The Wolves of Fairmount Park

By Dennis Tafoya

In The Wolves of Fairmount Park, Dennis Tafoya's lyrical, intense, sometimes tragic and sometimes hopeful second novel, the details of a drive-by shooting of two teenagers in a rough Philadelphia neighborhood are filled in from four perspectives: Brendan Donovan, a cop and the father of the boy shot and left comatose; George Parkman Sr., another father, this one of the boy who was killed; Danny Martinez, a cop whose job it is to investigate the killing; and Orlando Donovan, the junkie uncle of the cop's kid, who happens to live nearby.

No one knows what the two boys were doing in front of a dope house on Roxborough Avenue in the middle of the night, what business they might have had with gangs like Green Lane or the Tres Nortes. Even though they had a thousand dollars with them, they were good boys. Everyone says, "They were good boys."

Through the fast-paced interweaving of these four distinct voices, Dennis Tafoya, author of the acclaimed Dope Thief, tells the moving story of two kids in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the lengths that the people around them will go to find the truth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jun 22, 2010
• ISBN: 9781429950527

Dennis Tafoya

Dennis Tafoya was born in Philadelphia and now lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the novels Dope Thief and The Wolves of Fairmount Park, as well as numerous short stories.

Book preview

CHAPTER

1

When Michael Donovan and George Parkman Jr. were shot in front of the dope house on Roxborough Avenue on a Thursday night in June, Mia and Tisa were standing on the stoop at Pechin Street. They had some time, a little break before the next johns—the fat, shy Jewish kid who always brought blow and the old Polish guy from the neighborhood who smiled wide and told dumb jokes and kept his money in one of those little plastic things that you had to squeeze to open, like Tisa’s grandmother had to keep her nickels and dimes in. It had the name of a bank on the side of it, she remembered. So on nights when the old man came by that was what she thought about, her abuela, a nice old lady from Ponce who always smelled like baking.

Tisa moved to the edge of the porch and lifted the hair off the back of her neck because it was hot inside and she was sweating a little, and Mia followed, digging in her bag for her smokes and bringing out two. A single moth ticked against the porch light. Tisa watched Mia screwing up her face to see the end of the cigarette, and it always made her laugh when she was high, which she was a little.

Mia lit her cigarette and then Tisa’s and then waved out the match, leaving blue trails of smoke, and because she was high, Tisa had to watch them curl and dissolve in the hard white light until they were gone. They picked up their conversation from earlier, talking about how Mia’s man was getting out again and how did she feel about that? Mia said he was so good to her when he wasn’t loaded, and Tisa gave her a look and said, Yeah? When was that? With that look like will you please? That was when they heard the shots, like popping noises from up the street, and saw the black car go by, the radio blaring and a girl screaming, "No, no, no."

Michael Donovan’s father, Brendan, was getting in his car at the Roundhouse at Eighth and Race, the Police Administration Building that was supposed to look like a big pair of handcuffs, and wondering if he was doing the right thing asking to get off the street. He sat in the car and watched motorcycle cops come and go and thought about his own father standing on a chair at the Shamrock and toasting Brendan in his new uniform the day he graduated from the academy. The only time he could remember the old man really drunk, his eyes shining and rimmed pink. The place was full of cops, the guys the old man had worked with, the stone-faced Irish and Italian guys who voted for Rizzo because he was one of them, the guys Brendan thought of as his uncles.

He was sitting in the car and lost in his head, remembering the bitter shellac taste of the Scotch and Patsy McDonnell’s sister Iris pulling him to her in the corner by the big old Rock-Ola jukebox all those years before. He was thinking about those days, when women were mysterious and unknown to him as visitors from another country, then the radio made its hissing squeal and reported shots fired on Roxborough Avenue, and Brendan had the thought, Someone else’s problem now.

Asa Carmody and Detective Danny Martinez were down at a strip club on Front Street. Danny was on the edge of getting hammered, feeling the vodka starting to work in his blood. His eyes shining, he was watching a red-haired woman dance while he was trying to sort out fives from ones on the bar in front of him. Asa was buying rounds and calling attention to himself like he was wearing a sign, I’m here. Remember me here. Wearing a green T-shirt with a yellow shamrock from a bar on Ridge Avenue, and the leather vest that was the only thing his father left for him when he disappeared down a rabbit hole when Asa was nine. Looking at his watch every few minutes and making a circle in the air with his finger for Doreen to set them up again, Danny and him and a couple of rummies from the neighborhood. One more round, the night was young, yeah? Danny was trying to put this all together in his mind, but he was slow tonight. He watched Asa peel off bills and stick them in the girl’s G-string and whisper something and point to Danny. Asa with his stiff ginger hair and his hooded eyes, all business all the time. Thinking he was looking like a guy having fun at the bar with the friend he grew up with. Danny knew Asa, and knew he wasn’t ever having fun. It wasn’t in him.

The woman’s eyes were guarded, hard to read, but she nodded. So then Danny knew she was his to take home with him, and something wasn’t right about that. The woman was tall, and her hair was a hard, opaque red, like plastic, and she smiled shyly at him, but it wasn’t like she was attracted to him. It was more like she was afraid. Danny was wondering how many more vodkas it would take for him not to care, how many more to shut off that voice in the back of his head that said he was being played. Being moved as if by magnets under the floor. When the cell phone went off, he was relieved. Now he could make excuses and get away from Asa. Get his head straight and get back in the game.

George Parkman Sr. was leaving his girlfriend’s apartment on the river, wiping his mouth compulsively like he always did, trying to erase the perfumed waxy residue of her lipstick and wishing the wind would pick up and blow the smell of her out of his suit jacket. Telling himself he’d stop coming here. Call her and end it. Give her a few bucks, help her get set up with that store she was always talking about opening, Jesus, whatever, he had too much at risk to be so fucking dumb.

It was just that out on the floor at the plant, the metal stamping shop out on Rising Sun Avenue he had inherited from his father, he could feel his life going by in a rush. That green light that made them all look like they were dying, all the guys in their blue shirts and safety glasses and the smell of the cutting fluid that used to smell like money to him and now it felt like he was drowning in it. Home was no better, with a strange, delicate son he didn’t know and Francine telling him the same story every night about her mother’s cataracts or some shit. So he needed something real in his hands, someone he could hold on to who looked back at him with eyes that weren’t lined with disappointment at what the money never bought. Was that a crime? Was that a sin? Was it?

Orlando Kevin Donovan, Michael’s uncle, Brendan’s half brother, was nodding, lying on a tattered couch on the roof of his girlfriend’s house, a needle in his slack white fingers, his eyes opening and closing, opening and closing, the orange light from the street caught in the mist blowing down Green Lane toward the river.

He was still new with the needle, getting used to the hard rush of light into his head. He was carried along in a warm current and he had a lurching sensation of motion in his stomach and he remembered the first time he went on a real roller coaster. Dorney Park, somewhere up in the country, it took forever to get there. It was summer and Brendan had taken him and brought a girl and Orlando loved it all, being with his older half brother and the shy, pretty girl and eating hot, greasy funnel cakes white with sugar and the crush of people all around. He remembered sitting in the rigid bench of the coaster and the bar going down in front of them with a hard clank and the feeling of the chain catching under the car and the long ride up into the cloudless sky. The feeling in the pit of his stomach now was the same as that day when they crested the rise and teetered on the summit, Brendan grabbing his hand on the bar and saying, Are you ready? Are you ready? and Orlando shrieking and shaking his head and laughing.

Now, on the couch, the dope blowing up in his head, he was thinking that summer was coming, July was coming and another birthday and he was still alive. Still here, the blood tunneling through him and the lights pulsing in his eyes, red over green over white, the city coming awake in the dark and the faraway popping of guns a signal, a salute to him. The black sky was an ocean and he was suspended in it, the winking lights all around like the glow of phosphorescent life pulled in the current, and the echoing rumble of his heart resonating with the crack and shift of the plates in the earth.

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

Reviews for The Wolves of Fairmount Park

[capewood · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Fairmount Park is a large urban park in Philadelphia. This crime novel is set in the seedy parts of town that border parts of the park. A policeman's son is badly wounded and the son's friend killed in a drive-by shooting at a know crack house. At first it looks like a random shooting but was actually the opening shots of a gang war. This is Tadoya's first novel. He is a Philadelphia native and I hope to see more of his work.

[norinrad10 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I don't know who this fellow is or where he came from, but his two novels have been exceptional. Set on the streets of Philadelphia, this one tells the story of the ramifications of the shooting of two young men outside a dope house. It'll grab you up and carry you along right from the start. The air of authenticity rings through the whole story. Charlie Huston and Don Winslow fans will definitely want to check out Tafoya.

[tymfos · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Welcome to the mean streets of Philadelphia -- the City of Brotherly Love hardly seems to live up to its name as the book opens with the killing of two teens -- "good boys" -- in a drive-by shooting in front of a drug house. The aura of gritty violence only intensifies in the aftermath of the shooting.Why were the boys there? Why were they shot? We see the search for answers by the fathers of the boys -- Brendan Donovan, a Philadelphia cop, and George Parkman, Sr., a successful businessman; Brendan's estranged brother Orlando, a hard-core junkie; and Daniel Martinez, the detective assinged to the case. We also meet a memorable cast of hard-core criminals. This is a "hard-boiled," violent story not for the faint of heart.Author Dennis Tafoya does for Philadelphia what Dennis Lehane does for Boston in his Kenzie/Gennaro novels as he shows us the seamy underside of the city through the worst and even the best parts of the city. The atmosphere is gritty, intense. Where Tafoya falls short is in the story itself. It didn't pull me along like a Lehane novel. But it was a good effort. This writer has real talent for creating atmosphere, bringing a reader into the scene, and drawing interesting, complex characters. As I understand it, this is only his second novel. I won't hesitate to read future efforts.Guardedly recommended -- especially for folks who know or are interested in Philadelphia, or for those who enjoy more character-focused (rather than plot-driven) fiction.