Canary (8 page)
Authors: Duane Swierczynski
Something in Sarie’s jacket buzzes. Dad is still in the backyard so he doesn’t hear it. Sarie’s head, though, whips around like she’s a police dog who just caught a sniff of a bad guy. She takes a step closer to the living room, where her jacket is slung over the couch. There’s another buzz. She looks at Marty and tells him to keep an eye on the carrots, then hurries into the room. What the hell? Marty wonders.
He stirs the carrots a few times, then moves to the doorway. Sarie’s back is to him, but her body language makes it look like she’s texting. Clearly hiding it. She texts all the time, though. Why be so secretive about it?
Marty is clear of the doorway before she turns around. He slides across the kitchen linoleum in his socks, making no sound, and gives the carrots a few more stirs before realizing there’s something missing. The brown sugar, like Mom always used to add. Maybe they’re eating healthier now. When Sarie returns Marty tells her to watch the carrots—he has to go to the bathroom. He expects her to say
thanks for sharing
or something wiseass—the kind of thing they usually say to each other. But she seems preoccupied, says nothing.
Of course Marty doesn’t go to the bathroom. He slips his hand into Sarie’s jacket pocket expecting to feel the familiar contours of her iPhone. Instead he pulls out a cheap flip phone.
After dropping Auntie M. off at the retirement home with plenty of leftovers, Wildey retraces his route, taking Germantown Avenue, which slashes across North Philly, until Lehigh. There he hangs a left, heading toward Kensington Avenue—the heart of the so-called Badlands. Wildey’s three-bedroom row home is here, on Hope Street.
Yeah, yeah, he heard it from everybody when he first moved there. Hope, in the most hopeless area in the city. There’s even an Obama mural on a wall to drive the irony home—though some idiot did spray
BONER
over the one-word slogan beneath the portrait of the president.
When Wildey let his new address slip one day a couple of years back, his buddies back in the Twenty-fourth told them he was fucking nuts.
Why the fuck you living there? Don’t you know you don’t shit where you police?
All Wildey would do is smile and give them a line about its being cheap.
It’d better be fuckin’ cheap, Wildey. Shit, man, they should be paying you to live there.
But Wildey had his reasons, and he thought it was better to keep them to himself.
The Badlands
are
a strange choice for a cop to live.
For decades now its streets had been the biggest open-air drug market on the East Coast. And in recent years, it’s only gotten worse, because word got out: You want the purest, most potent heroin available? Head to Philly’s Badlands. It’s coming straight from the Mexican cartels, and they don’t mess around! Junk fiends have been known to drive from as far away as Florida and Maine to score, but mostly it’s junkies from other (better) neighborhoods or the burbs, near and far. And during the years Wildey worked those streets, he saw an increasing number of white people from the burbs. Not just kids, either. Middle-aged professors. Accountants. Soccer moms and so on.
Wildey quickly figured how it happened. Most well-off white kids don’t drive to a dangerous and heavily policed neighborhood just for the hell of it. They usually start out copping Oxys from friends, then scoring some from a small-time dealer near home. But a few years ago they changed up the Oxys, made it harder to get high on them. So white people had no choice but to go with heroin. The dope they could get in their neighborhoods and towns didn’t quite do the trick. As a general rule: The farther you got away from the city, the weaker and more expensive the dope. The joke going around was that suburban dope has been stepped on so many times, all you smell is sneaker.
No, they wanted the real deal, and it was no mystery where to get it. So they started cruising the strip between K&A—the Kensington and Allegheny El stop—and the next stop on the line, at Kensington and Somerset. Black dealers work one side of the avenue, Latinos the other.
Most of Wildey’s time with the Twenty-fourth was spent in an endless cat-and-mouse thing. You had your cops in uniform (like Wildey). You had uncover guys. You had your junkie CIs, trying like hell to work off their own shit. All three would triangulate on buyers. Some of them, commuting in from the burbs, would try to go for a package deal, buying sixty bags at a time—sometimes even selling it off back at home. The more they carried, the harder they fell. Most times, though, it was small-time, and you might bust a so-called caseworker (corner dealer), but rarely a midlevel player. They were too smart for that.
So on and on it went, the PD more or less fine with the casual deterrent of arrests, the city doing nothing about the endless abandoned houses that served as shooting galleries—“abandominiums,” they called them, turf wars breaking out on hot summer nights, legit business owners saying fuck it and moving out, scared residents with no means to get out sleeping in their bathtubs because they’re seriously afraid a bullet’s gonna come punching through the walls of their house overnight.
So why live here?
Because Ben Wildey wants to be the man who finally cleans it all up.
Not now, but someday. He doesn’t have the political muscle or the career busts right now. But he’s read enough and talked enough to know how it could work.
Why does he want to clean it up so badly? Plenty of reasons. But most of all it’s because his great-grandpops helped clean up the Tenderloin. And now Wildey wants to do the same with the Badlands. Carry on the Wildey family business.
The more Wildey reads, the more he realizes his neighborhood
is
the modern Tenderloin. Same shit, different decade. Just like it was ninety years ago, it’s pretty much hands-off. No pretense is made to clean it up unless someone decides to do it through sheer force of will.
Wildey takes a spin down the ave., just to see what’s what on this fine, brisk holiday evening.
There is the usual assortment of junkies hawking clean works and Subs from their bags. A buck for a needle, $10 for a Sub, $5 more to point you in the direction of the corners with the best stuff.
Some cars with out-of-state plates, a dead giveaway. If Wildey were still with the Twenty-fourth, that would be probable cause to pull a car over. Nicer cars, too, and there are plenty on the road tonight. It’s a long holiday weekend, and people need their dope. Let ’em go for it. For now. Wildey will be back for them soon enough.
He takes Lehigh again and turns right onto hopelessly narrow Hope Street. These blocks were built long before the dawn of the automobile, and there is literally no space to park unless you run up onto the sidewalk. Which some people do. Wildey parks his current peep car in the empty lot next to his house. Someone tries to steal the car? Whatever, Wildey will get another one. But no one does, and nobody messes with his house, either. He made sure the word spread: The po-po live here. Yeah, he has bars on the windows, but that wouldn’t stop most housebreakers. No, the thing that gives them pause is that they know how much a cop makes. It ain’t worth the bars.
Still, the previous tenant of his current abode was selling wet—cigarettes dipped in PCP. From time to time, junkies would knock on Wildey’s door and get the surprise of their lives when he would answer it in uniform. “What, you change your mind?” he asked, barely able to contain his laughter as they went booking down the narrow street.
As he drives back to Hope Street Wildey thinks about Batman and Robin.
Robin, especially.
When Wildey was coming up in the late 1990s in the Badlands, Batman and Robin were the two busiest narcotics cops working the streets. Both black guys in their late twenties, afraid of nothing. They’d swoop in with little warning, prompting cries from lookouts—“Yo, here come Batman and Robin!” Their real names didn’t matter to anybody, and they didn’t seek out publicity. Local papers caught on anyway and did a big story on them.
But back then Wildey wasn’t reading newspapers. Wildey was keeping himself indoors those days, but he liked when Batman and Robin would make an appearance because you could step outside and not feel like something was going to happen to you. He especially liked Robin, because he’d slip fifteen-year-old Wildey comic books, ask him, “What’s the word on the street, youngblood?” Not asking for real info, just making conversation.
A short while after the profiles appeared, a drug gang put a $5,000 hit on the heads of Batman and Robin. The small-time wannabe Tony Montanas were quickly rounded up—you don’t threaten a cop in Philadelphia and expect to be walking around for long. Batman and Robin shrugged it off.
Robin was the reason Wildey joined the force five years later. Yeah, he knew about his cop-grandfather, but he never met the man. Robin, though, was the real deal. To Wildey, Robin was how to be a black police officer in Philadelphia. When Wildey finally joined the force, he reached out to Robin to thank him. Robin said that he didn’t remember him but was proud of him anyway. “Still reading comics?” Wildey asked him. Robin just laughed. “I never read them. Those were for you youngbloods, calling me Robin and shit.” Yeah, Robin was his hero.
Until this year, that is.
In this bad, crazy year, Batman was one of the “tainted six” shuffled out of his NFU. And Robin …
Oh, Robin.
In late May, Robin was arrested while stealing drugs and money from a dealer in Southwest Philly. The FBI set up a sting with the help of a CI. Robin, a twenty-four-year vet, caught with $15 in his pocket and five pounds of pot in his jacket pocket. The feds had Robin on a wire, talking about all the dirt he’d done over the years. Even the police union didn’t want to bother with him. Wildey—now reading the papers—stared at Robin’s puffy face staring back at him.
Sorry to let you down, youngblood. But the streets got to me. They’ll get to you, too.
The scandal sent Wildey into a mental tailspin, one that lasted all the way through Memorial Day weekend, which was strangely cold and rainy. Would the streets get to me, too? Am I staying good just till the right bribe comes along?
Then came Monday, and the mayor and commissioner are naming Kaz Mahoney to head up a new “untouchable” narcotics field unit, and Wildey decides that no, the streets would not win.
Mom, you’re not missing much this Thanksgiving.
Strange to think that a year ago I was sitting at this very kitchen table, filling out the early admission forms for UCLA, still buzzing from our trip to L.A. the month before. Remember the four of us, walking around Westwood in the warm California sunshine? Me, finding it hard to believe this could be my new life? I kept glancing at your faces, bracing myself for one (or both) of you to tell me, Sorry honey, we can’t do this. But you and Dad were strangely quiet, taking in the sights, holding hands. At the time I thought it was weird but cool. The other weird thing was the headache that you couldn’t seem to shake. It was just the flight, you told me.
On the last morning of our trip Dad suggested an impromptu drive down to La Jolla. You dismissed it, saying it was close to three hours down, then three hours back, and then we all had a red-eye to deal with. Dad just smiled, told you the kids should see the smelly seals. Me and Marty looked at each other—seals? What was so special about seals? And why did they smell? Dad continued to press his case, and you gave in and made the drive, despite the headache.
So you drove down Highway 5 all the way to La Jolla, a hilly, pretty beach town totally unlike the Jersey Shore, which is the only beach I remember. Dad swears we were here once before, when I was three, to look at the seals. Nothing rings a bell but I instantly love the vibe of the place. The harsh salt of the ocean, the wet stairway leading to a little promenade where you could watch the seals laze about in a little sandy cove. The creatures were adorable but they also reeked, as promised. It was beautiful and gag-inducing, like so many things in life.
It’s also the last happy “normal” memory I have of us as a family.
Because four weeks later, at the pre-Thanksgiving table, I ask you for your social. You don’t hear me. You’re darting between oven and counter and fridge and stovetop like a hummingbird, feverishly trying to get dinner together. I repeat the question, Mom, what’s your social, and I know I sound irritated, which is what probably catches your attention. The look in your eyes startles me. Halfway through dinner you excuse herself. You almost make it to the first-floor bathroom, but then you don’t. I don’t understand until after dinner, when you and Dad tell me to wait a minute, you have something you need to tell me. And the floor of the world drops out from beneath my feet.
Don’t tell Marty, you say. So I don’t.
Twelve months later, I’m the one darting around the kitchen, with Marty at the table on his iPod. The thing’s practically glued to his hands these days, just as you predicted. Dad’s out in the backyard, even though it’s freezing, because he has this idea about grilling the small turkey I picked up two days ago. I don’t eat meat, but Dad jokes that I might change my mind once he gets this sucker grilling. I tell Dad I doubt it.
This isn’t the way it was supposed to be. I was the one who should have been flying home from California this morning. If I’d been in California, none of this would have happened. I wouldn’t be a snitch, facing jail unless I do something I know I can never do.
Fuck, the most I should be worrying about right now is how I’m going to finish Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
in time to make it down to Venice Beach with my friends. Or grappling with the tough Friday night decision of hanging out in Westwood vs. driving over to Los Feliz to go to that cool indie bookstore you and I found last year. (Do you remember that place, Mom? Skylight? Remember me promising you that, yes, we’d always go back whenever you visited?)
I stare at Dad’s back thinking I should tell him. Not everything, but enough. There’s a version I’ve worked up in my mind. A version that doesn’t implicate D., because that would be as bad as narking him out to Wildey. You know Dad. Dad would hit poor D. with the double-barreled shotgun blast of “You so much as look at my daughter again and I’ll rip out your heart” (concerned father) and “Hey, buddy, I’m going to help you beat this thing” (concerned drug and alcohol counselor).
So maybe I tell him I’m doing extra credit by volunteering with the police department. Observing for a paper, maybe? No, that won’t fly. I’m not taking any criminal justice classes and Dad knows it. None of my freshman triple classes (The Beats, The Greek Way) fit, either.
So … no. I can’t bring it up. I can’t even hint at it. Talking to you like this is one thing; talking to Dad is another. Dad is still uncannily sharp about these things, despite the events of the past year. For the past four years our relationship feels like that of an ex-con and parole officer, where the P.O. is basically a decent guy who genuinely wants the best for you. But he’s still going to crack down hard on your ass if you so much as think about stepping out of line.
Now Dad has the turkey in a disposable aluminum pan. He picks it up and turns with an excited look on his face.
—Want to get the back door for me?
—You’re really going to do this?
—I told you, unless it snows, I’m grilling this sucker.
—You’re hard-core, Old Man.
—Right on, Sarie Canary.
In the days immediately following Mom’s death, Dad and I tried to keep up the old routine. The banter, the puns. You always said I had inherited Dad’s weird sense of humor. But we quickly noticed that without you, there was a vital piece missing: our audience. Without you giggling or rolling your eyes, there was no reason for the puns or the banter. It sounded hollow. We stopped. It was bullshit anyway.
Now Dad’s out back trying to make the grill thing work, but it’s not the same. I miss you two out there, standing around the grill, sipping iced tea and laughing. I miss Marty waging action figure spy wars near the edge of the woods. I miss pretending to read, but mostly listening to you and Dad goof around. I miss the smell of the burning coals and wood chips. After you died, Mom, the whole backyard routine died, too. If me or Marty asked about cooking out, an awful look washed over his face. Kind of like guilt mixed with sorrow mixed with a bit of anger for even bringing it up in the first place.
Then school resumed and Dad inexplicably rekindled his love for the backyard. I arrived home one day to find him scrubbing the grime off the Weber with a wire brush and a hose. That night, he’d started small—spiral-cut hot dogs for the boys and marinated tofu for me. Dad continued to expand his repertoire, coming up with a surprising number of vegetable dishes. Last week he announced that he would be grilling the Thanksgiving turkey.
I want to tell him, No thanks, Dad—the police already grilled me down at the station.
I want to tell him, Dad I’m in serious fucking trouble and there you are playing around in the backyard. Your wife is dead and your daughter’s probably going to jail on a drug charge.
I want to tell him so much, but for the past year I’ve found it impossible to tell him anything. Why start now?