's out'?” Jay says.

They all turn to him and stare.

“Where you been the last couple days, man?” Kwame asks.

You don't want to know.

“You didn't see it, Jay?” his wife asks.

“Evelyn,” Mrs. Boykins says. “Go bring your father today's paper.”

“She went on TV, Jay,” Bernie says. “I watched it at Ev's.”

“The mayor held a press conference announcing an investigation into the beating,” the rev says.

“What?”

Evelyn returns from the kitchen with the newspaper tucked under her arm. She hands the paper to her father and plops down into her empty seat, sucking on a slick sliver of baked peach. Reverend Boykins licks his fingertips, flipping through the newspaper. When he finds what he's looking for, he passes the article to Jay. Jay looks down at a photo of Cynthia Maddox at city hall.

The headline: Mayor Pushes for Investigation into Union Beating.

The lines underneath:
A high-ranking member of OCAW is under investigation for the beating of a black member of the ILA on the eve of the strike.

Jay stares at her face in the paper, the pale eyes, the reassuring smile. It's a brilliant move, he thinks. She goes on television acting like an advocate for labor, a tireless defender of black men unfairly and unnecessarily beaten, when it's clear to him that the press conference's real goal is to undermine the power of the labor coalition and let business leaders in the city know that the boys on the docks won't hold out much longer.

Just wait and see, her smile says.

“She just told the whole city that we got a big, big problem,” Kwame says.

“A lot of the men, Jay, white ones too, feel like they were led
into the strike under false pretenses. If OCAW isn't really with them, they don't see a way to win this thing,” the Rev says. “And, frankly, I don't either.”

“Why did this Minty guy do it?” Bernie asks.

The Rev shakes his head, shrugging his thin shoulders.

Jay looks up from the article, the picture of the mayor.

To his father-in-law, who once stood at Jay's side just as he stands by these workers now, Jay says, “I'm sorry.” Because he, of all people, should have known Cynthia better.

It's not until sometime after midnight that he starts to get angry. The mayor, his ex-girl, is only half of it. More immediately, it's the man in the black Ford who's still stalking through Jay's mind; it's the mystery of who was behind the threats on his life. He can't stand the idea of being played with, being treated like a dog thrown a bone. He resents the pull of the money, the power he assigned it, the ways he imagined the hand that dealt it held dominion over him. He's angry with himself for cowering, for not going to the police from the very beginning, as a free man, an innocent man. He is so ashamed of the way he's behaved, so ashamed of his fear, that he feels actual rage toward a face he can't see—the one who sent the man in the black Ford, the one who wanted him scared, who was counting on it. The anger feels
good, landing on his tongue, dissolving like a warm, bitter pill. He feels the rush, the high, and remembers anger's power, its ability to clear the head. Unable to sleep, he sits up in bed next to his wife, watching her breath rise and fall, thinking of the one thing that
is
perfectly clear in his mind, the one thing he's absolutely sure of: if he can solve the mystery of who tried to kill Elise, he will know the identity of the person who's after him now.

More than once, the old man in High Point occurs to him as a possible suspect. Though, at least initially, he couldn't tell you why. It's less logic, or a story worked out in his head, and more lawyerly intuition. He was, after all, a onetime criminal defense attorney. He used to deal in motive for a living.

His suspicions about the old man are circumstantial at best. As a game, Jay presents the prosecutorial case in his head, the reasons why Erman Joseph Ainsley could have had a hand in the attack on Elise Linsey's life. He rereads the article in the
Chronicle,
marking the highlights. There's the description of Mr. Ainsley's rage at “real estate folks from Houston.” There are the charges of harassment by Mr. Ainsley against members of his community (threatening phone calls and the like), indicating a propensity for violence, or at the very least a shaky mental state. And maybe most important of all, there's the fact, stated openly in the newspaper article, that Mr. Ainsley had obtained Elise Linsey's home address—a sign that he either had contacted her or intended to.

Then, just like the old days, Jay tries to tear down the state's argument, piece by piece, just to see if he can:

Anger doesn't mean murder, else we'd all be in jail, this lawyer included.

He would pause here, waiting for the jurors' smiles.

The harassment mentioned by the prosecution, Jay would add, is no more than one neighbor's word against another's. The
state has entered no evidence that law enforcement was called or legal complaints made against Mr. Ainsley.

And as to Mr. Ainsley being in possession of Ms. Linsey's home address, well, I believe some of you might likewise be in possession of that information, or anyone else who has a phone book for the city of Houston in their house.

He would pause again, letting the jurors take in this last bit.

But of course the strongest counterargument Jay can think of is that he doesn't know where a retired mine worker would get $25,000 to blackmail
him
.

The old man sounds more like a kook than a criminal, a man more likely to take his fight to Washington than to an empty field alongside Buffalo Bayou. But then again, Jay knows firsthand what frustration with one's government can do to a person. Many people have taken up arms over far less. Maybe in the end, Ainsley decided Elise Linsey, as a representative of the Stardale Development Company, was an easier target than Ronald Reagan.

It may only be a circumstantial case against the old man, but absent any other workable theories about who wanted Elise Linsey out of the picture, Jay comes back to Erman Ainsley again and again. He can't, for the life of him, get the
Chronicle
article out of his mind. He can't forget the phone call with the reporter, Lon Philips, the mention of Ainsley getting a lawyer, or the empty building on Fountainview where Stardale's offices are supposed to be.

He can't shake the idea that there's more to the story.

So just a few days after Rolly's advice that he back away from a bad situation, Jay loads up the Skylark with ten gallons of unleaded at $1.39 a pop and heads out toward Baytown, his .38 snug in the glove compartment. His only plan is to talk to the man. But if it comes down to it, Jay plans to make his message
heard loud and clear: he and his family are not to be touched.

He doesn't tell anyone where he's going—not his wife or Rolly or Eddie Mae—and it's not until he's about twenty miles east on the I-10 that he starts to think that was maybe a bad idea. He is lately coming to the conclusion that secrets, in and of themselves, are dangerous. He makes a vow to call his wife when he gets to High Point.

The town is a few miles southwest of Baytown on the Trinity Bay shoreline, which is north of Galveston Bay and Texas City and the Bolivar Peninsula. Baytown itself is a Gulf city of the classic model, balmy and thick with vegetation. There are rubber plants and banana trees, sandy-colored palms and butter-colored houses, arched high on stilts. They look like rows of startled house cats. The houses have white or blue shutters, all weathered to a soft gray by the constant breath of warm, salt-cured winds, and almost every other house has a motorboat anchored in its front yard. People come to retire here. The ones who can't afford to live in Galveston or just don't want to. Galveston, with its ancient town center full of bead shops and pubs, too closely resembles the tourist trap and liberal cesspool of New Orleans for some. Baytown is where good Christians come to retire, cowboys and refinery workers who made good, saving 15 percent every two weeks their whole working lives. There are American flags waving hello to passersby and more crosses in more front windows than Jay can count. It's not a place he wishes to stay any longer than he has to.

He passes through Baytown, turning south on Farm Road 219.

A green highway sign puts him eight miles outside High Point.

Eight treeless miles of prairie and marsh, the land dotted every half mile or so by shallow ponds and snowy egrets lying in wait. The air is softer out here, more forgiving. It's a good ten
degrees cooler than it is in Houston.

The first thing Jay notices coming into High Point is the rise in elevation. It's no more than a few hundred feet. But along this flat Gulf coastland, driving over an anthill can feel like climbing the side of a mountain. Jay feels the pull of gravity on the back end of his car as he drives over the swollen landscape. At the crest, he can see all the way to Trinity Bay, drilling ships and pleasure boats tiny in the distance.

Main Street is easy enough to find. A simple turn off FM 219, and he's in downtown High Point, driving past the elementary school and a hardware store and a United States post office, which looks, inexplicably, closed at three o'clock in the afternoon. A lot of the storefronts are either empty or have their windows covered in cheap plywood. Jay has no trouble finding a parking spot right in front of the Hot Pot, which is sandwiched between a dress shop and a bait-and-tackle store with a handwritten sign in the window:
WE SELL GUNS TOO
.

Erman Joseph Ainsley is not out in front of the Hot Pot restaurant passing out flyers. That would have been too easy, Jay supposes. He shuts off the car engine and steps out of the car, feeding two nickels into the meter before walking into the Hot Pot café. Inside, he takes an open seat at the counter and orders from the pie case. A slice of lemon meringue and a cup of black coffee. He asks the woman behind the counter where he can get hold of a phone book.

The directory, when it arrives, is thinner than a high school yearbook. Jay opens to the
A
's, trailing his finger down the inky columns until he comes across an Ainsely, E. J. On Forrester Road. The house number is 39. He leaves a dollar on top of the cost of the pie and coffee and asks the way out to Forrester Road. The woman behind the counter pinches her eyebrows together. “You looking for Mr. Ainsley?”

The question catches Jay off guard. “Why do you ask?”

The woman scoops the bills and loose change from the countertop, crumpling them all together and stuffing the money into the front pocket of her apron. “He's the only one still left on Forrester, the only one left in that whole neighborhood, in fact. But I guess you already knew that,” she adds, taking particular notice of Jay's suit and tie all of a sudden. She gives him a cool smile, letting him know that she's on to him, country girl or not.

“I'm not sure I know what you mean,” he says.

“You ain't out here tryin' to get him to sell his place?”

“No, ma'am.”

“Hmph,” the woman mumbles, studying Jay. He can tell she hates to be wrong about things. “What do you want with Ainsley anyway?”

Jay pointedly ignores the question. “Is there a map somewhere that I can look at?” he asks. “Or maybe you could point me to a gas station.”

“Personally, I wouldn't listen to a thing that man has to say, but some people are hardheaded, so…” She sighs and points out the front windows of the café, beneath the gingham curtains. “Take Main back to 219 and head south, like you're heading to the water. The next exit you see, get off and go to your right. There's a line of houses out that way, right off the highway. That's where Ainsley stays. You can't miss it,” she says. “He's out by the old mine.”

 

The exit sign for the Crystal-Smith Salt Company is still by the side of the highway. Its lettering is cheerful, red, white, and blue. And a contrast to the otherwise drab surroundings. There are tufts of weeds growing around the buildings at the salt factory, which Jay can see from the highway. The exit Wanda instructed
him to take leads him onto a street called Industry. The factory, or what's left of it—empty buildings and crabgrass and a couple of shabby-looking trailers—sits to the right. The mine itself, Jay understands, is belowground, beneath the black asphalt he's riding on now, deep below the earth's surface where briny seawater sloshes inside underground caverns and rock salt practically grows on the walls. The salt caverns, or salt domes, as they're sometimes called, are a natural part of the Texas coastline, where the Gulf and land meet.

Just across the street from the old factory is a neighborhood of modest one-story homes. The houses are older white clapboard structures with pitched roofs and wooden porches. Jay imagines this is where the first workers at the Crystal-Smith Salt Company settled nearly a hundred years ago, and where Erman Joseph Ainsely has taken his last stand.

Forrester Road is marked by a small street sign that looks like it was peeled off a tin can, rust creeping around the edges. Jay makes a right, taking note of the house numbers, counting down from 63. He passes empty driveway after empty driveway. Number 39 is the second-to-last house on the right, the only one on the whole street with curtains in the windows and grass clippings in the front yard. Jay recognizes the front porch from Ainsley's picture in the paper. He remembers the American flag and the petunias in the box planter.

Jay takes the .38 from his glove compartment and tucks it into his waistband at the small of his back, pulling down his suit jacket to cover the bulge. The window above the box planter is cracked open. Jay hears a television playing loudly inside the house, tuned to a game show, if he had to guess by the constant stream of canned applause. There are pale yellow curtains in the front window and a few oddly shaped tomatoes or apples resting on the windowsill. A Chevy pickup at least fifteen years old sits
in the driveway, next to a station wagon. The homey feel of the place doesn't sit right with Jay. For some reason it makes him uneasy. He wants to get this over with.

Standing on the front porch, Jay wipes his slick palms on his pants legs, then pulls back the screen door, holding it open with his foot. He knocks on the front door, twice. Through a glass window cut in the wood, Jay tries to get a glimpse inside the house, cupping his hands against the glare of the South Texas sun and pressing his face against the glass.

On the other side, he sees a pair of eyeballs staring back at him.

Jay, startled, pulls back from the window. The screen door slips from behind his foot and slams hard against the door frame. Then the door to 39 Forrester opens. From behind the mesh wire of the screen door, Erman Joseph Ainsley pulls a baseball cap low over his weathered forehead, a hood over his cool blue eyes. He stares at Jay a long, long time, one hand on his hip, the other leaned up against the wooden door frame. Jay can hear a television behind him. Wink Martindale is calling for another
X
on the board. Ainsley keeps his hand on the door, protecting his property, his little piece of something in this world.

“Who are you?” His voice is phlegmy, moist with age.

“My name is Jay Porter.” He waits to see if the old man recognizes the name. “I'm an attorney, Mr. Ainsley, from Houston.”

The old man moves in for a closer look, coming so close to the screen door that the bill of his baseball cap makes a line of indentation into the netted mesh. He narrows his blue eyes in Jay's direction. “A colored lawyer?” he asks.

Because it's the easiest answer and because he doesn't have time to rehash the entire civil rights movement on this man's front porch, Jay says, “Yes.”

The old man nods, as if this is perfectly acceptable to him.

He pushes the screen door open in a wide arc, opening the house to Jay. “Well, come on then,” he says. “I guess you're as good as any other.”

He turns then, motioning for Jay to follow, before disappearing into the house.

The darkness inside is disorienting. It takes a frightening amount of time for Jay's eyes to adjust. He can make out Ainsley's shadow moving through the house, but little else. He doesn't know where he is or what the old man has in store for him. Jay, on instinct, reaches for the .38 at his waist. He walks down a long hallway, wandering into the blue light of a television set. It's streaming in from a nearby room where, to Jay's surprise, a woman sits in a seashell-scooped armchair, a pile of yarn in her lap. She glances up from her knitting needles, studying Jay over the half-moons of her reading glasses. He angles the gun in his hand so that it hides in the shadows behind his back. Whatever she makes of Jay, this stranger in her home, her expression is impassive, or uninterested. She nods her head to the left. “He's in the kitchen.”