The Concrete River

by John Shannon

  But now he had to let Squinty Butera know that the cops had the third bullet. How? He remembered the note from his office door, with the letter S or maybe a snake and a phone number. It seemed like weeks ago, but it had only been three days. He went through the mess of his condo looking for the note, took over an hour making the mess worse, then trooped back to his office and dug methodically down through Marlena's tidying. He found it at last, a yellow Post-it stuck to an unpaid phone bill that must have been near the phone when he called, another mark of letting himself get distracted. He went to a phone booth outside a 7-Eleven.

  “Yeah?” said a voice darkly, after eight rings. It wasn't Butera. A truck rumbled past and he waited for the noise to fade down.

  “This is a message for the guy with the squint.”

  “Nobody like that here.”

  “Look, we're way past that. This is as straightforward as it's gonna get. The third one went into the wall and the police have it. The deal stands. Bye-bye now.” He had no taste for trading threats so he hung up. He waited, staring at his trembling hand on the receiver. He wondered how long he was going to have to watch his back.

  NINETEEN

  Silence

  A battered Crown Victoria with Sonora plates was backed up on the lawn between the courts, all its doors open, and the whole neighborhood was helping empty out House B. There was a pyramid of cartons behind the car, and the big furniture was at the curb. Two men were lashing the kitchen table into a pickup and an old woman clutched an armful of dresses and scurried away as if someone might ask for them back.

  Everything in Jack Liffey's life seemed to be mounded up haphazardly—the contents of his office, his condo, and now the last will and testament of Consuela Beltran. Senora Schuler stood over the cartons, selecting items to jigsaw into the crowded rear seat, a small brown determined woman building something to last. There was no reason, he thought, that an Indian woman packing a horse and travois for a cross-country migration should appear any more courageous or dignified.

  Tony and his friends lounged by a Chevy that had been chopped and lowered into a platinum teardrop. Two older boys sat inside the car, and Tony's homemade bar bells stuck out of the trunk.

  “T-Bell,” Jack Liffey called.

  “Hey, Mr. Liffey.” The boy sauntered across the grass.

  “Where you going?”

  “Mexico,” he said glumly. “Grandma taking me to her place in Hermosillo.”

  “Have you ever been there?”

  “I never been ’crost at all. Nabo says my Spanish sucks. If I say el churcho and el carro they gonna laugh at me in real Mexico.”

  “There's nothing second-rate about being from California. You just tell them that's where Ritchie Valens came from. I want to speak to you and your grandma.”

  “Sure, okay.” As they walked toward the car, the boy reached up shyly and touched Jack Liffey's arm through the shirt, just where his tattoo was. “Did you kill a lot of people in the war?”

  “I didn't kill anybody. I usually left my M-16 in the barracks.”

  “You didn't never fight?”

  “I was in Saigon for Tet and I got caught in an attack, but I didn't do much. I shot up a lot of concrete but I don't think I hit anybody.”

  Would it all have been easier if he had seen combat? He'd known enough guys who could kill without scruple and never get a sleepless minute from it. He wondered what it was like to be that way. And if it made things easier, what did you lose in the bargain?

  “Abuela…”

  She seemed genuinely pleased to see Jack Liffey, and she started talking so fast that Tony had to stop her to translate.

  “She tried to call to tell you we are going but your telephone machine is not working.”

  The cops probably had the cassette. It was in some forensic lab with overheated amps working overtime to reconstitute the faint tonalities of Kathy's lament about child support.

  “She says… it's hard to translate. Because she met you, she doesn't think so bad of America.”

  He nodded. “Thank you.” He waited while a man in a strap undershirt deposited a glass bowl and moved off. There was no one else around all of a sudden. “Please tell her that what I'm going to say right now is just for you two. No one else.” He owed them something.

  She nodded gravely.

  “Your mother was murdered. The man who did it has paid. He's dead now. You must never ask what happened.” He didn't explain that the man who gave the orders for it was still around somewhere, and no one would ever hold his kind to account.

  The boy repeated enthusiastically and a lot of emotions passed over the woman's face as she listened. Then a tension seemed to go out of her and her shoulders sagged. She sat on the edge of the back seat and wept.

  “Was it the man with the cowboy boots?” the boy whispered eagerly. “Did you kill him?”

  Jack Liffey made a hushing gesture. “It's our secret, compañero.” He tucked his business card into the breast pocket of the boy's white T-shirt. “Call me when you get back up here some day and I'll buy you lunch. Maybe we can go look at some airplanes.”

  The boy smiled. “I remember the B-29 at that place. You showed me the bomb doors and told me about the little boy they dropped on Hiroshima.”

  The Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima was the first bomb, the one made from Uranium 235. What did they call the one that had dropped on his life?

  Suddenly Tony bolted for the house, and then he came back dragging the mangy white coyote on a rope. The dog resisted by getting sideways, then having itself yanked around.

  “Please, would you take Loco? Abuela says he can't come to Hermosillo.”

  Just what he needed. The dog glared at him and stood his ground. It should have looked intelligent. It had the forehead break of a collie or shepherd, but the eyes were too flat and dry. There didn't seem to be any curiosity behind them.

  “Loco, huh?”

  The boy grinned, and Jack Liffey took the rope.

  “Vaya con dios, Tony. Be hopeful.”

  *

  His own dullness began to shift as he drove, and some strange emotion was inside him all of a sudden, banging around like a rat in a wastebasket. Feelings darted up and stuck out their tongues. Shame, disgrace, plain dread. A primitive kind of scruple had been blasted away with his three shots. He'd killed in cold blood.

  Most of his life he had tried to behave in ways that he would not mind answering for. Now he had done something that put him beyond the marker, into a place where he had to admit that he could do the same things that the men in prisons did. He was the same human species as serial killers and child molesters. It made him queasy, and he wished he had his old aerospace job back.

  Loco made a mewling sound now and again. The dog had curled up on the rear floor, trying to pretend it was somewhere else. Loco obviously didn't like cars much.

  The Harbor Freeway was blocked by cop cars just past Martin Luther King, and the whole northbound was diverted onto the surface. People fumed and honked. One guy with a pony tail was bobbing up and down with such frustration that his Lexus rocked with it. Nine-year-olds darted among the stopped cars banging on bumpers with sticks and taunting the drivers. It looked like an organized game. When he finally got back on at Exposition it was like the start of the Indy. He glanced back down the empty freeway to see yellow crime-scene tape and, beyond it, two horses lying on their sides in a big pool of blood. He didn't see a horse trailer anywhere.

  *

  He peeked in through the little glass window in the door, like checking out a nocturnal cage at the zoo to see if the bushbaby was interesting enough to bother. She was out of traction, lying on her side on top of the covers to read a magazine, and he felt himself flooding with tenderness. He wondered what the magazine was. Hair Shirt? Nun's Digest?

  It was a double room, with the other bed mussed but vacant. He wondered if there was any way on earth he could make love to her right there. Paint out the little window, jam the door… J
ust the thought aroused him as he pushed in.

  She jumped a little, startled. “Oh, hi.”

  “I love your leg warmers. You're going to start a whole new plaster of Paris fad.”

  There was something nervous and aloof about her eyes that he didn't like.

  “It's no picnic.”

  “William Holden and Kim Novak.”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind.”

  She readjusted and he saw that the magazine was something called Commonweal. It didn't look like the kind of journal that told you handy hints for homemaking.

  “Where's your cell-mate?”

  She glanced over at the mussed bed. “She's in surgery. Would you fix the blinds?”

  The sun had come out and bright stripes slashed her face. He torqued his body around behind the mussed bed to get at the controls.

  “Happy?”

  “Thanks.” She was still squinting against the brightness, and, unobserved, he ran a mental fingertip over the planes of her face. He liked the idea.

  “I missed you,” he said.

  She nodded but didn't respond, and he sat on the side of the bed and touched her shoulder. “What's the matter?”

  It took her a while to start. “I'm in a foreign country, Jack. I don't speak the language very well.”

  Her tone hadn't been plaintive, just sad and resolved and a bit hasty, like someone who had taken a week working up to her confession and had to get to a priest before she backed down. His mind flashed forward, intuition working overtime, and he thought he took in her full drift in an instant, his insides knotting up with it. But he knew he would refuse to acknowledge anything until she spelled it out.

  “Go on.”

  She looked into his eyes.

  “When we make love, do you ever think of another woman?”

  He shook his head. “I don't think people do that very much. You may be thinking of yourself and fixating on your own pleasure, but most sex is pretty real. Unreality just gets in the way.”

  “Jack, I think of Jesus,” she said. “I can't help it.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “I'm not really at home out here. I didn't bargain for any of this.” She indicated the casts. “It scares me to death. Even ordinary things. It's been bothering me for a long time. I was the quiet kid at home, off in my room painting or reading. But no matter where I was, dad was there somewhere arching over me. Even in the convent, I think. When he died last year, I became a lot smaller and the world became more frightening.

  “I think I've got a sort of agoraphobia of the spirit. It's been harder than I thought to leave the asylum of the Church. I'm not strong enough.”

  “We all want to run back to our parents sometimes. Especially after we've had a good fright. I'm scared, too, but the worst is over. We got through it.”

  She stared at her hands but she wouldn't let him budge her.

  “You've got a whole community at the House to lean on,” he said. “You've got me.” He sensed the desperate tone creeping into his voice.

  She took his hand, but wouldn't look up at him. “I don't think I want people that close to me. I want to go back into my room. It's hard to face, but I think my vocation is for something more private. I'm going to the convent.”

  “You're just scared. I've seen it before, really.”

  She met his eyes finally and her face softened, grew panicky and then went blank. She'd got past some critical internal checkpoint and it was downhill now.

  “I've fallen in love with you,” he insisted. “I want to protect you.”

  Then she brought him to a dead stop. Her voice came to him in a beatific, forgiving, thousand-mile-away voice, repeating words from another life. “Jack, I don't think you're going to make it.”

  A chill took him and his mind reeled. What did she mean? But he knew what she meant, he just didn't have enough confidence left to answer it. He argued for a while, watching the stillness and serenity grow over her like a shell of steel. She pulled farther and farther from him, withdrawing above the clouds into her cuckoo realm, a place he would never know and never honor. He felt a hollowness open inside himself.

  “Look, I'm not a big player, Eleanor. I never have been. I just hoe my garden, and I take care of my own. I wouldn't let you down.”

  “I don't mind that, Jack. I just don't know the rules out here, and what I know, I don't like. I think I have a… religious temperament. We call it a vocation. I shouldn't have tried to turn my back on it.”

  “So you're going to deny the rest of yourself and the rest of us? You're a really loving person.”

  She just smiled with her new Buddha smile, and he knew she was lost. Okay, he thought—this could be the gift he gave her. And after all, she would be safer in cloud cuckooland, away from the Cowboy's friends. “Can I still see you?”

  “Jack. Please. Soon I'm going to be silent.”

  “You mean one of those places where nobody ever talks? Oh, shit.”

  “I need inner peace. Please.”

  “We'll never talk again?” He was chilled to the bone.

  “I mean ‘never’ now, Jack, I'm sorry, but only God owns the real ‘never’. Who knows?”

  He lay his palm on her wrist, but there was no response. “You know, life will be over soon enough,” he said with an edge, but then he dropped it. “Sorry, you do what you have to. Bye, kid.”

  As he was leaving, he thought he heard a few soft words from her. It might have been a blessing, but that only counted if you believed in it.

  *

  The dog had come over into the front seat and had its nose to the glass.

  “Back off,” Jack Liffey said as he got in.

  He decided a smoke and a drink would be a hell of a good idea. He bought a box of Shermans and a quart of single malt and carried them in a brown bag up into the derelict oil fields of the Baldwin Hills overlooking Culver City. There was a slit in the chain link fence and he pulled it open like a vagina and pushed Loco through, then followed. They strolled along a dirt road between oil pumps that no longer pumped, though a few others high on the hillsides above the path, maybe one in ten, still thrummed and grunted as they bobbed away. A sign on the fence around a well pump said, “Danger: this machinery starts automatically”, but he didn't believe it.

  A rabbit hurried away clumsily and Loco's rope went taut. The dog didn't bark. Maybe he had too much dignity. It wasn't a jackrabbit, but a short-eared gray rabbit of some kind, and it tucked behind a tall castor bean with elephant-ear leaves. A pair of cross-country runners passed, huffing along the trail to give Loco a wide berth and they nodded, drenched with sweat.

  Jack Liffey led the dog off the jeep road and climbed a weedy hillside until he could look out over Culver City. He could see his condo complex below, his own unit obscured by a stand of eucalyptus. He lit a long thin Sherman and decapped the Scotch and drank straight from the bottle. A sacrilege with single malt, but he was feeling particularly sacrilegious. In fact, you could put all religions in a sack and sink it out past the three-mile limit, particularly Catholicism. He tried cursing religion for a while, but it didn't make him feel any better.

  He fed the dog peanut-butter crackers, the only treat in the liquor store that it looked like a dog might like. It did.

  Smoke rose off a factory building and he heard the faint sirens, then saw the fire engines approaching. Burn, baby, burn. The wail seemed to affect Loco and Liffey stroked its chest again, both of them seeming to gather calm from it.

  Jack Liffey remembered looking out over L.A. in April 1992 with a profound sense of unease as roving gangs torched department stores and Korean mini-malls, and pillars of dark smoke rose all around the horizon, like burnt offerings to malign gods. Back then he'd finally located the unease: his sense of a world that was steadily getting worse, and nobody gave a damn, nobody was putting anything but token effort into fixing things, as a sort of social entropy carried the whole country down into chaos. The poor suffered, the rulers turned their ba
cks and the rich retreated into armed enclaves.

  He heard a crashing of brush below and hunted for the cause. A muscled wiry kid strolling down the path flailed absent-mindedly with a nunchak to decapitate castor beans and tree tobacco and young sumac as he passed. There it was, he thought, a coded portrait of his world—the random reaper. He liked the sound of the words and he said “the random reaper” aloud a few times as he drank. Loco sat against him and nuzzled his leg.

  He noticed the bottle was half empty. Then, with the pressure against his leg, he experienced a flush of sexuality and thought about Marlena Cruz. How promiscuous the imagination was, he thought. Only an hour earlier he'd been pleading for Eleanor Ong, and now he wanted Marlena Cruz, thinking about the delicious abandon of her heavy body, the tenderness that would well over him to blot out thoughts of anything else. He looked at the scotch bottle and decided there was enough left to introduce her to the peaty glories of unblended.

  “Loco, want to eat a lapdog?”

  *

  Her car was there. He parked at the corner and left Loco in the back sleeping. He felt rain as he approached her door and glared suspiciously up at the cloudless blue sky. It came again, just a teasing on his bare arms. He glanced down and saw tiny pale spots spreading like colonies of bacteria on his dark shirt. He watched in fascination as more dots appeared and groped outward, then he snapped his head around and caught a glimpse of the small boy fleeing, a big pump squirt rifle chugging at his side. Bleach, he thought.

  He had hid in the bushes as a child to send a spray across the windshield of cars stopped at a red light, but that had been harmless water. It had been one of his favorite shirts, but no great loss in the run of the universe.

  He felt for his key ring. She had given him a key but he decided to be gentlemanly and knock. A sexual thickness welled in him and he tried out smiles to offer her, tender greetings. It was a heavy dense door and he wasn't sure the knock carried, but he waited a few moments before ringing the bell so he wouldn't seem peremptory. He could feel the touch of her skin.