When the freeway is clear, Jay’s done it in less than fifteen.
Tucking Jon K. Lee’s business card into his front pocket, he starts down the steps of his office, stopping short when he sees Jim Wainwright coming up the paved walk, the front gate swinging closed behind him. Jim is a tall man. He played forward for the Prairie View Panthers before his time in the army, most of it spent in segregated housing at Fort Polk in Louisiana, and afterward finished his graduate studies at Texas Southern, then called Texas State University for Negroes. Even ten years into his retirement, it’s rare to see Mr. Wainwright, a former engineer, out of slacks and a tie. His look this morning, blue jeans and a paint-splattered PV sweatshirt, reminds Jay of the grim search out in Pleasantville. It stops him in his tracks. Tell me we weren’t too late. Jim shoves his hands into the pockets and shakes his head. “Nothing so far,” he says, words that fill Jay with relief. Jim stands quiet a moment, his brow tensed into a deep wrinkle.
“I need to talk to you, Jay.”
“You want to come inside?”
Jim hangs back. “Let’s take a walk, son,” he says.
They make it up the block, past the print shop and a nude furniture outlet, before Jim says a word, stopping in front of the Diamond Lounge, a small blues bar. He pulls on the door’s brass handle, and a warm rush of air pours out into the street, carrying the scent of tobacco and peanuts, which are roasted daily on a stove top in the back. The lights are up inside, showing the cracks in the leather booths, the untended sticky spills on the polished concrete floor. There’s half a drum set on the corner stage, and a few empty and crumpled paper cups from last night’s show. Mr. Wainwright, who looks like he’s had one hell of a week, plants his feet in front of the leather bar and orders a scotch and water. By Jay’s watch, it’s only 9:40 in the morning. The guy behind the bar slides a beer in front of Jay, unsolicited. He would ask for a glass of water, but he doesn’t want to leave Jim with the feeling that he’s drinking alone, not when Jay can feel a brick-size confession about to fall off the man’s chest. Mr. Wainwright takes a sip of his scotch, sucking air through his teeth as it goes down. “You’re in trouble, son,” he says.
“Excuse me?”
“I like you, Jay, I do. And when the tragedy hit last year, when the fires were still burning, I was one of the main ones said you were the man to call.”
“Thank you,” Jay says cautiously.
Jim finishes the rest of the scotch in one gulp. His hand shakes as he sets his glass on the bar top. “But it’s a lot of us involved in this thing. What, three hundred plaintiffs or something like that?”
“Four hundred and eighty-seven,” Jay says.
He finds himself reaching for the beer, taking a swallow without thinking, anything to wet the back of his suddenly dry throat. It’s a Michelob, ice cold.
“Well, there’s some out there, Jay, who ain’t happy with the way things are going. I think a lot of folks, myself included, thought we’d be further along in the process by now. Ruby and I, we’ve been lucky, least as it goes with the doctors and stuff. There’s some up to the north side of the neighborhood got their kids on inhalers now, in and out of clinics. And I know you know this stuff too. But my house, others on my street, the money we paid to fix things, my roof, resodding the lawn, the repaint on my wife’s car and mine, that’s money we’re not seeing back.” Mr. Wainwright picks up his glass, as if he forgot it was empty, and then sets it down again. Under the bare bulbs of the Diamond Lounge’s main room, the white hair against his deep brown skin makes a halo effect. “I put my faith in you, and that’s good enough for me, but there’s some out there that are feeling strung along.”
They’re not the only ones, Jay thinks.