Black Water Rising

house. A down pay­ ment, maybe, with money left over to pay off his car and the loan he took out to start his practice. In this envelope is a front yard for his baby and money so Bernie won’t have to go back to work in a couple of months. It’s a way out of the tight spot he’s in. All just for keeping his mouth shut . . . which, hell, he was planning to do anyway.

But it’s a fool’s dream, he knows.

There’s no way he can spend this money.

Or turn it over to the cops.

Like it or not, he’s stuck with $25,000. He’s too skittish to stash the money in the apartment.

So he buries it in the trunk of his car, beneath a box of legal pads. Then he covers the whole thing with a rusted tire iron and dirty oil rags and walks up the back stairs into the apart­ ment, where his wife is so caught up in a late-night showing of Cooley High on channel 11 that she does not seem the least bit concerned about where he’s been for the last hour and a half. On the couch, she lifts her lips to meet his when he says hello, but never takes her eyes off the television screen, never gets a good look at the fear on her husband’s face. Jay walks alone down their narrow hallway to the bathroom. Inside, he locks the door. He lifts the porcelain lid to the toilet’s tank, laying its heavy weight up against the bathroom door. Inside the tepid water, he keeps a pint of Ezra Brooks whiskey. He stands over the sink, the cap to the liquor bottle rolling around the mouth of the drain, and finishes the bottle in two clean swallows.

He catches a startling glimpse of himself in the mirror. His tawny skin has gone a flat, ashy gray. His eyes are red-rimmed and veiny, and the cut on his cheek has left an unsightly mark. He fingers the ugly scab, thinking of the new wounds that have opened up tonight, the new questions . . . about the money in his trunk, the man from the black Ford, and the woman on the boat.

Her face comes to him at once. Almond-shaped and pale, eyes dark like her hair. He remembers the way she looked at him on the boat—her fear, which Jay now realizes he misread at first. His own racialized disposition, his sensitive, almost exquisite sense of the world as black and white, mistook her fear as a fear of him—a fear that he might snatch her purse or pull her hair or harm her in some way. But he had missed the whole picture, the subtle shade of gray. She was not afraid of him because he was black or even a man . . . but because something in his countenance that night must have told her that he was not convinced, even then, that she was a damsel in distress. What he saw that night was a woman on the wrong side of town at the wrong hour and for all the wrong reasons. And whatever this woman’s secrets, she’s apparently willing to kill for them.

But he still doesn’t know who she is.

Since that first bit in the paper, there has been nothing else mentioned in either of the city’s two major newspapers about a white male, shot twice, in Fifth Ward. There has been no mention of an arrest made in the case or even a suspect the cops might be talking to. Jay doesn’t know what this woman may have already told the police about him. For all he knows, they could have been watching him tonight . . . watching him take an envelope full of cash, what could easily look like pay­ ment for something else; the man from the black Ford said he could make it look as if Jay had something to do with the shooting.

He can’t help feeling that this whole thing is a setup, the money nothing but bait. But why, he thinks, would anyone want to trap him? His whole life he’s made no enemies he can think of . . . save for the U.S. government, of course.

The thought is like a hand grenade tossed under his bath­ room door.

He watches it roll across the floor, taking up position at his feet.

The blow, when it comes, takes his breath away.

He has a sudden, sharp memory of Charlie Wade Robin­ son, a Panther out of Detroit, Michigan. Back in ’69, the feds tried to nail him on a charge of conspiracy to commit mayhem and engage in unlawful assembly, which one progressive judge promptly threw out of his court. When the feds couldn’t get Charlie Wade on that, they tried to put him away on an illegal weapons charge. But he dodged that bullet too. Two years ago, the way Jay heard it, Charlie Wade Robinson was coming out of a McDonald’s restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia, his six-year-old daughter in tow, when federal officers arrested him on felony tax evasion, right there in the parking lot. Long out of the poli­ tics game by then, Charlie Wade had started an arcade busi­ ness with an investor he’d met at a party, and the IRS claimed they’d played fast and loose with the accounting. The feds had finally found a charge that would stick. He’s been locked up ever since.

Same thing happened to a Natalia Greenwood, out of Clarks­ ville, Mississippi. She cut her teeth during Freedom Summer in ’64, and went on to Washington with Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party later that year. When they wouldn’t let the folks from the MFDP vote at the Democratic convention, Natalia Greenwood turned radical. She started talking about taking up arms ’round about the time the Deacons for Defense were getting going in Bogalusa, Louisi­ ana, long before the Panthers. She was rumored to have an FBI file two inches thick. She was arrested several times, for crimes as serious as conspiracy to overthrow the United States govern­ ment and as petty as not paying her phone bill. But she was never actually charged with anything in court. Except in 1978. She followed a girlfriend into the bathroom of a Manhattan disco and was arrested along with half a dozen other women who were doing lines on the countertop. For a cocaine-possession charge, Natalia Greenwood spent two years in lockup and the state took away her kids.

The names and faces come back to him:

Lionel Jessup, Camille Bodelle, Ronnie Powell, M. J. Frank, Carl Petersen.

Men and women who fought on the front lines for what they believed in and were labeled radicals, had their lives threatened on a daily basis, and somehow managed to escape the reach of the federal government in their prime . . . but who now, in their thirties and forties, suddenly find themselves in trouble with the law again, arrested and locked away in jail.

They were fools back then, Jay thinks. Young and naive to believe they could raise voices and guns against a superpower and get away with it. Weren’t they always meant to pay . . . some­ day, some way? Hasn’t he, deep down, been waiting for this very moment? The day when they would come for him again?

He wakes up hours later, mouth dry, his head a throbbing mess.

In the light of a new day, he tries to rein in his paranoia.

After all, Hoover dropped dead in ’72; COINTELPRO had been officially discontinued the year before. Jay had his day in court, and they let him go home. That was the end of it. This is a different time, he tells himself; it’s only your mind that can’t move out of the prison of its past.

It’s all in your head, man.

Nobody was watching him tonight.

The man from the black Ford made sure of it. He had Jay drive out to an abandoned rail yard, didn’t he? A place surrounded by empty fields?