“What happens after the protest? What happens if, I dunno, nothing changes?”
He holds out his hands. “I guess we see.”
Why don’t you just fucking shoot the judge? she thinks. You’re the goddamn Butler crew. We pay “protection” to you. Protect us now. Protect our kids. Make this stop.
But what she says is “Thanks, Brian. Say hi to Donna.”
“Will do.” Another tip of the imaginary cap. “Say hi to Kenny.” His smooth face freezes for a second as he probably recalls the latest neighborhood gossip. He flashes her doe eyes. “I mean, I meant—”
She bails him out with a simple “I will.”
He gives her a tight smile and walks off.
She closes the door and turns back into the apartment to see her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, smoking one of her cigarettes.
“Fucking power’s off,” Jules says.
“Or ‘Good morning,’” Mary Pat says. “‘Good morning’ works.”
“Good morning.” Jules shoots her a smile that manages to be bright as the sun and cold as the moon. “I’m going to need to shower, Ma.”
“So shower.”
“It’ll be cold.”
“It’s fucking ninety degrees out.” Mary Pat pulls her pack of Slims back across the table from her daughter’s elbow.
Jules rolls her eyes, takes a drag, directs the smoke at the ceiling in a long steady exhale. “What did he want?”
“Brian?”
“Yeah.”
“How do you know Brian Shea?” Mary Pat lights her second of the day.
“Ma,” Jules says, her eyes bulging, “I don’t know Brian Shea. I know Brian Shea because everyone in the neighborhood knows Brian Shea. What did he want?”
“There’s gonna be a march,” Mary Pat says. “A rally. Friday.”
“Won’t change anything.” Her daughter tries for a tone of casual apathy, but Mary Pat sees the fear swimming in her eyes, darkening the pouches underneath. Always such a pretty girl, Jules. Always such a pretty girl. And now clearly aging. At seventeen. From any number of things — growing up in Commonwealth (not the kind of place that produces beauty queens and fashion models, no matter how pretty they were coming out of the gate); losing a brother; watching her stepfather walk out the door just when she’d finally started to believe he’d stick around; being forced — by federal edict — to enter a new school her senior year in a foreign neighborhood not known for letting white kids walk around after sundown; not to mention just being seventeen and getting into who knows what with her knucklehead friends. A lot of pot around these days, Mary Pat knows, and acid. Booze, of course; in Southie, most kids came out of the womb clutching a Schlitz and a pack of Luckies. And, of course, the Scourge, that nasty brown powder and its fucking needles that turn healthy kids into corpses or soon-to-be-corpses in under a year. If Jules keeps it to the booze and the cigarettes with the occasional joint thrown in, she’ll only lose her looks. And everyone loses their looks in the projects. But God forbid if she moves on to the Scourge. Mary Pat will die another death.
Jules, she’s come to realize over the last couple of years, never should have been raised here. Mary Pat — one look at her baby pictures and childhood snapshots, all scrunched face and wide shoulders and small powerful body, ready to audition for the roller derby or some shit — looks like she came off a conveyor belt for tough Irish broads. Most people would sooner pick a fight with a stray dog with a taste for flesh then fuck with a Southie chick who grew up in the PJs.
But that’s Mary Pat.
Jules is tall and sinewy, with long smooth hair the color of an apple. Every inch of her is soft and feminine and waiting on a broken heart the way miners wait on black lung — she just knows it’s coming. She’s fragile, this product of Mary Pat’s womb — fragile in the eyes, fragile in her flesh, fragile in her soul. All the tough talk, the cigarettes, the ability to swear like a sailor and spit like a longshoreman, can’t fully disguise that. Mary Pat’s mother, Louise “Weezie” Flanagan, a Hall of Fame Irish Tough Broad who’d stood four-eleven and weighed ninety-five pounds soaking wet after a Thanksgiving dinner, told Mary Pat a few times, “You’re either a fighter or a runner. And runners always run out of road.”
Mary Pat sometimes wishes she’d found a way to get them out of Commonwealth before Jules finds out which she is.
“So where’s this rally taking place?” Jules asks.
“We’re going downtown.”
“Yeah?” That gets a wry smile from her daughter as she stubs out her cigarette. “Crossing the bridge ’n’ shit.” Jules raises her eyebrows up and down. “Look at you.”
Mary Pat reaches across the table and pats her hand so she’ll look at her. “We’re going to City Hall. They can’t ignore us, Jules. They’re gonna see us, they’re gonna fucking hear us. You kids ain’t alone.”
Jules gives her a smile that’s hopeful and broken at the same time. “Yeah?” She lowers her head. Her voice is a wet whisper when she says, “Thanks, Ma.”
“Of course.” Mary Pat feels something clench in the back of her throat. “You bet, sweetie.”
This may have been the longest she’s sat with her daughter, just talking, in months. She’d forgotten how much she likes it.
A tiny clap of thunder shakes the floor beneath their feet, rattles through the walls, and the lights come on above the stove. The fans start moving in the windows. Radios and TVs in the other apartments return to battle with one another. Someone whoops.
Jules shrieks, “I call shower!” and bolts from her chair like she owes it money.
Mary Pat makes coffee. Takes it into the living room with one of the freshly emptied ashtrays and turns on the TV. They’re all over the news — South Boston and the coming school year. Black kids about to get bused into Southie. White kids about to get bused out to Roxbury. No one on either side happy about the prospect.
Except the agitators, the blacks who sued the school committee — been suing it for nine years because nothing was ever good enough.
Mary Pat has worked alongside too many blacks at Meadow Lane Manor and the shoe factory to believe they’re bad or naturally lazy. Plenty of good, hardworking, upstanding Negroes want the same things she wants — a steady paycheck, food on the table, children safe in their beds. She’s told both her children if they’re going to say “nigger” around her, they better be sure they’re using it about those blacks who aren’t upstanding, don’t work hard, don’t stay married, and have babies just to keep the welfare checks rolling in.
Noel, just before he left for Vietnam, said, “That describes most of the ones I’ve ever met, Ma.”
“And how many have you met?” Mary Pat wanted to know. “You see a lot of coloreds walking up West Broadway, do ya?”
“No,” he said, “but I see ’em downtown. See ’em on the T.” He used one hand to imitate someone holding a subway strap and the other to scratch under his arm like a monkey. “They’s always going to Fo’-rest Hills.” He made chimp sounds and she swatted at him.
“Don’t be ignorant,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be ignorant.”
He smiled at her.
God, she misses her son’s smile; she first saw it, crooked and wide, when he was on her breast, drunk on mother’s milk, and it blew open a chamber of her heart that refuses to close no matter how hard she presses down on it.
He kissed her on the top of her head. “You’re too nice for these projects, Ma. Anyone ever tell you that?”
And then he was gone. Back out to the streets. All Southie kids loved the streets but none more so than project kids. Project kids hated staying in the way rich people hated work. Staying in meant smelling your neighbors’ food through the walls, hearing their fights, their fucks, their toilet flushes, what they listened to on their radios and record players, what they watched on TV. Sometimes you’d swear you could smell them, their body odor and cigarette breath and swollen-feet stink.