The Wolves of Fairmount Park by Dennis Tafoya Page B

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 . . .”
    â€œYeah.”
    She let the smoke go in billows from the side of her mouth, squinting, seeing things that were only inside her head.
    â€œYou want a baby, hon?”
    â€œNo.” She flicked away ashes. “I don’t know. I want both, Iguess. 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.
    â€œTo know, I guess. To know everything.”
    â€œEverything you can know if you never leave East Falls?”
    â€œIsn’t that everything?”
    â€œSeriously, have you ever been more than five miles from the Schuylkill River?”
    â€œI was down the shore with my mom a couple times. Before she lost the house.”
    â€œThat doesn’t count. Everyone’s been down the shore.”
    â€œYou want to leave?”
    â€œI don’t know, Orlando. Some days I just want to know where we’re going, I guess.”
    â€œWe’re going down the Wawa on Ridge Avenue.”
    â€œDo you promise?”
    â€œWith 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