From the plastic drainboard, he picks up an empty jelly jar. He fills it with tap water, then empties the entire glass into his stomach in just a few gulps. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
“How’d you find me?” he asks finally.
There’s something in the old man’s demeanor that Jay doesn’t quite comprehend. From the time Ainsley opened his front door, he has seemed to Jay to be, well, relieved, as if he had been wait ing for Jay to show up at his doorstep for hours, days, even. “I read about you in the newspaper,” Jay says.
It’s just enough to set Ainsley off.
“That idiot,” he barks. “I told that ding-dang reporter what the deal was, what’s really going on here. But, you know, some people got to have every goddamned thing handed to ’em. You see that piece of shit they put in the newspaper, you see how they lied on me? They gone and missed the whole story.” He shakes his head in disgust. His neck is the color of a mottled peach, dot ted with sun spots and flush with color. “But you wait,” he says. “When this all comes out, they gon’ be the ones to have their asses handed to them.”
Then he notices Jay’s gun.
The muscles in the old man’s neck stiffen. His jaw rocks back and forth in its joint. He takes a sudden sharp gulp of air.
“Boy, put that up,” he says.
He crosses to the window over the sink, yanking on the cur tains. “You better believe they got somebody watching.”
The old man’s eyes are frantic. He is not making a lick of sense. Jay slides the gun into the pocket of his suit coat, tucking it away. “Mr. Ainsley,” he says calmly. “Do you have any idea who I am?”
“Thought you said you was a lawyer.” He says it quite matterof-factly, as if he takes this to be the whole reason for Jay’s stop at his doorstep. The old man starts for the door. “Come on,” he says. “I want to show you something.”
He walks Jay along the fence line.
Jay can see the old salt factory from Ainsley’s backyard. The old man rests an elbow on top of the metal fence and looks, somewhat wistfully, across Industry Road. “They let us all go in seventyseven,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper, as if he’s speaking of a death in the family. “The year after Carter started with that petroleum program. I didn’t vote for the man, personally,” he adds as an aside. “Ol’ Ford woulda been all right with me.”
He takes off his cap and rubs the dome of his balding head, which is startling white. He feels around his skull with his fin gertips, as if he’s looking for something he’s lost. “And this one they got up in Washington now,” which he pronounces “Warshington.” “He ain’t a whole hell of a lot better. All busi ness, that’s how they do now. That’s all these fellas care about. That George Bush got people in oil. So you see how it works? They making hand over foot, crying OPEC this and market forces that, and all the while they got a shitload of black gold running right underneath your feet.” He settles his fingers into the rings of the chain-link fence. “I’m short a pension now. I got a wife in there, son. I got to eat.” He looks at Jay as if he expects him to do something about it.
Jay, lost in this whole conversation, isn’t sure what he’s meant to say.
His silence seems to anger Ainsley, or maybe embarrass him.
The old man slides his worn baseball cap back onto his head and looks back at the buildings and run-down trailers on the other side of Industry Road. “I gave my life to the mine,” he says. “You have any idea what it’s like to work two hundred feet belowground, boy?” He eyes Jay’s suit and tie, then shakes his head to himself, answering his own question. “Hours at a stretch, in the dark, the air so tart it burns through your gog gles, burns right through your eyes to the back of your skull. And that white salt dust, so fine, like a mist, getting everywhere . . . in your clothes, in your hair, in your lungs, so you can’t hardly breathe.” He nods his head in a slow, steady rhythm, as if he’s counting, one by one, each working day of his life, every hour spent underground.
“I’m not trying to complain. I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s right, that’s all, to kill off a workingman so somebody else can make a dollar.”
“Mr. Ainsley . . . what does this have to do with Elise Linsey?”
“Who?”
“The real estate agent from Houston,” Jay says, waiting for a flicker of recognition in Ainsley’s eyes. “Do you know who I’m talking about?”
There is the faintest smile on Ainsley’s lips. He clucks his tongue. “Don’t think she ain’t in on it too. Buying the land, see, that’s just a cover.”
Jay thinks of the empty building on Fountainview in Houston, where Stardale’s offices are supposed to be. The image comes to him unbidden. And once it’s there, he can’t easily get rid of it. It lends a sudden weight to this whole conversation, Ainsley’s con spirational ranting.
The old man steps back from the fence. He nods his head toward the back side of his house and waves one hand for Jay to come on. “It’s over here.”
There are three short cement steps leading up to the back door of the house. Ainsley stands with his hands stuffed in his pockets and one foot propped on the bottom stair. He’s staring at something on the ground.
“You ever have any contact with Ms. Linsey?” Jay asks him. “I mean, other than her coming around your place trying to get you to sell?”
Ainsley’s eyes are firmly on the ground at his feet. “Take a look.”
Jay turns to see what Ainsley is pointing at.
It’s coming up around the foundation of the house, black, like raw sewage.
Jay immediately takes a step back, wanting to protect his shoes. “Looks like you got a plumbing problem there,” he says, almost gagging at the thought.
“No, sir,” Ainsley says calmly. “That’s crude.”
