Small Mercies

21

George Dunbar’s two main dealers — Joe-Dog Fitz from H Street and Quentin Corkery from Old Colony — are working the gazebo at Marine Park for him. But George himself never shows up. Midway through the second day, after a big noontime rush from construction workers and some truckers from Boston-Buffalo, Joe-Dog and Quentin have an urgent discussion with their runners, all of them talking fast by the base of the gazebo. Mary Pat, with Bess’s window down, can hear a few words and phrases from twenty yards away, the most important of which is “low on beauties and Pepsi,” which she presumes means they’re running out of speed and cocaine. Heavens, she thinks, I hope you’re still well stocked on heroin, dear ones.

Quentin Corkery leaves the roost. He walks down the slope of Marine Park and hops in a yellow Datsun Z parked near the statue. He peels off the curb with a long screech. Mary Pat follows him back down Day Boulevard where, after less than two miles, he pulls off into Old Colony. The two housing projects in this section of Southie — Old Colony and Old Harbor — are sister projects to Commonwealth. They were all built within ten years of one another, all laid out with similar footprints. Mary Pat hangs back, puttering slowly up the thin road Quentin took to a rear parking lot. He pulls up directly in front of a small black stoop, hops out of the car, and runs inside the building. Mary Pat once dated a guy who lived here — Paul Bailey, doing eight to ten at Walpole, last she checked — and remembers the layout’s the same as Commonwealth: shotgun hallway going straight up the center, doors to the units branching off that main vein. She can’t get into position in time to see which unit Quentin enters, but she’s set up on the little stoop with a clear view through the yellow door glass when he exits, and she clocks him coming out of the fourth door down on the left. She puts her butt on the top of the short railing and swings her body around, drops down off the railing, and is already tucked along the side of the building by the time Quentin exits, hops in his Datsun, and drives off, once again laying enough rubber to make Mary Pat wonder if he deals drugs just to keep himself in tires. Mary Pat walks back to Bess, sitting in the corner of the parking lot where she left her. She pops the trunk and rummages through Dukie’s bag until she finds what she thinks she’ll need, then closes the trunk.

She puts on gloves before she reaches the main door. Once she’s inside, she notices the hallway smells a bit different from the ones at Commonwealth. Still smells of Lysol, spilled beer, and the potatoes, cabbage, and corned beef boiled inside at least a quarter of the units every Sunday. But there’s something else, a hint of mold, maybe? The scent of a damp April sidewalk or a nearby swimming pool, but there aren’t any swimming pools around here, that’s for sure. Four doors down on the left is number 209. She knocks and waits, her ear against the door. She hears nothing. She knocks a second time to be sure. She’s got the lock punch tucked under her shirt against her spine, just in case, but Dukie’s pick goes through the lock as if it’s a key. It takes less than thirty seconds, and she’s in.

The unit smells of pot smoke, cigarette smoke, and poor hygiene. In the back room, she finds a flop bed with no sheets and a single pillow, dark with old sweat. In the living room, there’s a torn couch, several plastic beach chairs, and a black-and-white TV sitting on top of a stack of five Yellow Pages, four of them still wrapped in plastic. The bathroom looks like it’s never been cleaned; it’s possible the whiff of mold she got in the hallway stems entirely from this one bathroom, because the wall behind the sink is black, and woolly gray mold-fingers sprout up the tile from the edge of the tub.

She checks the toilet tank, but there’s nothing stashed in there. Checks under the sink, the same. Bedroom yields nothing and neither does the kitchen sink. But on the fifth try — using a broomstick on the drop ceiling in the hallway closet — Ziploc bags plop to the top shelf or plummet all the way to the floor. She finds a chair and steps up to get her hand all the way in there and scoop the other bags out. Once that’s done, she feels something else back there, just the edge of it, something hard. She extends her body and then her fingers, and she knows it’s a gun the moment she wraps her fingers around the grip. She pulls it out — a .38 Smith & Wesson snub nose with a heavily nicked grip that’s beginning to shed rubber. She steps down off the chair and opens the cylinder. It opens easily, so at least the gun’s oiled and maybe even properly cared for. Six bullets nest inside.

She climbs back up, reaches in there a final time, and comes back with a small cardboard box that rattles. She opens it to find another half a dozen bullets inside.

She places all the bags on the kitchenette table, a greasy Formica top with more chips in it than her own. The extra-large Ziplocs contain weed, some of it green and pungent, some of it less green and crumbly, littered with stems; the large Ziplocs contain brown powder she recognizes immediately, with a pang in her heart, or white powder she assumes is cocaine. She knows a bag of black beauties as such right off (Dukie loved his amphetamines) and presumes the other pills are, respectively, ludes, LSD, and mescaline. It’s not a lot of drugs, not for a dealer; if she had to guess, she’d say they’ve sold maybe two thirds of their latest stash by this point. Losing it isn’t going to hurt them in the long run, but it will hurt them tomorrow.

She takes it all.

And the gun.

A few hours later, one of the runners shows up, lets himself in, and then comes back out with a desperate look on his face and tears off out of there.

Fifteen minutes later, both Quentin and Joe-Dog show up in Quentin’s Datsun Z. They run inside. They’re in there a while longer than the runner was. When they come back out, they look exhausted. And scared. They sit on the hood of Quentin’s car and smoke cigarettes and don’t say a word.

About half an hour later — What took you so long, George? — George Dunbar pulls up. George drives a beige late-’60s Impala. An absolutely forgettable car. George is clearly the only member of his crew with some idea of the benefits of escaping notice if you get up to criminal shit on a regular basis. George and his two dealers get into some finger-pointing — George at Quentin and Joe-Dog; Quentin and Joe-Dog at each other.

George storms inside. The other two follow.

Mary Pat starts Bess while they’re in there. Once Bess is idling, she’ll be all right, but when her engine first kicks over, it’s not pretty. The exhaust coughs out puffs of smoke that rise in the rearview, and the motor clears its throat half a dozen times before it calms down. When they come out this next time, she’s pretty sure, they’ll be on the move. It’s best to have Bess primed to move too.

She hears the door swing back against the building when they exit. They stop at the Datsun, where George unleashes a final tongue-lashing, followed by a strident finger pointed first at Quentin and then at Joe-Dog.

He hops in his Impala and peels out of there. Quentin and Joe-Dog stay where they’re at longer than Mary Pat had hoped they would. When they look down to light their cigarettes, she goes for broke and rolls along the back of the parking lot, eyes fixed straight ahead.

If they notice her, they don’t seem to think much of it.

She finds George Dunbar pulled over three blocks away, using the pay phone in front of a liquor store. His lips don’t move much; he’s mostly nodding. A lot. And his eyes are wide. Mary Pat thinks it’s a safe bet he’s getting his own tongue-lashing.

He puts the phone back as if the receiver might bite. He gets in his car and drives off, with Mary Pat tailing him from three cars back.

It’s not long before he pulls onto the Southeast Expressway and only a few miles farther before he pulls off and leads her along the edge of Dorchester and then over the Neponset River Bridge. From there, he leads her into Squantum, a spit of land that juts off the hand of North Quincy like a thumb that suffered an industrial accident. Squantum is surrounded, everywhere but the base of that thumb, by ocean, and she follows George and his nondescript Impala to a house on Bayside Road, just north of Orchard Beach. It’s a small Cape with dark brown shingles and white trim, with a small yard and a terrific view of the harbor directly across the street.

George parks in front, and before he’s out of the car, there she is — his mother. Lorraine Dunbar herself. Not much of a looker, to tell the truth, a face thin and hawkish under an abundance of fire-red hair, eyes too close together, a chin so violently squared off it looks like what’s left behind after an amputation. But she still has the body of a sixteen-year-old cheerleader — firm legs, an ass that looks like you could play the conga on it, and tits that defy gravity, logic, and time. Lorraine tells everyone who will listen that it’s her diet — lean meats and veggies, she crows, and no sweets — and her jogging. Where she came up with “jogging,” no one fucking knows, but Mary Pat’s seen her dozens of times running along Broadway or around the Sugar Bowl loop with her knees pumping so high they almost hit her chin, her cheeks puffing and lips pursed, wearing these zippered tops and pants of matching color with white piping and usually a matching headband to boot. Every time the topic comes up for discussion among the women of Commonwealth, someone offers the opinion that maybe, for tits and an ass like that, they could all do some jogging, but the idea lasts no longer than the smoke from the next cigarette.

Lorraine hugs her son and then looks out at the street. Lorraine is Marty Butler’s woman, so she’s been trained to look for threats in anything that looks out of place. She probably would have made Mary Pat and Bess if Mary Pat hadn’t backed up as soon as she saw George pull over. She sits at the start of a curve about thirty yards back up the street, under a tree that throws a nice late-afternoon shade. To see her, Lorraine would have to stand in the road and catch the light just right.

Lorraine and George head inside.

Mary Pat settles in.

At one point, she turns her head and sees Jules sitting beside her in the passenger seat. Jules yawns and gives her a sleepy smile.

It’s the sound of the outboard that wakes her.

It’s dark. Bugs mass under the lone streetlight. At the sound of a screen door creaking open and then snapping shut, she turns her head to see George Dunbar exit the house and walk across the road to the small cup of shoreline. He wears shorts and no shoes.

Mary Pat takes the binoculars from Dukie’s kit bag and trains them on the boat as it cuts its engine and bobs toward shore. Brian Shea jumps out of the boat as George half waddles in to meet it, and the two of them tug it to shore. Brian kills the light on the boat, and now the binoculars are no good.

Mary Pat turns off her dome light and exits Bess. She softly pushes the door shut behind her and crosses the road. Only one tree to hide behind and then just a beach wall that doesn’t even reach her knees. The tree stands at least twenty yards from Brian and George. But there’s no one else around and not much to muffle the sound, if only they’d speak the fuck up. She settles in behind the tree and strains to hear.

Brian Shea tells George, “You gotta...” and “We didn’t fucking...” and “...no free lunches.”

George’s back is to her, and his words travel upwind. He’s a lot harder to understand. She thinks she hears him say “I know” a couple of times. And something that could be “concrete” but she somehow knows isn’t. She knows that it’s also not “discreet” but “creet” is said for sure.

A sudden breeze carries Brian Shea’s three clearest sentences to her: “You already owe. Now you owe more. No one’s gonna grow a sense of humor about this.”

The breeze dies.

“I—” George says.

“...move it... Blue Hill Ave... I don’t fucking care.”

“...just sayin’...”

“...excuses are your own. Come on.”

They lift something out of the boat. They carry it through the dark, each man about four feet from the other. As they cross the road, they pass under the edge of the streetlight, and Mary Pat sees they’re carrying a duffel bag. It’s dark green, similar to the one Noel returned home from the army carrying, except she’s pretty sure this one has a zipper running up the center. George opens the trunk to his Impala, and they place it inside.

The car is only five or six yards away; Mary Pat can hear them pretty well now as Brian puts his hands on George’s shoulders.

“You tell those stoned-up Moreland monkeys I expect maximum bang for my buck.”

George nods.

Brian slaps George’s face. Not lightly. “You listening?”

“I am, I am.”

“You make damn sure they know they don’t do something makes the front page, we’ll dry up their entire fucking pipeline.”

“Okay.”

“And then you move the rest of the shit.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Not next month, not next year. Now. We clear?”

“We’re clear.”

“You’re not family, kid.” Brian steps in close and makes like he’s going to slap George in the face again, but at the last moment, he pats his cheek instead. “You’re just the son of the broad my boss fucks.”

“I know.”

“You what?” Brian’s voice is sharp.

“I said I know. I know.”

Brian Shea stares at him for a bit before walking back across the street. He drags his boat into the water with a few splashes and a few grunts, then engages the outboard and motors off.

An hour later, when George exits the expressway, Mary Pat thinks he must have made a mistake — instead of turning right toward Southie, he turns left toward Roxbury. She figures he’s distracted and will bang a U-ey soon, but he takes them deeper and deeper into the heart of Roxbury, down streets she’s never visited before, subsections of the city that feel as alien to her as Paris. But Paris is on the other side of the Atlantic; these streets are less than five miles from Commonwealth. It’s midnight on a Sunday, but some streets are as lively as a block party — coloreds mingling on their porches or gathered on the sidewalk around their cars. Other streets are dead quiet, not so much as an alley cat’s meow to break up the stillness. She feels eyes on her everywhere. Wonders if someone will just step in front of her car and scream, “White woman!” before they descend and tear her limb from limb.

That’s what they do around here, isn’t it? Wait for the unsuspecting honky, the disoriented whitey, the naive ofay? So they can show her who really owns these streets and how angry they truly feel.

She has no idea why they hate her so, but she feels their hate, in the looks she won’t acknowledge, the looks she doesn’t exactly see but knows are there, the looks that come from under the hoods of thick, sullen eyelids that clock her every movement.

Look around, a voice dares her.

She accepts the dare. Looks at the porches and stoops. No one’s looking at her. No one’s even aware she’s there.

And they’re not looking at George. Because...

George isn’t there anymore. An intersection glows yellow a block ahead, but George’s car isn’t at it. She accelerates, the fear suddenly overtaking her chest with the pounding of cymbals: I have no idea how to get out of here. She reaches the intersection and looks up at the street signs to her left — she’s on Warren Street, intersecting with St. James. She can’t tell if George went right or left. Can’t see his taillights. She looks up at the street signs again, this time to her right, and she wants to thank Jesus and the Holy Ghost and Saint Peter too that in a neighborhood this shitty, the street signs are actually intact, because it appears Warren Street splits two streets up the middle — to her left, St. James, but to her right, Moreland.

You tell those stoned-up Moreland monkeys I expect maximum bang for my buck.

She turns right on Moreland and accelerates. After one block, no George. After two blocks, no George. Resisting the urge to stand on the gas pedal, she keeps Bess at a steady pace. At the next stop sign, she looks to her right and sees the Impala. It’s parked on the other side of a playground a half block over. Parked beside a white van with its left rear door open. Three black guys stand with George at the back of the van. One’s tall and fat, another is skinny and short, the third is average height and build. They all have tall Afros and facial hair. They all wear glasses and turtlenecks. George is handing them items from his trunk, one after another after another.

Mary Pat’s no expert, and her vision is limited, but she knows a rifle when she sees one.

Why is a white drug dealer from Southie giving rifles to three black guys in Roxbury on the eve of forced busing?

Mary Pat presses her head to her seat back.

What the fuck is going on?