The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  “The woman doesn't know a thing. You can let her go.”

  “That so?”

  “That's why I came quietly.”

  “We ain't negotiatin’ here. Just shut the fuck up now.”

  There was dark cloud all around, but the car purred along in a charmed patch of brightness, light smarting the eye off the hood as if the gods had cleared a little space for their vengeful powers to work.

  Crossing the river, he saw that the river had slacked off, only a foot or two of runoff moving down the central channel, then the car turned south and east into forsaken industrial land. They humped over railroad tracks into what a sign with a picture of an old glass milk bottle suggested had been a dairy and then they idled slowly along a dirt track cleared of rubble. Now and again the air dams hanging under the bumpers scraped on some upraised chunk of dirt. They stopped beside a low flat building that said OFFICE. Standing alone nearby was a plank shack that might have been yanked whole out of a deep mountain hollow in West Virginia.

  “Get out,” the Cowboy said.

  Jack Liffey stepped out onto a little island of cement in a sea of mud. The Cowboy's friend locked up the car with a double-bleat of the car alarm and they walked to the office through sucking mud. There was a smell of manure in the air, and a faint deep noise, luring and anxious, maybe only a conception of noise as his mind tried to fill in the space, like the sound that a huge empty place makes in the distance. A gray curtain of rain had fallen over the mountains, and there was a tiny flashbulb flash in the thunderhead, too far to hear.

  The Cowboy ducked inside and came back out, like someone going to the refrigerator for another beer.

  “You're gonna have to hang around a bit, like a side a beef.”

  The other man had a big black pump shotgun now, and they took him to the shed where the Cowboy fought with a rusted padlock.

  “You shouldn't never interfere with nothin' that don't bother you personal. You just smelt out the wrong hound's butt, pard.”

  It was dim inside and felt damp, smelling like chalky plaster. He went rigid when he saw Eleanor Ong lying on her stomach on a piece of stained carpet, her hands tied behind her back with an extravagant amount of rope. A tennis ball was duct-taped into her mouth. She rocked a little when she saw him, her eyes crazed, but he didn't see any evidence of wounds. She was still wearing the clothes he'd last seen her in.

  When he looked up, the shotgun was on him.

  “I'm not in this business to let diddlysquats shoot up my car. You get that yet?”

  “I understand. You've got me now. How about letting her go?”

  Without warning the Cowboy slapped him hard with his open palm so Liffey's head rocked back and his cheek caught fire.

  “How about you keep the fuckin' shut up? You're only alive because my boss ain't made up his mind on you.”

  He took the shotgun, and the other man tied Jack Liffey's hands behind him. They dragged him across the room and tied a loose end of the rope to the trap pipe under a basin. He was on his knees on the concrete floor with the basin tight in his back.

  The Cowboy turned the shotgun around and rested the butt against Jack Liffey's cheek. The rubber butt-plate felt warm.

  “Just be happy I don't give you a little quick dentistry, tough guy.” He laughed dismissively. They left, and Jack Liffey could hear the padlock snapping down.

  He looked at Eleanor. “I'm sorry I got you in this,” he said mournfully. “I didn't know it would go so bad.”

  A chink of blue showed through the roof and it was all he could do to keep from looking at it. Like the bright eye at the far top of a deep well. One more horror was all he needed.

  “Can you nod or shake your head?” Her head barely moved. She made a series of tortured noises and he guessed the duct tape was caught in her hair and made it painful to move. “Did they hurt you? Make one noise for yes, or two for no.”

  She made a kind of groan from deep in her throat. She clearly made it twice.

  “Did they grab you last night when I dropped you off?”

  Yes.

  “You came straight here?”

  Yes. Tears were now running down her cheeks.

  “Did they ask you anything?”

  No.

  “Did they try to get you to do anything?”

  No.

  “They just tied you up and left you?”

  Yes.

  “Has anyone looked in this shack at all since then?”

  He established that the Cowboy's friend had fed her in the morning and led her once to a bathroom in the office. They'd taped the ball in her mouth after she'd started screaming out the bathroom window. Eventually the twenty questions ran out.

  “I messed it up,” he said lamely. “I'm sorry.”

  She made a whole string of noises, but he couldn't work out what she was trying to say. “I don't think they'll do anything terrible. They'd have done it already.” He wasn't as confident as he tried to sound, and he didn't know whether she believed him. They both knew what had happened to Consuela Beltran.

  His wrists hurt and he was losing sensation in his knees. His eye caught again on the chink of light overhead and his whole body went tense, sweat breaking out on his forehead. How could an irrational memory-fear even register against so much real fear?

  He forced his attention away from the oblong of sky. One of the rafter beams seemed serrated and he stared hard at the row of lumps until he worked out that they were the carcasses of rats, nailed up one after another. Was it voodoo? Why would you crucify rats? They were of all sizes and looked mummified. He wondered if his sense of reality was being subverted.

  “I love you,” he said to her.

  She made a steady choked sobbing, like a seizure, her head bobbing in tiny spasms.

  The padlock rattled.

  Let me do the talking, he thought, nearly delirious with fear. He saw now how people went mad; they just refused to look straight at things any more. Powerlessness was the worst thing there was.

  Light flooded in and the Cowboy's shape waited a moment against the light. As Jack Liffey's eyes adjusted he could see that the sky was all dark cloud. A doom sky.

  “Well, stud-duck, the boss checked in about you and he was mad enough to kick a hog barefoot.”

  “I've destroyed all the papers,” Jack Liffey said. “There's no reason for anyone to be after me.”

  “I'm sure you're right, pardner. I really am. I'm sure you'd love to wear out a few more saddles before checking out of the corral, but, the thing is, how are we going to trust you? You see? It's really pretty tough to see how we could wish you well.”

  The other one came in and tugged Eleanor to her feet.

  “I wonder if you're good at the big mysteries,” the Cowboy said. “Every swinging dick wants to know the answers and now you get to. That's the nut, really.”

  FIFTEEN

  The Whole Weight of the City

  The two hoods marched them across the waste ground. He tried to figure out where they were being herded so he could come up with a plan, anything at all to give him some hope, but the only thing he saw ahead was a ragtag corrugated metal shed against the far fence and he didn't really think they'd get that far. He tried to make himself some luck but he couldn't work the trick. Now and again puddles sucked at his feet, and he tried not to look at Eleanor Ong. Seeing her only made him feel more unlucky.

  “We gotta be at Johnny's at one,” the man with the shotgun said.

  “Shutup. Well, pard, I made you out tougher than a long-tail catamount and you and me mighta got on, some other life.” He laughed. “You don't wanna hear that. I guess I was just raised up on prunes and proverbs.”

  “What are you after, absolution?” Jack Liffey snapped.

  “We just do our job and then we leak out of this here landscape.”

  All of a sudden, the shotgun came up to bar their way. The Cowboy yanked the duct tape off Eleanor, a good hank of hair coming away with it, and she cried out and then gu
lped air as the tennis ball bounced incongruously away into the mud. Jack Liffey was jerked backwards, and the two hoods lashed them together back to back. He could feel her shuddering as she sobbed.

  The Cowboy's friend handed off the shotgun and bent over at a rusty steel trapdoor set in concrete at their feet. The door squealed as it swung up, and a chill swept out from whatever was below.

  “There we at,” the Cowboy's friend said.

  “Sorry, you two. Pa always said the best bet for crossing the river was to sink to the bottom and run like hell.”

  Jack Liffey could hear the whisper of running water down there somewhere and he smelled fermenting leaves.

  It was the playground trick again. One of them kicked the back of his knees so his legs buckled as the other shoved Eleanor. The earth was no longer underfoot and they plummeted into the dark like rocks. She screamed, but his voice had frozen up, he was trying so hard to keep his legs beneath him. His shoulder scraped concrete. He howled when his elbow glanced hard off something. He was sure it had cut him badly and then they hit water, followed almost instantly by the hard beneath the water.

  The pain in his arm was intense and there was a new pain in both ankles. When the splashing panic was over he found himself upright in cold water that was only up to his thighs. Eleanor was a dead weight trying to tug him over backwards. Far above there was a blob of light, and after a single glance at it, he couldn't think straight.

  “Nine-point-nine, degree of difficulty,” he heard faintly and then the voice boomed into echo. The steel trap gnashed shut and the light snuffed out.

  Darkness was actually an improvement. He pressed his good shoulder against the wall to keep himself located in the dark, then leaned forward to make sure Eleanor's slumping head stayed out of the water. Briefly he had seen the layout of their surroundings, a concrete box cut through by a horizontal storm drain maybe three feet in diameter. The water came about half way up the drain. There'd only been drizzle nearby, but he had seen the thunderheads on the mountains and he had no idea how many drains led into this one. He knew now how Consuela Beltran had ended up washed down into the pool at the Queen Mary. He wondered how long her body had drifted through the drains and how many branches it had followed.

  “Eleanor. Eleanor!”

  He thought he heard a sob.

  “Eleanor.”

  “It hurts so bad.”

  She jerked against him and he was elated that she was alive. She made a tiny screech when he moved, and he could almost see the sound of her voice flying up the concrete silo to rap once against the steel door at the top. He dragged her weight against the wall and the movement made a thousand echoes of splashing.

  “Oh, Lorsy. I think my leg's broke.”

  “I've got a Swiss army knife in my front right pocket.” Don't ask, he thought, tell. Leave no options. If either of them started thinking, they would panic and then they would begin to die. “I want you to take it out and hold it, and I'll open a blade.”

  She fumbled toward his left pocket.

  “The other right.”

  She sniffled as he torqued himself around, and her hands felt over him. “Is that a pickle in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

  It took him a moment to realize what she'd said. He owed her a laugh, he thought, a really big one some time, but not now.

  “I got it. I feel a lumpy thing on it.”

  “That's the corkscrew. It's on the backside. Hold the other side to my hands.” There was a short blade, a long blade, a combination screwdriver and bottle cap lifter, a can opener, and a pathetic little scissors. He thought he could find the long blade by feel. And then he heard the splash and her little sob.

  “I dropped it. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.” Hysteria skirled through her voice.

  “It's okay. Just squat against me and we'll slide down the wall. It'll take the weight off your leg anyway.”

  They inched their shoulders down the concrete until their legs gave out all at once, splatting them down heavily. The chest-high water had a rich smell up close, like mown grass and old iced tea.

  “Bounce a bit in my direction.” He patted the slime under him with his bound hands as they heaved their buttocks along. He sucked a breath, pretty sure he'd cut himself on a piece of broken glass, and then he found the knife almost five feet downstream. The fall and all the wrenching around had loosened his hands enough so he could pry out the blade by himself. It was only a moment to saw the two of them apart.

  He felt her bonds carefully, the lay of the rope against her wrists and then he found a spot to insert the blade and cut upward.

  “Oh, I got it I got it I got it I got it.”

  “Take the knife and cut my hands loose. Careful. It's very sharp.”

  The first thing they did when their hands were free was hug. “I prayed,” she said. “I prayed for you. I can't believe we're still alive. I'm not any good at this at all.”

  “You're doing fine.”

  “All I wanted out of life was a little more life and I got this. Jack, at one point I was so scared I wanted them to go on and kill me to get it over. It must be a terrible sin to pray to die.”

  He had to think and he had to calibrate his fear carefully so it drove him on without taking him over. “We can't go back up here,” he said. “Even if that cover's not locked, they'd see us and throw us down again.”

  “Are you going to save us now?” she said with an odd twist. “Is that what the tough detective is good for?”

  He didn't want to deal with that. “We've got to go downstream to the next manhole. It can't be far.”

  He felt her stiffen. “I can't crawl into a pipe.”

  “It's not that far.”

  A three-foot conduit, on hands and knees maybe two hundred yards. Crawling in the darkness with the whole weight of the city crushing down on them and a flood coming any time.

  “Maybe ten minutes. A lot of Jews in Warsaw crawled through a smaller pipe for hours on end to escape the ghetto after the uprising failed.”

  He could feel his tension holding at the edge of panic, like the sensation of drowning. Okay, we're climbing straight up the shaft! he thought, but he fought back the urge. Blank out your mind and crawl, he told himself. He slid his hand down the wall, hunting out the upper lip of the conduit. A shudder took him when he realized how small it was. Kneeling, their backs would almost graze the top of the pipe. The water had receded a bit, as if a drain plug had been pulled, and it rippled past shin-deep, a little more than a foot. He brought his head down and heard the hollowness. He was surprised by a faint glow, a hint of definition to the curve of the pipe far away.

  She sobbed with fear and he reached back over his shoulder to touch her.

  “Hush. There's some light.”

  “This is awful. It's too small.”

  “We can do it.”

  “What if there's water?”

  “We'd be pushed ahead of it,” he said, “and we could go up the next manhole.” Or they could body surf all the way to the L.A. River, he thought. The problem would be breathing. His mind entertained a terrible image of being carried along by a surge and then slammed against a steel grill high above the river, pinned there in some awkward posture by the tons of water gushing past.

  They say drowning is quite pleasant; you just take a deep breath of water and slip into oblivion.

  Who say?

  Well, obviously not people who drowned.

  She hugged his back hard and gave a series of rising squeals in the dark, thrusting her hips against him, and he thought she might be lost to panic.

  “Oh, dear. I'm sorry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I had an orgasm. I didn't mean to.”

  “It's okay, but save me a few for later. Let's go.”

  She wriggled out of his way, and he knelt into the cold water which rustled and whispered eerily in the pipe.

  “Jack!”

  “Here we go.”

  He shuffled into the
storm drain, knee and hand, knee and hand. The pipe was made of a smooth ceramic with joins every ten feet or so. He could feel twigs and light bobbing chunks, probably plastic cups, and there was a smelly foam carried along by the current.

  “It's not so bad,” he called. “Don't dawdle.” The water ran fast. Something sharp hit his leg from behind and he spread his legs to let it pass. The pipe's surface was smooth and cool just above the water line but gritty under the water, and his palm tended to lose purchase on the shallow curve.

  “I can't do it.”

  “Let's go, dammit.”

  He heard her set out at last, intoning something rapidly, some Catholic formula for self-hypnosis. He crawled mechanically, tiring himself with the tension of it all, trying to blank his mind against waves of claustrophobic horror.

  Her rosary soon gave out. “That prayer used to bring me peace.”

  He felt a spray and heard a different hollowness in one ear. Reaching up, he discovered an opening where a small pipe emptied into the storm drain at head level, pouring water over a crust of lime.

  “Even after I stopped believing.” Her monologue competed with the high-pitched rustlings of the water. He couldn't really follow her but he sensed she was just talking to keep from thinking.

  “I got used to knowing there wasn't anything. That was okay for a long time…”

  Left hand and right knee, right hand and left knee. Horses did it, but was it called a canter? A gallop? The water rush changed pitch, and his full attention turned to the new sounds.

  “Then this damn hope came back.”

  The pace was punishing, like trying to stay afloat in a pool on pure energy. Again and again he dragged his mind back from images of the pipe collapsing or filling with water.

  “Hope destroyed my peace.”

  The water became less whispery and felt faster.

  “Hush,” he said.

  “Now I wonder if I was just sick all that time I was comforted.”

  He wanted to listen to the water's chat and murmur.

  “Maybe the peace was a kind of sickness. It was peace that was unnatural.”