All Souls (18 page)

C H A P T E R   6

A U G U S T

I
ALMOST GOT SHOT LAST NIGHT,” JOE LAUGHED, CRAWLING
out of bed for another Saturday morning of tales from Southie's disco nightlife. Joe had a big head from drinking the night before. He, Mary, and Frankie had been partying at the Lith Club on Broadway, which had become the place to be for Southie's older teenagers. Joe said he was outside the club trying to talk this girl from the suburbs he'd picked up into going home with him, “when all the sudden, this guy with a bloody head ran by.” He said the bullets flew past him and the girl, who said she wasn't used to this kind of stuff. When they saw the gunman crouched between two cars, the girl held Joe in front of her as a human shield. “ ‘Fuck this,' I said.” Joe said he reversed positions, making his date into his own shield from the bullets. Joe was pissed off that the date didn't work out; she jumped into a cab and said she'd never come back to Southie again.

Joe's stories didn't faze me. I was used to them. Even the times I'd come close to the violence, I still felt comforted by the popular line that Southie was the one place “where everyone looks out for each other.” One morning on my way to St. Augustine's, I found three fingers. They were at the bottom of one of the tunnels, the outdoor passages that cut through our buildings from courtyard to courtyard. The one downstairs from us was on a slope, so the pouring rain that morning had formed a lake at the bottom, and there on the edge were the fingers. I remembered hearing some guy screaming the night before, but it sounded normal to me. And even after finding the fingers, I wasn't bothered. It was nothing, really—just another story to tell the kids at school.

We all laughed at Joe, looking for the telephone number the girl had given him before the shoot-out. Frankie said Joe was exaggerating the whole thing, that it wasn't that bad, just another shoot-out among rival gangs from the D Street Project. Davey looked reassured by Frankie's words and joined the laughter after some nervous hesitation. Mary, Joe, and Frankie often had stories about stabbings, with the popular broken bottle or “nigger knife,” and occasional gunfire. And before long they'd be making plans once again with their friends for another night out “at the O.K. Corral,” as they called it.

Davey sat on the mattress in the parlor and stared at the palms of his hands, crying. He was in agony. I watched him helplessly from across the room, sitting at the old-fashioned school desk that Ma had dragged up from the dumpster. I'd been daydreaming in the stiff wooden seat, imagining the old schoolrooms, like I'd seen on “The Waltons.” It was too hot to move; the weatherman had called the day “oppressive.” I'd stopped daydreaming when I'd realized Davey was in pain. I couldn't see anything wrong with his hands, so I figured that he was hurting because it was August again. He'd been taking his medication and staying off the Coca-Cola because he said it made him too jumpy. But here he was, falling apart anyway. He asked me if I could see it. “See what?” I asked. “My bleeding fucking wounds,” he screamed at me. I squeezed out of the cramped desk ready to run for the front door, because when Davey got like this there was no telling what he'd do. He'd never laid a hand on me, but I was scared to be alone with him when he had “the sickness in his eyes,” as Ma called it. Ma said that she could always tell if Davey was getting sick by looking in his eyes. Davey begged me not to leave him by himself now, with the stigmata of Christ and all the blood dripping from his palms. I wanted to tell him that he wasn't bleeding at all, but I knew that would just piss him off.

He got up from the mattress and started pacing the floors with his long strides and a high bounce to every step. Now that we had the breakthrough apartment, he had a long walk to make: from the end of the hallway in one apartment to the far reaches of the second apartment, then back again, over and over. He started singing “Ding dong, the Witch Is Dead” from
The Wizard of Oz;
except he changed the words. “Ding dong, the wicked
stick
is dead,” he sang. “Ding dong and merry-o / Sing it high, sing it low,” and he made his voice go really high and really low when he sang those words. Davey's T-shirt was wet with all his moving around, and as still as I was, I started sweating too.

“Who's the wicked stick?” I yelled to him from a good distance. I was getting ready to run in case I had asked the wrong question, sending him deeper into the madness. Then he turned around, holding up his two hands, and said, “Who's the wicked stick? Who do you think? Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub!” As scared as I was, I couldn't stop laughing at that word. I thought he'd made it up, or else was speaking in tongues like in the story he'd told me before about the apostles when they were filled with the Holy Spirit; with Davey I was ready for any kind of mysterious possession. “Beelzebub!” I laughed. “What the fuck is that? You made that up!” I said, trying to lighten things up a little. He told me that Beelzebub is just another name for the Devil. “Beelzebub! That's a good one,” I said, laughing hysterically now and plopping myself backwards onto one of the couches. “The Devil has many names,” he said, not laughing with me. “And he comes in many forms: like the stick. But,” he added, “by the blood of Christ, the stick is dead.” He turned around again, marching on his way with “Ding dong, the wicked stick is dead.”

I stopped laughing then, and I just prayed to every ancestor I'd ever heard of, and to my brother Patrick, and to the Blessed Mother, to intervene and not let Davey kill himself or anything like that. I'd found myself doing this often. I had to talk to someone about what I witnessed, and I never wanted to scare Ma or the rest of the family whenever they got home, so I just prayed.

Davey had always prided himself in being “a little nutty,” since, as he said, none of the people he'd met since moving into Old Colony wanted to “admit to their confusion.” It often seemed Davey was working really hard to be well, coming into the house, exhausted after a long day of conversations on the street with people he said were way nuttier than he'd ever been, but who weren't on any medication, not prescribed anyway. He was always jerking his head around toward the sound of commotion in the streets, and saying something that he thought was hilarious or wise about our lives in Old Colony. He was trying really hard to get a kick out of it all. But then in August it wasn't funny anymore; the people in our neighborhood weren't funny he said, no matter how many jokes they told or laughs they had or drinks they took. It was as if he took on all of the suffering he saw around us, suffering that so many in Old Colony tried to ignore with all the partying like there was no tomorrow. They were all “poor souls,” especially this time of year, and so was he.

When Ma came home that afternoon, Davey made like everything was normal, closing his hands tightly, as if he was hiding the wounds, and trying not to let Ma look in his eyes. When she looked at him with her own worried eyes, he just jerked his face away from her, heading out into the streets, and I kept him in my prayers.

Ma always looked down on the people who looked through their peepholes and then said they “didn't want to get involved.” The Duggans downstairs were at it again. It was one of those hot summer nights when no one could sleep, so we'd all felt something coming. When Ma heard all the screaming in the hallway, she looked through the peephole and saw Moe Duggan with a knife in his hand, and his thirteen- and sixteen-year-old sons bleeding from their chests, running for the roof to get away. Ma opened the door and pulled Brian and Joey inside, and locked it on Moe.

Brian collapsed onto the floor, and Joey ignored the blood spurting from his own chest to apply pressure to his little brother's wound. Ma called the EMTs. Reenie, the nosy neighbor from next door, came out of her apartment when she saw through her peephole that Moe had left the scene. She said Brian looked cold, and she grabbed Kathy's fur coat to throw on top of him. “Not my fuckin' fur coat!” Kathy screamed, and she knocked Reenie aside and caught the fur coat before it fell onto Brian.

We could see that Brian was turning an ash gray color and heard Ma say that he was dying, as she pressed her own fringed cowboy jacket onto the wound over Brian's heart. Davey came out of one of the back rooms but didn't say a word; he just paced back and forth past Brian and chain-smoked. Then he stopped pacing and looked at Brian and threw his two arms up like he finally knew what to offer. “Hey, Bri, you want a smoke?” When he got no response, he went back to his nervous pacing around the house, glancing at Brian from the corner of his eye whenever he happened to pass by.

Finally, about four EMTs and two cops charged into the apartment and rushed toward Joey, bleeding on the couch. Joey waved them off. “Forget me,” he screamed. “Take care of my brother!” One EMT was on the phone with a doctor at the City Hospital, and I listened as he spoke low and said they were losing Brian. Joey panicked and rushed to his brother's side again. But they kept working on Brian and were able to revive him. They put him on life support, and eventually carried him out on a stretcher.

From the window, we watched the crowd that had gathered outside, people stretching their necks to get a good look at Brian going into the ambulance. Reenie was at the center of a circle of women, throwing her arms around and giving her account of the episode. And right in the middle of the crowd was Moe Duggan, stretching his own neck like a nosy neighbor. I knew Reenie wasn't mentioning his role in the stabbing. “Look at that fucker,” Ma said, “like he's just a spectator. You wouldn't know that he was the father of two kids who were just stabbed, never mind that he was the one who knifed them.”

A week later I began the seventh grade at Boston Latin, and rode the English High bus with Brian, since Latin was just across the street from English. Brian was showing his scars and telling the story to everyone. The last thing he remembered before dying: Davey bouncing around the room, “Hey, Bri, you want a smoke?” People repeated those words for weeks whenever they saw Brian. We all got a kick out of the story. Brian and Joey were both fine, except for the scars, and they never did mention their father's role. Ma never understood why, when she was called to Station 6 as a witness, none of the Duggans wanted to press charges against Moe.

“Solid Gold” blasted from the TV set. I watched the show every Friday night, and played with Seamus and Stevie while Ma got dressed to go play the accordion at the Emerald Isle Pub in Dorchester. I wasn't going out to Illusions anymore, so I was able to babysit when Ma went out to the Irish clubs. Kool and the Gang appeared on the screen, and Ma came out of the bathroom to watch their dance moves, telling me to zip up the back of her sequined minidress. I told her that minidresses were out of style, and that she should wear something longer. That even the younger girls at Illusions were wearing dresses to their knees, maybe with a little slit up the side. “Oh, that's a good idea,” and she used her bare hands to rip a slit along the seam of the already too short dress. I hated to see her go out like that, even though all my friends raved about how nice-looking she was for a forty-year-old. Actually she was forty-five, but she got away with lying about her age to everyone, and made me do the same—even on official school documents.

Ma started making another one of her commotions looking for her spike heels and her pocketbook. I turned up the television so I could still hear “Solid Gold” through all Ma's rambling on about Kathy and her thieving friends who might have taken her stuff. I pretended that I was looking for her pocketbook out in the parlor. “Did you find it yet!” she screamed from the bathroom, as if it was a life or death situation. “Let's see … Nope, it's not under the cushions. Let me check the closet.” Ma was always hiding her pocketbook whenever any company came over from the neighborhood. And when they left, she would've hidden it so well that she couldn't find it herself, and would start screaming that whoever had just left was a known thief, from a long line of thieves who would steal your last dollar as soon as look at you. She was yelling now about Julie Meaney, who'd just left the house with Kathy. “And what shoes did Kathy wear out of the house?” Ma asked, all out of breath now from the excitement. Kathy was always stealing Ma's spike heels for a night out on the town on East 8th Street.

Davey was pacing by the front door, oblivious to Ma's uproar. He was in his own world until the loud thumps came from the metal door, like someone was in trouble again—in a family fight, or else running from the cops. Davey jumped and jerked his head toward the door, staring at it for a minute without responding, like he was imagining the trouble that might come through if he opened it. Then it banged again; it sounded like kicks this time. Davey unlocked the door. It swung open fast and a shotgun came through, pointed right at Davey's head, backing him up against the wall. “Hey, c'mon will ya? Knock it off, huh?” Davey said, as if they were just playing around with him. I grabbed the two little kids to me, and yelled for Ma. About five other armed men in leather jackets and wool hats came charging into the house, covering each other as they checked around corners, guns pointed. One of them aimed at me, Seamus, and Stevie. Then another brought Ma out of the bathroom with her hands up. “My kids!” Ma tried not to cry when she saw the guns pointed at us. There was panic in her voice but she kept control, thinking fast, and trying not to make any false moves. The babies started to cry.