Falls the Shadow Read online

  You could tell she was troubled, Kylie, the way she never ate and got all scrawny, the way she came to the fort with scabs up and down her arms. The first time, she said it was an accident, and after that first time they didn’t talk about it anymore. And you could see the need in her in the way she smoked her cigarettes. Once they got that first pack, and she felt the nicotine rush flow through her like a gift, she was obsessed with getting them, lighting them, smoking them. She inhaled so furiously it was as if she wanted to turn her whole body into ash. There was always a cigarette between her fingers, and she was always scrounging around for another one, and she always needed money to buy them, always.

  Then, when they started with the beer, stealing first a couple bottles from Wayne’s father, it wasn’t long before Kylie, her eyes rimmed dark with mascara, was waiting in front of the Chinese take-out place, asking the male customers if they’d take her money and buy her a six-pack. Kylie liked to drink, she drank fast—while they were still cold, she said—and often until she got sick. One corner of the fort, next to the bikes, held a veritable mountain of cans and bottles.

  But it was the reefer that changed everything for Wayne. And not just because it turned out to be the best of all ways to waste their days. Or because it started to get expensive, which forced them to be more brazen in their thefts. Or because Kylie took to it as if in marihuana she found what she had been looking for all along. No, for Wayne it was the reefer that changed everything, because it was under its influence that he first realized the truth of their relationship, one to the other.

  They were the best of friends, that’s how they saw themselves, more like a family than their families themselves, brothers and sister to one another. And they discussed openly among themselves their boy-girl escapades. Seamus was pretty much useless with the opposite sex, but Wayne was sort of dating Erin McGill and had already been to third with her in Palmer Park. And Kylie always had boys chasing her, boys she would tease and play with and let play with her and then mock back at the fort with Wayne and Seamus as the three got wasted on beer.

  But reefer felt different. They were twelve the first time they tried it, when Henry had given Wayne a couple of joints to get him started, and when they lit the first one, Seamus and Kylie went off into a fit of giggling, which pissed Wayne off, because nothing seemed to be happening to him. But the second time, when he hogged the reefer just to make sure it would have some effect, it hit him hard, the dizziness, the fear and paranoia. He closed his eyes, felt the world shift beneath him, feared he’d never recover, that what he had done to himself was permanent. He tried to get control, to fight off the nausea, and when he did, finally, when he opened his eyes, finally, it was as if the world had indeed changed.

  He could see things he had never seen before. Kylie looked different, her pretty dark eyes, outlined by the mascara, were sadder than he ever remembered. And Seamus looked different, too, bigger, more handsome, as unreal as a movie actor, playing his guitar as if it were a part of him. And strangest of all, the air between them seemed to shimmer, as if something never before glimpsed had turned hard and real. When Kylie looked at Seamus, and Seamus looked back, it was as if Wayne could see exactly the emotion running between them, and he knew what it was, instantly. It was love. Seamus loved Kylie; Kylie loved Seamus. And the reality of it seemed to settle like a sharp pain into Wayne’s chest. And that was the first time, believe it or not, that Wayne realized, Erin McGill notwithstanding, that he himself was helplessly and hopelessly in love with Kylie, and that Seamus was not just a friend but an adversary.

  He couldn’t tell her. How could he tell her? Kylie was his friend, more sister than his sisters, and then there was Seamus, who was always around when Wayne was with her. And what would he say anyway? So he didn’t tell her. Instead, back at the fort, they got high, or wasted on beer when they couldn’t afford the dope, and listened to Seamus play, and rolled around laughing at the rest of the world or poked sullenly at the fires they built at night.

  The new plan for getting dope money came to them out of the blue. Kylie was waiting outside the Chinese joint, searching for someone to buy a six-pack for them, when the guy she propositioned, propositioned her right back. Her mind was quick enough to figure out the angle straightaway. She motioned to Seamus and Wayne before leading the man down the street, around the corner, over the railroad tracks, to the fort. And then, just when the creep thought he was going to get some underage action, the boys went at him, Wayne especially. They sent him away, bloodied and broke, and split between them two hundred dollars. It was so simple, so obvious, so safe, because the mark could never go to the police, could he? The next time it didn’t just happen, the next time Kylie cast her gaze like a weighted bass plug and reeled in a mark, and it went off as smooth as the pale skin on her lovely cheek.

  And the thing of it, for Wayne, was that it excited him more than he wanted to admit, even to himself. Yes, he liked the huge boom box they bought with the money and kept down at the fort, and yes, he liked being high, like, all the time, but it was the thrill of it that hooked him, different from the other thieving they had done. The angry spurt of jealousy he felt when he saw the mark trying to make his Kylie. The fear that roiled his stomach as he and Seamus followed them across the railroad tracks to the patch of weeds outside the fort, not ever sure how the violence would unfold. The raw thrill of saving Kylie, the girl he loved, from some older man who was putting his hands on her, pulling her close, stroking her hair and rubbing her thigh and bringing his crusty lips close to her innocent mouth. And the fear on the mark’s face, yes, that, too, when they pulled him away, and began to rain on blows, and stripped him of his wallet, and stripped his wallet of cash.

  And Wayne would always remember the look on Kylie’s face, flushed and triumphant and proud, and maybe disappointed, too, though that he didn’t understand. And then the way they sat together around the fire at the fort and smoked and laughed and hugged and were as they always were.

  Until the one time it didn’t play out like they had planned. When they followed Kylie and the mark, and the mark started fiddling with her hair, started stroking her leg, drew her close, bent down to bury his face in her neck. They rushed in to pull them apart, but she stared at Wayne and Seamus, stared at them with dead eyes, and mouthed to them, clear as chalk on slate, “Go away.” And they did what she said, as they always did what she said, they left, the two of them, left her with the man, left like whipped dogs.

  Wayne wanted to go back, to stop it, to stop her, but it was Seamus who kept him away. “It’s what she wants,” he said.

  “She doesn’t want him,” said Wayne.

  “Or us, or anything,” said Seamus. “She wants only nothing. This is just like the cutting and the drugs. But there’s nothing we can do about it, Wayne. There never has been.”

  And so they stayed back, out of sight, just hearing the rude calls of the mark who wasn’t a mark anymore but had become a john. And when it was over, Wayne followed him back across the tracks and fell on him like a wolf and beat him bloody, beat him unconscious, beat him until Seamus pulled Wayne and his red fists off the lifeless figure.

  That got the police involved. The man wasn’t dead, but it was close, and all of Fishtown was talking about it. And what they were talking about was that it was the three of them, the trio of degenerate friends, that had done it. The police brought them in, and put them in separate rooms, and laid into them like they were cop killers on the lam. But they said not a word. Wayne’s knuckles had been scraped playing basketball. Seamus had been playing basketball with Wayne that afternoon when Wayne fell on the concrete and ripped up his hand. Kylie didn’t know anything about it. And the guy was an outsider, and pretty soon some other horrific act of violence came to sweep up the neighborhood’s attention, and that was that. Nothing but suspicions.

  But that was the end of them, the end of the trio, the end of the fort. They all knew that something had turned, and now beer or reefer or even sex wasn’
t enough. So Kylie went off in search of something harder to help her escape from what had become of her life, something that would more easily take her out of herself, and Seamus and Wayne, they went along for the ride. For if that’s what she wanted, self-obliteration, that’s what they wanted, too.

  And it wasn’t so hard to find.

  12

  “After a while we sort of drifted apart, the three of us,” said Wayne. “The connections just seemed to disappear.”

  “What were you on, son?” said Father Kenneth.

  Wayne rolled his shoulders guiltily. “Everything. Pills, cocaine, reefer laced with embalming fluid we swiped from the funeral home.”

  “My God,” said Father Kenneth.

  “Not bad, actually, if you could get over the taste,” said Wayne. “And then heroin.”

  “Was Seamus on heroin, too?” I asked.

  “We started together. That’s what made what happened so strange.”

  “Him getting killed by a drug dealer? That doesn’t sound so strange at all.”

  “No,” said Wayne. “Before that.”

  I looked at Father Kenneth. Through the whole of Wayne’s sad, lurid tale, I had been expecting the father to explode in some sort of righteous condemnation. But that hadn’t happened. Instead he had kept a benign expression on his face, showing only the measure of disapproval required of his position at the more troubling points, enough to say that the story had registered, not so much to discourage Wayne from continuing. He was good, the good father, I had to give him that. Probably had plenty of experience in the confessional, but still it was impressive.

  “Tell us about it, Wayne,” said Father Kenneth. “Tell us what Seamus did.”

  “There was an addict name of Poison, a big guy with this sort of electric gaze that drew to him the most desperate losers on the street. Which is how I fell in with him. He had contacts with some dealers, and he could keep you supplied so long as you stayed with his program. But his program was mostly about following his orders and taking the risks for his risky schemes and letting him hit you when he wanted, which was pretty much all the time. But you couldn’t just walk away from Poison. Once you were in, that was it, he’d kill you sooner than let you walk away, and he had done it once, right in front of us. Stuck his knife into some guy’s gut.

  “Now, I hadn’t seen Seamus for over a year. I had heard things, though. I heard some old poof had sort of taken him up, was keeping him off the street. He even had arranged to get Seamus’s teeth fixed. It sounded worse than Poison to me, and I didn’t know that Seamus was like that, a boy toy. But, you know, when you’re desperate like we were, anything goes, and I figured he had followed Kylie down that route. So I had written off Seamus. I figured I’d never see him again.

  “And then one night we were in the fort, Poison and his crew. It was a cold snap, and I had showed Poison our old place so we could build a fire to stay warm. And we were huddled around this fire, the crew, strung out, talking about our next scam, when this shadow just appears in the doorway. You couldn’t make out anything but the outline. It was tall, wide, and it was wearing this long coat that almost reached to the ground. And then the shadow talked.

  “ ‘I’m looking for a piece of scum called Poison,’ it said.

  “Poison scurried out of the light of the fire and said, ‘What do you want with him?’

  “ ‘I have a proposition,’ said the shadow. ‘It can be worth some money to him.’

  “ ‘Go ahead,’ said Poison.

  “ ‘Not until I know who I’m dealing with,’ said the shadow.

  “ ‘All right,’ said Poison, and he was standing now, with his hand in his coat pocket, and he stepped forward until his ugly, scarred face was lit by the fire. ‘How much?’

  “ ‘Five hundred dollars,’ said the shadow.

  “ ‘All for me? What do I need to do for it?’

  “ ‘Nothing,’ said the shadow. ‘I just want to take away one of your gang without you giving me trouble.’ And the shadow stepped forward into the circle of light from the fire, and it was Seamus. Like he was stepping toward me from out of a dream. And he said, ‘I want to take away Wayne.’

  “Poison looked over at me with a sneer and said, ‘Wayne’s with us.’

  “ ‘Not anymore,’ said Seamus.

  “ ‘Do you have the money on you?’ said Poison.

  “Seamus took an envelope out of his pocket. Poison stepped forward to reach for it. Seamus jerked it back. ‘Do we have a deal?’ he said.

  “ ‘We’ll have to discuss it some,’ said Poison with an eerie smile plastered on his ugly face, but just as he said it, his hand jerked out of his coat pocket and he charged at Seamus, the fire shining in the knife’s long blade.

  “Seamus turned sideways and kicked him in the face. Poison went spinning to the ground, his knife flying out of his hand. When Poison raised himself onto his knees, Seamus kicked him in the face again. Jesus, he just wiped him out. Then he looked around at the crew, saw me, and said, ‘Let’s go, Wayne.’ And I went. And he brought me here, to you, Father Kenneth. Do you remember?”

  “I remember,” said Father Kenneth, nodding. “And we cleaned you up, bought you some clothes, and got you into a treatment program. But it was you who did the hard work. It was you who stuck with it.”

  “Because Seamus visited and told me I had to. Because Seamus told me there was something golden on the other side.”

  “And was he right?” asked Father Kenneth.

  “What do you think, Father?”

  “I think you’ve come a long way.”

  “But if it was so golden, why did Seamus get back into the life? Why did he get himself killed like that?”

  “I don’t know, son,” said Father Kenneth. “I don’t know.”

  “And that’s why you think you were betrayed?” I said.

  “He left me here alone,” said Wayne. “Without him.”

  “Who was the old man who had helped him?” I said. “Did you ever find out?”

  “No,” said Wayne. “He didn’t want to tell me anything about him, and I understood. That kind of thing, who would want to talk about it?”

  “Was Seamus always a good fighter?”

  “Hardly. He was one of those big, timid guys.”

  “It didn’t sound like he was timid when he took on Poison.”

  “It was like he was a different person, like he had turned into some sort of comic-book hero.”

  “Was he ever arrested by the police, do you know?”

  “Not that I was aware of,” said Wayne. “Not when he was hanging with me.”

  “You have any idea what happened to Kylie?”

  “She disappeared. Maybe you should ask her mom.”

  “I tried,” I said, “but she didn’t know. She’s been too busy picking up her Mother of the Year award.”

  “Is there anything else you need for that legal case of yours?” said Father Kenneth.

  I looked at Beth, she shrugged. I slapped my knees and stood. Beth stood, too. “I think we’re through here, Father. Wayne, it was a pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much for your time. And good luck.”

  “Give me a minute, Wayne,” said Father Kenneth before he led us out of the small room.

  He was quiet for a long moment as we walked up the church aisle. “I don’t know if that helped,” he said finally, “but if you need anything more, give me a call, and I’ll do whatever I can.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “Now let me ask you, Mr. Carl. After hearing all that, is Wayne in any legal trouble?”

  “I wouldn’t think so. All this happened a while ago. The statute of limitations on most everything he might have done would have already run.”

  The priest glanced back toward the still-open door. “That’s good to know.”

  “It looks like he’s trying,” I said.

  “Oh, he is, Mr. Carl, believe me. But it will be a struggle still for a long time to come. Sometimes confession alone
isn’t enough. Sometimes you can’t move forward until you’ve gone back to take care of the past. It would help him, I think, if we could find Kylie. And that man he beat up. He didn’t seem like a nice man, but even so, maybe I’ll find out his name. Maybe Wayne will find some way to make amends. You’ll keep me informed of anything more you find out about Seamus?”

  “Sure, Father, if that’s what you want.”

  “Oh, I do, yes. And best of luck in saving your client in that prison.”

  “Thank you, sir,” I said. “We’ll certainly need it.”

  13

  “Quite the story,” said Beth as we wended our way out of Fishtown.

  “Yes, it was,” I said.

  “Three old friends, descending into the maelstrom of crime and drugs and prostitution, their bonds seemingly obliterated. And then, out of the blue, like some superhero with a cape, this Seamus Dent emerges to save his friend before succumbing to the dark side once and for all. But does anything we learned help François?”

  “Not yet,” I said.

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “Most of the facts behind the murder of François Dubé’s wife were fully presented in court. They will become relevant if we get to try the case again, but not when we’re fighting to get a retrial. For this we need something new, something that will pique the judge’s interest. Seamus Dent’s story is exactly that.”