Black Water Rising

here at the union offices, Pat, but when was the last time you actually set foot on the docks? You see what’s going on here?” He looks out across the room. “Come on, y’all, somebody’s gotta say it.”

There are nervous faces around the room, men looking down at their shoes, biting their fingernails.

“Containers,” the man says. “You know what I’m talking about.”

“Now wait a minute, Tom,” Bodine says.

“Another five, ten years, and it’s all machines loading contain­ ers onto the ships. We got merchants hiring their own people now, loading the containers right at their home base, getting rigs to drive ’em to the docks, already set to load. The machines do the rest. The Teamsters aren’t stupid. Everybody needs a driver. But the rest of us . . . every one of us in here might be out of a job.”

This silences everyone, the pro-strikers and the headshakers.

“That is a trend we’re seeing,” Bodine says, keeping his voice even and calm, even as the dark, wet spots under his arms are spreading fast. “But we believe that full-scale containerization, at seventy-five percent or more, is a good ways off.”

“The stevedores are hiring less and less every year,” Tom says. “Tell the men the truth, Pat. If you’re gonna ask them to dig their own graves, they might as well know what it’s all about.”

The reporters in the room are scribbling furiously. The photographer from the Washington Post takes a picture of Bodine on the stage, his jaw slack and sweat on his upper lip. “Tom, you’re scaring these men unnecessarily,” Bodine says. “This is about equal wages, not the merchants’ shipping practices. And this thing with the containers . . . it’s out of our control.”

The room goes silent a moment, the men made painfully aware of their precarious situation, the fact that their leader can’t protect them, not really.

Jay looks at his watch. He’s hot and ready to go home. He hasn’t seen the man from the black Ford, nor has Darren Hayworth seen the man who orchestrated his beating; there is no way of knowing if they’re the same person. He could stay here all night, listening to the rhetoric being lobbed back and forth, but again, this is not his fight. By about a quarter after nine, they start passing the ballots around, even while people are still talking and arguing. A team of union officers passes around shoe boxes full of mismatched ink pens. There are two voting booths on the right side of the room, in front of the stage. A line quickly forms. Bodine, onstage, says he’ll hear from just one more speaker. He calls on a young black man who says he can’t worry about containers and machines and what’s gon’ happen in five years. He needs a good wage . . . right now.

Jay tells Darren he’ll be in touch. The kid nods, grabbing a ballot and a Bic pen from a passing shoe box. Jay turns and leaves the hall alone. Out front, most of the reporters are at the pay phones. Jay hears the words “economic crisis,” “a blow to Hous­ ton’s golden age,” even one man asserting that “there’s no way they’ll vote to strike.” Jay lights a cigarette and waits for a guy from the Post to finish up a call. When the phone is finally free, he dials over to Evelyn’s place.

“She’s not here,” Evelyn says, right off the bat.

“What?”

“Johnny drove her home, ’bout an hour ago.”

Johnny Noland is Evelyn’s on-and-off-again boyfriend.

“I told B I was picking her up,” Jay says.

“Well, I guess she didn’t feel like waiting around. And Johnny was looking for any excuse to get out of here.”

Jay can hear the television going in the background. “She got home okay?”

“I’m sure,” she says.

“She call you?”

“I’m sure she’s fine.”

Jay sighs. He can feel himself starting to sweat again.

“Look, Johnny ain’t right about a lot of things, but he wouldn’t just leave her out on the curb,” Evelyn says. “I’m sure he saw her to the door.”

“Right.”

“What you so testy about anyway?” He can hear her sipping at something on the other end, ice cubes clinking against glass. “Bernadine told me you broke into your own house. You not running some kind of insurance scam, are you? Don’t you get my baby girl in trouble now.” She takes another sip of whatever it is she’s drinking, sucking an ice cube into her lonely mouth and rolling it around. It occurs to Jay that she is quite possibly drunk.

“Good night, Evelyn.”

He hangs up the phone, fishes another dime out of his pocket, and dials home. When his wife picks up, she’s short of breath and in a sour mood. “Where’s that white fan, the little plastic one you brought home from the office?”

“It’s in the hall closet,” he says, relieved to hear her voice. “Don’t fool with it. I’ll get it down when I come home.” He bites at the meat of his thumb. “You all right, then?”

“I’m eight months’ pregnant, Jay,” she says. “I had the air con­ ditioner on an hour before I saw you’d left it set to eight y degrees. I tell you every time, it costs more money to cool the place down than if you just left it at seventy-six the whole time. It’s like an oven in here.”

“I won’t touch it again, I promise.” He smiles.

The men are starting to trickle out of the meeting, in twos and threes, their heads down, caps pulled low over their brows. Jay can’t read their faces, only their sluggish gaits, the heavy sense that something solemn passed through this hall tonight. Bernie practically reads his mind. “They gon’ strike, Jay?”

“I don’t know, baby,” Jay says into the phone. “I don’t know.”