The Concrete River Read Online Free Page A

guy, the name was something like Liffey. I think what reminds me's not the name, it's that alert air you've got, you know, taciturn but fierce, polite to women and small children but hell on wheels when you run into other raptors.”
    “You've got an edge on you yourself.”
    “You try being a virgin for seventeen years. That'll give you an edge that salutes.”
    She stared straight at him, as if daring him to take it as flirtation. He laughed instead. “About Mrs. Beltran.”
    She banged the cigarette on a glass saucer. “She should be a real success story. She has a mind like… I don't know. Maybe she's a genius, maybe just shrewd. If she'd been born a man she'd be teaching in some college as the star Latino scholar or, if she'd lost her ethics somewhere along the way, she'd be arbitraging GM.”
    “Her husband couldn't handle it. She had spirit, and she wouldn't shut up when she knew she was right. After he took off, she went to school and got a B.A. at City in History. Her specialty was twentieth century California, we used to talk about Carey McWilliams. She's working on her doctorate at L.A. State in sociology.”
    He was beginning to feel very uncomfortable about himself. He'd met Consuela Beltran twice and hadn't seen very much of that. He'd seen a small brown overweight woman, a bit nervous, who looked a lot like a million other Latinas with a dozen kids at home. Articulate and quick, but not to take special note. How the hell did you avoid that snap stupid racism? And still get on with living? Your liberal grandmother could pretend she wasn't worried when she ran into a half dozen young blacks in bandannas on a dark street. They might all be Rhodes scholars, but she'd be insane to count on it.
    “She can see right through most pretense. It's what makes her good in the neighborhood organization. She can sort out the hidden agendas and who needs a few extra strokes of praise and who needs to feel in charge and all that.”
    “Were there fights in the organization?”
    “Like any living organization. There were plenty of mixed motives to go around. Some people have to dominate. Some people just like to hear themselves talk. Putting up with that malarkey is the curse of democracy. Have you ever been in a grass-roots organization?”
    “Does the Army count?”
    She laughed. “Not unless your platoon voted on what you did next.”
    “That's a thought.” He liked the laugh and he wondered how he would handle long hairy legs. He'd never been with a woman who didn't shave.
    “She was up against a group that called itself Cahuenga Slow Growth. Basically they were dead white males, the businessmen who'd run the town for generations. Backed up by a lot of retired Anglo working people who haven't fled to Orange County. Slow Growth really meant Enforce the Zoning so we don't have all these Mexicans and Central Americans doubling up in our houses and crowding us out.
    “Nobody likes seeing two or three poor families crammed into a small house, but until this society provides something better for immigrants we can't just throw them out on the street. Can you imagine the struggle, raising a family on minimum wage plus a few extra bucks selling oranges on the on-ramp? You don't rent a big condo in Brentwood on that. Besides, the Slow Growth people were all the children of Okies who doubled up in the houses here in the thirties, they just don't remember.”
    “You sound like you might have been one of them once.”
    She shook her head. “I grew up in Inglewood. Of course, before it was black. I come from probably three generations of middle class lawyers.”
    “How could an Anglo group hope to win here?”
    “Their literature was full of code words like blight and unsightly . It didn't say Beaners once.”
    “That's not enough.”
    “No, it's not enough.” She slowed down again, and made a face as if she was about to have family secrets dragged out of her. “You'll find a fair number of established