Black Water Rising

“I think it’s terrible what they did to that boy,” Mrs. Boykins says, dabbing at crust crumbs gathering at the corners of her mouth.

Jay looks at Kwame. “So what’s your next move?”

“Cleanup,” Kwame says.

“I don’t follow,” Jay says, again looking between Kwame and the Rev.

“Well, your mayor came through with the police all right,” Kwame says.

“She did?”

“She did.”

And because Jay still doesn’t believe it, he asks again, “She did?”

“Several officers have been assigned to investigate,” the Rev says.

“We got cops coming out the sky now,” Kwame says. “Sud­ denly, they’re tripping over themselves to help.”

“They came to take a statement from the boy,” adds the Rev. “Even drove out to the scene with him. And they interviewed Carlisle Minty, went and stopped him on his job at the Cole refinery, out on the channel.”

“He denied everything, of course,” Kwame says.

“The policemen have said they’re going to turn over every stone.”

“Cynthia did this?” Jay asks, with an uneasy mix of doubt and hope. His whole adult life, he’s wanted nothing more than to be wrong about one woman.

“The problem,” his father-in-law says, “is now that the story’s out, we’re having a hard time controlling these men on the picket line. They feel lied to. They went into this thinking OCAW was backing them through and through.”

“What do you mean ‘now that the story’s out’?” Jay says. They all turn to him and stare.

“Where you been the last couple days, man?” Kwame asks. You don’t want to know.

“You didn’t see it, Jay?” his wife asks.

“Evelyn,” Mrs. Boykins says. “Go bring your father today’s paper.”

“She went on TV, Jay,” Bernie says. “I watched it at Ev’s.”

“The mayor held a press conference announcing an investiga­ tion into the beating,” the rev says.

“What?”

Evelyn returns from the kitchen with the newspaper tucked under her arm. She hands the paper to her father and plops down into her empty seat, sucking on a slick sliver of baked peach. Reverend Boykins licks his fingertips, flipping through the news­ paper. When he finds what he’s looking for, he passes the article to Jay. Jay looks down at a photo of Cynthia Maddox at city hall.

The headline: Mayor Pushes for Investigation into Union Beating.

The lines underneath: A high-ranking member of OCAW is under investigation for the beating of a black member of the ILA on the eve of the strike.

Jay stares at her face in the paper, the pale eyes, the reassur­ ing smile. It’s a brilliant move, he thinks. She goes on television acting like an advocate for labor, a tireless defender of black men unfairly and unnecessarily beaten, when it’s clear to him that the press conference’s real goal is to undermine the power of the labor coalition and let business leaders in the city know that the boys on the docks won’t hold out much longer.

Just wait and see, her smile says.

“She just told the whole city that we got a big, big problem,” Kwame says.

“A lot of the men, Jay, white ones too, feel like they were led into the strike under false pretenses. If OCAW isn’t really with them, they don’t see a way to win this thing,” the Rev says. “And, frankly, I don’t either.”

“Why did this Minty guy do it?” Bernie asks.

The Rev shakes his head, shrugging his thin shoulders.

Jay looks up from the article, the picture of the mayor.

To his father-in-law, who once stood at Jay’s side just as he stands by these workers now, Jay says, “I’m sorry.” Because he, of all people, should have known Cynthia better.

Chapter 23

It’s not until sometime after midnight that he starts to get angry. The mayor, his ex-girl, is only half of it. More immediately, it’s the man in the black Ford who’s still stalking through Jay’s mind; it’s the mystery of who was behind the threats on his life. He can’t stand the idea of being played with, being treated like a dog thrown a bone. He resents the pull of the money, the power he assigned it, the ways he imagined the hand that dealt it held dominion over him. He’s angry with himself for cowering, for not going to the police from the very beginning, as a free man, an innocent man. He is so ashamed of the way he’s behaved, so ashamed of his fear, that he feels actual rage toward a face he can’t see—the one who sent the man in the black Ford, the one who wanted him scared, who was counting on it. The anger feels good, landing on his tongue, dissolving like a warm, bitter pill. He feels the rush, the high, and remembers anger’s power, its ability to clear the head. Unable to sleep, he sits up in bed next to his wife, watching her breath rise and fall, thinking of the one thing that is perfectly clear in his mind, the one thing he’s absolutely sure of: if he can solve the mystery of who tried to kill Elise, he will know the identity of the person who’s after him now.

More than once, the old man in High Point occurs to him as a possible suspect. Though, at least initially, he couldn’t tell you why. It’s less logic, or a story worked out in his head, and more lawyerly intuition. He was, after all, a onetime criminal defense attorney. He used to deal in motive for a living.

His suspicions about the old man are circumstantial at best. As a game, Jay presents the prosecutorial case