The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  Luis watched Brendan standing with the detectives, his face all red and Irish-looking, his neck rigid with the effort of not cursing, and the Parkman kid’s father, who was shaking his head no over and over and denying a lot of something. Luis was thinking, Oh, boy, as Brendan finally said something loud and made a gesture with his hands like I give up and walked quick toward the elevator to go up and check on his brother, who the nurses said was basically okay. Luis would stay down here, thanks.

  He thought about one of the last times he was with his father, before the old man’s heart attack and his mother bringing them all up here from the DR. Luis and his sister were going at it, fighting over a toy or something. He remembered being in the dirt yard, remembered the sound of his sister’s voice calling him chancho, a pig, and poking him in his soft belly, and his father coming out of the house, shaking his head, a big cigar in his mouth. Holding up his hands like he was praying, saying, Calma, Dios mío. Smiling, shaking his head. Calma. That was his old man. He didn’t take sides, didn’t give a shit who did what to who. He just wanted things to be quiet while he smoked his Partagas.

  Luis looked around himself now at the chaos of the emergency room, at the detectives looking skeptically at Parkman, at crazy, ranting Collins with his broken arm held out stiff in front of him, telling his story to an empty room, and he shook his head and headed out to the parking lot, fishing in his pocket for a cigar.

  Orlando sat on the edge of the bed, watching the nurses go by and wanting a cigarette. He was supposed to be lying flat, supposed to be letting the antibiotics work, drinking the apple juice they’d left for him, but he just wanted out. The hospital was bright, loud, crowded at all hours, and he just wanted to get out and into the street. Zoe didn’t help, pacing the floor and looking at him as if he were guilty of something. She’d go to the door, look out at the hall, move back to the window and look out at the traffic on Ridge, her eyes sliding to him, until he said, “What?” She just crossed her arms and shrugged.

  He said, “How many times I have to tell you?”

  “He just shot you? No explanation, no nothing?”

  “He was fucking crazy, I don’t know.” He reached out, but she did a matador slide and his hand grazed her hip. She held up her arms, like don’t touch me; and he sighed. She went to stand by the window again, and he got out of bed, awkwardly dragging the IV pole and the clear tubes, the blue floor freezing under his bare feet and his shoulder already itching where the bullet had passed through the skin, leaving a bright furrow like a set of painted lips stitched shut.

  He went to stand by her and watched the street, too. The headlights of the cars crawling from signal to signal, the streets bathed in a greenish glow from the streetlamps. He heard her breathing and looked over to see her head down, her hands over her eyes.

  “What am I supposed to do, you get killed? Where do I go then?”

  He breathed out, tried to think what to say. Then he saw a shadow in the door and it was Brendan. Shit.

  “Orlando?”

  He ducked his head, a reflex. Looked up at his brother as he resolved from a dark figure into someone recognizable. Saw for the first time the gray pasted into the hair at his temple, the deep cul-de-sacs under his eyes. Looked down again.

  “You’re out of bed? You’re okay?”

  Orlando couldn’t think what to say, mumbled “sorry” under his breath, looked from Zoe’s wary, foxlike eyes to Brendan’s frantic ones.

  “Jesus, Orlando. Jesus.”

  “I didn’t do it. Didn’t do anything. This crazy fuck tried to kill me.”

  “We don’t have enough, me and Kath? Not enough to worry about? We have to hear this, too?”

  “I swear to Christ, Bren.” He held his hands up, empty palms catching the light, and the IV pole rattled. He felt like a ghost, a phantom festooned with chains. Not fully present in life, able only to horrify. Looking from one disappointed face to another. The fact of him an object lesson, a curse.

  When he was alone he shifted in the hard, narrow bed, unable to sleep. The nurses knew dependency when they saw it and only gave him aspirin. The pain wasn’t bad, but it sometimes flared in his neck and back so that he couldn’t get comfortable, and he slept in short shifts and then woke up disoriented and stiff.

  Toward dawn he lay watching the sky turning a hazy brown and remembered the day he’d met Zoe, at a used-book store on Richmond Street full of local characters who came to drink beer and eat meatball sandwiches from a place around the corner. It was snowing, and she was dressed in black and her head was wrapped in a dark scarf so that only her face showed, that butter-cream white skin and her dark lips, suggesting something confectionary, so that he followed her through the dim confusion of aisles until he could work out something to say to her. He couldn’t remember what it was he’d said, but she’d smiled and before long he was pulling her from shelf to shelf, getting books down to read her passages he loved. Tugging the sleeves of her coat that were glazed with broken bits of ice. He showed her the back of the store, where the aisles ended in a chaos of unsorted books and flickering lights that was like the entrance to a mine. He spent hours there every week, stacking up ancient hardbacks with pages gone a speckled brown like birds’ eggs, or lurid pulps with half-dressed women whose green- or blue-tinged skin seemed to promise both sex and death.

  When they left the bookstore, they got paczki from a bakery up the street and walked to an empty bar on Lehigh. They drank whiskey and the pale, watery beer he liked and kissed in a corner booth listening to songs in Polish, the singers sounding alternately angry and heartbroken while the music struggled to keep up. She pulled his hand into her lap and he got hard, touched his lips with a finger red with the sickly-sweet jelly from the pastries. He opened her pants under her coat and she breathed into his mouth, making small, dovelike sounds.

  Remembering it later, he knew there must have been other people in the place, a bartender, some old guy drinking Pabst with his head down, but he remembered the two of them as alone in an empty room. The tiny barroom windows stingy with the failing afternoon light, the cold coming in waves through the thin plywood walls. Breathing on her small, white hands to warm them, putting each cherry-tipped finger in his mouth to taste it, and when she asked what she tasted like, he said she tasted like red.

  John Rogan stood over Danny’s desk holding a newspaper under his arm until Danny raised his head and snapped his fingers.

  Rogan gave it up slowly. “It’s probably nothing.”

  Danny read the article twice. Darnell Burns’s lawyer claiming that his client was at SCI Chester, the prison where his brother Ivan was locked up, until the end of visiting hours at eight thirty. There was a grainy picture of somebody the lawyer claimed was Darnell coming out of the visitors’ room.

  Danny shrugged. “Could be him.”

  Rogan made a face. “With the hood up like that? Could be anybody.” He reached down and shifted the paper. “Reminds me a little of Wyclef, before he shaved his head?”

  “And they had the gun.”

  “They had the gun. So they did it.” A beat. “Or they know who did.”

  “You’re not sure, now?”

  Rogan looked away, scratched at his neck. “I’m sure Darnell Burns is a violent moron. I’m sure he’s capable of it.”

  “And they signed the statements.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think this is bullshit, John? Did we make a mistake?”

  “I think these mopes locked up is a good day’s work.”

  “That’s not the same thing, is it?”

  “Don’t make yourself crazy, Danny. It’s as close as we’re going to get.”

  There was music playing, loud, from the house on Boston, and Freddie Castro looked up and down the street nervously before knocking on the door. The place was run-down, dark, and there was newspaper stuffed in the street-level window. He knocked again, louder, and finally Teyo opened the door a crack, saw it was him, then stepped aside, motioning
him to get off the street, quick.

  Teyo and Freddie were original Tres Nortes. They’d been in the Youth Study Center with Juli when they were young, the old one on Callowhill that the city finally closed after it got so old and fucked up that the city decided to turn it into a museum and send the kids to West Philly. They’d come up together, Juli and Teyo and Freddie. Now Juli was shot to pieces and the whole thing had turned to shit.

  Teyo had been with Juli at the dope house on Roxborough when the place was shot up. He’d been calling Freddie all week while they moved Juli from place to place around the city, asking him what to do, where to go. Now they were here, in a derelict house on Boston Street, and Teyo asked Freddie to come because he thought Juli was dying.

  Inside, the music was a roar of guitars and drums and the sound was like being beaten on the ribs, the lyrics about being down with the sickness. Teyo looked at him for a minute, his eyes wired open by coke and fear. He was sweating, the house closed up and stinking, and now that he was inside Freddie could hear someone screaming. The living room was almost pitch-black, lit by a few candles, and he followed Teyo, who just shook his head and pointed to where Juli thrashed on the couch, bleeding out of holes in his arms and legs, jamming his fist into his mouth in a vain attempt to shut himself up.

  The place stank of blood and vomit and backed-up toilets, and there were bandages and water bottles stacked up on a packing crate they were using as a table. Pacho De La Rocha and Dippy from York Street were there, looking disgusted and sick, standing in the corner smoking and spitting in the heat. Teyo walked through into the kitchen and stood by a candle where he had an open bottle of rum and he took a long pull and waited for Freddie.

  When Freddie gave up trying to understand whatever Juli was screaming around the fingers he had jammed in his mouth, he walked through into the airless kitchen and took the bottle from Teyo and sipped at it. Teyo couldn’t stop shaking his head. His shoulders were glazed with sweat and his beater hung limp and wet on his body.

  “I know, right? Could this shit be more fucked up? I finally told him Juli, man, you go to a hospital or you’re going to die here, brother. He don’t even make no sense now.”

  “Who’s out doing business? Who’s running the corners while you’re in here watching Juli?”

  “Fucking nobody, that’s who. It took like three seconds for everybody in North Philly to hear Juli was down, and with Juli down, we’re out.”

  Juli stopped screaming and started talking furiously to people who weren’t in the room, something about getting ice cream, and that was even worse, Freddie thought. His mind was gone, even the pain, and he was spiraling down to nothing, and that meant the Nortes were done.

  “And that guy, that African guy? Juli set that up like two months ago and the fucker is here, he’s here right now, and without Juli out front, that deal is over. That’s like a million dollars.” He made a gesture in the flickering candlelight, kissing the tips of his fingers. Gone.

  “You got the numbers for the guy? The African?”

  Teyo shrugged. He started going through his pockets.

  Freddie smiled and hit Teyo on the shoulder. “Let me see what I can do.”

  Freddie walked back up Boston toward Emerald, looking back over his shoulder at the house, still hearing the thump of the drums and bass, the noise they played to try to drown out Juli’s dying screams. He took out the card Teyo had given him with the numbers for the African, thought about when Juli was strong and they’d been making real money and he’d been able to take Pilar down to where he’d grown up in the DR. Show her Playa Rincon and Santo Domingo. Lie on the beach and drink rum drinks and eat fresh fruit and snapper in coconut sauce by the beach at night. Jesus, he wanted to go back.

  He finally came up to the Mercedes idling in the dark, and the window powered down as he got close. There was a snapping sound and Asa Carmody was working a Zippo, lighting a cigarette, squinting at Freddie and nodding his head. The man all tics and head bobs and edgy impatience. There was movement all around him now, Asa’s guys coming out of two SUVs and moving back down the street toward the blacked-out Nortes house. One of them had a shotgun out already, working the slide, fishing in his pockets to come out with shells, dull red and gleaming brass under the humming lights.

  Freddie reached out with the card, and Asa snapped his fingers impatiently and Freddie laid it in his hands, not sure what was going to happen next. Asa nodded and said, “Okay,” just the one word, and Freddie nodded back and kept moving, walking fast, his head tucked down, hoping to get down to Front Street and the noise of the cars and the rumble of the trains to cover the sound of what was coming next.

  He’d thought Asa would say something to him. Something about how this was the smart move, the Nortes were done anyway, Juli was done, and this was just what was coming, so what could Freddie do but be smart? He could be smart, or he could die with his friends in the little stinking house on Boston Street. The Nortes had their run, but now it was time for Asa and his guys, and all he’d done was see the truth of things. Asa hadn’t said anything, though, had just stared at him, and there was nothing to do but walk away fast and cover his ears with his hands.

  Danny Martinez was sitting at a little Italian place in Manayunk, on Main Street, and watching his phone on the table as it buzzed and skipped on the white tablecloth. He didn’t know the number, and the wine was hitting him hard on an empty stomach. Rogan was late, and Danny ripped a piece of bread out of the basket and stuffed it into his mouth. The phone was still buzzing when his mouth was empty, so he finally picked it up.

  “Detective Martinez?”

  “Yeah, this is Martinez.”

  “This is Jelan Williams.” The voice was hesitant, rising as if the statement was a question. “I don’t know if you remember me.” He remembered Jelan. She was a beautiful Jamaican girl from north of Ridge Avenue. Wide, almond-shaped eyes and a long body that seemed to curve like a bow drawn taut. Asa had gone out with her a few times, and Danny had always had a little pang of jealousy when he’d seen them together. Though they didn’t last. It never seemed to with Asa. The girls were drawn to him—he was always a good-looking kid and put out that knowing vibe, a sense of power in the world, even when they were teenagers.

  Jelan was one of those serious girls who seemed to have a plan, which might have been what brought her to Asa, the master schemer, when they were young. Of course, that was a lot of years before, and other than the occasional glimpse around the neighborhood, Danny hadn’t seen Jelan since then. The uncertainty in her voice seemed unlike her, though. The way he thought of her.

  “Jelan, sure, I remember. How are you?”

  “Oh, fine, thank you. But I’m calling about Darius.”

  Danny’s stomach grumbled audibly and he shifted the phone. “Darius.”

  “My brother, Darius. He was a few years behind us at Roxborough?”

  Danny shook his head. Soap. She was talking about Soap. He had just seen Soap at the bar, when was it? Two days ago, three?

  “Oh, of course, I’m sorry. Darius.” He had to force himself not to use the name he’d thought of as pinned to the kid, and he tried to remember if he knew how he’d come to be called Soap. “How can I help?”

  “I’m not sure what to call you these days. Is it Detective Martinez?” A slight mocking tone, but with affection. It was the old Jelan, who had regarded him slyly out of the corner of her eyes as if she’d had his number, even when she was sixteen and he was, at eighteen, a shy, bookish kid unable to look at her with anything but hot need. A scene came to him, a flash of her in her blue and white cheerleading outfit, flitting by him as he stumbled out of the boys’ locker room at the end of gym. A nearly imperceptible smile, a slight warp in her graceful neck that told him she knew everything that was in his roiling teenage-boy head. That’s what he got, his awkward half-step, her eyes and knowing smile, and a flash of blue and white. One of those seconds that stick in your head and never come out.

  “D
anny. Call me Danny, Jelan.”

  “Danny.”

  “Is Darius in trouble?”

  “He’s, well. He’s missing.” Then it came out of her in a rush, the way it always did at first. This part was always the same, from the first time Danny had been in uniform and a frantic mother had grabbed his arm, near the art center on Allens Lane, to tell him her son had wandered away from the playground, her story pouring out, her eyes streaming. All of the worry coiled in them springing out when there was someone, finally, who might help. Someone whose job it was to find the missing one in that moment when nothing else was important.

  “Darius always takes our mother to church. Always, and he didn’t show up on Sunday. We called everyone he knows, and no one’s seen him. I went to his apartment, I spoke to his girlfriend a dozen times, that brainless girl Bertrise from Ludlow. A more exasperating child I have never met. She’s carrying Darius’s baby, for God’s sake, but that girl has no more clue about life than a sparrow in a tree. She thinks I’m an idiot to worry, that he’s just hiding because all his friends were arrested last week. She thinks he’s some kind of secret agent, but I know what Darius does for money, Danny. I’m not stupid. He got involved with that boy, Ivan.” Bwoy, the way she said it now, agitated and worried about her brother. “They deal drugs, and I’ve talked to him until I’m blue in the face, but he fell in with that craven bait.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  She stopped herself, gave a laugh with nothing in it. “Bait.” It sounded to Danny like be-it. “I’m sorry, Danny. I turn into my mother when I think of Darius and what he’s made of his life. Bait, you never heard a Jamaican say that?” she said, and he heard it then. “It means scoundrel, I guess. Bad man. That good-for-nothing Ivan. His ridiculous brother, Darnell. Driving around the neighborhood in a stolen Mercedes. Carrying guns. Children, all of them.”

  “My grandmother used to call them malditos. The bad kids. She’d throw stones at them when they came near the house.”