The Concrete River (7 page)

The air over the city smelled sweet for some reason, like animal fodder, as he got back to his own mini-mall. Perhaps it was a leftover of the rain. He smiled at Marlena sweeping her walk as he drove past to park in back and she blew him a kiss.

His office door was standing open again and he sighed. Maybe the burglars had come back and tidied it for him. His sarcasm abandoned him abruptly when he entered and saw the man standing in the shadows in the room.

“Worst mess I ever saw sans the aid of hooch,” the man drawled. “Looks like you turpentined a couple cats in here. Jack.”

He wore a big white cowboy hat and tooled boots, but he was small and weasely and didn't seem to belong in them. His body shifted rhythmically, like a mongoose in front of a cobra. Jack Liffey tried to remember exactly where his guns were. The Dreyse was in the car and the Ballester Molina he'd taken home. He wondered if he should bolt.

“You mind telling me why you're in my office?”

“I want you to think on the last couple days, pardner.” He sat down in the swivel chair and a gray light caught his face. Something was wrong with his eyes. “Somebody brought you something, I think.”

“A black figurine,” Jack Liffey said. “A bird of some sort.”

He calculated he could be out of the room in half a second, and then he felt something hard in his back, the size of a gun and with what felt like a lot of mass. A
big
gun.

“We know you're smart as a cuttin' horse. Just keep still.” A hand felt expertly down his legs, up hard enough in his crotch to cause a twinge, across the small of his back and under his arms. “I know you, you done some ridin' and ropin' in the big Nam, think you can't be scared no more, but don't you believe it.”

The Cowboy swiveled back and forth in a restless way. Liffey wondered if the one behind him was the dangerous one. He was shoved all of a sudden from the side and he stumbled into a corner of the office away from the door. The other man filled the doorway, backlit so all you could see was that he was big, a feature player, but without the gaudy clothing of the other man. He carried a little Mac-11 spray gun with the 32-shot magazine. There were sure a lot of guns about.

“You've got me confused with somebody else. I scare easy.”

The Cowboy took a hand-rolled out of his shirt pocket and lit it with a wooden match. The smell was unmistakably dope. He sucked deep and held it a long time, smiling. He didn't seem very interested in talking to Jack Liffey.

The big man stooped and picked up a little battery radio and tested it. A jazz station came on and he held it away from his ear as if it had stung him.

“It's your dime,” Liffey said.

“Well, you're just right upholstered with impatience, ain't you?”

The big man found an oldies station and seemed to relax as some Stones came on, “Wild Horses.” Couldn't drag him away.

“I got stuff to do today,” Jack Liffey said. “So why don't you guys come back some other time and we'll talk about whatever you've got on your mind.” If they were going to shoot him they'd have done it.

“You sure don't use all your kindlin’ gettin’ your fire started up. I want you to know we ain't kiddin’ around here. The men we work for pay more in sales tax on a bad day than you got in the world, and you don't even cut their shadow. Fact you'd have to stand in the same place twice just to cast a shadow they could see.”

The gaudy patter annoyed him, but it didn't seem like a good time to complain about it.

“We don't care what you do with the stuff you got, we just don't care, because you don't amount to grease on a flapjack.But don't make us care.” The Cowboy took out his own pistol now, a little .32 that belonged in a purse.

The big man was behind him again and suddenly Jack Liffey's hand was wrenched behind him and then he heard the screech of cloth tearing and his wrists were being tied together with what felt like duct tape as the Stones sang on.

“We're not in this fuckin’ business to have to give the same message twice, you understand? That Spic cunt fell in the river. That's the end of it. You understand that?”

“Sure, uh-huh. I'm on top of it.”

The big man thrust his knees suddenly into the backs of Jack Liffey's knees. It was an old playground trick, but if you weren't ready for it, there was nothing you could do but go down hard. He managed to break his fall a bit by angling his weight so his hip and shoulder hit at the same time. The big man taped his ankles, then flipped him over onto his back so he lay uncomfortably on the lump of his tied hands and taped his mouth.

The Cowboy stooped and dragged the little purse automatic across Liffey's cheek like a straight razor. “You best save your breath now for breathin'. Our friend here's meaner n'a sheared sheep.”

He tore open Jack Liffey's shirt, little pearl buttons spinning away on the linoleum as the cool air hit his belly. He could see the big man's shoes, Redwing engineer boots that badly needed oil on the scuffs. The music came up loud on the radio, Jim Morrison croon-talking his way through “The End.”

Can you picture what will be, so limitless and free?

From somewhere the big man produced a writhing snake, a big diamondback rattlesnake. He held it hard behind the head so the open jaws couldn't get at his fat fingers, and he let the tail dangle over Jack Liffey's bare stomach, the rattle just grazing gooseflesh. It rattled once vigorously and then just shivered, a light grating sound like sheets of paper rubbing over one another. He could only hear it in lulls in the music.

All the children are insane, waiting for the summer rain.

“The spic cunt, she had an accident. She had cooties. Believe it.”

His body went tense and his chest arched up. The big man lowered the snake so the body wound back and forth across Jack Liffey's bare chest. His neck ached with the effort of holding his head up to see. The snake was heavy and cool, as if dead, but of course it was cold blooded.

The killer awoke before dawn. He put his boots on.

If he got any more tense he would explode. The big man lowered the snake's head and it went out of sight behind a coil. He could see up close that the diamond markings were made up of the whitened tips of diagonal rows of scales. The big man withdrew his hand gingerly and the snake writhed slightly. It seemed to be resting before making up its mind what to do, the rattle quivering.

The long throbbing bell-like organ solo started up.

“Bye now.”

He saw their feet withdraw as one of the coils of the snake flexed lightly and resettled across his belly. He wondered if its strike was always fatal or if it would just make him very sick. He remembered being told to cut crosshatches with a razor and suck out the poison, and then he remembered being told that that was no longer the conventional wisdom, that cutting crosshatches would only spread the venom more rapidly. He thought they made snakebite kits with little rubber suction cups, but it was academic because he didn't have a snakebite kit. He was sweating with the strain.

The snake rose and fell with his breathing but all its other motions seemed to damp down. Most of its weight hung to the right side of his chest and he contemplated rolling slowly in that direction to encourage a departure, but wondered if disturbing the perch would touch off a strike. The strain got to him and he let his neck fall back, but he couldn't stand not seeing for long.

Jack Liffey began to rotate his trunk to the right by infinitesimal stages. The reptile's scales did not seem to have much bite on his flesh, and when he got to forty-five degrees he could sense the snake beginning to move.

The West is the best. The West is the best.

The snake slid to the floor in a rush and Jack Liffey spun and rolled away in the opposite direction, picturing the rattler coming alert the moment it touched down and coming after him. He bucked and writhed, hit his head hard on the corner of his desk and finally wrenched his bound hands over his buttocks and brought them in front of himself for defense.

The snake hadn't moved an inch. It lay in some sort of defensive posture with its head aimed square at where Jack Liffey waited.

He ripped the tape off his mouth, then tore at the duct tape with his teeth and finally twisted his hands free, scrabbling for a weapon. A baseball bat would be perfect, but he didn't have a baseball bat. He settled for a heavy gray homemade vase one of his low-paying customers had given him in gratitude.

The snake seemed to be mesmerized, and all at once Jack Liffey got mad and threw down the vase. He got to his feet, still bound at the ankles, and hopped forward until he came down hard on the snake's head several times. It made no effort to avoid him, and there was a solid gummy resistance under his shoes like stepping on a hose.

It was some kind of rubber snake and they'd made him look like an idiot. Which was the point. His vision went red. To make you look the wrong way, to make you afraid of the thing that was irrelevant, the thing that was coming from the wrong place.

He tore the tape off his ankles and waited for his heart to slow down.

The end of nights we tried to die. This is the end.

He knew he was way over his head now, up against some really dangerous people, but none of that mattered. They had fucked with his self-esteem.

A smolder of anger rode with him and it flared irrationally when a policeman made a brusque two-hand pushing gesture to get his car to pull wider. For a millisecond he pictured driving the cop down, sending him topsy-turvy. But the reason for the detour was clear enough—a poultry truck had overturned and was burning across most of the road.

He'd spent the night nursing images of the Cowboy and the snake and trying to think himself into an alternate universe where he had behaved bravely and well. It was no use.

Chickens scurried past, a few actually on fire. Pedestrians chased them down, some laughing like children and others in an earnest of charity. He cranked the window down and could hear the cacophony of the chickens still in the truck, driven to an awareness of their danger. The driver tugged heroically on battery cage doors, freeing as many birds as he could, grabbing and flinging them away from him. A dusting of feathers hung in the air and one of the burning chickens fluttered up onto the Concord's hood with a tremendous will of wingbeats. The bird hit the glass and implored his comfort with hard yellow eyes for just an instant, and then it was gone, leaving a sad aftertaste of cruelty in the air. His psyche had no room to sympathize with chickens.

From a poultry point of view, he thought, the holocaust would be remembered for generations, retold and embellished until at last it became only a dim folk tale in the chicken memory. The day the iron beast caught fire and devoured our grandmothers. The cop pointed straight at him like death in a Swedish movie and waved him on.

And at his very worst the night before, Kathy had called. His child support was late.

I loved you so damn much once, Jack, I loved you to drive me to distraction. I can't believe it. I used to say it all the time. Imagine that. We were so close there for so long, I just can't believe it any more. I won't let myself get that close to anyone any more, I won't. I haven't. Remember that time I hit you with the ladle? Remember? I broke your collarbone.

Sure, he remembered.

What was I mad about, I can't remember?

He didn't know either but he must have deserved it.

She wouldn't let him talk to Maeve.

No money, no rights, Jack. That's the bottom line in this household. No money, no rights.

It was the American credo, for sure.

Tony was working out with his home-made weights when Jack Liffey drove up. He was doing curls in a frenzy, pumping away like a machine gone amok. Either it was a kind of aerobic training or the boy was working out his emotions. Across the street a handful of older boys with bandannas on their foreheads poked under the hood of a ’62 Chevy low-rider A woman was watering something in the tiny grotto. He wondered if they made Chia-pet Marys, and then decided it was a pretty mean thought.

Jack Liffey went around to the back where Tony was huffing and puffing.

“
Hola
, T-Bell,” he said.

The boy noticed him but didn't break his pace. He'd be a real hard one someday if nothing intervened. At the end of the set, he slammed down the pipe with its concrete cans.

“Grandma wants to see you.”

“In a minute. I came to see you.”

The boy picked up a towel, wiped his forehead off and tossed it back in the corner like a tennis player between sides.

Two dogs came along the weeds gnarring at one another, the bigger one backing up in apprehension. The bigger was a mongrel but it had the fat strong mouth of a rottweiler. The smaller looked like a white coyote and had a coyote way of trying to get sideways.

“Jaime!
Ven!
”

The boy bolted and got between the dogs, kicking out at the bigger one.

“
Ve! Ve
! Fuck off!”

He grabbed the collar of the frenzied white dog with both hands and held it back. Jack Liffey walked straight at the rottweiler. “Get lost!”

By some miracle the rottweiler barked once and then fled. Liffey knelt beside the white dog. The eyes were wild. The dog was really wired and couldn't get itself down.

“He's part coyote, isn't he?”

“I think so. My dad brought him from Arizona.”

“When was that?” Liffey ran his hand down the dog's chest from the neck down between the forelegs, over and over, soothing the animal. The breeder's trick worked like a charm, and the dog stiffened up to stillness and then gradually relaxed.

“I don't know.”

“Is he in Arizona now? Your dad.”

The boy didn't answer. It was a touchy subject.

“Try this if he gets wild. No dog can resist it.”

“We have to put him on a chain at night or he goes hunting for cats.”

They both fell silent for a moment.

“Do you know what a BMW M3 is?” Jack Liffey asked.

The boy nodded, but just to make sure he added, “With all the skirts and spoilers and the lumpy fenders sticking out.”