The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  “Yeah.”

  “This is Jack Liffey. Don't you ever go to school?”

  “Abuela says I can stay off another day.”

  “Did you find out anything about that car?”

  “My homies seen it, man. Just like you said, all blacked out. They seen it a lot in front of a place on Heliotrope. Around four o'clock when men get off and get a couple beers.”

  “What's the name of the place?”

  “I don't know. I gotta show you.”

  “Describe it.”

  “I gotta show you.”

  He guessed the boy had his own agenda working. Maybe he wanted to see what would happen when Liffey caught up with them, or he just wanted to ride around in a detective's car. All Chicano kids wanted to be seen in a beat-up ’79 Concord.

  “Will you be home if I come by at three-thirty?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “If you see the car, stay away from it.”

  “Sure. We see you, Mr. Liffey.”

  We? he wondered. He looked around Johnson's computer room, all the beige on beige machines, heard techno music looping softly on a CD in another room, heard Johnson whistling to himself, and picked up the coffee cup that said Total Quality Management means jobs. The moment seemed so clean and exact. What did that mean? Was he about to experience something momentous? Or was there just a pocket of brain cells dedicated to alertness that was misfiring randomly?

  “Got any death rayguns?” he called out.

  Johnson peered in with a soldering iron in his hand.

  “I could probably rig a laser to burn through someone, but you'd have to shoot him first to get him to stand still.”

  “That's too bad. I have a feeling I'm going to need an edge.”

  *

  He called the answering machine he'd got going again from the mess in his office and got three messages.

  “Jack, I was hoping I didn't have to make this call. You're two payments behind now. It'll break Maeve's heart if I cut you off completely, but my lawyer says I can't let you see her at all until you catch up. I'm sorry. You know how lawyers are.”

  Blame the lawyer. It was like Kathy to find some roundabout way of softening the rough edges, not altogether a bad trait. It just left you punching air once in a while. Not for the first time, he thought of his marriage as a hat that had blown off while he was looking out over a canyon. He'd made a grab for it at the time, but then it was just gone, dwindling out of sight, leaving a bit of hat feel round his forehead but even that fading fast. It was the kind of thing that could still make you feel guilty about being broke, though.

  “Jack, Mike. I think you might consider Houston, the city of no one's dreams. You know, the home of the Houston Ship Channel—the world's longest flammable body of water. There's some damn strange stuff I found about money passing that way. I'm still working on it.”

  Houston again. Opera societies didn't wage war. It was just too crazy.

  “This is Arturo Castro, Jr. Call me when you're free.”

  Arturo. He called, but Castro was out. Liffey wondered if he'd found out anything more about the cowboy and his pal. He'd like any margin he could get.

  *

  The Southern California Opera Society was up in the Bradbury Building where they did all the advertising shoots with the slim models in weird dresses posed arrogantly in front of the wrought iron elevator cages. There was a light well down the middle of the building, surrounded by open walks and gingerbread railings on every floor, like something from New Orleans, but a lot of the decorative wall tiles had fallen out and been replaced with plain tiles. The marble floor was worn and scarred, too.

  Inside the opera society's glass doors, however, all was well. Pastels, Berber carpet, a hypermodern reception desk and a hypermodern receptionist with spiked blond hair and a big blue ice diamond.

  “I must have turned left at Vegas,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “Nothing. I'm here to see Richard Cheuse. Did I pronounce it right?”

  “Rhymes with juice. Who can I say you are?”

  “Jack Liffey. Rhymes with spiffy.”

  She closed one eye, as if trying to decide if he was making fun of her.

  “It's okay. I'm Irish. We sing ballads instead of opera.”

  She fiddled with her intercom. “Dick, I've got a Mr. Spiffy to see you.”

  A balding little man came from somewhere in the interior. “Mr. Spiffy, did you call me earlier?”

  Liffey nodded. He didn't bother correcting him.

  “Come.”

  The top of the man's head was iridescent under the hall lights, like an oil slick, but the rest of him was a West Hollywood entrepreneur, a suit in one of those Armani beiges and shoes that even Jack Liffey could tell were worth any three pairs of his own. He walked with a stiff little roll as if his muscles were ready for anything.

  The office was dim, almost dark. “Light crushes things,” he offered. “I like the quiet and I like the cool.” His eyes wouldn't stay in one place. They roved, as if hunting out the danger that lurked somewhere.

  “You wanted to talk to me about what?”

  On the phone Liffey had said it was about some remaining real estate investments in Cahuenga. He didn't have much leverage, but Senora Beltran's sheaf of papers had given him that much.

  “A woman was murdered in Cahuenga.” Jack Liffey sat in an uncomfortable violet sling chair. “Perhaps you read about it.”

  “I don't really keep up with current events in that part of town.”

  “She was in an organization that was opposed to the opera society buying up Samson Rubber.”

  “That's ancient history. The building is a marvelous piece of vernacular architecture, but hardly suitable for an opera house.” There was a soft thumping sound in the wall, probably just the emanations of an old high-rise, but Cheuse's eyes snapped fiercely to the spot on the wall where the sound might have spawned.

  “She also came into possession of a lot of papers from your files.”

  “Ah.” He didn't go on, but the wall had lost its fascination.

  “Do I make you jumpy, Mr. Cheuse?”

  He shook his head, and Liffey had an inspiration. “What was your MOS?”

  The searchlight of his eyes passed back to Liffey. “I was a Ranger, Third Special Forces Group”—he offered a fleeting chilly smile—“a fighting soldier from the sky. Airborne. I had enthusiasm for the mission, I got with the program.” His fingers drummed the desk. “You know what I remember most, I remember walking through a village, all the kids lined up, going huh-lo, huh-lo, very soft and spooky, like doves.”

  “I remember being scared.”

  “Oh, yes, and that.”

  “I'm just an E-4 tech, but this woman and her son meant something to me. Do you have any idea what's going on in Cahuenga? And why you donated so much money to Slow Growth?”

  It had been his biggest card and it didn't seem to be working. Cheuse rocked back comfortably. “I presume it was because we would have benefited. Slow Growth wanted an arts complex east of the river. Your friend was probably associated with the people who prefer slums to art. There are days when I do, too. But if I could make it a sequoia grove, I would prefer that to anything.”

  “You like trees.”

  “Don't you? Trees don't talk. I can never get enough quiet. You know, that fear—it wasn't just an extension of things you'd felt before. It was something so big and pure it was new, like stumbling onto love for the first time.”

  “I bet you haven't talked like that since the first weeks you got back.”

  “No. I wasn't a forest vet, but I could have been. I was on that path for a few days, hid out in a tent in Kings Canyon up by the Middle Fork, but it was too much melodrama. The great weapon against even that sort of pain is a sense of absurdity.”

  Liffey could hear, faintly, the crash of garbage cans in an alley, and then the beeping as a truck backed up. The sounds were distant, like listening to model railroad vers
ions of real things. Perhaps that was what created the unreality of the whole interview.

  “I don't want to disturb your equanimity,” Liffey said. “I only have one more question. Why did you drop the plans for the opera house?”

  He wasn't sure but it looked like disquiet in the man's eyes before they smoothed with calculation again, the surface of a pond ruffled as a rock passed through.

  “The building wasn't suitable, and it was a county cultural monument so redoing it would have been too much bureaucratic trouble.”

  “It wasn't too much trouble for an expensive architectural firm to draw up plans. And a whole raft of bean counters were busy calculating the tax breaks.”

  The surface rippled again, and the spreading tremor of suspense passed out to the walls before dissipating as an extra flutter of ambient heat in the room.

  “Mr. Liffey.” He did seem to know the right name, after all. The words snapped all of a sudden like a twig in two hands. “You don't know enough to constitute a threat to anyone. You'd better go now.”

  *

  Dark clouds were building up again to the north, but the sky was still sunny. For some reason there seemed to be a convocation of old Chevys along Slauson and he had to park a block from the Catholic Liberation house. It wasn't his day. His eye was drawn to a weedy lot by three skinny dogs nosing at something, and when he looked closer he saw it was the carcass of a fourth dog. The skin shifted and flexed where the dogs tore gingerly at the tissue, as if trying to avoid certain parts. It was not something you could watch. He didn't know dogs lacked the elementary civility to avoid eating their own kind. They were as bad as people after all.

  Eleanor Ong was gone on a mission of mercy, some worker laid off from a battery plant on the east side who was succumbing to lead poisoning. The same kid in the Pendleton shirt was just as surly as ever.

  “Have a swell day.”

  *

  As he drove up, he caught a glimpse of Senora Schuler out in back where Tony's weightlifting equipment was. She wore a housecoat, the first time he'd seen her untidy, and she wept uncontrollably, hitting the sides of her head with the palms of balled up fists. He had entered the zone of pain again.

  The passage of Death was like one of those Midwest floods that tear open houses and leave unexpected things exposed to the world, unbearably intimate bedroom sets or broken toilets hanging in space. He didn't think she was a woman to show her emotions like this, and he held back and parked just out of sight to give her a minute to recover.

  When he knocked, he heard a scuffle and the weeping stopped abruptly. Senora Schuler peered out at him through the little grilled window in the door, then quickly opened. She took his sleeve with urgency and towed him through the house and out to the weightlifting bench. She pointed down at something that lay on a little plot of grass. It was a blued revolver. She must have found it in the house and hurled it out, like an offending rodent.

  “Take away! You take!”

  He bent down. It was an old Smith & Wesson .38 Chief's, with a three-inch barrel. About $250 at the swap meet. Blacks liked the fancy automatics, Glocks and Walthers, but Latinos wouldn't touch them and wanted only revolvers. Perhaps it was the tenuous historical thread to the Western six-shooter, or the reputation automatics had for jamming. He picked it up with a Kleenex and smelled it. It hadn't been fired and there was no smell of gun oil from a recent cleaning.

  “Tony?” he said.

  She nodded. “La cama—debajo de… the bed.” She shuddered. “You take. Bad.”

  He slipped the pistol into his coat pocket. Obviously the boy was not there, and he was planning to make his apologies and go when she took his sleeve again and tugged him inside. She invited him into the kitchen and poured them both coffee, and they sat facing one another at the scarred table. So, she didn't mind visiting in the kitchen, after all.

  She held her forehead in a hand and he could see her trying very hard to marshal her words. “My city. Hermosillo. Big city in Sonora.” She shook her head, as if there were an ironic meaning in there somewhere. “Smart people go away. All smart people go away. Go Mexico, distrito federal. Go Nogales. Go el Norte, Chicago, California. Men go. Smart people go, we feel stupid. We stay. We no good.” She made another face, as if shifting meaning again, so he could prepare to tack. “Childs needs family. Childs needs uncles and ankles. Childs needs to hear names.”

  She lit a cigarette, something Mexican from a dark blue pack, and it surprised him. He hadn't seen her smoke before. Her movements were very graceful and it was a pleasure to watch her wave out the match and set it gently in a shiny tin can.

  “This not home. A little bit Mexico, but not home. It broken here. Big city. Away no good. Broken. City is mean, sadness, hungry, strangers.”

  He could sense that there was something quite important struggling across the language barrier, and he knew a lot of it but not all of it and he was sorry once again that he didn't speak Spanish.

  “City kill my Consuelita. Now my little little boy.” She shook her head, her dark stiff hair hardly stirring. “Is terrible.”

  “I don't know what to do either,” he said. “We have to try to do what is right.”

  He had thought her stolid and stalwart, another long-suffering earth-woman from the third world, with Indian eyes and stocky frame, and he could see that was probably just another way he undervalued a culture that he couldn't contact. By all accounts her daughter had been brilliant. And in her, too, all along, something dark and shrewd and alert had moved beneath the surface.

  Nothing happened in the kitchen for a while. She breathed. She sliced the burning tip off her cigarette against the lip of the can. She looked into his eyes and away. Eventually, he got up and left.

  *

  Tony slipped out of a yard and flagged him down at the corner.

  “Man, she is mad today,” Tony said.

  Two friends were with him. Tony got into the front, and the other two slid to the opposite edges of the back seat, a window each, the four of them pressed into the far corners of the car. Tony introduced them but they wouldn't speak to the adult, didn't even meet his eyes. The chubby kid was called Nabo, and a mean-looking boy with a scar was Billy, if a thirteen-year-old boy could be said to be mean looking. All three wore khaki chinos and T-shirts with one sleeve rolled up to nothing.

  Jack Liffey wanted to tell Tony that his grandmother was worried about him, but it was not something the boy would want to hear in front of his friends. Warriors left their womenfolk behind.

  “Where to?”

  “Up there.” Tony waved ahead vaguely.

  As he drove away, he wondered how to get through to the prematurely aging boys. It was the most difficult thing he knew. It was so much easier on the streets just to let things come, to improvise, simpler to be uncommunicative and just as hard as necessary.

  All four of their heads swiveled abruptly to the same sight. It was a residential curbside, where a boy might have set up a lemonade stand in Liffey's youth, but here a boy of about fourteen held what appeared to be a comatose little girl across his arms, and a sandwich board around his neck that said Sister needs medisin.

  Liffey braked and all three of the boys reacted at once. “Don't stop!”

  “Man, go on!”

  “Keep going. Keep going!”

  He stopped the car at the corner and looked at Tony, who was writhing in distress.

  “He's Setenta y uno, O.G., man. They'll kill us here. For truly.”

  “He's asking for help.”

  “Man, you don't know nothing here. Maybe it's a trick, maybe a initiation, maybe he hurted her himself. They're bad vatos.”

  Liffey got out and walked back toward the boy. “Son, what's the problem?”

  Fierce black eyes met his own. “Fuck off and die, cop.”

  “I'm not a cop. Do you need help? Let me see the little girl.”

  The boy swiveled her away, as if Liffey's touch would soil her, and then he fled across the lawn.
r />   “Cuidadito! Jura!”

  He watched the boy disappear between two cottages and then headed back disconsolately toward his car, the three moon faces in the windows watching him. At least, he thought, the twentieth century was winding down.

  “You were right. You want to tell me where I'm going?”

  “Nachito's Billiares. On Atlantic.”

  It was a run-down brick building with the tell-tale row of bolted metal plates high up under the architrave signifying an earthquake refurbishing. An old neon sign had once said Stan's Billiards, but it was rusting away and the new name was painted crudely on the window. There were also stickers saying “No Grapes.” A dirt lot beside the building held several battered cars. There was no BMW.

  “Okay. Go that way.”

  They directed him up a side street, then past an odd mini-mall that had been built far back from the street. Doughnuts, a laundromat, and Video de Sonora. But there was no BMW there either, nor in the alley behind.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Liffey said.

  “There's another place we seen it.”

  He followed their directions to a small office building, built of heavy concrete rectangles like exposed bones, brutality as a kind of style. It belonged on the West Side not here, but then he noticed that it was inhabited by accountants and lawyers. There were three BMWs in the lot, two silver and one black, but not an M3.

  In a far corner there was a strange habitation. Trash had been rolled and wadded into big tubes and then banded with string. The coils had been built up into an igloo just big enough for a human occupant. A fantastically tattered old woman squatted beside her home, one hand protectively on a Ralphs shopping cart filled with more building material. She seemed to be waiting for a renewal of energy.

  Just as he was about to pull out one end of the lot, the M3 glided in the other, as blank eyed as a bird of prey. It gave a little throaty show-off spurt of speed and then swung around and parked on a red curb near the door. The first thing he checked was the plates. Very recent California, with a number three ahead of the three letters.

  The boys had caught their breath, and there was no need for anyone to point the car out. Jack Liffey backed unobtrusively into a slot. The Cowboy got out of the bird of prey, stuffed on his hat and said something into the dark interior. His pal followed, arguing in a desultory way. The Cowboy aimed his keyfob at the car, which flashed its parking lights and then the two of them swaggered into the building.