Small Mercies

Lights come on — first in the next-door neighbors’ house and then in Frank’s. Frank has crawled out from under the Caddy and tries to get to one foot on the sidewalk. He’s reaching into his jacket for a gun. But she’s already coming around the front of the Caddy with her gun pointed at him, her wig sliding halfway down the right side of her head, and she fires. The shot goes wide, hits what sounds like a trash can down the street. Frank’s hand clears his jacket, something in it for sure. She takes better aim and fires a second time, hears Frank shout, “Fuck!” He drops a gun and doubles over, and the blood spills from a hole in his stomach and through his fingers under the white streetlight glare and down the front of his white pants.

He tries to charge her, even with the bullet in him, but the mangled left foot isn’t cooperating. He makes the mistake of trying to put his weight on it, and he screams — it’s more of a shriek, actually — and falls to his knees, ends up on all fours at her feet as she puts the gun to the crown of his head.

“Daddy!”

Mary Pat looks up to see the girl on the stoop. Agnes crouches behind her, holding the girl back. It’s Frank’s youngest daughter — Caitlin, the one who just had her first communion a few months back.

“Don’t hurt my daddy,” Caitlin screams. “Please, lady, please!”

Frank grabs at her legs. Mary Pat clubs him with the butt of the revolver.

Caitlin howls. “Don’t hurt him!”

The next-door neighbor, Rory Trescott, runs toward them with a bat cocked. Mary Pat fires the gun once, aiming well wide of him, and Rory hits the deck.

Frank flops over on his side, blood pumping out of the hole in his stomach like a weak water fountain.

Mary Pat grabs his gun off the sidewalk and puts it in her waistband.

Caitlin Toomey comes off the porch as her mother swipes at her, trying to hold her back.

Mary Pat screams, “You keep her the fuck back!”

Agnes grabs her daughter.

Mary Pat sinks both her hands into Frank’s greasy wet hair and gets a solid grip. She drags him across the asphalt to Bess — he’s fucking heavy; it’s like dragging a fridge — and her wig falls off as she does, lands in the street in a streak of Frank’s blood.

“I know you, Mary Pat!” Agnes calls. “I know you!”

Mary Pat gets the back door open. She yanks Frank’s hands — first the right and then the left — behind his back and cuffs them at the wrist. She shoves Frank onto the backseat like he’s a rolled-up rug. Just pushes until he’s in. She slams the door shut and runs around the side of the car.

“I know you!” Agnes calls again. “I know you! I know you!”

Mary Pat gets behind the wheel, drops the shift into drive, and pulls up the street. They’ve driven a few blocks when Frank groans from the backseat. “I’m bleeding bad.”

“I know it,” Mary Pat says.

“I could bleed out,” Frank says.

“Well, shit, Frank,” Mary Pat says, “wouldn’t that just break my damn heart?”

29

Castle Island in South Boston is not an island, though it used to be. It’s a peninsula, connected by a main road, Day Boulevard, that dead-ends in a parking lot, plus the two walking paths that lead out to the Sugar Bowl, forever tainted for Mary Pat as the site where Marty Butler used a bagful of money to tell her she had no children left walking this earth. Just as the island isn’t an island, the castle isn’t a castle; it’s a fort. Fort Independence, specifically. The current structure, built in the mid-1800s on the site of two previous forts that dated back to Pilgrim times, is made of granite.

Edgar Allan Poe was stationed here at one point. The experience is said to have inspired one of his most famous short stories, though Mary Pat has never read any Edgar Allan Poe, so she holds no opinion on the matter. She knows from her school days that throughout its history — first as a Pilgrim stronghold, then as a British fort, next as an American one, and finally, as a historic monument in the possession of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts — no shots have ever been fired in a military action from its walls. But just like anything else in Southie, she thinks as she approaches, it was built to fight at the drop of a hat.

Frank has been passed out for a few minutes when she drives over the curb by Sullivan’s fast-food hut at the end of the parking lot. Frank wakes with a yelp. He’s disoriented and probably only half lucid from the blood loss. She can hear his handcuffs jingle a bit as he realizes they’re attached to his wrists. She loops down the path along the north side of the fort. It’s bumpy. Frank grunts a lot.