The Concrete River (12 page)

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.

“
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.

Jack Liffey started his battered Concord and cruised across the lot until he was only a few feet from the M3. He popped his glove box and handed Tony a spray can of white Rustoleum.

“Tag him.”

Tony caught his eye.

“You can do it or I will.”

Tony was out in a second, shaking the can until the ball rattled. The hiss of the spray cut through the distant hum of traffic as he squatted to hit the driver door expertly with a
placa
that looked like C60L in that Aztec writing that was all angles and reversed curves. The other two boys watched in awe. Tony crab-walked back, out of sight of the building, and tagged the rear fender. Liffey took up his post in front of the black car, looking calmly over it at the glass doors where they had gone in. The boy got bolder and hit the trunk, trailing a straight line of white around the car, and then he worked on the other door. In an office window a secretary looked on in horror, frozen to a standstill with a wad of papers in her hand.

“Get in the car.”

Jack Liffey took out the boy's .38. He walked around the M3 and put a bullet into each tire, the shots crashing back to him off the building. The whooping alarm went off, with the headlights flashing and the horn honking insistently, and he put a shot through the windshield for good measure. He'd hoped it would shatter, but it just holed, leaving a neat ring and a few small cracks.

Then he waited at his purring Concord, staring back at the office building.

“Stay out of sight, gentlemen.”

Finally the Cowboy came out in a rush but held up when he saw Liffey. They made eye contact, and then the Cowboy surveyed his car. The Cowboy's expression slowly warmed into a smile. Liffey felt his legs and arms tremble. He had a shot left and he could hurt someone in this frame of mind.

He got in and drove away.

“Jesus, Holy Mary, Mother of God,” one of the boys in back repeated.

You only had the space you inhabited, and if you let someone take it away, it was gone forever.

He stopped in the middle of the old deco bridge that spanned the L.A. River. The far bank was a moonscape of abandoned factories and smokeless stacks. A few birds flew against the bruised clouds. At a cement works, half a dozen conveyers rose steeply to gray hills like huge mantises tending their piles of dung.

He chose the exact middle where there would still be a little water in the mid-channel next summer and watched the .38 dwindle until the swift gray river swallowed it with hardly a sound. When they drained MacArthur Park Lake to build the Red Line Metro station they found eighteen-hundred handguns in the muck at the bottom, three generations of occluded carnage.

Back in the car he was fed up with warrior taciturnity. “What do you
vatos
want to do when you grow up?”

Now that they had seen the aging Anglo shoot up a car, they were willing to acknowledge him. In fact, he saw right away that they were still children underneath all the steel.

“I want to go to the Yucatan to catch parrots and sell.”

It was the boy with the scar, Billy, speaking with an artless trust. Jack Liffey smiled. He'd expected more of a low-rent ambition, and he liked the idea of the parrot wrangler. He could see the boy, grown up and wearing tighter khakis from Banana Republic, leading an expedition off into the jungle with a big net at shoulder arms.

“Do you keep birds?”

The boy nodded solemnly. “I teach them to speak.
Chinga tu madre, esse
.”

Once Liffey laughed, the others did, too. They were still tough kids. “That parrot, he'd be a big hit in Beverly Hills. What do you want to do?”

Nabo screwed up his face in thought. “I want to work for an airline. I see the big airplanes all the time and I never been inside one. I want to fly in one.”

“I have a feeling you will.” Liffey turned to Tony, but he was not to be drawn so easily. His ambitions were more private and Liffey let them lie. He started the car. “I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up,” Jack Liffey said. “But if some cowboy in a BMW wants to play, I'll play.”

*

Jack Liffey knew he'd turned a corner. Up to that point in his life, he could always pretend he could go back and try another tack, maybe even find out what had gone wrong and fix it, but now the way back was harder to imagine. By taking up the Cowboy's challenge, he had marooned himself out at the exhausted edge of things.

A group of Latino kids played baseball in the street and he thought of the afternoon he'd hung on the wire fence for hours, watching little league games one after another, trying not to think of Viet Nam. Most of his friends had drawn magic lottery numbers but he had thirty-seven and he didn't feel like doing a C.O. like Timmy Brice and he certainly wasn't going to tell a roomful of suspicious old farts that he was no C.O., but fuck this war, like Anthony Papadakis who was then doing eighteen months at a federal camp in Arizona. To tell the truth, the six weeks of Basic had been worse than the duty, sadistic gym coaches running his life. His duty hadn't been all that bad, monitoring air-conditioned instruments and watching green blips on screens. It was just that the tour had given him the first sense that the future was no longer provisional, and when the blips disappeared all of a sudden from the scope, he saw there was no way in hell to protect yourself from the future.