Canary (7 page)

Wildey drives his unmarked car back to Ninth Street and of course there’s a car squeezed into his former space. He pulls into another spot around the corner, then hustles back to the alleged Chuckie Morphine house. The air is freezing this morning, which is good. Nothing better to wake you up. He’s been up for what … a full day and a half now? He tells himself he’s just going to take a look, satisfy his curiosity, then head home for a few hours’ sleep before the family dinner.

There are wooden shutters covering the first-floor window. The front door has a diamond of cloudy glass set in the upper middle, impossible to see through. Wildey walks around the block, counting houses as he goes. Around back there’s an alley, and he counts them down until he finds the right house. There’s a six-foot wooden fence, but the lock is simply a hook-and-eye latch, and Wildey uses a pen to unhook it and opens the fence door a few inches. The yard is overgrown but otherwise clean. No sign of lights or life up in the windows. Guess everyone’s sleeping it off after a big night of sales.

Go home, Wildey. Get your rest.

One minute, one minute.

The D.A. in his head keeps after him.

You got probable cause here, Officer Wildey?

Probably, Mr. D.A.

That’s no answer, Officer.

Best you’re going to get.

Because Wildey
has
to look. He’s already opened the door. It’d be a waste not to step inside. He creeps through the tall grass, keeping one eye on the back door and windows and the other on potential hazards in the yard. Stash guns, tripwire, dog shit.

The back stairs are wooden and creaky. Wildey eases up them, scanning the other yards for curious neighbors. He always forgets he’s not in uniform, and a black man trespassing in a yard is the kind of thing that might get some jittery people in this neighborhood calling 911.

The back door is solid, no windows, but the blinds are up a little in the back windows. Wildey holds the post, leans over, takes a look inside. The kitchen is stripped, empty. Remodeled and painted, but there is no fridge, no oven, just the places where the appliances would go. What the fuck was this? Did he count houses wrong? No. This was it. He sees through the front of the house, and there’s the same diamond-cut window in the door, the shutters closed. This house is empty. Then why were people coming and going all night last night? An open house? No. You don’t just duck into an open house for five minutes. Besides, college kids like Skinny Boy aren’t in the market to buy houses. There’s no real estate signage. This house is just a shell. Unless he somehow spooked them last night. Maybe Skinny Boy called and warned them, and they cleared out quick.

Sorry, Honors Girl. You’re going to have to help me find them.

Marty Holland’s mom is sort of buried in the basement.

She thought burials were the most horrible thing ever and made Dad swear that, in the unlikely event of her death, her body would be cremated and not injected with chemicals and then locked in a box six feet below the surface of the earth. Dad would smile and deflect Mom’s death wish with statistics about how husbands usually died before their wives. But Dad turned out to be wrong.

A month after the funeral her ashes had been spread near Coronado Island, one of her favorite places.

What’s half-buried in the basement are Mom’s belongings, in a dozen plastic containers that have a harsh chemical smell. It clings to your hands even after a good washing or two. Dad couldn’t stomach the idea of throwing her stuff away, but he didn’t want to stare at it every day, either. So down into the family den/laundry room it went. The containers—purchased and packed by Dad in a frenzy one humid Sunday afternoon in early June—sat in the corner where a television and cable box might go.

Marty started spending a lot of time down there after that. Cooler in the summer, sort of warm in the winter, with the space heater going. Dad leaves him alone, like he usually does. Sometimes he just needs to open a container and pull out one of his mom’s sweaters—she was always cold—just to make sure her scent is still there, and not overwhelmed by the plastic smell. He knows that every time he opens a container a little more of her disappears. But Marty can’t help himself. It’s like he has to reassure himself that she was real, after all.

For the millionth time, he wishes she were here now.

Not just because it’s Thanksgiving. But because Mom was always the one who explained things to him. Not the case with Dad … or, now, Sarie. Ask Dad a question, almost any question, and you’ll most likely hear a brush-off.
Don’t worry about it. Wasn’t talking to you, Marty. Nothing to do with you, Marty, don’t worry.

Yeah. Don’t worry. Sure, Dad.

Sarie used to be like Mom, the kind of older sister who didn’t (usually) think he was a jerk face and would take her time talking to him. Ever since she started college, though, she was acting more like Dad.
Don’t worry, don’t worry.
The constant refrain. Which is why Marty knows it’s useless to ask either one what happened between them this morning, because he would be told it was none of his business and not to worry about it. Something was clearly wrong, though. He’d have to figure it out for himself.

He opens a container, reaches in, touches one of his mom’s old sweaters. Wishes for a moment, then tells himself to stop being such a baby.

Wildey lives alone in a bad neighborhood.

He used to date someone who lived in a much better neighborhood, and for a while he considered moving. They seemed to be on the same page right up until she turned to the kid page, and Wildey realized he had no choice but to close the book. For a while he tried to talk himself into it, but he knew himself too well. He knew what he wanted, and kids didn’t figure into that. Wildey’s not about to leave this neighborhood. Not before he has the chance to save it.

So this Thanksgiving evening he’s off to pick up the one member of his family still alive and at liberty: his great Auntie M. The M is for “Margaret.” She doesn’t remember her name most times, nor does she know who Wildey is. Sometimes there’s a glimmer of recognition, but there’s never much follow-through. Wildey can’t blame her. Auntie M. turned a hundred over the summer—they showed her grainy photo on the
Today
show and everything. She’s survived improbable odds. Wildey just wishes she was one of those centenarians who remembered every blessed detail of their lives, down to what they ate for breakfast on the first day of kindergarten.

“Hi, Auntie M.,” he says in the lobby of the retirement home in Germantown, about twenty minutes away from his house.

She looks at him and smiles but it’s pretty clear she has no fucking idea who he is. Her mind constantly reboots itself. To Auntie M., Wildey is just someone who’s going to wheel her somewhere for a warm meal. Maybe down the hall. Maybe somewhere outside. Can happen either way. It’s just nice to move somewhere different. She isn’t very hungry.

This is fortunate. Wildey is not much of a cook.

Somewhere hidden in the shadows and mists and cul-de-sacs of Auntie M.’s mind is a past Wildey would very much like to recover. Her older brother was John Quincy Wildey—his great-grandpops and a hero cop, working the tough, booze-soaked streets of the 1920s. There weren’t many black cops working then; the trade was dominated by the Irish. But John Quincy managed to stand out, and was even once commended by the public safety director—a marine general and war hero—for his efforts battling bootleggers, pimps, and racketeers. Wildey didn’t hear the first glimmer of these stories until a year after he joined the force, when some oldhead asked for his name again.
Wildey, huh? Any relation to John Q.?

That offhand question sent Wildey to the central branch of the Free Library on Vine Street, where he dug up old newspaper clips from 1924, the year his great-grandpa joined the force. He spent the better part of a weekend pumping quarters into the microfiche machines, the homeless guys slumming around the tables, pretending to read the
Daily News
for the tenth time just to stay warm. Wildey printed out everything he could but still wanted more. So he bought an old bound volume of the
Philadelphia Record
on eBay, just to get a feel for the times—the old ads, the weird little stories, even the weather reports. The enormous slab of yellowed newsprint was already crumbling into fragile little flakes when it arrived. Turning the pages was an exercise in frustration. The past quite literally crumbled under his touch. Wildey had to Shop-Vac the floor under his kitchen table three times a day.

It all turned out to be true: Great-grandpops John Quincy Wildey was a goddamned police hero. Back then all the bad stuff happened in a downtown neighborhood called the Tenderloin, and John Q. worked its notorious Eighth District, which was corrupt as hell until that marine general hit town to clean things up. Wildey read the clips with a dizzy fascination. How did he not know this? Why didn’t anyone ever tell him this shit? Granted, only one article mentioned his great-grandpops by name (and probably grudgingly, because, you know: black folk). But there were plenty of stories about the Eighth, and Wildey knew his own blood was mixing it up in those streets back then.

Until he started researching, all Wildey knew was that his grandfather, George Wildey, had been a cop until the mid-1960s, when he was gunned down in the line of duty. He left behind a boy, George Wildey Jr.—Wildey’s own father. Whose name had made the papers, too. For all the wrong reasons.

Knowing that John Q. existed changed everything for Wildey. Before him came two hero cops and one bad egg. That tipped the scales considerably.

So Wildey made sure to have meals with Auntie M. as often as possible, hoping that something would break loose in her mind and she’d be flooded with memories of her much older brother, cleaning up town when she was just a twelve-year-old black girl growing up in the slums of South Street.

“I remember this house,” Auntie M. says now, as her great-grandnephew wheels her up the cracked sidewalk toward his concrete front stoop, which has partially sunk into the sidewalk.

“Do you, Auntie M.?”

“My bedroom was in the back.”

Wildey smiles. Her bedroom was most definitely not in the back. She has never lived here. Wildey bought this place three years ago—cash. Cost less than a used car. He almost didn’t want to bring Auntie M. here—she shouldn’t have to deal with a block as grim as this on Thanksgiving. But her retirement home didn’t have a kitchen, and spending Thanksgiving in a restaurant just wasn’t the way it was done. You have to cook at home.

Dinner tonight is a turkey breast roll, closer to lunch meat than actual roast bird. Stuffing comes from a box, which Wildey screws up anyway. Yams from a can. Green beans from a can. Cranberry sauce from a can. Olives from a can. The olives are the appetizers. Olives and crackers, which come from a box. They’re not very good, and Auntie M. wisely avoids them. Maybe the gourmet part of her brain is still functional, as she instinctively seems to know to avoid processed food.

“Want some wine, Auntie M.?”

“That would be lovely.”

The funny thing about Auntie M. is that she isn’t one of those out-to-space centenarians. Her eyes are young and fix on you like tractor beams. She’s aware of everything that’s unfolding around her. She just can’t access the memories anymore. As if her brain sealed off those old rooms and passages, convincing her she didn’t need them anymore, that it was enough just to keep a handful of rooms in the house warm and lit.

“Tell me about your older brother again,” Wildey says, handing her a glass of pinot noir he picked up on the sale rack at the state store. Somebody told him that if you paid more than eight dollars for a bottle of wine you were a fool. Most of the people who bought pricier vintages lacked the capacity to taste the ultra-subtle differences. Wildey didn’t care either way. He only bought the wine because of the holiday.

“Who?” Auntie M. asks.

“John Quincy,” Wildey says. “Your older brother.”

“Oh, my John.”

The way she says it, it’s like great-grandpa is standing in the room with them. She’s addressing him, not summoning a memory.

Can she see ghosts? Wildey sometimes thinks so. (Hopes so.) But whenever he tries to play that angle, like he’s talking to a medium or something, Auntie M. looks at him with these big, accusing eyes.
No, you’re not going to get me to do that.

“He was a police officer, like me,” Wildey says.

“Oh, John. He was so handsome.”

“Tell me about him.”

“Oh, John,” she repeats, as if trying to conjure him up. If this is the case, she fails. And then forgets.

A few long moments pass before Wildey says it’s time to check on the turkey.