unplugged a hot iron that sat on an ironing board behind him. Next to that was an old sewing machine that rested on black iron legs with a heavy square pedal the size of a sewer grate and a black spinning wheel and a sewing needle secured to a silver arm like a glistening metal spike. Johnny ran his hand over his bald, chocolate-brown head, wiping away a layer of cold sweat. The wrinkles around his eyes smoothed out as his smile softened.
“He was like a father to you, huh?”
“Yeah, he was.”
“Still ain’t over it?”
“Are you?”
“We lookin’ at the same thing, right? But we don’t see it the same.”
“How do you see it?”
“After Chawlie died, I was angry. We both were. But I’m trying to think what Chawlie would want us to do?”
“Charlie didn’t die, Johnny. He was murdered.”
“And you think I don’t know that. But if he’s looking down on us right now, what’s he thinking?”
“He knows I’d like to catch the guy that shot him.”
“And do what with him? Lock him up? And for how long? What good will it do?”
“Maybe I’ll save the taxpayers of Philadelphia the expense of a trial.”
“You don’t mean that, son.”
“I’m starting to think I do, Johnny.”
“And what if it turns out to be some sixteen-year-old kid?”
“So be it.”
“You changed that much? You really that hard? What, Chawlie Melvyn gets killed and suddenly there’s no hope left in the world? You know, son, when I’m talkin’ ’bout carryin’ out the wishes of the deceased, I mean more than just buryin’ him next to his mother or crematin’ him and dumpin’ his ashes into the Delaware River or puttin’ a tombstone on his grave the size of the goddamn Washington Monument.”
“I heard George Washington had over two hundred slaves. Did you know that?”
“Don’t change the subject, son.”
“It’s the truth.”
“Only two hundred?”
“Maybe more.”
“What I’m sayin’ is that Chawlie didn’t die in vain. He didn’t believe that and neither should you. That’s the truth.”
“If you saw his blood on the sidewalk, Johnny. It was there for days, like a black stain.”
“Chawlie was fightin’ a war, Seamus. Like a lot of us are. Like you are. Otherwise, we’d pick up and go. It’s a war of attrition, son. Chawlie was just hangin’ on and then he saw the chance to do somethin’ real. He died savin’ a bunch of kids who’d never have learned what Chawlie Melvyn was all about. He put himself in the line of fire. It wasn’t an accident, what he did. He saw a gun and chose to shield those kids. He was willin’ to die saving someone else. That means somethin’.”
“You mean he’s a martyr?”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“Well, the cemetery is full of them, Johnny.”
We sat there in silence for a few minutes, not looking at each other but aware that we were both thinking the same thing. Charlie’s barber shop had instilled itself in our common memory, a dream of a better time when the old men sat around that place telling stories about how great Philadelphia used to be, about South Street in the summer, about the fish market and the Phillies and the old singers that stopped coming around and the prostitutes on Lombard and how many more dead cops there were with each passing year and that if they didn’t get out of Grays Ferry soon, they’d end up dying there, and how nothing would ever be the same unless someone did something about it.
I raised the glass of whiskey and held it up in front of me. Johnny did the same. We nodded and drank. I wished him a happy birthday and went out the door with the bell ringing in my head.
I took 27th Street through the heart of Point Breeze and onto Grays Ferry Avenue and then onto 30th, where I pulled into the lot at St. Gabe’s. There was a church, a monastery, and a school, all made of redbrick and jagged gray stone, the three buildings surrounding a parking lot and a deserted playground. At night, the shadows from the old church spread across the lot and the nuns would creep to their second-story windows and peer out at the sun sliding behind the gray skyline, and in the darkness it wasn’t unusual to see a car pull in and park at the far end of the lot. St. Gabriel’s seemed to be looking down on the entire city of Philadelphia with a weary eye.
Millie Price had asked me to meet her there at ten. I was early.
I looked across the lot at the flimsy wooden backboard and the rusty rim clinging to it. The metal pole swayed in the cold wind. The concrete that held it in the ground had long since turned to dust and been blown away. A wall of chain link made the whole place look like an old prison, where inmates might have come out into the cold air once a day and stared at the broken basket and laughed like crows at a rankled scarecrow. And the crooked weather vane sitting at the top of the arched steeple of St. Gabe’s would point down at them and laugh back.
The diocese had planted trees along a narrow strip of lawn bordering the playground. Thin dogwoods that bloomed in spring, the delicate white flowers emerging shyly for the first few years and then going into a kind of permanent hibernation, the dried bark peeling away and exposing the speckled, wind-blown skin beneath. They stood like that year after year, leafless and gray, their thin, petrified branches frozen in place.
I’d pulled my ten-year-old Jeep Cherokee into the lot. It was navy-blue, with an exhaust system that made it sound like a tank. The front wheels grinded as I circled toward the back. It had been making that same noise for two months. I’d taken it to Eddie’s garage earlier that day and he’d told me it needed bearings on both sides. It was a three-hundred-dollar job, the same amount of money Millie Price had offered me to take an old boyfriend off her hands.
“He just won’t take no for an answer,” she’d said.
“He’ll scare easily,” she’d said.
I turned the key and the Jeep went suddenly quiet. It was a sound that made me nervous. It made most cops nervous, and though I wasn’t a cop anymore, there was nothing like a quiet night to start me thinking. I’d put my time in with the Philadelphia Police Department, most of it spent right here in the 17th Precinct. I’d paid my dues and all I had to show for it was the Jeep and a pension that qualified me for food stamps and Section 8 housing. I lit a cigarette and rolled down the window. I imagined Father Kane up there in the rectory sipping a hot toddy and thinking maybe he should call the cops about the guy in the lot, sitting in his car and chain-smoking.
My father had grown up in the same parish and he’d told me there had been a shallow pond in the small courtyard between the monastery and the old cathedral. The priests had kept swans there. On Sunday afternoons the parishioners would stand around the pond as solemnly as if they were still in church and watch the swans glide effortlessly over the clear water. Some of the women would bring stale bread from home to feed to the hungry birds. They’d keep it wrapped in a napkin in their purses until after mass when they’d tear it into small pieces the size of a host and watch as the long curved necks of the swans bent for the soggy bread, their heavy-lidded black eyes almost haughty as they fought for every scrap.
It’d been like that for years, my father had said, since before he’d joined the force, young mothers pushing their babies in strollers along the narrow path, the babies pointing with their chubby little fingers at the swans floating across the glassy pond. The kids would all be wearing red baseball caps, as if everybody expected their child to be the next great third-baseman for the Phillies. Even the old folks came out to see the swans, congregating around the pond when it was warm and sunny and the glare from the sun off the water brought them to tears.
But it wasn’t very long before the
Someone had come in the middle of the night with a crossbow and killed the swans, every last one of them, leaving their blood-stained bodies, impaled with arrows, for the children and young mothers and old folks from the neighborhood to find the next morning. Their white feathers were the color of rust, their wide staring eyes like
