The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  “Jesus, everybody’s so touchy.” The little red-haired girl shook her head, looking at each of them in turn. She pointed at the big kid. “Ken, man. What the fuck?”

  He threw up his hands. “I was up the street at the Dunkin’ Donuts and Ryan called me and told me they were here. Didn’t you just say you wished I was there when the reporters came around? Didn’t you just say that like yesterday?”

  “Man, I didn’t mean so you could break somebody’s back. And they’re not even fucking reporters. Next time, ask a question before you start playing Twister with people you don’t even know who they are.” She pointed at the kid with the moussed hair, hanging back at the edge of some bushes. “And you, Ryan. Keep your fucking nose out of my business. I look like somebody who needs help from you? Yeah, you better run.”

  The kid disappeared around the side of a building, and Marianne reached over and took the straight razor from Zoe’s hands. She opened it, held it up to look down its shank. “You got that right out. I wish I’d been there with one of these when they fucked with Geo. I’d have cut their heads off.” She gripped the thing tight, her knuckles going white beneath her freckled skin, and Zoe took it off her, gently, and put it back in her purse.

  The young girl deflated somehow, got smaller, and her eyes went dull. Her head sank between her shoulders. “I’d have fucked them up. No question,” she said, but there was no force in it and she sat back down and dropped her head to stare at her shoes. “They wouldn’t have dared.”

  Ken looked from Marianne to Zoe and then Orlando, and he raised his eyebrows and pointed to Orlando’s chest. He looked down and caught the sight of blood titrating into the weave of his shirt.

  Zoe swore and dug some tissues out her purse, but Orlando just shrugged. Ken looked embarrassed, lowering his eyes like a giant, chastened dog. Marianne sighed and stood up, swatting his solid shoulder with one small hand.

  “Jesus, Ken. You have to excuse my cousin. He’s supposed to be taking medication for whacking the shit out of everyone who pisses him off.”

  “Christ, man, I’m sorry. I just get, you know. Everybody’s been over here fucking with us and I just get, like, fuck it. You know?”

  “It’s okay, man, no harm done. Stitches giving out.”

  Zoe unbuttoned his shirt and stuck the wad of Kleenex over the spreading red slick of blood.

  Marianne said, “Yuck. Man, sorry my cousin broke your boyfriend.” Ken walked away and stood by himself, looking up at the high windows of the buildings around them.

  Marianne looked up at Zoe and Orlando as he buttoned his shirt up. “He’s all fucked up about Geo. He almost didn’t graduate. They were going to kick him out. Geo tutored him and got him straightened out.” She smiled. “Geo turned him on to Bukowski. Ken didn’t know, you know, anything about poetry, and then to find out there were actual poems about drinking and fucking? You see what he’s like. I used to find him in the day-room, moving his finger along, under the words. Love Is a Dog from Hell. Sounding it out, you know, moving his lips? Ken read ‘Girls Coming Home’ out loud. At an assembly. I thought the nuns were going to shit.” She was flipping back and forth, Orlando could see. Smiling with her eyes full of tears. He knew how that was, when something was so big you couldn’t hold it in your head.

  CHAPTER

  12

  Danny walked along Fairmount Street in the sunshine. Evidence techs moved up the street ahead of him, dropping little cones where expended shells lay on the drying asphalt, catching the rays of light slanting in from the east. There were pieces of glittering plastic and glass littering the street where they’d been shot off of parked cars. Two uniforms stood talking to a tall homicide dick, Frank Keduc, who was making notes while one of the cops pointed away toward Broad Street. It was starting to get hot, and mist was burning off the empty lot behind the old hotel.

  Danny had gotten the call around nine that morning. Homicide and the evidence techs had already been on the scene for hours, talking to people from the houses on Thirteenth, tracing the long trajectories of automatic rifle fire. As he walked, he passed a drying pond of red ringed with yellow. There was a long black tail of powdery rubber running around the mark, and Danny figured it for a car that had pulled out fast from the curb, veering a little to miss whoever was lying in the red puddle. He could see shotgun shells lined up along the curb where they had rolled. One stood up on its brass end on the trunk of an Acura with a shattered windshield.

  Danny shook Frank Keduc’s hand and turned back up the street. “Who won?”

  “Who knows? It’s Alien versus Predator. Did you see the size of these shell casings?” He flipped back through his book. “Looks like it started back up at Broad, inside the building, and they decided to bring it out here onto the street. You know, you spend all that money buying automatic weapons, you want to see if they work.”

  Danny shook his head. “Wild West.”

  Keduc used his pen to draw lines in the air, pointing up toward Broad and down Fairmount to where they stood. “Shotgun shells from a twelve-gauge, I’m guessing that’s the home team. Which means it was the visitors who brought the machine gun.” He pointed to a pile of brass, long casings that had rolled into bright lines in the gutter.

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah. We’ve got three folks on their way to the morgue. Amazing nobody else was hit, when you think about it. Talk about dumb luck. The people on Thirteenth Street started calling 911 when the shots from the twelve-gauge started breaking windows.”

  “Who got killed?”

  Keduc looked at his notes again, tapping the page with his pen. “One’s a Somali national, a new flag for my map, and two guys who look local to me.” He handed Danny a digital camera, pushing a button with his thumb to bring up pictures on the display. Danny had to turn out of the sun to get an angle on the picture. Two dead men in the street, their features washed white by the flash. Keduc clicked the button and the men got closer and the red around their heads got more vivid. The one facing up had half-closed eyes and his throat was open in a ragged line as if dogs had been at it. Danny didn’t recognize him. The next pictures were taken from the side, and Danny could see the profile of the second man. His eyes were closed, his features distorted as if in pain. Keduc made a face. “Right through the lower abdomen. That must have hurt.”

  “I know this one.” Danny took the camera and turned it on its side, bringing the face on the display upright. “Yeah, this is—What the fuck is his name?”

  “Going by the tats, the clothes, the chains, I’m betting they’re in the system.”

  Danny had just seen this guy, he was sure. He could see him moving, hunching his big shoulders, but it was like seeing a cutout against a black background. He couldn’t place him. He closed his eyes, tapped his head. It would come to him.

  Ken walked with Zoe and Orlando back to the gate. As they walked, Orlando looked back at the stone steps where Marianne sat, lost in her own thoughts, her splayed feet and the bright red sneakers making her look young again for a few moments. He could see the kid, Ryan, with the ridiculous hair, watching them and keeping pace as they walked out, hanging back in the trees and trying not to be seen.

  Orlando didn’t know what to ask, so he said, “What was he like? Geo.”

  Ken shrugged, lifted one hand. “He was a good kid. Smart.”

  “Did he, you know, use? Get high?”

  “Nah.” Ken shook his head fast. “He wasn’t the type.” Not, Orlando could see in his eyes, not like you clearly are. “A lot of the kids here, they’re rich, their parents don’t give a shit, don’t know where they are or the kind of shit they get up to. So the kids get high, fuck around.” He looked up, thinking how to say it. “I mean, Geo’s dad is a total asshole, but somehow it didn’t rub off on the kid.” He stopped and looked at them. “I mean, how fucked up is this?” He looked left and right, making sure they were alone, then dropped his voice and leaned in toward Orlando. “He thought his own kid was gay. And that guy? To t
hat guy, his kid being a fag was like the fucking sun blowing up. No, that ain’t even it. People just thinking his kid might be a fag, that’s all it took.”

  “Did he say something, Geo? Something about the father?” Orlando pictured the man, hovering in the doorway while he sat at the Parkman kid’s desk. His pinched, disgusted look.

  “Nah, Geo never said anything. But something happened. There was a picture in the school newspaper. Geo was in this band, with some of the kids here? Anyway they took a picture of all of them dressed up, I don’t know, and Geo had on like . . .” He made a circle around his eyes. “Eyeliner. Don’t ask me. You had to know the kid. Nobody thought twice about it.”

  “Except the father.”

  “Fuck, yeah. He hit the roof. Marianne said the father went fucking nuts. Called the school, threatened to yank Geo. That kid, Ryan, the one hiding over in the trees thinks we can’t see him? He works in the office, it’s his co-op, the little bullshit job the students get here. He’s got a crush on my cousin, in case you haven’t figured that out. Anyway, he told her about the father calling, all the bullshit.”

  “Geo was embarrassed.”

  Ken lifted a shoulder. “He never talked about it.” He lifted his meaty hands and ticked off his fingers. “But I do know one, he disappeared for like three days, and two, when he finally comes back to school he breaks up with Marianne. Like the same fucking day he comes back.” He dropped his hands and started walking again, and they walked along after. “After that, he’s not the same kid.”

  “When was this? How long ago?”

  “A month? Two? I don’t know. We figured the old man told the kid he was yanking him out at the end of the semester. People were saying it, anyway. That’s the usual thing around here. The kid fucks up one too many times, the parents take the kid out of day school here and ship him off to some boarding school in Jersey or Connecticut or some fucking place.”

  “So the last two months, he knows he’s not coming back.” Thinking, maybe the old Geo wouldn’t use drugs, but the new one? How much bad news would it take for a seventeen-year-old kid to get fucked up enough to do something stupid? A sensitive kid who knew his own father couldn’t stand the sight of him?

  Zoe looked at Orlando, both of them knowing how quick it could go wrong, how strong the current was that carried you away, and if you wanted it, courted it, it didn’t take much time at all. You didn’t have to be a stone junkie to end up on the wrong set of steps with a couple of bucks in your hand. Smart kids, kids who were unhappy or curious or reckless or just lost. Zoe kept his gaze, both of them thinking about which of those things had been true about them.

  At the gate they shook hands and Ken apologized again. Orlando told him he understood and to forget it. They turned back to face the school across the wide lawn.

  “You know, Marianne’s here on financial aid, right? She’s smart, she’ll do good. My old man owns a Dodge dealership. He dumped me here so he wouldn’t have to look at me, I think. Marianne’s his niece, he never lifted a fucking finger to help her or her mom. When I got the diploma he acted surprised. Almost disappointed, like it didn’t compute. ’Cause I was such a fuckup.” Ken looked at them. “Parents, right? I can’t, you know, I can’t figure it all out.” He wiped a big hand across his eyes. “That stupid kid, Geo. My cousin Marianne told you what he did for me, right? We should’ve done more, you know? I should’ve. Looked out for him. Found out what was going on with the kid and been there.”

  Chris Black sat in his car on Delancey in Society Hill watching his cell phone. He was wired, gamey, had barely been out of Frank’s car since he had driven away from Fairmount Avenue the night before and left Frank and Gerry to die in the rain. The phone buzzed and jumped on the seat beside him, and he knew it was Asa calling for the tenth time. He kept himself from looking at the two briefcases on the backseat where he had thrown them. One full of money and the other full of drugs.

  He was going to have to make a decision, and soon. He’d driven around for hours after Fairmount, first barreling west in a panic till he hit the park, then dropping south to pick up the Vine Street Expressway and moving fast back across town to cross the Ben Franklin and only feeling safer as he moved deeper into Jersey. The first time the phone rang he was in Marlton, sitting in the parking lot of Olga’s, the big diner at the circle. Watching teenagers and cops come and go. He’d picked up the cell and looked at it, working the different lies he’d have to tell in his head and afraid they’d sound tinny and unconvincing coming out of his mouth. Asa would want to know why the African was dead, and where Chris was with the heavy briefcase full of money and the even heavier briefcase full of heroin. He’d thrown the phone down and pulled out of the lot, heading east down 70 away from the lights, wanting to find some dark and deserted place in the woods where he’d feel safe.

  He wasn’t running away with the money and dope. Not exactly. He just wanted to think, wished there was someone he trusted to talk to about this. He’d thought he’d trusted Gerry Dunn, but it was Gerry who nagged at him until he pulled his pistol in the hotel lobby. Feeling that dislocated feeling of things going wrong, of making the wrong move, feeling sweaty and out of control, the gun shaking in his hand. It was hot and close in the old hotel. It stank like mold and there was an inch of dust on everything and the trails of small footprints in the dirt on the rotted old flooring. The African had been sitting in the pink chair looking pissed, starting to say something when Gerry just backhanded him and lunged for the case. The African was talking fast but Chris couldn’t understand, slowly getting that it wasn’t English. It was something else, some other language the guy was speaking, but it was clear he was telling them to fuck off, lifting the case into his lap with a shake of his head as if denying a little kid the thing he wanted, and Gerry had pulled the big silver .45 from under his jersey and shot the African in the chest. The guy drew up, pulling on the case, and the next shot went through it, expelling a little huff of white powder.

  Gerry said, “See?” and picked up the case, one of those expensive-looking black cases with ridges. The African opened his mouth again, but no sounds came out and Chris could see blood on his teeth. A little trail of powder leaked from the hole in the case as Gerry lifted it, and he smiled and stuck a finger in the hole.

  Then there was a soft crackling sound, an electrical circuit being made, and the lobby filled with a harsh blue light and when he’d thrown his arm up to shade his eyes the automatic rifle opened up on them from the stairs. Christ, it was loud, louder than Gerry’s cheap pistol going off right next to him, a series of echoing pops that he felt in his chest as much as heard. The first one breaking Gerry’s arm so that he howled and dropped the case, bent over to run for the door as if in a storm, and Chris right after. Not even realizing until he hit the cooler air of the street that he had picked up the second case before he’d run. Somehow, without even knowing he’d done it, he’d stuffed his gun in his belt and grabbed the drugs and gotten out of there. Sweat streaming out of his hair. Gerry yelling for his brother and cradling his bloody arm while bullets knocked pieces of the old hotel into the street around them.

  Later, driving around Jersey in the middle of the night, pieces of it would come back, terrible fragments, like the sound of a rifle bullet punching through Gerry’s stomach and the sewery smell of his opened gut when the blood poured out of him. Did he see that? He had an image of Gerry’s eyes as he died, but he knew he’d been pushing his friend’s heavy body out into the rain in a panic.

  Chris smoked a joint in the parking lot of a diner in Vincentown and fell asleep for an hour, then drove back into Philly and cruised Fishtown and Port Richmond all night, unable to go home or call anyone he knew. He got coffee at the Wawa on Richmond Street around dawn, having to slide out the passenger side of the car because of the ruined door on the driver’s side with the hardware shot off. He drifted south to Society Hill and parked on Delancey.

  The road on Delancey was like brick—there was a name for the b
rick, something old-fashioned, but he couldn’t think of it. There were trees in planters and expensive-looking houses with brick fronts and black shutters like in olden times. He felt like he was a million miles from what he knew, though he was about a mile from where he’d grown up. The phone began to buzz again, and he rubbed his eyes and picked it up. It was warm, and he felt it move in his hands like something alive. He had to start dealing with the situation. He could tell Asa he’d hidden, dropped out of sight until he knew what was going on. He could say Gerry’d gone crazy or that the African had made a grab for the cash. Whatever he was going to say, he had to say it now. There was a line and he’d be crossing it soon. Whatever he intended, he’d have to face up to it and either get back in touch with Asa or admit to himself he was stealing the money and the drugs.

  He hadn’t even opened the cases. Usually Asa told him what to do and where to go, Gerry was right about that, but now maybe he’d take the money and run. Asa had dreams of big things, but they were his dreams. Where would he go with the money? What would he buy?

  A door opened in a house and a woman came out with a puppy on a leash. She was tall, in her late teens, maybe, wearing a green fleece and expensive-looking boots with tall heels. The puppy was white, some kind of retriever or something. Her eyes flicked over the beat-up Pontiac as she turned, scolding the dog, who nipped at her heels so that she laughed and danced a few steps and then took off jogging down the street, her boots making a clopping noise on the bricks.

  He would like to talk to her but didn’t know how. He could talk to girls on Frankford Avenue, dancers and neighborhood girls from the places he got drunk and did lines off the bar with his friends. He’d get pictures of himself with girls on a beach, but he’d never been out of Philadelphia except down the shore. The last time was a year ago, with a girl whose name he couldn’t remember when they went to see Shakira at the Taj. Asa had gotten him the tickets. She’d been appreciative, but distant, and blown him in the high-rise parking lot afterward and then gone quiet, retreating into herself so that by the time they got home he’d been glad to see her go.