It didn’t help that he was exhausted last night, having slept not a wink on Tuesday. He lay in bed for hours that night, before finally getting up and padding across the toffee-colored carpet to the armchair by Bernie’s side of the bed. He fished through the pockets of his pants until he came across his copy of the cops’ report. He called the precinct and asked to make an amendment to his earlier statement, the one made in haste without, he now realized, a proper inspection of the property by HPD officers. He mentioned the funny business with the downstairs window, the details that pointed to some kind of scheme, and the kid, of course. Jay was clear in his description: “nineteen or twenty, black male, with a flattop hairdo, and he was tall, six two maybe, and skinny, real skinny.” Not a bit of which the desk cop was willing to deal with over the phone. He would leave a message for Officers Young and McFee, he said. Soon after ending the call, Jay flipped over the cops’ report and jotted down every bit of it he could remember. He checked on his kids, covering Ben’s feet with his Ninja Turtles comforter and turning off the radio in Ellie’s room. In the kitchen, he made himself a drink. Three fingers of Jack and a handful of ice cubes.
Sipping in the dark, he tried to make sense of the breakin. Why the staged scene, and why, of all places, did he find the intruder, a nineteen-year-old kid, in the very room where Jay’s files are kept? The whole thing left a bad taste in his mouth, one that kept him drinking. Time was, he would have sat hunched over his kitchen table all night, trying to piece together a conspiracy out of the broken bits and pieces of a night like this. He’d passed whole decades that way, in the dark, guided only by the sound of his panicked heartbeat. But that felt like a lifetime ago. Jay had, for the most part, made peace with himself and the facts of his early life: the Movement, his arrest and criminal trial in 1970, when he’d been indicted on conspiracy charges and had come within a juror’s breath of going to prison for the rest of his life. They were less a plague on his psyche now than a distant source of pride. Kwame Mackalvy, his old comrade turned foil turned friend again, was right. They had been about something once. The marches and the protests, the demonstrations for a democracy that wasn’t hollow inside. It had mattered. They’d made a difference in people’s lives, including the lives of the two kids sleeping down the hall. And Jay had tried to do the same with his law practice, first with Cole Oil, winning $56 million for Erman Ainsley and the remaining residents by the salt mines, where the petrochemical giant was illegally storing and hoarding crude oil, black, greasy globs of which were coming up through the grass in his clients’ backyards. More than the money, for Jay the real win had been a trip to D.C. the following year, helping Ainsley pick out a suit for his testimony before a congressional hearing on the Coles’ business practices, charges of price gouging and wreaking environmental havoc. It was here that Jay thought the oil company would really be made to pay. But the investigation never made it out of committee; the fever for justice was lost somewhere in the turnover of congressional seats in ’84, when nearly every candidate out of Texas and Louisiana got donations from Cole Oil or its executive officers. The judgment itself has gone unpaid, held up on countless appeals for well over ten years now. Neither Jay nor his clients has seen a penny.
Ainsley is dead now.
It’s Dot, his elderly wife, to whom Jay speaks about the case, and one of her grandkids, a dentist in Clear Lake who demands updates on a monthly basis.
Still, the Cole case was a turning point for Jay.
It was only a month after the verdict that Jay took a call from a local official in Trinity County, not even ten miles from the town where Jay was born. The woman spoke so softly it seemed she was whispering into the telephone. A lumber company out of Diboll, she said, was driving across the county line and dumping wood waste in a makeshift and wholly illegal landfill just outside the town of Groveton. The arsenic the company used to pressure-wash and treat the wood was leaching into the soil, seeping into the groundwater. There were calls coming in from local residents. One woman had twelve dead chickens on her hands. Another swore she could smell death in her ice water. Jay had driven up Highway 59 that afternoon, stopping in Diboll first, and then tracing the back route he imagined the lumber mill was using. Sure enough, just off Farm Road 355, within plain view of a neighborhood of chain-link fences and chicken coops, home to a majority of Groveton’s black population, Jay was able to take pictures of a massive pile of rust-colored, rotting wood chips and pulp, steaming poison after a cold winter rain. Two days later, he met with Groveton’s beleaguered mayor and walked out as the city’s official counsel in the matter of City of Groveton v. Sullivan Lumber Co. A week after that, he filed the papers at the courthouse in Lufkin, stopping on his way to have a tense lunch of chicken salad and boiled peanuts with his mother at his childhood home in Nigton, the two avoiding so many topics that they’d hardly said anything at all.
There were many others after that–DDT residue found in a neighborhood of trailers and mobile homes near a plant in Nacogdoches; a hazardous waste site contaminating the well water in the town of Douglass; a chemical plant illegally dumping its runoff in a Latino neighborhood in Corpus Christi–the out-of-court settlements growing in proportion to his reputation.
The Cole deal is still his biggest payout to date, money he has yet to see.
He sends Thomas Cole a Christmas card every year, and he waits.
He’s a more patient man now, more measured and wise, he hopes, and less paranoid than his younger self, less quick to see the whole world as a personal attack on him, liars and spies at his back. There are no more pistols under his pillow, an argument his wife won years ago. Most days, he holds his head up for her, keeping a promise he made long ago: to get right in his mind, for her and for their kids, the two of them more beautiful than he feels he deserves.
The radio station is still running a postgame analysis of the general election when Jay turns onto Westheimer, about a block from Lamar High School, pulling into the parking lot of the dry cleaner across the street. He lets his daughter walk the rest of the way on her own. KCOH is heated up this morning, taking calls in the run-up to Person to Person, its daytime talk show, Phil Donahue for black folks. There’s no shock about Clinton heading back to the White House, so today’s topic on 1430 AM is closer to home: the runoff next month between Axel Hathorne and Sandy Wolcott. The question: How the hell did Dallas get a black mayor before Houston? “It’s 1996, people,” the host, Mike Harris, says, before the station cuts to a wrap-up of the morning’s big news.