Finally, he sits down with the mail, the bills he’s been avoiding, the kitchen calculator, and his checkbook. He runs the numbers two and three times and comes up short every time. He rear ranges the bills, deciding which ones he has to pay now and which ones can wait. What’s left in the register seems hardly enough to eat on, let alone raise a family. He looks around their tiny onebedroom apartment, cramped as it is with mismatched furniture, law books, and borrowed clothes for the baby, and worries that they’ll never get out of here. Back against the sofa, his financial life spread across the worn carpet, he thinks through his caseload, the open files on his desk, like running lottery numbers in his head, trying to guess which cases to play, where to put his money and time.
It’s become a game for him, a gamble.
It didn’t start out this way. One of his first cases out of law school was a police brutality lawsuit against the city. A rookie cop had allegedly roughed up a sixteen-year-old black kid who was nervous and fumbling for his license. The way the boy told it, the cop dragged him from the car, yelled a few epithets, and knocked him to the ground, hard enough that it left bruises and a scar that was still showing by the time they made it to trial. Jay took the case pro bono, going head to head with the city attorney, a white man who had at least a decade of litigation experience over Jay. But Jay had, in so many ways, been preparing for that trial his whole life. His own legal troubles were not so far from his mind. He remembered what it was to sit at a defense table, remembered what it felt like to have his basic civil liberties up for debate. The anger was still with him then. And he let it guide him the whole way. He went after the cop with a vengeance, making the poor man stand in for everything that was wrong with a country and a government that applied the law willy-nilly. By closing argu ments, half the jury was nodding along to his every other word, and Jay won the case.
But it was a moral victory, not an economic one. What he made off the city’s meager settlement wasn’t enough to cover his expenses or to make up for money he lost by ignoring his other cases during the trial. His performance in the courtroom got his name in the papers, for the second time in his life, and before he knew it, he had folks lined up in his office, all asking for his help. They’d heard he took that boy’s case for free and wanted to know what he could do for them. Their problems were low rent, the stuff you find in any black neighborhood in the country: a son in jail or a cousin who’d been let go on his job or an ex-husband who wasn’t making his child-support payments on time. They never had any money, and Jay could hardly make his own rent. Practicing law, he would soon find out, is like running any other small business. Most days he’s just trying to make his overhead: insurance and filing fees, Eddie Mae’s meager salary, plus $500 a month to lease the furnished office space on West Gray.
He, quite frankly, can’t afford his principles.
He needs a win, a jackpot.
And if it comes in the form of a prostitute with a neck ache, then so be it.
He shoves the bills together into a messy pile, stuffing them inside his checkbook, and decides on another beer. He drinks it slowly, leaned up against his couch, staring at the boxes of baby gifts that have been piling up for weeks now. The long, flat box is from his wife’s parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Al Boykins. Bernie has asked him on more than one occasion to get a move on it.
Jay stands and crosses the room, using his car keys to tear into the cardboard. The crib spills out in pieces. Jay sets it on the floor and walks to the hall closet, hunting for his toolbox. Inside, beneath his screwdrivers and drill bits, he finds a crumpled pack of Newports. He supposedly quit when Bernie got pregnant, but he keeps a stash here and there, in his car and at the office. He pockets the pack of cigarettes and carries the toolbox into the living room.
The whole thing takes him over an hour, but he manages to get piece A to fit with B, and B to fit with C, and so on. Before long, he has a crib. He lays the tiny, vinyl-covered mattress inside and runs his fingers along the handrailing. It’s white-painted plywood, cheap but sturdy. They’ll have to get some little sheets to go with it, maybe put up a mobile sometime, one that plays a melody. He tries to picture the little one who will sleep here soon, and wonders if she’ll have Bernadine’s dimples or her toothy smile . . . or if he’ll have Jay’s eyes, brown and wide and set in his face like two river stones, weathered and deep.
He crumples the instructions, shoving them in the empty box. On his way to the back door, he pulls the trash from the step can by the kitchen stove and grabs a stack of old newspapers. He drags the whole mess down the back stairs.
The waste bin out behind his building is overflowing with paper grocery bags full of chicken bones and black, moldy heads of lettuce, dead leaves and beer bottles and boxes of old clothes. The trash has a putrid smell, rotten and sickly sweet. There are flies buzzing over everything. It’s been sitting like this, untouched, for almost two weeks, what with trash pickup in Houston getting more and more sporadic. It’s one of the city’s dirty little secrets, that for all its recent economic prosperity—the fastest-growing city in the country two years running, the oil crises of the late ’70s a boon for an oil town like Houston—the city can barely keep up with its own growth. It is literally busting at the seams, its trashy insides spilling over everything. Sanitation workers put in overtime but can’t keep up with the new businesses and housing developments going up every week. Residents in tony neighborhoods like River Oaks and Memorial hire private com panies to haul their shit away, but on streets like Jay’s in Third Ward, lined with cheap rental units and shotgun houses, work ing people are at the mercy of the city. Jay dumps the empty crib box and his kitchen trash on top of the rotting heap in the bin. He tosses the newspapers next, watching as they dribble down the huge mound of garbage, landing back at his feet.
Jay reaches for the cigarettes in his pocket and makes a seat for himself on top of a broken TV. He strikes a match on the concrete at his feet and lights the end of a bent Newport. He takes a drag and picks up one of the old newspapers, killing time between this cigarette and the one he knows is coming next.
Cole Oil Industries, the largest oil and gas company in the city, made the business page, along with some other big names in petrol, Exxon and Shell. Cole Oil is reporting a slowdown at their main refinery near the Port of Houston; a shortage in bar rels coming in from overseas is listed as the cause. There’s some thing lurking behind the words in print, a hint, a threat really, of another oil crisis on the horizon. Jay doesn’t think he can afford much more than he’s paying at the pumps now, up to $1.37 at the PetroCole station by his house.
Below the fold is more on an ongoing story about labor prob lems at the port, dockworkers threatening to strike over wage issues. Jay reads the article carefully, thinking of Mr. J. T. Cum mings and his position on the port commission. Mr. Cummings, Jay knows, is up for reappointment to the commission, and a strike at the port could possibly hurt J.T.’s chances and help Jay in his civil matter. His job on the line, Mr. Cummings and his slick lawyer are likely to want to settle as quickly as possible, before word gets out about the hooker. Jay stores this informa tion about the strike in the back of his mind. He takes a couple of short puffs on his cigarette and turns the page.
And that’s when he sees it.
The City Beat, page 2.
Sunday morning, somebody found a body.
