Black Water Rising (27 page)

The applause on the television reaches a fevered pitch.

The woman goes back to her knitting.

Jay backs into the hallway, sliding his hand along the wall, feeling his way around to the other side of the house. In the kitchen, he finds Ainsley standing in front of the open door to the refrigerator. “I guess you want some water, a glass of tea or something,” the old man says.

The air in the kitchen is thick and un-air-conditioned. The room smells of Mentholatum and vanilla extract. There's a can of Postum resting on top of at least a week's worth of newspapers, spread out across an oval-shaped Formica table.

“I'm fine,” Jay says, hanging in the doorway.

The old man shrugs.

From the plastic drainboard, he picks up an empty jelly jar. He fills it with tap water, then empties the entire glass into his stomach in just a few gulps. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.

“How'd you find me?” he asks finally.

There's something in the old man's demeanor that Jay doesn't quite comprehend. From the time Ainsley opened his front door, he has seemed to Jay to be, well, relieved, as if he had been waiting for Jay to show up at his doorstep for hours, days, even. “I read about you in the newspaper,” Jay says.

It's just enough to set Ainsley off.

“That idiot,” he barks. “I told that ding-dang reporter what the deal was, what's really going on here. But, you know, some people got to have every goddamned thing handed to 'em. You see that piece of shit they put in the newspaper, you see how they lied on me? They gone and missed the whole story.” He shakes his head in disgust. His neck is the color of a mottled peach, dotted with sun spots and flush with color. “But you wait,” he says. “When this all comes out, they gon' be the ones to have their asses handed to them.”

Then he notices Jay's gun.

The muscles in the old man's neck stiffen. His jaw rocks back and forth in its joint. He takes a sudden sharp gulp of air.

“Boy, put that up,” he says.

He crosses to the window over the sink, yanking on the curtains. “You better believe they got somebody watching.”

The old man's eyes are frantic. He is not making a lick of sense. Jay slides the gun into the pocket of his suit coat, tucking it away. “Mr. Ainsley,” he says calmly. “Do you have any idea who I am?”

“Thought you said you was a lawyer.” He says it quite matter-of-factly, as if he takes this to be the whole reason for Jay's stop at his doorstep. The old man starts for the door. “Come on,” he
says. “I want to show you something.”

 

He walks Jay along the fence line.

Jay can see the old salt factory from Ainsley's backyard. The old man rests an elbow on top of the metal fence and looks, somewhat wistfully, across Industry Road. “They let us all go in seventy-seven,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper, as if he's speaking of a death in the family. “The year after Carter started with that petroleum program. I didn't vote for the man, personally,” he adds as an aside. “Ol' Ford woulda been all right with me.”

He takes off his cap and rubs the dome of his balding head, which is startling white. He feels around his skull with his fingertips, as if he's looking for something he's lost. “And this one they got up in Washington now,” which he pronounces “Warshington.” “He ain't a whole hell of a lot better. All business, that's how they do now. That's all these fellas care about. That George Bush got people in oil. So you see how it works? They making hand over foot, crying OPEC this and market forces that, and all the while they got a shitload of black gold running right underneath your feet.” He settles his fingers into the rings of the chain-link fence. “I'm short a pension now. I got a wife in there, son. I got to eat.” He looks at Jay as if he expects him to do something about it.

Jay, lost in this whole conversation, isn't sure what he's meant to say.

His silence seems to anger Ainsley, or maybe embarrass him.

The old man slides his worn baseball cap back onto his head and looks back at the buildings and run-down trailers on the other side of Industry Road. “I gave my life to the mine,” he
says. “You have any idea what it's like to work two hundred feet belowground, boy?” He eyes Jay's suit and tie, then shakes his head to himself, answering his own question. “Hours at a stretch, in the dark, the air so tart it burns through your goggles, burns right through your eyes to the back of your skull. And that white salt dust, so fine, like a mist, getting everywhere…in your clothes, in your hair, in your lungs, so you can't hardly breathe.” He nods his head in a slow, steady rhythm, as if he's counting, one by one, each working day of his life, every hour spent underground.

“I'm not trying to complain. I'm just saying, I don't think it's right, that's all, to kill off a workingman so somebody else can make a dollar.”

“Mr. Ainsley…what does this have to do with Elise Linsey?”

“Who?”

“The real estate agent from Houston,” Jay says, waiting for a flicker of recognition in Ainsley's eyes. “Do you know who I'm talking about?”

There is the faintest smile on Ainsley's lips. He clucks his tongue. “Don't think she ain't in on it too. Buying the land, see, that's just a cover.”

Jay thinks of the empty building on Fountainview in Houston, where Stardale's offices are supposed to be. The image comes to him unbidden. And once it's there, he can't easily get rid of it. It lends a sudden weight to this whole conversation, Ainsley's conspirational ranting.

The old man steps back from the fence. He nods his head toward the back side of his house and waves one hand for Jay to come on. “It's over here.”

There are three short cement steps leading up to the back door of the house. Ainsley stands with his hands stuffed in his pockets and one foot propped on the bottom stair. He's staring
at something on the ground.

“You ever have any contact with Ms. Linsey?” Jay asks him. “I mean, other than her coming around your place trying to get you to sell?”

Ainsley's eyes are firmly on the ground at his feet. “Take a look.”

Jay turns to see what Ainsley is pointing at.

It's coming up around the foundation of the house, black, like raw sewage.

Jay immediately takes a step back, wanting to protect his shoes. “Looks like you got a plumbing problem there,” he says, almost gagging at the thought.

“No, sir,” Ainsley says calmly. “That's crude.”

Jay looks up at the old man. “Pardon?”

Ainsley nods at the ground. “That's oil, boy.”

He stands back with his hands in his pockets, as if he's daring Jay to come take a closer look. Jay steps forward, bending at his knees. He touches the stuff with his right hand. It's loose, but thick, like melted gelatin. It slips and slides between his fingertips. “They call it creepage,” Ainsley says. “Last year it was just a few spots, mostly places where the grass stopped growing. I had little bald patches coming up everywhere. My neighbors too. See, that oil down there floats on brine water, and when the water level changes for some reason only God can account for, the oil gets pushed up to the top, right up through the ground. It didn't start to get this bad until the last month or so,” he says, pointing to the clumpy pool of oil and dirt. “If I had sold my house when everyone else did, I guess no one would have ever known about it, now would they?”

Jay stands, still rolling the oil around on his fingers, rolling this whole thing around in his mind, trying to get a good hold on it. Elise acted as a liaison, getting people to sell their homes.

But to whom? The federal government?

“They've had explosions at petroleum reserve sites in Louisiana,” Ainsley says. “They don't know if all this is really safe. They don't even care. They just buy up the salt mines, buy off the people. But I'm making a stink, you hear me?”

Jay remembers the old man's relief when he showed up at the front door. And it now dawns on him that Ainsley wasn't waiting for Jay so much as he was waiting for
someone
…to come see this mess for themselves. “Did you show this to that reporter from the
Chronicle
?” Jay asks.

“Not that I trust the press any more than a fox in a henhouse, but yeah, I called 'em when this come up,” he says, pointing to the oil. “I called everybody I could think of. The Department of Energy, even the goddamned White House.”

“Did the reporter come back out?” Jay asks, thinking of the strange phone call with Lon Philips and Philips wondering if Jay was another journalist.

“Yep,” Ainsley nods, his voice sour. “And I ain't heard a word back since. The government telling me the whole time they can't do nothing. But I know they trying to get rid of it now. You can hear the tanker trucks coming through in the middle of the night, always at night, just the way they brought it in. Dot used to couldn't sleep through the night for hearing the trucks come through. See, they pump the oil in over at the old factory site, and now they're trying to pump it out, always at night, mind you,” he says, lowering his voice. “And your tax money is paying for this, you understand. If this is government business, why ain't it out in the open, huh? Well, I'll tell you why, son, 'cause this is the cleanup part, the shit they don't want nobody to know about. See, they know I'm watching now.” The old man nods his head toward the fence line. “It's been real quiet over there, about a week or so now. Suddenly there's no more trucks. Nothing com
ing in, nothing going out. They know somebody's watching.”

Jay still has the stuff all over his fingers.

Ainsley offers him a rag from the front pocket of his overalls. Jay wipes the oil as best he can, but finds that it coats his skin completely, covering his pores, clinging like a parasite that has found an unsuspecting host. He wants to go inside and wash his hands. He wants to sit down somewhere. He wants to know who exactly wanted Elise Linsey killed.

There's a knock on the back door.

Jay and Ainsley look up at the same time.

Dot, Ainsley's wife, is standing inside the house, in front of a window, a somewhat grave expression on her face. She taps the glass, pointing at something over their heads. Ainsley is the first one to turn around.

“Here we go again,” he says.

Jay turns and sees it too.

Just over the fence line, on Industry Road, between Ainsley's backyard and the old factory, there's a black Ford LTD parked in the middle of the street. The man in the driver's seat is smoking a cigarette, watching the house.

 

Jay is over the fence in a matter of seconds. He lands hard in a muddy ditch on the side of Industry Road, his ankle turning underneath him. Still, he runs. He pulls the .38 from his jacket. Behind him, he hears Ainsley hollering but can't make out the words. He thinks the old man is yelling for him to stop.

The man in the black Ford lets Jay get within a few feet of the car. “You're a fool, Porter,” is all he says before swinging the car in a wide arc, turning it around in the middle of the street. Jay has to leap off to the far right side of the road to keep from getting run over. He ends up in the ditch on the factory side
of Industry Road. The bones in his knees crack and moan. He scrambles up the small incline, slipping in the mud more than once. By the time he's back on his feet, on top of the hot asphalt, the Ford is a good thirty yards down the road. Jay points his gun at the back of the car, his finger on the trigger. Sweat drips into his eyes, stinging and blurring his vision, fucking with his aim. He shoots wildly, shattering the Ford's back window in a crystal rain of glass that scatters across the pavement. The car swerves, its back end swishing left and right like an animal's tail. But the driver never stops. Jay watches the car turn back onto FM 219, heading toward downtown High Point and Baytown.

He hops across Industry Road, back to Ainsley's house. He cuts his right hand on the fence and tears a hole in the seat of his pants. He runs through the old man's backyard and through the back of the house, past Dot and the television room and
Tic Tac Dough.
He runs all the way to his car, Ainsley at his heels. Dot peers out from behind the curtains in the kitchen window. Ainsley hisses at her to get back inside, to shut the windows and lock the back door.

“You know that man?” Jay asks.

“He started coming around a while back, letting me know he's kind of watching things.” The old man is breathless from the run, coughing every other syllable. “He's come up on me only once, out back while I was in the yard. He told me to stop talking to newspapers, looked me in my eye and said it.”

Jay thinks he can catch the Ford on the highway, maybe find out where the man's going or where he came from. Jay struggles to open his car door. The car keys slip in his bloodied hand. By sheer force of will, he gets the door open.

“You coming back?” the old man asks.

Jay starts the car. Ainsley wisely steps back to the curb.

At sixty miles an hour, Jay tears down Forrester Road.

 

Down I-45, halfway to Houston, Jay has a sudden panic about his wife, at home alone, remembering that he never called her from the café like he said he would. He never told her where he was going. He pulls off the freeway and into a Shell gas station to call home. He's relieved to hear Bernie's voice. She actually sounds chipper this afternoon, telling Jay she's going to roast a chicken for dinner and wanting to know would he pick up a bag of white rice.

“B, listen,” Jay starts. “I want you to hang up the phone now and go make sure the doors are locked, the windows too. And I don't want you to answer the door for anybody but me.”

“We went over all this, Jay.”

“Just do it, okay?” he says firmly. “I'll be there as soon as I can. If you have any problems, somebody tries to mess with you or get in the apartment, I want you to call Rolly Snow. He can get there faster than I can.”