Jay rolls over and stares at his water-stained ceiling. He rests
the half-empty glass of whiskey on his bare chest, feeling the cool ring of its bottom against his skin. He remembers the promise he made to his wife. The promise to himself. Of a home. A man. One with moving parts. And a working heart.
Because he can’t sleep, he pulls the wad of folded-up copier pages out of the pocket of his pants. They are newspaper articles and such, part of Rolly’s full report on Elise Linsey. Jay glanced at them once in the dark cab of Rolly’s truck. Now, alone in his apartment, he reads through the pages carefully for the first time, absorbing every detail of the life they describe. He reads about Elise Linsey’s high school track team, her mother dying, and the arrests that made it into the back pages of the
Slowly, though, as he continues to read, a picture of the new, improved Elise Linsey emerges in the printed pages. Over the last eight months, her name has been mentioned in both of the city’s main newspapers as a contact for residential properties newly on the market. One of the real estate listings is for the empty condo at the Sugar Oaks Plantation. The pages give Jay a picture of her current professional life. It
The only really curious bit in the stack of newspaper clippings is an article from the
The article is several inches wide, with a large photo in the center—a picture of a craggy-looking man in his early sixties, wearing a baseball cap and overalls, one side of them held up by a large safety pin. From first glance, Jay takes him for a work ing man, can almost see the dirt under his fingernails and smell the sweat off his back. In the picture, the man is standing on what appears to be his front porch. There’s a Texas flag waving behind his head and limp petunias in a box planter hanging from a kitchen window. In his hands, the man is holding an oversize poster board, eight very distinct words printed on it:
jimmy carter, give me my dang job back!
jimmy carter has been crossed out with two dark lines, replaced by ronald reagan, whose name has been scribbled in
an arc over Carter’s.
The caption beneath the photo reads:
The piece, from a Sunday
is printed beneath a boldface heading called “Cityscapes,” where
readers can find little tidbits of nonessential news, mostly local
color and commentary. Stories highlighting a senior citizen
beauty pageant or a preschool golf team or a dog somebody
trained to barbecue brisket. Cute little stories about local eccen
trics or pieces of neighborhood flavor. It’s exactly the place you’d
expect to find an article about Erman Joseph Ainsley, of High
Point, Texas—a man who had, according to the article, just
returned from his second one-man march on Washington: Don’t get Erman Joseph Ainsley started about the New Testament’s David and Goliath. You’re liable to get an hour-long lecture about the pitiful state of humanity, or about the big guns in Washington who, he says, want to
take advantage of your fears.
“They think they can get away with any damn thing,”
Ainsley, a former salt mine worker, says, speaking of the
government. “But not on my watch. Not here in High
Point.”
Ask anyone in High Point, Texas, a small community
just outside Baytown, and they’ll tell you that Erman
Ainsley is not a man easily deterred. For the past four
years—since he lost his job a few months short of retire
ment when the Crystal-Smith Salt Co. closed its seventyfive-year-old factory in High Point—Ainsley has been
working tirelessly to save his beloved town. “I’ve lived here
all my life,” he says. “I was born in this house.”
Ainsley looks young for his sixty-plus years. He talks
fast and rarely stops for a breath. “My daddy worked the
mine, my granddaddy before him. This is all I’ve ever
known. When they took that, they took everything. What
we got left?”
The closing of the mine was a crushing blow to a town
with no other industry, save for small coffee shops and a
