Brood (11 page)

“Me's down with that,” he says. “Back home?”

“I love the apartment, Rodolfo. But it's too crazy there.”

“Me's got a room, solitary.”

“I know. But it would be weird. Going in with you? Everyone on the other side of the door. Philip, Little Man, Suzie, Captain Blood.” She moves her fingers as she counts them, her long, slender fingers. She still does her hand exercises so she will be able to easily reach an octave if she ever gets the chance to sit at a piano again. “Boy-Boy, Bump, Lola. They all worship you.”

It makes him smile. Warmth oozes through him, like honey through a crack in the jar. He closes his eyes and pumps his legs, propelling the swing higher. It wouldn't take much more elevation for him to go up and over. Or maybe he will jump—the energy generated by the swing plus his own energy, he might stay airborne for five seconds. He feels a cooling breeze on his face. The night air fills his shirt.

He glances up at the tops of the trees; the flashing lights of a patrol car illuminate the leaves, and they tremble blue and white. Moments later, the cop car appears, and to show how seriously put out he is, the officer driving steers it over the curb, over the paved walkway, and onto the grass, stopping as close to the playground as he possibly can.

Normally, the crew can almost instantly disappear when they see the police—if a cop ever sees them, the boys and girls move so quickly that the officers on patrol don't even register their presence, or they rub their eyes and look at each other quizzically, as if they had perhaps just glimpsed a coyote. But tonight is different.

Tonight the children do not run, nor do they steal into the shadows.

Rodolfo looks at Polly. She has dug the tips of her shoes into the gravel to stop her swing. She holds on to the chains and looks back at Rodolfo, waiting for him to indicate what they should do next.

From the tops of the boulders, from the bushes and the Great Lawn, from the four points of the compass, the brood appears, in twos, threes, and fours, until there are twenty of them encircling the playground. Tonight they are unafraid. Tonight they have reached the end of hiding, and they have reached the end of wishing that people would leave them alone. Tonight they are no longer wishing they were just normal children living in apartments with normal parents. Tonight they are tired of being hated and they are tired of being hunted. Tonight they are curious what will happen if they simply hold their ground.

The two police officers are both out of the Central Park Precinct—their headquarters are just two minutes from here, the building bucolic and barn brown with raised white letters proudly displaying the precinct's name. One of the officers is Olivia Martinez, and this is her first month on the job. Her black hair is cropped short as a choirboy's, and she is slight—so slight that she struggles with the gear she must carry: the club, the cuffs, the flashlight, the radio, the revolver, all ponderously hanging from her belt. Her partner is John Kluggel, a tall, fleshy officer in his sixteenth year on the force. This assignment is a demotion for him; he was pushed down the pay ladder from sergeant to patrolman after ordering his ex-wife's husband's car towed not once, not twice, but three times. Kluggel has watery blue eyes that say
Don't bother me
and a large red birthmark on his cheek the size of a slap.

Kluggel unsnaps his holster, and though Martinez thinks this is absolutely not the way to proceed with what appears to be, after all, just a bunch of teenagers hanging around a playground, she does the same, aware that by not doing so, she would be tacitly criticizing Kluggel.

“Watch and learn,” Kluggel mutters to her as he approaches Rodolfo and Polly. (He says, “Watch and learn,” no matter what he does in her presence, from filling out an arrest report to ordering hazelnut coffee.)

Martinez, glancing upward, left, right, then left again, is not sure if John has failed to see the dozen or so others who now basically encircle them or if he has seen them but chosen to ignore them and go for the two on the swings.

There are two ways to approach someone: You can walk fast or slow. John used to favor the slow approach, liking the cowboy swagger of it and the implication that he had all the time in the world and was not in the slightest bit tense or concerned. The slow approach gave whoever you were going to stop and frisk time to get real worried. But fairly recently, he switched to the rapid approach, coming up to people with startling speed, moving as if powered by an engine at full throttle. He covers the distance between the cruiser and the bed of white stones around the swings in four or five vigorous strides.

“Get up,” he says to the two on the swings, resting his hand on the butt of his revolver. He waits a moment and then repeats his order, this time his voice at a thick boil. He is a loyal subscriber to the shock-and-awe theory of police work.

But the two teenagers appear serene. The boy seems to be smiling, and the girl adjusts her long braid so that it hangs down the very middle of her back.

“We's not bothering,” Rodolfo says. He almost sings it.

“You heard me,” Kluggel says.

“You truthin' on that, Mr. Bang-Bang,” Rodolfo says.

The girl grins, and Officer Martinez recognizes the quality of the smile, sees the expression of a girl who is just the slightest bit frightened but who has had the misfortune to lose her heart to a troublemaker. Some girls like to ride the emotional rodeo until they are bucked off and go flying, until they get gored, until they get good and used up. Poor saps…

John, like every cop in the Central Park Precinct, knows that there is a bunch of weird kids roaming the park at weird hours, leaving weird things in their wake—bones of small animals, discreet little piles of human scat—and being weirdly elusive too, so elusive that spotting one of them (and these two on the swings surely fall into the category of Weird Kids in the Park, as do the other knuckleheads slowly encircling them above) is tantamount to a hiker spotting Bigfoot. And every cop in the precinct also knows that the mayor has a special interest in these little fuckers, an interest that is as weird as the bones and scat that the cops and everyday citizens find in the park from Columbus Circle all the way up to Harlem. Weird because each time the mayor, that rich little snob strutting around Gracie Mansion, applies a little heat on the matter of the park kids, he also makes a point of adding that if any cops see someone young running with the pack, they'd better not harm a hair on his (or her) head. Now, why would Mayor Morris say that? Speculation is that the mayor's own missing kid is now one of them, but of course, whenever anything big happens (and Dylan Morris's disappearance is huge), there are always conspiracy nuts who manage to “see” a pattern of secrecy and cover-up. John's explanation for the mayor's directive is a lot simpler, having to do with the mayor's wanting to avoid the public-relations disaster that would inevitably come if they were to harm some ten-year-old. But these two on the swings? Old enough to know better, and old enough to kick the shit out of, if need be.

“We're not doing anything wrong, Officer,” Polly says. She doesn't say it pleadingly, just states it as a matter of fact.

“Show me some ID,” Kluggel says.

“I don't have anything on me,” Polly says.

Kluggel smiles like someone who enjoys the smell of rotted meat.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks.

“Just hanging out,” Polly says.

“Just hanging out?”

“Yes.”

“What about you?” he says to Rodolfo.

“Lick me's ass,” Rodolfo says, pronouncing the word
ass
as if it had an infinite number of
s
's at its end.

Kluggel looks over his shoulder, checking to make sure Martinez is doing her job. She is. She's just a few steps behind him. She looks scared, though. That does not help.

“Stand up,” he says to Rodolfo.

“Me's swinging here, Officer.”

“Stand the fuck up or I'll…” But he doesn't have to make his threat explicit. Rodolfo rises from the sling seat. Holding on to the swing's chains, he lifts himself off the ground, somersaults backward, and, after landing, throws his hands straight up in the air, a move he learned watching the 2004 Olympics on his parents' TV when he was a little kid.

Polly starts to get up too, but Kluggel yanks out his billy club as if it were a sword and points it at her. “I'm asking you to stay where you are, miss,” he says with an awful approximation of good manners. She sinks down again and Kluggel's spirits lift. He will never get tired of people doing what he tells them to do.

“Pat her down, Officer Martinez,” he says.

“You's not to do,” Rodolfo says; his long finger goes back and forth like a windshield wiper.

“You be careful here, son,” Kluggel says. “You don't want to go opening your mouth when you're in deep shit.”

“Oh, me's so scared,” Rodolfo says.

“Please stand up for me,” Martinez says to Polly in what is meant to be an apologetic tone.

With inexplicable speed, Rodolfo intercepts Martinez and tackles her, ramming his shoulder right above her knees. She is sprawled on the ground, blinking up at the thick night sky.

It gives Kluggel every reason in the book to unholster his weapon. But no sooner has he withdrawn it than Rodolfo wraps his legs around Kluggel's legs, and with a quick violent twist, as remorseless as the crack of a whip, he brings Kluggel to the ground.

A moment later, Rodolfo sinks his teeth into the fleshy pad of Kluggel's right hand. Kluggel had been pretty badly bounced around by his own father, had a tooth knocked out in a fight at Far Rockaway the morning of his senior prom, had been bitten by his mother's Chihuahua, had once had a cinder block dropped on his foot, was in a five-car pileup on the Hutchinson River Parkway five Thanksgivings ago, and had shot off the lobe of his own right ear while cleaning his revolver. But nothing he ever experienced prepared him for the pain of Rodolfo's teeth sinking into his hand. If the pain were a color, it would be the brightest red, and if it were a temperature, it would be 213 degrees.

It's not just the bite. It's the tearing, the grinding. The gun slides out of Kluggel's hand. A voice within him sounds a warning, though he can barely understand the words—it's like someone trying to speak over the howls of a hurricane. But it tells him that under no circumstances can he allow this boy to take control of the firearm.

“Sorry,” Polly says to Martinez, pinning her down. She doesn't appear to be using much force, but Martinez is unable to move. It's as if she were in a coffin; consciousness races and lurches, but the body is finished.

Rodolfo springs up and kicks the gun away, and it spins under some bushes. He spits what he has bitten off, a little jagged chunk of flesh, a salty spray of blood.

“You's sick in body and soul, Officer Bang-Bang,” Rodolfo says. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. He hopes he has not just contracted some crazy disease from the officer on the ground.

John may have had departmental difficulties—his career on the force has been far from exemplary—but he retains a kind of dedication, even a vague sort of idealism. And he has always been a real competitor. He is dizzy with pain, but he is also determined to bring these kids in—and now he has something real to charge them with, something that will 100 percent stick. Cradling his wounded hand, he struggles to his knees. He glances back at Martinez. Useless. And then at his car. Too far away. He hopes against hope that another patrol car will come gliding by. Or anyone, really. Anyone.

He resists the temptation to look at the wound on his hand—it will only make everything worse. It's taking him longer than usual to get on his feet. One foot is planted, but his weight is primarily on his knee. Okay, on three. One—

That's as far as he gets. The wild boys and girls of the park come swarming from every direction. They plow into him as if he were a tackling dummy and it's the night before the big game. He ends up on his stomach, his face pressed into the pebbles. The little white stones jam into his nose, enter his mouth, press into the lids of his tightly shut eyes. He is helpless.

He hears the boy on the swing yelling at the others, telling them to cut it out, slow down. “We's okay, we's okay,” he shouts. “No more! Take it easy.”

But it doesn't feel as if any of the others are in a state of mind conducive to taking it easy.

What follows is an evisceration beyond anything anyone ever imagined, a vicious, savage devouring of his flesh and his bones, and the extinction of his life. Perhaps the horror of it can be inferred by two and only two moments at the end of John's life. The first is the moment of hope he experienced as the brood piled on him, the hope that there was something playful in their intent. Their heads, their knees, their bony chests, all knocking into him—monkey pile on Johnny!

The second moment is later, maybe three minutes into the attack, after they have rolled him onto his back or perhaps after he managed to roll onto his back himself. By then he is almost completely overwhelmed by the physical pain that is being inflicted on him—the tearing of his flesh, the twisting of his limbs. In an instinctive move to defend himself, he takes a wild swing at the blur of bodies, a real roundhouse, delivered, he thinks, with enough force to dislodge and perhaps knock unconscious at least two or three of them. But nothing happens. He doesn't feel the impact of his fist against…anything. No one says
ow;
no one reels back. The punch has not been thrown. But why not? And then he sees why not…the arm he thought was going to deliver the blow is not attached to him. It has been yanked clear out, and now one of those fiends who lives inside the darkness has it in his dirty little hands and he raises it above his head to show it to the others.

Rodolfo has given up on trying to get them to stop attacking the officers. He stands to one side with Polly, noting which ones are most out of control, which ones are going at it because they are being led by the hungriest and angriest of the crew, and which ones are simply watching. It's information he needs to determine whose blood gets drawn and sold and whose behavior is so extreme that their blood would simply be too dangerous on the open market.