The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  Orlando stood up and the cop tried one more time to wave him back, but he moved to the open door. The garage was big inside, and in the center of the floor were two cases, one filled with money and one filled with flat brown bricks of dope. He stood quiet in the shadows by the front door and watched Asa Carmody come down the stairs, favoring one leg. He didn’t notice Orlando.

  “You shot me, you crazy fuck. You shot me. Why the fuck would you do that?” He dragged one leg, smacking it as if it were a misbehaving child. “Danny?” He dropped his voice, as if talking to himself. “Nobody does a fucking thing I tell them anymore. Not that fucking Chris, not you. Not nobody. Where the fuck is Angel?” He dragged his bleeding leg over to the cases and let himself go down hard on his ass, his legs shaking. He had a book and a pistol, and he was sweating. “Oh, fuck. Not yet, goddammit. I’m not done.”

  Chris was dying, he knew it, and couldn’t lift his arms anymore. There was a shifting inside the truck and the door behind him opened and the girl climbed out. She dropped to one leg and touched his head and he saw glass in her hair like diamonds. Chris licked his lips and they felt thick and dry. He tried to tell her to find a place to hide, but he couldn’t say anything and the pain in his side was like a clamp that kept him from talking or breathing right and he felt sick. She got close to him and looked in his eyes and he thought of the first time he’d seen her.

  That night on Roxborough Avenue, Frank Dunn at the wheel stomping the accelerator and Gerry in the back, the radio going loud while they’d passed a bottle of Jägermeister back and forth. He’d been half in the bag and it had been so fast, so fast. He remembered more of the getting ready. Fitting the long clip into the handle, his hands pinched in the stiff gloves. Trying to steel himself, Gerry making him nervous, clapping him on the back and giving a whoop like a little kid. Pointing the little blunt machine gun everywhere, making Chris wince to think of him back there drunk with a loaded gun.

  Frank had to shout over the music, telling them there it is, and then they had the guns out the window, Gerry opening up first and Chris joining in, his finger already on the trigger before he took in the three people standing on the steps in front of the house. Asa had told them to make sure to get whoever was standing out front. Chris knowing what that meant, but expecting them to be the Dominicans or something. Bulked-up gangbangers, or the skinny corner runners. Something else, not three young schoolkids all turning to look at them as the car went by. There was more to this than he understood. He got some of it—they were shooting up the Dominicans’ place, and they were pinning it all on Darnell Burns. That was why they had the stamp bags. Shoot up the place, drop the bags, and the cops think it’s Green Lane trying to kill some Dominicans over turf. But shooting the kids out front? Why would Asa need that?

  It was something he couldn’t get hold of later. He knew he did it, pulled the trigger and emptied the gun at them, but something about the drinking or his sweating hands inside the gloves or some trick of his mind made it seem like it was something he’d seen, not something he’d done. It should have been loud, but he couldn’t remember the sound of the gun as much as seeing the spray of yellow light and the gun bucking in his hands, watching the spent shells spill out and rattle down the street as the car moved. He couldn’t have seen that, but he had a memory of it.

  Dying now, letting go of everything, it was easier than he’d thought it would be. And he knew why Asa had sent him to kill the girl. She’d been stupid enough to get close to Asa, to get pregnant, and that was a death sentence. For Asa, for whatever Asa was, killing Sienna was the only option. Chris could see that now. Being Asa meant being in a kind of pain all the time. He wasn’t a man, Chris knew. He was some kind of dark, vibrating energy that Chris could actually see, now he was dying, his mind a desolate building in the dark, the lights going off one by one.

  There were just a few memories he could still get hold of, and they were terrible things. The gun in his hands. The sight of the kids falling on Roxborough Avenue, and his own voice in his head. And maybe he hadn’t said it, but he’d thought it, and what he’d thought was Now I’m going to hell.

  Orlando watched Asa on the floor, sitting in a spreading pool of blood. He was holding the book up and smiling and talking about his plan. Then his hand started shaking and he dropped the book and went back on his elbows. Orlando walked out into the light in the center of the room and knelt down in front of Asa and the cases holding the money and the flat brown bricks of heroin, pain spreading in hard waves from his spine, conducted by his bones to his arms and legs and the top of his head, and there were bursts of light at the corners of his eyes.

  He had the gun up, pointing, but Asa’s hands were shaking and his face was bloodless, the skin going green. Orlando could see sweat standing out on Asa’s forehead, and he had the sad and guilty eyes of a dog.

  Asa said, “I can’t be here.”

  “But here you are. Do you know why?”

  “The weak always try to stop the strong, but they never can.”

  Orlando shook his head. “The strong. You tried to have a pregnant girl killed. You sent men to shoot children down in the street, didn’t you?”

  “Everybody thinks they know my business. What do you think you know, junkie?”

  “You sent the Irishman to kill me. Because I was asking questions. I saw you at that dope house on Shurs Lane. You and him together.” He remembered the man again, lost in his dope dreams. “We got high together and he told me. About killing people and throwing them in the river. I was high, I didn’t put it together at first. It’s for you, right? He kills people for you. Then you had that Puerto Rican kid kill my girl.” Orlando saw it, saw it the way he sometimes did, like there were lines drawn in the air in front of him. The patterns coming together, the machinery laid bare. Now, though, instead of making him feel powerful and connected to everything, it just made him feel sick and alone.

  “So that means it was you who shot the kids. Right? Or you had it done.” His hands were shaking so hard the pistol rattled in his fist, and he stopped and held the cool metal of the barrel to his hot forehead. He felt like he was going to pass out and talked fast, wanting to know, to get his questions answered. “Two young boys and that poor, fucked-up girl. The boys were there by accident, but why the girl? Why would you need to kill a pregnant crazy girl?”

  “She’s a junkie, a whore. I’m going to have that around me? Slowing me down? How the hell did I know there were going to be kids standing there? That’s on the fuckups who pulled the trigger. Not me.”

  “Jesus, it was you. You got her pregnant.”

  “She asked me to take care of her.” Asa’s eyes caught pinpoints of light, like an animal caught in headlights on a dark road.

  “That boy you killed, he was a good person. He tried to help people. I never did that. He taught someone to read. His name was George Parkman.”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  Orlando looked at the gun in his hand and then put it on the floor behind him. He stared at the dope, thought he could smell it, a rich tang like fertile soil that he could taste on the tip of his tongue. Jesus, he was so sick, was he dying? And there it was, all that dope just sitting there, brown and wet-looking, almost black under the hard light of the garage.

  A girl came from the dark street and sat by Asa, and Orlando remembered she was important but he couldn’t think about it just then. There were things he wanted to say, more questions he wanted to ask but he forgot what they were, and put out one white hand and touched the plastic-wrapped bricks that were dark and swollen and tight like ripe fruit.

  The girl sat cross-legged in a rivulet of blood and smiled at them and talked about spirits and saints and children with wings and bread. Orlando rocked on his knees and took a velvet-wrapped bundle out of the lining of his jacket and opened it on the floor, taking out his needles, a bent spoon, a book of matches. The girl was reproving Asa, gently, smoothing his hair back and telling him he could still be saved, they
could all be saved. Then she took his hand and put it on her stomach and asked him what they should name the baby. She said she knew he hadn’t wanted her to get pregnant, that he had plans, but that was love, and how could love ever be wrong, ever be wasted? Orlando heard Asa talking back to her, telling her about the plan, his plan, about the nature of the universe and the way it could be bent to the will of the determined. He was trying to push a rag against the hole in his leg, but after a little while there was no point in it and he just lay back. Orlando told him, “It’s just gravity,” and that there wasn’t a goddamn thing anyone could do about it.

  Orlando lifted one of the bricks of dope and tore at it with his hands and dumped the muddy brown powder out in a pile and sifted it in his fingers. Asa might have said his last words then, “You win, you win,” which he thought was something he’d have to remember and tell Zoe. He picked up a purple ribbon that had still held a few errant strands of her hair, then spit into the bowl of the spoon and lit the matches and waited.

  The cops came in, guns drawn, and they cleared the rooms and then let the ambulance crews come in. The cops were shouting to each other and the medics, pointing at each body and trying to set priority cases. They moved quick to get the one they knew was a cop up on the stretcher, and two cops in uniform were trying to coax what looked like a homeless pregnant girl onto a gurney when they came across a pale, thin male with blond hair lying on his side on a mattress thrown in the doorway to the garage office. The first cop to see him covered him with his gun, prodding him gently with one boot.

  “Another DOA in here, I think.” A medic carrying a tackle box with an EMS insignia on the side slid by the cop and knelt down. She took in the bruises and welts, the stitches leaking green fluid. She felt for a pulse, lifted one eyelid.

  “Wow, been through the wars, this one.” She opened the case and unwrapped a stethoscope from around her neck. “Okay, nah. He’s just, I don’t know. Passed out or something.” She called for a board, then ran her gloved hands along his neck and back. She felt something, gently lifted his black leather jacket and exposed a syringe, the tip glowing wetly. “Oh, okay. Wow.”

  The cop snorted. “We got a live witness, anyway.”

  “Yeah, maybe. His pulse is all over the place.”

  The cop turned to look at the scene again. “What the fuck happened here?” He nodded toward the lightly snoring blond kid. “Maybe he can tell us.”

  The medic looked up at the cop and waggled her eyebrows. “This kid is so fucked up, he was probably on the nod through the whole thing. He might have just wandered in, saw the dope and fired up, you know?” It had happened before.

  The young cop holstered his pistol, reset his cap, and made a gesture, his hands open and sweeping the scene, taking it all in. Orlando on the floor with his bruises and sputtering heart, the money wet with blood, the drugs, the dead and the dying. “Junkies.”

  CHAPTER

  19

  A week later, Brendan met Orlando at the hospital, shook his hand, and followed him to the room where Sienna lay dozing in a patch of sunlight, pale, her eyes set in wells of dark skin. Orlando wore Michael’s sweatshirt, and Brendan was still in his blues, coming off his shift working the desk at the Fifth District up on Ridge. Brendan saw that his brother was clean and the cuts on his face were healing, but he was thin and pale and his hands shook. They sat wordlessly until she woke, and seeing Orlando, she smiled and lifted a hand and he took it.

  “How’s it going today?”

  “Okay. Today is okay.” She looked at Brendan. “This is your brother?” Closed one eye and squinted at them. “I can see it.”

  Brendan worked his cap in his hands and smiled. “Then you’re the first.”

  “No, it’s something around the eyes.”

  Brendan looked at Orlando and then the girl, not sure what it was okay to say. He knew his brother had been visiting her, in the week since she’d been brought to the hospital. His brother was on methadone. It kept him from getting sick until they could get him into rehab.

  He looked at the girl and wasn’t sure what to feel. She’d been the cause of Michael and Geo getting shot, but she hadn’t done anything except get pregnant by a man who’d rather have her killed than accept the responsibility, so what did that make her but a victim herself? He said, “So, you’re feeling, you know. Better?”

  She looked out the window. “I can’t remember everything. I still get confused.” Her hand went to her throat and she worked a small crucifix there, running it back and forth along a chain. “The doctor told me it was seeing, you know, all of that. The boys. How they were hurt. And the drugs I was taking. I went crazy for a while. They told me what it’s called, but . . .” She put a hand across her eyes, and they waited for a minute. Brendan got her a tissue from a box, and she took it and thanked him.

  “Fugue.” Orlando took her free hand.

  “Right. Like in music.” She put one hand over her stomach, gingerly patting the hard mound. “I know the things I saw, a lot of them weren’t real. I remember touching one of the boys. When he was there, shot. Touching his face.” She touched her own face then, her small hands shaking, her eyes wet. “Anyway, it’s in my head that I did it. I don’t know.”

  Brendan poured a glass of water for her, and she took it in both hands, like a child.

  “Mostly I’m just tired. I sleep a lot. I just pray, I pray so hard that nothing I did hurt the baby. Asa’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Brendan looked at Orlando, who touched her hand again. “Yes. We talked about that, remember?”

  She nodded. “Right, that’s right. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “He tried to kill me. I can’t believe it, even if I know it’s true. Me and the baby. I thought I could get him to take care of me. I was such an idiot. I knew what kind of man he was when I started seeing him.” She laughed. “Listen to me. Seeing him, like in school. He had money and drugs and some kind of power, and I wanted to be around that. That’s why this happened, isn’t it? So much sin, so much evil. I invited it. That’s how it works, you have to invite the devil in.”

  She held on to Orlando’s hand again, her eyes fierce, and he just kept smiling, smiling, hoping she’d feel safe and relax. Telling her it was over, all of her troubles, that she was safe, the baby was safe. After a while, maybe she’d believe it, even if he never would.

  Orlando had seen Zoe leave the hospital. He’d been discharged himself, walking back up from the front desk with his papers toward her room, and had caught a glimpse of her at the curb in a wheelchair. He’d stopped and gone to the window, watching her mother holding her hand and talking to her. Zoe looked hunched and small in an oversized sweater. He watched the older woman’s lips moving soundlessly. A big old BMW pulled up and Zoe’s father got out. Older, his hair thinner, but still a big man, and they were both talking, the father and the mother, getting her out of the chair, helping her sit on the edge of the backseat. She smiled then, at her mother, her lips somehow smaller, bloodless, not the full red he always pictured. Then, released from the effort of holding the smile, her face went slack and empty. She looked right at him, he thought, her eyes pointed toward his face, but there was no sign of recognition. It might have been a trick of sun or shadow that made him invisible to her. Or maybe it was for him, the emptiness in that look, and the thought made him drop his eyes until the car and the girl were gone.

  They stood in the hall outside Sienna’s room, and Brendan was looking at his watch when George Parkman Sr. came through the door at the end of the hall. He moved slowly, taking in Orlando in his clean new clothes, Brendan in his blues. He moved slowly toward them but his eyes moved fast, back and forth between them and darting into the corners as if he were afraid of being trapped. He didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “Okay, I’m here.”

  Orlando looked at Brendan, who fingered his cap and then went to look out a window. Parkman worked the muscles in his jaw. “I’m not paying you anything.
Is this why he’s here? Is the uniform supposed to scare me?”

  Orlando stepped to the side and turned, inclining his head so that Parkman would move forward to the door of Sienna’s room. He stopped there, looking in, but Orlando took his arm and guided him in, and he went. She was sleeping, and they stood and looked at her, and Orlando thought Parkman looked in that moment as miserable as anyone he’d ever seen. His face seemed to lengthen with it, his mouth gaping slightly, and his eyes burned red as if he were standing in a column of smoke. The girl shifted, and she put one hand on her swollen belly in her sleep. Parkman took a half step forward, one hand up. He could have wanted to touch her. He might have been shielding himself.

  He looked from Orlando to the girl and then back, and his voice was barely audible. “Why is she here?”

  Orlando looked to the door and saw Brendan had come back and was standing there, listening. Brendan’s eyes were red.

  Orlando spoke quietly. “She was there. She was standing with your son and Michael when they were shot. I think the boys were looking for her. I think George Jr. knew. Something. About you and about this girl. I think he saw her at the homeless shelter where he volunteered. Strung out, pregnant. I think he sold some things. The camera. And he found her and he was trying to give her money, or get her help. And while they were standing there some men tried to kill her, and they killed your son instead.” Parkman turned suddenly and went to stand facing the far wall. He put one hand out and touched it, gingerly, as if testing its reality.

  Orlando said, “I can’t figure out how your son knew who she was. I know you . . . saw her. At the house where she worked. The girls there told me you used to come and see her. I think your son found out somehow and he thought if you weren’t going to help her, he would. Do you know how he found out about her? Did you keep her name somewhere? Something he might have found?”