Black Water Rising (7 page)

“What kind of car was it?” Jay asks, remembering the woman from the boat, her nice clothes and diamond ring.

“It was a Chrysler, kinda gold-like,” the man says. “It was a rental, that much I remember, 'cause the sticker on the back said
LONE STAR RIDES
. I got a good look at it too. I come up on it real close,” he says, tiptoeing on his bowlegs, walking through the open field like it's a graveyard, careful where he lays his feet. “The driver-side door was wide open. The light was still on inside.” He gets within a few feet of the white police paint, the lumpy circle in the dirt, and then stops short, his voice almost solemn. “He was laying right here.”

“Who was he?” Jay asks.

The man shrugs. “Cops pulled an ID off the man, but who knows?”

“It was a white guy, though, right?”

The man nods. “Laying right there, hanging out of the car, on his back.”

Jay looks out across the empty field. There are black mosquitoes dancing in the white light of his high beams, crickets humming to themselves in the brush behind them. Jay turns from the view of the field to look at the empty warehouse and the dark, nearly deserted street. At this hour, the place looks like an indus
trial wasteland. What in the world was she doing out
here
? “If he was on the driver's side,” Jay mumbles to himself, repeating the groundskeeper's description, arcing around the four
X
's that mark the car, to what would have been the Chrysler's passenger side, “then she must have been riding here,” he says softly, thinking out loud, still trying to piece together some kind of a story. He wonders if the dead man picked her up somewhere, if the two knew each other.

When he finally looks up again, the groundskeeper is staring at him.

“How do you know it was a woman?” the man asks.

“Excuse me?”

“I said…how do you know it was a woman he was with?”

It takes Jay a moment to understand what the man is asking, to realize the mistake he's made, the single clue he let slip from his mouth. The panic, when it hits him, is swift and forceful, and he actually feels himself sway just the tiniest bit. Then, remembering the article from the paper, he repeats a few of the details. “The cops talked to a lady friend,” he explains. “It was in the police report.”

“Is that right?” the groundskeeper asks, a knowing smile creeping across his stubbly face. He pinches off the head of his cigarette, letting the cherry fall to the dirt and pocketing the dirty butt. “Well, I know why they talked to her.”

“You do?” Jay feels the panic again, and he has a sudden thought of Jimmy's cousin, the boat's captain. It's the first time Jay has considered him since the night of the boat ride. And it now occurs to him that the old man might have seen the same blurb in the paper and gone straight to the police. He's so caught up in what that might mean for him, wondering if the cops already have his name, that he almost misses the next words out of the groundskeeper's mouth.

“Dude's pants were coming down,” the man says.

“What?” Jay asks, not immediately comprehending.

“The dead man,” the groundskeeper says. “The belt, the fly…his pants was wide open. The cops was all over it. And they was taking pictures of the ground over there.” He points to the dirt and grass where Jay is standing. “There were footprints, real small-like, you know, like a lady's shoe.” Jay remembers the woman's bare feet on the boat, her missing earring too. “But we don't really know it was a woman,” the groundskeeper says.
We,
like he's in on the investigation, like he and the cops are working this one together. “We don't know what that man was into. Hell, when I seen him, he was wearing leather in August, had on gloves up to here,” he says, demonstrating high on his forearms. “Ain't no telling what kind of freaky shit was going on. That mighta been why he was hiding out here in the first place.” He lowers his voice, speaking the seemingly impossible. “I mean, it coulda been a dude he was with.”

The groundskeeper helps himself to another Carlton. “Now ain't that some shit,” he says. His expression has cooled somewhat, and he seems to have turned his investigative gaze on Jay, taking a second look at Jay's soiled clothes and his missing shoe, seemingly calling his whole presence at the crime scene into question. Jay doesn't like the way the man is looking at him, or what he thinks the man may be insinuating. It would be ridiculous, the idea of Jay being in any way involved in a murder, if it weren't so…plausible. Even a rookie cop knows that more times than not, the perpetrator returns to the scene of his crime.

“You with the
Chronicle
or the
Post
?” the groundskeeper asks.

“I freelance,” Jay answers, a little too quickly.

“Maybe I could get your name, in case I remember something else.”

The smirk is faint, but impossible to ignore.

The groundskeeper stares at Jay, waiting for an answer.

“Ernest Pennebaker” is the first ridiculous name out of Jay's mouth. He delivers it as convincingly as a practiced closing argument, thanking the man for his time and reaching for his car keys. He nods good night as he slides into his front seat. Through the dusty windshield, the groundskeeper watches him, the Skylark's headlights carving deep shadows beneath the man's suspicious eyes. Jay throws his car into reverse, driving faster than he should, churning up reddish brown dirt across his rear window, creating a blinding haze of smoke.

He rolls up his window and turns on the radio, trying to shut out the noise in his head. The box is set to 1430 AM, black radio. They're in the middle of another hour of
Confessions
. Wash Allen is talking to a woman, a caller who's sleeping with a married man, has been for years. She's wondering if he'll ever leave his wife, and if he doesn't, where in the world will that leave her? The show is call-and-response, a rhythm borrowed from blues or the church, where black people come to lay down their problems. The callers have on-air names like CB handles. “This is Stormin' Norman calling…” “Yeah, Wash, this is your girl Sunshine…” “Dark 'n' Lovely here, Wash, and I got something to say…” They're all calling in, hot to give their opinions, to tell the woman on hold that she's a stone cold fool.

The next morning, he stands over the sink checking his cut in the bathroom mirror. It's at least an inch long where the tree branch got him. There's a thin slash just below his cheekbone, a little too high to be explained away as a shaving mishap. He would put a Band-Aid on it, but he doesn't want to draw any more attention to it. It's bad enough it looks like the scratch of a woman's fingernail, an act of aggression or passion, neither of which would be easy to explain to his wife. He doesn't want her to know where he was last night. Not yet at least. Not until he gets ahold of Jimmy's cousin. For it has become fairly clear to Jay that he will have to make some kind of statement to police detectives. He thinks it's better if he contacts them first, before they come looking for him. Bernie, were she to
hear about the shooting in the paper and the woman's apparent involvement, would demand that she and Jay march down to the station this morning, which Jay is not the least bit inclined to do, not without another witness, preferably one he's not married to. He wants someone other than his wife to testify to his fundamental innocence in this situation. Otherwise, how to explain his odd behavior? The fact that he's waited four days since the shooting to say a word about it or, more important, why he was at the crime scene last night. He feels sick when he thinks about the traces of himself he carelessly left behind—the Newport he tossed out the window as he was coming up the dirt drive, his footprints and tire tracks, and the shoe he lost in the brush—all of it just sitting out there, waiting to be discovered. He could hardly sleep last night for imagining the groundskeeper talking to homicide detectives, telling them about the stranger out after dark, sneaking around their crime scene. Jay thinks all of it can be easily explained away, but he wants to talk to Jimmy's cousin first. If the old man hasn't done so already, maybe he and Jay can make a statement together.

He opens the cabinet over the sink and pulls out a tub of Vase-line. He rubs jelly into the cut on his cheek, then uses one of Bernie's compacts to cover the mark with bronze powder. He tries to make it blend in, to make himself look at least presentable and, at best, credible. When he's done, he wraps a towel around his waist and picks up the .22 that's resting on top of the toilet's tank.

Jay has three guns: a .38 in his glove compartment, a hunting rifle in the hall closet, and the nickel-plated .22 he keeps under his pillow, always within arm's reach. He's tried to break the habit of carrying it into the bathroom with him. But most days it's right by his side. Some people, when they're in the shower, imagine they hear the phone ringing. Jay imagines people breaking into his apartment with guns drawn.

He lost a buddy that way. Lyndon “Bumpy” Williams had been Jay's roommate his first year at U of H, when the dorms were still segregated. It was Bumpy who joined SNCC first, who took Jay to his first meeting. He was one of Jay's oldest and closest friends. By the summer of 1970, the feds had some heavy intel on Mr. Williams, courtesy of COINTELPRO. They broke into his duplex on Scott Street while Bumpy was in the shower. He never heard them coming, never heard their orders to come out with his hands up. The first flash of movement behind the shower curtain, they shot him thirteen times. He was only twenty years old. Now, eleven years later, Jay still sleeps with his .22 and carries it into the bathroom with him. He also can't take sudden noises and won't sit with his back to the door, and several times a year, he catches himself, by rote, unscrewing the mouthpiece of his telephone, looking for bugs.

Back in his bedroom, he returns the gun to its hiding place beneath his pillow and makes the bed by himself, a routine he and Bernie came up with in their first months of marriage. “I don't like guns,” she'd said. “I don't want to see a gun.” There's an AM radio propped on the paint-chipped windowsill. It's picking up bits and pieces of a local news show on 740. Jay dresses quickly, listening to a report about talks between the dockworkers and the shipping companies. As he slips on his shoes, he remembers his pledge to call the mayor.

His clothes from last night are piled on a nearby chair, where he tossed them in the dark last night. On his way out, he scoops up the dirty, grass-stained clothes and rolls them into a tight ball, hiding the whole mess under his arm. When Bernie comes in from the kitchen, her robe open at her belly, she eyes the pile of laundry he's got wadded under his arm. “What are you doing?”

“Going to work,” he says simply, holding the soiled clothes as if they were an attaché case, a part of his usual uniform. He tries
to pass her in the narrow doorway, but she does not move, blocking him with her belly, waiting for him to say a proper good-bye. When he bends down to kiss her on the cheek, Bernie screws up her nose, pulling away from him and wiping at the side of her face. She looks down at her fingertips, staring at a glob of brown jelly.

“Are you wearing makeup?”

“No,” he says, turning away from her. “Of course not.”

Outside, beneath the carport, he tosses the dirty clothes into the back of his Buick, which, he notices, is still covered with the reddish dirt from the open field by the bayou, the location of a murder. He stops at a car wash on the way to his office. With two dollars' worth of quarters, he washes the Buick twice, rinsing any trace of the crime scene from his car. He uses the soiled clothes from last night to dry the soapy water. Then he pitches them into the trash.

He arrives at his office late, his suit damp and wrinkled from the car wash. Eddie Mae has a message from Charlie Luckman, saying he wants to meet for lunch. This is settlement talk for sure, Jay thinks. But the relief he feels about the possibility of a quick financial resolution to the case is tempered by the morning he's had. He knows he's being paranoid—chucking his clothes, washing his car—but he can't seem to stop himself or calm his racing nerves. He goes into his office and shuts the door, lights a cigarette at his desk and picks up the phone.

He starts with a guy named Tim.

Tim was Jay's client a few months back, the one with the outstanding bill. Jimmy, Tim reminds Jay, was dating Tim's sister. Fine, Jay says. He doesn't care. He's trying to get in touch with Jimmy's cousin. It's another half hour before he's able to track down Jimmy, at a bar on Calumet. There's loud music playing in the background, and it takes a while to make Jimmy understand
who Jay is or why he's calling. Jimmy, who frankly sounds drunk at nine o'clock in the morning, tells Jay he hasn't seen his cousin in days.

“You got a number for him, some way I can reach him?”

“You might try his girl's place,” Jimmy slurs. “He's kind of in between digs right now.”

“You have her phone number?” Jay asks.

“Well, let me see if I can find it,” Jimmy says, as if he keeps a Rolodex right there on the bar top. “Here,” he says a moment later. “Try this one: 789-3123. Gal's name is Stella.”

“Thank you,” Jay says, jotting down the information.

“You get ahold of him, you tell him I don't appreciate how he left my boat. He left dirty dishes on the floor. Didn't even bother to straighten up or nothing. It ain't right,” he says. “You tell him I don't appreciate it one bit.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Then Jay adds, “You know if he talked to any cops recently?”

“About what?”

“Nothing,” Jay says, thinking better of it. He hangs up the line.

Stella's number is busy the first five times Jay tries it. When he finally gets through, the line rings some twenty times before Jay simply gives up.

He thinks of calling the cops on his own, but can't bring himself to do it.

He remembers his own advice:
Keep your fucking mouth shut.

It's a warning that lives under his skin, in his DNA.
Keep your head down, speak only when spoken to.
A warning drilled into him every day of his life growing up in Nigton, Texas, née Nig Town, née Nigger Town (its true birth name when it sprang up a hundred years ago in the piney woods of East Texas). A warning always delivered with a sharp squeeze from his mother's hand
before crossing the street or going to school, and especially before going out after dark.

He's not proud of his fears, but there they are, pinching at him from all sides like too tight shoes, restricting his movements, limiting his freedom. A shame, considering the real reason he marched so many years ago was to prove fear was dead, that it belonged to another time, to men like his father.

Jay sits at his desk, thinking about Jerome Porter.

The same image always comes to him, like a well-worn photograph in his mind, a snapshot of another time. It's an image of his mother, eighteen, sitting in the front seat of her daddy's pickup truck, Jay's father, twenty-one and strong, behind the wheel. They were newlyweds, the way Jay always heard the story. His mother, Alma, was just starting to show. They were riding on a farm road that ran behind Jay's grandmother's place, a barbecue joint and greengrocer, where his parents were both working the summer after they married. Jay's father was driving his young wife home 'cause she wasn't feeling too good on her feet.

There was another truck on the road that day, riding their bumper and honking the horn, two white men in the cab and a loaded rifle rack in the back window. This was Trinity County, 1949, a lawless place for men like Jerome Porter. The police were white. The sheriff and the mayor. And they made it known that the countryside belonged to them. There had been a rash of poultry theft that fall and winter, somebody (or bodies) sneaking onto people's farms after dark, spiriting away valuable hens, sometimes going so far as to slit a guard dog's throat in the process. Wasn't no way to tell who it was, but white folks got it in their minds that it was niggers' doing. They set up vigilante groups, guarding property with rifles and axes, questioning folks coming in and out of the grocery store, even harassing little boys coming out of the colored elementary school. They stopped people on
local roads, demanding to search their cars and making citizens' arrests if anything was out of order. And local law enforcement didn't do a damn thing to stop them.

Jerome, Jay Bird, as Alma called him, was careful not to go above thirty miles an hour. He didn't want to give the men in the truck any excuse to stop the car, which it turns out they did anyway by pulling their pickup ahead and blocking the road. Jay's parents were in Alma's daddy's truck, and she knew he kept a pistol in the glove box. She reached for it, but Jerome told her not to make it worse. He got out of the car, let the men have a look around, and asked them politely to let them go on their way. “My wife's not feeling well,” he explained.

Something about the self-satisfied way he said it seemed to set them off. Maybe they didn't have wives or didn't like the ones they had, but they got kind of rough then, poking around on the passenger side, near Alma, making Jay's father understand that nothing in this world really belonged to him. It was all within their reach. His father was a tall man, taller than Jay. He stood up straight, looked the men in the eye, and said, “Y'all need to get away from there now. Leave her be.” The men turned to each other then, agreeing on something, an approach, something choreographed from their repertoire. They were small and squat, and they charged at him like yard dogs, coming at him from two sides. Within the first couple of blows, it was clear they would not be satisfied by some regular beating, a few kicks in the dust. They were going for something else, scratching past his skin and bones, punching at his spirit. They had him near 'bout to the ground when Alma got the gun out of the glove box, a little .25-caliber pistol her brothers had taught her to shoot. “Your daddy took one look at me with that gun and said, ‘Alma, don't you dare.'”

As a kid, Jay listened to this story in disbelief.

It was nothing like the cowboy movies he watched on television. There was no explosion, no gut shot, no hero. Not his father anyway. Jerome Porter wouldn't let his wife save him, afraid of what would happen to her if she pulled the trigger. There was no coming back from shooting a white man in Trinity County, 1949. If a mob didn't get you, the courts would.

It turned out the gun scared them anyway, it was shaking so in Alma's hand. The men couldn't be sure Jay's mother would heed her husband's instruction not to shoot. They ran back to their truck and took off. A red Ford was all anybody ever remembered. No license plate, no names.

Jay's daddy was beat pretty good about the head.

He managed to get himself into the truck. He turned the engine over, but never got the car into gear. He turned to his wife and said, “Alma, I think you better drive.” He passed out a few moments after that. She pushed him over to the passenger side by herself, even in her condition. The nearest colored hospital was all the way to Lufkin. She didn't think Jay Bird could make it that far, so she drove him to St. Luke's Faith Memorial in Groveton. In the waiting area, the nurses went so far as to let Jay's mother fill out all the paperwork, let her think her husband would be the next one in line. Alma sat with him, holding his hand, his head resting on her lap, wondering why they were letting other people go ahead of Jerome. It wasn't until late in the evening, the waiting room empty and the two of them the only ones still waiting, that she understood what was going on, that this white hospital had no intention of treating her husband.

She laid his head softly on the bench, then got up and called over to her parents' place. Somebody needed to run up to Jerome's mama's house, she said, and let Mrs. Porter know her boy was in trouble, that it looked bad. She asked her brothers to drive down, to help her get her husband all the way to Lufkin.

They got him out of St. Luke's and into Alma's brother's Dodge so Jay's father could lie out in the backseat. He came to at least once, but he never said a word. Just looked at Alma and kind of smiled. He died somewhere between Groveton and Lufkin. That was December. Jay was born five months later.