Small Mercies

The black guy tripped over his own feet and fell on his back, and George and the two girls found this hilarious. Then—

“Hold up,” Bobby says to Rum Collins. “Where the fuck are you in all this?”

“Huh?”

“Where are you in this story?”

“I’m, like, watching?”

“Then who threw the second beer bottle, numb nuts?” Vincent asks.

Rum stares back at them, a blank slate.

“George threw a beer bottle at Auggie Williamson outside the station, right?”

A nod.

“So that bottle’s gone. Now you want us to believe he threw another one at him inside the station.”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d he get it?”

Rum turns a shade or two whiter. His lips part, but no words leave his mouth. Somewhere back in that pebble of a brain of his, he’s backhoeing like a motherfucker.

“You threw the second bottle,” Bobby says.

“No.”

“Then you threw the first,” Vincent says.

“No.”

“Pick one.”

“No.”

“Fucking pick one!” Vincent flings a black ashtray made of hard plastic right at the kid’s head. The ashtray misses, but the message lands.

“I threw the second one,” Rum says.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” Bobby says.

“Forget about what?” George Dunbar asked, standing over Auggie Williamson.

“Whatever,” Auggie said, and they could all hear the shakes in his voice and see them in his hands. “Forget this ever happened.”

“We can’t,” George said, “because you keep coming into our fucking neighborhood.”

It was Jules who delivered the first kick.

“Jules Fennessy kicked him?”

Rum nods. “She was pissed, man. Just out of her head. It was like you could tell she felt bad for him? And the worse she felt for him, the madder she got. It made no sense.”

Brenda kicked the guy next. Then George.

“Then you,” Vincent says to Rum Collins.

Rum stares at them for a bit, eventually nods.

When Rum kicked the spook lying on his back, it felt better than anything he could remember feeling since maybe his ninth birthday, when he got that three-speed bike he’d been asking for since he was seven. Rum knew what he was staring down — the rest of life in Southie with every day looking exactly like the last. Maybe he’d move up at the supermarket, make his way from produce to deli, but after that, where would he go? He didn’t have a head for numbers, he wasn’t a leader, he knew that much. That meant any type of management position was off the table. So he’d spend his life in produce or deli or dairy. His life. From now to sixty-five. Find some dishrag hag for a wife and pop out four or five little Rums and watch them lose the only good thing about the life their father had known — at least, when Rum was a kid, you knew your neighbors. You shared your food and your rituals and your music. Nothing changed. It was the one fucking thing they couldn’t take from you.

But they could. They would. They were. Forcing their notions and their ways and their lies on you. Lies because they told you change was going to make you happier, it was going to make you richer, it was going to brighten your world.