Black Water Rising

Jay offers to give the kid a ride home.

After he drives to Kashmere Gardens and back, he heads home to his wife, and Rolly, laid up on his couch. Bernie is reading a paperback at the kitchen table when he comes in. He kisses the part between her two french braids. Rolly, in the other room, is watching a western on television, Jay’s .38 resting on his thigh.

“Didn’t you tell me Elise Linsey used to work for Cole Oil?” Jay asks him.

Rolly stretches his lengthy arms overhead. “She was a secre­ tary, I said.”

“For Thomas Cole. They had a relationship, you said.”

“Something like that.”

“Well,” Jay whispers, “that’s some fucking coincidence.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m going to need those phone records, man,” Jay says. “I need you to go back as far as you can, and I need you to do it as soon as you can.”

Rolly sits up on the couch, wiping at the corners of his mouth. “I guess you not gon’ take my advice then,” he says.

“What’s that?”

“I guess this means you’re not gon’ leave it alone.”

Chapter 26

By the time Jay makes it to the Chronicle’s offices the next day, he’s had time to work out a few things in his head, after spending part of his morning in the government records department at the main library of the University of Houston, asking the librarian on duty for anything related to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The librarian was an older white lady, in her seventies maybe, with hair dyed black as midnight. She brought him congressio­ nal funding records and maps, even newspaper articles, and told him she remembered him from his time on campus, when he used to spend days on end sifting through government records, looking for legislative ammunition. She told him that back then she’d been happy to help him find whatever information he needed, that it was her little way of being a part of things. “You at it again, son?” she asked, pulling at the thin sleeves of

her cardigan. Jay smiled awkwardly, embarrassed that he couldn’t place her, that he didn’t remember her at all, in fact. He’d had a kind of blindness back then too, he thought.

In the middle of his political struggles, this woman hadn’t even registered to him, no matter her kindness. Of course, it’s no secret he didn’t trust a lot of white people when he was younger. And the one he did trust—with everything—turned out to be a crushing disappointment to him, personally and politically. The mistake of trusting Cynthia Maddox had cost him his sanity and his sense of safety with himself. It’s partly why a woman like Elise Linsey had the power to shake him to his core, why he so easily let his fear get the best of him, mislead and confuse him. The whole world around Jay might have changed in the last decade, but his freedom, his true peace of mind, is not yet at hand.

The librarian at U of H left him in a carrel with a hot cup of tea and a stack of papers and offered to bring him anything else he needed. He looked at the maps first, SPR sites going all the way back to the beginning. Bryan Mound in Freeport, Texas, was the first government storage site, and, according to the congressional paperwork in front of him—the records of government contracts and checks cut—the Bryan Mound site was initially managed by ColeCo, an engineering division of Cole Oil. Which meant, to Jay, that Cole Oil either taught the government the technology of storing oil in underground salt caverns or learned it them­ selves on taxpayer money.

But of course the most interesting thing about the maps of SPR sites located throughout the Gulf Coast was something that, by the time he saw it in print, came as no surprise to Jay. The maps, some dated as far back as 1976, showed no Strategic Petroleum Reserve facility in High Point, Texas, at all. And in all the pages and pages of Department of Energy records handed to him, there was not one mention of a purchase payment to the Crystal- Smith Salt Company. There was no record, in fact, of the government being involved at all. Which explains, Jay thought while sitting in the library of his alma mater, why the government so insisted they couldn’t help old man Ainsley with the closing of the salt mine or the crude coming up in his back­ yard. It was never their oil to begin with.

He takes the maps and a stack of papers with him to the Chron­ icle’s offices on Texas Avenue, downtown, where he’s in for his first real shock of the day:

Lon Philips is a woman.

Lonette Kay Philips, actually, according to the roster of employees covering a whole wall of the first-floor lobby. Jay calls up to her desk three times from the pay phones by the elevators, and each time, an answering service picks up the line. He would leave a message, but what would be the point? Philips hasn’t returned a single one of his calls in the past twenty-four hours. And anyway, he has no way of knowing if she’s even in the build­ ing. The security guard posted by the elevators is no help. He won’t say whether he’s seen Lon Philips come through for the day, nor will he let Jay past without an express invitation.

In the end, Jay tries a different approach.

Near the building’s front doors, there’s a young woman in her twenties sitting behind a wide U-shaped desk made of glass and steel, whose job it is to answer the Chronicle’s main phone line and patch calls through to the offices upstairs. She does this while flipping through a thick catalog filled with motorboats and RVs advertised as “Condos on Wheels.” The catalog com­ pany offers E-Z financing in bright yellow writing. The recep­ tionist, when Jay approaches, is looking longingly at a Leisure Mobile V100, which is really just an oversize van with the back­ seats taken out and a full bar put in instead. I guess we all have a dream, Jay thinks. For ten dollars, the girl behind the desk is happy to report that Lon Philips is indeed in the building. “I saw her myself this morning,” she says. For another ten, Jay asks her to call up to Lon Philips’s desk or to get somebody on her floor to tell Ms. Philips that there’s a man downstairs with flowers for her, and that he’s demanding she sign for ’em herself.

“Make it twenty,” the girl says.

He has a smoke in the lobby, and he waits.

It’s nearly twenty minutes before Ms. Philips comes down.

He spots her by the purposeful gait, the way she impatiently marches to the receptionist’s desk, wanting to get whatever this is over with, and by the fact that, on her approach, the girl behind the desk nods her head in Jay’s direction.

Sniffing a ruse, Philips puts her hands on her hips. “What the hell is this supposed to be?”

She is probably ninety-five pounds, wet, and barely five feet tall. Her hairdo, a Dorothy Hamill sweep puffed up with lots of teasing and hairspray, looks like it weighs more than she does. And her voice, which Jay took to be