Black Water Rising

out onto the tiny front porch, walking him to the little gate, just beyond earshot of the guard. “I’m not trying to hurt you, Jay,” she says.

“I thought you said you didn’t know my name.”

“You just told me,” she says, tilting her head to one side. “Inside.”

But he didn’t . . . did he?

He can’t remember. His head is starting to ache again.

“I just wish you wouldn’t go to the cops about anything, is all. They don’t know a thing about you,” she says. “I’ll give you whatever you want, I swear.”

“Why should I trust you?” Jay asks.

He still doesn’t understand the man from the black Ford, her insistent denials, or his missing gun. “How do I know you’re not trying to set me up?”

“I told you,” she says. “I don’t even know who you are.”

Chapter 20

He told her he believed her. She put a hand on his knee and asked him what he planned to do. They were laid out in the bed of her truck, parked behind an abandoned fairground, next to a faded red barn and a row of sunken bleachers. Underneath a crescent moon, they lay side by side, watching lightning bugs, early for this time of year, dance in the shadows of the pines. Cynthia had walked the grounds earlier, playing on an old swing set while Jay sat smoking cigarettes, watching from the bleach­ ers. She smelled of grass and clay. There were pine needles stuck in her hair. Jay kissed her lips in the back of the truck. She put her hands on the small of his back, inching toward him.

The sex was awkward.

It started too fast and never arrived anywhere. Cynthia kept fidgeting, too much in a hurry and getting in her own way. Even­ tually, Jay rolled off to one side and pulled up his pants. He lay on his back, listening to Otis Redding crackling on the Ford’s tinny radio. Sitting on the dock of the bay, wasting time . . .

Cynthia asked again about Roger. What was Jay prepared to do?

The cops had raided Bumpy’s girlfriend’s place the week before. Cynthia had found Jay coming out of a Spanish lab on the south side of campus and told him he needed to see Bumpy right away. Something big was going down.

Bumpy had been seeing a freshman that spring, a gal study­ ing biology over at TSU. She was living with an auntie in South Park, and against Jay’s strident objections, Bumpy had started holding meetings at her place, arguing that they needed to take some of the heat off the Scott Street duplex. They played cards out on the front porch, and sometimes Bumpy’s girl would cut hair or let them smoke a little weed if her aunt wasn’t home. But they kept no files at the house, no phone sheets or mimeographed flyers. So Jay was more than a little surprised and upset to find that the police had discovered a small arsenal of guns stashed in paper bags under the house. The deputies had made a beeline for the guns within a few minutes of storming the house . . . as if they’d known just where to look. Which could mean only one thing: somebody had snitched.

They had all initially suspected Bumpy’s girl. How well did he know her and all that. If she wasn’t the rat, it was at least assumed that the girl’s aunt, sick of fist-pumping boys coming around her house all time of the day and night, had called the cops. But this assessment didn’t hold much weight, especially not after the sheriff’s department threatened to arrest the girl and her aunt too.

Bumpy went a little crazy over the whole thing. His girl wouldn’t talk to him, and he wanted someone to blame for that, and for his missing weapons, which had been one of the most valuable assets A ABL had; the guns were for protection, yes, but they were also a source of income. Bumpy called an emergency meeting at the Scott Street place. Founding members, newcom­ ers, anybody who’d ever made it to even one meeting or showed their face at a rally. He billed it as a rap session, had some of the girls fry up a plate of chicken, made it sound like a party. When the place was filled to capacity, Bumpy shut the door and turned the key, locking everybody inside for almost twenty hours. Lloyd Mackalvy and Roger Holloway were assigned to guard the doors, each armed with a .38.

Bumpy interviewed everybody one-on-one, seeking a second opinion from Jay from time to time, but also grilling Jay when he got the chance, asking if he was talking to anyone outside AABL about the inner workings of their organization. Besides his buddies in AABL, there was only one person Jay talked to, period. And there was no way he would have told Cynthia about the guns.

Jay kept an eye on Roger from across the room. For a soldier on guard, Roger seemed to be having a royally good time. Always a piece of chicken or a beer or a girl in hand, he kept himself far across the room from the heat of inquisition. By the time the sun was coming up the next day, Bumpy had exhausted himself. His eyes were bloodshot, his mouth dry. He had a couple of beers and went to bed before he ever got around to talking to Roger. So Jay took it on himself to ask Roger if he had known about Bumpy’s stash in South Park.

“Naw, man,” Roger said, picking chicken meat out of his teeth. He wasn’t exactly looking Jay in the eye. “I don’t even like guns, man. You know that.”

“Naw, Roger, that’s the thing,” Jay said. “I don’t know that. Matter fact, I don’t really know a thing about you, man, not really.”

“I’m Roger, man,” he said, smiling broadly. “Just Roger.”

It was an odd, indirect answer. And it kind of sat with Jay funny.

Cynthia was furious about the whole thing and furious with him for not ousting the dude on the spot. She needed no more convincing that Roger Holloway was a snitch. Laid out in the back of her truck, she kept saying over and over that the feds couldn’t get away with it. This was their government after all, a point he was too tired to argue. He hadn’t come out here to talk about Roger, to be lectured by her about whose government it was. Some nights he hated to be reminded of how different they were, how much separated their two views of the world. He wanted to kiss her, to bring her closer. But he felt her slip­ ping away, pulled into some corner in her mind, pouting there like a petulant child. She wanted Roger dealt with. She wanted some show of aggression from him, when all he had was fear and apprehension, and the true knowledge of what his government would do to him if he wasn’t careful.

Cynthia rolled over flat on her back, pulling her skirt down, covering her knees and every inch of open skin. The silence was there again, popping up between them like mushrooms after a hot spring storm, until there was nothing left except the sound of Otis whistling, and even that faded after a while.

Given the circumstances, the police raid and his growing suspi­ cions about a mole in their midst, Jay had half a mind to cancel the African liberation rally, which was only a couple of weeks away. Stokely, on a swing back from