Black Water Rising

by Attica Locke

  A few months later, Marcus Dupri would testify on the stand that he saw what happened next from the stage. He saw the first chair get thrown. It was a white kid, he said to the judge and jury. It was SDS who started the worst of it.

  But in the end, it didn’t matter because, after that, all hell broke loose.

  First, some of the SDS boys in the back overturned a table. The rest of them rushed the stage.

  The African liberation banner came down in someone’s fist. Marcus Dupri shoved one of the white kids tearing up the stage.

  Somebody punched Lloyd across the mouth.

  Lloyd let go of Roger and grabbed a member of SDS by the 274 Attic a L o c ke

  back of the neck. He whacked the kid across the knees with the microphone stand.

  The whole stage exploded into a ball of arms and legs. Bumpy fired his weapon into the air.

  In the back, the cafeteria workers ran.

  Jay ducked, covering his head as the first window was bro­

  ken.

  He reached for Cynthia. But she was gone.

  In the chaos, they were separated.

  He crawled across the floor, staying low.

  He was, foolish as it may seem now, looking for her. It was the university police who showed up first. A huge tacti­

  cal mistake. Only three officers to deal with two hundred or so riotous college students, some of them armed. They should have waited for the team of HPD officers who were only a few minutes behind them. Instead, the campus cops arrived, ill equipped and unable to stop most of the people from running for the exits. Bumpy got out. Lloyd and Roger too.

  Alfreda and Delores.

  Jay was still on the floor when HPD stormed the building a few moments later. The cops lined them up in a paddy wagon,

  “niggers on one side, whites on the other.” The news photogra­

  pher showed them his press pass, and they let him go, but not before confiscating his camera. Jay, his hands cuffed behind his back, watched as they kicked the photographer out of the van, slamming the door on him while he shouted on the street, going on about his rights.

  At the station, the men were booked together, then segregated once again, into separate cells. By the next morning, they were released one by one.

  All of them except Jay.

  His lawyer tried to prepare him a few minutes before the Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 275

  arraignment. The charge was inciting a riot. Jay said he wasn’t guilty, so that was the plea. It was all cut and dry, he thought. Except the judge refused bail. They wouldn’t let him go home. Then, a few days after his arraignment, they moved him from men’s central to a holding cell at the federal courthouse down­

  town. He tried to rap with the officers who made the escort, but nobody would tell him nothing.

  He asked to speak to his lawyer.

  They sent a new guy. A kid not that much older than Jay. They met in a dirty room with low light and no windows. The kid had a folder tucked under his arm.

  Jay said, for the dozenth time, that this was all a misunder­

  standing. He’d given a speech, which the United States Consti­

  tution, last he checked, gave him every right to do. He hadn’t thrown one chair, hadn’t destroyed any property or asked any­

  body else to do so. And he had the witnesses to prove it. It was a rally, he said, not a riot.

  “That,” the lawyer said, “is the least of your problems.”

  From his folder, he pulled out a black-and-white photo. It was the rally. Jay onstage. A shot of him clocking Roger Holloway.

  “The feds want to charge you with conspiracy to commit murder against a federal informant, Mr. Porter.”

  It was official: Roger Holloway was a snitch.

  Jay pushed the photo across the table. “This is bullshit,” he said. “I hit the guy ’cause he was being a punk, not ’cause I was trying to kill him.”

  “They got you on tape, Jay.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Something about you, uh, ‘handling a nigger.’ ”

  Jay shook his head. No, man, you got it all wrong. Then he remembered.

  276 Attic a L o c ke

  The phone call to Stokely. The call he’d made from Cynthia’s house.

  Jay’s stomach sank, down past his knees.

  It was nearly impossible for him to accept what he was hearing. For yes, it was conceivable that the federal government knew about his relationship with Cynthia, that they had bugged her place as well as his. But he also, in this moment, had to acknowl­

  edge the possibility that Cynthia—who had been the first to point out Roger’s suspicious behavior, who had chided Jay for not doing something about it, who had shown up at the rally uninvited—had put the bug in the phone herself, had kissed his forehead and walked out the door.

  C h a p t e r 2 1 He wakes up alone, about an hour before dawn, his wife some­

  where way across town. He lies curled up on the couch, one hand lifted over his head, balancing a glass of whiskey on the arm of the sofa. His third, if you count the two he downed when he walked in the door tonight, before he collapsed on the couch into a few fitful hours of sleep, his dreams a disjointed parade of faces.

  Lyndon “Bumpy” Williams and Marcus Dupri. Lloyd Mackalvy and Alfreda Watkins. Charlie Wade Robinson and Natalia Greenwood. Lionel Jessup and Ronnie Powell and M. J. Frank. Carl Petersen. Cynthia Maddox. He woke up think­

  ing about them all, marveling at the difference a decade makes, 278 Attic a L o c ke

  between then and now, between their dreams and where they landed. From death to prison to the mayor’s office, and the many cramped spaces in between.

  Of them all, Cynthia made the greatest leap.

  By whatever means . . . Jay may never know.

  The true pain of it really, the not knowing.

  And the blinding confusion that brings.

  Jay rolls over and stares at his water-stained ceiling. He rests the half-empty glass of whiskey on his bare chest, feeling the cool ring of its bottom against his skin. He remembers the promise he made to his wife. The promise to himself. Of a home. A man. One with moving parts. And a working heart.

  Because he can’t sleep, he pulls the wad of folded-up copier pages out of the pocket of his pants. They are newspaper articles and such, part of Rolly’s full report on Elise Linsey. Jay glanced at them once in the dark cab of Rolly’s truck. Now, alone in his apartment, he reads through the pages carefully for the first time, absorbing every detail of the life they describe. He reads about Elise Linsey’s high school track team, her mother dying, and the arrests that made it into the back pages of the Pasadena Citizen and the Houston Chronicle and the Post. Slowly, though, as he continues to read, a picture of the new, improved Elise Linsey emerges in the printed pages. Over the last eight months, her name has been mentioned in both of the city’s main newspapers as a contact for residential properties newly on the market. One of the real estate listings is for the empty condo at the Sugar Oaks Plantation. The pages give Jay a picture of her current professional life. It is entirely possible that Elise Linsey has made a good living selling high-end suburban homes, that she’s turned her life around.

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 279

  The only really curious bit in the stack of newspaper clippings is an article from the Houston Chronicle that Jay has to read twice before he understands it, or rather what, at all, it has to do with Elise Linsey. He runs his finger down the columns to find her name in print because he missed it the first time around. The article is several inches wide, with a large photo in the center—a picture of a craggy-looking man in his early sixties, wearing a baseball cap and overalls, one side of them held up by a large safety pin. From first glance, Jay takes him for a work­

  ing man, can almost see the dirt under his fingernails and smell the sweat off his back. In the picture, the man is standing on what appears to be his front porch. There’s a Texas flag waving behind his h
ead and limp petunias in a box planter hanging from a kitchen window. In his hands, the man is holding an oversize poster board, eight very distinct words printed on it: jimmy carter, give me my dang job back!

  jimmy carter has been crossed out with two dark lines, replaced by ronald reagan, whose name has been scribbled in an arc over Carter’s.

  The caption beneath the photo reads:

  Erman Joseph Ainsley, of High Point, returns from Washington, D.C.

  The piece, from a Sunday Chronicle a couple of months back, is printed beneath a boldface heading called “Cityscapes,” where readers can find little tidbits of nonessential news, mostly local color and commentary. Stories highlighting a senior citizen beauty pageant or a preschool golf team or a dog somebody trained to barbecue brisket. Cute little stories about local eccen­

  trics or pieces of neighborhood flavor. It’s exactly the place you’d expect to find an article about Erman Joseph Ainsley, of High Point, Texas—a man who had, according to the article, just returned from his second one-man march on Washington: 280 Attic a L o c ke

  Don’t get Erman Joseph Ainsley started about the New Testament’s David and Goliath. You’re liable to get an hour-long lecture about the pitiful state of humanity, or about the big guns in Washington who, he says, want to take advantage of your fears.

  “They think they can get away with any damn thing,”

  Ainsley, a former salt mine worker, says, speaking of the government. “But not on my watch. Not here in High Point.”

  Ask anyone in High Point, Texas, a small community just outside Baytown, and they’ll tell you that Erman Ainsley is not a man easily deterred. For the past four years—since he lost his job a few months short of retire­

  ment when the Crystal-Smith Salt Co. closed its seventyfive-year-old factory in High Point—Ainsley has been working tirelessly to save his beloved town. “I’ve lived here all my life,” he says. “I was born in this house.”

  Ainsley looks young for his sixty-plus years. He talks fast and rarely stops for a breath. “My daddy worked the mine, my granddaddy before him. This is all I’ve ever known. When they took that, they took everything. What we got left?”

  The closing of the mine was a crushing blow to a town with no other industry, save for small coffee shops and a single hotel that served workers who came from as far as Beaumont and Port Arthur to work two-and three-day shifts at the mine. The hotel has since closed. Two small cafés on High Point’s Main Street are also considering closing.

  “It just ain’t enough people here no more,” says Wanda Beasley, a woman in her early fifties who favors hot pink jogging suits and Keds sneakers. She’s been running her Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 281

  father’s restaurant, the Hot Pot, for twenty years now. “I’ve never seen it this bad.”

  Most of the houses in Mr. Ainsley’s modest neighbor­

  hood are boarded up. Ainsley’s newest beef is with the real estate developers who are canvassing the town and buying up acres and acres of residential property. “If somebody comes around offering me some money, you can believe I’m gonna take it and get the hell out of here,”

  says one resident in between bites of Wanda’s “famous”

  Frito pie.

  It’s this lack of town loyalty that gets under Ainsley’s skin.

  “They sold out,” he says.

  His crusade started with the local city council, then his state representative, then his congressman—writing letters, calling their offices incessantly, demanding help for his struggling town—but these days Ainsley directs almost as much of his energy toward his own neighbors. Two or three days a week, he stands in front of Wanda’s place and passes out flyers, warning people against talking to any real estate folks from Houston.

  Some people in the community consider him a menace. He’s being blamed for a rash of strange, late-night phone calls in town—lots of heavy breathing and abrupt hangups. A number of townsfolk think that Ainsley is making the calls to scare the residents he feels are contributing to the problem. But when presented with the accusation, Ainsley responded with a single harsh word, “Hogwash.”

  He doesn’t seem to care that he’s alienating the very people he claims to be trying to help. He just wants the world to know what’s going on in High Point. From his personal Rolodex, Ainsley offered this reporter the name 282 Attic a L o c ke

  and home addresses of the former owners of the CrystalSmith Salt Co., as well as the name of a real estate agent representing the Stardale Development Company, based in Houston, which has already bought twenty homes in High Point. Pat Crystal and Leslie Smith offered a writ­

  ten statement thanking Mr. Ainsley for his dedication and years of service to their company, adding that the closing of the salt mine was simply an economic decision. Elise Linsey, the real estate agent, could not be reached for comment.

  Through the floorboards, Jay hears Mr. Johnson’s television set come on.

  A few seconds later, he hears the opening theme song to AM Magazine, a locally produced morning news show, which his neighbor often listens to at full volume. The song means it’s half past six. Jay is still drunk. In a minute, he will get up, make a pot of strong coffee, and call his wife. For now, he remains sunk into the couch, staring at the article.

  He doesn’t know which is more interesting. The fact that Elise Linsey was, at one point, working for a well-financed real estate development company. Or the byline at the top of the page. The name catches his attention right away. It’s familiar to him even before he can exactly place where he’s seen it. When it finally comes to him, the name, it pushes him up out of his seat.

  Because the man who wrote the article about Erman Joseph Ainsley and the closed salt mine is the same man who left the note for Elise Linsey at her doorstep—the note that Jay found by chance, days before her arraignment, before her court case had even made the evening news.

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 283

  By the time he makes it into work, there are two cops waiting for him.

  Eddie Mae takes one look at Jay and, unsolicited, brings him a can of tomato juice from the vending machine by the parking lot. She sets the morning-after elixir on her desk. Jay downs it in a single gulp, his hand shaking a bit as he returns the empty can to Eddie Mae. He steals a nervous glance through the open doorway to his private office, where the cops are waiting. Detec­

  tives, he can tell by their dress, the starched shirt collars and clean-shaven skin.

  “What in the hell happened to you anyway?” Eddie Mae asks, nodding at his bruised face. He knows he looks like hell, and his nerves are only making things worse. He dabs his damp fore­

  head with a corner of his sleeve and straightens his tie. “Lock the door,” he says to Eddie Mae. “And don’t let anybody in.”

  “Mr. Porter?”

  Jay buttons his suit jacket and walks into his office. One of the cops, in his late thirties, is seated in front of Jay’s desk smoking a cigarette, Jay’s ashtray resting on his thigh. The other cop, the older one, is standing next to Jay’s filing cabinet, a few inches from the stash of dirty money. Jay wonders how much they know, how much trouble he’s already in.

  The young one moves first, returning Jay’s ashtray to his desk and moving quickly onto his feet. He shakes Jay’s hand, the ciga­

  rette resting between his middle and ring fingers. “I’m Detective Andy Bradshaw, Mr. Porter. And this is Detective Sam Widman, my partner.” Widman is still lingering by the filing cabinet, his eyes scanning the stack of files on top. He appears to be reading the names on the labels. He glances at Jay and gives him a simple nod. 284 Attic a L o c ke

  The blinds in Jay’s office are open. He takes a measured stride across the room, aware that the cops’ investigation began before he even walked into the room; they’re marking his movements. He pulls a string to close the blinds, then bends to pick up a stray stack of files on the floor, walking them to his desk as if this is all a part of his morning routine. “What
can I help you with, Officers?”

  “What happened to your face?” Widman speaks for the first time. He’s still standing by the filing cabinet, the heel of his shoe practically touching the drawer where the money is hiding. He’s staring at Jay, waiting for an answer.

  “I fell down some stairs,” Jay says.

  Widman cocks his head to one side, eyeing the shape and color of the bruises on Jay’s face. “You must have fallen pretty hard, Mr. Porter.”

  “Can I ask what this is about, Detectives?”

  “You know a man named Marshall Hennings?”

  “Pardon?” Jay asks, because at first the name doesn’t even register.

  Widman’s partner, Bradshaw, stubs his cigarette into the ash­

  tray. “Mr. Hennings manned a boat you were on, Mr. Porter, the night of August first.”

  So . . . here we go.

  “ Yes, that’s right,” he says.

  “Mr. Porter, Mr. Hennings died sometime shortly thereafter,”

  Widman says. “He was found in his automobile in a ditch along Elysian, north of here. It was more likely than not a car accident, but in the course of our investigation, some questions came up. And, you know, we have to look at every angle.”

  “Sure.”

  “That’s why we’re here,” Detective Bradshaw says.

  “About Marshall?” Jay asks.

  “Yes.”

  Bla c k Wat er R isi n g 285

  Jay looks back and forth between the two detectives. “Mar­

  shall?”

  “Did Mr. Hennings seem all right to you that night?” Widman asks. “Did he seem well?”

  “Well, I’d never met the man before, but . . . sure, he seemed fine.”

  “And there was nothing unusual about his behavior?”

  “No.”

  “Nothing unusual about that night at all.”

  Jay pretends to consider this. “No, not that I can recall.”

  Detective Bradshaw makes a note on a tiny pad he lifts from his shirt pocket. Widman watches him, then glances down at his right shoe, the heel of which he taps lightly against the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet. “Jimmy Rochelle, a relative of Mr. Hennings, said something about you asking if Marshall had talked to any cops,” Widman says, looking up. “Why did you imagine Mr. Hennings would have been in touch with law enforcement?”