The Wolves of Fairmount Park (2 page)

Dogs began to bark then, first one, close by, then others, blocks away, and he remembered his mother telling him when he heard the dogs at night it was the wolves, the wolves in the park that had never been caught and never would. She'd lean over his bed, her breath sweet with wine, swaying drunk and her eyes on fire, and afterward he would lie awake for hours and listen for them, see them moving in a line down the trails in the dark woods, silver and black under the moon and their teeth snapping, bone white.

An hour later, Orlando was on the street, watching the frantic light show of ambulances and cop vans, the families clumped at the curb (ready to go at any hour, empty eyes drawn to the dancing lights, surging at the TV cameras like fish hoping to be
fed). He hung back, wanting to observe but not be observed, still rolling with the dope, the dwindling chemical jolts becoming a music that moved him along the river of black road.

He had been a student at Temple, but he floated away from that like the last man from a sinking ship. Let it all go when his mother, Maire, turned up dead, wedged behind a Dumpster off Oregon Avenue. His mother finally gone, he walked the streets and fed his growing habit, bumped along in the current like a stick in the black rainwater, and wasn't it all so terrible and grand? Some nights he could hear the throb and hum in his legs and chest, while he stood under the last working light on the block, his slight black form outlined in white.

Now he stood and watched the uniformed cops clumped by their cars, the detectives with their badges out and huddled by the bright splash of blood on the steps of the house Orlando knew was a dope house run by some Dominicans from Kensington. As he got closer he saw the bullet holes in the front door and a kid in a blue jacket using chalk to circle a bright shell casing in the street. Another cop, a young Hispanic guy in plainclothes, bent close over a bunch of glassine bags and frowned, then looked up and said something to an older guy wearing nylon gloves and working a pen in his hands, clicking it, twirling it in his fingers, clicking it again in a way that Orlando found hypnotic. There was a low, buzzing hum and one of the TV crews turned on one of those intense blue-white lights that Orlando knew was called a sungun, and he fished in his leather jacket and put on his shades.

He saw one of the uniformed cops narrow his eyes and then bend to the ear of the young Hispanic detective and point out
Orlando and whisper something. Shit, what was that about? He turned then, slowly, as if his attention had been caught by something back up the street. He began to wander away, his head down, when he heard someone shout behind him, and then he started to run.

He kept close to the line of cars, running hard for the dark at the end of the street, whipping off the sunglasses and holding them in one balled fist. The circling lights of the ambulances and cop cars played in the wet trees and across the houses, the world going red and black, red and black. He hadn't run flat out in a long time and felt it as a burning in his chest and a hot line in his flank, and his jaws hung open and wet like a dog's.

He had loved to run as a kid, but that was a long time ago, and he didn't seem to be getting anywhere. He felt every step, his boots hitting the street with a painful smack that rattled his knees and jarred his head. At the end of the street he grabbed the bumper of a sagging Olds, bent double, and vomited hot bile into the shadows, hearing now the easy stride of the young cop, the tap, tap of his small feet, and he braced himself for the flashlight so when it snapped on he was ready, a grimace pressed into his face and his eyes screwed up, and the cop said his name while Orlando waved the light away and nodded, thinking,
Shit, shit, it was going to be a good night, and now what?

Now the cop was saying, “Orlando, man, why you running from me?”

Orlando heaved, his throat too burned to talk, but he stood upright and managed a shrug, like what else was he going to do? It was the game, like cowboys and Indians. Junkies and cops. You chase me and I'll run.

“Orlando, isn't Brendan Donovan your brother?”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why? Is he or isn't he?” With that exasperated cop voice, tired from listening to dipshits lie all day. His brother had it, too, that voice.

He began to put it together, the lights and the splash of blood. “Did Brendan get hurt? Is that what this is?” Making a big sweep with his hands, taking in the lights and the cop cars and the news vans. Feeling guilty now he had run. And his brother (half brother, Brendan was always quick to say) lying in a hospital, or worse?

The cop cocked his head, moving the light over him, and Orlando wondered how he looked. Black leather jacket, black jeans hanging off his skinny ass, his pale skin even whiter now than usual. His pupils tiny as pinheads in his face, his white-blond hair growing out in spikes and barbs from when they'd cut it when they had him up at PICC, the prison in Northeast Philly.

“No, Brendan's okay,” the young cop finally said. “His son's been hurt.”

Orlando's mind raced, picking things up and dropping them. Trying to remember the last time he'd seen his nephew, Michael, thinking of him as a little kid, but he'd be what, a teenager now. Fourteen? Something. His face was hot, processing all the guilt of being banished from his brother's life since the second time he'd been arrested, coming out of a store on South Street where he'd shoplifted a dozen hats while Zoe flirted with the kid at the counter. Having trouble even calling up his nephew's face. His nephew. Jesus.

“Michael? Michael was hurt back there?” Knowing he must sound like the dipshit junkie he'd become. His head steaming with the effort of calling up his own family, the gears and belts in his brain slipping while he blinked into the flashlight.

The cop shook his head, and Orlando dropped his gaze. He wanted to say,
I'm not just this. I wasn't always this.
He said, “Get that fucking light out of my face and tell me, is Michael okay?”

Kathleen Donovan sat in the chapel, balling Kleenex in her hand and looking at the tiny stained glass window, wondering at the compact, utilitarian version of faith represented by a chapel in a hospital. A couple of benches that stood in for pews. On the blond paneling in the front of the room, a design like a star that might suggest a cross. The same scuffed linoleum that ran through the corridors. What kind of generic God would hear your prayers here? Faceless, nameless, demanding nothing, offering some kind of bland good wish for a speedy recovery, maybe. This was not the God she knew from grade school at Holy Cross. The God of Holy Cross was a jealous and an angry God, full of judgment on the unrighteous, or even the lazy and unwary. His agents were bitter and frustrated nuns and snarling priests whose hands were stony and quick to mete out punishment. Whose tongues were as sharp and wounding as their hands.

Whose presence did she wish for now? From which God did she seek mercy for her son, bleeding down the hall in the
ER, his face swollen, his eyes blackened? Dear God, she pleaded, dear God, but who was watching? The bland and nonspecific deity of this small room off a busy hallway, or the wrathful ghost of the hard stone church at Holy Cross? She worked the piled Kleenex in her hand like a rosary and thought again that she had always expected this night, the emergency room vigil, the tense faces of the cops, the practiced concern of the Captain, but in her mind it had always been for Brendan. She had spent so much time and imagination on warding off the image of Brendan shot down on some North Philly street, she felt blindsided by the news that it was Michael. She had wanted to argue with the cop who had called the house, say, no, it was Brendan found unconscious on the curb on Roxborough Avenue, surrounded by broken glass and cellophane wrappers, like something thrown away. No, not her son, Michael.
You mean Brendan, my husband,
she told the kid who had called. That's what she had been preparing herself for all these years. Then it was Brendan ringing through, and when she heard his voice she screamed.

They had had to get someone to unlock the chapel, which wasn't usually open unless the priest from St. Josaphat was there to say Mass. Brendan's partner, Luis, had looked at the Dominican janitor when he'd said that, and said to him in Spanish that he could get the goddamn keys or pack for fucking Santo Domingo, forgetting as he always did that Kathleen spoke Spanish, too.

Wedged into the narrow pew now, she looked over at Francine Parkman, the mother of the other boy shot down on the curb on Roxborough Avenue. She was small and dark, with a brown
line for a mouth and eyes with shadowed lines under them. Italian, or Puerto Rican, Kathleen thought. She had a trim waist, an expensive sweater that looked like cashmere. She looked, Kathleen thought, like money. Did that matter now, in the weak green light of the chapel? Were they supposed to be sisters now their two boys were shot down on the same street corner in the middle of the night? Already she had seen the way George Parkman had looked at them when the Parkmans had come in, their faces white, their eyes wild. Something ungenerous in the line of his mouth. Suspicion that Michael had gotten George Jr. into some kind of trouble?

The door opened and they both turned to look, their bodies as tense as if they were condemned prisoners, wondering which of them would be the first to be taken out to some bullet-pocked courtyard. There was the doctor, his hair prematurely gray, his eyes infinitely tired, and behind him George Parkman, his expression blasted and empty. Kathleen turned to look at Francine Parkman, who threw up a hand in self-defense as they got closer. That's what she would remember later, that small hand, sprinkled with minute brown freckles, the nails dark as blood, shuddering with the effort of holding back the terrible thing coming.

Kathleen watched them go, their wracked bodies bent, their shoulders heaving, and wanted to ask,
Is he your only child?
It was insane, she guessed, but it was in her mind that they should have had more children, she and Brendan. That having one child had been a mistake. That to have one child was a kind of bet with God about the goodness of the world, a hope too fragile to hang so much happiness on. Hadn't Brendan come home every
night, his eyes full of the ways that people let each other down, slid backward into darkness? Their terrible needs and endless rage and desperation imprinted on his face, a terrible bone-deep knowing that soured his expression, rearranged his features so that when he walked in the door at the end of his shift, sometimes for a moment she didn't know who he was.

Brendan Donovan couldn't find any place to be. He couldn't stand to be in the room with Michael, hearing the buzz and clack of the machines and wanting to touch his son's swollen face and trying to keep from breaking down. The place was full of cops, his friends and guys he didn't even know, and there was comfort in that, but already there were questions about what Michael and the Parkman kid were doing in front of a dope house, and if there was one thing Brendan did not want to be it was the cop with the bad kid. He'd seen it, they all had, but that wasn't how it was, and if he tried to tell them, grab one of the detectives and put him straight, he'd just get pissed off and forget himself and want to put a fist in someone's eye.

He paced, getting to know a little route from the ER to the front desk to the vending machines. He had just turned to walk back down the quiet hallway from staring at the candy bars he didn't want when he saw the Captain moving up the hallway, nodding at him and talking out of the side of his mouth to a young Spanish kid in a rumpled suit who was carrying a notebook, and Brendan had to think about that, about his kid's name and his name and Kathleen's in the chicken scrawl of a
homicide cop's notes stuffed in a file somewhere, and their life reduced to a shorthand narrative passed from the cops to some bored ADA and then the newspapers and TV to circle back to him through family and friends.

“Brendan.” The Captain put his hand on his arm, and Brendan nodded but couldn't say anything. “I'm so sorry. How is Kathleen?”

He cleared his throat and pointed down the hall toward where he'd last seen her, in the chapel with Francine Parkman. “She's hanging in.”

“I can't imagine.” The Captain was tall, big across the shoulders, going bald now. He was a tough fucker, and the guys all liked him. A Jew among Irish and Italian Catholics, a guy who almost never raised his voice, almost never sounded like brass usually sounded, like they were trying to shut you down before you got a chance to say anything.

Now the kid was putting his hand out. Brendan wondered if he was Dominican—he reminded Brendan of guys he knew from the neighborhood. Wide but not fat, muscled in his arms, with skin the color of milky coffee and the close-shaved head all the young guys had now.

“Danny Martinez.”

“Brendan Donovan.”

The Captain put his hand on Martinez's sleeve. “Danny is Violent Crimes. He's the guy who put that Derrick Leon and his friends away.” Brendan remembered Derrick Leon, one of those scarred, wild-eyed gunmen who came out of the drug trade once in a while, moving up fast by killing everyone he knew, and Brendan remembered he'd been locked up but didn't know
who'd done it. This Martinez kid looked about twenty-two, and something about him was more bookworm than street cop. Little wire-rim glasses and a way of taking the room in from the corner of his eyes, though you never knew. The Captain turned back to Brendan.

“What are the doctors saying?”

“They're waiting on X-rays. He's in, he's unconscious, but they're saying he's got eye movement and that's a good sign. He's got a . . .” Brendan had to clear his throat again. He tapped his right temple. “He got hit in the temple, but it looks like the bullet didn't penetrate the skull.”

Martinez cocked his head. “Small caliber, like a .22 or something?”

Brendan shook his head. “Haven't seen the slug, but maybe. Maybe it was a misfire or ricochet or something.”