Small Mercies

4

On the way home, Mary Pat doesn’t admit to herself that she’s worried, but she doesn’t dillydally either. No stops, no pop-ins at any of the bars. Just straight home.

Jules is not there. And Mary Pat can tell from a quick glance around their unit that she hasn’t been there during the day.

She calls the Morellos a third time, gets Suze again, but Suze immediately says, “She’s here. Let me get her.”

Mary Pat feels herself slide down the wall but can’t decide if it’s relief or something else. Did Suze say “Jules is here”? Or “She’s here”? In which case “she” could be—

Brenda. Whose voice comes over the line now. “Hey, Mrs. F.”

“Hey, Brenda.” A leaden dread fills Mary Pat’s stomach. “Jules there?”

“I ain’t seen Jules since last night.” Brenda’s words come out a little too fast, as if she’s been preparing them.

“No? Who’d you see her with last?” Mary Pat lights a smoke.

“She was with, you know, Rum and, ah, you know, Rum.”

“Rum and Rum? He comes in a pair now?”

“No, I meant just Rum. She was with Rum.”

“Where was this?”

“Carson.”

Carson is the local beach. Not much of one. No tide. An inlet of the harbor, not the ocean beyond. Mostly a place for kids to go and drink behind the old bathhouse.

“When did you see her and Rum last?”

“Like, midnight?”

“And they just wandered off?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, you know.”

“I don’t know.” Mary Pat can hear the edge in her voice. Hopes Brenda doesn’t hear it to the point that it shuts her down. She softens her voice. “I’m just trying to find her, Brenda.” She lightens the mood further with an embarrassed laugh. “Just being a silly worried mom.”

Nothing on the other end of the line but silence. Mary Pat bites down into her lower lip hard enough to taste blood and nicotine.

“I mean,” Brenda says, “I mean, she walked off with Rum, and that’s the last I saw her.”

“Was she drinking?”

“No!”

“Bullshit,” Mary Pat says. The gloves come off for a second. “Brenda, do not take me for a fool, and I won’t take you for a fucking liar. How drunk was she?”

Hisses and pops on the line. A dog barking somewhere far off on Brenda’s end. Then: “She was, you know, feeling no pain. She had a few beers, some wine.”

“Pot?”

“Yeah.”

“Was she stumbling drunk?”

“No, no. Just buzzed, Mrs. F. I swear.”

“So, last time you saw her, she was with Rum?”

“Yeah.”

“And you haven’t heard from her since?”

“No.”

“If you do?”

“I’ll call you first thing.”

“I know you will, Brenda.” Putting some steel into the words before adding, “Thank you.”

Brenda hangs up, leaving Mary Pat looking at the phone in her hand and feeling a screeching train of helplessness barrel through her. Jules is seventeen, able to do what she wants. If Mary Pat calls the cops, she knows they can’t do a damn thing about it until it’s been seventy-two hours. At least. And Mary Pat doesn’t have that. So she’s now in the position of sitting on her hands or chain-smoking until her daughter walks back through the door.

She tries it for a bit, finds herself thinking of Dreamy Williamson facing life without her child, and recalls that Dreamy sent her a beautiful card when Noel died. She roots around in a drawer where she put most things related to Noel’s death — his dog tag and war medals, his laminated funeral card, the sympathy cards — and eventually finds the one Dreamy sent her. On the front is a cross and the words May the Lord Grant You Strength in Your Hour of Need. Inside the card, filling up both sides, she wrote to Mary Pat:

Mary Pat sits at the kitchen table staring at the letter until the words blur. This woman wrote to her as if she were a friend. She signed her last name, which Mary Pat couldn’t even recall this afternoon. She called Mary Pat a fine woman and spoke to a friendship that Mary Pat is hard pressed to grasp. Yes, she’s friendly with Dreamy, but friendship is something else entirely. White broads from Southie aren’t friends with black women from Mattapan. The world doesn’t work that way.

For a minute or so, Mary Pat looks for a pen and paper to write a note of condolence to Dreamy, but she can find only a pen and some scrap paper. She resolves to find a proper sympathy card tomorrow and puts the pen back in the drawer.

She takes a beer, her pack of Slims, and an ashtray into the living room and turns on the TV, comes right in on the news and right in on the story about Auggie Williamson. Investigators believe he was fatally struck by the train between twelve and one a.m., and the impact threw his body under the platform. The conductor of the train never felt the impact. Trains raced by the body all last night until they stopped running, and a few went past it this morning before one conductor noticed the corpse in the crevice under the platform. Police won’t confirm rumors that drugs were found on his person, nor will they explain how he came to be on the platform last night or why/if he’d jumped or been pushed into the path of the train.

They put a picture of him up on the screen and she can see Dreamy in his eyes, which were a brown so soft it’s almost gold, and in his chin and lips. He looks so young. But the reporter announces that he graduated high school two years ago and was working in the management trainee program at Zayre.

High school graduate? Management trainee program? Do drug dealers enter management trainee programs?

But, oh, she thinks as she looks through the boob tube into his eyes, you’re just a baby. Her mother used to say that from the time a child took his first steps, every step after took him farther and farther away from his mother. Mary Pat looks at the photograph of Dreamy’s son in the last moment before it’s wiped off the screen, and she imagines her own child’s picture showing up on the same newscast, maybe tomorrow, maybe the next night.

Where the fuck is she?

She turns off the TV. She calls Rum’s place, gets his mother. No love is lost between her and Mary Pat, so the conversation is brief: “No, Ronald isn’t here, he’s at work up the Purity Supreme until ten. No, I haven’t seen Jules in, like, a week, maybe more. Anything else?”

Mary Pat hangs up.

She sits there. And sits there. She has no idea if it’s for an hour or a minute.

Before she knows she’s doing it, she swipes her smokes and her keys from the tray by the recliner and leaves the unit. She goes around the back of her building and then follows the path until she reaches her sister’s door in Franklin. Big Peg has a daughter the same age as Jules; the girls aren’t terribly close, but they do like to get high together. Almost the same thing could be said about Mary Pat and Big Peg — they’re not terribly close, but it never kept them from drinking their weight together if they happened to cross paths.

Mary Pat, not much for travel, has still managed to see parts of New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Maine in her life. Not Big Peg. Peg married Terry “Terror Town” McAuliffe two days after senior prom. They started dating freshman year at Southie High, and neither of them has an ambition known to anyone beyond the fact that they never want to leave Southie. It’s a big day if they make it to Dorchester, and Dorchester is only six blocks away. And if the world finds their worldview narrow, well, Big Peg and Terror Town don’t give a fuck about the world, they only give a fuck about Southie. They raised seven kids who took their parents’ pride in their neighborhood like gospel from Christ (if Christ had been raised in Commonwealth and was prone, on general principle, to pounding the shit out of anyone who wasn’t). Depending on their ages, those kids — Terry Junior, Little Peg, Freddy, JJ, Ellen, Paudric, and Lefty (who was given the birth name of Lawrence but has never been called it a day in his life) — rule the corners, the project stoops, and the playground sand pits with a pride so bright and unyielding it can’t help but turn violent when even marginally challenged. As a project rat herself, Mary Pat knows all too well what happens when the suspicion that you aren’t good enough gets desperately rebuilt into the conviction that the rest of the world is wrong about you. And if they’re wrong about you, then they’re probably wrong about everything else.

Big Peg opens the screen door in a faded housedress, a beer and a lit cigarette in the same hand. “You all right?” she asks her sister with suspicious eyes.

“I’m looking for Jules.”

Big Peg pushes the door open wider. “Come in, come in.”

Mary Pat enters and they stand there just inside the door, these two sisters who were never close. Peg’s unit is a three-bedroom that currently sleeps nine people, the shotgun corridor running from the front door to the kitchen in back, the rooms off the corridor. The noise of the place is, as always, several decibels past the point where most human beings could hear themselves think.

“Oh my God, you so wore these pants.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did, I can smell your farty ass in them.”

“Fuck you.”

“I will hit you with a baseball bat.”

“No, you won’t. You can’t find one.”

“Freddy has one.”

“Mom, stop her!”

Jane Jo, aka JJ, comes bolting from one of the rooms and barges across the hall into another. Her little sister, Ellen, comes flying after her, both of them shrieking. And then the room they enter seems to explode. Things get upended in there, toppled, the walls give off dull thuds.

“The fuck you doing in my room?”

“I need your bat.”

“What bat? Get out of my room.”

“Gimme the bat.”

“I’ll hit you in the fucking head with the fucking bat.”

“Just help me find the bat.”

“Why do you want the bat?”

“To hit Ellen with it.”

There’s a pause and then:

“Cool.”

Ellen starts wailing.

Big Peg leads Mary Pat to the kitchen, closes the door. Big Peg says, “When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Last night. Right around this time.”

Big Peg snorts. “I’ve lost Terror to two-week benders. He always turns up.”

He/she/they always turn up. If Mary Pat hears that one more time tonight, she’s going to stove someone’s fucking head in with her bare fist.

“Jules isn’t Terry,” Mary Pat says. “She’s Jules. She’s seventeen.”

“Little Peg!” Big Peg screams without warning, and twenty seconds later, her eldest daughter, a girl who’s always managed to be twitchy and listless at the same time, comes through the doorway, going, “What’s up?”

“Show some manners. Say hi to your aunt.”

“Hey, Mary Pat.”

“Hi, sweetie.”

Big Peg asks, “You seen Jules? Look at your aunt when you talk to her.”

“Not lately.” Little Peg’s listless/twitchy eyes twitch listlessly at Mary Pat. “How come?”

“Ain’t seen her since last night,” Mary Pat says. She can feel the helpless-hopeful smile she wears around her cigarette. “Just getting a little worried.”

Little Peg stares back at her with nothing in her eyes, her mouth slack and half open. She could be a mannequin in a Kresge’s window.

Mary Pat remembers when Little Peg was five and Mary Pat used to babysit her occasionally. That Little Peg was hilarious and sparked like a snapped electric wire in a storm. She was so aware of herself and the life around her, so joyful.

What takes that from them? Mary Pat wonders.

Is it us?

“So, you ain’t seen her in a bit?”

“No.”

“Like, how long?”

“I saw her up the park last night.”

“Which?”

“Park? Columbia.”

“When?”

“Like, eleven? Maybe eleven-forty-five. No later than that.”

“Why no later?”

“Cuz Ma gives me a beating I don’t walk through the door by twelve.”

Mary Pat looks at her sister, who raises her eyebrows proudly in confirmation.

“So sometime between eleven and twelve?”

“Yeah.”

“Who was she with?”

Now this dead-eyed fidgety girl with the stringy brown hair and acne-inflamed forehead grows cagey. “You know.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“I swear to Christ, I don’t.” Mary Pat gets so close she can see her own eye reflected in her niece’s. “Rum?”

A nod.

“And who else?”

“You know.”

“Stop saying ‘You know.’”

Little Peg looks to her mother, but Big Peg’s nostrils flare and her breathing is heavy enough that they can hear it over all the other noise in the house. Always a sign, since Big Peg was a child, that volcanic eruptions are on their way.

“Answer my sister.”

Little Peg turns her head back to Mary Pat but lowers her eyes. “Well, I mean, Rum was with George D.”

Big Peg slaps her daughter on the side of the head. Little Peg barely flinches. “You fucking kidding us?”

Mary Pat says, “You mean George Dunbar.”

“Yes.”

“The drug dealer,” Mary Pat says.

Another slap from Big Peg, same place, same velocity. “The guy who sold the shit to your cousin Noel that killed him? That guy? You’re hanging out with that fucking guy?”

“I don’t hang out with him.”

“Watch your tone with me.”

“I don’t hang out with him,” Little Peg whispers. “Jules does.”

Mary Pat feels her insides seize up — heart, throat, even her guts, everything just clenches.

For all their power, the one thing Marty Butler’s crew can’t get their arms all the way around is the drug traffic in Southie. They try; there are all sorts of stories floating around about small-time dealers found in shallow graves on Tenean Beach or with needles shoved through their eyes in empty warehouses, but still the drugs get in. They come from the blacks, of course, in Mattapan and Jamaica Plain and the sprawl of Dorchester, but it’s the whites like George Dunbar who sell it to their own people. And no one from the Butler crew is going to kill George, the story goes, because George’s mother, Lorraine, is Marty Butler’s girlfriend. Mary Pat has heard that Marty himself has knocked George around a few times, even gave him a shiner one time, but the kid keeps doing it. And he isn’t the only one, so the drugs keep pouring in.

“It’s like when the Japs used to send hordes of kamikazes at my old man and my uncles in Dubaya Dubaya Two,” Brian Shea said to Mary Pat once. “If they send enough of them, a few of them are getting through. And not even the greatest navy in the world can stop it. And we’re just a crew, Mary Pat, we can’t keep it all out.”

This was back when Mary Pat came to Brian (and by extension Marty) for justice in Noel’s death. “But you can punish the people you know are doing it,” she pleaded.

“And we do when we catch them. We punish them hard. Sometimes permanently.”

But not George Dunbar. Because he’s untouchable.

And now this untouchable merchant of poison is hanging around her daughter?

As gently as possible, she says to Little Peg, “Why does George Dunbar hang around Jules?”

“He’s good friends with Rum.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“And he’s, you know—”

“If you say ‘you know’ one more fucking time,” Mary Pat snaps.

“He goes with Brenda.”

“What do you mean — ‘goes’?”

“He’s her boyfriend.”

“Since when?”

“Since, like, I dunno, beginning of the summer?”

“So you saw all four of them together at the park?”

“Yeah, no. What?” For a second, Little Peg looks completely confused. It’s the look of someone, in Mary Pat’s experience, who’s lost the thread of the story she’s trying to keep straight. “I mean, yeah and no, because Brenda and George were beefing, so she left, and then Rum and George and Jules left, and that’s when I left.”

“And this was at Carson Beach?”

“What? No. No, it was at Columbia Park, like I said.”

“Cuz Brenda told me they were all hanging at Carson Beach.”

“Then she’s a fucking liar.”

Her mother gives her another slap upside the head. “Watch your fucking mouth.”

“We were at Columbia Park,” Little Peg says. “That’s where I saw her. If she went to Carson after, I don’t know about it, because I went home.”

Mary Pat and Big Peg exchange a look — the look of all parents when they know a kid has presented a story and will stick to it for now. No use in pushing further; then she might really start to lie.

“Okay,” Mary Pat says. “Thanks, honey.”

Little Peg shrugs.

“You can go,” Big Peg says.

After Little Peg leaves, Peg gets them a couple beers from the fridge and they sit at the kitchen table and drink them. When the small talk runs dry in under a minute or so, the conversation turns to the neighborhood storm cloud everyone’s obsessed with.

Of Big Peg’s older kids, one’s out of high school, and three are in it. All of them won the lottery and will be staying at Southie High. Sheer luck of the draw. No Roxbury for them. No fear of the bathrooms and the corridors and the classrooms for them.

Turns out that’s not good enough for Big Peg. Oh, no.

“I ain’t sending them,” Peg says.

“What?”

She swallows some beer and nods at the same time. “Ain’t sending them. We’re joining the boycott. Weeze would roll over in her grave if she saw a pack of darkies walking down the same corridor as her granddaughter at South Boston High School, Mary Pat. Tell me I’m wrong.”

“Weeze” (or “Weezie”) was what they’d called their late mother, Louise. No one else had ever called her that, just her kids, and only, while she was alive, in a conspiracy of silence.

“You’re not wrong,” Mary Pat admits, “but what about their education?”

“They’ll get their education. I give this a month, two at the most. When the city realizes we won’t bend and all we want is what’s ours?” Big Peg winks in a knowing way. “They’ll back down.”

The words — and Big Peg’s confidence — ring hollow. And when they do, the fear that’s been eating away at Mary Pat’s stomach lining all day returns.

Big Peg sees it, sees the tears that well up in her sister’s eyes. “It’s gonna be okay,” Peg says.

Mary Pat looks her sister directly in the eyes for the first time in who knows how long and can hear the rawness of her own voice when she whispers, “I can’t lose another one. I can’t. I can’t lose... anything else.” She wipes at a single tear before it reaches her cheekbone, drinks some beer.

Big Peg says, “You gotta get ahold of yourself, hon. Nothing bad happens to kids from Southie as long as they stay in Southie.”

Mary Pat brings her fist down on the tabletop hard enough to rattle the beer cans. “Noel OD’d in the playground across the fucking street.”

Big Peg is unfazed. “Noel went to some fucked-up country on the other side of the world and came back with his head all screwed up because he left the neighborhood.” Peg’s eyes implore her to see the basic common sense of her argument.

Mary Pat stares back across the table at her sister. Is that what people really think about her son? That it was Vietnam that turned him to drugs? Mary Pat tried thinking that way for a while, but then she faced the sobering truth that Noel didn’t discover heroin in Vietnam (Thai stick, yes, heroin, no); heroin discovered Noel in the projects of South Boston.

“Noel never touched heroin in Vietnam,” she says, and it sounds like a weak argument when it leaves her mouth. “He got hooked here. Right here.”

Big Peg sighs in a way that suggests there’s just no reaching some people, and her gaze clicks off Mary Pat’s face. She stands, draining her beer in one long swallow, and says, “Well, I gotta be up for work in the morning.”

Mary Pat nods. Stands.

Big Peg walks her down the noisy hallway, all seven of the kids fighting about something, paired off into mini-skirmishes with no ability to see the larger war.

At the door, Big Peg says, “She’ll turn up.”

Mary Pat feels too defeated to be annoyed. “I know.”

“Get some sleep.”

Mary Pat laughs at the idea of it.

“You can’t let them rule your life,” Big Peg says, and shuts the door behind her.