Small Mercies

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.