The Wolves of Fairmount Park

by Dennis Tafoya

  As they wandered away up Fifty-second Street he turned, reaching under his jacket to pull the iron from the loop of belt under his arm. He stuck it quickly under the piece of lath that was serving as a door handle and worked the pry bar back and forth, the old nails groaning a little and then slowly pulling free. He drove the bar deeper beneath the latch and popped the piece of wood off the door, and it clattered in the street with a noise that seemed to echo up the block.

  He stuck his boot over the piece of wood on the sidewalk and stood motionless, not even looking around him while he counted slowly to ten. Then he pulled the bar away from the wall and stuck it under his jacket again and forced the door open slowly on its rusted hinges. The door gave slowly and then stuck, and he squeezed through the small gap, scraping his chest on the rusted latch.

  He was in a narrow alley between two buildings. It was almost pitch black, inches deep in dented, rusted cans and broken glass. Halfway down the alley he had to scrape past a tree that had grown up over the years, displacing the wooden siding on the south side of the alley. He almost got stuck but levered himself up on the opposite wall and shimmied through the gap.

  There was a window on his right, covered by a loose metal grate. He lifted the tire iron and put it between the grate and the brick but was too low to get an angle on it, so he backed up, stepping up onto a brick ledge and putting one foot onto the wall behind him. It was awkward but gave him a purchase on the metal and a view through the window.

  He could see into the back of the store, a little room walled by cases of canned goods and detergents. An Asian girl, Korean maybe, about eight or nine, was sitting at a table surrounded by books. She was writing something, chatting to herself. There was a radio going on the table, and she sang along in a high, broken voice and rocking in time to the music, pointing into the dark corners of the room with her pen as if cuing an unseen audience. He recognized the tune, the one where the girl sings about her baby taking the morning train. After a minute a woman came in and put a small plate of something next to the girl, and the girl grabbed her hand to make her dance. The woman pulled back and gave the kid a stream of complaint that Orlando couldn’t make out, pointing to the books and turning to snap the radio off.

  The girl dropped her head and picked up her pen. Orlando’s legs started to cramp, but he kept himself propped upright though he couldn’t say why. He took the pry bar off the brick and held it. When the woman, who looked too old to be her mother, disappeared again, the girl got a book from under the stack and started reading it. It was a comic book, something with a lithe woman in flight on the front, wearing green and black, and the girl moved her finger along the frames, then closed it and looked at the cover. She turned and tried to position her body like the woman in the picture, fists up, legs cocked. She jumped up onto the chair, made flying noises, whooshing and zooming noises, spinning on the chair.

  He watched, his nose streaming, his stomach turning. He was truly dopesick now, and he put out a hand and saw it vibrate, a wild, theatrical shaking that rattled the fine bones in his knuckles. This was the start of something terrible, he knew, inexorable, a revolt in the provinces of his body that would spread generally until it ran away from him and he’d twist and writhe and wish he was dead. This was a moment, like standing in cold water up to his knees and watching a wave coming, building power and force as it came down on him. It wasn’t bad yet, but it was going to be, and he clutched the cool iron bar to his chest and watched the little girl on the chair as she spun and danced, her eyes closed, moving through clear air and clouds.

  He came out of a Baptist church on Pine Street with his arms full. He was making too much noise, he knew. The door stood open and he was moving back and forth between the church and the long silver van parked at the curb with FIRST THESSALONIANS BAPTIST painted below the windows. He dropped a small amplifier next to the speakers he’d already loaded and pushed the sliding door shut, climbing from the passenger side across the long front seat to the driver’s seat. He sat for a second, breathing hard, then lifted the iron and awkwardly banged at the steering column to open it.

  The van was nice, well appointed, and the engine was quiet as he moved along Pine Street getting the feel of the big thing. He drove south by a darkened school, zigzagging to put some distance between the van and the church. A cop car went by in the other direction, lights going, and he ducked his head and turned the van down the next street he came to. His arms jerked, making it hard to keep the van to tight circles on the turns, and his nerves were like plucked wires under his skin, radiating waves of pain as if he were being pricked everywhere, along his arms and legs, his spine. He was sweating, the fear of getting caught and the increasing need for dope merging so that he pulled hard to the curb, gripped by a wave of nausea. Orlando looked up and found himself in front of the hospital where he’d been born. The name was different, but he knew it used to be called Misericordia. He tried to remember what it meant, the name. He couldn’t now, but wouldn’t it be something about misery? Wouldn’t it just? He almost laughed.

  Orlando stashed the van and called Audie, who sounded glad to hear from him, even in the middle of the night. He’d said sure, he’d come down and take a look at the van and the stuff and get him a few bucks for it, and why didn’t they meet at noon down where the shit was stashed? Orlando said okay, a little disappointed, and wandered up to a squat on Arizona to crash with Arthur the vet and two hopper friends of his. The train hoppers were wiry little fuckers who talked to each other in an impenetrable code, and one of them showed Orlando a chain with a big padlock on it that he swung around his head, he said, whenever he felt threatened. He bobbed his head with the effort of spinning the heavy chain.

  “Don’t take it the wrong way. I’m just claiming my space, you know? You got to claim your space everywheres you go. Otherwise they get up on you and that’s how it all starts.”

  Arthur rolled his eyes at the display and told Orlando they were basically harmless if you stayed out of their way. He showed Orlando a room on the second floor with a space cleared for him to lie down and gave him a couple of pills from a stash he’d been hoarding, painkillers he’d scored from the VA hospital before he’d left the last time.

  When the pills began to work Orlando lay on some old quilted pads from a freight truck and closed his eyes. He couldn’t sleep, but he ran through the last days in his head and tried to sort out what it meant. He would try to hold it all laid out in front of him but he would lose it just when it all started to line up, and there was a buzzing in his ears and bright lines and flashes in his eyes as if he were seeing his own electricity, the power that ran him.

  Geo and Michael had gone looking for a girl, a prostitute who had been a favorite of Parkman Sr. They tracked her down a block from the house where she’d gone to bum money from Mia and Tisa, and then while they were all standing there they were shot at and Geo was killed. The cops said it was just drug war stuff, Green Lane guys shooting up the Tres Nortes, and that just made it bad luck. They were trying to help a girl who was pregnant and strung out. Messed up even before she saw the boys shot down on the street. Orlando had seen her a few days later down by Mexican Bob’s, and she was completely broken then. Talking to herself, wandering in a daze.

  So had it just been a kid who felt bad for a woman he thought his father had victimized? If that was true, how did he know who she was? Geo had the sex ads in his room, so he was definitely looking for a girl he knew was a prostitute. He worked at the homeless shelter, so maybe that’s how he knew she was messed up and pregnant, but how did he know who she was in the first place? The girl had said she had a date. Was that just bullshit because she was crazy or high? Or did someone make a date with her? A date to stand in front of a dope house and get shot at?

  However it had played out, the kid had died trying to do a good thing, right? He had found out his father was screwing this girl, and when she showed up at the homeless shelter pregnant and messed up and broke, he’d tried to find her an
d help her. He sold his camera to Ryan to raise money to give the girl, and got shot for his trouble. Then when Orlando had asked around about it, talked to a few people about what happened that night, he was cut off at all his corners. So somebody knew he was involved and didn’t like it.

  It made him feel connected to the kid, like carrying the little keychain he’d taken from the kid’s room. He wished now he’d kept the CDs he’d stolen instead of giving them to Audie and Franny for letting him get high with them. He touched his pocket and felt the hard outline of the little keychain with its lightsaber charm. The kid who watched movies about men with a code. Samurai and warriors and lonely dreamers who followed their own lights. It was worth doing, trying to know this. Trying to understand what happened to a kid like this. Even if it cost him something. Even if no one else wanted to know.

  It was about noon when Orlando got off the El at Girard, assaulted by the noise of the trains, the smell of piss on the landings going down. There was a fine, misty rain coating everything and fog that had eaten the expressway and all the buildings past the end of the block, so that there was that feeling of being inside even out on the street and the traffic noises seemed to come from everywhere.

  He’d parked the van in an alley off Hope Street and gotten a promise of dope and a little money from Audie, who said he’d have to meet him there and look it over before he came across. He wished he’d been able to score some more pills from Arthur, who was gone when Orlando had woken up after a couple hours of thin sleep, his limbs falsely reporting pricks and stings as if he were lying on broken glass. He wanted to go back up to Roxborough and talk to Zoe, straighten things out and explain, apologize, but he needed to be himself to do that.

  At the bottom of the stairs from the El station there was a PennDOT crew with the street torn up, one of those giant orange Ingersoll welding rigs putting out a painfully loud hum, a couple of neighborhood people watching a guy with a mask in the street hunched over a pit throwing a yellow-white glare, as if he were doing some kind of magic there. Orlando walked up toward Hope and stood in front of the little stand just under the tracks, counted change in his pocket, watched a woman buying lottery tickets and wanted one, just for the sensation of scratching the fine, ashy layer off the card and the little tremor of anticipation in the gesture.

  He looked up and down for cops, but saw nothing. A guy in work clothes ducked into Club Ozz, a strip joint that billed itself as the land of make-believe for gentlemen. A bunch of PennDOT workers stood around in orange vests, but he didn’t read them as cops. Across the street, a woman unlocked the door at the tattoo place next to a shuttered clothes shop.

  He retreated down the alley a few steps to watch for Audie. It was cold in the mist and rain, and he shook a little and zipped his jacket up. After a few minutes he saw Audie get out of a beat-up old Honda and stand waiting for the traffic to clear. Orlando hadn’t noticed the car pull up, and there was somebody else still in the car that he couldn’t make out behind the wet glass.

  Audie caught his eye and nodded, crossing in the middle of the block to where he stood. He looked serious; he kept his head low in the light mist and kept moving past Orlando down the alley, his hands in his pockets.

  “How’s it going, man?”

  Orlando moved to keep up with him. “Oh, you know. Anxious. I’m a little behind, you know?”

  “I hear that. Where is it?”

  Orlando pointed to where the van was pulled half up on a rotting curb between two derelict buildings, down where Hope looked like a wide alley. Weeds cascaded over a broken fence and pooled around the tires of the van like it had been there for years. Audie kept moving, going quickly down the alley without looking back. He moved around behind the van and pulled at the door, motioning Orlando over.

  “So what is all this shit?” He stuck his head in, and Orlando got a strange vibe, Audie’s voice too loud, his eyes all over the place except on Orlando’s face and acting busy with his head buried in the van.

  “It’s an amplifier, some speakers and cables and shit, from a church up on Pine. Everything okay there? Did you bring me anything?” Two pigeons wandered in the trash by the curb, and he thought how it seemed like the streets used to be full of birds and that you hardly saw them anymore.

  Audie said, “Yeah, sure. Just seeing what’s what.” He finally turned then, facing Orlando. Audie flicking his eyes over him and then up the alley the way they had come. Scratching at the bright tattoos on his arms, the dragons and kimonoed girls. The pigeons went up, lifting with a rattling noise, and Orlando took a step back and pivoted to look behind him. There was a guy moving down the street toward him, a guy with black hair and a ratty black raincoat whose face he knew but couldn’t place. He was out of it, not thinking right, and when he finally remembered he’d gotten high with the guy in the dope house and that he’d played the music Orlando liked so much, he smiled and pointed.

  The guy wasn’t smiling back at him. He was going into his coat, concentrating on him with an intensity that finally set off an alarm, but all Orlando could do was back up, hitting the wall with his elbows, looking fast at Audie, who was watching everything with a sick and fascinated look, one hand on the open van door.

  He was too tired and beat down to run, Orlando thought, too out of it, stretched too thin over too many days, and the guy, the Irish guy, was closing the distance with his hand in his coat, his face sad, his mouth turned down. The gun came out then, a small black pistol pointed at Orlando, and his chest moved up and down, an exhalation that was a sigh of resignation. Why would anybody shoot me? He thought this, forgetting everything that had happened and falling back on his own image of himself as a wandering eye that took in everything without comment or explanation. Forgetting that he had asked a lot of people about murder, and that his quest had gotten him shut down on every corner he had ever scored drugs. Forgetting it all and thinking himself harmless in the last moment.

  There was a squeal of brakes from Girard and a little red car stopped hard and they all turned to look, frozen. The car had blacked-out windows and there was music coming from inside it that got clearer as the passenger’s side window went down. The music was loud, hard drums and a foreign language, and Orlando cocked his head to hear it. Audie actually said, “Is that French?” Then the big automatic rifle in the window opened up, a sawing roar bounced around the hard brick surfaces of the alley, followed closely by the ringing of the bullets as they punched through the metal skin of the van, making a line of holes, a wild track running left to right and up, finally smashing the rear window before catching Audie in the side so that he made a noise, a hard plosive exhalation, and blood sprayed out of him over the weeds and the fence and the brick wall before he fell.

  The Irish guy swung, somehow not hit that Orlando could see, and he walked toward the car, Christ, how was that possible? Who walks toward a rifle, the yellow sparks and gray smoke going like in a movie? But the black-haired guy squared to the car like it was nothing and had the pistol up in front of him and was pulling the trigger again and again, an arc of shells coming over his right shoulder and his shots breaking the rear window of the little red car and making small black holes in the door.

  Orlando should have been running, but he stood against the wall and watched it happen. Audie lying on the ground, his legs jerking, his eyes open but unfocused, his hands plucking the air, blood on his face and coming out of his mouth. The Irish guy dropping the big pistol he’d been firing and going under his coat again. A kid, a skinny, tall kid with long braids getting out of the car, loosing a cascade of spent shells off the seat that chimed musically in the street. The kid unsteady, hurt maybe, leaning against the car door as he wrestled with a long belt of bullets that was draped around his neck. He was laying the belt into the gun and screaming something in French, hitting the bolt with his opened hand, when the black-haired Irish guy got another pistol free from the folds of his coat and fired twice fast, the bullets snapping through the kid so that he dropped his he
ad, somehow still holding on to the rifle.

  The car drifted forward a few feet, and Orlando could see the guy in the driver’s seat slump forward, his head hitting the steering wheel and setting off a long, loud blast of the horn. The Irish guy stood still, the pistol pointing straight out at the kid with the rifle, whose own head was down as if he were thinking hard or just acknowledging the damage the Irishman’s gun had done. The kid stood weaving, the rifle in one hand, the barrel pointing down and out.

  They all stood there for a minute, the car horn going, the shot-up guy in the braids trying to lift the barrel of the gun, and then Orlando took a step back, and then another, and then he was running flat out, past Audie and south down Hope Street into the fog. Past the beat-down empty factories with their grilled windows, across the old concrete-bottomed lots dotted with rain and through the rusted, gaping chain-link fences. He ran south and then west, losing himself in the flat, empty spaces before throwing himself down behind a hedge on American Street and staying there, prone and still, his heart going in his chest.

  The whole thing had looked simple to Angel. The way it should go. One junkie pointing out another on the street so Angel could shoot him. Asa Carmody wanted to tell him about it, about why it had to be done. This guy, Orlando, a junkie from around the neighborhood, was asking questions of mutual friends about their business, but Angel wasn’t interested. Angel kept shaking his head, holding his hand out for the burglar’s number, telling Asa not to confuse it with details about who said what. He would ride with the older junkie, the burglar from Fishtown, down to Girard to see the younger junkie, who was some kind of half-assed thief, and Angel would shoot the young guy and solve Asa’s problem.