The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  “I just want to tell Michael I’m sorry. I just want him to wake up so I can tell him.”

  “Jeannette, listen to me. Whatever happened, I’m sure it had nothing to do with anything you did or said, okay?” Jeannette lifted her face again to look at Kathleen, who smiled at her, but Jeannette was looking over her shoulder, her head cocked, so Kathleen turned and saw one of the security guys in his blue blazer, holding the front door open and making a come on gesture with his arms. One of the ICU nurses was coming out the door, blinking in the sunlight, and the guard was pointing to where they sat on the steps. The woman turned to them, concerned, but when she saw Kathleen her face broke open into a smile, and Kathleen exhaled with a hard sigh, as if she’d been holding her breath for a week. He was awake.

  CHAPTER

  10

  Angel Riordan sat in a bar on South Street. He hadn’t noticed the name when he came in, but he ordered a beer and a shot and let his breathing ease, working his jaw and occasionally reaching into his coat to find the pistols he carried most of the time, touching the butt of each in turn. The gesture calmed him, the way working a rosary had comforted his aunt in Clonard in Belfast. She’d put him on a boat to New York when he was thirteen, thinking she’d make him safe from the violence that had taken his brothers and father.

  He’d been taken in by his aunt’s cousin in Philadelphia, Tom Devlin, who worked strong-arm for the roofers union. Tommy Devlin was tall and balding and silent, except when the rage took him and he’d grunt and chuff like some great animal about to put his horns into someone. Devlin put him to work burning nonunion rigs, and then beating the ones who didn’t get the message, and then Angel was as lost as if he’d stayed home throwing rocks at British APCs in the Falls Road.

  Now he sat and stared and realized a tall girl with a broad face and blond hair in braids was standing in front of him behind the bar. She was smiling, wearing a black T-shirt that read OVERWORKED AND UNDERFUCKED. She moved closer to him and extended her hands, slowly, toward his face. He sat up straight, holding himself still, and she put her hands on either side of his head and slowly took his sunglasses off. She put them down carefully on the bar by his elbow and nodded with her lips pursed, as if pleased at the effect.

  “That’s better. Whatcha doing there, Irish?”

  He shifted in his chair, dropped his head, looked up and down the bar. Finally he said, “Trying to keep from putting a bullet in my boss.”

  “I hear that. Let’s get a drink in you. That will help.”

  “It couldn’t hurt, could it?”

  She put a shot glass in front of him and got down a bottle. Jameson’s, the twelve-year-old stuff, and he nodded thanks and pointed to her and she got herself a glass and ran the bottle across from one glass to the other without lifting it.

  “Sure that’s wasting good whiskey.”

  “I don’t think we have to worry about them running out, do we?”

  He nodded. “How’d you know I was Irish, just to look at me?”

  “Please, I know the look. Like it’s always about to rain. Like your mom just died and your dog got run over. Anyway I’ve been working in an Irish bar for six years, give me some credit, huh?”

  He looked around him for the first time. It wasn’t much, walls painted black or just gone black with grime. The little Irish flags, the Guinness signs. The copy of the declaration in the name of God and the dead generations.

  “Fuck, I know,” she said, as if he’d said something. “Like if it was so great back in Kerry, why did they come here to shovel shit in some slaughterhouse in Germantown, right?”

  “Where are your people from?” He pushed the glass over to her and she refilled it. A big-shouldered guy in a green T-shirt came through a door in the back and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

  “Hannah, there’s a bunch of shit that needs to go in the reefer.”

  She let her face go slack, rolled her eyes. “That’s fucking Raul’s job.” She wound up and threw a wet bar towel down the length of the bar without looking.

  “Then find fucking Raul. I have to go.”

  She shook her head, never taking her eyes from Angel, and mouthed, “What an asshole.”

  “Want me to shoot him?”

  She smiled and her face changed, one eyebrow going up, the corner of her mouth lifted, and she was beautiful.

  “Fuck,” she said. “Definitely.”

  He stayed for two hours, drinking Jameson’s and listening to her talk. She was Mennonite, from somewhere out near Lancaster. Her family had a place in Reading Terminal Market, a butcher shop. She’d been working there since she was nine and one day when she was sixteen she’d just taken what was in the till and walked out, figuring it was what she was owed for working the shop for seven years. All those years, she said, standing behind the counter watching the girls come through and looking at their clothes, their hair. The Mennonites kept plain, she said, with the little white prayer caps on the girls. Spoke some lost dialect of German to each other. One day she just scooped up all the money in the register and walked down to the Gallery and bought herself a pair of jeans and a leather jacket. She’d dumped her long dress, the cap, the long white pants she’d worn under her clothes, jammed it all in a trash can on Chestnut Street. Bought herself a thong and felt naked beneath the jeans. But liked the feeling, like for the first time a woman with something men would want. Slept on a hard bench in Thirtieth Street Station that night, listening to the trains.

  She kept the boots, though, ’cause good boots are good boots, right? She kept calling him “Irish,” and he didn’t say her name until she walked away down the bar, and then he said it quietly to himself, like he was saving it somewhere for later. Hannah.

  When it was dark, they gathered in a parking lot in East Falls. St. Bridget’s was a black tower over their heads, and the trees over Midvale made Asa think of the jungle. Across the lot some kids stood around, smoking, tilting on skateboards, punching each other lightly on the arms and in the stomach. Asa smoked a cigarette and looked at his watch. Chris Black rolled up in his Navigator, got out, and lifted his hand in greeting as an old Firebird pulled in and idled. The Dunn brothers, both bulked up and traced with tattoos, got out and shook hands with Chris. Asa nodded, keeping his distance, and watched Chris open the back of his SUV. The brothers, Frank and Gerry, looked into the open hatch and smiled at each other. Gerry looked around, then reached in and lifted the barrel of one of the AKs and let it drop again, Asa thinking, Yeah, brilliant. Like a little kid, having to touch the gun. And leave some more fingerprints, dumb-ass.

  Angel came last, pulling his car in next to Asa’s Mercedes, muttering a few words to him the others couldn’t hear, then gliding back out again. Chris watched him go, then went over to where Asa stood by the open door of his car.

  “Is he coming?”

  “It’s our show. He’s just going to be around, you know. In case we need help.”

  “We won’t.”

  “Don’t worry about what he’s doing.” He leaned in and looked up into Chris Black’s eyes. “This thing, tonight? This is the deal. This is the thing. This guy, this African? This is us getting our hands on real money. This is on you. You want more, you want to be more, show me something tonight.” His breath came harder, and the big kid wanted to step back because the man was working himself up. “There is nothing to worry about but getting this done right. Do you understand what’s going on? Are you fucking paying attention? If you do this right, you get everything you ever wanted.” Asa’s eyes were big in his head, bright and wet. “We do this right, we get this going on regular, it’s a pipeline. A pipeline that brings us money.” Chris, a foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, shifted his feet and flinched when Asa lifted his hand to tap his muscled chest. “Get your head out of your ass and learn something.”

  . . .

  Orlando sat on the edge of the bed in George Parkman’s room and looked at Parkman Sr. until he let his head drop and walked away down the hall, every s
tep ringing off the hardwood floors and old plaster walls. The house was a massive place on the edge of Chestnut Hill, fronted with dark stone and surrounded by walls, and to Orlando it had the look of an abandoned hill fort at the edge of some vanished empire. In his lap, Orlando had a picture of George Parkman Jr. standing with his mother next to a Christmas tree.

  Orlando turned on the desk lamp, one of those high-tech-looking things with a long mechanical arm, and he grabbed it and swung its blue beam around the room, feeling like an alien intelligence scanning for clues, the light like one of those articulated metal limbs in War of the Worlds.

  There were posters for bands like Rogue Wave and British Sea Power and Arcade Fire and for movies—Paths of Glory, Classe Tous Risques, Rififi, Bob le Flambeur. Ronin and Le Samouraï. Ghost Dog and The Hidden Fortress. The Apartment and Irma la Douce. Orlando couldn’t get a fix on what the kid was going for, but he tried to let it all stick in his head. There was a big, slightly blurry photo of a bunch of people in aprons under a banner that read RIDGE AVENUE HOMELESS PROJECT. The kid was in the front row, beaming and waving a massive spoon next to a heavyset woman who held a ladle, her free arm crushing him to her colossal bosom. He knew the place, a shelter that catered to women and kids and was decorated with one of those staggering, operatic Philadelphia murals he loved: a family, homeless and desperate, and all around them angels with the fierce and resolute faces of children.

  He folded himself into the chair at the desk, opening the drawers, each in turn, lifting out the pens and papers and running his hands up under the inside surfaces looking for whatever might be hidden or taped to the undersides. On the table there were photographs of kids trying not to smile too wide, trying not to laugh, looking at each other out of the corner of their eye. The kids were mostly the pale kids, some with white makeup and spiked hair, clunky boots, and leather straps around their arms. One picture, though, was of George Jr. standing between Michael and a pretty girl in a cheerleader’s uniform, his arms around both of them. Someone had drawn arrows and names on the picture. A girl, from the handwriting. Michael and Jeannette and Geo, with an arrow pointing to George Jr. Next to that photo was another of a scowling bruiser with long hair holding up a diploma in one hand and jerking the Parkman kid’s arm up with the other like George was a trophy fish. In the picture, Parkman Jr. looked helpless with laughter.

  In one of the drawers he found another picture, a close-up of a fierce-looking girl with a fringe of hair above her eyes, the rest of her head shaved to red stubble, glowering with an intensity that Orlando recognized as love. She had her fist raised, and he had to turn the picture over to read what the girl had written on the back of her hand. A heart with GEO + M.K. in heavy black letters.

  Orlando stretched, got up, and opened a folding door to the closet. He ran his hands across the coats, all with the antique look of thrift or army-navy stores, then put his face against the sleeves and breathed in. Smelled cigarette smoke on a couple of the jackets. There were hats piled on the top shelf. Berets, fedoras, a top hat. He lifted each, ran his hand through the linings. Got nothing from the clothes but the camphor tang of mothballs, the decaying smell of tobacco. In the pocket of an army officer’s coat he found a keychain, a little replica of a green lightsaber. He stuck it in his pocket.

  He left the closet open and went to an expensive-looking stereo system and flipped it on. Bright LEDs flashed, a motor whirred in the CD and Arcade Fire came out of the speakers, loud. “No Cars Go.” He let it play, felt the antic bass in his legs and chest. There were hundreds of CDs in a rack by the stereo, and more piled on the floor. Another rack was full of DVDs. The French and Italian films from the posters. Books about the New Wave and postpunk music were stacked by the bed. Orlando recognized a textbook he’d read about media production when he’d been at Temple. Whatever allowance the kid was getting, this was where it was going. There was one of those ballistic cases for something big, a digital camera, maybe, though the bag was empty. A tripod and a stack of little digital tapes.

  He pictured the kid, George, sitting at the desk with the music going. Geo, maybe, if you knew him. Getting himself amped up to do something. Listening to a song about a place you couldn’t get to in a car or a plane. Maybe that meant a place you got to when you got high, but already Orlando didn’t think that was this kid.

  On top of the stereo was the yearbook from the school Michael and Parkman attended. Inside were pictures of boys and girls in uniforms and notes from dozens of kids, all addressed to Geo. Orlando found the page with the senior picture of the ferocious girl with the red hair, but there was nothing written there. He read the name, Marianne Kilbride. He flipped the pages, and stuck in the back of the book was a newsprint page torn from something, a newspaper or booklet. It had been folded up small, and Orlando carried it over to the desktop and unfolded it, smoothing it out to read it.

  It was two columns of ads for escorts and massage parlors, each one with asterisks or arrows in a sloppy hand. Notes in the margin with question marks. “GFE? Roses? Greek?” The kid trying to parse the world of paid sex, maybe, but why? There were phone numbers next to the ads, or Web sites, and all but one had been crossed out. The ad was for a place called Continental, with a number that was probably a cell phone, a 267 exchange. Orlando folded it back up and stuck it in his pocket.

  The song ended, and he became aware of Parkman Sr. standing in the doorway, rocking on his heels. He thought about what a guy like that saw when he looked in here. No trophies, no jackets with letters. No hockey sticks or baseballs. Nothing about conspicuous achievement or standing, just the trackless steppes where the brainy, awkward kids wandered, trying to make sense of the world. He realized, too, that nothing he could say was going to help Parkman understand his kid or comfort him. There was only one thing he could say, and he said it.

  “He wasn’t using.”

  George Parkman looked around the room as if seeing it for the first time. He hovered near the door, toed a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas open with his docksiders. “You’re sure?”

  “No, I’m not sure. But it doesn’t look like it to me. I’ll know more when I talk to his friends.”

  “Is that necessary?”

  Orlando almost laughed. “Yeah, it’s fucking necessary. Do you want to know what was up with your kid or not?”

  When George Sr. walked away again, Orlando dumped a down-filled pillow onto the bed and stuffed a handful of CDs into its empty case. He opened a sweating window by the desk and looked out into the black night and dangled the pillowcase out the window.

  After a minute he brought it back in and sat on the bed. He upended the pillowcase and fanned the CDs out where he could see them. The Chameleons. The Cure, an import the kid had probably spent thirty bucks on. Nick Cave. Morrissey.

  He picked up the pillow and held it to his face, getting the faint tang of sweat mixed with the lingering artificial perfume of shampoo and deodorant. The smell would fade out in a few weeks or months, and there wouldn’t be any sign the kid had ever been alive in this room. The parents would split up and sell this mausoleum, the mother would shut down or drink herself blind, the father would disappear to some other town, and in a couple of years even the people who loved the kid would forget his face. He began stuffing the CDs back into the pillow case.

  Danny sat in the back of the RMP, listening to the radio traffic as they made their way down Grays Ferry Avenue. He remembered when it was new to him, being in the car, still trying to get comfortable with the belt on and the holster, all that bulk at his waist sitting at the wheel. He remembered when he was tuned in, cocking his ear to hear the calls, ready, no, eager to hear his unit number. He’d suppress a smile when he hit the lights, loved getting out of the car and having everyone look to him.

  Everything about him changed the day he put the uniform on. The way he stood, his center of gravity different; the way he was with people and the way they looked at him. He had crossed some line and it changed who he was. He couldn
’t wait to get at it. Every day, then, and out at night half the night with the guys from the Third or the nurses from Jeff or Penn, telling each other stories, learning that ironic distance from the crap they saw, listening to the older guys and trying to impress each other with what they’d seen, what they’d been through.

  In the lee of the expressway they passed oil tanks, or gas tanks; Danny didn’t know. Pipes and smokestacks and small fires burning off the exhalations of the refineries. The car made a slow turn down Peltz, and the patrolman driving slowed and reversed at a dead end before looping back around to find Ellsworth. The place empty, dead acres of asphalt under showers of chemical light, ending in a little fringe of dusty trees at the edge of the Schuylkill.

  Down Federal he could see kids running across the street, coming from shadow and disappearing again into the dark, silhouetted against the lights for a few moments as they ran flat out, and he wanted for a second to chase them down and see what it was about. Danny could see their teeth, white in the circle of light, their perfect faces split by wide smiles, throwing glances over their shoulders as they ran. Up to no good, a voice in his head told him. To be running like that, laughing like that. No cares, no worries in that minute, running flat out. He tried to remember what it was like. He wasn’t that old, should be able to remember when you could empty your head and just be moving fast and lost in the thing, but it was already gone. Now when he saw kids running, he could only think of chasing, or being chased.

  The road stopped at empty train tracks. Danny could see the lights of the other cars, and out on the river the Marine Unit and the light going on that, too. He got out slowly, stretched, pulled out his notebook. Thanked the patrolmen who’d given him the ride down from the station. Took in the coroner’s van, the news crews pulling up.