Small Mercies

“Take the money in that bag and use it to fly to Florida, stay in a nice hotel, and spend your days looking for your daughter. Kinda money that’s in that bag, Mary Pat, you could stay down there for a few years.”

Lewis lights a cigarette, considers her through the flame.

Marty stands in front of her. His eyes are very still. “I’m going to walk my friend Lewis back the way we came. You stay here for a bit and collect your thoughts and make a final decision. If you decide to keep the bag, I hope you use its contents in good health and with my blessing. If you decide to return the bag, you know where to find me. Whatever decision you make, this topic we’ve been discussing? We’ll never speak of it again. Do you understand?”

She doesn’t trust herself to speak. She manages a nod.

“We understand each other then, hon.” Marty squeezes her shoulder once before he and Lewis walk back up the causeway toward land.

Once they’re out of earshot, she stops constricting her face, and the sob leaves the back of her throat like a ball of bile and exits her mouth. She looks down at the money in the bag as her tears stream onto the paper.

And she knows her daughter is dead.

She knows her daughter is dead.

11

Bobby Coyne and Vincent Pritchard drive through Southie to interview the final witness on their list — thus far — to the last night of Auggie Williamson’s life. The witness, a tower crane operator named Seamus Riordan, agrees to meet them at Boyd Container Terminal along Summer Street during his lunch break.

The moment they cross into Southie, Bobby feels a difference in the air. Bobby grew up only a few miles south in Dorchester, in a parish that was wholly white and predominantly Irish; he presumes that in most places in America, a distance of a few miles between two enclaves that share identical ethnic characteristics doesn’t represent a seismic difference in culture. But crossing the border into Southie always gives him the feeling that he’s just entered the rain forest of an unknowable tribe. Not specifically hostile, not dangerous by their nature. But, at their heart, opaque.

Driving along Broadway, he sees a young guy exit a bus and then turn to help an old woman who was waiting to board that bus. In his entire life, Bobby’s never seen more people help little old ladies cross streets, avoid puddles or potholes, carry their groceries, or find their car keys in purses overstuffed with rosary beads and damp tissues.

Everyone knows everyone here; they stop one another in the streets to ask after spouses, children, cousins twice removed. Come winter, they shovel walks together, join up to push cars out of snowbanks, freely pass around bags of salt or sand for icy sidewalks. Summertime, they congregate on porches and stoops or cluster in lawn chairs along the sidewalks to shoot the shit, trade the daily newspapers, and listen to Ned Martin calling the Sox games on ’HDH. They drink beer like it’s tap water, smoke ciggies as if the pack will self-destruct at midnight, and call to one another — across streets, to and from cars, and up at distant windows — like impatience is a virtue. They love the church but aren’t real fond of mass. They only like the sermons that scare them; they mistrust any that appeal to their empathy.

They all have nicknames. No James can just be a James; has to be Jim or Jimmy or Jimbo or JJ or, in one case, Tantrum. There are so many Sullivans that calling someone Sully isn’t enough. In Bobby’s various incursions here over the years, he’s met a Sully One, a Sully Two, an Old Sully, a Young Sully, Sully White, Sully Tan, Two-Time Sully, Sully the Nose, and Little Sully (who’s fucking huge). He’s met guys named Zipperhead, Pool Cue, Pot Roast, and Ball Sac (son of Sully Tan). He’s come across Juggs, Nicklebag, Drano, Pink Eye (who’s blind), Legsy (who limps), and Handsy (who’s got none).

Every guy has a thousand-yard stare. Every woman has an attitude. Every face is whiter than the whitest paint you’ve ever seen and then, just under the surface, misted with an everlasting Irish pink that sometimes turns to acne and sometimes doesn’t.

They’re the friendliest people he’s ever met. Until they aren’t. At which point they’ll run over their own grandmothers to ram your fucking skull through a brick wall.

He has no idea where it all comes from — the loyalty and the rage, the brotherhood and the suspicion, the benevolence and the hate.

But he suspects it has something to do with the need for a life to have meaning. Bobby is a child of the ’40s and ’50s. When, as he recalls, you knew who you were. Without question.

And it’s the “without question” that’s bothered him ever since. While he tromped through Vietnam. While he danced with the needle. While he worked patrol in the heart of the city’s black communities — Roxbury and Mattapan, Egleston Square and Upham’s Corner.