Black Water Rising

head on it like a pillow. He’s snoring softly, like a baby.

“No,” Lonnie says finally. “I never talked to her.”

She motions for the girl behind the bar to bring her another beer. “Not for lack of trying, though. I guess by the time I got to her, she was all talked out.”

“You think she was talking to another reporter or some­ thing?”

“More like the Federal Trade Commission.” She pops a jala­ peno pepper in her mouth, cooling the sting of it by sucking air through her front teeth. “They’ve been looking at Cole Oil for about six months now.”

“How do you know that?”

She smiles, sly and prideful. “I am a reporter.”

“I don’t get it,” Jay says, shaking his head. “Why are you sit­ ting on this?”

Lonnie rolls her eyes. “It ain’t all that simple,” she says. She leans across the table, propping her elbows on top of the maps. “What you gotta understand is, this was a joke assignment, that piece you read. It wasn’t supposed to be much of nothing. I mean, look, I’m barely two years out of the University of Missouri,” she says. “I’ve had maybe two bylines. I’m a girl, and untested. To send me out to High Point, it was a joke, you understand? Write a little something about the kook by the water, an old man shak­ ing his fist in the air. ‘Write it cute,’ my editor said. I mean, that is literally what he said. This was never meant to be more than Sunday morning filler.”

“So what happened?”

“Well, it started with the fact-checkers downstairs,” she says, letting out a soft burp. “I mean, nobody could corroborate any of it. Except for the obvious—the factory closed and the old man was pissed, driving everybody around him crazy. But this shit about the government, none of that added up,” she says. “Of course, to my editor, this only added to the ‘character’ of the piece, you know, ’cause it only made Ainsley sound crazier, which, to him, was the story. I mean, one man marching on Washington . . . it’s a joke, right?”

“How did you get to the FTC?”

Philips nods her head, as in “hold on,” and reaches for another chip. “I kind of knew from the beginning that there was some­ thing missing from the story. But we had a slot to fill, so at print time, we went with what we had, what you read. Then about a week later, I get a call returned. A guy from the Energy Depart­ ment, who’s been there since Ford. And lo and behold, just like you said, the U.S. government has only a handful of SPR sites in the country, and High Point, Texas, ain’t one of ’em. Therefore, he cannot comment. But then he starts asking me a lot of ques­ tions on what I know about the whole deal. In the course of my work, had I had any contact with an Alexander Bakker or Elise Linsey? Questions like that, you know. And then he asked if I had spoken with any other current or former employees of Cole Oil.”

Three beers, and the heat is starting to catch up to her. She peels the flannel shirt off her shoulders, revealing a rather frilly camisole underneath.

“You get those sometimes,” she says. “The ones behind a desk, the type that don’t want to make an official statement, but got a lot of shit they wanna say anyway. He was dropping hints left and right. I mean, this whole thing might not have gone anywhere if this dude hadn’t called me back.”

“Who’s Bakker?” he asks.

“A lawyer.”

“I thought we were talking about the FTC?”

“We are, we are,” Lonnie says. “But it started with the DOE. They were looking at the big oil companies— your Exxons and Shells and Coles—as early as seventy-four. The Carter administration, what I come to find out on my own, launched a full-fledged investigation round about seventyseven, looking into charges of hoarding and price gouging while the whole country was in the midst of a major crisis. And it’s not just this deal with the salt caverns, of which I would venture to guess there are many, all along the coast, filled to the brim and effectively hidden underground,” she says, pointing to the geological maps on the table. “That ain’t even half the shit they been pulling.” She rests her cigarette in the ashtray, freeing up her hands to punctuate the story, accenting every other word with a two-handed flourish in the air. “But it was a half-assed investigation from the start, never fully funded, so my guy on the inside tells it. I mean, hell, half of the Energy Department’s policy was written by oil industry analysts, guys who used to work for Cole and Shell and Exxon and Gulf Oil. You understand? The shit went nowhere. And then when Reagan and Bush came in, the investigation was officially closed. Big fucking surprise, right?” she says. “Espe­ cially with all the friends the Coles got up in Washington. The whole thing just went away.”

A few more customers trickle into the restaurant. The man in the booth lifts his head once, looks right at Jay, then lays it back down. Jay can smell onions and fried corn coming out of the kitchen, chicken mole and cilantro.

“And then here comes Mr. Ainsley, walking on Washing­ ton.”

Lonnie smiles at the imagery, the sheer lunacy of it.

“And somebody in the Energy Department, and even I don’t know who, passed some of their information, shit they put together along the way, over to the FTC. All of a sudden, the word gets passed along . . . those boys down in Texas are set­ ting prices like they ain’t got enough to fill a fucking Toyota when anybody with their eyes wide open can see what’s really going on in this industry.” She starts to whisper, as if she fears just speaking this out loud might cause a panic right here in the restaurant. “Barrel prices dipping lower than Elizabeth Taylor’s neckline, industry analysts predicting a worldwide oil glut. A glut, Mr. Porter,” she says with a caustic smile. “You understand what that means, don’t you? It means this whole city’s economy is built on a lie.”

She picks up her cigarette from the ashtray and takes a long drag, blowing the smoke through her tiny nostrils, waving it away from her hair. “And the party’s about over. They can’t sus­ tain this, and they know it. Hiding the oil, that’s just one tactic of many, to keep the supply-and-demand balance the way they want it. If the shit hadn’t started coming up in Ainsley’s backyard,” Lonnie says, “wouldn’t nobody have ever known the difference, you see?”

Jay thinks about the petrochemical workers, out on strike alongside the longshoremen, and the shutdown at the Cole refin­ ery. The strike, he realizes, would have made it impossible to move the oil that was leaking out of the cavern, to tuck it safely away somewhere else, like back in the oil drums at the plant. The strike, therefore, made it impossible for the company to hide its crime, which was, by then, starting to come up in plain sight, like