Read Black Water Rising for Free Online Page A

beer. He drinks it slowly, leaned up against his couch, staring at the boxes of baby gifts that have been piling up for weeks now. The long, flat box is from his wife’s parents, the Reverend and Mrs. Al Boykins. Bernie has asked him on more than one occasion to get a move on it.
    Jay stands and crosses the room, using his car keys to tear into the cardboard. The crib spills out in pieces. Jay sets it on the floor and walks to the hall closet, hunting for his toolbox. Inside, beneath his screwdrivers and drill bits, he finds a crumpled pack of Newports. He supposedly quit when Bernie got pregnant, but he keeps a stash here and there, in his car and at the office. He pockets the pack of cigarettes and carries the toolbox into the living room.
    The whole thing takes him over an hour, but he manages to get piece A to fit with B, and B to fit with C, and so on. Before long, he has a crib. He lays the tiny, vinyl-covered mattress inside and runs his fingers along the handrailing. It’s white-painted plywood, cheap but sturdy. They’ll have to get some little sheets to go with it, maybe put up a mobile sometime, one that plays a melody. He tries to picture the little one who will sleep here soon, and wonders if she’ll have Bernadine’s dimples or her toothy smile... or if he’ll have Jay’s eyes, brown and wide and set in his face like two river stones, weathered and deep.
    He crumples the instructions, shoving them in the empty box. On his way to the back door, he pulls the trash from the step can by the kitchen stove and grabs a stack of old newspapers. He drags the whole mess down the back stairs.
    The waste bin out behind his building is overflowing with paper grocery bags full of chicken bones and black, moldy heads of lettuce, dead leaves and beer bottles and boxes of old clothes. The trash has a putrid smell, rotten and sickly sweet. There are flies buzzing over everything. It’s been sitting like this, untouched, for almost two weeks, what with trash pickup in Houston getting more and more sporadic. It’s one of the city’s dirty little secrets, that for all its recent economic prosperity—the fastest-growing city in the country two years running, the oil crises of the late ’70s a boon for an oil town like Houston—the city can barely keep up with its own growth. It is literally busting at the seams, its trashy insides spilling over everything. Sanitation workers put in overtime but can’t keep up with the new businesses and housing developments going up every week. Residents in tony neighborhoods like River Oaks and Memorial hire private com panies to haul their shit away, but on streets like Jay’s in Third Ward, lined with cheap rental units and shotgun houses, work ing people are at the mercy of the city. Jay dumps the empty crib box and his kitchen trash on top of the rotting heap in the bin. He tosses the newspapers next, watching as they dribble down the huge mound of garbage, landing back at his feet.
    Jay reaches for the cigarettes in his pocket and makes a seat for himself on top of a broken TV. He strikes a match on the concrete at his feet and lights the end of a bent Newport. He takes a drag and picks up one of the old newspapers, killing time between this cigarette and the one he knows is coming next.
    Cole Oil Industries, the largest oil and gas company in the city, made the business page, along with some other big names in petrol, Exxon and Shell. Cole Oil is reporting a slowdown at their main refinery near the Port of Houston; a shortage in bar rels coming in from overseas is listed as the cause. There’s some thing lurking behind the words in print, a hint, a threat really, of another oil crisis on the horizon. Jay doesn’t think he can afford much more than he’s paying at the pumps now, up to $1.37 at the PetroCole station by his house.
    Below the fold is more on an ongoing story about labor prob lems at the port, dockworkers threatening to strike over wage issues. Jay reads the