Black Water Rising (5 page)

Bernie's awake when he comes into the apartment.

She's standing in her house shoes and a faded brown robe
that won't close over her belly. She stares at Jay standing in her kitchen, smelling of smoke, newsprint stained on his fingers. She looks him up and down, lingering about his face, trying to read his expression, why he's breathing funny.

“I heard you go out,” she says.

“I was taking out the trash,” he says.

Bernie nods. This makes sense to her, makes her feel better.

“You gon' put another bag in?” she asks.

“I always do.”

“No, you don't, Jay.”

He reaches under the sink and pulls out a black trash bag, snapping it open to make his point. “You gon' fight with me about trash bags?”

“I'm just saying. Sometimes you don't.”

She's mad with him about something. He doesn't know what, and he doesn't think she knows either. They've been kind of short with each other since Saturday night, their nerves slightly on edge, their collective, unspoken anxiety masked as ill temperament. Jay closes the lid on the trash can, deciding then and there he won't tell her about the newspaper article. It'll only upset her, and for no good reason he can think of. Besides, he's still hoping it's nothing.

Eddie Mae pokes her head into Jay's office, where he's been working since seven o'clock this morning. She leans against the door frame, kicking at a piece of carpet that's coming up on the floor, holding a stack of pink message slips. Her wig is red today. Which means she's in a bad mood. Or a drinking mood. Or she's got a date to play dominoes after work. Jay can't remember which, can't keep up with Eddie Mae's changeable temperament. He wants her to leave the messages on the left corner of his desk like he's taught her to and leave him to his work. He does not want to give her the idea that he's gon' stop everything every time she walks into the room. Eddie Mae is cheap labor—no paralegal training and not a day spent in secretarial school—but
she's costly in other ways. She won't let him alone half the time, always checking up on him and henpecking about what he eats for lunch. She's a black woman and a grandmother, no matter the tight polyester tops that tug against her chest, and she treats him like a son or a nephew. She seems to sense something in Jay that needs caring for.

“Your father's on the phone,” she says.

“Excuse me?”

“Mr. Boykins. He's waiting on line two.”

His father, right.

Jay sets his pencil down. “You find the witness in the Cummings thing?”

“I'm working on it,” she says, scratching at the wig's scalp, getting to hers underneath. “I know where she work, but the dude at the club won't give me her phone number, and she ain't returned none of the messages I left.”

“What club?”

“The Big Dipper, out 45.”

Jay nods, motioning for her to leave the message slips on his desk.

Then he picks up the line. “Rev.”

“You know I wouldn't bother you at work unless it was something,” his father-in-law says straightaway. His voice is hoarse this morning, overworked and strained. “Son, we got us a big problem.”

Jay reaches for his pencil, thinking a kid at the church must have gotten himself in some kind of trouble. A bar fight or joyriding or maybe petty theft. One time, a girl, barely sixteen, knocked the front teeth out of her boyfriend's mouth. Jay gets these calls from his father-in-law several times a month, usually with somebody's mama crying in the background. He searches
for a clean slip of paper to write down the facts, the kid's name and where they're holding him, already weighing what a trip to the station will do to his afternoon schedule.

“You got some time tonight, son? Time we can talk?”

Something in the Rev's tone makes Jay pause. “What's going on?”

“I'd rather we talk in person. Can you come by the church tonight, sometime around seven thirty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. We'll see you then.”

Reverend Boykins hangs up, leaving Jay to wonder who
we
is.

He tries to go back to his work, but finds he can't focus.

It's more than the cryptic call from his father-in-law. He's also had trouble putting the newspaper article out of his mind, the one from yesterday's paper. Before he left the house this morning, he actually tucked the newspaper clipping into his pants pocket because he simply couldn't bring himself to throw the thing away. He's had a few halfhearted thoughts of phoning the police. But to say what exactly? He doesn't know that the gunshots they heard Saturday night have anything to do with the shooting death in the newspaper. And no matter how hard he tries, he simply can't picture himself walking into a police station and offering information that ties him to some other shooting…certainly not with his felony arrest record. Free advice he gives to any prospective client who walks through the door: don't volunteer anything to a cop that he didn't ask for in the first place. Keep your fucking mouth shut.

He already checked the
Post
this morning, standing over his kitchen table in his shorts and bare feet. There was no more mention of a white male, shot twice in Fifth Ward. It's as if the whole thing was simply forgotten, and Jay tries to convince himself that
he can do the same. He puts his mind and body to work, diving into the mound of paperwork on his desk.

The rest of the day passes in a blur.

Eddie Mae gets a stomachache around four o'clock, the symptoms of which are very vague. She comes out of the bathroom wearing lipstick and fresh powder, asking if she can go home early. She practically skips out the door when he says yes. At a quarter to seven, Jay grabs his suit jacket and heads for his car.

 

First Love Antioch Baptist Church is located on the northeast side of Fifth Ward, out by the railroad tracks, where the Ewell Line runs east-west three times a day like clockwork, shaking the church's fake stained glass. The church is small and poor and set in the middle of a residential street lined with one-room shacks. Jay parks right in front. He lights a cigarette and stares at a gray house down the street. She would be nearing eighty, he thinks. The juror at his trial. He used to bring her things, a bag of groceries every now and then or flowers, any little thing just to say thank you. She's been dead three years, and her people, the ones who stay in the house now, won't hardly ever open the door. They don't know Jay or what their grandmother did for him, the life she saved.

He tosses his cigarette and steps out of his Buick, into the reckless path of a late-model Cadillac thumping by on the street, blasting music on the stereo, so loud the whole car shakes, rattling gold chains hanging from the rearview mirror. Jay feels the crush of bass in his chest. He stares at the group of young men in the car. They're no more than nineteen years old, brothers with do-rags mashed against their foreheads. They regard Jay with open suspicion, his pressed clothes and polished shoes. They seem to know he doesn't belong here, in their neighborhood, in
their time. As the car continues up the street, Jay can't help but think of where he was at nineteen. Marching, strategizing, planning. Fighting for a hell of a lot more than gold chains hanging from a Coupe de Ville.

He turns for the church steps, hearing the last ringing chords of “Jesus, Come Walk with Me” on the church's aging pipe organ. Choir practice is ending, Jay thinks, or just getting started. Inside the sanctuary, he walks down the blue-carpeted center aisle between the pews, where he walked on his wedding day. The man at the organ bench is small and thin, with a cheap, greasy Jheri curl slicked against the sides of his head. He's scooping up sheet music. The woman standing next to him is packing up her hymnal.

It's only then that Jay notices the men down front, filling up the first three rows. There's got to be more than a dozen of them, men dressed in scuffed work boots, grimy jeans, and stained T-shirts, a few of which read
BROTHERHOOD OF LONGSHOREMEN, LOCAL
116 in letters that are cracked and fading.

In an instant Jay knows what this is about, what he's walked into. He can read it on the men's stern faces, their rough, calloused hands, the nylon caps clenched in their fists. He can smell it on them. The salt of the Gulf.

He knows this is some trouble about the strike.

Reverend Boykins stands in the center aisle, down in front of the pulpit. He waves a hand for Jay to come forward. “We've been waiting on you, son.”

They have all turned around now. They're all looking at him.

In the crowd, Jay spots a familiar pair of dark brown eyes.

Kwame Mackalvy, who dropped “Lloyd,” his given name, sometime during their junior year at the University of Houston—“Lloyd” was a banker's name, he'd said, an “establishment”
name—is sitting in the second pew, wearing a union T-shirt over his loud and colorful dashiki. He runs a hand along the fresh, clean T-shirt as if admiring a new costume, getting into character. This is Kwame's scene, Jay thinks, always some fight to be had, a cause to get behind. Kwame runs a community center a few blocks from Jay's apartment, but the two men haven't spoken in years. They run in different circles now, Jay with his middle-class aspirations and Kwame still holding notions of a coming revolution.

“Jay Porter,” Kwame says, drawing out the name, eyeing Jay's suit and his close-cropped hair. He lets out a slow, catlike grin, his teeth white and unnaturally large. “White man still got you, huh, bro, one way or another.”

“It's good to see you too, Lloyd,” Jay says flatly.

He's relieved when Reverend Boykins opens the meeting, if only to move out of Kwame's political crosshairs. His father-in-law speaks to Jay first. “Son, you heard about the trouble we've been having down at the Ship Channel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, we got a bigger mess on our hands here.”

The Rev nods toward an older gentleman in the first pew. He's wearing a Houston Independent School District janitor's uniform, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve. Awkward and shy in front of the group, the man starts to put his hands in his pockets, forgetting he's in his uniform, which doesn't have any pockets. He rests his hands at his sides instead; then, with an elbow, he nudges a young man beside him. The boy, eighteen or nineteen, stands and turns, facing the rest of the men too. He's wearing a sling on his left arm. His face is beaten something awful, bruised and discolored, his lip busted and swollen. One of his front teeth is chipped. “Mr. Porter,” the janitor says. “This
here's my son.” He puts a hand on the boy's shoulder. “You can see they beat him good. They drug him from his car, coming from one of the meetings, broke his arm in two places.”

“Who?” Jay asks, though by now he's already guessed.

“Some of the ILA boys.”

The ILA is the International Longshoremen's Association, the white union down at the docks. The Brotherhood of Longshoremen belongs to the blacks. The two labor groups were ordered to integrate a few years back and are still operating under a government consent decree to do just that. But the process has taken longer than anyone expected, except for maybe the longshoremen themselves. “Some of them ain't too happy about us talking about a walkout,” one of the men says, his ashy elbows propped on the back of the first pew, his hands in two tight fists. “We supposed to all be brothers now, part of the same union. Government say so. If some of us strike, we all got to.”

“ILA ain't having none of that,” one of the dockworkers says.

From what Jay has read in the papers, talk of a strike originated in the Brotherhood's camp. The two unions technically operate under the same voting body, pay into the same pool of funds, but the black workers are routinely paid less than their white brothers, and the Brotherhood is using a new round of negotiations with the shipping companies to get more pay. They've got enough white ILA men promising to join their ranks, enough for a bona fide strike.

“They got some good white ones down there,” one man says.

“But the rest of them crackers is up to no good,” another man says, pulling a gnawed toothpick from his mouth. “They trying to scare us out of a strike. And the police ain't doing a damned thing about it.”

“He drove himself to the station,” the janitor says. “My boy looking worse than he do now. They wouldn't do nothing,
wouldn't let him fill out a report, nothing. Even though Darren says he saw the men who did it.”

“Police making a bigger mess out of this than it is,” somebody chimes in.

“They're doing everything they can to make trouble for the mayor,” Reverend Boykins adds. “The police department has made no secret of the fact that they don't like her.”

“We gon' strike either way,” the man with the toothpick says. “We talking about walking out as early as this week. Soon as we get the votes.”

“Place wouldn't be nothing without us.” An older man speaks, his chest puffed out, gray hairs peeking out of his union T-shirt. “All the money they making off our backs, and we ain't seeing none of it. Folks can't put food on the table, businesses can't sell 'less we load and unload them ships. It's time they start paying us what we're worth, least what the other boys is getting.”

“I mean, what was all that ‘we shall overcome' stuff,” Ashy Elbows says, glancing vaguely in Jay's direction, “if I can't pay my rent?”

The men are all staring at Jay, waiting. He doesn't understand what they want from him, what exactly they think he can do about any of this. Reverend Boykins seems to read his mind. “We understand you know the mayor, Jay.”

Kwame turns to Jay and winks.

Jay feels a stream of sweat running down the center of his back.

Yeah, he knows the mayor.

Of course, she's been trying to forget him ever since she ran for office, paying a whole slew of consultants to bury her past. A couple of reporters tracked him down during the mayoral race, asking all kinds of questions about their days together at U of H. But Jay didn't say a thing, not one word about the fact that she joined SNCC when she was twenty-one, then the more
radical SDS a year later. He didn't say anything about the guns she kept in her dorm room or about the marches she organized single-handedly. Cynthia Maddox was just a girl he went to college with. Maybe they'd had a class together, maybe they hadn't. Maybe they'd had a cup of coffee together one time…it wasn't for him to say.

“We figure,” the Rev says, “maybe you can talk to her.”

“And say what exactly?”

“We need to send a message, son. Let the city know these young men are serious about a strike. And if some of the ILA keep acting ugly, our men are going to need police protection. The mayor is going to have to get off the stick, talk to the chief and get some uniforms down there watching these boys.”

“You been involved in this type of thing before, Mr. Porter,” the janitor says. “I followed your other case, the one against the police department a few years back. If the city sees you representing my boy in this thing—”