Small Mercies

5

She finds Rum out on the loading dock behind the Purity Supreme. Ten at night and the heat still hits like a steamed blanket; the loading dock smells like wilted lettuce and bananas so overripe they split their skin. Rum’s smoking a cigarette and drinking tallboys with the other supermarket punks who’ve just gotten off work from produce, deli, and bagging. The strength in numbers puts a brave look in his eyes when Mary Pat gets out of Bess, and that look turns to amusement when Bess’s door creaks and the engine shudders to a stop.

Bess is Mary Pat’s piece-of-shit station wagon that she has no choice but to drive until it gives up the ghost. Not that she drives much, but every now and then she can’t avoid it. She could have walked here, but she obsessed on an image of the headlights sweeping the back of the loading dock and the punks scattering like rats, except for Rum, who she’d bump with a fender or the car door. What she forgot was that the effect of Bess on just about anyone is not threatening but comic. Bess is a two-toned 1959 Ford Country Sedan. Its rear end sags like an old dog’s ass, rust and winter road salt have eaten away the rims of the wheel wells and the lower third of the paint job, the roof rack is long since gone (no one recalls where or when), both taillights are cracked (but operational), and the tailpipe hangs on with nothing more than Hail Marys and fraying butcher’s twine. About the only thing you can say for Bess anymore is that she was a great car to transport the two kids around in, she has a 352 V8 under the hood that turns her into a rocket on the highway, and the radio works. Bess once sported two different shades of green — “April” and “Sherwood” — but at this point, both shades are so blanched you’d have to take Mary Pat’s word for it.

When she gets out of Bess, the boys in her headlights cut up, except for Rum, who just watches her come with a cocked eyebrow she considers tearing off his face as he guzzles from his tallboy.

She doesn’t go with any preamble. “Where’s Jules?”

“Fuck should I know?”

“Don’t let the beer give you too much stupid right now, Ronald. You might confuse it with courage.”

“What?”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“I don’t know.”

“When’s the last time you saw her?”

“Last night.”

“Where?”

“Carson Beach.”

“And then?”

“And then what?”

“Where did she go?”

“She walked home.”

“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at one in the morning?”

“It was twelve-forty-five.”

“You let my daughter walk home in this neighborhood at twelve-forty-five?”

He raises the beer toward his lips. “Uh—”

She slaps the beer out of his hand. “Alone?”

No one’s cutting up anymore on the loading dock. She knows their mothers. They know her. Everyone’s as quiet as a church pew waiting a turn for confession.

“No, no,” Rum says quickly. “She wasn’t alone. George gave her a ride home.”

“George Dunbar?”

“Yes.”

“The drug dealer?”

“What? Yes.”

“Gave my daughter a ride home.”

“Yes. I was too fucked up.”

She takes a step back from him, makes a show of assessing him. “Where you going to be in an hour?”

“What?”

“I asked you a fucking question.”

“I’m gonna be, like, home.”

“Like home? Or home?”

“Home. I’m going home.”

She notices his four-year-old orange Plymouth Duster in the employee parking lot. She’s always hated the sight of that car, as if she’s always known its owner was a sign of bad things to come.

“If George doesn’t back up your story, I’m coming to see you again.”

“Fine,” he says in such a way that she knows he has something to hide.

“You can just tell me now.”

“Nothing to tell.”

“It’ll be better for you if you do.”

“I’m fine.”

“Okay.” She holds out her arms as if to say, This was your choice, how it goes from now on.

She catches his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallows, but then he looks at his shoes and the beer can she knocked out of his hand.

She gets back into Bess, and they all stare at her, wide-eyed, as she backs up and drives out of the parking lot.

“I don’t give two shits what he told you,” George Dunbar says to her half an hour later. “It isn’t true.”

She looks at this handsome kid with his smooth demeanor and his heartless eyes who sold her son his own death in a little plastic baggie. He stares back at her with a gaze so flat and stripped of emotion it would look weird on a Ken doll.

George was a part of the fabric of the Fennessy household for about ten years, always running in and out with Noel; in all that time, she never felt she got a clear view of him. It was as if a part of him, a core part, wasn’t there when you went looking for it. She mentioned this to Ken Fen once and he said, “Most people we know are like dogs — there’s loyal ones, mean ones, friendly ones. But all of it, good and bad, comes from the heart.”

“What kind of dog is George Dunbar?”

“None,” Kenny said. “He’s a fucking cat.”

She looks now at this cat who couldn’t even be bothered to show up to Noel’s funeral. “Why would Rum lie?”

“I have no idea what goes on in another man’s mind.”

George Dunbar did two years of college. Majored in economics. He didn’t drop out because he couldn’t hack it; he dropped out because he was making too much money selling drugs. His uncles run a cement mixing company, and George, she’s always heard, has been promised a third of the business that once belonged to his late father. But he’d rather deal drugs. For a kid from Southie, he speaks like some rich people she’s run into over the years — like his words and God’s come from the same well, while your words come from a place off the map that no one can hear or see.

“So you didn’t drive her anywhere?”

“No, I did not. She walked off to go home at around quarter to one.”

“And you let a girl her age walk home alone through this neighborhood?”

George gives her a look of pure bafflement. “I’m not her keeper.”

They sit in the gazebo in Marine Park. Across Day Boulevard, Pleasure Bay is lit in a gummy moonlight. George Dunbar was easy to find. Most nights he can be found sitting in the gazebo in Marine Park. Everyone in Southie, from cops to kids, knows it. Just more proof he’s protected. If you want drugs, you go to the gazebo and see George Dunbar or one of the kids who works for him.

She finds herself wishing that his mother will get caught fucking around on Marty Butler, get her ass thrown to the curb. And that two days later, someone will mess up George Dunbar’s perfect hair by pumping a bullet into his fucking head.

“What’d you guys get up to last night?” she asks him.

He shrugs, but she catches him looking off to the trees for a moment, a sign that he’s thinking about his answer as opposed to just answering.

“We all had a few beers in the ring at Columbia. Then we walked on down to Carson.”

“When?”

“Eleven-forty-five.”

She’s never known kids to be so precise. They always speak in rounded-up time: I was there at noon. One. Two.

But these kids — Little Peg, Rum, and now George Dunbar — keep saying “eleven-forty-five” or “twelve-forty-five.” As if, on the night in question, they were all checking watches they don’t own.

Two kids on bicycles and a hippie in a VW van wait outside the gazebo, watching them, waiting for Mary Pat to leave so they can score.

George notices them. “I gotta go.”

“He was your friend.”

“What?”

“Noel,” she says. “He thought of you as his friend.”

“I was his friend.”

“You kill your friends?”

“Leave me the fuck alone,” he says very quietly. “And don’t come back, Mrs. Fennessy.”

She reaches out and pats his knee. “George, if anything happened to my daughter, and you were involved?”

“I said, leave me the fuck—”

“Marty won’t be able to save you. No one will be able to save you. She’s my heart.” She squeezes his knee a little harder. “So, pray — on your knees tonight, George — that my heart turns up safe, or I might come back and rip yours right out of your fucking chest.”

She stares into his flat eyes until he blinks.

She rolls Bess past the Collinses’ house, but Rum’s orange Duster isn’t there. No matter. Southie’s small when you own an orange car.

She finds the Duster twenty minutes later, parked outside the Fields of Athenry (which, in true Southie fashion, everyone just calls the Fields). This is Marty Butler’s stronghold. You don’t walk in there unless you’re from Southie, and you don’t walk back out on your own two feet if you act even a little off. In its ten-year existence, it’s never been crowded, even on Saint Patrick’s Day, and there’s never been a fight on the premises. The only person ever known to bump a line in the bathroom got his nose broken mid-snort by Frankie Toomey, aka Tombstone, aka the killer of killers on Marty Butler’s crew.

She parks Bess in a spot on Tuckerman and walks back. She finds Rum sitting at the corner of the bar, drinking a beer with a whiskey back. They all hang out here — all the boys who’ve left high school with no plans and just enough balls over brains to be occasionally useful to Marty. She orders the same as Rum. As she waits for her drinks, she ignores him, though she can feel him staring at her and breathing shallow through his mouth. She takes in the rest of the bar. Tim Gavigan, the kid who dropped off her signs, is in here; she thinks she spots Brian Shea down the end, definitely notices Head Sparks, who did a couple jobs with Dukie back in the old times. There are a few other guys she recognizes but can’t name off the top of her head, guys who are in the Life.

The bartender, Tommy Gallagher of Baxter Street, brings her drinks, takes her money, leaves her and Rum to themselves. She downs the shot. Turns to Rum. Sips her beer from the mug. “You lied to me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Sure you did. George didn’t drive Jules home.”

“First I told you she walked home, but you got all pissy, so I said George drove her home to get you off my back.” He raises and lowers his eyebrows as he slurps some beer.

“So, she did walk home alone?”

He looks at his beer. “What I fucking said.”

“That’s your story.”

“Yeah, it’s my story. Why don’t you—”

When she breaks his nose with her right fist, it sounds like a cue ball shattering a tight rack. The whole bar hears it. He screams like a girl, and she hits him again, exact same spot, drives the punch through his hands, which are soft and covering that nose. Then she punches him in the eye, bringing her left fist to the party this time.

He says something like “Wait” and something like “Shit-fuck,” but by that point she’s blasting combos into his thick fucking woodchuck head — left eye, right eye, left cheek, right cheek, two quick punches to his left ear, and then a single blast to his jaw. A tooth — yellow with nicotine, red with blood — leaves his mouth.

They pull her off him. Their grips are hard, forceful. The grips send a message: We’re not fucking around.

But once they have her arms, she uses her legs. As fast as she can, she kicks his face, his chest, his stomach. And then her feet meet air.

They drag her to a barstool.

She hears a voice she recognizes say, “Stop. Mary Pat, stop. Please.”

She looks into the Windex eyes of Brian Shea.

“Come on,” he says. “Huh?”

She exhales.

The men holding her loosen their grip but don’t let her go.

“Tommy,” Brian Shea says to the bartender, “give Mary Pat another of what she was drinking. Then give us all a round.”

Rum tries to get to his knees but falls over.

“You can let me go,” Mary Pat says softly.

Brian cranes his head down to look in her eyes. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“You’re good.” He chuckles at that. “She’s good!” he crows to the guys holding her, and the whole bar laughs way too loud.

He nods at someone, and the hands — there were at least six of them — leave her body.

Rum makes it to his knees this time, but he vomits, and the vomit is red.

“She mighta punctured a fucking lung,” Pat Kearns says.

“Bring him to the doc on G,” Brian says. “Make sure the doc knows he don’t get the Cadillac treatment. This one’s a Dodge. A used Dodge.”

They start to drag him out.

Brian says, “The fucking back door, you dumb fucks.”

They drag him in the other direction. Eventually, they reach the back door and beyond, and the bar noise returns to normal, which, as Mary Pat has always read it, feels itchy and fearful but gives off a pleasant hum nonetheless.

“This is no little thing, Mary Pat.”

She downs her second shot of the night, looks Brian in the eyes. “I know.”

“You started a fight in Marty’s place. His sanctuary.”

“That wasn’t a fight,” she says.

“Oh, no?”

She shakes her head. “That was a beatdown. That little pussy didn’t get one shot in.”

“You can’t do beatdowns in Marty’s place. If you were a fucking guy, you’d be dead. Or, you know, at least in a body cast.”

“So put me in a body cast, but wait until after I find my daughter.”

He narrows his eyes. Downs his own shot. “Jules?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’s she at?”

“That’s my question. No one’s seen her since last night.”

“Why didn’t you say so?”

“I did.” She jerks her thumb at the blood and vomit Rum left in his wake. “To him.”

He grimaces. “That fucking putz? Asking him for information is like asking a telephone pole for a steak and cheese.” He points two fingers at his own chest. “We help. We provide services to this neighborhood. We coulda been looking for Jules all day if you’d asked. No one forgets what you did for us, what Dukie did for us — we’re here for you, Mary Pat.” He takes out a small notepad and a pencil. Licks the tip of the pencil as he opens the notepad on the bar. “Tell me everything you know.”

After she finishes, he says, “I’ll square what you did here tonight with Marty.” He puts the notebook and pencil back in the pocket of his Baracuta. “But you gotta give us twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours?”

“It’s not gonna take that. It’s probably gonna take, like, three, but you can’t be running around like Billy Jack — fuckin’ Mary Pat Jack — beating the fuck out of people. You can’t do it. It’s gonna bring attention.”

“I can’t sit on my hands for twenty-four hours.”

He exhales loudly. “Then give us till, say, five tomorrow. A full day. Give us that long to find her for you. You don’t rattle any cages, you sure as shit don’t go to the fuckin’ cops, you let us work for you.”

She lights a cigarette, turns it between her fingers, round and round. Closes her eyes. “That’s a lot to ask.”

“I know it is. But with this busing bullshit and that spook getting himself killed last night, we don’t need one more outside eye looking into this neighborhood. Because they might start asking how it really runs, how things really get done, and we cannot have that, Mary Pat. We absolutely cannot.”

She looks around the bar, can feel that everyone was just looking at them and are now pretending they weren’t. She looks back at Brian Shea. “Five o’clock tomorrow. That’s my good-girl-behavior limit.”

Brian signals Tommy for another round. “Fair enough.”