Heinies?
The crowd cheers. The horns continue to honk.
“The American Dream is no handout.”
The crowd goes fucking wild.
“The American Dream is roll up your sleeves and make your own way. Without welfare!”
A tidal wave of applause.
“Without government help and government orders!”
A group of men walk by Mary Pat, carrying pale white bodies under their arms, or that’s what it looks like until Mary Pat looks close and sees they’re life-size dolls, clearly as light as air in the big men’s arms. The crowd lets the men pass. One of the men, she realizes, is Terror McAuliffe, Big Peg’s husband. He looks right at Mary Pat, checking her out — face to breasts, breasts to face — and then he moves on.
No recognition.
“Francis and I have four children,” Agnes is saying, “three of them at Southie High. But they’re not going to school tomorrow. Because I won’t let them go. Southie won’t let them go! Am I right? Southie won’t go!”
The chant rolls up and down Broadway: “Southie won’t go! Southie won’t go! Southie won’t go!”
Agnes stands back, beaming, and her eyes drift to someone in the crowd, off to her right, about fifty yards from where Mary Pat stands. Mary Pat catches a glimpse of curly black hair in that section of crowd.
Mary Pat moves through the crowd. All her cockiness about her disguise suddenly feels like false confidence. Barroom bravado. Anyone, at any point, could turn, see her profile an inch away from their nose and...
What?
Scream her name.
That would do it.
Tom O’Rourke has the bullhorn now. Tom is also on the school committee. But he’s a dry speaker, a cure for insomnia is ol’ Tom, and even though he cycles through the usual greatest hits — tyranny, reverse racism, disruption of community and culture — he’s got everyone’s eyelids drooping when a cheer rips through the crowd. Mary Pat follows dozens of turned heads to see the men with the dolls swinging ropes over the streetlamps and flagpoles up by the courthouse. They’re not practiced at it — only one rope holds fast on the first try — but the crowd gives them so much vocal support that Tom O’Rourke calls it a day. Which brings another round of cheers.
Mary Pat nears where she thinks she saw Frank Toomey, but the sun’s gone down at this point. It’s not yet full dark, but deep shadows have fallen across the crowd in jagged swaths. This makes it harder to discern faces than it would be in full dark, where your eyes tend to adjust. And the sunglasses sure don’t help. Someone with black hair passes close to her, but when he emerges from the other side of the couple between them, he’s got a beard and a double chin, and she recognizes him as one of the Clarks from I Street. She turns in the crowd and he’s coming toward her, his eyes locking with hers, Frank Toomey himself, all brute force and Old Spice as he works his way through the crowd with a gruff “’Scuse me, ’scuse me” that sounds less like a minor plea and more like a major command. He comes right for Mary Pat; she can’t move. They’re packed in there too tight, people jostling and turning to see whatever’s going on by the courthouse at the moment, but Mary Pat’s realizing too late she should be reaching into her purse, which is twisted to the back of her right hip, as Frankie is almost on her, his mouth curving into a cruel smile as he gets in close enough for her to smell his breath and says, “’Scuse me, hon, I just gotta get by.”
She pivots to her right as best she can and then he’s brushing past her, his big bearish body sliding against her own, close enough for her to notice the smallest flecks of gray beginning to find his sideburns, and then he’s moved on. And right behind him, hands in their jacket pockets on a summer night, are Johnny Polk and Bubsie Gould, two headbreakers who run South Shore Sand & Gravel and several porn shops in the Combat Zone.
Before the crowd can close, she steps into their wake, staying right on their heels, as Frank, two steps ahead of them, parts the crowd like the prow of a boat. She wishes she hadn’t chosen a powder blue pantsuit — it seems the kind of detail people will remember later — but then she reminds herself she has no other endgame. Her primary objective is not to kill Frank Toomey and escape. It’s simply to kill Frank Toomey. Which, arguably, she could do right now — just pull out the gun and shoot all three assholes in the back. But who would be the true asshole then? Bullets could pass through their bodies; a panicked stampede could leave people trampled; she could miss. No, here was not the place.
The crowd surges forward as one, and Mary Pat is spun halfway around so that she’s involuntarily facing the courthouse again. The life-size dolls are hanging from the flagpoles and lampposts now with signs around their necks. One reads sen. kennedy, another judge garrity, a third mayor k. white, and a fourth william taylor, a name she doesn’t recognize. The men who carried the effigies stand below them with lighters in their hands. As the crowd bellows its approval, they light the dolls on fire.
It takes a minute. The flames dance along the edges of the effigies, some blue, some yellow. One of them — Garrity’s — goes out, and they have to start again. But then...
The light from the flames washes over the crowd closest to the courthouse. It bathes them in red and yellow and blue light that floods their heads and faces like liquid. The air smells of lighter fluid and fury. The effigies twist on their ropes and burn.
The crowd chants, “Southie won’t go!”
The crowd chants, “Niggers suck!”
The crowd chants, “We are one!”
For a moment Mary Pat’s vision turns telescopic, and all she can see are the faces surging forward on necks that strain from the stretching, red mouths slick with spittle, signs thrusting into the air like pitchforks, legs of children draped down their parents’ shoulders and chests. Moving through the thickness of the crowd and the thickness of its rage is like trying to squirm her way between freshly laid brick. Her lungs ache as if she chain-smoked half a dozen cigarettes in a row, and her head grows light.
Just when she thinks she might pass out, she clears the crowd. Pops out on the corner where West Broadway meets East.
Across Broadway, Frank Toomey reaches a cherry red Caddy with a white hard plastic roof. He chats easily with Johnny Polk and Bubsie Gould. He grimaces comically, and they share a laugh. He says something that makes both of them cock their heads. He nods several times so they’ll accept that he means what he says. Then he gets in the Caddy and pulls off the curb. He U-turns and heads up West Broadway.
It’s fucking agony as she waits to see what Johnny and Bubsie are going to do. They seem to be wondering themselves. Then they nod and walk three doors down to a bar.
Mary Pat runs full out for two blocks, hops behind the wheel of Bess, and stands on the gas. Bess putters out of the parking space. Begins to gain speed. Nears a stop sign. Mary Pat cranes her neck — nobody around — and blows the stop sign. She blows the next stop sign and reaches West Broadway with some momentum. At this point, all she’s got are guesses. If Frank were heading home, he’d have taken a side street that ran parallel to Dorchester Street and worked his way over to his house on West Ninth. But he didn’t. He drove up Broadway toward the bridge. Mary Pat lays all her chips on the table and decides he’s heading into the city itself, downtown somewhere.
If that had been the case — and someone hadn’t lit a car on fire and left it at the intersection of Broadway and E — she would have lost Frank Toomey for the night. But she reaches the intersection just as the traffic begins to snake around the burning car, and she catches sight of that white roof and cherry red frame as it passes the flames — is everything on fire tonight? — and keeps the car in sight until it turns right at the I-93 on-ramp.