Pleasantville (3 page)

He was going home.

The first time
Jay hears the name Alicia Nowell he's sitting in his car, at a stoplight, Thursday morning on his way to take Ellie to school. Ten-year-old Ben gets dropped off first. He's had a hard time with school, almost since his first days of kindergarten, and by the third grade Bernie had pulled some strings at the school district, where she was working at the time, and got him enrolled in a special program at Poe Elementary, which starts a half hour before Ellie's classes at Lamar High School, another placement Bernie orchestrated. It's just the two of them in the car, Jay and his daughter, the station set to KCOH. Ellie has control of the dial Mondays and Wednesdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays are Jay's turn. Fridays are theoretically Ben's to program the radio, but he's claimed, more than once, not to
care what they listen to, and Jay usually cedes those mornings to his daughter as well. She's quiet today, face pointed to the passenger window, her arms folded across the puffy expanse of her black Starter jacket, her chin and the bottom half of her face tucked below the zipped collar. She's hardly spoken since they left the house, just a few mumbled words as Ben climbed out of the Land Cruiser, reminding him not to forget his lunch. To Jay, there hasn't been so much as a “Good morning.” They got into it yesterday after school, over this business with the telephone. Jay was short with her, he knows. He has only two settings when it comes to his daughter: either calm and solicitous, gentle in any inquiry about her thoughts and concerns, or else he becomes stony and impassive: the more words come out of her mouth that he finds misguided or unreasonable in some way, the more he thinks she's pointedly dismissing the wisdom of his judgment, the way
he
would do things. It is an ugly trait of his that Bernie often called out, managing with just a few words to bring him back to his better self. But his wife knew him better than his daughter does, and he knew his wife better than he knows his teenage daughter. There are things she knew about her family, not secrets so much as hard-earned intimacies, that she inadvertently took with her, leaving the rest of them to fend for themselves in this new, foreign land, meeting daily at the kitchen table, or passing in the hallway, without their shared interpreter. She, more than anyone else, knew Jay's tendency to mask fear with brooding, knew his panic too often takes the form of withholding, a silence that can suck the air out of any room. With his daughter, it's something he's still working on.

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 break-in. 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.

The story of the missing girl has already played twice.

By the seven-thirty segment, she has a name: Alicia Ann Nowell. Jay reaches for the volume. Ellie has her books in her lap. She reaches for the door handle but doesn't move right away, pulled in by the story as well. According to the radio, the girl, a Houston native, did not come home Tuesday night. Early reports indicate she was last seen in the neighborhood of Pleasantville, at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere, a few miles from her home in Sunnyside. At the mention of Pleasantville, Ellie turns and looks at her dad. Jay is tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, his brow creasing deeply. The story ends with an emotional plea from the family for information. Jay can hardly make out the mother's words, so choked and garbled are they with panic and tears. It's already been two days. “My name is Maxine Robicheaux. Alicia Nowell is my daughter. Please, please, if you have seen my child, please call your local police station, tell somebody something, please.” The news reporter goes on to describe Alicia as eighteen and black. She was last
seen in a long-sleeved T-shirt, blue. Her ears are triple pierced on both sides. “I have to go,” Ellie says, opening the car door.

Jay turns off the radio, watching as she starts toward the school.

She stops suddenly and runs back to the car, her hair springing loose from the collar of her jacket. She favors Evelyn, Bernie's sister, more than her mother, but more than anyone else she looks like Jay's sister, Penny, who lives in Dallas. Ellie is fairer than either of her parents, redbone they used to call it in the country. She has freckles across her nose and forehead, and her eyes are the very color of her aunt's nickname, copper and full of fire when she laughs or sings, which she does when she thinks no one is listening. It's Ben who is the spitting image of his mother, down to the dimple in his left cheek. Jay rolls down the passenger-side window so Ellie can lean in and tell him, “Ms. Hilliard wants to see you.”

“Which one is that?”

“The principal.”

“What's that about?”

She shrugs and then waves, saying she'll get a ride home with Lori's mom, adding that Mrs. King said she could pick up Ben too. “Bye, Daddy.”

“Elena,” he calls after her. But she's already gone, swallowed up by the crowd of teenagers moving across the street. It's mild outside, but bright and sunny. Across Westheimer Road, Jay can hear the snap of the halyard against the school's metal flagpole. He traces his daughter's movements as long as he can, but eventually loses sight of her in the crush of students, at least a dozen of them wearing nearly identical puffy Starter jackets, girls tucked inside their private cocoons, trapped somewhere between childhood and the coming chrysalis. Jay can still remember the day Ellie was born, can still remember holding Bernie's father, Reverend Boykins, who wept openly in the hospital
parking lot, Jay saving his own tears for the moment he brought his daughter home, a fall day like this one.

Officers Young
and McFee keep their three-thirty appointment, stopping by Jay's office at the tail end of their shift. They're day cops usually, seven to four. Tuesday night they'd been picking up overtime. By sunlight, McFee looks a little older than Jay originally thought, and she's Latina, no matter the last name. She has her hair slicked back into the same tight little bun. In the entryway to Jay's office, she hovers, barely filling half the door frame. She's letting her partner take the lead. Young, to Jay's dismay, hasn't written down a single word. He's holding a notepad and is clicking the top of his ink pen.

“He was in the room where my files are kept,” Jay says. “Wouldn't figure a kid like that to be interested in anything he couldn't trade or pawn before the sun came up.”

Young nods, a gesture more of appeasement than agreement. “But you said yourself that nothing was actually stolen from the property.”

“The case files up there go back more than
ten
years,” Jay says. “It would take nearly that long to go through every photograph and sheet of paper to know if any of it is missing.” The phone on Jay's desk rings. From down the hall, Eddie Mae hollers his name. Since her eldest grandson installed their phone system, she's learned to forward calls to his office, but she won't fool with the intercom, not when it's just the two of them in the office half the time.

“Mrs. Delyvan is on the phone for you.”

Jay sighs.

He has to take this call.

“Did you see him take anything?”

“Well, no.”

“He have anything in his hands?”