Small Mercies

29

Castle Island in South Boston is not an island, though it used to be. It’s a peninsula, connected by a main road, Day Boulevard, that dead-ends in a parking lot, plus the two walking paths that lead out to the Sugar Bowl, forever tainted for Mary Pat as the site where Marty Butler used a bagful of money to tell her she had no children left walking this earth. Just as the island isn’t an island, the castle isn’t a castle; it’s a fort. Fort Independence, specifically. The current structure, built in the mid-1800s on the site of two previous forts that dated back to Pilgrim times, is made of granite.

Edgar Allan Poe was stationed here at one point. The experience is said to have inspired one of his most famous short stories, though Mary Pat has never read any Edgar Allan Poe, so she holds no opinion on the matter. She knows from her school days that throughout its history — first as a Pilgrim stronghold, then as a British fort, next as an American one, and finally, as a historic monument in the possession of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — no shots have ever been fired in a military action from its walls. But just like anything else in Southie, she thinks as she approaches, it was built to fight at the drop of a hat.

Frank has been passed out for a few minutes when she drives over the curb by Sullivan’s fast-food hut at the end of the parking lot. Frank wakes with a yelp. He’s disoriented and probably only half lucid from the blood loss. She can hear his handcuffs jingle a bit as he realizes they’re attached to his wrists. She loops down the path along the north side of the fort. It’s bumpy. Frank grunts a lot.

Bess is going to need all the help for what comes next, so Mary Pat steadily depresses the gas pedal as they go. When they reach the northwest corner of the walls, she comes fully out of her seat and stands on the pedal. Bess fishtails, and Frank falls of the backseat with a scream. Mary Pat grinds her foot into that fucking pedal and growls through gritted teeth as she wills Bess straight up the hill. Right near the top, the back wheels give, and she knows they’re not going to make it. They’re going to slide backward and probably sideways, and then they’re going to tip and flip and roll.

“We’re going out together, Frank!” she calls. Frank yells back something that sounds like “You crazy cunt, Mary Pat.” But Bess, bless her ancient old-lady heart, finds one last breath in her engine, one last surge, and the back wheels catch dirt instead of grass and the car bursts over the top of the hill.

Mary Pat is not prepared for four bald tires at full acceleration to hit damp grass on a humid summer night, and they shimmy crazily all over the field leading up to the doors of the fort. She gets control of the car just before smashing into the doors, and the moment the car comes to a full stop, Bess expires. The engine shudders to a halt, and little metallic pings and gasps rattle around under the hood, and the frame shakes and surges like it’s having a heart attack. Plumes of brown smoke shoot out from the back of the car and then spill from under the hood.

For a moment it feels like losing a pet. Mary Pat pats Bess’s side after she exits. She tries to come up with the proper words, but all that finally occurs to her is a simple “Thanks” to the only car she’s ever owned outright.

While Bess continues to pass through her death throes, Mary Pat picks the rusty old lock on the main door of the fort and pushes it open. She goes back for Frank, pulling him off the floor of the backseat by his hair.

She would have expected more rage from him. Tough-guy talk. Threats. But he’s plaintive. Surprised, it seems, by her barbarity. When he hits the ground, he cries, “Come on! Please! Please, Mary Pat, I’m holding my fucking guts in here!” She hoists him to his feet and pushes him through the door in a wild stumble, which ends almost immediately when he puts weight on his mangled leg and falls down again. She lets him lie there for a bit, grinding his head into the grass.

The interior of the fort is an oval — parade grounds and storage rooms down below. Parapets and cannon slots up above.

She drags Frank into the first room she sees. The rooms just off the main parade ground are barely rooms. They have no doors, no furniture, nothing. They feel like prison cells, but she’s pretty sure she’s heard they stored gunpowder, armament, and food back in the long-ago. She drops Frank with his back to the wall to discover he’s passed out again.

Pussy.

She removes the gun she took off him. A Colt .45 1911, almost identical to the one her uncle Kevin brought back from World War II. Uncle Kev would bring it out when she was a little girl and they went over to his apartment, and he’d let her sit on his lap with it after he’d stripped it and checked the chamber. He’d tell her he kept it for two reasons: 1) to always remind himself of the savagery man was capable of against his fellow man; and 2) in case the niggers came for them all some night.

In the end, he used the gun on himself, Christmas morning 1962.

She searches Frank. Finds a spare clip for the .45 in his pocket and adds it to her bag. She removes his coat, bunches it up, and presses it to his wound. He mumbles but doesn’t wake, and she uses the duct tape to wrap the bunched-up coat as tightly as she can around the wound.

She gets a look at his leg and almost throws up. Jesus. No wonder he can’t stand on it. The foot is pointing in the opposite direction, and the bones in his calf punch out through the skin like broken sticks. It gives her the idea, though, to pull off his remaining boot.

Where she finds a knife.

She considers it. Is this the knife? The one he drove up under her daughter’s rib cage and into her heart?

She finds him looking at her. His breathing is very shallow. “You know you’re a dead woman?”

She shrugs. “You’ll be strolling — oops, sorry, crawling — into hell before me, Frank. Bank on it.”

“Not if you get me to a hospital.” His voice is friendly. Reasonable.

She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “No car, Frank. It’s dead too.”

“Just walk down the hill to the pay phone by Sullivan’s.” A helpful smile joins the friendly voice.

“To... do what, again?”

“Call me an ambulance. Or call Marty.”

She waits a bit before answering. Long enough to watch the hope flower in his eyes. “Frank,” she says as softly as possible, “you are going to die tonight.”

He opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts him off.

“There is no way out for you,” she explains. “No threat, no promise, no bribe can buy you one more day of this life.”

Until that moment, he’d thought he had a chance. But now he realizes — truly grasps — he’s living in his own nightmare. Wide awake for every second of it.

He searches her eyes, and she allows him full access. Somewhere beyond the walls of the fort, a seabird cries out.

Frank Toomey’s face grows dark and cold with outrage. “No!” He jerks at the cuffs on his wrists. “You hear me, bitch? No! You will—”

She slams the heel of her hand into his forehead, rams the back of his head into the granite wall. “How is it,” she says as he tries to clear the tweeting birds from his fucking brain, “that you have any rage left in your soul for me? You took my child. You took my child, Frank. And the baby inside of her. You used her. Chewed up her life while she could have been living it and then plunged a knife up under her rib cage and into her heart? And you call yourself a human being?” She holds up the blade of his knife to his face. “Is this the knife?”

Frank stares at her with his dead eyes.

“Don’t give me your fucking eyes,” she says. “Like you’re too cool for my pain. This is my pain.” She slices his cheek.

“Jesus!”

“I said lower your fucking eyes.”

He glances at his own blood on the knife blade and then looks down at his lap.

“You’re only alive right now because I honestly want an answer — how can you raise children of your own? How can you know something of love and yet kill a child?”

“I’ve killed lots of people in my life, Mary Pat.”

“I know. But a child, Frank?”

He makes a shrugging motion, his hands cuffed against the wall. “I don’t think about it.” The blood drips off his cheek in fat drops. Plop. Plop. Plop.

“About what?”

“About any of it. Killing someone, it’s like shoveling snow — I don’t like doing it, but if it’s gotta be done, it gets done. And my kids have nothing to do with it. They’re my kids. A separate thing. Your daughter—”

“Say her name.”

“Jules,” he says. “She was a problem. She was talking shit about telling my wife she was pregnant, and she killed that kid so—”

“She didn’t kill him. She was with them when—”

He’s shaking his head. “She used the rock on him. It was her.”

She smashes her fist down on his shattered leg. The scream he lets out is like something from the animal kingdom, the screech of prey being eaten alive in the high grass. He topples to the dirt floor. Lies there with his mouth open, eyes wide with shock.

“She didn’t use the rock,” she says. “You’re just trying to make shit up. You weren’t even on the platform.”

“Why would I make that up?” he gasps. Tears fill his eyes when he says, “Please don’t hit my leg again, but why would I make that up? How’s it serve me? And of course I was on the platform.”

She doesn’t say anything for a long time. She looks out at the parade grounds under the light of a half-moon.

“I think...” he manages as he works his way back into a sitting position, “I think she did it as a small mercy.”

She looks back at him. “What?”

“Possibly,” he says.

“Mercy from what?”

He doesn’t say anything for a bit.

“Mercy from what?”

“I told them to fry him.”

“Huh?”

“Throw him on the third rail,” he explains. “Fry him. Show the rest of the spooks in this city what happens if they come down to our part of town.” He looks at the blood slowly consuming his coat and the tape she’s wrapped around it. His skin is the blue-white of mackerel. “Jules didn’t like that. She kept saying let him go.” He snorts. “We couldn’t let him go. No. I told them, ‘Fuck that. Fry him.’ The boys, they listened — boys do that. They picked the kid up and were about to toss him between the second and third rail, and yeah, that’s when she hit him. Which ended any idea that it was a fucking accident, thank you very much. He was dead the second he hit the ground.”

She watches him steadily. Thinks it’s odd how the worst of us look no different than the best of us. Like someone’s son, someone’s husband, someone’s father. Loved. Capable of love. Human.

“And you couldn’t forgive her, could you?” she asks. “For the mercy?”

He hisses against the pain for a moment. “If she was weak there, where else would she be weak? In a police station? On the stand? I’m sorry, Mary Pat, but you know there’s a code down here. Live and die by it.”

She reaches into her bag, comes out with her .38, and is about to blow his fucking brains all over the granite behind him when she hears a vehicle approaching.

The car pulls right into the fort. Doors open. Headlights sweep the parade grounds.

Marty Butler calls, “Time for a reckoning, Mary Pat.”