Pleasantville (8 page)

Jay hears the line click, then a man's voice. “This is Jon Lee. What can I help you with?” He sounds young, young enough to drive a Z, Jay thinks. Either it's all he can afford, or he's still chasing the kinds of women who are impressed by that sort of thing. Another ten years at the Cole trough, and he'll be in a Mercedes for sure. Jay wonders how long he's been paying bar dues.

“I'm trying to understand why I found your business card in my office.”

“I'm sorry, who is this?”

“You working the Ainsley case now?”

He wouldn't have figured Thomas Cole to pull a dirty stunt like this, breaking into his office, but how else to explain the coincidence?

“I think you've got the wrong number.”

“You had a car stolen a few weeks back, right? A Nissan?”

“How do you–”

Lee stops suddenly. “Lisa, can you get off the line for a sec,” he says, waiting for the departure of his secretary. A second later there's another click, and then the line goes dead completely. Jay pulls the phone from his ear, staring at the receiver. He dials Lee's number again, but the call goes straight to voice mail, two, three more times. Jay hangs up, feeling the rush of
heat again, downright panic about what this means. “Get upstairs,” he says to Eddie Mae. “There's an inventory sheet inside the front of every box, every file we ever started for the Cole case, from Ainsley on down.” Eddie Mae nods. She filed most of that paperwork herself. “Go back to the beginning, the first briefs, Ainsley's deposition, all the way back to 1981, and make sure every piece of paper, every videotape, everything is accounted for.” He reaches for his car keys.

“Where are
you
going?”

“Can you also pull our billing records for '81, '82? Accounts payable.”

“Why?”

“Just do it, please.”

Eddie Mae looks up, cocking her head to the side, noting the tension through his neck and jaw. Jay carefully avoids her eye. There's no way she could know what he's thinking. There's only
one
person who knows what he did, years ago, which didn't win him the biggest case of his life so much as ensure he wouldn't lose it–and his wife is gone. “Pull the records,” he says.

Cole Oil Industries
moved its headquarters in the fall of '91, from a towering high-rise in downtown Houston to a sprawling glass-and-stone industrial park outside the Loop, parking itself off the Southwest Freeway on Beechnut, right across the street from Brown & Root, its biggest competitor in the great rebirth of the military-industrial complex. Both had made a fortune in government contracts during George H. W. Bush's Gulf War, Brown & Root providing logistical support to U.S. troops in Kuwait, and Cole Oil managing oil-field production in Iraq. The construction of the brand-new, state-of-the-art complex was an act of optimism ahead of the '92 elections, a Bush win promising a wide, patriotic path into untapped markets in oil-rich nations previously
closed to American money and interests. Texas didn't see Bill Clinton coming.

It's a twenty-minute drive west from here.

When the freeway is clear, Jay's done it in less than fifteen.

Tucking Jon K. Lee's business card into his front pocket, he starts down the steps of his office, stopping short when he sees Jim Wainwright coming up the paved walk, the front gate swinging closed behind him. Jim is a tall man. He played forward for the Prairie View Panthers before his time in the army, most of it spent in segregated housing at Fort Polk in Louisiana, and afterward finished his graduate studies at Texas Southern, then called Texas State University for Negroes. Even ten years into his retirement, it's rare to see Mr. Wainwright, a former engineer, out of slacks and a tie. His look this morning, blue jeans and a paint-splattered PV sweatshirt, reminds Jay of the grim search out in Pleasantville. It stops him in his tracks.
Tell me we weren't too late.
Jim shoves his hands into the pockets and shakes his head. “Nothing so far,” he says, words that fill Jay with relief. Jim stands quiet a moment, his brow tensed into a deep wrinkle.

“I need to talk to you, Jay.”

“You want to come inside?”

Jim hangs back. “Let's take a walk, son,” he says.

They make
it up the block, past the print shop and a nude furniture outlet, before Jim says a word, stopping in front of the Diamond Lounge, a small blues bar. He pulls on the door's brass handle, and a warm rush of air pours out into the street, carrying the scent of tobacco and peanuts, which are roasted daily on a stove top in the back. The lights are up inside, showing the cracks in the leather booths, the untended sticky spills on the polished concrete floor. There's half a drum set on the
corner stage, and a few empty and crumpled paper cups from last night's show. Mr. Wainwright, who looks like he's had one hell of a week, plants his feet in front of the leather bar and orders a scotch and water. By Jay's watch, it's only 9:40 in the morning. The guy behind the bar slides a beer in front of Jay, unsolicited. He would ask for a glass of water, but he doesn't want to leave Jim with the feeling that he's drinking alone, not when Jay can feel a brick-size confession about to fall off the man's chest. Mr. Wainwright takes a sip of his scotch, sucking air through his teeth as it goes down. “You're in trouble, son,” he says.

“Excuse me?”

“I like you, Jay, I do. And when the tragedy hit last year, when the fires were still burning, I was one of the main ones said you were the man to call.”

“Thank you,” Jay says cautiously.

Jim finishes the rest of the scotch in one gulp. His hand shakes as he sets his glass on the bar top. “But it's a lot of us involved in this thing. What, three hundred plaintiffs or something like that?”

“Four hundred and eighty-seven,” Jay says.

He finds himself reaching for the beer, taking a swallow without thinking, anything to wet the back of his suddenly dry throat. It's a Michelob, ice cold.

“Well, there's some out there, Jay, who ain't happy with the way things are going. I think a lot of folks, myself included, thought we'd be further along in the process by now. Ruby and I, we've been lucky, least as it goes with the doctors and stuff. There's some up to the north side of the neighborhood got their kids on inhalers now, in and out of clinics. And I know you know this stuff too. But my house, others on my street, the money we paid to fix things, my roof, resodding the lawn, the repaint on my wife's car and mine, that's money we're not
seeing back.” Mr. Wainwright picks up his glass, as if he forgot it was empty, and then sets it down again. Under the bare bulbs of the Diamond Lounge's main room, the white hair against his deep brown skin makes a halo effect. “I put my faith in you, and that's good enough for me, but there's some out there that are feeling strung along.”

They're not the only ones, Jay thinks.

He's put out his own money too. Nearly thirty thousand to test the soil and the water out there, another fifty grand to two researchers at Baylor to study the long-term medical effects of the chemical burn on adults and children, and over a thousand hours at forty-five bucks a pop for an investigator to take plaintiff and witness statements, the same woman he used in Arkansas for the Chemlyne trial. Not to mention money he's loaned to more than a dozen families in Pleasantville, newcomers, ones who bought in late to the neighborhood, who still have young kids, college to pay for, braces, school trips and summer camps, piano lessons and new shoes every six months, the ones who can't easily afford to cover what insurance won't. While they wait for settlement checks to start rolling in, Jay has paid out of his own pocket to patch their roofs, redo drywall damaged by the fire hoses, or pad out the rent money needed for a temporary apartment while repairs are done on their homes. Pleasantville is his entire practice now, and he'll go broke if he can't settle it soon.

The truth is . . . he's planning to retire after this. Ellie's college and Ben's, pay off the house, the whole bit, and then he's going to sit down somewhere for a few years, take as long as he wants to figure out what the point of any of this has been, what grace he's meant to make of his flesh and bone, the breath that won't stop, even if his wife has none. He's going to lie down somewhere and
wait
. Jay is forty-six now, which might as well be sixty in black man years. Kwame Mackalvy had a heart attack
last year, was in the hospital for a week afterward, scared out of his mind. Jay took him peanut brittle and copies of
The Nation
and
Jet
, shook the man's hand when he left and said they'd get together real soon. Kwame, still Lloyd to Jay, his old running buddy, he'd hung on long enough to get released from the hospital, only to drop dead in his front yard two days later. Bernie's dad had a prostate scare this summer. Penny, Jay's baby sister, is on three different medications to lower her blood pressure. It's hard some days not to view life as little more than the space between diagnoses, the rest between twin notes of tragedy and catastrophe. And Jay doesn't want to spend his knee-deep in other people's problems.

He hasn't told Eddie Mae yet, hasn't said the words out loud to himself.

But he's through practicing law.

He reminds Jim, “We got ProFerma up to seven-point-five in just the last few months.” It's another bullshit number, he knows, and one that had taken at least ten meetings to get to. He is actually trying to reach fifty million, to come close to what he did with the Cole case, what he still, for personal reasons, considers his proudest moment as an attorney. Fifty million would mean over seventy thousand dollars for each family. It isn't enough, but nothing ever would be, and seventy grand could patch a house, pay off medical bills, even get a kid to college. The trick is to arrive at that number without a trial.

A trial he can't do.

He just doesn't have it in him anymore.

He never really got over Arkansas, his last big case, those months and months he spent in court while his wife, unbeknownst to him, was dying at home. And for what exactly? It's hard not to look back and see the whole thing as a waste. How do you bill a client for the hours you should have been by your wife's side, for time you can't get back?

This infighting among plaintiffs, different views on how to proceed and impatience at the glacial pace of the legal system, that's to be expected, and he tells Wainwright so. “No, this is bigger than that,” Jim says. “There's a group of them, Jelly Lopez and Bill Rodriguez, they're talking about going with another lawyer. I wanted to say something last night, but it wasn't the right time.”

“No, of course not.”

“They've already met with someone.”

“Who?”

Jim reaches into the back pocket of his jeans and pulls out a folded Post-it note, on which he'd carefully printed the name. “Ricardo Aguilar.”

“Never heard of him.”

But it explains something strange ProFerma's lawyer said during their last meeting, a lunch at Irma's downtown. Drunk on Patrón, his slim, pinkish face sweating from the heat of raw chiles and the buzzing neon signs, he'd boasted that he happened to know the community's bottom line, and it was less money than Jay was proposing, even suggesting some folks might take as little as a few thousand dollars and a buyout of their property. At the time Jay took it for a bluff, but now he wonders if ProFerma has been illegally talking to someone behind his back.

Mr. Wainwright nods to the gentleman behind the bar, raising his glass for a refill. Jay takes a second pull on his Michelob. Jelly Lopez, Jules to his employers at ConocoPhillips, where he works as a drilling supervisor, was one of the last to sign on as Jay's client, filling out the plaintiff's forms in Jay's office, his wife clutching her purse in her lap while he asked five questions for every two on a page. Why did Jay need to know this about him? Why did Jay need to know that? What did his annual income, his medical history, or his wife's family's educational
background have to do with the fires or getting ProFerma to pay to replace the air ducts in his house, to clean the water his kids drink? He's high maintenance, to put it mildly, but certainly not the worst Jay's ever seen. He was in a hurry to see somebody pay for what was done, and Jay understood. Jelly and Bill Rodriguez are neighbors. They share a fence on Berndale, and their kids are in the same preschool class. Bill's son was diagnosed with asthma in April. “I wouldn't have put much stock in it, some of the new folks just wanting a say in how things are done,” Jim says, “not wanting to feel hemmed in by all our voices, the old guard, folks who've been in Pleasantville for some forty years, since we were younger than them. You know we vote on any and everything out there, even what color to paint the trim on the community center. But majority rule don't feel much like a democracy if you're always sweating from underneath it.” He gives a nod of thanks as the bartender pours another glass of Ezra Brooks. Overhead, the music coming through the speakers slows. They're playing a Texas favorite now, A. G. Hats, the first track off his album,
Belle Blue
, the only one he ever recorded. A run of black keys, followed by the familiar voice, thick and slow as honey.
See, dreams the only thing I got, the onliest way I know how to live . . .

“But this thing is gaining a little steam,” Jim says. “And not just with folks like Jelly and Bill.” From his other back pocket he pulls a letter-size piece of paper folded in thirds. He holds it out for Jay. “This has been making the rounds since before the election. Might have come out of Acton's campaign, or more likely something Wolcott had her people send out.”

It's a flyer, printed on a mimeograph machine, the kind that used to reside in every school and church office in the country, making loads of smudged copies. There is probably one collecting dust in a back room at the Pleasantville community center right now, and it occurs to Jay that the author of this flyer must
have known that too, as this leaflet was clearly designed to appear as if it originated within the community, as if a group of concerned citizens were reaching out to their own. The words are in black and white, but fuzzy around the edges. There are exclamation points going all the way down the page, starting with the heading across the top.

WHO IS REALLY LOOKING OUT FOR THE CITIZEN

OF PLEASANTVILLE!

BEFORE YOU CAST YOUR VOTE!

DEMAND AN ANSWER FROM AXEL HATHORNE

ABOUT HIS SUPPORT FOR THE

BUFFALO BAYOU DEVELOPMENT PROJECT!

AND

WHAT IT MEANS FOR OUR FUTURE!

THIS COUDL BE THE MOST IMPORTANT VOTE IN

PLEASANTVILLE'S FUTRE!

“What's the Buffalo Bayou Development Project?” Jay asks.

“It's another stab at the River Walk thing, turning the banks of Buffalo Bayou into a city showcase, with restaurants and shops, boat rides up and down the bayou.” Jay cringes at the memory of his own boat ride on Buffalo Bayou fifteen years ago, the late-night leap to save a drowning woman, an act of chivalry that nearly got him killed. But he doesn't know how a development deal miles up the bayou would affect the neighborhood of Pleasantville.

“Who knows?” Jim continues. “But folks are skittish. They told us the freeway would modernize things.” He's speaking of 610, the Loop that circles the city's center. “But that only boxed us in on all sides, all these plants and factories moving to the area, in our backyard. Who knows if ProFerma would have set up shop here without the highway being built? Development in
this city is like a cancer, spread every which way, eating everything in its path. They start talking hotels, restaurants, tourist pulls, all up and down the bayou and out to the Ship Channel, and who's to say they won't tear right through the back side of Pleasantville? The bayou's not even a mile from us.” He stares into his glass. “We should never have let those factories in, should have laid down in the streets against it, like we did with the freeway. We should have fought it.”

“And you asked Axel about it, the bayou thing?”