The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  Right now Soap thought they were taking him home, which was cool ’cause you never knew how people were going to react when they finally got what was going on. Though man, anyone who got in a car with Riordan had to be either stupid or not paying attention. They were moving along the river, Angel with someplace in mind, he guessed, ’cause he didn’t ask Chris anything and he drove like he knew where he was going.

  Soap sat with his legs splayed in the back, singing along with the KYW news jingle, then asking them if they wanted to come with him to the club, meet some people, get some drinks. “Man, I knew your brother, man.”

  “Yeah?” said Chris, not really interested. He had been hearing Shannon stories for years and was sick of it, like Chris never did anything and his older brother was a legend.

  “Yeah, man, he was cool. I mean, he was crazy, all due respect, but he knew how to have a good time.” Soap laughed, and here it came. “I remember him down that strip club used to be down there off Front? Motherfucker gets up on the stage with the girls, starts taking off his pants, grabbing his johnson. The owner wants to get up in it, till he seen it was Shannon. Then it was cool.”

  “Yeah,” says Chris. His brother was a borderline retard, truth be told, but he let it go ’cause pretty soon he wasn’t going to be hearing any more stories from Soap.

  “Hey man, where the fuck you all driving me to?”

  Angel just turned his head to look at the kid, so Chris said, “Man, this is for your protection. Last thing you want is to be seen coming right from Asa’s place and meeting with a cop, yeah?”

  “Okay, yeah,” said Soap, and pinched off the roach and put it in his coat. “I get you, yeah, this some Wile E. Coyote shit.”

  Chris nodded, but couldn’t guess what the stoned kid was trying to say. Angel came to a turnoff near Fairmount Park that put them along the creek and drove down into the woods a ways, moving slow.

  “Now it’s the woods, huh.” Soap sang some more, his high voice filling the car, “KYW Newsradio . . . Ten Sixty.” He closed his eyes. “Man, I didn’t realize, this stuff is harsh, man, like getting hit with buckshot in the head, you know?”

  Chris turned and said, “What?” and almost laughed. “Is it?”

  “Yeah, I got this weed off my sister’s boyfriend. This shit is powerful.”

  Ahead of them the rear end of a car came into the headlights, a beat-up white Buick with its front end stuck in the weeds.

  Angel spoke for the first time. “Come on, then.”

  Soap roused, gathered himself up, and slid over to get out. Chris got out to stand by Angel, his hand making the unconscious gesture of touching the hard butt of the pistol through his shirt.

  “This is better, yeah? We’ll get you home in this other car, so no one sees anything, gets nervous?” Chris working it maybe too hard, not knowing how the man could be so dense to what was happening. Soap made a gesture, throwing up his hands like okay, whatever.

  “Yeah, sure, we change cars. This is how they do it in the big leagues, huh?”

  They were in a small clearing in the woods between the river drive and the water. There was the constant hissing susurrus of the cars going by behind the screen of the trees, and to their left was the vast black space in the lights that was the Schuylkill River at night. Across it they could see the expressway and the lights of the cars going by, bumping along in a stop-and-go stream like in something Chris had seen on TV about blood cells moving in a body.

  They turned to look at it, Soap and Chris and even Angel. The river and the expressway and the trees, and behind that the city and the lights. Chris was talking again, saying how Asa thanked him for coming out and helping with the thing with the cop, but Soap waved him off.

  “Fuck that, he going to leave my sister out of it?”

  “Yeah, Soap, that’s right, man, you got no worries.”

  Chris moved ahead to stand by the car, and Soap followed, still talking.

  “Asa Carmody is a freak, and you all freaks for working for the man. Motherfucker smiles but don’t mean it. Bring family into business like that? Threaten my sister?”

  “Nah, man.” Chris was heated, forgetting himself for a minute. “Nah, it ain’t like that, it’s just he thought you were cold, man, when he asked you for help. Asa’s the kind of guy—”

  The shot made him jump a little, a flat pop that hurt his ears, and he froze, his hand still out in front of him. Making some kind of point to Soap, who went down on his back, eyes open, his string pulled forever. Chris turned to Angel, who was already putting the gun away, bending to drag the kid by the foot to the edge of the water.

  Chris said, “Jesus. What the fuck, man?” He held out his arms. “I thought you’d throw me a sign or something. That’s uncool, man, I thought I was the one getting shot.”

  Angel stopped in the action of dragging the body, bent to the task, one of Soap’s oversized boots in his hand. He straightened and looked at Chris, said nothing, but cocked his head a little, like a dog. Like he didn’t know who or what Chris was. He went back to it, shifting to get leverage on Soap’s right leg and then making a quick jerk that let the momentum of Soap’s body carry him down the slope of the last few feet to the edge of the water.

  He got down on one knee over the body, fished in his jacket, and came out with the longest knife Chris Black had ever seen. Some kind of dagger, speckled with rust and as long as his forearm. Angel paused for one second, drew a breath, then placed the tip of the knife between two of Soap’s ribs and pushed down. He pushed it hard, cords in his pale neck straining, working the grip in his hands until the hilt hit the kid’s chest.

  Chris stood, transfixed, saying, Jesus, Jesus, in his head. “What the fuck,” he said quietly. “I don’t, um. What the fuck.”

  Angel pulled the knife out, and it made a long and terrible noise as he worked it free. He set the tip against Soap’s abdomen again, this time lower down, and pushed it hard. There was nothing in his face, no rage or disgust, nothing at all that Chris could see. It was just work.

  There was an exhalation from Soap’s body, a breathy hiss that made Chris jump.

  “It’s nothing.” Angel tugged the knife up again. “Just air.” He lifted the tail of Soap’s shirt and wiped the blood off the knife in long smooth strokes. “See? You make some holes they go down and don’t come up so fast. Otherwise he’s there floating for all the world to see.” Chris caught the faint accent then, the hard, clipped tones of Northern Ireland. Chris had an uncle that sounded like that. Like the old man was working stones in his mouth when he talked.

  Angel stood up again over the body and made the knife disappear into his coat again, then stood back and pushed the dead boy into the water with his foot. He pushed at his feet, then at his shoulders, the body rasping over the lip of river stones. When he was done, one of the kid’s hands was still in the mud at the lapping edge of the water, as if even in death he didn’t want to go that way, and Angel toed it gently with his boot until the kid floated away toward the city and the lights.

  Chris opened his cell phone while Angel stood still on the riverbank and watched.

  Chris said, “Yeah, we’re all done.” There was a pause. “Yeah.” He closed the phone, waited a minute.

  “Angel, man, we got to go, we got things to do.” He shuddered a little, he couldn’t help it. To see the kid’s face go slack, his eyes go blank and dry. To know it again, that we’re machines that can get turned off. And the other, Angel working like a butcher on the kid’s chest and stomach. Hard not to cross himself, ward that off somehow.

  He got back to the passenger side of Angel’s car, wanting him to hurry up but not wanting to get into his shit when the man was in his shooting mood. Eventually, whatever Angel was doing was over and he came back and opened the door, looking over the car roof at Chris in the dark.

  “You talk too much.”

  “What? I talk too much?”

  “Alla you people,” he said and got in. Chris got in, too, his mind going
, chewing on what the fuck that might mean, hoping it would never be just him and Angel down here on the river.

  The moon was a perfect white circle of ash, and Orlando and Zoe were laced together on the couch on the roof, her skirt around her hips, hair wild on her shoulders, both of them breathing hard as winded sprinters. She dropped her head to his chest and he twined her hair in his fingers. She fished in her purse for her cigarettes and put one in her mouth. He took one from her and stuck it unlit in his own, felt the expansion of her lungs through his own chest as she pulled the smoke in, held it, let it go.

  “I saw Mary from Conrad Street today.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah, she was in with her baby. Getting dinner for her and Marty.”

  “Man, I ain’t seen Mary in, I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, she looked good.”

  He kissed her along her hairline, watched her eyes. “Tell me.”

  “That baby was so pretty. Just couldn’t stop looking at it, you know?”

  Mary and Marty were a couple that used to hang out with them when they first started up together. Marty had gotten caught with a loaded gun the year before when he and a couple friends from East Landsdowne had staked out a liquor store in Atlantic County, down the shore. The DA had dropped the case, but it scared the shit out of him and he had gotten cleaned up and out of the life. Got a job detailing cars and married Mary.

  Orlando talked around the unlit cigarette. “Mary’s pretty. I guess Marty’s a good-looking kid, too, so . . .”

  “Yeah.”

  She let the smoke go in billows from the side of her mouth, squinting, seeing things that were only inside her head.

  “You want a baby, hon?”

  “No.” She flicked away ashes. “I don’t know. I want both, I guess. This life and that one. Other things. I don’t know. What do you want?”

  The wind moved, and he reached under the blanket and snapped his jeans, then touched her tiny, rounded stomach where she was slick with sweat.

  “To know, I guess. To know everything.”

  “Everything you can know if you never leave East Falls?”

  “Isn’t that everything?”

  “Seriously, have you ever been more than five miles from the Schuylkill River?”

  “I was down the shore with my mom a couple times. Before she lost the house.”

  “That doesn’t count. Everyone’s been down the shore.”

  “You want to leave?”

  “I don’t know, Orlando. Some days I just want to know where we’re going, I guess.”

  “We’re going down the Wawa on Ridge Avenue.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “With all my heart.”

  He thought of his brother and the picture of Maire. He remembered standing in a closet with Brendan, a line of white light falling across his brother’s face as he angled to see if their mother was coming. Orlando was pressed back into the darkest part of the closet with the empty luggage and some blankets with a camphor smell that burned his eyes. He could hear his mother stomping from room to room, raging. Slamming a book on a table, breaking things. He tried to guess what was being broken from the sound. A porcelain angel holding a violin, a lamp that was a hugely pregnant Mary on a pale donkey.

  After a while it got quiet, and his brother held up a hand to Orlando to be still and slowly opened the door and stepped out, his eyes wary as an animal’s, lifting his feet with silent, exaggerated care like Elmer Fudd in the cartoons sneaking up on Daffy Duck. He shut the door behind him, and Orlando burrowed deep into the junk in the back of the closet and listened hard for every squeak and rattle from downstairs. After a while Orlando got tired of waiting, of listening for nothing, and fell asleep.

  George Parkman Sr. was drunk. He had carried a Scotch up to get dressed for the viewing and had barely touched it, but with nothing in his stomach and not enough sleep he realized the couple of sips had pushed him over the edge into that place where he seemed trapped in a heavy column of air that made his movements clumsy and slow and pushed down on his face so that he was afraid to speak for fear of slurring his words and drawing attention to his impaired state.

  He sat there half-dressed, hating the thought of going to Donahoe’s, but it was the funeral home his family had always called so there it was. The place was ancient, owned by aging bachelor brothers whose florid pink faces radiated a practiced and unnerving sincerity that George found it difficult to be in the same room with, never mind to negotiate the details of his son’s viewing and funeral.

  Christ, a viewing. That was Francine, to want the boy’s ravaged body on display. When they were dressing, the silence punctuated only by the occasional strangled exhalation from Francine, as if she were getting the news again and again, every five minutes, he had wanted to grab her arm and say, Let’s not do this. Let’s just, he’d say, let’s just take him out to Fernwood and put him in the ground, you and me, and leave the rest of them to go sit at the funeral home and talk to each other, which was what they were there to do anyway. He remembered his old man stretched out at Donahoe’s, couldn’t stop staring at his father’s sunken, waxy cheeks while his aunts chatted away with cousins they’d hadn’t seen in a year and he didn’t know what any of it was for.

  He heard Francine stand up in a rustle of clothes and listened to the hollow clacking of her heels on the stairs going down and he realized he wasn’t nearly ready. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his tie crumpled in his fist and suddenly came to himself and looked down at it, the gray silk crushed in his hand. One shoe off and one on. He bent down and fixed his shoes, stood up and left the tie and went for another one, nearly identical to the first. He stood and looked at his side of the closet, hung with more than a dozen suits, a cashmere coat he’d bought six months ago and never worn. Business was good; the money rolled in. Francine had wanted to send George Jr. to a private school in Newtown, but George Sr. had said no. St. Vincent’s was where he’d gone, it was good enough for his son.

  He went to stand at the mirror and looked at his own hard face and broad shoulders and narrow eyes. He dropped his tie again and went quick into the bedroom and got a picture of the three of them that sat on Francine’s dresser. He went back into the closet and stood still in front of the mirror, holding the picture up and scrutinizing George Jr.’s face and then peering over the picture at his own reflection.

  The kid had one of those unformed teenage faces that made his father nervous. There was something so tentative about the kid, the way he walked and talked and sat on the corners of seats, his body bent toward the door and escape. It provoked George Sr., that way of being. Sit still, he’d wanted to say, as the kid jiggled his foot, sit up and be here. Be a man, that was what he’d finally say, when the kid would come to him with some fucked-up concern that he couldn’t understand. George Jr. was always trying to explain some subtle problem about the way other kids looked at him or expected him to act that he didn’t feel, and it bothered George Sr. to think his kid wasn’t popular or good at anything physical and it made him nearly insane that somehow the boy thought his father wanted to know or could help, as if they were allies, when it was all George Sr. could do to keep from smacking the kid.

  What he’d wanted, when he was honest, was a kid like Michael Donovan. George Sr. would sit in the stands at the hockey games, his own son nowhere in sight, off somewhere with that crowd that wore pale makeup and black lipstick, which at least George Jr. had enough sense to keep off his face. Michael would come off the ice and high-five his father and grab one of the other kids and bang on his helmet, his face open and good-natured and comfortable with being the kid everyone liked. The kid they looked to.

  What were they doing together on that street, in front of that house? Was it some game, some taunt to his narrow-shouldered artsy son to be somewhere dangerous? Was it finally George Jr. trying to be in with the cool kids, and buying dope from a boarded-up crack house was what the cool kids were into? He’d smoked dope when he was
their age, everyone he knew had smoked dope except some of the Catholic girls, and some did pills, but mostly they’d all drunk beer, which he couldn’t see George Jr. doing.

  Now he held the picture up, tilting it one way and then another. He searched his son’s face, traced the boy’s slim hand where it lay across his chest, looking for himself. There was Francine’s aquiline nose, a fullness in the lips that might have been from his mother, but where was he? Where was the evidence that at last this was his son? He got down on his knees and propped the picture against the mirror, trying to somehow get both his image and the picture of his son in front of him. He was sitting like that, pushing his eyebrows up and down, squeezing the bridge of his nose, his eyes streaming, when Francine finally came back in and found him there. She took the picture from him and stood him up and picked a tie out of the rack and put it in his hands. She looked at him and he looked down and wiped at his nose with his sleeve.

  “You’re crying for yourself.” She shook her head. “Jesus.”

  “Why did this happen to us?”

  “You never looked at him, practically. The whole last year, what did you ever do with him or say to him?”

  “I didn’t know, how could I know, Francine?”

  “You wanted what? For him to be captain of the team? That wasn’t George.”

  “These are the things a man wants for his son. I don’t care who you are. You want to see him out there, in front of people. Standing up.”

  She shook her head and her eyes flashed and she slapped him. He shook his head as if it didn’t register, and she lifted her hand again but dropped it.

  “You didn’t deserve him. That’s why he’s gone.”

  “A mother and her son and a father and his son, that’s two different things. You can’t know.”

  She closed her eyes, the muscles in her face working, and then opened them again. “Get dressed.”

  At the funeral home there were crowds, more than he expected. Teachers and kids and parents, clogging the narrow street in front of Donahoe’s and standing silently in the back of the room, and George Sr. wasn’t prepared, kept wishing he’d either stayed sober or kept going, pouring the warm, bitter Scotch into himself until he lay obliterated at the foot of the bed.