The Wolves of Fairmount Park (20 page)

Angel stood in Hannah's small living room in the middle of the night. His shirt was off and he'd pulled his jeans over his skinny hips. He looked back in through the open bedroom door to where she slept, her yellow hair splayed out over the pillow. She screwed up her features and muttered something in German. Her half of an argument playing out in her dreams, he figured. A mother or father and some argument she could never win, no matter how she laid it out in her head every night.

When he first came over he used to write postcards to his mother, long dead by then. He'd been a strange and a lonely kid, and he'd swiped a handful of postcards from a store down on Market near the river for no reason other than the owner's back was turned and there they were. At night he'd lie on the floor by the oblong of light coming under the door to his room, forming each letter with painful slowness. He'd start each one
Dear Ma,
and he'd write a line or two about school, as if he were still going, or how kind the Devlins were to him, though he was terrified of them both and would stay away for days at a time. He'd leave the cards at St. Peter's in Fishtown, stuck between some votive candles in their red glass holders.

One winter night when he was seventeen Tommy Devlin had driven him up to Frankford and pointed out a garage where a roofing rig stood half out of the bay, the thing black with tar, and handed him a rolled-up newspaper and a heavy lighter. He'd wedged the paper under the tank and lit it and the thing went up, burning with a stingy blue flame and black, stinking smoke. Angel had watched it go up from the street, his thin raincoat gathered around him like a cape, and was standing there still when a guy came out and went for the hose. The guy was big across the shoulders, with curly black hair. He was wearing a purple robe flapping open to show thermal underwear and ripped work pants, and his feet were stuck in unlaced boots with lolling yellow tongues. The tap was frozen solid and the guy swore and kicked at it and one of the boots came off.

He finally took in Angel standing there, shaking in the cold. The guy screamed something at him and grabbed him by the arm, going up and down on the one boot. Angel dropped to his knees, pulling the guy off balance so that he flapped his free hand in the air and swore. Angel grabbed a piece of cinder block that had been used as a chuck for the rig tires and brought it hard up into the man's temple and the guy went down, blood springing from his head like a tap opened in the street. The man moaned as the rig slowly drifted into the road, burning tar dripping behind as it rolled. Tom Devlin honked then, one
long blast from the horn, and Angel dropped the block in the street and walked away without looking back.

He went home that spring, back to wander Belfast like a ghost. His aunt's house had been torn down to make way for a market and his friends were all scattered. He saw two little kids in Clonard in the shadow of the ragged wall they called the peace line, playing with a junked bike turned over, spinning the wheels. He asked where everybody was and they'd said they'd buggered off, and laughed a secret laugh to each other and told him he should bugger off, too.

He got a tattoo in Wellington Place, a wolf biting a sword and the words
NEITHER COLLAR NOR CROWN
. He had a picture he'd given to the girl at the shop, his father at eighteen sitting on a parked car, the same beetle brows, the same full lips, wearing a white shirt with one sleeve rolled up and the tattoo fresh and bloody on his arm. He'd pointed it out to the girl and apologized for the small size of the picture, but she'd said it was a design she'd seen before on some of the old-timers around the Falls and Shankill and she'd sketched it for him in fast strokes on thin white paper.

He'd gotten it in the same place as his father, his lower right bicep, and standing in Hannah's narrow living room he held it up to a small mirror on the wall near the front window. It was black in the weak yellow light from the street. On the left arm was a design he'd gone back and gotten the next day, before leaving again for Philadelphia. A cross with a flaming heart wrapped in razor wire. Below that were the words
BY KNIFE, BY GUN
and twelve tick marks in small neat groups. The last small mark was still fresh, surrounded by a penumbra of red.

.   .   .

Orlando got off the bus on Lancaster Avenue, pulling at a suit jacket Zoe had picked out for him from the Goodwill on Front Street. It was too big, but it made him look like he had shoulders, and he ducked to catch himself in the sideview mirror as the bus pulled away, turning one way and then the other, admiring the effect. Zoe followed and stood by him, pursing her lips. She was dressed in a white blouse and a dark skirt and had makeup on and pale lipstick that softened her features. He felt something, a flush of heat in his chest that he knew was guilt at seeing her looking like a young girl again. Which she was, or had been, before she'd met him.

She turned to him, opening a small makeup case, and rubbed her finger on a pad and then smoothed a pale line onto his brow to cover the bruises there. He caught her hand and kissed her fingers, and she smiled and shook her head. They walked up a long drive from the street, past a wrought-iron fence and wide fields of grass that were a wet, hypnotic green. Kids stood in clumps and couples, sweaters tied at their waists, book bags swinging. Ahead were redbrick buildings and old trees hanging over slate walks.

Orlando got quiet, so Zoe tapped the arm of a boy wearing a blazer and tie and asked him some questions. He pointed to where some kids stood around a girl with bright red hair sitting on the steps to one of the buildings. Her hair was growing out, but Orlando recognized her from the picture in George Jr.'s room. Marianne Kilbride. She wore a white shirt and a tie, red sneakers that set off her hair. When she looked up to talk to
another girl, Orlando could see thick mascara around her pale green eyes.

“Marianne?”

She looked up, her eyes guarded, and lifted her book bag into her lap as if trying to hide behind it. She looked from Orlando to Zoe, took in his scuffed boots and her cheap bag, and dropped her gaze to her own hands plucking at the strap of her bag.

“Are you reporters?” She lifted the bag higher on her lap and looked around her as if for help.

“No.” Orlando took in the jagged black lines she'd inked on her forearms when her sleeves rode up.

“There have been a bunch of fucking reporters. They ask you all these questions and they don't even listen to goddamn answers and then they put all this shit in the paper that you never said.” She looked at him fiercely, suddenly the girl in the picture come to life.

“I'm Michael Donovan's uncle.” He told her his name and put out his hand, and she shook it.

“You're the one, then? I heard they were on their way to see you or something? Did you see them? That night?” She lifted her small hands, looking from him to Zoe.

“No, Marianne.” He kept his voice low, conscious that other people were watching them talk. He saw a kid with a fauxhawk of moussed hair walk fast toward a parking lot at the side of the building.

Marianne Kilbride dropped her head. “Like it matters now. What happened to Geo. Like anybody can do anything.”

Zoe sat on the bottom step and tried to catch her eye. “We're trying to figure out what happened, Marianne.”

“I heard Michael was awake or whatever. What did he say?”

Orlando knelt down next to Zoe. “He's still in pretty rough shape. He doesn't remember much yet. He might not ever get it all back.” Somewhere a bell rang, and kids began to drift into the buildings. “Marianne, the cops think Geo was going to score in that house. Do you think he was getting high?”

She looked up and her eyes went wide, and Orlando became conscious of a shadow falling across his shoulder as a big hand grabbed his sleeve and jerked him to his feet. It took Orlando a minute to place the face—the big kid from the picture, holding George Jr.'s arm up and wearing a cap and gown. Now the kid had Orlando bent backward over the iron railing of the fence and was pushing him hard, squeezing the breath out of his lungs.

The kid's hair was shorter than in the picture and he had on a blue button-down shirt with the name ken over the breast pocket. His eyes were huge and black and his breath hissed in his nose, which Orlando could see had been broken and reset. A brawler, Orlando thought. He tried to get a purchase on the kid's enormous hand as it bore down on his chest, but he couldn't draw a breath and was starting to get panicked. He could feel the stitches at his shoulder cutting through his skin.

“Ken!” Marianne Kilbride snapped her fingers at him, like trying to wake a sleeper. Orlando looked over at her and saw her face change, a little thrill of fear in her eyes. There was a bright flash over the kid's shoulder and Zoe laid her straight razor against his throat. She had to reach up, tweaking his Adam's apple with the blunt edge of the blade.

“Calm down, go-tard. Ease the fuck up.”

“Jesus, Ken, will you settle down?” Marianne Kilbride moved
closer and put her small hand on the kid's huge bicep, and he seemed to register her for the first time and let up on Orlando's chest and blink as if coming awake. More slowly, Marianne put her hand under Zoe's and lifted it away from Ken's neck. There was a pause, and Orlando rubbed at his chest and flexed his back, feeling a knot where it had been bent back over the railing. Ken touched his neck and looked at his fingers.

“Jesus, everybody's so touchy.” The little red-haired girl shook her head, looking at each of them in turn. She pointed at the big kid. “Ken, man. What the fuck?”

He threw up his hands. “I was up the street at the Dunkin' Donuts and Ryan called me and told me they were here. Didn't you just say you wished I was there when the reporters came around? Didn't you just say that like yesterday?”

“Man, I didn't mean so you could break somebody's back. And they're not even fucking reporters. Next time, ask a question before you start playing Twister with people you don't even know who they are.” She pointed at the kid with the moussed hair, hanging back at the edge of some bushes. “And you, Ryan. Keep your fucking nose out of my business. I look like somebody who needs help from you? Yeah, you better run.”

The kid disappeared around the side of a building, and Marianne reached over and took the straight razor from Zoe's hands. She opened it, held it up to look down its shank. “You got that right out. I wish I'd been there with one of these when they fucked with Geo. I'd have cut their heads off.” She gripped the thing tight, her knuckles going white beneath her freckled skin, and Zoe took it off her, gently, and put it back in her purse.

The young girl deflated somehow, got smaller, and her eyes
went dull. Her head sank between her shoulders. “I'd have fucked them up. No question,” she said, but there was no force in it and she sat back down and dropped her head to stare at her shoes. “They wouldn't have dared.”

Ken looked from Marianne to Zoe and then Orlando, and he raised his eyebrows and pointed to Orlando's chest. He looked down and caught the sight of blood titrating into the weave of his shirt.

Zoe swore and dug some tissues out her purse, but Orlando just shrugged. Ken looked embarrassed, lowering his eyes like a giant, chastened dog. Marianne sighed and stood up, swatting his solid shoulder with one small hand.

“Jesus, Ken. You have to excuse my cousin. He's supposed to be taking medication for whacking the shit out of everyone who pisses him off.”

“Christ, man, I'm sorry. I just get, you know. Everybody's been over here fucking with us and I just get, like, fuck it. You know?”

“It's okay, man, no harm done. Stitches giving out.”

Zoe unbuttoned his shirt and stuck the wad of Kleenex over the spreading red slick of blood.

Marianne said, “Yuck. Man, sorry my cousin broke your boyfriend.” Ken walked away and stood by himself, looking up at the high windows of the buildings around them.

Marianne looked up at Zoe and Orlando as he buttoned his shirt up. “He's all fucked up about Geo. He almost didn't graduate. They were going to kick him out. Geo tutored him and got him straightened out.” She smiled. “Geo turned him on to Bukowski. Ken didn't know, you know, anything about poetry, and
then to find out there were actual poems about drinking and fucking? You see what he's like. I used to find him in the day-room, moving his finger along, under the words.
Love Is a Dog from Hell
. Sounding it out, you know, moving his lips? Ken read ‘Girls Coming Home' out loud. At an assembly. I thought the nuns were going to shit.” She was flipping back and forth, Orlando could see. Smiling with her eyes full of tears. He knew how that was, when something was so big you couldn't hold it in your head.

Danny walked along Fairmount Street in the sunshine. Evidence techs moved up the street ahead of him, dropping little cones where expended shells lay on the drying asphalt, catching the rays of light slanting in from the east. There were pieces of glittering plastic and glass littering the street where they'd been shot off of parked cars. Two uniforms stood talking to a tall homicide dick, Frank Keduc, who was making notes while one of the cops pointed away toward Broad Street. It was starting to get hot, and mist was burning off the empty lot behind the old hotel.

Danny had gotten the call around nine that morning. Homicide and the evidence techs had already been on the scene for hours, talking to people from the houses on Thirteenth, tracing the long trajectories of automatic rifle fire. As he walked, he passed a drying pond of red ringed with yellow. There was a long black tail of powdery rubber running around the mark, and Danny figured it for a car that had pulled out fast from the curb, veering a little to miss whoever was lying in the red puddle. He could see shotgun shells lined up along the curb where they had rolled. One stood up on its brass end on the trunk of an Acura with a shattered windshield.