our side, get the whole city behind us.”
Jay sighs, feeling again that the rules keep changing.
This is not my fight, he wants to say.
“I got a baby coming, sir,” he says. “I have to work.”
“How did it go with the doctor?” the Rev asks.
“He says Bernie’s looking real good, doesn’t expect any com plications.”
“Well, we’ll pray on that, son, that’s for sure.”
“Yes, sir,” Jay says.
He’s about to hang up the phone when his father-in-law pipes up again.
“Think about coming to the meeting, son. This is history, you know.”
He’s been stalling on the hooker case. Between the union drama and his anxieties about the shooting death in the newspaper, he’s let his work slip. And time is not on his side. It was two days ago that he promised Mr. Luckman he would present the settle ment offer to his client, but in truth, Jay’s been avoiding her alto gether—not returning her calls and telling Eddie Mae to inform her he’s out of the office if she should drop by unexpectedly. He doesn’t want his client to know about the offer. Dana Moreland would probably think $7,500 was enough to retire on. Jay is still holding out for more. If he can come up with a witness who saw J.T. and the girl, he thinks he can scare five digits out of Cum mings and Charlie Luckman. That in mind, he heads out to Gilley’s after sundown, this time dropping Bernie off at her sister’s, going it alone. It’s safer this way, he reasons, remembering the black Ford on his tail just two nights ago.
And anyway, Pasadena, Texas, is not exactly a pleasure desti nation.
There’s a sign on Red Bluff Road as it crosses Highway 225, the major artery in and out of Pasadena, Texas. It’s a homemade billboard, white with hand-painted black letters. It’s been there for more than a decade. A relic, some could argue. A holdover from another time. The sign has faded some, taking a beating from hundreds of South Texas storms. But cruising along at a cautious speed on Highway 225, Jay can see the words quite clearly from his car window:
PASADENA, TEXAS
“PROUD HOME OF THE KU KLUX KLAN”
Nearly every citizen in town, every cop and city official, including Pasadena’s mayor and the police chief, drives by the sign maybe two, three times a day, Jay thinks. On the way to the grocery store or work or taking their kid to the doctor. You can hardly get to city hall without driving past it. Folks on their way to church Sunday mornings see this sign every week, rising some fifty feet in the air, high above the buildings and trees. There has never been a campaign launched to tear the sign down, no arguments made in the local newspaper that perhaps this is no longer the time for such unapologetically racist fare, at least not broadcast so loudly. Hell, the city could just come in and break the sign down in the middle of the night if they were moved to. And yet here it is, lit eerily from below by city streetlights, the white of the billboard stark against the black sky. It still stands on high as the unofficial town welcome.
In an odd way, Jay finds the sign comforting. He has come to appreciate these kinds of visual clues. To see a Confederate flag flying outside someone’s home or in the back window of a pickup truck is about as accurate a warning system as a man could hope for, like the engine light coming on in your car a few miles before something may or may not blow up; it’s a caution before trouble starts, offering a clean window of time in which to make a run for it.
He would not be out here now if weren’t for business. There’s nothing appealing about Pasadena, Texas. It’s flat land, cow pas tures and overworked strawberry fields turned over for cheap housing, strip malls and liquor stores, gun shops and honky tonks. And somewhere in the middle of all of it, a small-time country singer opened the world’s largest nightclub, capable of holding more rednecks in one location than Jay ever wanted to encounter in a lifetime. Mickey Gilley’s place made the city of Pasadena, Texas, famous.
The dance hall sits on several acres, including the parking lot, which, at a quarter to ten, is filled with dozens of Chevy and Ford pickup trucks, most of which have a red-and-white Gilley’s bumper sticker above their tailpipes or pasted in the back win dows of their cabs. There must be dozens of people huddled in groups outside the club. They’re getting an early buzz on, drink ing beer out of coolers propped up in the beds of their trucks, lis tening to Waylon Jennings or the Charlie Daniels Band on their car stereos. At the front doors, there’s a group of girls waiting in line, their hair feathered up to the brims of their pink-and-white cowboy hats. They’re popping gum and sharing a can of hairspray. They glance in Jay’s direction, nudging each other as he drives through the parking lot, where all eyes are on him: a black man in a crisp white button-down, no pearl buttons or tassels, no beard on his face or even a mustache, driving a Buick Skylark no less. He is clearly not one of them.
Jay parks at the far end of the lot, the front end of his Buick tipping dangerously over the edge of a steep ditch that separates the gravel lot from the cars passing by on Spencer Highway. He has a sudden, bothersome thought of Jimmy’s cousin, an image of the old man driving off the side of the road, his body discov ered in a ditch, just like this one. And he wonders, not for the first time, why Marshall told his girl he’d be home after cleaning the boat, but when Jay spoke with Jimmy, he complained that his cousin had left it a mess.
He is about to open his car door when something hits the glass on the driver-side window, right by Jay’s ear. He jumps, thinking it’s a rock, that somebody is throwing stones at his car. He turns and sees a couple of roughnecks standing outside the driver-side door, one with his arms folded across his substantial chest, the other motioning for Jay to roll down the window. The man taps the window again with his pinky ring, a turquoise stone the size of a small biscuit. When Jay doesn’t respond fast enough, the one with the chest pushes his friend out of the way and taps on the glass harder. Slowly, Jay rolls down the window halfway. He can immediately smell the liquor on them, the sweat from a good day’s work. The one with the chest says, “You lost, boy?”
Jay rolls down the car window a little more, far enough so the men can see the .38 sitting in his lap, where he laid it about a half mile outside Pasadena’s city limits. He puts a hand on the butt of the weapon. “I believe I’m all right . . .
The one with the chest backs away first, pulling his friend with him.
Jay keeps one hand on his gun, watching their retreat in his side-view mirror. He takes his time getting out of the car, light ing a cigarette. Then he makes the long walk across the parking lot, keeping his eyes straight ahead.
