Sometime late, after midnight, Jay opens his eyes, sure he’s heard something, a noise inside the apartment. He turns over in darkness, but can’t make out the lines on the clock by his bed. He reaches for his gun. He’s up and into the hallway in a matter of seconds, into the kitchen before he realizes the phone is ringing. The noise he heard. It rings a second time. Jay flips the light switch and looks at the clock above the stove: 2:37. The phone rings again. This hour, the news can’t be good. He fears this is the moment he’s been dreading.
“Jay.”
His wife is standing behind him in the doorway, her faded brown robe around her shoulders. She’s staring at him: bloodshot eyes, hair mashed to one side, a .22 in his hand. Her look is something past concern. She actually seems afraid of him. The phone rings again. Bernie goes to answer it. Jay picks it up first. He turns his back to her and clears his throat, speaking into the phone with a clear, calm voice, one he uses for juries…and cops. “This is Jay Porter.”
“Son, you got to come out here.”
It’s his father-in-law, wide awake.
Jay feels relief at first, thinking this is another legal service call, another kid in trouble. He sets the gun on the kitchen table, reaches for pen and paper.
“You hear me, Jay?” his father-in-law asks. “They shooting out here.”
“What’s that?”
“They shot up a house on Market Street, man’s wife and kids sleeping in the next room. By a miracle, a sheer miracle, they wasn’t hit.”
“Who? Who’s shooting?”
“ILA.”
“Jesus,” Jay mumbles, forgetting for a moment who he’s talking to.
Then he asks, “How do you know for sure it was—”
“They’ve been harassing these boys all week, son, after every meeting. The union’s gon’ vote on this thing soon, and some of the ILA are bent to see it come out their way. This boy here, man’s house I’m in, he’s been getting calls all week, saying what they gon’ do to him and his family if he votes for the strike. There are shells everywhere, broken glass right in the man’s living room.”
“You call the police?” Jay asks. He glances at his wife, not wanting to alarm her, knowing she’s listening to every word.
“We’re waiting on ’em now. But we’re not gon’ see this go down like the last time. They got to take us seriously this time. We need a lawyer down here.”
“Now?”
“They almost killed the man, Jay, his wife and kids, you hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The police have got to know there’s gon’ be some repercussions if they don’t do their part to protect these men. You understand?”
“Yes, sir.”
Jay looks at his wife, wondering how he’s going to explain this to her, him leaving at three o’clock in the morning. “It’s your father,” he whispers.
Bernie seems to understand at once. He doesn’t belong to only her.
She turns and pads softly out of the room.
She’s sitting up in bed when he gets off the phone. He returns the gun to its hiding place beneath his pillow, then puts on the same clothes he was wearing only a few hours ago. “Union boys are running into some trouble,” he says, his voice thin with fatigue. “I’m driving out to the north side.” He slips on his dress shoes, putting on the costume, knowing he ought to at least look the part.
“You got to stop this, Jay.”
No shit.
Only she’s not talking about the phone call, him leaving in the middle of the night. “You can’t grab a gun every time the phone rings,” she says. “I can’t have this around my kid, Jay.” Then, a whisper, “I won’t.”
“Don’t start that now.”
“You’re not right, Jay.”
He stands in the middle of the room, eyes on his shoes.
Bernie looks up at her husband, her voice halting. “You’re not…right.”
Jay slides his wallet into the back pocket of his slacks.
“I don’t know when I’ll be back,” he says.
“I figured that part out already,” his wife says.
He turns and leaves without kissing her good-bye.
He checks the .38 in his glove compartment. It’s in a small leather case underneath his registration papers, the only gun for which he has a permit. It would be illegal to have the .22 in the car or else he might have brought that along too. Reverend Boykins said he thought the gunmen had gone, but there is no way of knowing if they’re coming back, and Jay has no intention of walking into an ambush. The late-night drive is unsettling, the air kind of heavy with the knowledge that this is trouble’s hour. Jay pushes in the car lighter and rolls down his window. He lights a cigarette and thinks about his wife.
She was just a kid when they met, thirteen years old when her father brought her by the courthouse, the day the verdict came down. Jay remembers getting dressed that morning, leaving his cell for the last time, either to go home or to the Walls in Hunstville. And he remembers the judge’s warning. There were to be no outbursts in the courtroom, no matter the verdict. Then, adding his own two cents, the judge said, “I don’t have an ounce of respect for you, boy. The nigra issue is an important one in this country. But you boys goin’ ’bout it the wrong way. And that’s all I’m ’on say on it.”
Jay remembers looking at the jury box, at the black lady in particular, the one who stayed down the street from First Love Antioch Baptist Church. She wouldn’t look at him. She was in black from head to toe, and she had her head down, hands clasped around a wrinkled handkerchief, her lips moving slowly.
She was praying.
Jay threw up right there in the courtroom.
He managed to get his head between his legs, so most of it spilled out across the floor. Black coffee and some chunks of white bread they’d served him in lockup. Some of the church ladies in the back stood up. So did members of the press. Reverend Boykins was sitting behind Jay, with his wife and two daughters. He put a hand on Jay’s shoulder. Jay remembers turning around. He was shaking his head, trying to say something, ready to make his bargain with God, the Rev as his messenger. But he couldn’t get any words out. He couldn’t speak, for days, it would turn out. He was finally out of speeches.
The Rev whispered in Jay’s ear. He spoke of God and faith.
He’s got you, son. He’s not gon’ let you fall.
The judge made them all wait until a maintenance crew could be located in the building. They lugged buckets and mops into the courtroom, cleaning up Jay’s insides in front of everybody. He was long gone by then, lost in the swamp and stink of his fears, steeling himself against what he thought was inevitable.
But the verdict, when it came back, was not guilty.
The judge read it twice, as if he didn’t believe it either. The lady in black, his angel, was weeping. She held her thin, prayerful fingers up to the ceiling, up to the sky and the Lord on the other side, to thank him, as it was clear she didn’t trust her vote on a piece of paper, didn’t trust white folks’ doing. She dabbed at her eyes with an eyelet handkerchief; then, finally, she looked at Jay. Despite the noise in the courtroom, he thought he could hear her heartbeat, soft as a whisper in his ear. She gave him a small nod, just as simple and courteous as if they had passed each other on the street. Then, one by one, the jurors were led out.
He doesn’t remember the faces in the courtroom, doesn’t remember meeting the reverend’s family or his future wife. He doesn’t remember the parting words from the judge. He looked in the gallery for one face, and when he didn’t see it, he was ready to go. He walked out of the courtroom with maybe thirty dollars in his pocket and no place to stay. He walked around the city for hours, and then days. He spent six dollars seeing Beneath the Planet of the Apes twice, eating popcorn for lunch and dinner; he slept in MacGregor Park one night. His third day out of jail he had breakfast at a Wyatt’s cafeteria, eggs and coffee. Then he took the bus to St. Joseph’s Hospital downtown. When the admitting nurse asked what was bothering him, he wrote down on a piece of paper: I’m tired.
The next time he met Bernadine Boykins he was in his last year of law school. She was a senior at the University of Houston, a school he hardly recognized anymore. By 1977, the student population was over 10 percent black, and the dorms were fully integrated. There were an Afro-American studies program and classes in Chicano history. The only activists left on campus were the feminists, white girls who felt entitled to everything.
He’d seen Bernie around the church, times he went by to pay his respects to her father. He thought she was cute, but just a kid. In truth, Evelyn, Bernie’s sister, was probably, at the time, more to his liking. There was something kind of solid about her looks. Jay hadn’t been with a woman in a long time and thought it best to start with one who might not mind taking the lead. To this day, he’s pretty sure that’s what the Rev and Mrs. Boykins had in mind when they invited him for dinner one Sunday; they were trying to set him up with their eldest girl.
But five minutes into the meal, he knew he could never make it with Evelyn, who was pouting about the heat, pouting about her lips, and couldn’t someone pass her a better piece of chicken. After dinner, he took a cigarette on the porch, and Bernie brought him a glass of tea, floating a slice of lemon on top. She sat on the porch steps, pushing her skirt between her knees, and asked him if he’d seen Cooley High, what kind of music he liked, and if he’d ever been roller skating. Then she asked if he’d like to go out with her sometime.
“I’ve had a crush on you since I was thirteen years old,” she said.
He couldn’t explain, even then, why this moment grabbed him so, why it hit him at the knees. It was about the sweetest thing he’d ever heard, offered up with such sincerity, such simplicity. Bernie was so at ease with her feelings, and Jay admired that, was drawn to it even. He took a good long look at her that day. She was nearly twenty by then and shapely, with soft brown eyes and a heart-shaped face that looked up at him, waiting for some answer. He told her he’d have to ask her father. She laughed out loud, showing her long, white teeth.
They dated off and on that summer. She was answering phones at a dental office on the north side of town. He had a car by then and would pick her up sometimes when she got off work. They went to the movies mostly, held hands in the dark. She helped him study for the bar exam, made up flash cards even though she didn’t understand half the terms she was writing on them. And a couple of months into his first job—handling traffic tickets and DWIs at a low-rent shop across the street from a municipal courthouse—Bernie told him to go out on his own if he hated the job so much. “Do your thing,” she said.
He got to thinking that he loved her.
She held him up in ways he had never expected from a woman. So he married her. She moved into his small one-bedroom apartment and never once complained. She loved him in an uncomplicated way, not at all weighed down by false expectations. She seemed to understand the limits of his emotional fluency, the things he simply could not, or would not, talk about.
It was a good fit for him. So much had changed in the world in so few years, they were almost of two generations, though he was only seven years older than she was. And he liked it that way. There were things about his past he didn’t want to be reminded of. With Bernie, he could start new. He went along with her friends, made do without any of his own. And over the years, they made a pact, unspoken but as real and present in their marriage as the furniture in their apartment, the bed they slept on every night: she didn’t ask questions. About his trial, where he got those guns, why they never saw his mother at Christmas or Thanksgiving. But lately, the baby coming and all, she seems to want something more from him. He can’t bear to disappoint her, but he won’t be pushed into places he’s not willing to go. That was never a part of the deal.
He doesn’t notice the headlights in his rearview mirror right away, at least they don’t mean anything to him at first. It’s not until he’s exiting the I-10 freeway, going south on Lockwood, that he gets the feeling again, the sour ripple at the base of his chest, the tickle in his gut. He looks in the rearview mirror and realizes the square white lights have been behind him for some time, on the freeway and now here on Lockwood Drive. He tries to keep his nerves on an even keel as he glides into the right lane, waiting for the car to pass. The driver stays behind him, in the left lane, keeping a steady pace. Jay slows, then speeds up, then slows again. But no matter what move he makes, the driver stays on his tail, eventually sliding into the right lane, directly behind Jay. Its headlights blast through the Buick’s back window, bouncing off his rearview mirror and momentarily blinding Jay. He can’t tell the make or model of the other car, can’t see the driver’s face from here. In his mind’s eye, he pictures a black Ford, a white male at the wheel, and wonders again if the guy is a cop, if he ought to pull over.
When Market Street comes up on the right, Jay makes a sharp turn without signaling, his car fishtailing widely as he speeds onto Market. He cranks the wheel heavily to the left to keep from slipping into a steep ditch lining the side of the narrow road. When he finally manages to straighten the car, he looks into his rearview mirror. The square white headlights are behind him still.
Up ahead, past Phillis Wheatley High School, Jay sees half a dozen cars parked in front of a graying wood-frame house. There are lights on in the neighbors’ front windows, folks peeking from behind curtains to watch the commotion, the police activity on their block. There are two squad cars parked in front of the gray house and uniformed officers standing on the patchy lawn.
The car behind Jay stops suddenly in the middle of the road.
Its headlights snap off.
Jay can finally make out the shape of the car, its long, boxy silhouette. It’s a Ford LTD for sure, black as the night on all sides. The driver starts to back away from the house, away from the cops and the scene on the street, pivoting on the narrow road, almost dipping into the ditch on the left side to make the turn. The driver heads east, back toward Lockwood Drive, picking up speed. Whatever his business with Jay, he does not want to handle it here, in the company of others. This only deepens Jay’s apprehension, the nasty feeling in the pit of his stomach that the man in the black Ford means nothing but trouble.
He parks in front of the gray house, leaving his .38 in the glove box, and steps into the red-and-blue swirling haze of the cop cars. He recognizes some of the union men standing in the front yard. They’re smoking cigarettes and drinking out of mismatched cups. Somebody took the time to make coffee, to pass it around. This is union business now. Kwame Mackalvy is standing on the cracked driveway, arms folded across his chest. He’s talking to a young Hispanic woman who’s scribbling Kwame’s every word onto a notepad.
He called the fucking press, Jay thinks.
As he steps onto the grass, walking toward the front door of the house, a cop puts out a hand to stop him, landing a firm shove in the center of Jay’s chest.
“Who the hell are you?” the cop asks.
He’s a kid, black. Jay’s got ten years on him, at least.
The black cop cuts a look at his white partner, showing off. “I asked you a question,” he says, digging his finger into Jay’s sternum.
Jay is slow to answer the cop, resenting the need to justify himself to a kid who wouldn’t even have a job on the police force if it weren’t for the civil rights Jay’s generation marched and died for. “You want to take your hand off me?”
“What did you just say?” the cop barks.
Reverend Boykins crosses the patchy lawn. He’s in a suit and tie, impeccable, even at this hour. “This is Jay Porter, Officer. He’s a lawyer.”
These are the magic words. The cop releases Jay without another word.
Kwame Mackalvy waves Jay over to his spot on the driveway. “I got Sylvia Martinez from the Post here. You want to make a statement, bro?”
“No,” Jay says bluntly and without breaking his stride.
He walks up the cinder-block steps and into the house. Inside, the air is a good ten degrees hotter than it is outside, more humid too. There must be thirty people piled into the tiny house. Union men, neighbors, kids up past their bedtime. There’s a woman in a cotton nightgown crying on the couch, a man kneeled in front of her, holding her hand. He’s wearing nothing but blue jeans and house shoes. Jay walks to the family, speaking to the woman first. “You okay?” he asks.
She doesn’t look up or acknowledge where the voice is coming from. She simply nods, her eyes glazed over as she stares blankly through the hole in her front window, watching police officers pick up shotgun shells from her yard.
“Mr. Porter.” The man, young for a husband and father, stands, still gripping his wife’s hand. Jay recognizes him from the church meeting a few nights ago. “Donnie Simpson,” the man says. “’Preciate you coming out here.”
Jay nods, shaking the man’s hand. “What happened?”
“Three shots, right through that window.”
“Nobody was hit?” Jay asks.
“No, sir. The kids was sleep in the bedroom with us.”
Across the room there are two little girls and an older boy in T-shirts and pajamas, sitting at a card table with a bowl of plastic fruit resting on top. They’re eating Frosted Flakes out of the box, the older boy doling out equal portions to his sisters. The girls are watching the cops, the excitement in the house. None of the kids is more than ten years old, all of them tall and lanky like their father.
“They stay out here on the let-out couch usually. But late summer like this, we keep them in the back room with us, where the window unit is.”
Jay nods, looking at the kids, thinking the same thing as Mr. Simpson.
“If they had been out here…” Donnie says, his voice low.
“You see who did it?”
“No, sir. We was sleep.”
“How do you know it was ILA?”
“Like I told them,” he says, nodding toward the cops. “The ILA been calling my house all week, man, talking about I better not vote to strike. And I’m not the only one neither. Other brothers been getting the same phone calls, all time of the day and night. They trying to shut us down, Mr. Porter.”
Reverend Boykins and the two police officers step inside the house. The bare bulbs on the ceiling catch them in a harsh light, throwing deep shadows beneath their eyes, lighting up the greasy sweat running down their necks. The reverend wipes at his face with a handkerchief. “Come on, now,” he says, waving a hand out across the room, trying to get the men’s attention. “Let’s let the gentlemen talk now.” He steps to the side, giving the cops the floor.
“All right, all right,” the white cop says.
Kwame Mackalvy and the brothers outside crowd onto the front porch, trying to listen in through the open front door. June bugs and mosquitoes wiggle past them, into the funk and sweat and feast of human flesh in the house.
“We got a lot of information tonight,” the cop says. “I want you to know we take seriously what’s happened here.”
“Then what you gon’ do about it?” one of the men on the porch asks.
“Let the man finish now,” the Rev says.
“We’ll take the information we have here and file a report at the station.”
“A report?” the man on the porch says.
“That’s it?” Donnie asks.
“You gon’ have to do better than that, brother,” Kwame says, looking at the black cop, holding him, especially, accountable.
“There’s no eyewitness to the shooting,” the white cop says.
“We told you who did this,” Donnie says.
“ILA motherfuckers, that’s who,” somebody in the room says. “They beat up a kid last week.”
“The ILA is a big union with a lot of members, some of whom support you boys,” the white cop says. “Now, you want to tell me specifically who shot a gun through this house, who’s been calling you…I’ll go talk to ’em myself.”
“What if we got you a list of names?” Donnie says, turning to the other men. “Come on, y’all, we all at the same meetings. We know the ones that get up in front of everybody, trashing the strike, saying what they gon’ do to stop it.”
“Now I want to be clear here,” the white cop says. “I’m not gon’ go around accusing folks without some kind of real evidence.”
“Isn’t that your job, to find the evidence?” Kwame says.
“You get us a list, we’ll be sure to put it in the file,” the cop says.
“That’s it?” one of the men asks.
“Man, get the hell out of my house with that shit.”
“Donnie, that’s enough,” Reverend Boykins says.
“Hey, we’re just trying to do a job here,” the black cop says.
Kwame clucks his teeth, shaking his head at the kid.
The white cop passes his business card to Reverend Boykins, who passes it to Jay, who doesn’t know why he’s the one suddenly in charge of the thing.
“Call us if something changes,” the white cop says to Jay.
By four o’clock in the morning, the men are still working on their list, calling out names to each other across the room, going over any beef they’ve ever had with any member of the ILA. Donnie’s wife is in the back room now, trying to get the kids down for what’s left of the night.
Jay turns down the third cup of coffee he’s been offered. He stands alone by the door. He doesn’t know what more they need from him, why he even got out of bed for this. He pulls the cop’s card from his pants pocket and turns it over to Donnie. “You tell your wife I’m real sorry,” he says on his way out.
“Wait a minute now.” Donnie looks at the Rev and the other men in the room. “We’re ready to move on to the next step with this thing…right?”
Jay turns to his father-in-law. “What’s he talking about?”
The Rev takes a deep breath and a step toward Jay. “We think Kwame was right, son. We think a lawsuit may be our best chance to be heard.”
Kwame, on the other side of the room, stands with his hands clasped behind his back, firing up a speech. “The police department is not doing enough to protect these men. As we move forward with a strike, we need to know that the city and the mayor back their right to peaceably assemble.”
Jay sighs to himself. He’s been here before. The late-night strategy session, the caffeinated rhetoric. He is suddenly very tired and wants to go home to his wife. “Lloyd,” he says to the man Kwame used to be, “the cops came, they did their job. You know who did this, it’s a different story, but—”
“Not this. Forget this,” Kwame says. “We’re going with the kid.”
Jay looks around the room, not immediately understanding.
“Darren Hayworth, son,” Reverend Boykins says. “The young man with the busted arm. You met him and his father at the church.”
“They beat the shit out of that kid,” one of the men says.
“He was coming home from a meeting, you remember,” the Rev explains. “He was headed to a second job when they cornered him out Canal Street, near the tracks. After they left him out there, bleeding all over, the boy drove himself to the north side station, not even half a mile from the ILA headquarters on Harrisburg. The cops there wouldn’t even take his statement.”
“And he said he seen the ones who did it,” Donnie says.
“He’s got names?” Jay asks.
“Naw, but he say they was at the meeting that night.”
“As far as we’re concerned, the Houston Police Department failed in its duties to protect one of its citizens, to see the law carried out,” Kwame says. Then, writing the press release in his head, he adds, “He’s a good-looking kid, hardworking…just the kind of message we want to send.”
“You talk to the mayor yet?” his father-in-law asks.
“I’m working on it.” A lie to a man of God, and family to boot.
“Well, tell her a lawsuit is coming. That’ll get her attention,” Kwame says.
“Look,” Jay says, trying to think of a way to slow them down, a way he can get out of this. “I don’t even know what kind of case you’d have, and second, I’m not sure I’m the right guy. I can’t really take on something of this magnitude right now. I do have other cases, other…obligations.”
The Rev nods to some of the men across the room, one of whom pulls a brown paper sack out of a metal lunch pail sitting on the kitchen counter. The man, in faded Levi’s and mud-crusted work boots, walks toward Jay in the center of the room, handing him the paper sack. Inside there are bills: $20s and $10s mostly, some singles and loose change. “The Brotherhood ain’t a real group no more, not legally,” the man says. “We don’t have our own funds. But we got this together since just last week. We’ll try to get you some more soon.”
Jay looks at the men in the room, men who work just as hard as he does for what little they have. He hands back the paper bag. “I can’t take this.”
The men in the room look at each other, not sure what this means.
“I’ll get in to see the mayor this week,” Jay says. “She’ll take my call.”
He knows it’s true as soon as he says it. He’s always known she would see him if he pushed. And maybe that’s why he’s never tried. “I’ll talk to her.”