The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  So Angel had seen it all in his head, the way he always did, but it didn’t play out the way he’d seen it. There was no way to see what was coming today. The African’s man throwing down on him with the giant machine gun from the other night. Somehow missing him from how many feet away? Though it was hard, he knew, making a big, belt-fed gun like that do what you wanted while you were hunched over in a little car. It was dumb luck, for sure, but then also on him not to panic, to stand his ground and empty his guns until the kid went down, those magnificent braids spread all around him in the mud on Hope Street. The man’s mouth open in something like a smile, and blood in his teeth. Angel would remember that.

  It was a good trick, the African picking him up somewhere and following him here. Part of him admired the man for doing that and was sorry the man was dying in the street, small bubbles opening in the blood on his chest. Ruining his shirt, a bright print with tall black girls and African colors. Angel got the smell of rain and weed and gunpowder.

  Asa had set it all up, called Angel and told him what to do, got the thief with the dragon tattoos on his arms to cash in on his friend, the junkie Angel was supposed to kill. It was tough the little thief got shot up, but he had turned on his friend, and Angel thought, There you go. Fuck him for informing. Himself, he’d always been lucky, never even nicked by a bullet, but of course it wasn’t just luck. It was something he’d learned, and so early it was like he’d always known it. To keep going, stand your ground and fight it out and not run. To keep your head. It was a talent, or just the way he was, but it served him. He liked how the big African kid fucked with him, called him out in French, and he wished he knew the language to know what it was the guy was saying. Now they were his last words. Imagining wild, flamboyant insults that maligned his family, his manhood, the generations that spawned him—but who knew? He felt bad again, seeing the guy lying there with the rifle in his open, useless hands. His eyes blinked once, twice, then opened finally in the rain, and Angel wished he knew his name.

  Angel had lowered his head to get a view of the driver, dead, slumped across the wheel, laying on the horn with his forehead. Bad enough to have a gunfight on the edge of fucking Girard Avenue in the middle of the day; now the horn was going so that everybody for two blocks was looking their way, and he’d have to move. He shook his head to see the two cars ruined, the dead man lying stretched out in the street. Next to the van was the other one, Audie, the rat, the one who’d put them onto the little junkie he’d come here to end. Audie was lying on his side, drawn up, his face gray. Spitting blood onto the side of the shot-up silver van. Trying to talk around the blood.

  Angel stood over him. “You’re Murphy?”

  Audie moved his mouth, but only blood came out.

  Angel shook his head. “You’re Irish, you should know better. It’s what comes to the informer.” He spat.

  At the end of the block he thought he saw the junkie pivot and turn west, just a flash of the leather jacket, but that could wait for another day. Would have to, now. He could hear sirens going, even over the racket of the horn. Took one last look back and had to shake his head again, smile at the man who tracked him down and opened up on him. Not give a shit where or when, just roll down the window and blast away like an old-time gangster and fuck it all. He found a hole in the fence and stepped through.

  Zoe knocked on the door of a house on Shurs Lane, and the guy who ran the house let her in. They didn’t like the place, she and Orlando, though she couldn’t exactly say why. It was partially the people who ran it, the tall Puerto Rican kid, Benigno, who had kind of a superior attitude, or the spacey Asian girl with the half-smile. It was run-down, but all the places they knew were run-down. There was a lot of trust in going in to a place to score, or hang out and get high, and whether the people or the place seemed cool was a complex and a shifting thing.

  She sat for a while and talked to a girl she recognized from the neighborhood, somebody she’d met at Fluid, a club down on Fourth Street. She was there waiting on her boyfriend and lounged on a sprung couch draped with an Indian print, and they talked about people they knew, bars they liked, the vintage place down on Third where the girl had gotten her dress, a bright blue chiffon with a beaded neck that Zoe coveted.

  It took a while, longer than it should have, and the Asian girl just ignored them with her strange smile, and the Puerto Rican kid pled a slowdown and asked could they wait, which was fine with Zoe, there being nowhere to go since things were all fucked up with Orlando. Her body was tired, but her mind was alert, up half the night at Mary’s, talking the thing with Orlando out and drinking coffee. They were straight, Mary and Marty, which was cool for them, but she had come away wanting to get high. The baby was beautiful and well-behaved, but something about the quiet, the order of the house, got under her skin and made her edgy in a way she couldn’t bring into focus.

  The girl in the blue dress had a flask of something sweet in her purse, and she shared it with Zoe, who took a bigger hit off it than was probably polite. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and called for dope, dope, and the girl laughed and took it up, calling, “We want to get high.” They went back and forth with the flask, getting to be best friends, Zoe feeling the drinks fast, laughing too loud and too easily. The girl’s boyfriend came back from wherever and she left with him, waving and making extravagant promises now about how they would get together, go somewhere, and hang out.

  The Asian girl came out and put something in her hands, and Zoe touched her cheek, now everybody’s friend, but the smile didn’t change. The tall kid, Benigno, with the bushy Afro, hung back in the doorway, talking on the cell, and she had the crazy idea it was about her, and that made her laugh, too. She wanted to do the dope there, but the guy came out and said they were done for the day and she should take the dope and go. In fact he was pulling the girl into the back, waving Zoe off, turning off lights like it was a fucking bar at closing time.

  She almost ran home, crossing the few blocks to the house and half hoping Orlando would be there, though she didn’t know how she’d be when she saw him. She’d been angry and tired and he’d been frantic. Still, he’d raised his hand to her, something he’d never done, that she hadn’t thought was in him, and that opened a lot of bad doors in her head, thinking about her father standing over her, breathing hard, his eyes red and heavy fists hanging. When she’d first met Orlando she’d slept with the razor on the nightstand, close by, and would wake up to check it was there. He knew that, knew all of it, and should have never. Not ever.

  So now she sat with the little glassine bag on the scarred table in the kitchenette, looking at it, feeling antsy, wanting to wait and not wanting to. Wanting to talk to Orlando and not wanting to, wanting to mark his thin white skin with her small hands, pull his hair, feel his hands on her, feel him move inside her. All of it, and where was he? Did it mean anything, that he was cut off, or was it just paranoia or him acting up at a corner and taking it for conspiracy, as if Orlando Donovan were at the center of things in the world?

  She laid out the dope, then got out the spoon and the little velvet ribbon he used to tie himself off and a clean needle from the exchange down on Girard. She opened her Japanese puzzle box and took out her iPod from its secret drawer, put on her headphones, and dialed up an Algerian CD Orlando had found at Beautiful World down on Passyunk. Her heart went faster, timed to the echoing drums and bursts of distorted guitar. The words were in a language she didn’t know, but they made her think of seduction, of nameless longing. The word “abandon,” the word “bereft.” She lit a red candle and opened a bottle of wine and waited. Looked at the dope, went to the window and watched the street. Watched the flame gutter, listened to it hiss.

  CHAPTER

  16

  Danny had been going through old files, talking to older homicide guys he knew and Drug Enforcement agents, connecting dots in a chart in his head. He talked to Frank Keduc about the dead Somali and two beat cops from Kensington about the Dunn b
rothers. After three hours in cold cases, he called Matt Gialdo, and the retired detective had Danny come out to his house, a neat little three-story house in Mt. Airy.

  It was raining when he pulled up, but Gialdo was in the open door of the garage. Danny remembered him as a fastidious guy. All the homicide guys he knew were dudes, dressed sharp, were sharp, but even in that company Gialdo stood out. His family was from Trinidad, which threw everybody who thought he’d be Italian when they heard the name. He had a way of changing the feel of a room, the temperature, just by focusing on a suspect. Danny had watched him close, had seen him get confessions, it seemed, just by listening intently, nodding his head when he heard the truth. It was something he did with his eyes, some wordless transaction between him and the people he talked to that eliminated bullshit as an option.

  There was a tarp spread out on the floor and motor parts neatly arrayed under a work light. Matt pointed to a little sports car under another tarp.

  “MG. I bought it ten years ago, but now I have the time to spend on it.” It was the kind of meticulous job Danny could picture Matt doing. “It keeps me from driving Dessie crazy.” Matt walked past the tarp and started running his hands along a row of cardboard file boxes. He lifted one and set it aside, then pulled one along the floor and spun it to face Danny.

  “DeAngelo Barnes.”

  Danny knelt down. “Do you remember it?”

  Matt Gialdo looked away. “Summer of 2002. They found him in the river near the boathouses. Two coeds from Princeton down to practice rowing. Crew, I guess they call it, when it’s kids from Prince ton. He was shot once, up close.” He tapped the side of his head. “His mother called me every day for six months. After I heard about DeAngelo giving up Derrick Leon, I spent a lot of time looking at how Leon could have had it done, but I couldn’t see how. Leon had already killed all his friends out of paranoia, so who was left that would care enough to kill DeAngelo because he had given up Leon? I think everybody I talked to was glad Leon was off the street.” He looked at the box. “I talked to him. To Leon. And he gave me that smile, that crazy smile? So I knew he knew something, but he never said. He was so crazy he wasn’t making a lot of sense anyway.”

  Neither of them touched the boxes. The recall was standard, Danny knew, for homicide guys. They’d be able to tell you chapter and verse on unsolveds from ten, fifteen years before. He knew he was already doing it, just in his time. You take things out once in a while, dust them off, look at them from different angles. After a while they stay in your head.

  Danny was thinking of his kid from the river. Soap Williams. “Anything, you know, stand out?”

  Matt touched his stomach, his chest. “He had these holes. Holes, not gunshot. From some kind of long knife. A bayonet, the coroner thought.”

  Danny went into his pocket and pulled out his notebook. He had a sketch he’d made of Soap’s body, a crude rendering of a featureless body. Alongside the head was an arrow pointing slightly up, the angle of the shot that had killed him. On the torso were three spots he’d inked in, and the notation long knife, military?

  He thanked Matt Gialdo and loaded the case into the backseat of his car, squinting through the light rain. “I’ll copy a few things out and get them back to you.”

  The older detective shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. Mrs. Barnes died a year ago. His sister moved, somewhere out west, but I don’t hear from her. I don’t think anybody much remembers DeAngelo but me.”

  The rain stopped, and the sun poked holes in the clouds. It got hot, and just as fast, unbearably humid. Orlando walked south and west, stopping to look back, zigzagging at the corners and alleys. Still not sure whether it had all happened the way he remembered. Audie acting so weird, and the Irish guy, who definitely had a gun because he’d shot that tall black kid with it. If the kid hadn’t pulled up and unloaded, Orlando knew he’d be dead back in that alley. He’d gotten a pretty good look at the shooter with the rifle and didn’t have a clue who he was, or why he’d want to help Orlando, so it must have just been something between the Irish guy and the shooter with that enormous goddamn machine gun. A nice-looking guy, he’d have said, with neat features and wild braids and wearing a bright print shirt.

  At a little park in Northern Liberties he tried to jump a chain between two posts and went over hard. He got up fast and moved away from the street, limping. He couldn’t remember the name of the park, which was just a couple of green blocks with a little playground and some trees. He and Zoe had watched a movie there the summer before. A crazy Western with Gregory Peck, all lurid, dense colors and people so in love they had to shoot each other to escape it. He limped to the center of the park and dropped to his knees between two small trees. Two women were setting up lawn chairs a few feet away, wearing sunglasses and tank tops. One of them cradled a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.

  He pulled himself into a sitting position, tried to seem harmless or normal while he planned what to do, where to go. The women looked at each other, and the woman with the baby went into a complicated-looking backpack studded with pockets and got out a bottle while he tried to avoid their eyes. He drew up one knee stained with dirt and grass, his eyes going to the edges of the park. He couldn’t stop looking at the baby’s fragile head out of the corner of his eye, the weight of it in its mother’s slender hands.

  Something was jabbing him through his pants, and he reached in and pulled out the little lightsaber keychain he’d taken from Geo’s room. He held it in his hand, putting his fingers against his chest and feeling the air and blood moving through him. So it had been Audie who warned him about talking to the wrong people, and Audie himself turned out to be the wrong people. But did Audie give him up to the Irish killer for money? Or did he get in trouble, too? And acting to protect himself and Fran, he’d given up Orlando?

  He looked at the keychain in his palm. It all had to do with the kid, and asking questions. That’s why he’d been shut down, and why people were trying to kill him now. The Irish guy had talked to him when they’d been high back at the house in East Falls, about the people dead in the river. It wasn’t some kind of dope dream; the guy had put people in the river, and that’s where Orlando would have gone. Dead, into the van, with a bullet in his head, and then into the river somewhere, down with the river silt to wash away, his bones to become ash sifted by the current.

  What else had the guy said, back in the dope house? Nothing he could remember. He remembered the tall, angry Puerto Rican kid with the bushy ’fro, and the other guy, Asa, the red-haired guy who told the kid to let him in. The kid not liking it, but doing it. If he could overrule the angry kid, outrank him, then he owned the place and the kid just ran it. He’d been there before, Orlando, with Zoe, and they didn’t like the place, didn’t like the angry kid, but he’d never seen Asa there before.

  He watched some people carrying gardening tools to a little community plot, squinting skeptically at the new sun. Moving through the little furrows and bending to the green shoots in the orderly rows. He got to his feet, slowly, feeling his skeleton through his skin, feeling like he didn’t belong there. Thought about how he’d look to the people coming down in their rubber boots with their kids to plant cauliflowers and squash. He had that feeling he’d had before, of wanting to explain himself, but why, and who would want to hear it?

  He started jogging, feeling like bones wrapped in the thin sheet of his skin, every footfall an electric shock that ran through him, a little wave of pain communicated through his slight frame from his feet to his head. He was sick, he was hunted, and for what? Zoe was right, it was all for his brother, wasn’t it, really? Nobody was paying him and nobody cared. It was a show he was putting on, to get something from Brendan. To be treated with respect, to be worthy of respect and love? Is this what it took? And was it worth it? For the first time he let himself worry about Zoe. Let himself wonder if she was safe. If it was smart for him to even go to her. He was already moving, though; he’d have to find her, talk to her, tell her
to get away. With no one he could trust to carry the message, he’d have to tell her to her face.

  He ran north, cut right to find an open road. He came out at a little island in the street at Second and Girard, a shard of concrete pointing south and clotted with green bushes. He puked, bent double, his hand on the cool stone base of a statue of a tall man on a horse. The figure held a lance that towered over Second Street, and his horse was canted back as if about to rear, but the man, helmetless, looked serene, almost happy, ready to move alone against whatever was arrayed against him in the blocks south of Girard Avenue.

  Orlando dropped to his knees, then pulled his shirttail out of his pants and bent to wipe his face clean with shaking hands. He stepped out of the bushes and sat hard on the curb, noticing a kid was sitting in the shadow of the statue, selling water bottles from a cooler full of melting ice. The kid looked at him for a minute, his expression mournful, and then he held a bottle out to Orlando, who waited a beat before taking it.

  “I can’t pay you. I got nothing.”

  The kid shrugged. He had one of those kid faces that was already a thousand years old. A line of constant worry above his brows and eyes so full of disappointment it looked like there was room for nothing else. Then the boy let a smile break through, and it was like watching a swimmer break the surface of a dark lake. “Everybody’s got something.”

  Orlando stuck his hand in his pocket and came up with the keychain. He looked at it for a minute, then held it out on his palm, and the kid looked at it, too. He lifted one eyebrow, then went into his own pocket and came out with the same lightsaber keychain, his in royal purple.

  The kid looked down the block, then knocked his hand against Orlando’s in salute and put the chain away. Orlando nodded and stood up and started walking away.