The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  “I would be, if everything worked.” He looked down at his ankles. “I'm running about half a Liffey.”

  “Please have a seat.”

  He sat and thumbed through a month-old Sports Illustrated. There was nothing else. A nineteen-year-old seven-footer brought in from Italy was having trouble getting used to Salt Lake City. Some petite swimmer was making sure her nipples showed through the spandex. A washed-up quarterback was opening a cattle ranch in Wyoming. It was like reading random messages from another universe.

  “Jack, come on back.”

  Art Castro leaned into the waiting area, the tidy mustache looking painted on his round face. Jack Liffey followed him down the corridor.

  “Did she announce me?”

  “No. It's one of her penalties. She would have, sooner or later.”

  “Remind me to stay on her good side.”

  Art Castro laughed softly. “She keeps out the riff-raff.”

  “So you only work for people who don't need you. It's a concept.”

  In the office, a tiny chihuahua was vibrating and panting in the center of the rug.

  “Good grief.”

  Art Castro frowned. “Calm down, Pedro. My aunt asked me to pick him up from the vet's.”

  At least it wasn't named for a Cuban revolutionary. Jack Liffey sat in a hard chair near the desk, and the dog took an immediate liking to his scuffed shoe, licking and sniffling at it.

  “They're wound too tight,” Art Castro said.

  “I wonder what they were bred for? What could they possibly do?”

  “The variety within the dog species is unique among mammals,” Art Castro said pedantically. Now and then he liked to remind you he had a college degree. “What this one is good for you'll have to ask a mesolithic man from the Sonoran Desert. Or my mesolithic Aunt Cecilia.”

  Jack Liffey kept thinking of the scene from Tolstoy where the overbearing countess snatched the cigar from the general's mouth and tossed it out the window of the moving train, and without missing a beat the general snatched her lapdog and sent it after the cigar.

  The dog crooned and began fucking Jack Liffey's foot.

  “Hold on, there, pal.”

  Art Castro sighed and scooped it up, then set it down on top of a filing cabinet. The dog went rigid with its forelegs stiff, gnarring rhythmically like a cicada.

  They talked politely for a while about the smog, about the decline in property values, and the tendency of people to hide away in their own gated neighborhoods.

  “There won't be any public land left. We already haven't got any parks. This city is shameful on parks.”

  “We've got beaches.”

  “You got beaches. Browns and blacks are marooned inland.”

  “Maybe the Big One will come along and move the shoreline inland a few miles.”

  The dog mewled and started snapping its tiny jaws.

  “What can I do for you?” Art Castro said finally.

  “I want to send you a package to hold. It's the usual kamikaze sort of rules. I don't want you to open it unless something tragic happens to me, then you'll find instructions on what to do inside.”

  Art Castro cocked his head, without replying. He looked around at the dog, which had gone quiet again, then back at his hands which he opened in front of him as if inspecting whether they were holding anything.

  “You sound like you're in trouble.”

  “I can't tell you the what-fors, Art. I need this. I'm sorry.”

  “I've never known this sort of thing to do much good, but you call the shots.”

  “How do I keep your secretary from opening it when the postman drops it off?”

  He rubbed one eye. “Well, if you write Private and Confidential on it, you can pretty well bet she'll open it.” He dug in his desk and finally came up with a card. “Send it here.”

  The card simply said AC Enterprises and had a P.O. box in Bell Gardens. “It's a front I keep.”

  Jack Liffey memorized the number and the zip and handed the card back. “Thanks.”

  “You're giving me the bads. Can't I help?”

  “I don't think you want to get involved. I'm hoping this is a way out, not a way in deeper. Okay?”

  “Don't worry about sounding innocent on my account. I know you're not one of the bad guys.”

  There was a tiny sound of water and Art Castro glanced around. Dog pee dripped over the edge of the filing cabinet and the smell was remarkably strong all of a sudden, like opening an old box you found in the back garden.

  “Shit.”

  “I've got to go.”

  “Abandon me in my hour of trial.” He shook Jack Liffey's hand. “You're a great kidder, Jack. I hope this works out.”

  *

  It was a seedy-looking bar, driven to outlandishness by the sideshow crowd who'd spilled in from a carny site nearby. A midget with a big head was perched precariously on a bar stool, talking to a man who was over six feet tall and couldn't have broken a hundred pounds. He looked as if he'd been assembled out of a dozen No. 2 pencils.

  The midget waved flamboyantly. “So the Devil goes, ‘You got to give up your soul at the end,’ and the lawyer goes, ‘Sure, no problem, man, but I don't get it, what's the catch?’”

  The skinny man threw his head back and laughed in a rapid staccato that reminded Jack Liffey of the chihuahua.

  “Could I get a beer? Whatever's on tap.”

  Ten minutes earlier, nobody had been at the old dairy, just tire marks in the mud, but it didn't have the look of a place that had been cleared out. On the way there he'd seen the carnival tents going up, and the activity drew him back, like good dense cover for a duck shoot. Berkov's Fun-o-Rama, the trailers and trucks had said in garish reds and golds. He was careful not to let any of the guns show.

  “How did the great DiMaggio do today?” somebody cried out in a terrible Cuban accent.

  “Honey, I'm home. And you gotta lot a’ ‘splainin’ to do.”

  An overweight bartender waggled his eyebrows a few times as he set a waspwaist beer glass in front of Jack Liffey. “You wanta run a tab?”

  “Sure. You know anything about the old dairy down on Gleason?”

  “We don't serve a lot of milk.”

  “Water either, I bet,” the pencil man butted in. “You know why W.C. Fields never drank water?”

  The midget giggled. “No, why did W.C. Fields never drank water?”

  “Because, sez Mr. Fields, fish fuck in it.”

  They both thought that was uproarious. Jack Liffey had heard it, but smiled politely. “I just wonder how long the dairy's been vacant.”

  “Long as I can remember,” the bartender said. “You got a reason to ask?”

  “I know somebody looking for land around here. Know who owns it now?”

  “Who knows? Probably the Arabs.”

  “I see somebody in a BMW coming and going. Must be planning to do something with the land.”

  “Are you a cop?” A little wave of stillness spread outward from the bar, heads cocked for the reply.

  “Nah, I'm an insurance agent. You know, it's amazing how many people don't know the advantages of term insurance. I'll bet you're seriously underinsured on your accident and personal liability. You take your average person, now, they haven't even got a private supplement for disability.” That was dull enough to turn the buzz loose again. Even the pencil man sitting next to him lost interest.

  The bartender remembered something that needed his attention down the bar. There was nothing any of them knew that would help him. He knew what he had to do, and he only needed to prepare himself. They said scared money never wins, but he was betting on it. You couldn't rely on courage. Sooner or later everyone failed in courage. All you could rely on was worrying things to death.

  “Buy us a drink?” the pencil man said.

  “What's yours?”

  “Cognac.”

  It was beer glasses in front of the midget and the pencil man, but Jack Liffey shrugged.
“Two cognacs,” he called along the bar. It was bad karma to make new enemies now. There were a dozen other people drinking in the room, a pair of bearded twins with heads a size too small, a big woman with breasts bobbling under a lacy shirt, and a lot of fairly normal looking men with tattoos.

  “You is a cop, ain't you?” the pencil man insisted. “Insurance is just blowin’ smoke up our ass.”

  “Nope.”

  “I can smell ‘em.”

  “How come you're not helping set up the tents?”

  ”We're talent. Talent don't get paid to sweat. You know why I don't like cops?”

  “You don't need a reason. Nobody likes cops.”

  He drew himself up to a kind of dignity. “Cops're all trained to see evil and so that's all they see. It's like doctors, they just see disease everywhere. I happen to believe people are inherently good inside.”

  The midget guffawed. “Nietsche was wrong. It's the devil who's dead.”

  The bartender brought snifters of cognac and the pencil man nodded his thanks. The midget bent forward, kneeling on the stool, to inhale the aroma over the snifter, and he broke into a wide grin as if reminded of something rapturous in his youth.

  “Can I get a marshmallow? I always drink cognac with a marshmallow.” No one paid him any attention.

  “You know, I ain't bulimic,” the pencil man insisted. “You might think it, but I ain't. It's just metabolism and will power. Now, Jane Fonda was bulimic. And look where it got her.”

  “If I can't have a marshmallow, I want a little parasol. Hey, proprietor, I want a little bumbershoot in my drink.”

  They were too self-consciously exotic to hold his attention any longer. He left some money and walked out into a startling new mist just as a black BMW with smoked windows was disappearing toward the dairy.

  Time to rock and roll, he thought.

  SEVENTEEN

  Boston and Philadelphia Are in Two Places at Once

  A fog was creeping in, flowing half way up the telephone poles and slicing itself to ribbons. It cushioned the sky and hushed the streets, an eerie dirty fog that you didn't see often in L.A. In his childhood he'd walked downhill to school into fogs like this, thick ones up from the harbor where the foghorns bayed forlornly, and his legs had disappeared into it first, then the rest of him would be sucked down into the prickly damp.

  The warehouse along the road was a colorless shape through the mists. Even the carnival tents were draining of color, and the big eighteen-wheelers that had looked so garish.

  Inside he was full of turmoil, tense and confused and blank as if he had forgotten who he was. Then he focused and the outside world didn't matter at all. He felt the angular object in his jacket pocket, the other one uncomfortable in the small of his back. He'd expected anger, but mostly he was just impatient to get it over.

  A kind of unease invested the things around him, as if they'd become other than what they were. The steering wheel might suddenly reveal that it had been a snake all along and writhe away. The tall industrial fireplug looked unfamiliar and threatening. Had it been there when he went into the bar? It wasn't fog at all; it was a strange fear etching his vision, like a fine rain of acid frosting a pane of glass.

  A legless man went past on a skateboard, paddling the ground urgently with thick leather staves in his hands, then fading into the mist just as a Coke can flew after him, struck the sidewalk and clattered. An old woman limped after him on an aluminum walker, shaking her fist.

  It was time. He reached for the ignition key but cause-and-effect seemed to have gone out of the world. The car lurched away from the curb without ever seeming to start. He passed the legless man, bent forward to flail along faster. Everyone had a mission, Jack Liffey thought.

  The carnival site dropped behind, and then he was crossing the concrete river once again, water still running in the central channel. Just upriver a weir dammed the flow shallowly to the full width of the channel, twigs and detritus jutting up over the weir to froth the overflow. Down below, oil-scummed pools lay marooned on the dry flats, and isolated rags of mist hovered over the water. He saw gang tags along the concrete banks but no C60L.

  The chain link gate into the dairy yard was open, and in the distance he could see the BMW at the office. He parked diagonally across the gate. Mud sucked at his shoes as he limped across the wasteland. Half way was the slab of a vast foundation and a heap of rotting timbers from whatever the structure had been. Remarkably, it still smelled like cow shit, marinating in the damp.

  The fog gathered around him and then shimmered all of a sudden, the air turning strangely molten. Space twittered like aspen leaves. His heart pounded and he whirled around as something grazed his cheek. There was a hiss from the flickering nimbus that surrounded him, a faint close seething like a boiling pot. He reeled back and every atom of his intelligence strained to figure out what was happening. He waved an arm into the aura and felt tickles against his hand, furry bursts of contact. Something nipped at his forehead and he ducked.

  Then he saw it plastered to his hand—a termite with iridescent wings. He laughed in relief. He could make them out now, wheeling around, orbiting and milling. He saw an opalescent snow of molted wings at his feet and then he noticed the snow writhing as the wingless bodies crawled across the drifts on their epic trek toward decaying wood.

  Circus freaks and legless men and termite clouds and murder—life had taken a strange turn. He brushed irritably at the swarm and stepped out into still air, reestablishing a small sphere of normality. No one had come out of the office, and he saw that he still had the element of surprise.

  He winced as his ankle twisted suddenly on uneven ground. The tenderness would be with him for at least a month. He concentrated on the ache to keep his mind from reeling away on other errands.

  He slid two sandwich baggies onto his hands and took out the little square Dreyse submariner's pistol, manufactured for the Great War, before wars became so common that they started numbering them. He pulled the magazine out. A magazine!, the Basic instructor from his own war had bellowed in his ear, Never never a clip! A pistol—never never a gun! He counted rounds, and then checked the chamber. He had three shots. The Ballester-Molina wouldn't have worked, because when that ran out, the whole world knew it. Like any Browning action, the receiver stayed back after the last shot, exposing the barrel so you could swap a fresh magazine in and let the receiver snap home to chamber the first round, all in one fluid motion.

  He stopped at the office door, but he couldn't hear anything inside. He turned the knob very slowly, just in case they'd locked themselves in, but he felt the mechanism give all the way. He wondered where they would be in the room. Breathe, exhale, pistol up, and he swung the door hard and felt it crash into something that gave.

  “Ow! Goddam!”

  Al Squinty Butera turned, rubbing his shoulder, and his eyes fastened on the little pistol. One hand twitched, as if wishing to go for his own weapon, but Jack Liffey could see the whole rig of the shoulder holster hanging off a straight chair across the room.

  Bobby Snakeskin O'Connor sat at the desk, doing something Jack Liffey hadn't seen in twenty years. A lid of grass was spread across the black linoleum top of the desk and he was picking out seeds and stems. A tiny joint was going between his knuckles, and the room reeked of dope. When O'Connor recognized the visitor, his jaw dropped comically for an instant before his face hardened up into calculation.

  “Over there, Squinty,” Jack Liffey said. He wanted them both in a small arc of fire. “Knock knock.”

  O'Connor settled back and took a hit off his joint to demonstrate his cool.

  “Let's get all four of our hands flat on the table.”

  He couldn't find the cowboy hat anywhere. It seemed to matter for some reason. Butera shuffled behind the desk, wiped a space clean of marijuana shreds and leaned forward on his palms.

  “Don't go hairy-ass apeshit,” Bobby O'Connor said, in a throat voice, holding his breath with the smoke. “We
can talk this over.” O'Connor was eyeing the plastic bags on Jack Liffey's hands and he wasn't liking them.

  So far, Jack Liffey thought, it had been a nicely structured thirty seconds or so and he didn't feel like pushing anything quite yet.

  “What makes you think we have anything to talk about?”

  “Cause we got friends with balls the size of a Buick.”

  “That's exactly the problem,” Jack Liffey said. “You guys are part-time help, but there's always the first string. I've got to find a way to get back up the food chain and convince somebody I'm out of it.”

  “We could promise to pass the news on,” Bobby O'Connor said. “You ain't going to be able to cut the deck any deeper.”

  It was Butera who was the question mark. Jack Liffey had to know more about him. And the whole thing was complicated by the way Butera had manhandled Eleanor Ong, it made revenge a wild card that he had to fight against.

  “We're gonna play a little You Bet Your Life,” Jack Liffey said. “Squinty first. Pay attention. Groucho never played it this way, and there's no fuckin’ bird with twenty-five dollars gonna drop down. Whether you live or die depends on your answer to one question. Ready? A woman gets in her Volvo and drives from Boston to Philadelphia at forty miles an hour. Then she turns around and drives back at fifty miles an hour. What's her average speed?”

  “What the shit is this?” It was Bobby O'Connor, rising up out of his chair. “You're plumb loco.”

  Jack Liffey brought the pistol up and aimed it at the Cowboy's left eye, the good one, he was sure now. O'Connor puffed once and then subsided.

  “Come on, Squinty. I think you heard all the elements. This is the Big S.A.T. You pass and you get another thirty years to live.”

  Al Butera lifted his head. “Forty-five miles an hour, the average speed is forty-five.”

  Jack Liffey nodded. “Not bad. Not right, but not bad for a guy makes his living the way you do.”

  “Bullshit!”

  “Can you correct him, Snakeskin?”

  O'Connor just glared.

  “It's a trick question, fellas. You don't have enough information. You see, when she's doing forty from Boston to Philadelphia it takes her longer to make the trip than when she's going back at fifty. So she drives a little longer at forty than at fifty and her average speed is gonna be under forty-five. But I give you a B plus. You got the basic concept of average.”