Black Water Rising

Most nights, he played cards by himself in his room, listening to the radio. And he waited.

One month passed, then another. She never came. She never called.

Every hour he waited was just another brick in the wall he was building at his feet, to shield himself from what he could no lon­ ger deny: Cynthia Maddox had betrayed him, plain and simple, one way or another. If she had not sold him to the feds, then she had loved him and left him—if she had loved him at all.

He still longed for her in a way that made him sick to his stomach.

How could he love someone he hated, or hate someone he loved so completely?

So he decided he would do neither. He would neither love her nor hate her. He would simply put her away. It was a begin­ ning for him. He learned that other things could be put away too; whatever hurt could be hidden, if only he willed it so. He set about quietly packing up his life, piece by piece, like heavy luggage, trunks put in storage. Until, slowly, he remade him­ self.

In July of 1970, the Houston Police Department’s Central Intelligence Division shot and killed Carl Hampton, shot him dead from the roof of a Baptist church. When Bumpy Williams, Jay’s oldest friend, was killed a month later, Jay walked away from the movement for good. He never looked back.

He went, of all places, to law school. It kept him out of Vietnam (that, and his felony arrest record), and it gave him hope. There could be a life on the other side. He got married, and he pretended to forget all about Cynthia Maddox.

She didn’t start showing up again until sometime in the sum­ mer of 1976, campaigning for Senator Bentsen. She was running the senator’s Houston office, and the Post did a big spread about the little gal from Katy who wanted to put Lloyd Bentsen in the White House. Jay had stumbled across the article by accident. Someone had left a newspaper behind in one of the orange vinyl booths in the cafeteria at South Texas College of Law, where he was in his second year. The day Cynthia came back into his life, he’d been in the cafeteria for hours, reading contract law for so long that his eyes were starting to cross. He had picked up the discarded newspaper as a mere distraction during lunch.

Her picture was on page three. A girl he once knew.

He pushed his sandwich across the table, left his coffee to get cold.

The article listed Cynthia Maddox as a graduate of George Washington University and an aide in Bentsen’s D.C. office, working closely with him on legislation he was drafting in the Senate’s Economic Growth and Transportation Subcommittees. There was no mention of her time in Texas—her years at the University of Houston or her early, more radical political activ­ ism—other than to say she was born and raised in Katy, a local girl. She had remade herself as well.

Jay spent that summer on edge. Just knowing she was in the city was a terrible imposition, a burden on his soul. It interfered with his ability to study, to sleep, to even eat some days. Every­ thing in his life had come to a sudden stop.

Somewhere deep down, he was still waiting.

She never came to him, though. She never called.

In the end, Bentsen lost his bid for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. His campaign office downtown was closed by the fall, and Jay went back to his studies. Cynthia, pre­ sumably, went back to D.C. By the time she returned for mid­ term elections in ’78, this time running her own campaign for local office, she was a stranger to him. The hair was blonder, the clothes stiffer, the politics, save for a few perfunctory nods in the general direction of equality and justice, were unintelligible to him. He found he could see her picture daily in the newspaper without a quickening of his pulse. It no longer mattered that she was in his city. He was no longer waiting.

He might have left it at that. If his father-in-law hadn’t called on him to get involved with the mayor again, to break their ten years of silence. If he hadn’t needed to get his hands on informa­ tion about the shooting by the bayou. And if he hadn’t stayed up ’til two o’clock in the morning last night cleaning blood off his living room floor, trying to make sense of Erman Ainsley’s rant against the government. He might have left Cynthia Mad­ dox alone for good. But the mess he’s in now is bigger than his past, bigger than his aging feelings for a woman he hardly knows anymore, a woman he may have never known.

He showed up at Cynthia’s office this morning, unannounced. There were no smiles from the mayor’s secretary this time. She has, in fact, spent most of the forty-five minutes Jay has been waiting with her eyes to the closed double doors that lead into the mayor’s private suite, where Kip is standing, likewise wait­ ing, put out of whatever business is going on just on the other side of those doors. The phone has rung exactly twenty-three times, and each time, the secretary looks helplessly at Kip, ask­ ing, “How much longer you think?”

It’s a quarter after eleven when the doors finally open. A group of men emerge from the suite first, followed by Cyn­ thia, who is smiling broadly. The men dwarf her, some by as much as a foot. They encircle her like a fresh kill in the bed of a pickup truck, like they’re trying to decide which one she belongs to, who landed the final shot. Jay recognizes a few of them from their pictures in the paper: Pat Bodine, president of the longshoremen’s union; Wayne Kaylin, president of the oil and petrochemical workers’ union; Hugh Bowlin, of the Mari­ time Association; and Darwood Becker, a commissioner with the Port of Houston Authority. The man to Cynthia’s right, the one who’s got a hand on her elbow, standing firmly beside her even as the others begin to disperse, is Thomas Cole, whom Jay has seen in person only once before, at the lunch with Luckman and J. T. Cummings. As usual, Cole is the only one in the room who doesn’t look particularly frightened.

Cynthia is clearly smitten with him.

As the others say their good-byes, moving on toward the elevators, Cynthia and Thomas stand facing each other, Cole bent over to catch the mayor’s every word. It appears the two are whispering to each other. When they pull out of their semiembrace, Cynthia flashes Mr. Cole a girlish smile. “We’ll do fine,” Cole says, patting her low on the back. “We’ll be just fine.”

As he turns toward the elevators, Cole catches a glimpse of Jay, standing just a few feet away. His expression is flat. He is, after all, looking at a stranger. Still, Cole holds Jay’s gaze a hair past what is universally considered polite.

“Can I help you with something?” Jay asks.

Cynthia turns, noticing Jay for the first time.

She looks nervous, eyeing the two men, sensing a tightness in the air.

Cole never utters a single word. His eyes soon glide over Jay, like a stone skipping on water. He nods good- bye to the mayor and walks to the elevators alone. Once Cole is gone, Jay feels the energy in the room shift into a lower gear, as if the others had all been holding their breath in the presence of Texas royalty, no one more so than Cynthia. She quickly waves Jay into her suite without a bit of inquiry, as if she had invited him. Inside, she pulls a Carlton from her purse and lights it. She kicks off her black pumps and tells Kip, twice, to shut the door. She takes a hard pull on the cigarette, inhaling deeply and blowing the smoke through a toothy smile. She receives Jay without