The Wolves of Fairmount Park (7 page)

“I saw Mary from Conrad Street today.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, she was in with her baby. Getting dinner for her and Marty.”

“Man, I ain't seen Mary in, I don't know.”

“Yeah, she looked good.”

He kissed her along her hairline, watched her eyes. “Tell me.”

“That baby was so pretty. Just couldn't stop looking at it, you know?”

Mary and Marty were a couple that used to hang out with them when they first started up together. Marty had gotten caught with a loaded gun the year before when he and a couple friends from East Landsdowne had staked out a liquor store in Atlantic County, down the shore. The DA had dropped the case, but it scared the shit out of him and he had gotten cleaned up and out of the life. Got a job detailing cars and married Mary.

Orlando talked around the unlit cigarette. “Mary's pretty. I guess Marty's a good-looking kid, too, so . . .”

“Yeah.”

She let the smoke go in billows from the side of her mouth, squinting, seeing things that were only inside her head.

“You want a baby, hon?”

“No.” She flicked away ashes. “I don't know. I want both, I
guess. This life and that one. Other things. I don't know. What do you want?”

The wind moved, and he reached under the blanket and snapped his jeans, then touched her tiny, rounded stomach where she was slick with sweat.

“To know, I guess. To know everything.”

“Everything you can know if you never leave East Falls?”

“Isn't that everything?”

“Seriously, have you ever been more than five miles from the Schuylkill River?”

“I was down the shore with my mom a couple times. Before she lost the house.”

“That doesn't count. Everyone's been down the shore.”

“You want to leave?”

“I don't know, Orlando. Some days I just want to know where we're going, I guess.”

“We're going down the Wawa on Ridge Avenue.”

“Do you promise?”

“With all my heart.”

He thought of his brother and the picture of Maire. He remembered standing in a closet with Brendan, a line of white light falling across his brother's face as he angled to see if their mother was coming. Orlando was pressed back into the darkest part of the closet with the empty luggage and some blankets with a camphor smell that burned his eyes. He could hear his mother stomping from room to room, raging. Slamming a book on a table, breaking things. He tried to guess what was being broken from the sound. A porcelain angel holding a violin, a lamp that was a hugely pregnant Mary on a pale donkey.

After a while it got quiet, and his brother held up a hand to Orlando to be still and slowly opened the door and stepped out, his eyes wary as an animal's, lifting his feet with silent, exaggerated care like Elmer Fudd in the cartoons sneaking up on Daffy Duck. He shut the door behind him, and Orlando burrowed deep into the junk in the back of the closet and listened hard for every squeak and rattle from downstairs. After a while Orlando got tired of waiting, of listening for nothing, and fell asleep.

George Parkman Sr. was drunk. He had carried a Scotch up to get dressed for the viewing and had barely touched it, but with nothing in his stomach and not enough sleep he realized the couple of sips had pushed him over the edge into that place where he seemed trapped in a heavy column of air that made his movements clumsy and slow and pushed down on his face so that he was afraid to speak for fear of slurring his words and drawing attention to his impaired state.

He sat there half-dressed, hating the thought of going to Donahoe's, but it was the funeral home his family had always called so there it was. The place was ancient, owned by aging bachelor brothers whose florid pink faces radiated a practiced and unnerving sincerity that George found it difficult to be in the same room with, never mind to negotiate the details of his son's viewing and funeral.

Christ, a viewing. That was Francine, to want the boy's ravaged body on display. When they were dressing, the silence punctuated only by the occasional strangled exhalation from Francine,
as if she were getting the news again and again, every five minutes, he had wanted to grab her arm and say,
Let's not do this. Let's just,
he'd say,
let's just take him out to Fernwood and put him in the ground, you and me, and leave the rest of them to go sit at the funeral home and talk to each other,
which was what they were there to do anyway. He remembered his old man stretched out at Donahoe's, couldn't stop staring at his father's sunken, waxy cheeks while his aunts chatted away with cousins they'd hadn't seen in a year and he didn't know what any of it was for.

He heard Francine stand up in a rustle of clothes and listened to the hollow clacking of her heels on the stairs going down and he realized he wasn't nearly ready. He was sitting on the edge of the bed with his tie crumpled in his fist and suddenly came to himself and looked down at it, the gray silk crushed in his hand. One shoe off and one on. He bent down and fixed his shoes, stood up and left the tie and went for another one, nearly identical to the first. He stood and looked at his side of the closet, hung with more than a dozen suits, a cashmere coat he'd bought six months ago and never worn. Business was good; the money rolled in. Francine had wanted to send George Jr. to a private school in Newtown, but George Sr. had said no. St. Vincent's was where he'd gone, it was good enough for his son.

He went to stand at the mirror and looked at his own hard face and broad shoulders and narrow eyes. He dropped his tie again and went quick into the bedroom and got a picture of the three of them that sat on Francine's dresser. He went back into the closet and stood still in front of the mirror, holding the picture up and scrutinizing George Jr.'s face and then peering over the picture at his own reflection.

The kid had one of those unformed teenage faces that made his father nervous. There was something so tentative about the kid, the way he walked and talked and sat on the corners of seats, his body bent toward the door and escape. It provoked George Sr., that way of being.
Sit still,
he'd wanted to say, as the kid jiggled his foot,
sit up and be here. Be a man,
that was what he'd finally say, when the kid would come to him with some fucked-up concern that he couldn't understand. George Jr. was always trying to explain some subtle problem about the way other kids looked at him or expected him to act that he didn't feel, and it bothered George Sr. to think his kid wasn't popular or good at anything physical and it made him nearly insane that somehow the boy thought his father wanted to know or could help, as if they were allies, when it was all George Sr. could do to keep from smacking the kid.

What he'd wanted, when he was honest, was a kid like Michael Donovan. George Sr. would sit in the stands at the hockey games, his own son nowhere in sight, off somewhere with that crowd that wore pale makeup and black lipstick, which at least George Jr. had enough sense to keep off his face. Michael would come off the ice and high-five his father and grab one of the other kids and bang on his helmet, his face open and good-natured and comfortable with being the kid everyone liked. The kid they looked to.

What were they doing together on that street, in front of that house? Was it some game, some taunt to his narrow-shouldered artsy son to be somewhere dangerous? Was it finally George Jr. trying to be in with the cool kids, and buying dope from a boarded-up crack house was what the cool kids were into?
He'd smoked dope when he was their age, everyone he knew had smoked dope except some of the Catholic girls, and some did pills, but mostly they'd all drunk beer, which he couldn't see George Jr. doing.

Now he held the picture up, tilting it one way and then another. He searched his son's face, traced the boy's slim hand where it lay across his chest, looking for himself. There was Francine's aquiline nose, a fullness in the lips that might have been from his mother, but where was he? Where was the evidence that at last this was his son? He got down on his knees and propped the picture against the mirror, trying to somehow get both his image and the picture of his son in front of him. He was sitting like that, pushing his eyebrows up and down, squeezing the bridge of his nose, his eyes streaming, when Francine finally came back in and found him there. She took the picture from him and stood him up and picked a tie out of the rack and put it in his hands. She looked at him and he looked down and wiped at his nose with his sleeve.

“You're crying for yourself.” She shook her head. “Jesus.”

“Why did this happen to us?”

“You never looked at him, practically. The whole last year, what did you ever do with him or say to him?”

“I didn't know, how could I know, Francine?”

“You wanted what? For him to be captain of the team? That wasn't George.”

“These are the things a man wants for his son. I don't care who you are. You want to see him out there, in front of people. Standing up.”

She shook her head and her eyes flashed and she slapped him.
He shook his head as if it didn't register, and she lifted her hand again but dropped it.

“You didn't deserve him. That's why he's gone.”

“A mother and her son and a father and his son, that's two different things. You can't know.”

She closed her eyes, the muscles in her face working, and then opened them again. “Get dressed.”

At the funeral home there were crowds, more than he expected. Teachers and kids and parents, clogging the narrow street in front of Donahoe's and standing silently in the back of the room, and George Sr. wasn't prepared, kept wishing he'd either stayed sober or kept going, pouring the warm, bitter Scotch into himself until he lay obliterated at the foot of the bed.

He had thought of his kid as an oddball, a loner, but there were a lot of kids there and only some of them were obvious losers. A girl with a shaved head and a fringe of hair at the front sat next to a big kid in a leather jacket and gripped his hand while tears rolled down her face. When he stared too long at them, the big kid looked in his eyes and cocked his head, calling him out. Jesus. Was this red-faced slab of a kid friends with George Jr.?

There were also nice-looking kids with open faces, though, kids who could be cheerleaders or jocks and who wore dresses or jackets and ties, and he wondered how they knew his son and why they were there. Was it some kind of admission of guilt,
the cool kids having somehow gotten George Jr. into something that got him killed on the steps of the dope house?

When he couldn't stand to be out in front of everyone anymore he walked back through to where there was an old-fashioned drinking fountain and conical paper cups, and he filled one and stood looking at some ancient print of Cork that was so dark all he could make out was there were cows in it, or maybe small, misshapen horses. He became aware of someone standing at his elbow.

He turned to see a big man in an ocher sport coat holding out his hand, and he stood for a minute before taking it. The man had red hair that curled in on itself like cheap carpeting and a pink face with broken veins across the bridge of his nose, and he smelled like something sweet that might have been wine.

“Mr. Parkman. I'm Abbott Collins.”

George stood there for a minute, trying to remember, and it came to him in a rush. The private detective his former partner Joe Reese had recommended.

“Right, right, sorry.” He shook the man's hand, his grip too tight. Something his father had passed to him and automatic now. The detective nodded.

“No apologies, Mr. Parkman. This is a black day.” The man had a strangled voice, as if he'd burned his throat. “All my sympathies, sir.”

“Thank you.” He wondered what was next. Joe Reese had said he'd put the guy in touch, but George hadn't expected the man to show at the viewing, for Christ's sake. “Joe said you helped with something. Employee theft or something?”

“Yes, that's one thing I've done. I guess he thought you'd want someone looking into George Jr.'s death. Someone besides the police.”

“The police.”

“Yeah, they're working it, to be sure, but there are so many rules for them, you know?” He moved in, too close for George, who retreated toward the wall and almost unseated the picture. “A cop, he has to ask permission for everything. Things that should take a week take two. Things get lost in the shuffle, in the paperwork.”

“You don't like the police?”

“No, no, not at all. I was a cop, eight years homicide. The cops are good, they just don't have, you know, the freedom of action that a professional would have.”

George pronounced his words with the drunk's exaggerated care. “Freedom of action.” He liked the sound of that. It called up images of this hulking fucker in his cheap coat slamming some smart-aleck kid against a brick wall in an alley and cutting off his wind until he told them who did this to his son.

“Can I ask, sir, what the detectives have said? What they've told you about Brendan Donovan, for instance?” The man turned and George turned with him to see them, the Donovans, Brendan and Kathleen, coming in now from the entryway and talking softly to some people they knew in the back of the room.

“They haven't said anything. I talked to the one guy, a detective, I can't remember his name. He wants to talk to me again. He didn't really tell me anything.”

“Nothing about Brendan Donovan, or his brother?”

George turned to the man Collins, had to keep himself from
grabbing his sleeve. “Tell me.” He searched the man's face with his eyes.

“Abbott,” said the man. “Call me Abbott.” He took a card out of his pocket and gave it to George, who crushed it in his hand.

“Tell me what about Brendan Donovan.” He let that get out louder than he intended, and the larger man took his arm and led him into a darkened corner. George craned his neck to keep an eye on the Donovans. Collins leaned in and cocked his head.