Small Mercies

Well, his car. She finds it parked in front of a barbershop across from the Training Field on Common Street. The barbershop is closed, its lights off. All around it are homes, some dating back to Revolutionary times, most to the early 1800s. They’re row houses — either redbrick, brownstone, or clapboard — not an inch to spare between them. He could be in any of them. Or none of them. Could have taken a parking space where he found it and walked off around the corner. She thinks about looking for him on foot, but the only place more clannish than Southie is Charlestown. If she starts walking around looking in windows, word will get to Frank before she gets half a block.

But he’ll come back for the Caddy, she hopes. She finds a spot with a clear view of his car on the far side of the Training Field, so named because it was where Union troops mustered and trained during the Civil War, and checks her wig and makeup in the rearview mirror. She settles in and tells herself she’s not exhausted. She can’t remember the last time she had real sleep; even in the motel last night, she got three hours tops. She pinches her thigh as hard as she can. Slaps her own face a few times. Smokes cigarette after cigarette...

She wakes around midnight with no idea when she fell asleep. She blinks half a dozen times, slaps herself again, and gets a clear look across the Training Field. The Caddy is still where Frank Toomey parked it.

Jesus.

Dumb fucking luck. Nothing more.

She resolves to stay awake even if she has to cut herself, but halfway through her next cigarette, her eyelids flutter. She gets out of the car. Stands in the clammy air, her wrists leaning against Bess’s roof as she smokes. She spots a phone booth half a block up on the corner. Perfect angle on Frank’s car from there, so she trudges up to it and steps in, closes the door behind her. She thinks of who she can call at this late hour — or at any hour anymore, she realizes with the pang of the exiled — and then she drops a dime in the slot and dials.

“Mary Pat,” he says when they put him through to her. “How’d you know I’d be working the late shift?”

“Luck o’ the Irish, Detective.”

“We took three nasty automatic rifles off the street this morning.”

“Did you?”

“We certainly did. Thank you.”

“If you worked this morning, why you still at it?”

“I went home and slept,” he says. “Came back, though. Everyone’s doubling up. Half the cops in the city are gearing up for tomorrow. A lot of them were over your way keeping the peace tonight.”

“I saw you at Auggie Williamson’s funeral.”

“Noticed you myself.”

“Why’d you rush off?”

“We got a warrant we’d been waiting on. Had to serve it to a shithead who killed his girlfriend, stop him before he could kill another one.”

“That must have been satisfying.”

“Not really. What I do feels a lot like sanitation work most days.” He fails to suppress a yawn of pure exhaustion. “I heard you exchanged some words with Auggie’s parents.”

“Mmmm,” she manages.

“I bet that wasn’t pleasant.”

“It wasn’t.”

He makes the same excuse she tried for. “They lost a son. Violently. They can’t see straight.”

“No.” She sucks in a big wet breath that rattles in the confines of the phone booth. “They see fine.” She looks out through the smeared glass at the Training Field where soldiers once prepared for battles to free the slaves. She imagines they were young, impressionable. Scared shitless. The grass of the field has turned nearly white in the summer heat — there’s been no rain this summer; none — and under the streetlights and through the grimy glass, it looks like snow. She’s never felt more lost.

No, she realizes, not lost.

Homeless.

She clears her throat and tries to explain something to Detective Michael “Bobby” Coyne, a perfect stranger when you get right down to it, but she feels the need to tell him something even she doesn’t understand. She feels the need to be heard, whether she makes sense or not. “When you’re a kid and they start in with all the lies, they never tell you they’re lies. They just tell you this is what it is. Whether they’re talking about Santa Claus or God or marriage or what you can or can’t make of yourself. They tell you Polacks are this way and wops are another and don’t even get us started on the spics and the niggers but you sure can’t trust them. And they tell you that’s the Way. And you, you’re a fucking kid, you think, I want to be part of the Way. I sure don’t want to be outside the Way. I gotta live with these people my whole life. And it’s warm in there. So warm. The rest of the world? That’s so fucking cold. So you embrace it, you know?”

“I know,” Bobby says.

“And then you dig in because now you got kids and you want them to feel warm. And you spread the same lies to them, mainline them into their blood. Until they become the kinda people who can chase some poor boy into a train station and bash his head in with a rock.”