Small Mercies

12

After his shift, Bobby has a few pops with a couple of Robbery detectives at JJ Foley’s and then heads home to the house on Tuttle Street where he lives with his five sisters and his brother, Tim, the failed priest. None of the Coyne siblings is married. Three, Bobby among them, tried and failed. Two came close to the altar but didn’t make it the whole way there. The other two have never even had a long-term relationship.

This is a source of great mystery in the extended family of Coynes and those families the previous generations married into — the McDonoughs and Donnellys and Kearneys and Mullens — as well as to the neighborhood at large, because several of the Coyne girls were real lookers, or had been in their youth, anyway.

The house is one of the last of the sprawling single-family Victorians that’s stayed a single family on Tuttle Street. Most of the rest of them, built for large Irish families between the big wars of the first half of the century, have been converted into two-family houses. Some have even been cut up into multiple-unit buildings. But not the Coyne house. It remains exactly as it was when they all grew up here, learning its creaks and hiding places and the source of its sad groans on heartless winter nights.

He finds Nancy and Bridget sitting at the kitchen table, nursing their nightly highballs and smoking their cigarettes — Parliaments for Nancy, Kents for Bridget. He grabs a beer from the fridge and a fresh ashtray and joins them at the table. Nancy, who works in urban planning, is bitching about a coworker to Bridget, who’s an ER nurse at City. Nancy, still a stunner in her early forties, can talk paint off a wall; Bridget, meek and mousy and perpetually pickled when not working, barely utters a full sentence in a given day.

Nancy finishes her rant about someone named Felix and the coffee maker in the break room and flicks her eyes at Bobby. “You need to lose a few pounds, Michael. Don’t you think he needs to lose weight, Bridge?”

Bridget looks down at her knees.

“That’s a rather unkind way to greet a man.” Bobby peels back the tab on his beer.

“I want you to live a long life.”

“You used to tell me I was too skinny.”

“But that was the heroin.”

The word “Oh!” pops out of Bridget’s mouth in horrified surprise.

“Well, it’s not a secret!” Nancy says.

“Actually,” Bobby says, “it kinda is.”

“To the outside world.” Nancy waves at the windows. “Not in here.”

Claire comes through the side door off the driveway and hangs her umbrella on a hook. “What’s not in here?”

“We’re talking about Michael’s problem.”

“The drug thing?” Claire pulls the cork from a bottle of red, pours herself a glass. Kisses Bobby’s head lightly as she comes around him to take a seat.

“Yes, the drug thing,” Nancy says. “He thinks we’re going to blab it to the world.”

“Why would we do that?”

“No one said you would,” Bobby says. “I just find it uncomfortable to talk about.”

“You’re a fucking hero,” Claire says, and Bobby is touched to see Bridget look at him with wide eyes and an emphatic nod. “You know how many people kick that shit?”

“Very few,” Bobby admits.

“But you did.” Claire raises her glass to him and drinks.

“I was just telling him he could lose a few pounds,” Nancy says, “and it turned into this thing.”

“What thing?” Bobby says.

“See, he’s getting upset.”

“I’m not getting upset.”

“Yeah, you are.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Like I just said. Upset.”

Bobby sighs and asks Claire how her day was.

“We,” Claire says, turning her wineglass in a small circle on the table, “have a real storm of shit coming. I don’t think anyone realizes yet.”

Claire is a secretary at the Metropolitan District Commission Police barracks in Southie. MDC cops work the beaches and the parks and leave the project crime to city cops. So most city cops think MDC cops are pussies, but Bobby’s always found them to be the most knowledgeable source of information for all things Southie.

“This the busing thing?” Bobby asks.

Claire nods. “We’re getting some ugly intel. Mass-unrest kinda ugly.”

“It’ll blow over,” Bobby says, just to be optimistic.

“I don’t think so,” Claire says. “You’re working that colored kid’s death, right?”

“I am.”

“Was he a dealer?” Nancy wants to know.

Bobby shakes his head.

“Well, what was he doing there?”

“Car broke down.”

“He shoulda taken better care of it.”

“Oh, so it’s his fault,” Claire says with a roll of her eyes.

“I’m not saying it’s his fault,” Nancy says, “just that if he’d taken better care of his car, it wouldn’t have broken down and he wouldn’t have died.”

Claire says, “Sounds like you’re saying it’s his fault.”

“I said the exact opposite!”

Claire turns to Bobby. “You making arrests soon?”

“Not unless we catch some big breaks. Pretty sure we know who did it. But knowing it and proving it, you know, big difference.”

“Well, give us a heads-up if you think you’re gonna bust anyone white from Southie anytime near the first day of school. Cuz this city is about to go boom.” She refills her glass of wine.

“I dunno,” he says, suddenly weary.

“You don’t know what?” his sister Diane asks. Coming down the front hall now, just off her shift at the public library in Upham’s Corner. Goes immediately to the stove and turns on the kettle for her tea.

“We’re talking about the kid got killed at Columbia Station,” Nancy says.

“You caught that?” Diane asks Bobby.

“I did.”

“I heard Marty Butler’s guys were involved,” Claire says.

“Eh. More like wannabe — Marty Butler guys. But” — Bobby thinks of George Dunbar for a second — “if he takes a personal interest, he could cause headaches, sure.”

The Butler crew has a lot of cops on their payroll. At both a local and a state level. Even if you’re not a dirty cop, you’re reluctant to cross or expose the ones who are (or could be; you rarely know for sure). If you do go forward and make a case against Marty or one of his boys, evidence has a way of vanishing, witnesses contract acute amnesia, and the cases tend to die a quick death in open court. Whereupon the cops at the center of them have a history of being demoted or reassigned. So, if you take a run at the Butler crew, you cannot fucking miss. Not if you’re fond of the little things — a living wage, a pension at the end of it, or a roof over your head. Shit like that.

Claire knows the ins and outs of police culture the way the rest of them don’t. She pats Bobby’s hand and says, “Be careful. No one’s life is worth your own.”

Bobby has fought a war — okay, a “police action” — in a country nine thousand miles away trying to prove the opposite.

Nancy, always the first to go for the jugular, chimes in. “And you gotta think about Brendan.”

Brendan is Bobby’s son. He’s nine and lives with his mother except on weekends, when he comes here and spends forty-eight hours with his father, five crazy, doting aunts, and gentle, bleak-hearted Uncle Tim, the failed priest. Bobby loves Brendan in a way that defies every notion he ever had about love before his son entered the world. He loves him beyond all capacity for rational thought. He loves him more than he loves all other people or things or dreams — including himself, including his own — combined.

“Nobody,” he says to his sister, “not even Marty Butler, is crazy enough to come after a cop. And even if he was, he sure as shit wouldn’t come after a cop’s kid. Not if he wants to see the next day of his life. Where do you come up with this shit, Nance?”

Nancy, never one to admit a mistake, pivots. “I wasn’t talking about physical harm, Michael, I was talking about you losing your job, your pension. And then what will that treacherous cow you used to be married to do to our weekends with Brendan?”

“It’s a fair point,” Diane says, and even Bridget nods in agreement.

Bobby’s family loves his son almost as much as Bobby does. Even Tim, floating in a fog of bitterness and the most esoteric reading material Bobby’s ever come across, manages to visibly lighten on weekends. And it’s not just because Brendan is the sole nephew (or niece). Brendan is, simply put, a wonderful individual. Nine years old and he’s thoughtful, empathetic, profoundly curious, funny as fuck, and warm. It’s as if he somehow inherited the best traits of his blood relatives but none of their damage. Yet, anyway.

His sisters would say, “That’s only because Shannon doesn’t have him all to herself,” but the truth is that Shannon is a good mother. Terrible wife and didn’t come highly recommended as a daughter or sibling, but she loves her son, and she’s dedicated herself to his upbringing in a way she never dedicated herself to anything or anyone in her life.

“I won’t lose my job or my pension or my boy,” Bobby tells his sisters now.

“As long as you don’t fuck with Marty Butler.”

“He’s a fucking criminal,” Bobby says. “I’m a cop.”

“He’s a connected criminal,” Claire reminds him.

It isn’t just fellow cops Marty Butler has in his pocket. There are judges for sure, probably at least one congressman or state senator, and maybe, just maybe, the darkest of the dark whispers say, someone or maybe a half-dozen someones in federal law enforcement. Over the years, far too many potential witnesses against Marty or his associates — whose identities were kept under lock and key, mind you — have vanished or been killed.

“I know,” Bobby assures them all. “It was kids chased Auggie Williamson into the station. And no matter what I find out, it’s not looking like first-degree murder. Might not rise much higher than involuntary manslaughter.” He yawns into his fist, exhausted. “I’m gonna hit it, ladies.”

He puts his beer can in the trash, gives each sister a peck on the cheek, and heads up to bed.

After a shower, he sits by his window and smokes and looks out at the night. He told his sisters the truth — he doubts the kids who were instrumental in the events that led to Auggie Williamson’s death will face serious prison time. And that fact, he realizes, was what created the sudden wave of exhaustion.

He’d stood with the parents, Reginald and Calliope Williamson, as they identified their son in the morgue. They didn’t cry or wail. They took in the breadth of their son lying on the metal table and each ran their hands down one of his arms — Reginald on the left, Calliope on the right. Then they did the same to his cheeks. With their hands there — each pressed to their son’s face — Reginald said, “I love you, my son,” and Calliope said, “We are always with you.”

Bobby’s seen a lot of parents identify their dead offspring. It stopped getting to him some time ago. But the way the Williamsons beheld their son, how they’d caressed his arms and face, as if doing so might provide warmth on his journey to the other side, stuck with Bobby for most of the day.

If four black kids had chased a white kid into the path of a train, they’d be facing life. If they entered a plea, the best offer would be a minimum of twenty years hard time. But the kids who chased Auggie Williamson into the path of a train won’t, Bobby knows, face more than five years. If that.

And sometimes that disparity wears him the fuck out.

Bobby finishes his cigarette and climbs into bed.

When he closes his eyes, he can see Reginald and Calliope’s palms gliding ever so slowly along the bare arms of their dead son.

Not how you ever imagined it would end twenty years after you first burped him and changed his diapers.

Bobby’s killed two people in his life. Neither could have been older than eighteen. One may have been fifteen, sixteen. Bobby has no way of knowing for sure. He killed them both in Vietnam on the same day while he defoliated bush near his base. The VC hid in vegetation. They harvested food from vegetation. So Uncle Sam sent Bobby and his platoon out with a South Vietnamese platoon to poison the fuck out of the countryside around their base. They had hand sprayers and spray trucks. Farther south they were using helicopters. Someday soon, Bobby had heard, they planned to drop the shit out of planes.

The kids who came out of the bush did so from both sides of the road, skinny little fuckers with square heads and rifles or machetes bigger than they were, firing or swinging away like it was do or die, now or never. Which, as it turns out, it was. Bobby shot one of them in the face with his M14, was tackled right in the road by another who had a fucking machete but didn’t think to use it until Bobby was on the ground. Bobby put the muzzle of his .45 into the kid’s abdomen and fired up twice. Blew the kid’s esophagus to shreds. Was looking into the boy’s eyes as those bullets ripped through his body. Was looking into his eyes a few seconds later when the boy died, Bobby thinking, Why didn’t you use the machete before you tackled me?

That was back in the days when the VC was still figuring it out. That morning Bobby and the other guys killed fifteen of them, the whole gang. The corpses lay on the road afterward, and it was clear from their rib cages that none of them had eaten a full meal in months.

Two of them were dead because they’d tried to kill Corporal Michael “Bobby” Coyne of Dorchester, Massachusetts. But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren’t in charge of making them.

Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something — anything — that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

Bobby lies in a soft comfortable bed nine thousand miles and twelve years removed from those dead boys on the road and decides that tomorrow he’s going to haul all four of those Southie kids in.