“Show some manners. Say hi to your aunt.”
“Hey, Mary Pat.”
“Hi, sweetie.”
Big Peg asks, “You seen Jules? Look at your aunt when you talk to her.”
“Not lately.” Little Peg’s listless/twitchy eyes twitch listlessly at Mary Pat. “How come?”
“Ain’t seen her since last night,” Mary Pat says. She can feel the helpless-hopeful smile she wears around her cigarette. “Just getting a little worried.”
Little Peg stares back at her with nothing in her eyes, her mouth slack and half open. She could be a mannequin in a Kresge’s window.
Mary Pat remembers when Little Peg was five and Mary Pat used to babysit her occasionally. That Little Peg was hilarious and sparked like a snapped electric wire in a storm. She was so aware of herself and the life around her, so joyful.
What takes that from them? Mary Pat wonders.
Is it us?
“So, you ain’t seen her in a bit?”
“No.”
“Like, how long?”
“I saw her up the park last night.”
“Which?”
“Park? Columbia.”
“When?”
“Like, eleven? Maybe eleven-forty-five. No later than that.”
“Why no later?”
“Cuz Ma gives me a beating I don’t walk through the door by twelve.”
Mary Pat looks at her sister, who raises her eyebrows proudly in confirmation.
“So sometime between eleven and twelve?”
“Yeah.”
“Who was she with?”
Now this dead-eyed fidgety girl with the stringy brown hair and acne-inflamed forehead grows cagey. “You know.”
“I don’t.”
“You do.”
“I swear to Christ, I don’t.” Mary Pat gets so close she can see her own eye reflected in her niece’s. “Rum?”
A nod.
“And who else?”
“You know.”
“Stop saying ‘You know.’”
Little Peg looks to her mother, but Big Peg’s nostrils flare and her breathing is heavy enough that they can hear it over all the other noise in the house. Always a sign, since Big Peg was a child, that volcanic eruptions are on their way.
“Answer my sister.”
Little Peg turns her head back to Mary Pat but lowers her eyes. “Well, I mean, Rum was with George D.”
Big Peg slaps her daughter on the side of the head. Little Peg barely flinches. “You fucking kidding us?”
Mary Pat says, “You mean George Dunbar.”
“Yes.”
“The drug dealer,” Mary Pat says.
Another slap from Big Peg, same place, same velocity. “The guy who sold the shit to your cousin Noel that killed him? That guy? You’re hanging out with that fucking guy?”
“I don’t hang out with him.”
“Watch your tone with me.”
“I don’t hang out with him,” Little Peg whispers. “Jules does.”
Mary Pat feels her insides seize up — heart, throat, even her guts, everything just clenches.
For all their power, the one thing Marty Butler’s crew can’t get their arms all the way around is the drug traffic in Southie. They try; there are all sorts of stories floating around about small-time dealers found in shallow graves on Tenean Beach or with needles shoved through their eyes in empty warehouses, but still the drugs get in. They come from the blacks, of course, in Mattapan and Jamaica Plain and the sprawl of Dorchester, but it’s the whites like George Dunbar who sell it to their own people. And no one from the Butler crew is going to kill George, the story goes, because George’s mother, Lorraine, is Marty Butler’s girlfriend. Mary Pat has heard that Marty himself has knocked George around a few times, even gave him a shiner one time, but the kid keeps doing it. And he isn’t the only one, so the drugs keep pouring in.
“It’s like when the Japs used to send hordes of kamikazes at my old man and my uncles in Dubaya Dubaya Two,” Brian Shea said to Mary Pat once. “If they send enough of them, a few of them are getting through. And not even the greatest navy in the world can stop it. And we’re just a crew, Mary Pat, we can’t keep it all out.”
This was back when Mary Pat came to Brian (and by extension Marty) for justice in Noel’s death. “But you can punish the people you know are doing it,” she pleaded.
“And we do when we catch them. We punish them hard. Sometimes permanently.”
But not George Dunbar. Because he’s untouchable.
And now this untouchable merchant of poison is hanging around her daughter?
As gently as possible, she says to Little Peg, “Why does George Dunbar hang around Jules?”
“He’s good friends with Rum.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And he’s, you know—”
“If you say ‘you know’ one more fucking time,” Mary Pat snaps.
“He goes with Brenda.”
“What do you mean — ‘goes’?”
“He’s her boyfriend.”
“Since when?”
“Since, like, I dunno, beginning of the summer?”
“So you saw all four of them together at the park?”
“Yeah, no. What?” For a second, Little Peg looks completely confused. It’s the look of someone, in Mary Pat’s experience, who’s lost the thread of the story she’s trying to keep straight. “I mean, yeah and no, because Brenda and George were beefing, so she left, and then Rum and George and Jules left, and that’s when I left.”
“And this was at Carson Beach?”
“What? No. No, it was at Columbia Park, like I said.”
“Cuz Brenda told me they were all hanging at Carson Beach.”
“Then she’s a fucking liar.”
Her mother gives her another slap upside the head. “Watch your fucking mouth.”
“We were at Columbia Park,” Little Peg says. “That’s where I saw her. If she went to Carson after, I don’t know about it, because I went home.”
Mary Pat and Big Peg exchange a look — the look of all parents when they know a kid has presented a story and will stick to it for now. No use in pushing further; then she might really start to lie.
“Okay,” Mary Pat says. “Thanks, honey.”
Little Peg shrugs.
“You can go,” Big Peg says.
After Little Peg leaves, Peg gets them a couple beers from the fridge and they sit at the kitchen table and drink them. When the small talk runs dry in under a minute or so, the conversation turns to the neighborhood storm cloud everyone’s obsessed with.
Of Big Peg’s older kids, one’s out of high school, and three are in it. All of them won the lottery and will be staying at Southie High. Sheer luck of the draw. No Roxbury for them. No fear of the bathrooms and the corridors and the classrooms for them.
Turns out that’s not good enough for Big Peg. Oh, no.
“I ain’t sending them,” Peg says.
“What?”
She swallows some beer and nods at the same time. “Ain’t sending them. We’re joining the boycott. Weeze would roll over in her grave if she saw a pack of darkies walking down the same corridor as her granddaughter at South Boston High School, Mary Pat. Tell me I’m wrong.”
“Weeze” (or “Weezie”) was what they’d called their late mother, Louise. No one else had ever called her that, just her kids, and only, while she was alive, in a conspiracy of silence.
“You’re not wrong,” Mary Pat admits, “but what about their education?”
“They’ll get their education. I give this a month, two at the most. When the city realizes we won’t bend and all we want is what’s ours?” Big Peg winks in a knowing way. “They’ll back down.”
The words — and Big Peg’s confidence — ring hollow. And when they do, the fear that’s been eating away at Mary Pat’s stomach lining all day returns.