Small Mercies

10

The next morning, she goes into work feeling so jagged it’s like she’s got sharpened quills sticking out of her. By this point, all the other girls know she hasn’t seen her daughter in three days, and they give her a wide berth. A few look like they’re considering offering sympathies or... something, but are too wary to approach.

In the break room, over coffee, all the talk centers on Auggie Williamson.

By now, the reporters have pieced together some of the facts from that night. Auggie Williamson’s car — a ’63 Rambler — broke down on Columbia Road. That left Auggie a couple options, neither ideal. The first was to walk along Columbia Road for about a mile until he reached Upham’s Corner and turned onto Dudley Street, at which point he would be among his kind. But that would be a long mile through a white neighborhood into a slightly mixed neighborhood before he reached a mostly brown one.

The second option, and the one he took, was to walk a few hundred yards to Columbia Station. There he could board the subway southbound, hope he didn’t run into any white gangs in the four stops it took him to reach Ashmont Station, where he could transfer to a bus that would take him into Mattapan, where he could, again, find safety among his own kind.

That was the option Auggie Williamson chose, but within those few hundred yards, he either talked some shit to the wrong people or tried to pull some nigger bullshit like stealing another car to get himself home or sticking someone up for carfare.

And he got what was coming.

At least that’s the sum total of the theories of the girls in the break room.

She reads the newspapers as the girls gossip.

Auggie Williamson had been returning from his job at the Zayre department store off Morrissey Boulevard. He’d worked until midnight because they were taking inventory that weekend and he was in the management trainee program. According to the papers, Auggie Williamson was twenty. He had lettered in baseball at Boston English, where he carried a consistent B-minus average through all four years. After graduation, he worked for a year at a pizza joint in Mattapan Square before being accepted to the management trainee program at Zayre.

Some of this information, Mary Pat suspects, she’s half heard from Dreamy over the years. Half heard because she was only half listening.

Dreamy has two daughters, Ella and Soria, who Mary Pat knew about, though she could never quite recall their names. Raised in the same household as Auggie, created by the same man, Dreamy’s husband, Reginald, a sweet, respectful, polite man. Dreamy works with Mary Pat, Reginald works as a clerk at the DPW, Ella’s in high school, Soria’s in seventh grade. The whole family sounds like a straight-up working-class family on the rise. Auggie had no criminal history.

She comes across a picture of Auggie in his baseball uniform in yesterday’s Herald American.

“Look how they try to make him look like a saint.” Dottie’s suddenly standing over her, a butt sticking out of her mouth, unlit. She lights it now. “Keep talking about how he was a hard worker, his father’s a hard worker, blah blah blah. We’ll see.” She nods at the rest of the girls. “We’ll see.”

“But,” Mary Pat says quietly.

“What?” Dottie leans down to hear her.

“But he’s Dreamy’s kid. And we all know Dreamy, all know what a hard worker she is.”

The other girls murmur and exchange looks of possible agreement.

Dottie’s having none of it. “The mothers can be saints — you see that on the ten o’clock news all the time. But the sons, the sons, Mary Pat, we all know, are born to crime. They have no fathers, so they—”

“He had a father.”

“And look where it got him.” Dottie snorts and takes in the rest of the room. “As nice as Dreamy might be, who would leave her son in here alone with their purse? Anyone?”

All the girls shake their heads.

Dottie turns on Mary Pat. “How about you?”

“Let her be, Dot,” Suse says. “She’s going through something.”

Dot smiles warmly at Mary Pat. “I’m just asking — would you leave your purse unattended with this Auggie Williamson?”

“No,” Mary Pat says. But before Dot can crow, she adds, “I wouldn’t leave it alone with anyone.”

“Okay. Would any of us leave our daughters alone with him?”

A round of headshakes. Dot looks at Mary Pat in triumph. Takes a step back when she sees what lives in Mary Pat’s eyes.

Mary Pat stands, a crumpled paper in her hands that she doesn’t remember crumpling. “I can’t leave my daughter alone with anyone, because I can’t fucking find her.”

Dottie holds up a hand. “Mary Pat, I’m sorry.”

Mary Pat cocks her head at that. “Are you? Because you run your mouth a lot, Dottie, about the niggers and how they’re all lazy and from broken homes and how the men all fuck around and don’t stick around to raise their kids.”

A nasty little smile finds Dottie’s little green eyes. “Because it’s the truth.”

And a question that’s been nagging at Mary Pat for a while — maybe her whole life, who knows? — finds her tongue. “It’s your truth too, though, ain’t it?”

A few of the girls make audible noises, something between gasps and moans.

“What’d you fucking say?” Dottie asks.

“Aren’t you from a broken home? Didn’t your husband fuck around and then leave you to raise the kids by yourself? I’ve noticed the people who bitch most about the coloreds and their bad qualities, they usually have those qualities themselves. I mean, when’s the last time you did even half the amount of work around here the rest of us do?”

Dottie clenches her fist and steps hard up to Mary Pat. “You listen to—”

“Dottie, you’re gonna unclench that fist before I snap it off at your wrist and shove it straight up your fat fucking ass.”

Dottie looks at the rest of the girls. After a few seconds, she tries a laugh. But when she looks back at Mary Pat, her little green eyes swim with fear.

“I am not going to repeat myself,” Mary Pat says.

Dottie’s fingers unfurl slowly from her palm. She wipes the palm on her slacks. “You’re not yourself.” She turns to the girls. “She’s not herself. And who can blame her?” She takes a drag off her cigarette, her elbow cupped in her palm to steady the shakes. Turns her eyes back on Mary Pat. “Who can blame you?” She crinkles her face in something that’s supposed to resemble sympathy. Her eyes pulse once — just once — to let Mary Pat know this moment will not be forgotten. Or forgiven. And then she smiles sadly, playing to the room. “You poor dear.”

After the break is over, Mary Pat lingers to smoke another cigarette and read the papers. If the nuns got an issue with it, they can take it up with her. In her present mood, they better be awfully brave fucking nuns.

Unnamed witnesses saw a black man running into Columbia Station at twelve-twenty, followed by at least four white kids. One witness thought it was four males with long hair, another witness thought it was two boys and two girls. (Was one of those girls mine? Mary Pat wonders. But she doesn’t really wonder. Jules. For fuck’s sake. Jules.) One witness distinctly heard someone whistling, the way one whistles to a dog. Another heard someone call, “We just want to talk.”

Police have ascertained that there were other people on the platform when Auggie Williamson and his four pursuers arrived. They are asking those people to come forward. It’s believed — though not proved yet — that Auggie Williamson fell or was pushed into the path of the train. That the impact to his head spun him around on the platform and he somehow, from there, fell to the tracks and rolled under the platform.

It all sounds fishy as hell. If Mary Pat can buy that someone could extend his head into the path of a moving subway car and not end up getting the rest of his body knocked onto the tracks ahead of the car, she certainly can’t accept that Auggie then staggered in place long enough for the train to pass before conveniently falling forward onto the tracks and then rolling backward under the platform.

No drugs were found on his person. The papers make sure to mention that. All that means to Mary Pat’s neighbors (and most of the whites in West Roxbury and Neponset and Milton and everywhere else in or around the city that’s stayed uniformly white) is that whoever killed Auggie Williamson — whether with intent or by accident — stripped him of the drugs he was carrying.

And if this didn’t have such a personal aspect for her — if Auggie wasn’t Dreamy Williamson’s son, if Jules wasn’t a “person of interest” in his death — Mary Pat would have written it off the same way.

But reading through the papers, chain-smoking one Virginia Slim after another, she allows a picture to emerge in her mind of an Auggie Williamson who might not have done drugs, who most certainly was not from a broken home, who possibly didn’t try to steal a car or rob someone for cab fare but was, instead, a twenty-year-old kid whose car broke down in the wrong neighborhood.

And what neighborhood is that, Mary Pat?

My neighborhood.

When she walks out of work at the end of the shift, Marty Butler’s butterscotch AMC Matador is parked at the curb. Weeds stands by the back door, and as soon as Mary Pat has exited Meadow Lane Manor, he opens that door and she spies Marty sitting in the back.

She doesn’t move for a moment, just stands on the sidewalk pretending she has options. Once that little fantasy runs aground, she gets in the car with him.

He smiles and kisses her cheek and tells her she still looks as lovely as the day she married Dukie, thereby reminding her that he was at her first wedding, reminding her that Dukie worked for him, reminding her that he doesn’t just own the present, he owns history too.

Marty looks like he stepped out of a JCPenney circular. The Dad Model, wearing cardigans with a football cocked in his hand or fake-laughing with the other Dad Models. Square haircut, strong jaw, cleft in his chin. Eyes that smile without a shred of joy. Never has a hair out of place, a whisker or shadow on his cheeks. His teeth are white and straight. He’s handsome in the blandest of ways and hasn’t seemed to age for at least twenty years.

It’s a mystery what made Marty Marty. Some say it was the tour of duty in Korea. Others whisper ever so quietly that Marty Butler was always fucked in the head. A guy Dukie used to drink with, who grew up with Marty on Linden Street, told Dukie, “In high school, ’member he had a sister died from TB? He skipped her funeral to play basketball. Scored twenty-four points.”

As Weeds drives them back toward Southie, Marty asks Mary Pat, “Will you be at the rally Friday?”

“Oh, right.” In truth, Mary Pat had forgotten. The busing outrage, which seemed to consume everyone in Southie right now — and had consumed her up until three days ago — had slipped from her mind.

“‘Oh, right’?” Marty chuckles. “It’s only the future of our way of life at stake, Mary Pat.”

“I know,” she says. “I know.”

“You know who the truly happy countries are? Denmark, Norway, New Zealand, Iceland. You never hear a bad thing about those places. They don’t fight wars, they don’t suffer unrest. You never see them on the news. They have unity and prosperity because they stay whole. They stay whole because the races don’t mix because there are no races to mix.” He sighs, blowing it out through his lips. “First they’ll tell us where our kids can go to school, next they’ll tell us which god we’re allowed to pray to.”

“You pray?” She doesn’t mean to insult him, but it’s never occurred to her that someone like Marty Butler takes to prayer.

He nods. “I pray every night.”

“On your knees?” She just can’t picture it.

“On my back. In bed.” He shoots her an amused grimace. “Mostly for wisdom, sometimes for special dispensations for members of our flock.”

Our flock. His and God’s. That explains it.

“Do you recall when little Deidre Ward had the cancer? Sure, she was only seven or eight. I prayed hard those days, and wouldn’t you know the cancer went into remission. The Lord listens, Mary Pat. The trick is to have a pure heart when you ask Him for something.”

“Will that bring my Jules back to me?”

He gives her a distant smile and pats her leg. Gives the flesh above her knee a firm squeeze. His thumb and index finger dig all the way into the tissue. And then he pats lightly again and removes the hand as they cross over the bridge into Southie.

“How’s that car of yours?” he asks. “Still running?”

She nods. “As unlikely as that may seem.”

He gives his own reflection that distant smile of his. “Some things don’t know when to quit.”

“Why should it?” she says. “As long as it’s still getting me where I need to go.”

He looks at her and wiggles his eyebrows up and down like they’re in on a joke together. “And your apartment there? At Commonwealth?”

She shrugs. “The same.”

“Because I came into some cans of paint, Mary Pat. Crates of them. They’re all sitting in a warehouse over on West Second. Every color of the rainbow. Would you be interested in sprucing up your walls? Adding some color?”

“If you have a few cans I can take off your hands, sure, Marty, that’d be nice.”

He waves at the absurdity of the proposition. “No, no, hon. We would never expect you to do your own painting. You take a few days somewhere and we’ll pop in and paint them walls professionally for you. You’ll come back to a place so pretty you won’t even recognize it.”

“What’s with all the renovation lately, Marty?”

“What now?”

“Well, first your place and now mine?”

He looks at her with such bafflement that she knows he has no idea what she’s talking about.

“The house behind the Fields,” she says.

He stares back at her. Still no clue.

Weeds, from the front seat, says, “She’s talking about the work we’re doing on the kitchen, boss.”

“Ah!” Marty says. “Of course, of course.” Another pat for her knee. “The thing of it is, I don’t think of that house as ‘mine,’ Mary Pat. I still live in the same spot I always did over on Linden.”

She smiles and nods and tries not to let him see into the part of her brain that knows he’s lying. Brian Shea claimed they’d been working on the living room. Weeds claimed it was the kitchen. And Marty had no fucking clue about any of it until Weeds tipped him off.

“Well, think about the paint, at any rate,” Marty says.

The car pulls to the curb in front of Kelly’s Landing. A takeout place going back to Prohibition times — best fried clams in the city — it closed a month back. Mary Pat’s parents went on their first date at Kelly’s; her mother remembered her own father taking her there as a child, as she took Mary Pat, and Mary Pat took Jules and Noel. And now it’s boarded up. A place that provided food and memories for generations. The owners, it’s said, decided it was time to try something new, time for a change.

Change, for those who don’t have a say in it, feels like a pretty word for death. Death to what you want, death to whatever plans you’d been making, death to the life you’ve always known.

They get out of the car and walk past Kelly’s onto the causeway.

“I miss the smell,” Marty says. “That fried-food smell? My entire life, I walked past here, the air had that smell. Now it just smells like low tide.”

Mary Pat says nothing.

“How did we get here?” Marty Butler wants to know.

He’s not talking about the causeway they’re walking along. He’s talking about this point in their relationship, such as it is. It’s been cloudy all day, the sun taking the day off behind a wall of woolen gray. No hint of rain but no hint of sun either. She and Marty walk toward the Sugar Bowl, a small oval park surrounded by benches. The Sugar Bowl sits a half mile out in the bay where the two causeways meet. People fish from the causeways. Mary Pat and Marty pass men and a few women casting their lines, some out of boredom, some for their dinner. Ken Fen used to fish out here, came home a couple times with flounder that was gamey. Most of the time, he admitted, he just went there to check out of his own head for a little bit. The fishermen and fisherwomen all acknowledge Marty with nods, but nobody speaks and nobody approaches.

“How did we get here?” Marty asks again. As if he didn’t know. As if he hasn’t known every move she’s made since her search for Jules began.

“I don’t know,” she says. “I’m just trying to find my daughter.”

“It feels so unnecessary,” Marty says. “All this...” He searches for the appropriate word in the clouds, comes back with “conflict.”

“I’m not after conflict,” she says. “I’m not looking for a fight.”

“Tell me what you need,” he says to her.

“I need Jules. I need my daughter.”

“And we need peace around our thing,” he says. “Peace and quiet and nobody looking our way.”

“I understand that.”

“You understand that, but you beat the snot out of a kid in my bar? You understand that, but you run around the neighborhood causing a fuss?”

“She’s my daughter, Marty.”

He gives that a quick flick of his head, his lips pursed, as if it’s an entirely different subject matter, as if he’s speaking English and she’s speaking Mandarin.

“What it is, Mary Pat, is a matter of order. Everything works when everything works a predictable way. Look at this bay.” He waves his arm at the water around them. Pleasure Bay. Walled in by these causeways and the tiny park where they intersect. “No waves. No surprises. Not like out there.” Now he’s gesturing at the ocean beyond. “Out there, you’ve got waves and swells and undertows.” He turns his bland face to her. “I don’t like oceans, Mary Pat, I like bays, I like harbors.”

They pass a woman feeding the seagulls. She flicks hard pieces of bread at the birds from a white paper bag dotted with grease spots. She’s surprisingly young for a bird feeder, no older than Mary Pat, but her eyes burn with loss. Loss of love, loss of hope, loss of mind — it’s impossible to tell which. But loss. The gulls caw and tread the air in front of the woman in terror. Afraid to get close, too hungry not to risk it.

“I’m not going to cause any trouble,” Mary Pat tells Marty.

“You’re already causing it.” He fishes a pack of Dunhills from his Baracuta and lights one with a slim gold lighter, turning away from the mild breeze to do so. She gets a look at the crown of his head and notes that his brown hair is orange up there, which tells her he uses hair dye, which makes her wonder for a moment if he’s a closet fag. Were that the case, so many things about Marty Butler would finally make sense.

“If I’m causing trouble,” she says carefully, “it’s not because I want to cause you trouble. It’s because I want to find my daughter.”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

“She was Frank Toomey’s mistress.”

He makes a face as if he just bit into something unpleasant. He turns the grimace to the sea for a moment and then sighs softly. “I’m aware.”

“Marty,” she says, “you’re fucking aware?”

He holds a hand up to his ear, a man who loathes when women use profanities. “Frank assures me he hasn’t seen your daughter in a couple weeks. I asked all my men. She hasn’t been around Frank, she hasn’t been around the Fields.”

“So where is she?”

“That’s not the issue at hand.”

“It very much is the fucking issue at hand.”

He shakes his head. “Your daughter is missing. My heart breaks for you. But her leaving to wherever she went does not overrule my right to conduct business in this neighborhood.”

“No one’s stopping you from conducting business.”

“You are.” He doesn’t raise his voice, but it definitely grows tighter. “You are.”

“How?”

“Everyone’s watching us. If this busing abomination happens? Cameras will be on this neighborhood like it’s the moon landing. And now with this colored kid getting killed and your daughter maybe being mixed up in it, they’re going to bring more cameras in here. And the one place those cameras can’t point? Is at me. And mine. But if you keep acting the way you’re acting, hon? I fear they may have no choice.”

“I just want to find my daughter.”

“So find her. But look someplace besides my organization.”

“But what if someone in your organization knows something they’re not telling you?”

“They wouldn’t dare.”

They near the Sugar Bowl, and Mary Pat is surprised to realize it’s almost empty. Just one man sitting on the center bench watching them come. The Sugar Bowl is never empty on a summer day. But here’s this one man and no one else.

Do I die here? she wonders. Is my crime already that big?

It wouldn’t be, she knows all too well, the first time (or the fifth) that Marty Butler made a problem vanish by making a person vanish.

They reach the end of the causeway, and the man who rises from the bench is a man she’s never seen before. He’s wearing a blue leisure suit with a white turtleneck. His brown hair is combed back tight against his scalp. He holds a doctor’s satchel in his right hand as he stands and looks down at Mary Pat. He’s very tall.

Marty says, “This is a friend of mine from down Providence. You can call him Lewis. You see that bag in Lewis’s hand, Mary Pat?”

She nods. Lewis stares at her the way ravens stare at worms.

“I want to give you the bag,” Marty says. “Lewis wanted to give you something else. Because it’s not merely my business you’re affecting with all your noise. You’re affecting Lewis’s. And the people he works with down Providence.”

“I’m just—”

“Don’t say you’re just looking for your daughter. There’s more to this. And you know it. Now, Lewis would like to end this his way. But I convinced him to try my way first.”

Lewis hands her the satchel.

“Open it,” Marty says.

She notices, with no shortage of humiliation, that her hands shake as she unsnaps the clasp over the center of the satchel, then pries the bag open. It’s half filled with money — stacks of well-used hundreds, all rubber-banded together.

“Brian tells me Jules went to Florida,” Marty says.

The man from Providence stares at her and never blinks.

“Brian feels pretty sure of this.”

“I don’t know that she did,” Mary Pat manages.

“Ah,” Marty says, “but that’s where you have to take a leap of faith. Your friends have looked for her on your behalf, those friends of yours that people don’t lie to. And those friends have not found her. So you must put faith in their opinion that she is no longer to be found in this general area. But it’s not just faith I’m asking for. I’m saying you go prove it to yourself.”

“How would I do that?”

“Take the money in that bag and use it to fly to Florida, stay in a nice hotel, and spend your days looking for your daughter. Kinda money that’s in that bag, Mary Pat, you could stay down there for a few years.”

Lewis lights a cigarette, considers her through the flame.

Marty stands in front of her. His eyes are very still. “I’m going to walk my friend Lewis back the way we came. You stay here for a bit and collect your thoughts and make a final decision. If you decide to keep the bag, I hope you use its contents in good health and with my blessing. If you decide to return the bag, you know where to find me. Whatever decision you make, this topic we’ve been discussing? We’ll never speak of it again. Do you understand?”

She doesn’t trust herself to speak. She manages a nod.

“We understand each other then, hon.” Marty squeezes her shoulder once before he and Lewis walk back up the causeway toward land.

Once they’re out of earshot, she stops constricting her face, and the sob leaves the back of her throat like a ball of bile and exits her mouth. She looks down at the money in the bag as her tears stream onto the paper.

And she knows her daughter is dead.

She knows her daughter is dead.