Black Water Rising

“If I’m remembering it correctly, the defendant has admitted to being in the man’s car, out to dinner or something like that.” Charlie, following the action from his seat, nods his head. The judge leans forward in her chair, her eyes focused on the state’s attorney. “Do you have anything that puts the defendant at the scene of the crime? An eyewitness, a murder weapon?”

“No, Your Honor,” the prosecutor says.

Charlie, on cue, stands and asks for a dismissal of the case, based on a supreme lack of evidence. Judge Vroland announces to the room that she’s inclined to agree with Mr. Luckman. She doesn’t seem particularly pleased by this fact. She looks at the prosecutor as if her hands are tied, advising the attorney to pull together some more evidence and take it back to a grand jury. “I just can’t see you mounting a case with what you got now.”

Behind him, Jay hears Lonnie whisper, “Oh, boy.”

A moment later, Judge Vroland makes her second ruling of the day, granting defense counsel’s motion for a dismissal of the case.

In less than twelve minutes, it’s all over.

Elise is free to go. The gun, and the truth, still buried beneath the surface.

She kisses her lawyer on the cheek, looking, only once, over his shoulder. She spots Jay in the gallery. Across her thin, pinkish lips, he sees something he takes for a smile as the clerk calls the next case on the docket. Lonnie puts a hand on Jay’s shoulder. “What now?” she asks.

Jay says the only thing he can think of. “I have to go pick up my wife.”

He stops in the washroom on his way out of the building. For five whole minutes, he stands alone over an empty sink, watching water run. When he feels he has the strength, he splashes cool water on his face, wiping at his eyes with his sleeve. Behind him, one of the stall doors opens. A man, taller than Jay, glides to the row of washbasins. Jay catches a glimpse of him in the bathroom mirror. The man is lean, his features seemingly cut from stone. The face is instantly familiar.

Thomas Cole is standing at the sink right next to him.

Jay stands perfectly still, watching Cole admire his own reflection, smoothing a few wayward hairs on his dark blond head. When Cole finally looks up, catching Jay’s reflection in the mirror, he smiles, an odd twinkle in his steely gray eyes. “Don’t make me regret I didn’t kill you when I had the chance,” he says, his tone mannered and cool, the smile belying his true menace.

Just then, two lawyers enter the men’s room. They stand at the urinals rehashing a prosecutor’s performance in Judge Kup­ perman’s courtroom; they are both convinced the prosecutor passed gas at some point during her opening statement. In the mirror, Cole gives Jay a wink. He tucks his hands into the pock­ ets of his linen trousers and saunters out of the men’s room. Jay stays behind at the washbasin, feeling a heat radiate through his whole body. He is almost faint with it, a rage that has the power to break him if he doesn’t hold himself together. Everything, he knows, depends on him keeping a cool head.

Bernadine is waiting for him on the front steps of the church, one hand on her swollen belly, the other tangled in the straps of her purse. She’s biting her bottom lip when he comes up the walk, and one of her french braids has started to come loose in the back. She looks to have slept as little as he did last night. When he’s within loving distance of her arms, she grabs hold of his neck. In his ear, she exhales. One breath, one syllable. She whispers his name, his father’s first initial. On the stairs, she’s two steps taller than he is, and it is something, he feels, to look up to this woman, to feel held up by his wife. She’s the first to tell him about the strike, the vote that ended it. They’re going to take a chance on this race-blind thing, she says.

“Daddy’s up in the office, on the phone right now. I know he wanted to say something to you about it.”

“Not now,” Jay says, feeling her belly close to his. “Let’s go home.”

He steals her away then, carrying her purse for her to the car. They leave without a word to anybody, ride the whole way to Third Ward in silence.

When they get to the apartment, Bernie takes a pair of chicken breasts out of the freezer for a late lunch. She lays the raw meat in a shallow pool of water in the kitchen sink. Jay takes off his jacket and tie. He lines up two beers on the dinette table, down­ ing the first in a matter of seconds. Bernie, never one in favor of daytime drinking, watches him without saying much of any­ thing. She keeps an eye on the chicken thawing in the sink, and when she gets bored with that, she shuffles across the kitchen floor, taking a seat across from her husband at the table.

Finally, Jay tells her what he’s thinking about doing next.

“Leave it alone,” she says, speaking softly to him, as if the baby were already here, already sleeping in the other room. “It’s over, Jay.”

“They brought this to my doorstep. They did this, not me.” He raises his voice in a way that makes her wince. He realizes she has never seen this side of him, that she came into his life long after he thought his anger had run out. He stares into the liv­ ing room, his gaze falling on the bleached-out spot on the floor, where he scrubbed blood with his bare hands. “They came into my house, Bernie.”

“I was here, Jay, alone,” she says. “This has to do with me too.”

“They came into our house,” he says. “I didn’t ask for any of this.”

“Then walk away.”

He shakes his head slowly. “They’re stealing from people, B. People like me and you. People like your daddy, your sister, the ladies at your church, working people. We’re paying more at the pump, paying more for our clothes, the shoes on our feet, the food the grocers pick up from their suppliers in those big, gassy eighteen-wheelers. This oil thing touches everything. You’re paying an extra fifty cents on that chicken breast for the cost of the plastic it’s wrapped in. That’s made from petroleum too,” he says, looking at his wife under the dim white light of the overhead bulb. “They’re cheatin’ people every which way. And I’m not gon’ be pushed into keeping my mouth shut about it.”

Bernie, listening to all this, bites her bottom lip.

Jay sets his beer can down, pushing it away.

There was a man, he says, a man who used to come around his granddaddy’s place, a little restaurant the family had up in Nigton. The man was a soldier, a vet, and a drunk. He used to come in every day in his old uniform, which was coming apart at the seams. He never had any money. And sometimes Jay’s mama would pay him a quarter to sweep up out front and get himself a little lunch. Mostly the man would just sit for hours at a stretch at