Small Mercies

11

Bobby Coyne and Vincent Pritchard drive through Southie to interview the final witness on their list — thus far — to the last night of Auggie Williamson’s life. The witness, a tower crane operator named Seamus Riordan, agrees to meet them at Boyd Container Terminal along Summer Street during his lunch break.

The moment they cross into Southie, Bobby feels a difference in the air. Bobby grew up only a few miles south in Dorchester, in a parish that was wholly white and predominantly Irish; he presumes that in most places in America, a distance of a few miles between two enclaves that share identical ethnic characteristics doesn’t represent a seismic difference in culture. But crossing the border into Southie always gives him the feeling that he’s just entered the rain forest of an unknowable tribe. Not specifically hostile, not dangerous by their nature. But, at their heart, opaque.

Driving along Broadway, he sees a young guy exit a bus and then turn to help an old woman who was waiting to board that bus. In his entire life, Bobby’s never seen more people help little old ladies cross streets, avoid puddles or potholes, carry their groceries, or find their car keys in purses overstuffed with rosary beads and damp tissues.

Everyone knows everyone here; they stop one another in the streets to ask after spouses, children, cousins twice removed. Come winter, they shovel walks together, join up to push cars out of snowbanks, freely pass around bags of salt or sand for icy sidewalks. Summertime, they congregate on porches and stoops or cluster in lawn chairs along the sidewalks to shoot the shit, trade the daily newspapers, and listen to Ned Martin calling the Sox games on ’HDH. They drink beer like it’s tap water, smoke ciggies as if the pack will self-destruct at midnight, and call to one another — across streets, to and from cars, and up at distant windows — like impatience is a virtue. They love the church but aren’t real fond of mass. They only like the sermons that scare them; they mistrust any that appeal to their empathy.

They all have nicknames. No James can just be a James; has to be Jim or Jimmy or Jimbo or JJ or, in one case, Tantrum. There are so many Sullivans that calling someone Sully isn’t enough. In Bobby’s various incursions here over the years, he’s met a Sully One, a Sully Two, an Old Sully, a Young Sully, Sully White, Sully Tan, Two-Time Sully, Sully the Nose, and Little Sully (who’s fucking huge). He’s met guys named Zipperhead, Pool Cue, Pot Roast, and Ball Sac (son of Sully Tan). He’s come across Juggs, Nicklebag, Drano, Pink Eye (who’s blind), Legsy (who limps), and Handsy (who’s got none).

Every guy has a thousand-yard stare. Every woman has an attitude. Every face is whiter than the whitest paint you’ve ever seen and then, just under the surface, misted with an everlasting Irish pink that sometimes turns to acne and sometimes doesn’t.

They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall.

He has no idea where it all comes from — the loyalty and the rage, the brotherhood and the suspicion, the benevolence and the hate.

But he suspects it has something to do with the need for a life to have meaning. Bobby is a child of the ’40s and ’50s. When, as he recalls, you knew who you were. Without question.

And it’s the “without question” that’s bothered him ever since. While he tromped through Vietnam. While he danced with the needle. While he worked patrol in the heart of the city’s black communities — Roxbury and Mattapan, Egleston Square and Upham’s Corner.

He wants to question. He needs to question. A Vietnamese hooker he’d thought was a friend once walked up to him in a club in Saigon and tried to cut his throat with a razor blade in her teeth. Bobby thought she’d been leaning in to give him a kiss until the last microsecond, when he felt a voice in his chest scream-whisper, No. Fuck no. Even as he chucked her off his lap, he felt an odd sympathy for her — if he were a Vietnamese bar girl, he’d want to kill his ass too.

Looking out at Southie now, as the bustle of Broadway passes by in its uniform whiteness — white baby pushed in a stroller by white mother as three white muscle-heads in their straining white T-shirts exit the drugstore and pass an old white couple sitting on a bench and a gaggle of white girls runs along the sidewalk past a white boy sitting on a mailbox looking forlorn, and all around them, in the background and in the foreground, are other white people — Bobby recalls a taxi girl in Hué telling him she could never go back to her village now that it was known she’d slept with a white man. (Not Bobby; some guy way before Bobby.) It shocked him, this idea that she could be looked down upon because she’d slept with a white man. That made no fucking sense, where Bobby came from. He told her that. He said, “We’re the people who solve problems. That’s why we’re here.”

His taxi girl, Cai, said, “People should be left to themselves.”

Is that the key? he wonders as he looks out on Broadway. Should everyone just leave everyone else the fuck alone?

Seamus Riordan seems to think so. Those are the first words out of his mouth when they meet up with him in the break-room trailer at Boyd Container Terminal: “Couldn’t you’ve just left me be?”

Seamus Riordan is from Southie, so he’s a hard case. He’ll bust their balls as a matter of course.

“Why were you on the platform that night?” Bobby asks.

“Coming home.”

“From?” Vincent asks.

“Being out.”

“Out where?” Bobby wonders.

“Of the house.”

“So, you’re out of the house,” Bobby says pleasantly. “Any place specific?”

“Yup,” Seamus says, and folds his arms.

“Where?”

“Specifically?”

“Yes.”

“I was, ya know.”

“I don’t.”

“Hanging out with someone.”

“A friend?”

“Sure.”

“Hey!” Vincent says. “Why don’t you cut the shit?”

Vincent looks ready to pop out of his skin. Like a lot of guys who try too hard to act like they deserve respect, he has very low tolerance for people he correctly perceives don’t respect him. This leads to Vincent getting in a lot of confrontations, which has led to two excessive-force complaints being leveled against him in the last eighteen months. So the fact that, at a relatively young age, he’s reached Homicide, the very tip-top of the career ladder, means he’s inexplicably failing upward, which can only mean he’s connected to someone with major juice in the department. He’s someone’s nephew, someone’s cousin, someone’s rent boy.

He doesn’t play Bad Cop well, though. He comes off more as Bitch Cop or Whiny Cop or Embarrassing Teenage Son Cop.

Which is what elicits Seamus Riordan’s black hole of a smile. “Cut the what?”

“The shit.” Vince lights a cigarette and exhales the gray smoke through his nostrils, which is why his nose hairs are more prevalent than they should be on a guy in his late twenties.

Seamus Riordan looks at Bobby. “Am I a suspect in something?”

“Not at all.”

“I’m just a potential witness?”

“That you are.”

“So if I don’t like this dickhead’s attitude, I can just walk away, go climb back up in my crane, am I right?”

Bobby places a hand to a surging Vincent’s chest. “You can.”

Seamus Riordan gives Vincent a fuck you glare. “Then you should check your fucking attitude, Serpico.”

Now Vincent’s torn — between embracing the comparison to his idol (not Serpico the man, whose ethics he doesn’t share, but Al Pacino as Serpico, his fashion hero) or taking the comparison for the insult Bobby is sure Seamus Riordan intends it to be.

Vincent leans into the former. “Check your fucking attitude, little man.”

Seamus gives Bobby a wry smirk of the eyes, as if to say, Kids these days, am I right?

Bobby lights his own cigarette. Offers Seamus the pack. Seamus takes one and Bobby lights it for him and then lights Vincent’s and suddenly they’re all friends. Ready to go to the bar together once they’re done, that kinda vibe.

“It was over by the time I got out of the train,” Seamus says.

“Tell me,” Bobby says.

“There were these four kids...”

“White?”

“Yeah.”

“Male or female?”

“Two boys, two girls. The inbound train had just left and they were standing on the edge of the platform and the boys were screaming at each other, one of them calling the other a retard, I heard that. And one of the girls was, like, just screaming? Like losing-her-fucking-mind screaming. And then the other girl slapped her and she shut up.”

This is now as far as Bobby and Vincent have gotten into the timeline of the night. The other witnesses have taken them through:

From that point, all recollections of the first five witnesses grew hazy. Those were four loud, violent kids on that platform. No one wanted to catch any of their eyes by mistake. No one wanted to be dragged into this. Be the next person to hear they were in the wrong neighborhood.

So they looked away.

Then three walked off. Left the station. Took their chances hailing cabs.

Two waited for the outbound train that Seamus Riordan arrived on. Kept their eyes focused on the tracks until they could see the lights of the incoming train. But neither looked back at those four kids and whatever they were doing to the kid they’d been chasing.

The outbound train arrived. The two witnesses got on.

Seamus Riordan got off. At twenty past midnight, he was the only passenger to exit.

“And that’s when I seen the five of them.”

“You mean four.”

“The four of them and the spook kid.”

“Wait,” Bobby said, “what?”

“The four white kids and the black kid,” Seamus said. “Four plus one makes five.”

“But he’d fallen off the platform by then.”

Seamus Riordan narrows his eyes. “He was lying at their feet.”

“After the train left the station?”

“Yeah.”

“You’re not making this up?” Vincent says.

“Who the fuck would make that up? Your parents raise any kids who aren’t fucking retarded?”

Bobby Coyne watches Vincent for signs of impending violence, but by now he’s like a ball-snipped dog. If Seamus gives him much more abuse, he’ll roll on his back for a belly rub.

“So,” Bobby says, “the train’s gone, the victim’s still on the platform with the kids standing over him?”

“Yup.”

“And then?”

Seamus’s eyes bug. “I don’t fucking know. I didn’t make it to forty-three in this fucking town because I linger when I see four people standing over a body.”

“So he was dead?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said ‘a body.’”

“Yeah, like, someone lying on the ground. He was kinda moving from side to side. I could see that much. Then I left.”

“But he was on the platform.”

“How many times I gotta say it? You wanna try a new language? Fucking, I dunno, Flemish, that be better? He was on the platform. Rolling back and forth a bit. Wait, not rolling. More like... flapping.” He shrugs. “Like a, I dunno, a fish just came off the hook.”

Vincent peers at Seamus Riordan. “But what kind of fish?”

“A black cod,” Seamus says. And he and Vincent laugh their asses off.

Not for the first time in his life — or even the eightieth — Bobby hates humanity. Wonders if God’s great unforgivable crime was creating us in the first place.

“And then you left?” he asks Seamus Riordan.

Seamus Riordan’s laughter trails off. “Yeah, I left.”

“And a kid died.”

Something catches in Seamus Riordan’s eyes. A glint of shame, perhaps. Or maybe Bobby’s just being hopeful.

Because in the next breath, Seamus shrugs and says, “Wasn’t my kid.”