Jay looks up at the old man. “Pardon?”
Ainsley nods at the ground. “That’s oil, boy.”
He stands back with his hands in his pockets, as if he’s dar ing Jay to come take a closer look. Jay steps forward, bending at his knees. He touches the stuff with his right hand. It’s loose, but thick, like melted gelatin. It slips and slides between his fin gertips. “They call it creepage,” Ainsley says. “Last year it was just a few spots, mostly places where the grass stopped growing. I had little bald patches coming up everywhere. My neighbors too. See, that oil down there floats on brine water, and when the water level changes for some reason only God can account for, the oil gets pushed up to the top, right up through the ground. It didn’t start to get this bad until the last month or so,” he says, pointing to the clumpy pool of oil and dirt. “If I had sold my house when everyone else did, I guess no one would have ever known about it, now would they?”
Jay stands, still rolling the oil around on his fingers, rolling this whole thing around in his mind, trying to get a good hold on it. Elise acted as a liaison, getting people to sell their homes. But to whom? The federal government?
“They’ve had explosions at petroleum reserve sites in Loui siana,” Ainsley says. “They don’t know if all this is really safe. They don’t even care. They just buy up the salt mines, buy off the people. But I’m making a stink, you hear me?”
Jay remembers the old man’s relief when he showed up at the front door. And it now dawns on him that Ainsley wasn’t waiting for Jay so much as he was waiting for
“Not that I trust the press any more than a fox in a henhouse, but yeah, I called ’em when this come up,” he says, pointing to the oil. “I called everybody I could think of. The Department of Energy, even the goddamned White House.”
“Did the reporter come back out?” Jay asks, thinking of the strange phone call with Lon Philips and Philips wondering if Jay was another journalist.
“Yep,” Ainsley nods, his voice sour. “And I ain’t heard a word back since. The government telling me the whole time they can’t do nothing. But I know they trying to get rid of it now. You can hear the tanker trucks coming through in the middle of the night, always at night, just the way they brought it in. Dot used to couldn’t sleep through the night for hearing the trucks come through. See, they pump the oil in over at the old factory site, and now they’re trying to pump it out, always at night, mind you,” he says, lowering his voice. “And your tax money is paying for this, you understand. If this is government business, why ain’t it out in the open, huh? Well, I’ll tell you why, son, ’cause this is the cleanup part, the shit they don’t want nobody to know about. See, they know I’m watching now.” The old man nods his head toward the fence line. “It’s been real quiet over there, about a week or so now. Suddenly there’s no more trucks. Nothing com ing in, nothing going out. They know somebody’s watching.”
Jay still has the stuff all over his fingers.
Ainsley offers him a rag from the front pocket of his overalls. Jay wipes the oil as best he can, but finds that it coats his skin completely, covering his pores, clinging like a parasite that has found an unsuspecting host. He wants to go inside and wash his hands. He wants to sit down somewhere. He wants to know who exactly wanted Elise Linsey killed.
There’s a knock on the back door.
Jay and Ainsley look up at the same time.
Dot, Ainsley’s wife, is standing inside the house, in front of a window, a somewhat grave expression on her face. She taps the glass, pointing at something over their heads. Ainsley is the first one to turn around.
“Here we go again,” he says.
Jay turns and sees it too.
Just over the fence line, on Industry Road, between Ainsley’s backyard and the old factory, there’s a black Ford LTD parked in the middle of the street. The man in the driver’s seat is smoking a cigarette, watching the house.
Jay is over the fence in a matter of seconds. He lands hard in a muddy ditch on the side of Industry Road, his ankle turning underneath him. Still, he runs. He pulls the .38 from his jacket. Behind him, he hears Ainsley hollering but can’t make out the words. He thinks the old man is yelling for him to stop.
The man in the black Ford lets Jay get within a few feet of the car. “You’re a fool, Porter,” is all he says before swinging the car in a wide arc, turning it around in the middle of the street. Jay has to leap off to the far right side of the road to keep from getting run over. He ends up in the ditch on the factory side of Industry Road. The bones in his knees crack and moan. He scrambles up the small incline, slipping in the mud more than once. By the time he’s back on his feet, on top of the hot asphalt, the Ford is a good thirty yards down the road. Jay points his gun at the back of the car, his finger on the trigger. Sweat drips into his eyes, stinging and blurring his vision, fucking with his aim. He shoots wildly, shattering the Ford’s back window in a crystal rain of glass that scatters across the pavement. The car swerves, its back end swishing left and right like an animal’s tail. But the driver never stops. Jay watches the car turn back onto FM 219, heading toward downtown High Point and Baytown.
He hops across Industry Road, back to Ainsley’s house. He cuts his right hand on the fence and tears a hole in the seat of his pants. He runs through the old man’s backyard and through the back of the house, past Dot and the television room and
“You know that man?” Jay asks.
“He started coming around a while back, letting me know he’s kind of watching things.” The old man is breathless from the run, coughing every other syllable. “He’s come up on me only once, out back while I was in the yard. He told me to stop talking to newspapers, looked me in my eye and said it.”
Jay thinks he can catch the Ford on the highway, maybe find out where the man’s going or where he came from. Jay struggles to open his car door. The car keys slip in his bloodied hand. By sheer force of will, he gets the door open.
“You coming back?” the old man asks.
Jay starts the car. Ainsley wisely steps back to the curb.
At sixty miles an hour, Jay tears down Forrester Road. Down I-45, halfway to Houston, Jay has a sudden panic about his wife, at home alone, remembering that he never called her from the cafe like he said he would. He
