Small Mercies

When she wakes, it’s hot as hell in there, the garage’s metal door serving as a conductor for the rays of sun pounding the other side of it. George is rattling his handcuff against the door handle. She looks at her watch — two-thirty. Heroin begins to leave the bloodstream after six hours. George is right on schedule.

She loops the seat belt once around the back of the passenger seat. She uncuffs George, leads him over, and pushes him down into the seat. He groans a few times, asks her what she’s doing, but she ignores him. She has to pull hard on the belt to get the latch plate up near his hip, but once she does, she slaps the cuff into the latch plate hole on the first try.

“You know what I don’t get,” she says.

He shakes his head, still a little foggy.

“You and Brenda. You don’t seem like a couple.” It’s something that nagged at her while she was falling asleep in the back of the car.

“We’re not.”

She closes her eyes for a moment, wondering if there’s any bottom to this.

“So if Rum was a cover for Frankie Toomey, who were you the cover for?”

“Who do you think?”

In the dark swelter of the car, she says nothing for a bit. And then:

“Marty.”

He doesn’t nod. But he doesn’t shake his head. He just holds her gaze.

“And George? One last question — when did they really take up with the girls?”

He takes a minute to formulate his thoughts. “Frank liked to say the reason they call it freshman year is because that’s when it’s freshest.”

This is one of the moments she’ll look back on and wonder how it was she managed not to kill him.

She drives them downtown.

“What do you know about how she died?”

George is out of sorts and grumpy. He keeps trying to raise his cuffed hand to block the sun from his eyes. He switches to his left hand, but it’s still too much sun for one hand. “Frankie was pissed because she called his house after midnight and threatened to tell people.”

“Tell people what?”

He gives her a careful look.

“Rum already told me she was pregnant,” she tells him.

“Then, yeah, that’s what she was threatening.”

She drifts into oncoming traffic and has to swerve hard to avoid an oncoming cab. It’s not anything George said. It’s a fragment of memory from the last day she spent with Jules. They’d been walking along Old Colony, and Jules had spiraled into that weird dark mood which grew so exasperating that Mary Pat had asked her if she was PMSing. To which Jules replied:

No, Ma. Definitely no.

She was trying to tell me, Mary Pat thinks. And I couldn’t hear. I couldn’t see and I couldn’t hear. Because I didn’t want to. Because truth hurts, truth costs, truth upends your world.

They have to divert at the Broadway bridge because an anti-busing demonstration has shut down the bridge. As they follow the detour down along A Street, they pass throngs walking toward the bridge with anti-busing signs, anti-Garrity signs, anti-black signs.

They stop at an intersection and wait out the passing of a thick line of protesters.

“Why’d he kill her?” she says softly, surprised the words left her mouth because, in the end, no reason could be good enough.

“She wanted money to raise her kid.”

“He has plenty of money.”

“Doesn’t mean he wants to share any. Plus, I heard she was asking for a lot. Said she didn’t want to raise her kid the way she was raised.”

Mary Pat tries to keep the wince in her heart from appearing on her face. “And if she didn’t get the money?”

“She’d tell people it was his.”

“Who told you this?”

“Larry Foyle. He was pretty down about it. Said it wasn’t right. Said, ‘We’re killing little girls now?’”

“How’d you feel about it?”

“Really sad.”

She looks over at him. He’s still trying to dodge the sun, moving his head below his hand.

“No, you didn’t,” she says.

He sighs. “No, I didn’t.”

“Do you feel things, George? I’ve always wondered.”

He frowns at his own reflection in the window. “I think it’s a pretty idea, but no. Honestly? Outside of my mom, I never felt anything for anyone.”

“At least you’re honest.”

He points at the protesters, stragglers now, but still a decent number of them working their way up A Street. “Look at these fucking morons. Whether niggers walk the halls of Southie High this year or not, you’ve all already lost. The towelheads just told us to go fuck ourselves and get used to walking until they decide to let us have more oil. But you’ll pick a fight with the niggers, who are just as poor and fucked as you are, and tell yourselves you stand for something.”

The traffic moves. They make it through the intersection just as the light turns from yellow to red.

“If you don’t care about any of it, George, why’d you pick a fight with Auggie Williamson?”

He lowers his hand and looks at her, and the sun bathes the side of his face in harsh yellow that bounces and refracts as she drives.

“He was weak,” he says. “You could see it in his eyes.”

“Maybe he was just scared.”