The Concrete River (14 page)

“I think I know what you mean.”

“Fitting in got to be a chore for you, didn't it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The nun thing, the religion where people do what they're told.”

She waited, looking at her nails as if deciphering a message written there, then she looked up as if she'd made a decision.

“You'd be surprised how much personality nuns have. Sometimes I think they get spoiled with it—the way the nun's life conspires to keep them infants. All the moral earnestness and caring for others without any real personal connection. They all stay younger than their age.”

“You don't seem so much younger than your age. Oops. That's a trick question.”

“Half the nuns I know were afraid to stop smiling. I think they felt like God's TV shows. If they ever stopped being nice, He'd switch them off. Cancel their season.”

He laughed. “How did they ever let someone as pretty and headstrong as you take orders?”

“I can't be flattered, Jack. I'm too vain. Why did we go out the back?” she added doggedly.

“I don't think you'd believe me if I told you.”

“Try me.”

The waiter brought two huge beers and Jack Liffey waited as the man decanted a sampling very slowly into tilted glasses and then moved away soundlessly.

“I think the world can be a bit rougher than you know.” He told her obliquely about the rattlesnake. “They wanted to scare me away from looking into Senora Beltran's killing. I scare pretty easily, but I also get angry. I have a kind of personal code about people getting up into my face. It's the only face I've got. This afternoon I got into their face.”

He told her what he'd done, and describing it made it seem even crazier. It had seemed to make sense at the time.

“Why on earth did you do that?”

He sighed. “I'm not sure. I know those two are at the heart of this thing and I'd like to see who starts buzzing when the brick hits the beehive. Of course, I can't go home for a while.”

She digested that as the seafood appetizers arrived.

“You're wrong,” she said finally. “About my naivete, anyway. Remember, I was taught Original Sin. We start from the assumption that things are rotten.”

“Yeah, well, a rotten time
out here
doesn't mean going to bed without your supper.” He wasn't sure why he was being rough with her. “It means little girls get raped in the park and some men enjoy inflicting pain.”

“I'll take that under advisement.”

For the rest of the dinner, they talked about other things and they both loosened up. He did his best to turn on the charm and she was enlivened, smiling and laughing, touching his hand when he lit a cigarette for her with the candle in the red glass cup, and he thought he sensed a promise in her manner, but he was reluctant to think about it too much. His emotions were volatile enough already.

*

“So where are you going tonight?”

They were strolling along a residential street behind the restaurant, a little too shadowy for comfort. Far in the distance someone howled, perhaps in pain, and they both stopped to listen. All they could hear was wind and traffic, and a scattering of dogs, touching each other off like a long-distance conversation. She held his upper arm with both hands and his skin burned where she touched him.

“I can't very well say, ‘Your place or mine.’”

“We don't usually entertain gentleman callers at Liberation House, but there aren't any rules.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Jack, I'm a little afraid of you. You're really at loose ends, aren't you?”

“Yeah.”

“I don't know if I'm strong enough.”

“Don't kid yourself. You're more ragged than I am.”

“That's the problem.”

They tiptoed up the creaky wood staircase holding hands. The old wainscoting showed many generations of paint, and fading posters pleaded leftish causes,
anos de mujeres
and big doves hunting forlornly for peace. It was not a hallway that had much use for irony.

“You'll be grounded for a month,” he suggested, and she shushed him.

Her door was at the end of the hall. The room was far less tidy than he'd anticipated, more art studio than bedroom. A big black and white charcoal sketch of a Latino festival was on an easel, bustling with crinolines and sombreros. On every surface and tented against the walls there were other drawings, mostly of people, old craggy faces, grinning children, workmen on building sites. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her hide a sketch discreetly behind some others.

“Art or therapy?” he asked. He went straight to the one she'd sequestered and tugged it out against the pull of her arm. It was of him, one leg of his pants hiked up, sitting on the edge of the desk downstairs, as she must have seen him. He thought he looked overbearing. “From memory. That's remarkable.”

“I have a little wine.”

She wiggled the cork out of a half empty bottle of some sweet white wine and poured it into two juice glasses. She was very nervous, most of her brashness having stayed behind somewhere else.

“Do any of these date to your religious years?”

“I didn't realize my religious years had ended.”

“They end tonight.”

“You forget that I always have the option of confessing.”

“Do you regret it already?”

She sat on the edge of the bed and took off her deck shoes, and he studied his portrait glumly. “We never see ourselves the way others do. The things that you think show don't, and all the things you want to hide show. I wish I could draw you.”

“I have a better idea,” she said. She tugged off her sweater with a cross-armed exercise in geometry and then worked on the leotard top in an unladylike way. It seemed to unsnap down in the crotch, under the buttons of her jeans. She peeled it off to reveal uptilted breasts and a world of freckles. “Of every fruit of the tree you may freely partake.”

He figured he'd better nudge things forward before she fixated any further on being the Vestal sacrifice at his barbarian altar.

“Cheer up,” he said. “It can actually be fun.” He knelt to kiss her and found her grasping him hungrily.

For a while she grew more tense and then something in her switched off—or on—and she forgot that she had to worry it to death and began to work herself down into enjoyment.

“What a treat, Jack's penis,” she said, holding him in her fist like a gear shift. She smiled grimly, but neither of them could get it inside her. They tried with him on top and then she tried to lower herself onto him, but he could see her wince and it put him off. A combination of nerves and disuse, he figured. The virgin state may have passed technically but the sanctuary was still reliably locked up.

“Things will loosen up,” he said.

As if to compensate, some flood of sensations unloosed and she came unexpectedly to his touch.

“Zowie zowie,” she said, like something from comic book onomatopoeia. “Now it's my turn.” And she was all over him, trying to do everything at once.

Only when they were done, and lying damp and hot against one another, did she begin to worry about the others in the house again. “I don't know how to deal with this in the morning.”

“I could leave very early.”

“Maybe it would be best. But I want to sleep next to you. I've never actually woken up next to a man, opened my eyes to see hairy shoulders.”

“They're not that hairy. Are you going to sketch me like this?”

“It's the way I grab onto things.” Her fingers explored the shape of his face. They were silent for a time, wind whispering and insinuating at the window.

“Are you going to confess this?” he said after a while.

“Your engine is going all the time. There's no neutral, is there? I have this feeling you're always looking for something. Did something disappear from your life?”

“My wife and daughter.”

“Ah, of course.”

“Don't overweight it. Whatever went AWOL for me was long before that. They probably left because something was already wrong. I hear existential dread comes from a missing vitamin in the diet.”

“I doubt it,” she said. “There's a God-shaped hole in my life.” She closed her eyes. “I believed for so long and so fervently. When you first lose faith, you still believe there's something there to find again, very close by. Then after a while you can only hope there's something somewhere. In the end all you can do is cling to the
idea
of faith, like a secret lover.”

He kissed her cheek softly. “You behave well,” he said. “That's what matters.”

*

An onshore breeze had brought cloud like a low gray ceiling, and drizzle made the streets reflective and hissy. He had tiptoed out at five, and he watched the sunrise from a twenty-four-hour Denny's, where he read every word of the morning
Times
until he could return the call to Art Castro. Castro finally got to work and summoned him to a meeting at a place called Cahuenga Concepts across the river on Firestone.

He kept looking out the corner of his eye for the black M3 as he crossed the concrete river, one of his wipers torn and leaving a blur. Then he realized that that car would probably be in the shop today. He wondered what they would be driving, or if they'd just track him down from an armored helicopter that fired missiles. Sooner or later, he would have to deal with them.

Castro was waiting in the lot in his misted-up Lexus. Jack Liffey rapped on the window, and it came down with an electric whir.

“Hi there, Art
uro
.”

“I been thinking about something,” he said without preamble. “You Catholic?”

“No.”

“I went to parochial school. You know what the nuns used to say to the girls? Never eat ravioli on a date because it will make the boys think about pillows. Can you beat that?”

“I know a better class of nun,” Jack Liffey said, thinking about Sister Mary Rose.

They went in together, a small lobby with glass cases where they had to wait while a beautiful black receptionist with beads in her hair checked on the phone. One display showed a Magic Golf Cleat that retracted into your shoe so it didn't mar the clubhouse floor. There was a self-inking date stamp, a teflon wok, a big plastic salad spinner that ran on batteries and a display of writing paper with
The Official......of the World Cup
printed on each sheet. Official what? he wondered.

“Mr. Pelopidas will be right out.”

Art Castro made a point of walking around the room, studying the displays. The golf cleat display had a TV silently playing an 800 commercial, an extreme closeup of a shoe walking on wood.

“See how the rubber cup stays extended on a hard surface. It's really clever.”

It might have been irony. Art Castro wasn't always easy to read.

“I try to remember everything I see,” he said. “It takes time, but you never know when it will come in handy.”

“I try to forget as much as possible,” Liffey said. “I just hang onto skills.”

“Always the tough guy.”

A short stocky man looked in, his skin olive and his glistening black hair slicked back tight. “Gentlemen. Please come this way.”

It was an odd office, the size of a basketball half court with four desks, one per wall, each facing inward as if the geographic center of the room contained something to be watched, but the center held only a work table and some lateral filing cabinets. A man in an old-fashioned vest pecked at a laptop at the north desk—Jack Liffey always liked to be oriented. Pelopidas headed for the east desk, which looked the best and biggest. A woman in a woolly two-piece was methodically Xeroxing from one pile into another near his desk.

“Sweetie, can you do that later?”

She seemed startled. “Sure, Mr. P.” She tidied the two piles and sauntered out a door.

“Real nice ass,” Pelopidas said. “We let the real estate people share our Xerox so we can look at their girl's ass.”

“Understandable,” Art Castro said. “If not politically correct.” They sat facing him.

“Nobody gets pregnant looking, and when nookie goes out of style, we're all gonna be in deep doo-doo.”

“Opera,” Art Castro said.

“Yeah, something like that. Opera. You know, we was the first pioneers of the cable ad. You bring us your invention and we help produce it and then we set up a boiler room of telephone ladies somewhere and we start flogging ads to the little cable outfits in East Hogback. You pace yourself real careful and you can build up the cash to go to the bigger cables and bigger still until everybody in the country's dying to buy your no-battery flashlight. We provide a genuine service for the little guy, let him compete with Mr. GM and Mr. Ford.”

One of the fluorescents buzzed annoyingly, but no one seemed to notice.

“Opera,” Art Castro said.

“Sure, opera. We was setting up this boiler room not far from Houston a few months ago. God-forsaken place called Alvin. We like to grace these little towns where maybe a lot of housewives want some pin money, and they don't want an arm and a leg for coming in, answer the phones. So we go to rent a storefront and in the course of normal business we meet some real estate gentlemen of the cowboy hat persuasion. And later these guys come to us, because we got an L.A. operation, and ask us to help them out with some L.A. business.”

The north phone rang, and Pelopidas held up while the other man met his eyes and got some unspoken signal. The other man punched a button and the phone went silent.

“Thanks.”

Jack Liffey stared at this other man, his bald spot chalky, and a kind of slackening at the corner of his lips, like a sneer waiting to bloom. He was sure he'd seen him somewhere before.

“It seems they got a big place called the Petro-Center they're thinking of upgrading to an entertainment complex, bug out of the old offices that ain't doing so well since the oil business went eighty-six. All they gotta do is get this guy in Holland or somewhere to come over, give the go-ahead to be their maestro and the money'll just fall into their pockets. But this guy, it seems, some people in L.A. been sweet-talking him and he asks more and more money every time they ring up. Guy gets a swell head. He wants a better opera house every time they talk. First its more seats and practice rooms, then some kind of red stone outside and jobs for his friends, and then he wants to hold them up for a place to live and a car.