He reached for Cynthia. But she was gone.
In the chaos, they were separated.
He crawled across the floor, staying low.
He was, foolish as it may seem now, looking for her.
It was the university police who showed up first. A huge tacti cal mistake. Only three officers to deal with two hundred or so riotous college students, some of them armed. They should have waited for the team of HPD officers who were only a few minutes behind them. Instead, the campus cops arrived, ill equipped and unable to stop most of the people from running for the exits.
Bumpy got out. Lloyd and Roger too.
Alfreda and Delores.
Jay was still on the floor when HPD stormed the building a few moments later. The cops lined them up in a paddy wagon, “niggers on one side, whites on the other.” The news photogra pher showed them his press pass, and they let him go, but not before confiscating his camera. Jay, his hands cuffed behind his back, watched as they kicked the photographer out of the van, slamming the door on him while he shouted on the street, going on about his rights.
At the station, the men were booked together, then segregated once again, into separate cells. By the next morning, they were released one by one.
All of them except Jay.
His lawyer tried to prepare him a few minutes before the arraignment. The charge was inciting a riot. Jay said he wasn’t guilty, so that was the plea. It was all cut and dry, he thought. Except the judge refused bail. They wouldn’t let him go home. Then, a few days after his arraignment, they moved him from men’s central to a holding cell at the federal courthouse down town. He tried to rap with the officers who made the escort, but nobody would tell him nothing.
He asked to speak to his lawyer.
They sent a new guy. A kid not that much older than Jay.
They met in a dirty room with low light and no windows.
The kid had a folder tucked under his arm.
Jay said, for the dozenth time, that this was all a misunder standing. He’d given a speech, which the United States Consti tution, last he checked, gave him every right to do. He hadn’t thrown one chair, hadn’t destroyed any property or asked any body else to do so. And he had the witnesses to prove it. It was a rally, he said, not a riot.
“That,” the lawyer said, “is the least of your problems.”
From his folder, he pulled out a black-and-white photo.
It was the rally. Jay onstage. A shot of him clocking Roger Holloway.
“The feds want to charge you with conspiracy to commit murder against a federal informant, Mr. Porter.”
It was official: Roger Holloway was a snitch.
Jay pushed the photo across the table. “This is bullshit,” he said. “I hit the guy ’cause he was being a punk, not ’cause I was trying to kill him.”
“They got you on tape, Jay.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Something about you, uh, ‘handling a nigger.’ ”
Jay shook his head.
Then he remembered.
The phone call to Stokely. The call he’d made from Cynthia’s house.
Jay’s stomach sank, down past his knees.
It was nearly impossible for him to accept what he was hearing. For yes, it was conceivable that the federal government knew about his relationship with Cynthia, that they had bugged her place as well as his. But he also, in this moment, had to acknowl edge the possibility that Cynthia—who had been the first to point out Roger’s suspicious behavior, who had chided Jay for not doing something about it, who had shown up at the rally uninvited—had put the bug in the phone herself, had kissed his forehead and walked out the door.
Chapter 21
He wakes up alone, about an hour before dawn, his wife some where way across town. He lies curled up on the couch, one hand lifted over his head, balancing a glass of whiskey on the arm of the sofa. His third, if you count the two he downed when he walked in the door tonight, before he collapsed on the couch into a few fitful hours of sleep, his dreams a disjointed parade of faces.
Lyndon “Bumpy” Williams and Marcus Dupri. Lloyd Mackalvy and Alfreda Watkins. Charlie Wade Robinson and Natalia Greenwood. Lionel Jessup and Ronnie Powell and M. J. Frank. Carl Petersen. Cynthia Maddox. He woke up think ing about them all, marveling at the difference a decade makes, between then and now, between their dreams and where they landed. From death to prison to the mayor’s office, and the many cramped spaces in between.
Of them all, Cynthia made the greatest leap.
By whatever means . . . Jay may never know.
The true pain of it really, the not knowing.
And the blinding confusion that brings.
