“It’s George, man,” the guy says, and then it all clicks so hard Jim’s head spins a little.
Jesus.
The last time Jim saw George Wildey, Jr., it was more than ten years ago, in an interrogation room, back when Jim was working narcotics. Guy says he knows you. Yeah, Jim knew the guy. He did what he could for him, which wasn’t much. He had a few felony arrests for burglary, dope dealing, auto theft. There are two paths you can follow. Even as a kid, Jim knew George Junior here was headed down the wrong one, despite what his father did for a living.
“Hey, George,” Jim says. “I’m sorry, it’s been a while.”
“Yes it has, yes it has. Is that your oldest?” George asks, looking at Cary.
“No, no. This is Cary, my second-born,” Jim says. “Care, this is my friend George. His daddy was—”
“Grandpop’s partner,” Cary says, getting it.
George Junior gestures to the bunch of flowers leaning up against the wall.
“Shoulda thought of that.”
Jim shakes his head. “They’re for both of them. My pop and yours.”
George Junior nods at the beer in Jim’s hand. “Heh heh. That for them, too?”
“Yeah, I guess so. You want a pull?”
“Nah, man, I don’t drink anymore.”
They’re roughly the same age. In the short time their fathers were partners, they socialized twice—and both were very awkward experiences. Jim actually liked Officer Wildey quite a bit. His big bear laugh, his cool taste in soul, jazz, and even rock. Wildey was the guy who pointed out that the Stones pretty much ripped off “The Last Time” from the Staple Singers, and this always came to mind when the song came on the radio. Or when he played it at home, late at night.
His son Junior, though, is another story. Always has this look in his eye that’s part accusation, part confrontation.
“You still working narco?” Junior asks now.
“Nah. Moved over to homicide about ten years back.”
“Hom-i-cide,” George Junior says, drawing out the syllables as if holding the word up to the light to inspect it. “That’s good, real good.”
George Junior stands there shivering in the heat. He seems to want to lean against the wall but doesn’t want to appear weak. Jim wants to ask a lot of questions—where are you living, what are you doing, how’s your mom—but decides he really doesn’t want to hear the answers. Jim just wants to go home to his family and hope the visit next year is a little better. Maybe someone will finally decide to reopen the bar.
Jim pulls out his wallet, flips it open, reaches inside.
“Here.”
“No, man, I don’t need nothing like that.”
Jim shakes his head as he pulls out a white business card, emblazoned with a golden badge and his beeper number. Your basic get-out-of-a-gentle-scrape card. It wouldn’t help you with, say, possession with intent to sell. Or homicide. But it could make a traffic stop a little easier.
“Just in case,” Jim says.
George Junior takes the card, blinks. “In case of what?”
Every time Jim pulls up in front of his house he can’t help but feel disappointed. They bought their row on Unruh Avenue as their starter home in the late seventies when Mayfair was still solid—lots of guys on the force lived in the Northeast—and they had one kid. The loose plan was to stick around for five, six years, then bolt for someplace bigger. Maybe even out in the near burbs.
But those five years passed in a blink, and in the meantime came their second boy (Cary), and before long it was 1990, and they realized they’d been there a dozen years and now with a new baby girl in the house. Instead of moving they doubled down, building a deck off the back of the house to make up for the lack of a yard. According to conventional wisdom in Northeast Philly, once you put on a deck you were there for life. But who cares. In the warm weather, the deck is pretty much where they live.
Jim holds the door open for his widowed mom, Rose, whom they picked up after their visit to the shuttered bar. Rose Walczak still lives in the house she bought with her husband almost fifty years ago, but sooner or later she’s going to have to move. Not necessarily to an old-age home—she’s a bit too young for that—but to a small apartment, maybe, in a better neighborhood. This was a decent slice of Frankford for a long while, but lately it’s joined the rest of the city in becoming one sprawling high-crime area. Jim dreads taking the call someday that someone’s attacked her.
Rose will refuse, of course. This is her world, and all she knows. Part of Jim can’t blame her—and if he’s honest, that same part of him will be gutted to put the house up for sale. The ghost of his father still looms large there.
“DADDEEEEEEEEEE!”
Audrey comes thundering across the wooden floor. She’s five years old and crazy and strong as a bull.
BAM—a wrecking ball right to Jim’s upper thighs. He scoops her up and blows raspberries into the side of her neck, causing her to wail and squirm around in his arms.
Rose hands Claire her homemade potato salad (which the kids love) and beet salad (which they loathe). She kisses Staś on his forehead, then pats his girlfriend, Bethanne, on her cheek. “Such a pretty girl,” she says. Bethanne blushes.
Cary walks behind Rose, in her wake, and winks at Bethanne, his gaze lingering. He has a public crush on his brother’s girlfriend that sometimes borders on the inappropriate.
“Fuck off, Care,” Staś says.
Jim wanted to name their firstborn after his father. But Claire didn’t want him going through life saddled with a name like Stanisław, or even the shorter version, Stan. (“Stan’s the guy who fixes your plumbing,” she said.) So they settled on the alternate form Staś, pronounced “Stosh.” People mishear it all the time, call him Josh, which drives him nuts.
Claire wraps her arms around Jim’s burly torso and tucks herself in.
“Time to get your disgusting Polish meat out of my fridge onto the grill,” she says.
Jim whispers:
“I can think of someplace more fun than the grill.”
She pokes him again, harder this time, laughing despite herself. But she really does hate the smell of the kielbasa. Despite this, she already has the links cut and butterflied so all he has to do is char them a little. Jim buys kielbasa from Czerw’s, a small shop in Port Richmond that’s been grinding and smoking the stuff since the Great Depression. Pop used to shop there.
Claire doesn’t eat red meat—and even if she did, she wouldn’t eat pork—so this is something she only tolerates on special occasions. To Jim there’s nothing better than the aroma of the smoked stuff wafting out of the fridge whenever you open it. Claire more or less gags every time.
As Jim turns the links, Audrey is spinning around lip-syncing to her new favorite song, which is pumping from a CD boom box:
An older version of me, is she perverted like me?
Jim doesn’t know whether to laugh or burn the goddamned CD. Then again, his parents never stopped him from listening to whatever he wanted. Songs about how sweet brown sugar tasted probably went over Ma’s head anyway.
He twists the cap off another Yuengling, flips the kielbasa, tries to slow down time enough to enjoy the moment, because in this life moments like this are all too rare. His boys fighting, Audrey running around the deck like a spaz. All of them together, kielbasa on the grill, cold beer in his hand, Claire surprising him, slipping her hand around his chest, kissing him on the side of his neck. She’s happiest when everybody’s home. Jim has to admit—he is, too.
Audrey Kornbluth
May 7, 2015
Audrey Kornbluth, twenty-five, hasn’t set foot in Philadelphia for close to two years.
She also hasn’t seen her father, aka the Captain, in over three. Word is, he’s shaved his beard because it went gray. Which must be weird—she’s never seen him without facial hair. Whatever. Either way, he’s no doubt the same old grim asshole.
The flight from Houston to Philly took four ho
urs and change. She’s essentially trading one oppressively humid city (the fourth largest) for another oppressively humid city (the fifth largest—or is it sixth or seventh now? Audrey’s lost track). A wasted morning flying from one armpit to the next. All in an ill-fitting black dress with long sleeves that hug her arms a bit too much.
“Your grandmother asked me to remind you about the sleeves,” her mom texted her, although she speaks her texts so it came out Your grand mopper asked me to rewind you about the Steves.
That is, Steves/sleeves to cover her beautiful fully inked arm sleeves. God forbid a young lady should show off her tats in mixed company. But she complies, because Audrey loves her Grandma Rose. Or maybe she loves the idea of Grandma Rose more. Because in real life, she’s kind of a pain in the ass.
Outside the terminal the hot humid air smacks her in the face. Her long black hair goes whipping around like Medusa’s snakes. Her eyes tear up. She clutches her overnight bag—oh yes, this is going to be a short visit, guilt only buys you twenty-four hours, people—and looks for the limo. For all this hassle, she was promised a limo.
No limo.
Instead what she gets is a minivan. Cyanotic blue Honda Whatever, a few years old, dinged up here and there.
She gets a sister-in-law, the only one who talks to her, waving and yelling at her, hurry up, hurry up, we’re running late. Cheering kids in the back. Wait; they’re not cheering. They’re yelling.
This is going to be a nightmare.
She was promised a limo, goddammit.
So Audrey Kornbluth, grown-ass woman, wedges herself between two toddlers in the third row of a six-year-old minivan. A dirty finger violates the personal space around her face.
“Who are you?”
Patience; he’s an innocent.
“I’m your aunt Audrey.”
“No you’re not! Our aunt Audrey lives in Texas.”
“Psst, kid. See those buildings?” She points at the squat ugly gray terminals of concrete and glass that they are currently speeding past. “Behind them are these magical devices that transport you from one location to another. One of them brought me here from Texas!”
“Aunt Audrey is pretty.”
“You’re not pretty,” says the other toddler with the certainty of a judge delivering a verdict.
Audrey twists up her face and leans in close to her nephew.
“Yeah, and you’ve got peanut butter on your lip.”
Audrey pulls the seat belt across her torso. It locks up. She pulls again. It locks up. Yanks it hard. Locks up. Oh fuck it. If they crash she’ll be well protected by all the human meat around her.
“Who are you two firecrackers, anyway?”
Audrey is not being funny. She can barely keep her nieces and nephews straight. She hasn’t been home in close to two years, and her two brothers keep multiplying, as if they’re making a hedge against Armageddon. In the second row in front of her are three boys who she knows belong to either Staś or Cary, but she’ll be damned if she knows which is which.
One of her sisters-in-law turns around, placing her hand on the back of the driver’s seat. “You okay back there, Audrey?”
“I’m fine.”
“You look like Houston’s agreeing with you.”
“Yeah, it’s a cool city.”
“How’s CSI school?”
“Just great,” she lies.
CSI school is going very, very badly. In fact, the University of Houston is about seven days away from saying fuck you very much, pleasure taking your tuition money, good luck out there in the world of the desperate and unemployed.
It seemed like a fun idea at the time. Audrey grew up watching CSI—way before she was officially allowed to watch such gruesome things. Mom would have been mortified. Dad just smiled and looked the other way while his ten-year-old daughter was treated to the image of a human head being pulverized by a golf club or a rib-spreader going to work on a hooker’s torso. Audrey reveled in it.
And she continues to revel in it. The problem isn’t the science; the problem is the whirling chaos of her life that prevents her from doing the science. And universities tend not to care about whirling chaos. They want you to show up and just do the science.
The ride from the airport to the city proper takes you through an industrial wasteland of smoke and oil and machines and fire, then sports stadiums and a thousand billboards. Apparently there’s a mayoral primary this month, because the ads are full of names that Audrey dimly remembers. ABRAHAM. WILLIAMS. DEHAVEN. KENNEY.
Predictably, there’s a traffic slowdown near the stadiums.
“We’re going to be late,” says the sister-in-law who is driving. She’s not speaking to anyone in particular, but she’s especially not speaking to Audrey.
Her name is Bethanne, which, of course, Audrey mentally autocorrects to Bitchanne. She’s never done a thing to Bitchanne, except maybe breathe. But Bitchanne is married to Staś, her older sibling, and since Staś doesn’t talk to Audrey anymore, his wife follows suit. It’s kind of a shame because Audrey remembers when she was just a kid and used to look forward to Bethanne coming over. She’d play all the silly girly board games that Staś and Cary refused to play. Now she doesn’t talk to Audrey at all.
The sister-in-law whose skinny ass occupies the passenger seat does speak to Audrey, but delights in telling backstabbing whore lies. Which is far, far worse—Audrey would prefer the stony silence. The backstabber’s name is Jean and she is the reason her brother Cary drinks so much.
Speaking of…
“Uh, I thought there was supposed to be a limo?”
Jean turns, puts on a faux pout and says,
“The city only arranged for two per family, honey. There’s one for your dad, Grandma Rose, and Staś, the other for your mom, Will, Cary, and Gene.”
Audrey seethes as she does the family calculus in her head: okay, so the Walczak sons (Staś, Cary) get a limo ride, and meanwhile, Audrey’s stuck in a cluttered minivan with the peanut butter gang. But lo! It’s not just siblings in the limo. There’s Will, Mom’s newish boyfriend. And Gene, who is Cary’s son. Gene—the grandkid?—gets in the limo before fat ugly Aunt Audrey from Texas?
Then again, it makes sense, she guesses. She’s the adopted one. The only member of the family who doesn’t have almighty Walczak blood running through her veins.
“Don’t worry,” Jean says. “We’re going to meet up with them near Spring Garden Street before driving up to the corner.”
“Wunderbar,” Audrey says.
The corner is where, precisely fifty years ago, on May 7, 1965, Audrey’s grandfather was murdered.
Growing up, Audrey Kornbluth heard a lot about her grandpop Stan. Hero cop. Family man, only forty-one when he died, far too young, and so on.
She only saw Grandpop Stan when she was visiting her grandmother’s house and had to pee.
See, the only bathroom was upstairs, and Grandpop Stan’s black-and-white picture hung slightly askew on the wall by the staircase—one of three photos arranged in a triptych on the wood paneling along the shag-carpeted staircase. In order of ascension:
Her older brother Staś, who is pretty much a dick. Photo taken the day he graduated from the Academy. Audrey remembers that day clearly, which ended with Staś and Cary in a fistfight. (Is there a Walczak family gathering that doesn’t end in a fistfight?)
Next in line: her father, the Captain, taken the day he graduated from the Academy back in 1971. Young Audrey used to laugh at his longish blond hair, which is now long gone. A Study of Her Father as Early-1970s Hipster.
And finally: Grandpop Stan, taken the day he graduated from the police academy (you might be sensing a theme here) in May 1951. He had close-cropped blond hair, deep-set eyes, an uneasy smile.
Staring at you, whenever you needed to go pee.
She has to admit, it used to creep her out, the way his eyes seemed to follow you.
That’s Audrey’s memory of her grandfather.
The limos p
ull up to the corner under police escort, followed by the motley assortment of civilian vehicles. Uniformed cops salute stiff and precise as the vehicles pass. One whole block of Fairmount Avenue, from Seventeenth to Eighteenth, has been cordoned off to accommodate rows of folding chairs facing the pizza joint. A police flag covers the memorial plaques, with four roses anchoring each corner. Bagpipers wail in the background.
Audrey climbs out of the back of the minivan and steels herself for the painful and awkward hours to come.
Her father, the Captain, climbs out of the back of the first limo. And as rumored, he is indeed beardless. His big pink cheeks are freshly shaved and raw. He’s also about thirty pounds heavier. Blond hair so light it’s almost gray, cropped close to the skull. The man is a mountain, considerably heavier than the last time she saw him. Which was painful, awkward, shitty.
And wouldn’t you know it—the first person he locks eyes with is Audrey.
Even as he puts his sunglasses on, he continues to stare at her. No discernible emotion on his face.
Audrey flinches first and looks away. Oh god, this is going to be awful.
One by one, her siblings and Mom and boyfriend Will—and yes, even little Gene—climb out of their limos and gawk at Audrey. Wow. She actually showed up. Wonder what the over/under is on her appearance.
Mom is the first to break ranks to come over to give her a hug.
“You look good, daughter,” she says.
“The phrase you’re searching for is pleasingly plump,” Audrey says.
“I didn’t say that.”
“Ah, but you were thinking it, Claire.”
She always calls her mother Claire, while Claire refers to Audrey as daughter. It’s a thing they do.
As the bagpipers continue to wail and asses begin to fill seats, Audrey nervously scans the crowd for other familiar faces. It’s not difficult to tell the Walczaks from the Wildeys (duh), though the Wildey side is much more sparse. There will be empty chairs. Audrey considers sitting on the Wildey side, just for the hell of it. Why yes, I’m the white sheep of the family.
Revolver Page 2
