Small Mercies

Bess is going to need all the help for what comes next, so Mary Pat steadily depresses the gas pedal as they go. When they reach the northwest corner of the walls, she comes fully out of her seat and stands on the pedal. Bess fishtails, and Frank falls of the backseat with a scream. Mary Pat grinds her foot into that fucking pedal and growls through gritted teeth as she wills Bess straight up the hill. Right near the top, the back wheels give, and she knows they’re not going to make it. They’re going to slide backward and probably sideways, and then they’re going to tip and flip and roll.

“We’re going out together, Frank!” she calls. Frank yells back something that sounds like “You crazy cunt, Mary Pat.” But Bess, bless her ancient old-lady heart, finds one last breath in her engine, one last surge, and the back wheels catch dirt instead of grass and the car bursts over the top of the hill.

Mary Pat is not prepared for four bald tires at full acceleration to hit damp grass on a humid summer night, and they shimmy crazily all over the field leading up to the doors of the fort. She gets control of the car just before smashing into the doors, and the moment the car comes to a full stop, Bess expires. The engine shudders to a halt, and little metallic pings and gasps rattle around under the hood, and the frame shakes and surges like it’s having a heart attack. Plumes of brown smoke shoot out from the back of the car and then spill from under the hood.

For a moment it feels like losing a pet. Mary Pat pats Bess’s side after she exits. She tries to come up with the proper words, but all that finally occurs to her is a simple “Thanks” to the only car she’s ever owned outright.

While Bess continues to pass through her death throes, Mary Pat picks the rusty old lock on the main door of the fort and pushes it open. She goes back for Frank, pulling him off the floor of the backseat by his hair.

She would have expected more rage from him. Tough-guy talk. Threats. But he’s plaintive. Surprised, it seems, by her barbarity. When he hits the ground, he cries, “Come on! Please! Please, Mary Pat, I’m holding my fucking guts in here!” She hoists him to his feet and pushes him through the door in a wild stumble, which ends almost immediately when he puts weight on his mangled leg and falls down again. She lets him lie there for a bit, grinding his head into the grass.

The interior of the fort is an oval — parade grounds and storage rooms down below. Parapets and cannon slots up above.

She drags Frank into the first room she sees. The rooms just off the main parade ground are barely rooms. They have no doors, no furniture, nothing. They feel like prison cells, but she’s pretty sure she’s heard they stored gunpowder, armament, and food back in the long-ago. She drops Frank with his back to the wall to discover he’s passed out again.

Pussy.

She removes the gun she took off him. A Colt .45 1911, almost identical to the one her uncle Kevin brought back from World War II. Uncle Kev would bring it out when she was a little girl and they went over to his apartment, and he’d let her sit on his lap with it after he’d stripped it and checked the chamber. He’d tell her he kept it for two reasons: 1) to always remind himself of the savagery man was capable of against his fellow man; and 2) in case the niggers came for them all some night.

In the end, he used the gun on himself, Christmas morning 1962.

She searches Frank. Finds a spare clip for the .45 in his pocket and adds it to her bag. She removes his coat, bunches it up, and presses it to his wound. He mumbles but doesn’t wake, and she uses the duct tape to wrap the bunched-up coat as tightly as she can around the wound.

She gets a look at his leg and almost throws up. Jesus. No wonder he can’t stand on it. The foot is pointing in the opposite direction, and the bones in his calf punch out through the skin like broken sticks. It gives her the idea, though, to pull off his remaining boot.

Where she finds a knife.

She considers it. Is this the knife? The one he drove up under her daughter’s rib cage and into her heart?

She finds him looking at her. His breathing is very shallow. “You know you’re a dead woman?”

She shrugs. “You’ll be strolling — oops, sorry, crawling — into hell before me, Frank. Bank on it.”

“Not if you get me to a hospital.” His voice is friendly. Reasonable.

She jerks a thumb over her shoulder. “No car, Frank. It’s dead too.”

“Just walk down the hill to the pay phone by Sullivan’s.” A helpful smile joins the friendly voice.

“To... do what, again?”

“Call me an ambulance. Or call Marty.”

She waits a bit before answering. Long enough to watch the hope flower in his eyes. “Frank,” she says as softly as possible, “you are going to die tonight.”

He opens his mouth to speak, but she cuts him off.

“There is no way out for you,” she explains. “No threat, no promise, no bribe can buy you one more day of this life.”