walking into a police station and offering information that
ties him to some other shooting . . . certainly not with his
felony arrest record. Free advice he gives to any prospective
client who walks through the door: don’t volunteer anything
to a cop that he didn’t ask for in the first place. Keep your
fucking mouth shut.
He already checked the
kitchen table in his shorts and bare feet. There was no more men
tion of a white male, shot twice in Fifth Ward. It’s as if the whole
thing was simply forgotten, and Jay tries to convince himself that he can do the same. He puts his mind and body to work, diving
into the mound of paperwork on his desk.
The rest of the day passes in a blur.
Eddie Mae gets a stomachache around four o’clock, the symp
toms of which are very vague. She comes out of the bathroom
wearing lipstick and fresh powder, asking if she can go home
early. She practically skips out the door when he says yes. At a
quarter to seven, Jay grabs his suit jacket and heads for his car.
First Love Antioch Baptist Church is located on the northeast side of Fifth Ward, out by the railroad tracks, where the Ewell Line runs east-west three times a day like clockwork, shaking the church’s fake stained glass. The church is small and poor and set in the middle of a residential street lined with one-room shacks. Jay parks right in front. He lights a cigarette and stares at a gray house down the street. She would be nearing eighty, he thinks. The juror at his trial. He used to bring her things, a bag of groceries every now and then or flowers, any little thing just to say thank you. She’s been dead three years, and her people, the ones who stay in the house now, won’t hardly ever open the door. They don’t know Jay or what their grandmother did for him, the life she saved.
He tosses his cigarette and steps out of his Buick, into the reckless path of a late-model Cadillac thumping by on the street, blasting music on the stereo, so loud the whole car shakes, rat tling gold chains hanging from the rearview mirror. Jay feels the crush of bass in his chest. He stares at the group of young men in the car. They’re no more than nineteen years old, brothers with do-rags mashed against their foreheads. They regard Jay with open suspicion, his pressed clothes and polished shoes. They seem to know he doesn’t belong here, in their neighborhood, in their time. As the car continues up the street, Jay can’t help but think of where he was at nineteen. Marching, strategizing, plan ning. Fighting for a hell of a lot more than gold chains hanging from a Coupe de Ville.
He turns for the church steps, hearing the last ringing chords of “Jesus, Come Walk with Me” on the church’s aging pipe organ. Choir practice is ending, Jay thinks, or just getting started. Inside the sanctuary, he walks down the blue-carpeted center aisle between the pews, where he walked on his wedding day. The man at the organ bench is small and thin, with a cheap, greasy Jheri curl slicked against the sides of his head. He’s scoop ing up sheet music. The woman standing next to him is packing up her hymnal.
It’s only then that Jay notices the men down front, filling up the first three rows. There’s got to be more than a dozen of them, men dressed in scuffed work boots, grimy jeans, and stained T-shirts, a few of which read brotherhood of longshoremen, local 116 in letters that are cracked and fading.
In an instant Jay knows what this is about, what he’s walked into. He can read it on the men’s stern faces, their rough, cal loused hands, the nylon caps clenched in their fists. He can smell it on them. The salt of the Gulf.
He knows this is some trouble about the strike.
Reverend Boykins stands in the center aisle, down in front of the pulpit. He waves a hand for Jay to come forward. “We’ve been waiting on you, son.”
They have all turned around now. They’re all looking at him.
In the crowd, Jay spots a familiar pair of dark brown eyes.
Kwame Mackalvy, who dropped “Lloyd,” his given name, sometime during their junior year at the University of Hous ton—“Lloyd” was a banker’s name, he’d said, an “establishment” name—is sitting in the second pew, wearing a union T-shirt over his loud and colorful dashiki. He runs a hand along the fresh, clean T-shirt as if admiring a new costume, getting into char acter. This is Kwame’s scene, Jay thinks, always some fight to be had, a cause to get behind. Kwame runs a community center a few blocks from Jay’s apartment, but the two men haven’t spoken in years. They run in different circles now, Jay with his middleclass aspirations and Kwame still holding notions of a coming revolution.
“Jay Porter,” Kwame says, drawing out the name, eyeing Jay’s suit and his close-cropped hair. He lets out a slow, catlike grin, his teeth white and unnaturally large. “White man still got you, huh, bro, one way or another.”
“It’s good to see you too, Lloyd,” Jay says flatly.
He’s relieved when Reverend Boykins opens the meeting, if only to move out of Kwame’s political crosshairs. His father-in law speaks to Jay first. “Son, you heard about the trouble we’ve been having down at the Ship Channel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, we got a bigger mess on our hands here.”
The Rev nods toward an older gentleman in the first pew. He’s wearing a Houston Independent School District janitor’s uniform, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his sleeve. Awkward and shy in front of the group, the man starts to put his hands in his pockets, forgetting he’s in his uniform, which doesn’t have any pockets. He rests his hands at his sides instead; then, with an elbow, he nudges a young man beside him. The boy, eighteen or nineteen, stands and turns, facing the rest of the men too. He’s wearing a sling on his left arm. His face is beaten something awful, bruised and discolored, his lip busted and swollen. One of his front teeth is chipped. “Mr. Porter,” the janitor says. “This here’s my son.” He puts a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “You can see they beat him good.
