Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

Why are we doing this?” “Doing what?” “Walking around, shopping, getting up, going to bed, getting up again? What are we trying to, you know, like, achieve?” Mary Pat wants to give her daughter one of those shots they give tigers to knock them out. What the fuck is she on about? “Are you PMSing?” she asks.

Great deep question - why r we here etc?

While her lips say, “That’s quick thinking,” her head says, I pray you don’t breed.

Nice irony

“But, yeah, I don’t like colors in my milk.” He arches his eyebrows as if he just said something wise. “Not. For. Me.” She shoots him a tight smile. And if you do breed, please don’t breed with my daughter.

Find someone good. Find someone who might be dumb but won’t be mean. This one will grow mean because he’s only one or two elevator stops above retard, and yet he thinks he’s kind of smart, and the ones who are like that grow mean when they realize the world laughs at them. You’re too good for this boy, Jules.

Scathing description of her daughter's boyfriend

They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any. If it doesn’t fall from the sky and land on you, doesn’t find you when it wakes up every morning and goes looking for someone to attach itself to, there isn’t a damn thing you can do. There are way more people in the world than there is luck, so you’re either in the right place at the right time at the very second luck shows up, for once and nevermore. Or you aren’t. In which case . . .

Lehlane's fatalism?

Poor people talking shit about poor people. Race don’t come into it. They keep us fighting among ourselves like dogs for table scraps so we won’t catch them making off with the feast.

Good observation about racial violence - divide and rule.

When she breaks his nose with her right fist, it sounds like a cue ball shattering a tight rack. The whole bar hears it. He screams like a girl, and she hits him again, exact same spot, drives the punch through his hands, which are soft and covering that nose. Then she punches him in the eye, bringing her left fist to the party this time.

Tough woman and mother

“Take the money in that bag and use it to fly to Florida, stay in a nice hotel, and spend your days looking for your daughter. Kinda money that’s in that bag, Mary Pat, you could stay down there for a few years.” Lewis lights a cigarette, considers her through the flame. Marty stands in front of her. His eyes are very still. “I’m going to walk my friend Lewis back the way we came. You stay here for a bit and collect your thoughts and make a final decision.

What a nasty human being!

“We understand each other then, hon.” Marty squeezes her shoulder once before he and Lewis walk back up the causeway toward land. Once they’re out of earshot, she stops constricting her face, and the sob leaves the back of her throat like a ball of bile and exits her mouth. She looks down at the money in the bag as her tears stream onto the paper. And she knows her daughter is dead. She knows her daughter is dead.

What a way to find out that your daughter is dead.

So, if you take a run at the Butler crew, you cannot fucking

miss. Not if you’re fond of the little things—a living wage, a pension at the end of it, or a roof over your head. Shit like that.

Not good options if you go up against the blue wall

It isn’t just fellow cops Marty Butler has in his pocket. There are judges for sure, probably at least one congressman or state senator, and maybe,

just maybe, the darkest of the dark whispers say, someone or maybe a half-dozen someones in federal law enforcement. Over the years, far too many potential witnesses against Marty or his associates—whose identities were kept under lock and key, mind you—have vanished or been killed.

Marty Butler and his gang control the city

If four black kids had chased a white kid into the path of a train, they’d be facing life. If they entered a plea, the best offer would be a minimum

of twenty years hard time. But the kids who chased Auggie Williamson into the path of a train won’t, Bobby knows, face more than five years. If that.

Still true today and what about the january insurrection!!!!

Call them gooks, call them niggers, call them kikes, micks, spics, wops, or frogs, call them whatever you want as long as you call them something—anything—that removes one layer of human being from their bodies when you think of them. That’s the goal. If you can do that, you can get kids to cross oceans to kill other kids, or you can get them to stay right here at home and do the same thing.

Demonize the enemy!!!

Before he can believe she’s really pulled his pants off, she’s already yanked his ball sac toward her and flicked the blade along the underside. She’s going to venture a guess he’s never screamed so loud or so high in his life. The blood flows freely from the cut.

Mary Pat is mean and violent

Mary Pat’s no expert, and her vision is limited, but she knows a rifle when she sees one. Why is a white drug dealer from Southie giving rifles to three black guys in Roxbury on the eve of forced busing? Mary Pat presses her head to her seat back. What the fuck is going on?

Good question

“No?” Dreamy says. “You raised a child who thought hating people because God made them a different shade of skin was okay. You allowed that hate. You probably fostered it. And your little child and her racist friends, who were all raised by racist parents just like you, were sent out into the world like little fucking hand grenades of hate and stupidity and, and, and you can go fuck yourself, Mary Pat, if you think for one second I’m okay with that. Or that I forgive. I do not forgive. So go back to your neighborhood and sit with your monster

Well, that's telling Mary Pat the truth

friends and get yourselves all worked up to stop us from attending your precious school or whatever. But bitch, we’re coming whether you like it or not. And we’re going to keep coming until you quit, not the other way around. Until then, get the fuck out of my neighborhood.”

“And then you dig in because now you got kids and you want them to feel warm. And you spread the same lies to them, mainline them into their blood. Until they become the kinda people who can chase some poor boy into a train station and bash his head in with a rock.” “It’s okay,” he says gently. “It’s not!” she screams into the confines of the phone booth. “It’s not. My daughter’s dead and

Auggie Williamson’s dead too because I sold my daughter lies. And before she ended up swallowing them? She knew it. They always know it. They know at five. But you keep repeating the lies until you wear them down. That’s the worst of it—you wear them down until you scoop all the good out of their hearts and replace it with poison.”

And so that's how bigotry and racism grow, handed down from generation to the next until someone or something breaks the cycle.

“You gave her those qualities too, Mary Pat. We’re not one thing. We’re people. The worst of us has good in him. The best of us has pure fucking evil in his heart. We battle. It’s all we can do.”

Are these the author's own beliefs?

She laughs. “You flood our community with heroin. Rent women out to fuck strangers for money. You molest children. Turn other children into worse versions of you. You rob. And you kill. But I’m sick. I’m depraved. Oh, okay, Brian.”

Mary Pat sums up the mob's activites very well