Small Mercies полностью

Mary Pat applies a large flesh-colored bandage to the cut once it’s clean. She’s got a basketful of Band-Aids, bandages, gauze, iodine, surgical shears, and antiseptic under that sink. It’s like the ER at City down there. Back when Dukie was in the Life, she needed it, of course. After he passed, she kept it around for Noel, who never met a conflict he couldn’t escalate into a fistfight.

Like mother, like son.

She smiles again. The truth is, she’s loved fighting ever since she can remember. Literally. Her first concrete memory of any length is of Willie Pike riding his bike through a puddle in front of the spit of lawn where four-year-old Mary Pat sat fussing over the hair of her Raggedy Ann doll. She saw the gleeful look in the little fucker’s eyes as he aimed the bike for the puddle. And he saw that she saw it. He pedaled faster, the little shit. Smashed his tires through the puddle and covered Mary Pat and Raggedy Ann in the slimy water that probably hadn’t come from rain — those puddles just sprang up all over Commonwealth, even during weeks of dry weather, and smelled of sulfur and bleach. She chased Willie Pike past four buildings before he wiped out on a turn. And when she got to him, she didn’t pause — a harbinger: she never paused in a fight — she unleashed. He was six and a boy, so there was no way she was going to win, but he was bleeding from both nostrils and crying like a pussy by the time he did get on top of her. He got a few licks in before Old Lady McGowan pulled him off and slapped him a few times around the head for good measure. Sure now, Old Lady McGowan told him, his father needed to strap his bottom black and blue for hitting a little girl. Old Lady McGowan thumb-poked him in the shoulder a few more times for emphasis before she walked Mary Pat back to the puddle to get her Raggedy Ann. When Mary Pat picked the doll up, it felt like lifting a trophy.

She’d have at least twenty more fights before she reached sixth grade — and those were the ones outside her door. Inside the Flanagan home, it was Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robots from seven a.m. wake-up to ten p.m. shutdown. The boys — John Patrick, Michael Sean, Donnie, Stevie, and Bill — lived in one room. At one point, John Patrick’s senior year at Southie High and Bill’s first year in second grade, all five of them were living in there at the same time. Mary Pat’s father, those times she could remember him actually being home, would say the room smelled like a fish’s asshole. After John Patrick left — hitching a ride west; no one had heard from him in twenty years — a battle ensued for his top bunk. Donnie, who was stronger than Michael Sean, got it for the first six months, but Michael Sean spent all that year working out at L Street until he was stronger. About a week of fistfights and two broken noses later, Michael Sean got the top bunk, but Stevie hated the sound of Michael Sean snoring through his broken nose, so he tried to smother his brother with a pillow — Stevie, possessor of the scariest glare Mary Pat had ever seen, was always fucked in the head — and their mother had to break it up. Stevie, who was thirteen at that point, small and feral like their mother, slammed their mother’s head against the window and broke the pane. That it was it for Stevie, they shipped him off to St. Luke’s Home for Troubled Boys and never spoke of him again, even when they saw his name in the papers ten years later for that stickup that went horribly wrong in Everett.

The stitches — black, thick, and hard as metal, all seven of them — remained in the back of their mother’s head for three weeks, and when they came out, it wasn’t much better. For the rest of her life, Louise Flanagan’s hair grew around the scar and refused to fall over it, so it looked like all her thoughts, secrets, and shames could be accessed by pulling down on a red zipper in the back of her skull.

Not that her mother couldn’t dish it out as well as she took it. To this day, Mary Pat can’t look at a wooden spoon without recalling the sting of one against her wrist, her cheek, the poke of the tip in her stomach. And that was for the minor offenses. For the major offenses — Weezie’s shoe. She had three pairs, all prewar, all built to last. Every five or six years, she’d get the soles replaced, and then everyone walked on eggshells for weeks, hoping to not be chosen as the one she’d use to break them in.

If the old man was around, you had to watch out for his hands — the backs of the knuckles as hard and pointed as lug nuts, the flick of his index finger springing off his thumb into your temple, the grip of his fingers in your hair to drag you across the floor toward his belt (as he had the night Mary Pat got all Ds on her report card). Jamie Flanagan loved that belt most of all. He hung it on a hook just outside the bathroom door for that purpose only, used a different one to hold up his pants.