The Concrete River (6 page)

It was late afternoon when he got off the freeway on La Cienega. He passed an old apartment building that had caught his eye long ago. It had been abandoned, boarded up, then had had the boards ripped off and street kids had been living in it for months, covering it with graffiti. The most prominent sign, over the entrance, said
You're Fucked We're Your Future
.

Maybe so, he thought.

*

Marlena's UPS note was taped to his office door, but she had gone home so he went in and hunted in the debris for his phone. It wasn't that hard for a detective. He went to the wall outlet, picked up the cord and yanked on it until the phone emerged from the litter, trailing its handset.

“It's not really UPS. I just used their notepad,
queridoa
. A messenger brought a package.”

“Will you come open up and get it for me?”

“I brought it home with me. You can get it when you come and have a drink.”

“I see. You sure there's a package?”

“It's about the size of a stack of screenplays. I see a lot of them.”

A chill went up his back.

“I want you to take the package out into the middle of your back yard and leave it there.”

“What do you—?”

“Just do it for me, and then come back in the house, okay? I'll be there in ten minutes.”

“Okay, Jack.”

*

First he lobbed an old brick onto it from about fifty feet away, and when nothing happened he looked it over more closely, without touching it. Marlena Cruz waited behind a flimsy garden shed that probably wouldn't have helped much, clutching a small hairless dog that was mewling away like a rodent. It was a brown manila package with his name on it and no return address, about eight inches thick. He got some rope and duct tape out of his car and taped the rope thoroughly to one end of the package. Then he taped the other end to a fence post and, beginning to feel foolish, he stood at the far end of the yard and yanked the package open. The brown paper tore noisily and a wad of papers spilled onto the lawn.

So much for sapper training.

“I'm glad it wasn't an admirer sending you a porcelain chotchke,” she said.

“So am I,” he said. “For sure.”

He carried the papers indoors and set them on the rickety Danish modern coffee table, the only surface not already covered by her own chotchkes, porcelain dogs, wood and plaster dogs, aluminum dogs, large flocked floor-sitting dogs from Tijuana and small blown glass dogs from the county fair. The top quarter of the stack of documents was a single edge-bound booklet and the rest was loose papers.

“Aren't you going to look?”

“Not just now.”

“I'll never figure you out,” she sighed.

“Who brought the package?”

“A kid on a bike. Maybe twelve years old.”

“Somebody from the neighborhood? Would you recognize him?”

“Probably. He had one of those funny bicycles kids have with the high handlebars, and he had a wicker basket on it. You don't see that so much.”

“Keep your eye out for him.”

She brought him a scotch with ice, stood behind him and began to massage his neck and shoulders. He had never told her he didn't drink; it involved too much explanation. He set the glass in front of himself and stared at the ice cubes bobbing to the surface.

“You look worn out tonight. Did you have a bad day?” She was much less ornery at home, or maybe it was being in heat.

It would have been great to drink it. “Not as bad as the Beltrans. They found her dead, drowned in the river.”

“Ooh, I'm sorry. Did you see the boy?”

“He took it like a warrior, while anyone was watching. Then he cried. I wish city kids didn't have to grow up so fast. It's like a huge social experiment in forced breeding. All the middle tones will be gone in a generation. We won't even understand what a gentle smile is.”

“Poor baby.”

She ran her hands softly along his neck, dragging a nail, and his hair stood on end. He hadn't made up his mind how to get out of there before she got too far. His sense of the pattern in his life had been disrupted somehow, and he wasn't sure how to get it back. The dog was making rapid squeaking sounds and seemed to be trying to mount his shoe.

“Fidel,
stop
that.”

She threw a small sofa pillow at the dog. The thing yelped and raced off into the house.

“Fidel?” he said.

“In Spanish it is common. It might not be referring to Castro.”

“But it does?”

“Sure. I had Raul and Che, too, but Raul got distemper and Che ran in front of a Sparkletts truck and got run over.”

“Your house is a holocaust for the Cuban Revolution.”

She came around the sofa and curled up next to him. “I like Cuba. Every Hispanic does a little, maybe secretly, except the exiles. They thumbed their nose at Uncle Sam and they got free health care.”

“The gays don't like it so much,” he said.

“What do you care? This isn't for men, is it?” Her hand rested on his penis, as it began to swell under his trousers, then she kneaded him softly.

“You've never been quite so forward,” he said.

“You keep slipping away. I want you, Jack. Please don't make me ashamed.” She bent forward and closed her lips over the lump in his trousers, and he leaned back, shocked not by her actions but her words. Had he shamed her before, by diplomatically evading her bedroom?

It was strange how things happened. You drifted from day to day, and months went by, years, then all of a sudden, without you willing it, a change came up. He knew he was going to go through with it now, but he hadn't been thinking along this line at all. If he'd been thinking this way, it was about a slim nervous ex-nun.

Unbuttoning the back of her dress, he found her stockiness quite attractive. Then she was up against him and they were exchanging very wet kisses.

“Slow, slow,” he said. “We're not kids. We've got all night.”

“It's been too long,” she said. The dog whined in the doorway, and they went into the bedroom and shut Fidel out.

There were ruffles on the bed and more decorative dogs on various surfaces, a thousand tiny censorious eyes on him. Her thick-strap brassiere released enormous brown breasts that actually weighed heavy in his hands.

As they tumbled into the four-poster, his mind raced against his will, spinning off into some strange realm. He imagined the two of them moving out of the city to start a dog-breeding ranch somewhere up in Canyon Country. Not the little yippy dogs, but shepherds and danes and collies. They could sell the dogs to people who turned off Highway 14 in their station wagons on the way to the Antelope Valley, and Maeve would come out alternate weekends to help train the smarter shepherds as seeing-eye dogs.

She got both hands on his penis, rubbing it against herself as she knelt over him, and he imagined the lazy moon-lit nights when they had finally grown used to the incessant howling and baying. At the end of the year, they would sit rocking on the long porch and he would say, The dogs have been good to us. She said something and he felt her fingernails scrabbling at his back. Only toward the end when they were both finally quieting down did he notice the persistent scratching at the door. She was very brown everywhere and smelled strong and wonderful and tasted salty.

“It doesn't mean you have to marry me,” she said, pounding the pillow under her head. “It's just good.”

“You'd better tell that to Fidel. He's going crazy with jealousy.”

The volume came up when he opened the door, the dog yipping away at him as he walked past to the coffee table in her bathrobe. He lifted the bound volume. “To Mr. L” was written on a note taped to the cover in fat magic marker letters.

It was a report labeled “Babylonian Opera House and Performance Center.” He recognized the artist's sketch on the cover, the thousand-yard-long facade of the Samson Rubber Company, a faux Babylonian temple along the L.A. River, just another of L.A.'s vernacular buildings like the Brown Derby and the giant doughnut. Latterly it had been Uniroyal and then it had sat derelict and decaying in the far corner of Cahuenga for twenty years, bas reliefs of striding middle eastern kings spalling away under the graffiti.

Joost ter Braak, he thought, have they told you about this? He read the
Times
regularly, and this plan to redevelop the rubber temple was a famous civic secret, known to everyone, never whispered in public. The rest of the stack included financing plans worked out by the Basin Redevelopment Agency, memos from city officials, business plans and county department documents that would take him a lifetime to digest.

Who, he thought, wanted an opera house badly, and who didn't? And who on earth would kill for it?

Driving down toward Playa Vista into the morning overcast, he passed a tall man strolling along Jefferson in white bucks, carrying a banjo, and he wondered if the man had fallen asleep in a time vault for thirty or fourty years. L.A. was like that. On his left bulldozers were reshaping the last open wetlands for a big new plantation of condos.

Overlooking the site was the long cliff of Westchester, the south bank of the historic floodplain of the L.A. River until a big storm in the middle of the nineteenth century had diverted the main flow south toward Long Beach to leave only Ballona Creek flowing west. Few people in L.A. noticed the natural features that were still there beneath the grid of streets—like the slope a mile north at Rose that had been the north bank of the floodplain. He had once enjoyed knowing things like that, the broken geography under the asphalt and the lost flora and fauna, it was like getting a leg up on the massive denial that the city feasted on, but he was becoming tired of knowing too many things that did him no good.

The art school where Lewis taught one day a week was a post-modern assemblage of tinkertoys and kitsch, like the leftovers from several real buildings, and he parked right in front and tried not to look at all the in-your-face ugliness. Too many opinions, he thought. You didn't need to carry them around with you. You could probably make up as much as you needed as you went along.

“Lousy overcast,” he said to the blond secretary. She eyed him suspiciously.

“I'd like to leave some stuff for Mike Lewis.”

“He shares a box with the grad R.A.s.” She nodded to a rabbit-warren of boxes against the wall. The big one marked RA‘s’—someone had taken no chances with the apostrophe—was stuffed.

“It appears to be full.”

She took a long time seconding his opinion. “You can't leave it on the counter. It's against policy to leave mail on the counter.” She broke off, as if that settled it.

“Perhaps if we put our heads together,” he said slowly, “we can come up with a solution to this problem.”

“He's not in today.” She had rheumy eyes and he wondered if she was on some kind of slow-down drug. “He's in his office tomorrow at one.”

Mommas always told you that you got farther with politeness. “Is there some way I could leave a package this size for him? Just
theoretically
speaking.”

“I can't take the responsibility for accepting something.”

“What if you unlock his office door and leave it on his desk?”

“I'm not authorized to do that.”

“Is there someone who can?”

“Not now.”

He had a vision of this going on forever, an endless series of cavils and quoted regulations, their hair growing out and out over the years like Einstein's until it filled every crevice of the office.

“What if I sat down here, poured gasoline over myself and lit it?”

She glared.

He left the office and circled the building. In the back corner of the small campus he found a doublewide house trailer with
Custodial
over the open door. Inside, a squat Latino was loading bottles and cans onto a rolling cart.

“
Companero
, I'm trying to leave some papers for Mike Lewis who teaches here. I'm having a little trouble with the Dragon Lady.”

There was a hint of a smile hovering at the corner of the man's lip. Jack Liffey tucked a ten-dollar bill into the packet of papers.

“Do you think you could put it in his room for me?”

The janitor looked around quickly and then tucked the packet under some rags on the bottom of the cart.

“Is this a good place to work?” Liffey asked.

The janitor shrugged. “I had my own land in El Salvador. I didn't hold my hat in my hand.”

“I hope you get your land back, senor.
Gracias
.”

“
De nada
.”

Driving away, he saw a hillock of black trash bags piled in the corner of a mini-mall and he remembered the garbage strike. Flies were already dancing in celebration. It would only get worse.

He wondered if you could equate having your own land to having a secure job with a window office and a good salary, working alongside a few people you respected, doing something you were good at and recognized for being good at. Neither one had turned out to have much of a future.

On the other side of Jefferson three cop cars were askew and two old Mustangs were stopped with their doors open, a half dozen young black men sitting handcuffed on the curb. The cop cars were LAPD and a helicopter was circling, too, in case the suspects tried to levitate. Then he noticed one man being stripped by two of the cops, a pistol to his head. He had a vision of gang rape by the police, with the rest of the city commuting past to work, pretending not to see.

The arrest scene didn't matter, not really. The black trash bags didn't matter either. The Dragon Lady in the office. The styrofoam cups fouling the concrete river. Gorillas on fire. That was the problem, letting your attention be diverted by what didn't matter, getting scared by it, fouling up your consciousness with it. The world was getting fuller and fuller of stuff that didn't matter. Maybe he could help the kid, Tony. That might be something that mattered.

He dreaded seeing the mess in his office again but he had to dig out Chris Johnson's phone number. He was a former computer hacker and phone phreak who'd turned to designing video games a half jump ahead of the techno-cops from AT&T who'd taken a dim view of his work. Two years earlier a radio station had offered an old Porsche 501 to the ninety-seventh caller and Chris had blown away their tie line and placed every call from fifty through ninety-seven, just for good measure.