Black Water Rising (34 page)

He slows the car on the bayou overpass, waiting for the cop car to pass, pulling the Buick all the way to the right, under a streetlamp. It's only then that he sees his gun.

It's been sitting on his front seat this whole time.

A nickel-plated .22.

His missing gun. His illegal, unregistered, missing gun.

It must have been placed in his car sometime while he was in the bar with Elise, laid across the passenger seat as gently as a sleeping baby.

The blue and red police lights fill his rearview mirror.

The squad car pulls in right behind Jay.

So this is the plan, he thinks, the way they intend to shut him up.

He wonders which one made the call to police.

Elise or the man in the Ford.

Behind him, he hears the doors of the squad car open. He quickly pushes the .22 onto the floor, reaching his right foot across the floorboard and kicking the gun under the passenger seat. It disappears into the shadows on the floor.

In his side-view mirror, he sees one of the officers coming up on the driver's side. The other cop, a flashlight in his hand, is walking on the raised curb to the right, which stretches from the street to the edge of the bridge. Jay can hear the water down below, lapping against the bridge posts beneath them. When the first cop arrives at his door, Jay sees the gun at his waist, the metal cuffs. He wonders what would happen if he laid his foot on the gas, if he just drove away, how long before another squad car picked up his license plate on the radio, how far would he get and what would he have to leave behind.

“Can I see your license and registration, sir?” the cop says.

Jay obediently produces a wallet from his back pocket. Through the open driver-side window, he hands his license to the cop. The cop shines his flashlight in Jay's face. Jay is careful not to make any sudden moves. He steals a glance in the right side-view mirror. The second cop, white like his partner, but younger and thinner, is hanging in position at the right rear of the vehicle, one hand on his flashlight, the other at his holster. He's watching Jay closely, as one might eye a cornered animal, a thing whose behavior is dangerous and unpredictable. The cop seems edgy, his hand inching toward his gun. Jay lets his eyes drop, scanning the ripped carpet along the floorboard. He thinks he sees the nose of the .22 peeking out.

My God, he thinks, they cannot search this car.

The first cop, tall, with reddish blond hair and thick jowls, shines the flashlight into the whites of Jay's eyes. “Where you headed to tonight, sir?”

“Home,” Jay says, squinting against the light.

“Where you coming from?”

“A restaurant.” He tries to remember how many beers he had.

The cop waves over the roof of the car to his partner, signaling him to move in closer to the vehicle. The second cop raises his flashlight. He shines the beam through the back window first, taking even-paced steps along the right side of the Buick, moving closer and closer to the .22 under the front seat.

Jay feels a burn in his stomach.

They cannot search this car.

“You had anything to drink tonight, sir?” the first cop asks Jay. His partner shines his light through the rear window, skimming along the backseat, the trash and empty soda cans piled up on the floor. The beam of light climbs over the front seat, landing in a pale pool in the empty seat next to Jay.

“I asked you a question, sir,” the cop at Jay's window says, tapping Jay on the shoulder with the butt of his flashlight. His partner is inches from discovering the illegal weapon. Trapped, Jay makes a sudden, brash decision to go for broke.

He opens the driver-side door, forcing the cop on the other side to stumble back a few paces. “What the hell do you think you're doing!” the cop yells. Jay swings his feet onto the pavement beside the car, puts his head down between his legs. “I feel sick,” he says, hanging halfway out of the Buick.

“Get back in the car, sir.”

Behind him, Jay hears footsteps along the right side of the car, the cop's partner moving into a new position, as they are suddenly in a situation here.

Jay starts to stand.

“I said get back in the car, sir.”

“Please, I feel like I'm going to be sick,” he says, wobbling on his feet.

The first cop has his hand firmly on his weapon. The second cop has already dislodged his from his holster. “Sir,” the younger cop says. “You need to get to the side of your vehicle and put your hands on the back of your head.”

Jay clutches at his stomach, staggering in the street. He looks up at both officers with a pitiful, hangdog expression on his face.

“Jesus,” the first cop says, somewhat irritated. “How much have you had to drink anyway?”

“Get your hands on your head, sir,” his partner yells.

There's a pickup truck coming down Main from the north. Jay takes a chance, stumbling out in front of the truck, the cops yelling behind him. The young cop raises his weapon, leveling it at Jay. Behind him, Jay hears his partner say, “Don't shoot. Don't shoot.”

The truck slams on its brakes, coming within inches of Jay's legs. The driver, a woman, leans out of the cab, screaming.

Jay runs to the other side of the bridge.

He throws himself against the concrete railing, the line of it jabbing against his ribs. What comes out is real. Dark and bitter, flecked with blood, his insides pouring into the bayou below.

Within seconds, he feels his arms yanked behind him, the bones in his shoulders turned at an unnatural angle. He feels the pinch of metal cuffs on his skin. He knows what comes next.

“You're under arrest,” the first cop states.

Jay lowers his head to show that he means to cooperate.

They walk him to the squad car, shoving him into the cage in back.

As the squad car pulls away from the curb, going north on Main, Jay turns around in the locked backseat and steals a last look at his car, still parked on the side of the road, the nickel-plated .22 resting peacefully beneath the front seat.

He said he would never be back here.

Behind bars an inch thick.

His feet aching on a filthy linoleum floor. A pool of urine in one corner, dried vomit in another. Men sleeping on the floor like dogs. No place to relieve himself with dignity. No place even to set himself down so he can think straight.

Ten paces by fifteen.

He's lived his whole life in this tiny cell, it seems.

Lived in fear of it, at least. Which, it turns out, is exactly the same thing.

As being in the sweat and shit of it, the I-can-hardly-breathe of it.

The stench in this place, the way the walls start to pinch at his insides.

It's never left him. He's spent the last ten years right here, on lockdown.

Keep your fucking mouth shut.

Isn't that the law he's lived by?

Keep your mouth shut, speak only when spoken to.

And what good did it do him? The silence?

The freedom he marched for, a lifetime ago.

The speeches he made. The dreams he had.

What good was any of it, really? If he can't get free in his own mind?

So he can eat at a lunch counter.

Drink warm water from a fountain.

And he can vote.

So what now?

Jay is not a praying man, not really. But some moments in a man's life beg for a little magic, a faith beyond what the eyes can see. The morning his verdict came down, he prayed, alone, in a cell smaller than this one. They kept the lights on twenty-four hours a day. The cell was drenched in white light and hot, not a comforting shadow in sight. He got on his knees next to the bed, elbows on a mattress so thin it looked like somebody had laid a cracker across the springs. He closed his eyes and he tried to picture God the way other people did:

As a father.

One who might watch out for him, lay a comforting hand.

He carried that picture in his head and into the courtroom that day. And he made a bargain with God.
You cut me loose, set me free out of this mess I'm in, and I'll lay it down,
he said. It was a promise to walk away from the armed rhetoric, from the politi
cal shit storm he was forever stirring, from a way of life that had consumed him. It was a promise to lay his voice down, to silence himself, which turned out to not be freedom at all, not even nowhere close.

And standing now in a urine-stained corner of this jail cell, where he paid a toll of six cigarettes to be left in peace, he strikes a new bargain with himself. There is a way out of here, he knows, out of this prison in his mind. It requires only the courage to speak.

 

It's nearly two hours before he's allowed to make a phone call. To Bernie, of course. She's still out to her parents' place in Fifth Ward, waiting on word from him, still up at nearly one o'clock in the morning. She answers the phone in a low whisper, then, hearing his voice, curses him repeatedly, softly, so her daddy won't hear. When he tells her where he is, the gist of what has happened, his wife lets out a jagged little gasp that breaks his heart. The pay phone to his ear, Jay can hear Bernie shuffling around her parents' house in the dark, looking for her purse and shoes. He tells her to stay put. He passed a sobriety test at the station, and there are, as of yet, no charges being filed against him.

He's remained remarkably calm, considering.

He's kept to himself, tried to keep his mind clear.

There have been four fights, two of which drew the attention of the guards, but not to the degree that they were willing to open the cage and break up the commotion themselves. Instead, they yelled threats from the safe side of the bars, tapping their clubs against the hard metal and chipping black paint onto the dirty floor. Two of the fights were territorial. Somebody sat in somebody's spot, or maybe it was somebody looked at somebody
wrong. The other two fights were about some girl named Thelma who stays over on the north side. Of the nine men locked in the small cell, two of them apparently knew each other on the outside, and both laid a strong claim to this little gal who, it sounded like, is still in high school. Jay has stayed out of all of it. Except for the two minutes the guards let him out to make his phone call, he's done his time in one solitary corner, in a tiny sliver of space down in front, by the bars.

At two thirty, they start calling the first of the men out of the cell. One by one, the news comes down the hallway. Somebody's mama or sister or girlfriend managed to pull together bail money, dipping into next month's rent. Each time the guards call an inmate's name, the man in question stands righteously and gives the rest of them the finger, a final salute before the cage opens, just for him.

By a quarter after three, there are only three men left in the cell: one of Thelma's beaus, Jay, and an older black man, in his late sixties, wearing a soiled undershirt and high-water black pants with white socks. He's having a one-sided argument with himself about how he knows his gal ain't gon' leave him in here, that she'll bail him out, if only so she can get a ride to work the next morning. He goes on and on, complaining about the fact that she don't cook him baked chicken no more, always sending him for McDonald's…until finally, Thelma's boyfriend asks the old man, rather politely, to please shut the fuck up.

It's a little after four o'clock when the guards call for Jay. He hasn't seen the two cops who arrested him. He's had almost no communication with anyone, in fact. When Jay asks the guard what, if anything, he's been charged with, he gets a grunt for a reply and is marched to another room down the hall.

Processing, it turns out.

Where his jacket, watch, and wallet are returned to him. His belt and tie.

And he's told that he's free to go.

He's slow to move, and the clerk, a chubby girl in her twenties, ponytail cocked to one side, asks Jay if he's gon' need a goddamned escort out of the building. “You can go, you know,” she says. When Jay asks her about his vehicle, she only shrugs.

 

He walks out of the police station about an hour or so before dawn, hungry and tired, his feet blistered and burning through the soles of his dress shoes. He stands briefly at the foot of the cement steps, the same spot where he left Elise Linsey so many nights ago, and he wishes for the hundredth time that he'd listened to his wife that night, that he'd gotten out of the car and gone at least to the door of the police station, told the truth as he knew it.

This time of night, the sky is somewhere between black and blue, the dying night as tender as a bruise. The air is moist and mercifully mild. Jay starts walking to the east, cutting through his city. He walks along the railroad tracks that run just to the north of downtown, chasing the sun, it seems, and its early morning peek into the sky, the predawn scene of peach and violet, the wispy streaks of white clouds, thin as a whisper, a secret.

He walks east until he hits Main Street and the bridge over Buffalo Bayou.

The Buick is still parked by the side of the road. At the sight of it, Jay breaks into a weary, lopsided trot. He lays his cheek across the dewy roof of the car. He is bone tired, but deeply grateful. The keys are still in the ignition, the doors unlocked.

Overhead, the amber streetlamps shut off one by one.

In the predawn light, Jay looks both ways up and down the
street, watching for any traffic on Main. Then, on his hands and knees by the curb, he reaches into the car and beneath the front passenger seat, feeling along the frayed carpet on the floorboard. When he hits something hard, the metal of his .22, he claws the gun out from under the seat, holding it in the pinkish palm of his hand.

For the life of him, he can't remember where this little thing came from.

If the gun was Bumpy's first or Marcus Dupri's, or if it was the same .22-caliber pistol that Lloyd Mackalvy pressed into Jay's palm on Highway 71, the night they outran the Klan, the night Stokely said they were gon' change the world.

Jay swings his arm in a wide arc, sending the gun sailing through the air and over the bridge's concrete railing, watching as it pierces the skin of the water. Maybe it will find its twin somewhere along the muddy bottom of the bayou, he thinks. Either way, it doesn't matter. He doesn't need it anymore.

 

At seven thirty sharp, he's standing inside Charlie Luckman's office, on Milam, his dirty shoes sunk into the plush, caramel-colored carpet, the grime and sweat and rank funk of the jail cell still staining his clothes, clinging to his skin. He stands at the front desk looking like some half-dead shit the cat dragged in.

The receptionist, an alarmingly thin woman in her sixties, her neck somewhat shrunken beneath the weight of a blond bouffant, does not appear to understand Jay, even after he gives his name three times. She keeps looking down at the same piece of paper, anything to avoid looking this filthy black man in the eye. “I'm sorry,” she says. “But Mr. Luckman has a full, full schedule. He's got clients, you know, and he's due in court for a ruling just this morning.”

“Ma'am,” Jay says. “I can guarantee you he's going to want to talk to me before he goes into that courtroom. This is about his client Elise Linsey.”

It's the name that does it.

The receptionist finally picks up the phone receiver on her desk and dials the extension to Charlie Luckman's office. “There's somebody named Porter here to see Mr. Luckman,” she says to a voice on the other end.

He's led down a long hallway then, past the conference room. Charlie's secretary, a pretty brunette in a navy blue wrap dress and flats, smiles through clenched lips when she sees Jay coming down the hall, when she gets a good look at his soiled clothes and knotted hair. She offers him a seat, tells him Mr. Luckman is on a call. Jay nods politely and walks right past her.

He opens the door to Luckman's office.

Charlie is indeed on the phone. He looks up when he sees Jay.

“What the hell is this?”

He's behind his desk, his collar unbuttoned. There's a blue-and-red-striped tie hanging across the back of his leather chair, a glass of milk on his desk. “I'm gon' have to call you back,” he mumbles into the phone.

Charlie's secretary steps in from the hallway.

“I told him you were on the phone,” she says.

“What the hell is going on here?” Charlie says. He looks at Jay, screwing his face up at the sight before him, or maybe the smell. “I don't know how you run your business, Mr. Porter, but I don't respond to ambush tactics. You got something you want to say on the Cummings thing, you can call a meeting or wait 'til we get in front of a judge. You can't just barge in here, not today,” he says, reaching for his tie. “I'm not doing this today.”

And then, because he can't resist, “That girl gon' take the five
grand or what?” Charlie asks, spontaneously shaving $2,500 off his last offer.

“That's not why I'm here,” Jay says.

Charlie lifts up the white collar of his shirt, nods to his secretary. “Get him out of here, would you?”

“I know where the gun is,” Jay says quickly.

The office, which is beige and mahogany and smells faintly of butterscotch, is suddenly stilled, the air tight, as if somebody took the whole room in a choke hold, knocked the wind out of them all, especially Charlie. With the loose ends of his red-and-blue tie in his hands, he stares at Jay Porter, maybe just now remembering Jay's face in the courthouse yesterday and what little sense that made to him at the time. He's putting something together in his mind. “The gun that killed Mr. Sweeney,” Jay says. “I know where it is.”

Charlie clears his throat. “Gail, shut the door,” he says.

The secretary pushes the maple-colored door closed with her hand. Charlie sighs. “Might you kindly put your behind on the other side of it?”

Behind him, Jay hears the door open and close again with a carpet-padded whoosh of air, soft as a baby's breath. The room is starkly, almost painfully quiet. Charlie steps from around the corner of his desk, moving toward Jay slowly, tentatively, as if he were actually physically afraid of Jay, of what he has to say, but feels forced to close the gap between them anyway, if only to keep their voices at a minimum, down to a whisper. “How do you know my client?”

“Why don't you ask her?”

“Don't you dare play games with me,” Charlie says. “Don't come in here and say something like you just did and play games with me.”

“Why don't you ask her how she got those marks on her
neck?” Jay says. “Why don't you ask her why she
really
shot that man?”

“How do you know…?” Charlie asks, almost stopping himself before he gets the words all the way out. “How do you know she shot him?”

“Because I was there.”

There,
he said it.

The words, once out, are like a locomotive on the tracks, with too much physical strength behind them to stop on a dime. He cannot, will not stop the truth. He tells the whole thing: the ride on the boat, the gunshots, the screams, the water rescue, the late-night drop in front of the police station, the black Ford and the money, Elise's cagey behavior, the news from High Point, the old man and the oil, the cover-up, the real estate buys, the government's sudden curiosity in Ms. Linsey, the calls from D.C. He runs the story all the way to its breathless end, plopping the meat of it at Thomas Cole's doorstep. He ends grandly on the link between Thomas Cole and the deceased, the man who tried to kill Mr. Luckman's client. This is his mess, Jay says, speaking of Cole. “And somebody ought to do something about it.”

Charlie walks to the office's one window, which covers an entire wall. There's a small bar parked in the thick carpet in front of the window. It's got a mirrored tray on top, a pitcher of water and a coffee carafe and three different types of scotch. Charlie pours himself a glass of water, downs it, then pours a scotch. He looks up at the view in front of him, the green spread of Allen Parkway, cut in half by the serpentine bayou, the city's main vein.