Canary
Page 6
He opens a container, reaches in, touches one of his mom’s old sweaters. Wishes for a moment, then tells himself to stop being such a baby.
Wildey lives alone in a bad neighborhood.
He used to date someone who lived in a much better neighborhood, and for a while he considered moving. They seemed to be on the same page right up until she turned to the kid page, and Wildey realized he had no choice but to close the book. For a while he tried to talk himself into it, but he knew himself too well. He knew what he wanted, and kids didn’t figure into that. Wildey’s not about to leave this neighborhood. Not before he has the chance to save it.
So this Thanksgiving evening he’s off to pick up the one member of his family still alive and at liberty: his great Auntie M. The M is for “Margaret.” She doesn’t remember her name most times, nor does she know who Wildey is. Sometimes there’s a glimmer of recognition, but there’s never much follow-through. Wildey can’t blame her. Auntie M. turned a hundred over the summer—they showed her grainy photo on the Today show and everything. She’s survived improbable odds. Wildey just wishes she was one of those centenarians who remembered every blessed detail of their lives, down to what they ate for breakfast on the first day of kindergarten.
“Hi, Auntie M.,” he says in the lobby of the retirement home in Germantown, about twenty minutes away from his house.
She looks at him and smiles but it’s pretty clear she has no fucking idea who he is. Her mind constantly reboots itself. To Auntie M., Wildey is just someone who’s going to wheel her somewhere for a warm meal. Maybe down the hall. Maybe somewhere outside. Can happen either way. It’s just nice to move somewhere different. She isn’t very hungry.
This is fortunate. Wildey is not much of a cook.
Somewhere hidden in the shadows and mists and cul-de-sacs of Auntie M.’s mind is a past Wildey would very much like to recover. Her older brother was John Quincy Wildey—his great-grandpops and a hero cop, working the tough, booze-soaked streets of the 1920s. There weren’t many black cops working then; the trade was dominated by the Irish. But John Quincy managed to stand out, and was even once commended by the public safety director—a marine general and war hero—for his efforts battling bootleggers, pimps, and racketeers. Wildey didn’t hear the first glimmer of these stories until a year after he joined the force, when some oldhead asked for his name again. Wildey, huh? Any relation to John Q.?
That offhand question sent Wildey to the central branch of the Free Library on Vine Street, where he dug up old newspaper clips from 1924, the year his great-grandpa joined the force. He spent the better part of a weekend pumping quarters into the microfiche machines, the homeless guys slumming around the tables, pretending to read the Daily News for the tenth time just to stay warm. Wildey printed out everything he could but still wanted more. So he bought an old bound volume of the Philadelphia Record on eBay, just to get a feel for the times—the old ads, the weird little stories, even the weather reports. The enormous slab of yellowed newsprint was already crumbling into fragile little flakes when it arrived. Turning the pages was an exercise in frustration. The past quite literally crumbled under his touch. Wildey had to Shop-Vac the floor under his kitchen table three times a day.
It all turned out to be true: Great-grandpops John Quincy Wildey was a goddamned police hero. Back then all the bad stuff happened in a downtown neighborhood called the Tenderloin, and John Q. worked its notorious Eighth District, which was corrupt as hell until that marine general hit town to clean things up. Wildey read the clips with a dizzy fascination. How did he not know this? Why didn’t anyone ever tell him this shit? Granted, only one article mentioned his great-grandpops by name (and probably grudgingly, because, you know: black folk). But there were plenty of stories about the Eighth, and Wildey knew his own blood was mixing it up in those streets back then.
Until he started researching, all Wildey knew was that his grandfather, George Wildey, had been a cop until the mid-1960s, when he was gunned down in the line of duty. He left behind a boy, George Wildey Jr.—Wildey’s own father. Whose name had made the papers, too. For all the wrong reasons.
Knowing that John Q. existed changed everything for Wildey. Before him came two hero cops and one bad egg. That tipped the scales considerably.
So Wildey made sure to have meals with Auntie M. as often as possible, hoping that something would break loose in her mind and she’d be flooded with memories of her much older brother, cleaning up town when she was just a twelve-year-old black girl growing up in the slums of South Street.
“I remember this house,” Auntie M. says now, as her great-grandnephew wheels her up the cracked sidewalk toward his concrete front stoop, which has partially sunk into the sidewalk.
“Do you, Auntie M.?”
“My bedroom was in the back.”
Wildey smiles. Her bedroom was most definitely not in the back. She has never lived here. Wildey bought this place three years ago—cash. Cost less than a used car. He almost didn’t want to bring Auntie M. here—she shouldn’t have to deal with a block as grim as this on Thanksgiving. But her retirement home didn’t have a kitchen, and spending Thanksgiving in a restaurant just wasn’t the way it was done. You have to cook at home.
Dinner tonight is a turkey breast roll, closer to lunch meat than actual roast bird. Stuffing comes from a box, which Wildey screws up anyway. Yams from a can. Green beans from a can. Cranberry sauce from a can. Olives from a can. The olives are the appetizers. Olives and crackers, which come from a box. They’re not very good, and Auntie M. wisely avoids them. Maybe the gourmet part of her brain is still functional, as she instinctively seems to know to avoid processed food.
“Want some wine, Auntie M.?”
“That would be lovely.”
The funny thing about Auntie M. is that she isn’t one of those out-to-space centenarians. Her eyes are young and fix on you like tractor beams. She’s aware of everything that’s unfolding around her. She just can’t access the memories anymore. As if her brain sealed off those old rooms and passages, convincing her she didn’t need them anymore, that it was enough just to keep a handful of rooms in the house warm and lit.
“Tell me about your older brother again,” Wildey says, handing her a glass of pinot noir he picked up on the sale rack at the state store. Somebody told him that if you paid more than eight dollars for a bottle of wine you were a fool. Most of the people who bought pricier vintages lacked the capacity to taste the ultra-subtle differences. Wildey didn’t care either way. He only bought the wine because of the holiday.
“Who?” Auntie M. asks.
“John Quincy,” Wildey says. “Your older brother.”
“Oh, my John.”
The way she says it, it’s like great-grandpa is standing in the room with them. She’s addressing him, not summoning a memory.
Can she see ghosts? Wildey sometimes thinks so. (Hopes so.) But whenever he tries to play that angle, like he’s talking to a medium or something, Auntie M. looks at him with these big, accusing eyes. No, you’re not going to get me to do that.
“He was a police officer, like me,” Wildey says.
“Oh, John. He was so handsome.”
“Tell me about him.”
“Oh, John,” she repeats, as if trying to conjure him up. If this is the case, she fails. And then forgets.
A few long moments pass before Wildey says it’s time to check on the turkey.
WILDEY: hey
WILDEY: hope you got some sleep and time to think things over
WILDEY: worried about you text back, ok
CI #137: I’m here, almost dinner time
CI #137: why are you worried
WILDEY: Thought about something
WILDEY: Your boyfriend probably knows you were picked up
WILDEY: He’s not gonna try to hurt you is he
CI #137: I don’t have a boyfriend
CI #137: Seriously
CI #137: Are you there? I have to go we’re eating now
WILDEY: happy thanksgiving honors girl
Something in Sarie’s jacket buzzes. Dad is still in the backyard so he doesn’t hear it. Sarie’s head, though, whips around like she’s a police dog who just caught a sniff of a bad guy. She takes a step closer to the living room, where her jacket is slung over the couch. There’s another buzz. She looks at Marty and tells him to keep an eye on the carrots, then hurries into the room. What the hell? Marty wonders.
He stirs the carrots a few times, then moves to the doorway. Sarie’s back is to him, but her body language makes it look like she’s texting. Clearly hiding it. She texts all the time, though. Why be so secretive about it?
Marty is clear of the doorway before she turns around. He slides across the kitchen linoleum in his socks, making no sound, and gives the carrots a few more stirs before realizing there’s something missing. The brown sugar, like Mom always used to add. Maybe they’re eating healthier now. When Sarie returns Marty tells her to watch the carrots—he has to go to the bathroom. He expects her to say thanks for sharing or something wiseass—the kind of thing they usually say to each other. But she seems preoccupied, says nothing.
Of course Marty doesn’t go to the bathroom. He slips his hand into Sarie’s jacket pocket expecting to feel the familiar contours of her iPhone. Instead he pulls out a cheap flip phone.
After dropping Auntie M. off at the retirement home with plenty of leftovers, Wildey retraces his route, taking Germantown Avenue, which slashes across North Philly, until Lehigh. There he hangs a left, heading toward Kensington Avenue—the heart of the so-called Badlands. Wildey’s three-bedroom row home is here, on Hope Street.
Yeah, yeah, he heard it from everybody when he first moved there. Hope, in the most hopeless area in the city. There’s even an Obama mural on a wall to drive the irony home—though some idiot did spray BONER over the one-word slogan beneath the portrait of the president.
When Wildey let his new address slip one day a couple of years back, his buddies back in the Twenty-fourth told them he was fucking nuts. Why the fuck you living there? Don’t you know you don’t shit where you police? All Wildey would do is smile and give them a line about its being cheap. It’d better be fuckin’ cheap, Wildey. Shit, man, they should be paying you to live there. But Wildey had his reasons, and he thought it was better to keep them to himself.
The Badlands are a strange choice for a cop to live.
For decades now its streets had been the biggest open-air drug market on the East Coast. And in recent years, it’s only gotten worse, because word got out: You want the purest, most potent heroin available? Head to Philly’s Badlands. It’s coming straight from the Mexican cartels, and they don’t mess around! Junk fiends have been known to drive from as far away as Florida and Maine to score, but mostly it’s junkies from other (better) neighborhoods or the burbs, near and far. And during the years Wildey worked those streets, he saw an increasing number of white people from the burbs. Not just kids, either. Middle-aged professors. Accountants. Soccer moms and so on.
Wildey quickly figured how it happened. Most well-off white kids don’t drive to a dangerous and heavily policed neighborhood just for the hell of it. They usually start out copping Oxys from friends, then scoring some from a small-time dealer near home. But a few years ago they changed up the Oxys, made it harder to get high on them. So white people had no choice but to go with heroin. The dope they could get in their neighborhoods and towns didn’t quite do the trick. As a general rule: The farther you got away from the city, the weaker and more expensive the dope. The joke going around was that suburban dope has been stepped on so many times, all you smell is sneaker.
No, they wanted the real deal, and it was no mystery where to get it. So they started cruising the strip between K&A—the Kensington and Allegheny El stop—and the next stop on the line, at Kensington and Somerset. Black dealers work one side of the avenue, Latinos the other.
Most of Wildey’s time with the Twenty-fourth was spent in an endless cat-and-mouse thing. You had your cops in uniform (like Wildey). You had uncover guys. You had your junkie CIs, trying like hell to work off their own shit. All three would triangulate on buyers. Some of them, commuting in from the burbs, would try to go for a package deal, buying sixty bags at a time—sometimes even selling it off back at home. The more they carried, the harder they fell. Most times, though, it was small-time, and you might bust a so-called caseworker (corner dealer), but rarely a midlevel player. They were too smart for that.
So on and on it went, the PD more or less fine with the casual deterrent of arrests, the city doing nothing about the endless abandoned houses that served as shooting galleries—“abandominiums,” they called them, turf wars breaking out on hot summer nights, legit business owners saying fuck it and moving out, scared residents with no means to get out sleeping in their bathtubs because they’re seriously afraid a bullet’s gonna come punching through the walls of their house overnight.
So why live here?
Because Ben Wildey wants to be the man who finally cleans it all up.
Not now, but someday. He doesn’t have the political muscle or the career busts right now. But he’s read enough and talked enough to know how it could work.
Why does he want to clean it up so badly? Plenty of reasons. But most of all it’s because his great-grandpops helped clean up the Tenderloin. And now Wildey wants to do the same with the Badlands. Carry on the Wildey family business.
The more Wildey reads, the more he realizes his neighborhood is the modern Tenderloin. Same shit, different decade. Just like it was ninety years ago, it’s pretty much hands-off. No pretense is made to clean it up unless someone decides to do it through sheer force of will.
Wildey takes a spin down the ave., just to see what’s what on this fine, brisk holiday evening.
There is the usual assortment of junkies hawking clean works and Subs from their bags. A buck for a needle, $10 for a Sub, $5 more to point you in the direction of the corners with the best stuff.
Some cars with out-of-state plates, a dead giveaway. If Wildey were still with the Twenty-fourth, that would be probable cause to pull a car over. Nicer cars, too, and there are plenty on the road tonight. It’s a long holiday weekend, and people need their dope. Let ’em go for it. For now. Wildey will be back for them soon enough.
He takes Lehigh again and turns right onto hopelessly narrow Hope Street. These blocks were built long before the dawn of the automobile, and there is literally no space to park unless you run up onto the sidewalk. Which some people do. Wildey parks his current peep car in the empty lot next to his house. Someone tries to steal the car? Whatever, Wildey will get another one. But no one does, and nobody messes with his house, either. He made sure the word spread: The po-po live here. Yeah, he has bars on the windows, but that wouldn’t stop most housebreakers. No, the thing that gives them pause is that they know how much a cop makes. It ain’t worth the bars.
Still, the previous tenant of his current abode was selling wet—cigarettes dipped in PCP. From time to time, junkies would knock on Wildey’s door and get the surprise of their lives when he would answer it in uniform. “What, you change your mind?” he asked, barely able to contain his laughter as they went booking down the narrow street.
As he drives back to Hope Street Wildey thinks about Batman and Robin.
Robin, especially.
When Wildey was coming up in the late 1990s in the Badlands, Batman and Robin were the two busiest narcotics cops working the streets. Both black guys in their late twenties, afraid of nothing. They’d swoop in with little warning, prompting cries from lookouts—“Yo, here come Batman and Robin!” Their real names didn’t matter to anybody, and they didn’t seek out publicity. Local papers caught on anyway and did a big story on them.
But back then Wildey wasn’t reading newspapers. Wildey was keeping himself indoors those days, but he liked when Batman and Robin would make an appear
ance because you could step outside and not feel like something was going to happen to you. He especially liked Robin, because he’d slip fifteen-year-old Wildey comic books, ask him, “What’s the word on the street, youngblood?” Not asking for real info, just making conversation.
A short while after the profiles appeared, a drug gang put a $5,000 hit on the heads of Batman and Robin. The small-time wannabe Tony Montanas were quickly rounded up—you don’t threaten a cop in Philadelphia and expect to be walking around for long. Batman and Robin shrugged it off.
Robin was the reason Wildey joined the force five years later. Yeah, he knew about his cop-grandfather, but he never met the man. Robin, though, was the real deal. To Wildey, Robin was how to be a black police officer in Philadelphia. When Wildey finally joined the force, he reached out to Robin to thank him. Robin said that he didn’t remember him but was proud of him anyway. “Still reading comics?” Wildey asked him. Robin just laughed. “I never read them. Those were for you youngbloods, calling me Robin and shit.” Yeah, Robin was his hero.
Until this year, that is.
In this bad, crazy year, Batman was one of the “tainted six” shuffled out of his NFU. And Robin …
Oh, Robin.
In late May, Robin was arrested while stealing drugs and money from a dealer in Southwest Philly. The FBI set up a sting with the help of a CI. Robin, a twenty-four-year vet, caught with $15 in his pocket and five pounds of pot in his jacket pocket. The feds had Robin on a wire, talking about all the dirt he’d done over the years. Even the police union didn’t want to bother with him. Wildey—now reading the papers—stared at Robin’s puffy face staring back at him. Sorry to let you down, youngblood. But the streets got to me. They’ll get to you, too.