Black Water Rising (28 page)

“Why in the world would I call
him
?”

“Then call the police, B.”

Bernie's voice comes back soft, frightened. “Jay?”

“Don't argue with me, B. Just do it.”

“Jay…there's a police officer here right now, sitting in the living room,” his wife says. “He said you called the station, wanting somebody to come out and check on me. He just got here. I mean, not two minutes before you called.”

Jay feels his knees give. “Bernie, I never called any cop.”

“But he's sitting right—”

Her words stop short.

Jay can picture his wife in the apartment, on the kitchen phone, turning her pregnant body to take a second look at the
white man in her living room, realizing that something is indeed off about his appearance. The suit that's just a little too nice for city work, the gold on his finger, and the scotch on his breath.

Over the phone, Jay hears his wife whisper, “Oh, God.”

“Are you on the kitchen phone?”

“Yes.”

“His back to you?”

“Yes.”

“Then get out of there, B.”

“Should I call—”

“There isn't enough time.”

“What is this, Jay? What's happening?”

“Just hang up the phone and walk out the door and don't look back.”

 

He tries hard not to picture his life without her. As he pulls into the alley behind his apartment building, Jay tries to convince himself that there's still a life before him that's worth living, a life with Bernie in it. A few feet from his building, he jumps from the car with his .38, leaving the engine running. He ducks under the carport and races for the stairs. The back door is open. It's the first hint that maybe, just maybe, his wife got out okay. The sun has set by now, and the apartment is dark. Jay steps inside, hardly able to see more than a few inches in front of him. He moves blindly through his apartment, feeling along the walls, calling his wife's name. The silence is unsettling. The stillness in here is all wrong. Jay feels a terrible ache, down to his bones, a painful premonition that behind the cloak of darkness that surrounds him, something awful awaits. It's then that he hears his wife, her voice a soft, gurgling whimper, a sound choked with tears. Jay turns and flips on a switch in the hallway. A path of light falls into the living
room, where Bernie is curled up on the floor, her back against the wall. He flies to her side.

“Bernie!”

She is staring blankly across the room.

Jay reaches over her, turning on a lamp by the couch.

The barrel of the .45 catches the light first.

Jay sees the gun, is able to comprehend it, before he sees the man's face. He quickly raises the .38 in his hand. But the man from the black Ford shoots first, taking out a chunk of plaster just a few inches from Bernie's head before aiming the weapon at Jay.

“Drop the gun,” he orders.

Jay refuses. The two armed men stand face-to-face.

“Don't be stupid, Porter,” the man says. He aims the gun at Bernie again, daring to take a step closer. On the floor, Bernie stuffs her hands over her mouth, stifling a scream, tears streaming down her face. The man from the black Ford looks at Jay. “You really think I'd miss twice? Drop the fucking gun!”

“Let her go,” Jay demands.

“You're fucking this up, Porter,” the man says, his words clipped, as if he's out of patience, and Jay is out of time. “I like to keep things neat, understand? That's my job. Now you're making two more problems for me to clean up.”

“You got me…. let her go.”

“Drop the gun.”

“Let my wife go, and I'll do whatever you want.”

The .45 is still aimed at Bernie's head.

The man from the black Ford looks between her and Jay and Jay's .38.

Then, deciding something, he looks at Bernie and barks, “Get
up.”

Bernie looks at her husband. “Jay?”

Jay steels himself when he thinks of what he's about to do, the script he's already written in his head. He looks into his wife's eyes. He wants her to understand what he's asking of her, that he needs her to trust him completely. He wants her to see the way out. “Go on, B, get up.”

The man from the black Ford orders her to stand next to him, on the other side of the room.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Bernie says weakly.

“You're not going anywhere,” the man says.

“She's eight months' pregnant, man. Let her go to the fucking bathroom.”

Jay lowers his gun finally, placing it at his feet. He kicks it across the matted carpet toward the man from the black Ford.

“Let her go.”

The man picks up Jay's .38, a gun in each hand now.

He nods to Bernie, who takes one last look at her husband.

She looks frightened, unsure of herself and what comes next.

“Jay?”

“Go on, B,” he says.

He watches his wife shuffle slowly out of the room.

The man from the black Ford calls after her, “And leave the door open so I can hear you.” Then he turns to Jay, who raises his arms in a grand show of surrender, counting the seconds in his mind, how many steps to the closet door.

“I'm losing faith in you, Porter,” the man from the black Ford says. “You got about five seconds to tell me why I shouldn't shoot you right now.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Jay sees her enter the room, leading with the long nose of his shotgun, the rifle he keeps in the
hall closet. He tells her to shoot and don't think. The man from the black Ford sees Bernie and the rifle and reacts quickly, pointing his .45 at her. Bernie holds her breath and shoots.

The blow knocks them both to the floor, the kickback pushing Bernie into the wall behind her. The man from the black Ford falls to his knees, blood oozing from the place where his right hand used to be. The stump at the end of his arm is almost unrecognizable as a feature of the human body. Bernie, aiming God knows where, blew the thing clean off. The man, howling in pain, raises Jay's .38, shooting weakly with his left hand. The bullet whizzes past Jay's right ear, but misses him completely. Jay grabs the shotgun from his wife, slides a bullet into the chamber, and points the barrel of the rifle at the intruder. The man sits up at the waist. Jay has a clean shot at the center of his forehead.

“Jay!”

The sound of his wife's voice ricochets inside his skull, lighting up the place where his reason still has a hold. A breath away from pulling the trigger, he moves the gun six inches to the left and shoots a hole through the man's right shoulder. The man's eyes go blank. The .38 falls from his one good hand, and he collapses completely, his body crumpling onto its side. For a moment, the air in the room is perfectly still, nothing moving but gun smoke winding in the air.

“He's still breathing,” Bernie whispers.

“He passed out.”

Which means they don't have a lot of time.

“Is Mr. Johnson home?” he asks.

Bernie stares at her husband, confused by such a simple question. “Not yet, I don't think,” she stutters. “His wife doesn't get off work until nine.”

Jay sets the gun against the television.

The sight of this man incapacitated on his living room floor
does not relieve his fears about the mess he's in. This guy was only ever a messenger, moving on instructions from someone else. This is not the end of anything, Jay suspects.

He turns and looks at his wife. “You'll have to help me move him.”

 

They drive to Riverside in silence, listening to the whistle of the man's breath in the backseat. Bernie rests her head against the passenger-side window. Jay stares straight ahead through the windshield, following every traffic law of Harris County, Texas, to the letter. When they get within spitting distance of the hospital, Jay turns off his car lights and puts the Buick in neutral, coasting in darkness to the rarely used service entrance around back.

Riverside is a county hospital, its patients mostly black and poor. The hospital staff is used to treating gunshot victims, and they are not known to ask a lot of questions. Jay leaves the man from the black Ford on his knees, a few feet from the service door. As they pull away from the hospital, Bernie starts to cry again. Jay reaches for his wife's hand and trains his eyes on the road ahead.

Jay lost track of Cynthia sometime after his trial.

She simply vanished from his life, disappearing without explanation or apology, without a word to him or even a kiss good-bye. She was just
gone
.

The rumors on campus were rampant:

Cynthia Maddox was a fed.

No, she had gotten picked up on drug charges in Matamoros, Mexico. LSD, somebody had heard.

No, she was living on a commune in Oregon. Or she had run off with a married sheriff's deputy and was living down in Corpus.

Somebody said she had transferred to George Washington University.

Somebody else said it was UT.

He waited for her to come back. He quietly finished out his final semester, skipping meetings at the Scott Street house and dropping his global equality crusade. He kept his head down, got a job somewhere. He took his old room at Miss Mitchell's boardinghouse, renting by the week. Most nights, he played cards by himself in his room, listening to the radio. And he waited.

One month passed, then another. She never came. She never called.

Every hour he waited was just another brick in the wall he was building at his feet, to shield himself from what he could no longer deny: Cynthia Maddox had betrayed him, plain and simple, one way or another. If she had not sold him to the feds, then she had loved him and left him—if she had loved him at all.

He still longed for her in a way that made him sick to his stomach.

How could he love someone he hated, or hate someone he loved so completely?

So he decided he would do neither. He would neither love her nor hate her. He would simply put her away. It was a beginning for him. He learned that other things could be put away too; whatever hurt could be hidden, if only he willed it so. He set about quietly packing up his life, piece by piece, like heavy luggage, trunks put in storage. Until, slowly, he remade himself.

In July of 1970, the Houston Police Department's Central Intelligence Division shot and killed Carl Hampton, shot him dead from the roof of a Baptist church. When Bumpy Williams, Jay's oldest friend, was killed a month later, Jay walked away from the movement for good. He never looked back.

He went, of all places, to law school. It kept him out of Vietnam (that, and his felony arrest record), and it gave him
hope. There could be a life on the other side. He got married, and he pretended to forget all about Cynthia Maddox.

She didn't start showing up again until sometime in the summer of 1976, campaigning for Senator Bentsen. She was running the senator's Houston office, and the
Post
did a big spread about the little gal from Katy who wanted to put Lloyd Bentsen in the White House. Jay had stumbled across the article by accident. Someone had left a newspaper behind in one of the orange vinyl booths in the cafeteria at South Texas College of Law, where he was in his second year. The day Cynthia came back into his life, he'd been in the cafeteria for hours, reading contract law for so long that his eyes were starting to cross. He had picked up the discarded newspaper as a mere distraction during lunch.

Her picture was on page three. A girl he once knew.

He pushed his sandwich across the table, left his coffee to get cold.

The article listed Cynthia Maddox as a graduate of George Washington University and an aide in Bentsen's D.C. office, working closely with him on legislation he was drafting in the Senate's Economic Growth and Transportation Subcommittees. There was no mention of her time in Texas—her years at the University of Houston or her early, more radical political activism—other than to say she was born and raised in Katy, a local girl. She had remade herself as well.

Jay spent that summer on edge. Just knowing she was in the city was a terrible imposition, a burden on his soul. It interfered with his ability to study, to sleep, to even eat some days. Everything in his life had come to a sudden stop.

Somewhere deep down, he was still waiting.

She never came to him, though. She never called.

In the end, Bentsen lost his bid for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. His campaign office downtown was
closed by the fall, and Jay went back to his studies. Cynthia, presumably, went back to D.C. By the time she returned for mid-term elections in '78, this time running her own campaign for local office, she was a stranger to him. The hair was blonder, the clothes stiffer, the politics, save for a few perfunctory nods in the general direction of equality and justice, were unintelligible to him. He found he could see her picture daily in the newspaper without a quickening of his pulse. It no longer mattered that she was in his city. He was no longer waiting.

 

He might have left it at that. If his father-in-law hadn't called on him to get involved with the mayor again, to break their ten years of silence. If he hadn't needed to get his hands on information about the shooting by the bayou. And if he hadn't stayed up 'til two o'clock in the morning last night cleaning blood off his living room floor, trying to make sense of Erman Ainsley's rant against the government. He might have left Cynthia Maddox alone for good. But the mess he's in now is bigger than his past, bigger than his aging feelings for a woman he hardly knows anymore, a woman he may have never known.

He showed up at Cynthia's office this morning, unannounced. There were no smiles from the mayor's secretary this time. She has, in fact, spent most of the forty-five minutes Jay has been waiting with her eyes to the closed double doors that lead into the mayor's private suite, where Kip is standing, likewise waiting, put out of whatever business is going on just on the other side of those doors. The phone has rung exactly twenty-three times, and each time, the secretary looks helplessly at Kip, asking, “How much longer you think?”

It's a quarter after eleven when the doors finally open.

A group of men emerge from the suite first, followed by Cyn
thia, who is smiling broadly. The men dwarf her, some by as much as a foot. They encircle her like a fresh kill in the bed of a pickup truck, like they're trying to decide which one she belongs to, who landed the final shot. Jay recognizes a few of them from their pictures in the paper: Pat Bodine, president of the longshoremen's union; Wayne Kaylin, president of the oil and petrochemical workers' union; Hugh Bowlin, of the Maritime Association; and Darwood Becker, a commissioner with the Port of Houston Authority. The man to Cynthia's right, the one who's got a hand on her elbow, standing firmly beside her even as the others begin to disperse, is Thomas Cole, whom Jay has seen in person only once before, at the lunch with Luckman and J. T. Cummings. As usual, Cole is the only one in the room who doesn't look particularly frightened.

Cynthia is clearly smitten with him.

As the others say their good-byes, moving on toward the elevators, Cynthia and Thomas stand facing each other, Cole bent over to catch the mayor's every word. It appears the two are whispering to each other. When they pull out of their semiembrace, Cynthia flashes Mr. Cole a girlish smile. “We'll do fine,” Cole says, patting her low on the back. “We'll be just fine.”

As he turns toward the elevators, Cole catches a glimpse of Jay, standing just a few feet away. His expression is flat. He is, after all, looking at a stranger. Still, Cole holds Jay's gaze a hair past what is universally considered polite.

“Can I help you with something?” Jay asks.

Cynthia turns, noticing Jay for the first time.

She looks nervous, eyeing the two men, sensing a tightness in the air.

Cole never utters a single word. His eyes soon glide over Jay, like a stone skipping on water. He nods good-bye to the mayor and walks to the elevators alone. Once Cole is gone,
Jay feels the energy in the room shift into a lower gear, as if the others had all been holding their breath in the presence of Texas royalty, no one more so than Cynthia. She quickly waves Jay into her suite without a bit of inquiry, as if she had invited him. Inside, she pulls a Carlton from her purse and lights it. She kicks off her black pumps and tells Kip, twice, to shut the door. She takes a hard pull on the cigarette, inhaling deeply and blowing the smoke through a toothy smile. She receives Jay without ceremony or politesse, treating him as an old friend. “I know what you're thinking,” she says, misreading his expression. “But I'm telling you, this is going to work out better for everybody.”

She offers Jay a cigarette.

He declines, hands in his pockets, keeping himself at a safe distance.

“There is a way out of this mess,” she continues. “A way everybody can win.” She pushes herself off the front edge of her desk. “We just need the right person to present it,” she says, throwing her voice in a wide, encircling arc, inviting Jay into that
We
. As if they're in this one together, comrades again.

He remembers this Cynthia.

The girl who would get hold of an idea and work it, over and over in her head 'til you could see sparks in those blue-gray eyes. He can tell by the look on her face now, the bright flash in her eyes, that she's sitting on something big.

“Are you going to the port commission meeting tonight?” she asks. “We could really use you on this thing,” she says. “
I
could really use you, Jay.”

The phone on the mayor's desk rings. From his perch at the back of the room, Kip answers the line. Jay hears him whisper into the receiver, the words lost in the distance.

“I don't see why you and I can't put a lot of shit behind us,
Jay,” Cynthia says calmly, almost casually, as if they were talking about something as mundane as an old card game that went sour. “If you came out tonight, if you stood with us, it would send a message to those men, to the Brotherhood camp, in particular, that we're not—
I'm
not—out to hurt them. 'Cause I'm not, Jay. I'm not. And you of all people should know that.” She lowers her voice to a sweet drawl. “If you stand with me on this thing, Jay, maybe I can help you out too, you know, maybe get you out of that shithole of an office you call a law practice. I mean, you got a lot of talent, Jay. You just never figured out how to channel it.”

“Fuck you, Cynthia.”

“People listen to you, Jay.” She says it softly, almost wistfully, as if she's never forgotten in all this time what drew her to him in the first place, as if she's carried it with her a long, long way. “You just got to remember to speak up.”

“You giving me advice now, Cynthia?”

“I know you, Jay, better than anybody. Don't forget that.”

He can smell her perfume from here, woodsy and strong. It makes him think of pine needles and red clay, nights in the back of her pickup truck.

“You haven't forgotten me, have you, Jay?” she asks.

“If only it were that easy.”

Behind him, Kip hangs up the phone and they have an audience again. The mayor is dry and businesslike all of a sudden. “I could really use somebody like you in this administration, Jay, as a liaison to some of the more
diverse
communities in the city.”

Jay smiles bitterly at the offer, almost charmed by the audacity of it. So that's what this is all about? She wants him to be her blackface.

“If you stand with me—”

“Cynthia, I don't stand with you on anything.”

“Oh, come on, Jay,” the mayor says, quick to her own defense. “You
know
me. You know where I'm coming from.”

“I know you sold out those men with that press conference,” he says. “You got management hovering like vultures, just waiting for the whole thing to collapse. That's about all I need to know about where you're coming from.”

Cynthia shrinks away from him, her voice suddenly stern and cold, that of a woman refused. “Whether you understand it or not, Jay, I'm doing what's best for those men. Because what's best for this city, and this city's economy,
is
what's best for those men. When business wins, we all win,” she says, Reagan smiling over her shoulder. Jay can barely resist laughing out loud.

“A strike,” Cynthia says, “is not helping anybody.”

She plops down into the wingback chair behind her desk. The phone rings again. Behind him, Jay hears Kip pick up the line. Cynthia rests her elbows on the mahogany desk. “We're losing tens of thousands by the day. Another month, we'll be losing
millions.
You understand? This has got to stop.”

“Cynthia,” Jay says, trying to slow her down.

“This is one of the most prosperous times in this city's history,” she says, shaking her head somewhat incredulously, as if she's only of late discovered that running a city isn't nearly as much fun as she thought it would be. “And I'll tell you what, the shit ain't gon' fall apart on my watch. I won't let it, Jay.”

“I didn't come here to argue with you about this,” he says.

He pulls his hands from his pockets, runs his fingers along the dark stubble that's come up in patches along his jawline over the last few days. He's shy with his words, which makes him seem more nervous than he intends.

“Is this something to do with the girl?” Cynthia asks.

Jay ignores the question, having decided before he walked
in here that he would not say any more than he had to. “What do you know about the federal government storing oil underground?” he asks. “In salt caverns on the coast?”

Cynthia leans back in her chair. “What in the world are you asking me about that for?”

“You were in Washington in the seventies. You were in Bentsen's office.”

It feels odd to say it out loud. The first time they've acknowledged to each other this part of her life, the years after she disappeared, the years after him.

“I figured if anybody would know something about it….”

“Well, it's not some big secret,” she says. “Not in the least.”

“This was Carter's deal?”