Small Mercies

9

She falls asleep in the La-Z-Boy and wakes an hour later when someone pounds a fist against her door. She runs to the door and opens it without checking who’s on the other side, her body throbbing with the scream of a hope that it’s her, it’s Jules, it’s her.

But it’s not Jules. It’s not anyone. No one’s there. She looks up and down the hall. Still no one. She looks back in at her apartment. It’s empty in a way it was never empty after Dukie or Ken Fen or even Noel left. It’s empty the way graveyards are empty — filled to bursting with the remains of what can never be again.

Back in seventh grade, Sister Loretta used to say that even if hell was not the firepit with the horned demons and the pitchforks that the medievalists supposed, it was, make no mistake, a void.

It was an eternal separation from love.

What love?

God’s love.

Anyone’s love.

All love.

The pain from a pitchfork or even from an eternal flame cannot compare to the pain of that void.

“Everlasting exile,” Sister Loretta said, “the heart forever untouched and forsaken.”

Mary Pat steps back inside long enough to grab her smokes and her lighter.

When she reaches the Fields, the sign is still up — Closed for Private Function — and the lights behind the single high window are dim, but she starts knocking and she doesn’t stop. She uses her left hand because the right is still barking from the contact with Rum’s woodchuck head. She’s been pounding a solid minute when someone throws the locks on the other side of the door. Three of them. One after the other. And then nothing. It’s her last warning — if you want in, you open the door. Final chance to walk away.

The fear is not small. Suddenly, it’s the only thing she can feel. A full-bodied presence. As real and substantial as another human being standing on the sidewalk beside her. Other people have gone through this door, she knows, and never come back out. This door is not just the door to a building; it’s a border between worlds.

She flashes on Jules dancing around the kitchen in her bathrobe the other morning, pretending to box, smiling that lopsided toothy smile of hers, and Mary Pat pushes the door open.

The guy standing behind the bar has a lit cigarette between his lips and squints at the smoke floating into his right eye as he pours himself a shot of rum. He’s a guy everyone calls Weeds because he’s skinny and unpleasant to look at. Has a harelip, a left eye that floats in the socket, and is rumored to have pushed his little brother off a roof when they were kids just to hear the sound of the poor bastard landing. He’s not wearing his Baracuta jacket tonight, just a T-shirt that looks soiled in the dim light.

Larry Foyle sits at a table along the wall. Larry’s body looks like a set of tires stacked atop one another, and his neck isn’t much smaller. His head is enormous, like the head of a statue. His hands could cup a moose in one palm. He still lives with his parents and can often be found pushing his grandfather in his wheelchair along Day Boulevard. Larry is usually affable, a sly cutup, but tonight he looks at his beer and not once at Mary Pat. Like Weeds, he’s stripped down to a T-shirt. She can’t make out the state of it, or even the color, but she can smell his body odor from twenty feet.

They’re the only two men in the room. Down at the end of the bar, the back door is open; she looks at Weeds. His eyes pulse once in the poor light, an indication she’s to head to that back door. Then he downs his shot and pours himself another.

During the walk down the bar, she waits to hear the scrape of chair legs, the rustle of limbs, footsteps rushing up behind her. A vein pulses in a part of her throat she never knew a vein to exist. The bar area gives way to a thin dark corridor that leads to the bathrooms and the back door. It smells of Lysol and urinal cakes. The night breeze feels damp and warm on her face.

Brian Shea is waiting out back. She’s never been out here before and is mildly surprised they’ve made a kind of grotto out of it, with cobblestone covering the ground and lights strung from the exterior walls of the bar and the body shop next door. A few wrought-iron tables and chairs share space with potted plants and the occasional beer keg. At the far end stands a blue three-decker house with white trim. That house has been the subject of dozens of rumors over the years — it’s Marty Butler’s true residence; it’s a stash house; it’s a high-end casino; it’s a high-end bordello; it’s where they keep all those paintings that were stolen from the Fogg Museum back in ’71. Until tonight she’d never seen it full-on, only the top floor from the street. It looks like nothing much, like every other three-decker in Southie and Dorchester, though the paint’s been kept up.

Brian Shea doesn’t offer her a seat, but she takes the one across from him anyway. The first thing he says, with a hint of cruelty in his tiny smile, is “You went to my house?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do that?”

“You didn’t keep your word.”

“My what?”

“Your word. You told me you would reach out to me by five o’clock. You didn’t.”

The smile grows a little larger, a little crueler. “You’ve been around long enough, Mary Pat, to know that someone like you doesn’t make demands of someone like me.”

“And you’ve been around long enough, Brian, to know I don’t give a fuck what you think I’ve been around long enough to know.”

He puts his palm to the back of his neck and stares at her with his Windex eyes. His T-shirt isn’t as soiled as Weeds’s was, but she notices streaks of chalky residue on his arms and a spot of it on his cheek.

Did these guys break into a schoolhouse? Or hot-wire a cement mixer?

“Did you know my Jules was having an affair with Tombstone?”

“He doesn’t like that nickname.”

“He’d prefer Child Molester?”

“She’s seventeen.”

“So you did know.”

A small downward flick of the eyes. “I knew.”

She feels light-headed for a moment. As if she might fall out of her chair. “Is she with him now? With Frankie?”

He shakes his head. “Frank hasn’t seen her in days.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me. I promised you I’d ask around, I did.”

“I’ll ask him myself.”

“No, you won’t,” he says. There’s a thin wisp of fury in his voice, and she knows it’s a far bigger threat because it isn’t a threat but a promise. “Frank has a wife and kids and probably twenty-four-hour BPD or fed surveillance on him. You are not going to go making a scene at Frank Toomey’s house. You hear me?”

“So where is she?”

“I asked if you fucking heard me.”

“I heard you.”

The cords in his neck relax. He sits back.

“So where is she?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said you asked around.”

“Yes.”

“And what did you hear?”

“That the last anyone saw of Jules was when she walked home that night.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I don’t care.”

“Cops came by my place.”

“You sure you didn’t go to them?”

She grimaces.

He widens his eyes. “Well, I dunno, Mary Pat. I don’t know who you are right now. You’re off your fucking nut.”

“My daughter is missing.”

“Girls her age go missing all the time. Maybe she’s hitchhiking to San Francisco or, I dunno, fucking Florida.”

“The cops said—”

“You’re quoting cops now?”

“They said she was mixed up in that thing where the boy got killed.”

“What boy?”

“The boy at the train station.”

“The nigger drug dealer?”

“How do you know he was a drug dealer?”

A snort. “Oh, okay, he was looking for the Peace Corps office and got lost. Make you happy?”

“The cops said—”

“Stop saying ‘the cops said,’ ‘the cops told me.’ Are you out of your fucking mind? We don’t talk to cops around here.”

“I didn’t talk to them, they talked to me. They told me a group of white kids chased the black kid into the station. They think those white kids might have been George Dunbar, Rum, Brenda Morello, and my daughter.” She lights a cigarette.

Brian is watching her with an expectant look in his eyes that gradually fades. “That’s it? Cops tell you some white kids who might have been your daughter and her friends might have chased a nigger drug dealer into Columbia Station where he might have fallen on his spearchucker head and fucking died? And you want to do what with this information?”

“Find out if it’s true so it’ll help me find my daughter.”

He notices the chalk on his arms and slaps it off with his hands. He indicates something she hadn’t noticed before — a sledgehammer resting against a toolbox by the steps to Marty’s three-decker.

“I been working my ass off all day, helping the boss renovate his house, and I’m fucking bushed. Exhausted. Meanwhile, you go to my house and disturb my wife and dump a beer all over my dining room table like a slob with no manners. Then you fucking come here — twice — while we’re busting our asses to make the boss’s living room look nice. And why, Mary Pat? Why? Because your fucking daughter is probably off getting high or getting laid and forgot to call? Or because she said, ‘You know what? Enough of this shit, enough of this town, enough with them about to bus a bunch of fucking chimpanzees into my school, I’m going to Florida.’ Because I will bet you a thousand bucks of my own money that that’s where she’s headed. So I suggest you think of your daughter in Florida, sipping drinks, getting a tan. I suggest you remember that kids leave, that’s what kids do, but neighbors are forever. They shovel your walk when you’re sick, tell you when someone’s looking at your house funny, that kinda thing.” He lights his own cigarette, his pale blue eyes holding hers through the flame. “But you, right now, you are not being much of a neighbor. And we’re all getting pretty tired of it.”

“You’re getting tired of it?”

“Everyone is.”

“Well, tell everyone I’m just warming up.” She stands.

He flicks his cigarette into her chest. He does it casually, then stares at her blankly as she swipes at the sparks and pieces of coal before they can burn the fabric of her shirt.

“Shitty things,” he says as he reaches for a fresh cigarette from his pack, “happen to shitty neighbors.”

She can’t think of a comeback — she can’t really think of anything at this point; her brain swims — so she leaves.