The Concrete River (4 page)

The sound of the water was a little too fast to be soothing, but he still liked watching the racing dark surface. He wondered why people always found solace in moving water. You could just as easily see a cosmic indifference, a process of wear and erosion that would go on without you and go on until everything on earth was worn away.

A flotilla of schoolkids came toward him across the bridge, all loud bantering and fists against shoulders. Two or three danced at the periphery with a mean edge. Something had happened since his day. It was as if the country had gone through a toxic hormone spill and even the six-year-olds had to train up to spear lions. This group was black, brown and white in almost equal numbers, all wearing some flash of green, a bandanna or a shirt. He'd thought kids never ganged up across race, but here was the evidence. That was something to be said for Cahuenga.

They were almost past when a trailing white kid turned back.

“Hey, man, watcha lookin' at?”

“Just thought I'd look at the river.”

Two blacks came back to help out.

“That's some strange shit, man. Look at the river? What for?”

“I don't know,” Jack Liffey said, still feeling amiable, though he could sense the trouble brewing. “Do you always know why you do things?”

“Are you saying I'm stupid? You're a pussy.”

The two black kids fanned out to block him against the concrete railing. He guessed they were about fourteen or fifteen, but one of them was taller than he was. The rest of the gang hung out at the end of the bridge, watching casually.

“Man, you're stealing our Jesus.”

“Yeah, motherfucker, you're dissing our Jesus.”

There was nothing that could be said to that so he just stared neutrally back, waiting to see what move they'd make.

“Gimme your wallet,” the white kid said.

The black kid on his right tugged a silk shirt out of his waistband to show the handle of a cheap 9mm Star.

“Don't fuck with us, man.”

“No trouble.”

He took out his city wallet with his left hand and handed it over. The white kid snatched it and they all ran.

“Have a nice day,” he called. The Dreyse was in his coat pocket, but it wasn't worth getting someone hurt. Besides, his real wallet was still in his right rear pocket. The city wallet held two outdated credit cards, some random business cards from insurance agents, the photo of Jim Garner that had come with the cheap wallet, and a ten-dollar bill so a mugger wouldn't get too angry.

He wondered if it was something to do with meeting Eleanor Ong that had kept him feeling good-humored through it all.

He was standing and waving one arm, complaining about twinges in the shoulder, nitrogen bubbles from a deep dive. Jack Liffey took the weight belt from him and tossed it into the cracked sea chest. They were rocking softly on a ratty old shrimper tied up at the end of Fish Harbor in San Pedro.The sky was overcast and dark in the afternoon.

Only Mike Lewis would go scuba diving in the lull of a rainstorm, he thought. He'd probably wedged it in between his classes in urban theory, whatever that was, and a hell-bent dash in his old Toyota to some TV interview. Somewhere in there he wrote books on L.A. social history.

“Before you get the bends, have some of this.”

Jack Liffey handed him the fifth of unblended scotch. He hadn't touched it himself, and wouldn't, but a bottle was
de rigueur
on a visit to Lewis. He was a little feisty restless guy, a former SDS leader who'd been blackballed from the big schools for years so he'd taught part-time in little art colleges. Then he wrote a probing social history of L.A., about who'd gored whose ox, that became so hot the
Times
and the talk shows couldn't get enough of him.

“The only time I can catch up with you is when you're diving. All I've got to do is look for air bubbles.”

“Dig out a sweatshirt, will you?”

Toni Mardesich, the wiry old man who owned the boat, did something skillful looking and nautical with a heavy rope and stepped ashore. “Last one off button the flaps.”

“Thanks for the ride, Toni.”

“Any time, Mikie.”

Fish Harbor was sad. The big Japanese tuna boats with their ten-mile draglines had killed off the industry, and the American boats with their third-generation Italian and Yugoslav crews rarely went out any more. He remembered as a kid the bustle of the wharf, with old men repairing nets and young men hurrying back and forth, and the fabulous pageant of Fisherman's Fiesta every year, decorated boats parading up and down the channel to be blessed by some bishop, all of which was long gone. The boats sat and decayed. Taking Mike out was probably just something to do for a guy who was bored and broke. Mike Lewis seemed to know everybody.

He looked even smaller in the huge dark sweatshirt. They sat and stared out over the gray channel toward the dead tuna packing plant on Terminal Island, a single seagull swooping and crying over the water. It was a view that for some reason had no sense of intimacy at all. It was the stillest he'd ever seen Lewis.

“I remember Consuela Beltran,” Mike Lewis said. “I met her when I was writing the piece on the Cahuenga election. A really strong woman with big brown eyes who always wanted to talk about post-structuralism.”

“Funny, she never asked me about it.”

There was a scuffling on the wharf and they both looked over at a mountain of rotted net and oblong floats where some kids were playing king of the hill, apparently in two teams, skins and shirts. Skins were winning, rougher than Jack Liffey remembered similar games on Averill Park's big hill. They looked like they were maybe twelve or thirteen.

“Tell me about the elections.”

“The Latinos won all three contested seats and it's now three to two on the council. It's the first city council in the county with a Latino majority. Latinos are so disaffected only about thirty percent of them vote. And of course a lot are still Mexican citizens.”

“What's the significance of
la gente
winning?”

“Who said it was
la gente
who won?”

“Catholic Liberation's on their side. They can't be all bad.”

Lewis beckoned for another hit of scotch. “That's good stuff, but I prefer Irish.” He was married to a fast-talking Irishwoman he'd met in a decade of self-imposed exile, and he still affected a lot of Irish mannerisms like buying rounds in a bar and carrying wooden matches. “Nothing's all bad. But you've got to peel the onion and see what's underneath. You read my piece right after the election.”

Liffey grimaced. “I think I must have missed it.”

Lewis tutted once. “That ex-nun with the long legs would like to think she was part of a crusade against geriatric Anglo capitalists, but the Cahuenga Neighborhood Organization got a lot of their war chest from slumlords, Anglo, Latino and Korean. Two families a house, five, ten—the more the better. It doesn't make it all crooked. It's just another fact.”

“An unpleasant fact to some.”

He shrugged. “Facts are just facts. Activists like Jorge Gallegos felt they were using the slumlords. They took the money and used it to get some Latinos in office. Of course, one of the candidates was a developer and the others were pals of realtors, even if they had vowels on the ends of their names.”

There was a sharp scream on the net mountain. It looked like a shirt had fallen backward and hit his head, with his allies clustered around. The skins looked down sheepishly. Jack Liffey wondered if it was cynical or just realistic to call war the human condition. Peace was the aberration. War kept reasserting itself, and he was having trouble formulating any philosophy that made it acceptable.

He stirred as if to go intervene, but Lewis touched his arm. “You don't know enough about it.”

“I'm not bad with kids.”

The hand tightened on his bicep. “Don't be a fucking liberal.”

The kid-war seemed to be simmering down, and Liffey tilted back his head and let the sea air cool the underside of his chin.

“We probably won't know who was using whom in Cahuenga until we see their votes a year from now. More social services, or just more slums.”

“My dad used to have a saying for a situation like that,” Liffey said. “Whether the vase hits the hammer or the hammer hits the vase, it's the vase that breaks.”

Lewis raised his eyebrows. “Meaning, it's the big dogs that eat. True. I have a sense there's even more layers to the onion. I just don't have time to look into it.”

They both ducked when they heard the first shot. It was followed by a half dozen more, small and shrill like a .22, and when Liffey finally managed a peek over the gunwale he saw a group of shirts running, carrying one of their number spread-eagled between them. The skins weren't to be seen.

“Jesus, kids,” Liffey said. “What do your post-structuralist friends say about twelve-year-olds with guns?”

“You wouldn't fret so much if you had a sufficiently inclusive embrace of the human experience.”

Liffey looked around and frowned at him until Lewis broke into a grin. “‘I am large, I contain multitudes. I am not the poet of goodness only, I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also.’ I like things a little ragged.”

“Don't be an ass-hole.”

*

The rain held off and after trying a pay phone that had had its armored cable sawed half through and one with the quarter slot impossibly jammed with burnt matches, he finally found a working model outside a bar on Pacific just up from Fish Harbor. There was some sort of commotion at the other end.

“Ms Ong, please.”

“Just a sec.”

The instant she came on he could hear that she was crying.

“This is Jack Liffey. Is something wrong?”

“Oh, God. Mr. Liffey. You'd better come over here. She's dead. Consuela's dead.”

“What happened?”

“She drowned in the L.A. River. It's
horrible
.”

She seemed to have lost most of her cocky fortitude, and he felt a chill go through him. “I'll be there.”

*

The warm damp made his steering wheel feel sticky, as if it had been shellacked. He drove straight up the Harbor Freeway and east out Gage, past all the abandoned plants and past what was almost a shanty town with rows of tiny peeling shacks that supported cardboard and tin add-ons in between. The flat light from the overcast sky was merciless, allowing no shadows or hidden corners. He hadn't been this way in years and it surprised him L.A. had a slum that rivaled South Africa. She was waiting for him in front of the Liberation house in a fluffy white sweater. Her eyes were red and he had an overwhelming urge to touch her as she got in.

“She was so darn vital.”

“Who found her?”

“The police came by. They said she'd been in the water a long time. It's unbelievable. She floated all the way to Long Beach and they found her near the Queen Mary.”

Eleanor Ong held her face to wipe her tears surreptitiously. He wondered if she'd known the woman that well or she just cried a lot.

“Did they say anything about wounds or marks?”

“They weren't very forthcoming. They wouldn't be, would they?”

“You never know. Some cops are just people.”

“Left here. It's a couple blocks up on the right.”

There were a lot of small bungalows from the 1920s done up with stucco and arched entries the way Latinos did, fairly tidy lawns, a few apartment houses. There was no question which house. People were scattered around the neighborhood staring at it as if it was about to stand up and do something entertaining, and two police cars were in front, though not black and whites. Cahuenga P.D. used a fat beige stripe on the side of their white cars, as if they were a rich suburb trying for designer law enforcement. One of the cars left as he approached and he parked almost a block away.

“It's up there,” she said.

“I kind of figured that out,” he said. Two cars was too much for an accidental drowning, maybe even three if the white Lumina was a police plainwrap. “Have you been here much?”

“A few times. I brought her home once in a while, and I had dinner with them twice. I stayed with Tony once when she had some election work.”

“Was there ever any sign of the husband?”

She shrugged. “There's a photo, but if you're asking if I saw any cigar butts in the ashtrays, no.”

“No other men?”

“Mr. Liffey, are you investigating her?”

“I'm getting curious. Come on, call me Jack or I'll call you Sister Mary Rose.”

She blushed as she got out. He hadn't seen a woman blush in a long time. For all her tough front, she was still a nun.

“Jack. It's such a macho name.”

“Jack be nimble,” he said with an apologetic smile. “It wasn't my fault.”

The house was the front bungalow of a court, eight identical Spanish tile buildings that faced each other across a walking path that ran up from the street. A big brass B was beside the door. The one with the A had a tiny grotto with a statue of the virgin square in the middle of its meager share of grass. Toward the back, about E, a very heavy woman hid herself ineffectually on the stoop behind an open screen door.

“What should I say?” Eleanor Ong said just before they stepped up on the porch toward the open door.

“Whatever they ask. You don't fuck with—screw with cops if you can help it.”

“I don't shock that easy, Jack.”

“We'll see about that.”

They were both startled by his tone, but by then they were half way into the overcrowded living room. Two uniforms, and two shoes, he noted. The shoes were both paunchy and older, probably Cahuenga's only detectives. One was a Latino, and the other had a nice florid Celtic face. Maria Elena Schuler sat on the sofa, red faced but trying hard not to break down in front of all these foreigners as she spoke softly to a woman her age. Liffey recognized the boy, two years older than when he'd brought him back down from the Central Valley. He sat next to his grandmother, wearing only a white sleeveless t-shirt to show off his home-made tattoo, fierce as a warrior. The barrio warrior recognized Liffey and the boy inside almost nodded. There were several others, neighbors or relatives sitting on all the chairs, or standing behind them.