Small Mercies

by Dennis Lehane

G’bless. They could add it to the list that includes It is what it is and Whatta ya gonna do. Phrases that provide comfort by removing the speaker’s power. Phrases that say it’s all up to someone else, you’re blameless.

Since birth, Ken Fen had no choice but to buy into the violence. He just never bought into the hate.

“Donna,” she says, “I can’t find Jules. And Brian promised to look into it. So I need to find him.” “You don’t wanna fuck him?” “No, I don’t wanna fuck him.” “Why not?” “Because I fucked him in high school and it wasn’t that great.”

Pat. It feels good for a moment to remember who they were before they again have to sit with who they are.

“I’m sorry your husband died.” “I’m sorry yours did.” “No, he just left me.” Donna shakes her head. “The first one. Dukie?” “Oh, right.” Mary Pat nods. “That was a long time ago.” “Still gotta hurt.” “He hit me a lot.” “Oh. What about the second one?” “Never. He was a gent.” “But he left you.” “Yup.” “Why?” It takes Mary Pat so long to speak that by the time she finally does, Donna’s finished her cigarette and the light in the room has changed. “I embarrassed him.” “How?” “I dunno.” “Your hair?” I have bad hair? “Your face? Your tits? Your . . . what?” “My hate.”

“I might meet a guy who’s better for me, maybe, but I’ll never meet a better guy.”

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. And sometimes that disparity wears him the fuck out.

Two of them were dead because they’d tried to kill Corporal Michael “Bobby” Coyne of Dorchester, Massachusetts. But he knew they were really dead because they were in the way. Of profit. Of philosophy. Of a worldview that said rules apply only to the people who aren’t in charge of making them. 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.

He glances sideways once, catches her glancing sideways right back at him with a secretive smile, and he considers the possibility that maybe the opposite of hate is not love. It’s hope. Because hate takes years to build, but hope can come sliding around the corner when you’re not even looking.

Bobby is struck by the notion that something both irretrievably broken and wholly unbreakable lives at the core of this woman. And those two qualities cannot coexist. A broken person can’t be unbreakable. An unbreakable person can’t be broken. And yet here sits Mary Pat Fennessy, broken but unbreakable. The paradox scares the shit out of Bobby. He’s met people over the course of his life who he truly believes existed as the ancient shamans did, with one foot in each world: this one and the one beyond. When you meet these people, it’s best to give them breadth the length of a football field, or else they may suck you right into that next world with them when they go. Because they’re going. Make no mistake. They are fucking going.

“The rule of law is all that separates us from the animal kingdom.”

Shannon was cold and imperious and noticeably unfond of humanity, and Bobby mistook the shine she took to him with his being a person of value—if someone who doesn’t like anyone likes you, doesn’t that render you peerless? It gave him pride, but no pleasure, to have a woman that beautiful and heartless on his arm.

“No matter what we claim in public, in private we all know that the only law and the only god is money. If you have enough of it, you don’t have to suffer consequences and you don’t have to suffer for your ideals, you just foist them on someone else and feel good about the nobility of your intentions.”

She sits there, overcome suddenly with a fresh horror of the self. Her daughter is dead, Auggie Williamson is dead, the lives of several teenagers on the platform that night are ruined, and her mind still grasps with grubby desperation for ways to feel superior to them. To feel superior to someone. Anyone.

“I didn’t kill your son,” she says. “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