Axel shakes his head. “This isn’t even a part of my platform. It’s not in any of the campaign literature. How would anybody think to put this out there?”
“It’s Wolcott,” Neal says. “This has Reese Parker’s name written all over it. Mailers, that’s her thing. When she ran Blanchard’s campaign in Dallas, she was sending out letters all over the city, letters from black preachers hinting that Blanchard’s unmarried opponent, Dale Ackerman, was living outside the laws of the Bible, taking care to point out his close friendship with one of his male aides. It was a week after the election before anyone realized nobody’d ever heard of a single name signed to those letters. The preachers, the church names, she just made it up whole cloth. Rove in Austin was so impressed, he hired her to work George W.’s race for the governor’s seat. I would have thought she’d have hopped onto a national race by now, especially with rumors about Bush making a run for the White House. I don’t know what she’s doing fucking around with a mayor’s race in Houston.” He plops down in a nearby chair, seemingly exhausted by the force he’s up against. “We’ve been negotiating a price for Acton’s endorsement. We’re working on a number. He’s a greedy bastard, and an asshole, frankly. But I don’t think he’d stoop to this.”
In Jay’s pocket, the Motorola trills again.
“You planning something along the bayou?” he asks Axel directly.
“No, not at all.”
“They’re using this to paint him as a fool.” Sam puffs on his cigarette. “The bayou project is a boondoggle, a money pit,” he says. “And everyone knows it.”
Russell Weingate nods. “The BBDP is just a commission, a few developers with deep pockets, that’s all. Every election cycle, they court the candidates, write a few checks, make their pitch.” For decades, folks have been dreaming up ideas to build something grand along Buffalo Bayou, like the River Walk in San Antonio: restaurants, shops, and luxury hotels with views of the water, anything but the weeds and concrete that surround it now. “And every cycle the candidates nod and act interested, and then they cash those checks and nothing ever comes of it. No one can seriously think that just ’cause Axel met with the commission one time that he’s serious about this thing. That commission’s a dinosaur. They’ve been around for at least fifteen years.”
“Since Cynthia’s reign,” Jay says, his tongue nearly tripping on a name he hasn’t uttered in years. Cynthia Maddox, the former mayor of Houston, Texas, current booster for Axel Hathorne’s historic run for office, and the woman Jay has long suspected of turning him over to the feds in ’69, of being an undercover informant, one, or a girl in over her head, two, a believer who sold her soul to save her ass. It was a betrayal that gutted Jay’s life, stole from him love and faith when he needed them most. “Isn’t that where she ran into trouble her last years in office?” he says. It was widely reported back then, in the pages of the Post and the Houston Chronicle, that she used taxpayer money to have the Army Corps of Engineers survey the land along the bayou for construction, and then nothing ever got built.
“That’s not all Cynthia’s fault,” Axel says.
“You can’t put the whole oil bust on her,” Sam says. “Those early investors fled because the city’s economy collapsed, everything dried up.”
“Only no one remembers it that way,” Russell says. “And now it looks like Wolcott and her attack dog Parker are trying to turn Cynthia’s support of Axel into a liability for him, like he’s pushing her old ideas.”
“This is just to scare people,” Neal says.
“Well, it’s working,” Jay says.
His phone rings again. Irritated now, he snatches it out of his pocket. He flips open the mouthpiece, barking a less than cordial “Hello.”
It’s a woman’s voice. “I’m sorry to have to call you on your cell phone.”
“Who is this?”
“This is Ms. Hilliard, Mr. Porter.”
“Who?”
“From Lamar High School.”
“Is Ellie okay?”
“Oh, yes,” she says. “She’s sitting right here in my office.”
Hilliard, he remembers. The school’s principal. “That serious, huh?”
“I’m afraid so, Mr. Porter.”
He sighs. “I’ll be right there.”
He flips his Motorola closed. “Gentlemen,” he says. He reaches for the flyer. “You need to clean this up before it gets any further out of your hands.” He folds the paper, tucks it back into the inside pocket of his jacket. “If there’s a message I can convey to my clients to put them at ease about the threat of any proposed development, I sure as hell wish you’d tell me.”
“There is no threat,” Sam says, openly bristling at the idea that anyone or anything would come between him and his beloved Pleasantville, his tiny fiefdom by the port. “I appreciate your concern for the community’s feelings on this,” he says. “But anything more that needs to be said will come from me.”
A tiny worm of a frown inches across Axel’s face. But he never says a word. Between the two of them, it’s hard not to wonder whose political dream is being fulfilled, that of the son or the father. Had he been born in a different time, Samuel Hathorne might have made his own run for mayor of Houston, instead of settling for the office that was within his reach: “mayor” of Pleasantville, and city hall’s ambassador to the colored community, delivering votes in exchange for working streetlights or a new middle school–what neighborhoods like River Oaks and Memorial took for granted as their due. Everything in Pleasantville had been fought for and protected by Sam Hathorne, who led with a strong, steady hand. In the parlance of his day, he was what black folks used to call the Head Nigger in Charge, a title that was high praise or a deep insult, depending on the speaker’s tolerance for obsequiousness as a political tool. Sam knew the game better than anyone else, and he played his hand. “I’ll take care of it,” he says.
CHAPTER 6