C H A P T E R 6
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.
I knew we were all going to die, I just knew it. I could feel my heart beating against Seamus’s and Stevie’s heads as I covered them.
“I got ’em,” one of the guys shouted from Frankie’s room. They all rushed in to where Frankie was, except for one who stayed behind to cover us with his gun, telling Davey and Ma to go and sit still on the couch with me and Seamus and Stevie. Davey looked around the room fast, as if he might be planning an escape. Just then we heard fighting and Frankie yelling in the back room. Ma started to plead and cry.
That’s when the intruder with the gun pointed at us said he was a cop, and that we were being raided for drugs. He held up his badge; it was upside-down. “Drugs!?” Ma screamed. Davey sat rocking back and forth as he always did, laughing at the cop, or maybe trying to get him to laugh along, and then turning his head away, looking nervously out of the corner of his eye at the gun. The gunman yelled at him, “Hey … Stop that! Stop it!” Davey just looked at him again. That’s when the guy cocked the trigger and screamed, “I said fuckin’ cut it out!” “Cut … what … out?” Davey asked, looking at the gun as if he wasn’t sure he was even allowed to talk, and then looking away from the gun, back at us. The kids were crying, especially Seamus, whose face was covered in tears, looking at Ma. “Stop moving so fast,” the guy said. “What are you doing?” “Oh, Davey does that,” Ma explained with a smile, like we could all be the best of friends if we connected. “He rocks back and forth. You see, he’s mentally ill,” she added, looking for some sympathy. “Yeah, schizophrenic!” Davey said proudly.
“Yeah, well, we all got our problems … just sit still.”
Just then they brought Frankie out, shirtless and sweaty, bent over like the handcuffs were hurting him. I thought he looked like a criminal, which was a real surprise to me. Frankie’s no criminal, I thought. I guess I would’ve looked like a criminal too if I was the one being brought out in handcuffs. I realized the ones who had him in handcuffs looked a lot like the gangsters I’d seen around town. “Frank!” Ma screamed. Two guys stood in front of Ma, blocking her from getting closer. Four other guys rushed Frankie headfirst toward the door. “Where are you taking him?” Ma pleaded, her voice shaky, as if she was struggling to stay calm.
“He’s goin’ to jail, ma’am.” Now they were calling her ma’am. They held up the shotgun they’d found in Frankie’s room. It was the one that Coley and Ma had got in the D Street Project back when we moved into Old Colony and had to protect ourselves. It had gone missing, and Ma figured someone had stolen it. But Kevin had kept it hidden, under the bed in Frankie’s room. “He says he owns the gun, ma’am, but that he can’t find his license. Besides that, we found ten hits of acid.” I knew then that Kevin had gotten Frankie into trouble again, hiding his stash in Frankie’s room. But Frank wasn’t about to rat on Kevin. Just then, one of the guys handed the shotgun to the one who was keeping us all under cover like we were Ma Barker and her boys, and they all left. We weren’t allowed to follow them. We looked out the window and saw the ladies on the stoop clear the way for Frankie and his captors. They put him into an unmarked car. I still wasn’t sure they were really cops; they’d acted more like gangsters. I hated the cops plenty for all the beatings I’d seen them giving out during the busing troubles. And now—Especially if those bastards are the law, I said to myself—I could see how some of the kids in the neighborhood could start to feel like criminals whether they were or not; or even why they’d be proud to be outlaws.
The court made a deal with Frankie: he wouldn’t be prosecuted if he joined the service. So Frankie went into the Marines. Ma was thrilled to see him get out of Old Colony. Even though he’d stayed out of trouble with his boxing, Ma said it was getting so that trouble would find you easy enough these days.
Everyone missed Frankie. We’d all started to go to his fights, except Ma, who said she couldn’t bear to see Frankie get hurt in the ring. Davey missed Frank the most, though; the two of them had gotten close, and like the rest of us Davey felt safe in Old Colony with a brother who could box. When Davey had first been set free from Mass Mental, there were people in Old Colony who didn’t know he was one of us—and who thought he seemed odd. But any time he was teased, Frank was the first to his rescue. One time a gang of kids Frankie called “the pretty boys,” with their perfect hair and pressed clothes, were making fun of Davey and his bouncy step. “Hey, Frank, some maggots are botherin’ me!” Davey shouted up one of the tunnels. Frankie sent Davey back to where the pretty boys were hanging out by the incinerator, and stayed hidden in the tunnel to watch the teasing himself. As soon as it began, he walked up to them saying, “You fuckin’ with my brother?” They begged for forgiveness, saying they didn’t know Davey was a MacDonald. And off went Frankie, with Davey bouncing behind him and looking back at the pretty boys with a tough-guy stare and clenched fists.
Joe missed Frankie too. He’d just bought his new pimpin’ van from our neighbor, Cookie. We’d all envied Cookie in her blue van with ocean paintings on the side, and “The Blue Goose” written on it in sparkly country-western-style letters. Cookie was so big, she had the driver seat pushed so far back that you couldn’t see her head when she drove by—she looked all breast and belly. Joe had to get new bucket seats, and he couldn’t wait until Frankie got out of the Marines, so they could ride around picking up girls.
The Blue Goose was like an apartment, with a table, sink, and a bed. And Joe stole Ma’s curtains to hang in the windows. As soon as Kevin stepped inside, he called it his new pad. Joe never locked his door—he had no need to in Old Colony. So Kevin and his friends Okie, Joey Earner, and Timmy Baldwin practically moved in, playing cards, drinking, and inviting girls over, whenever Joe was home sleeping. One night Davey made a commotion in the street, banging on the side of the Blue Goose and demanding to be let in. Kevin and his friends had girls over and had locked Davey out. “I want some action too,” Davey yelled, peeking through the rear windows. That’s when Joe went down and kicked everyone out.
The next morning, Joe arrived at his new mechanic job forty minutes outside the city. He turned around and saw Joey Earner crawling out of the bed, scratching his head, and asking, “Where are we, Joe?”
The only one more excited than Joe to see Frankie leave the Marines after three months was Davey. Frankie came home with a bald head and all kinds of military clothes and boots. He was even more obsessed with working out now, jogging five miles a day—sometimes we’d spot him running backwards along the beach, wearing his combat boots. Joe waited until Frankie was ready to party at night, but Davey started to follow Frankie on his runs. Then Frankie got an apartment with Davey in Old Colony. That’s when Frankie started getting Davey to focus on his appearance. He taught Davey to shave correctly and more often, got him punching the heavy bag, and doing a hundred push-ups a night. Davey said he was feeling good about himself, said he was going to try to meet a woman. He started wearing Frankie’s clothes. But Davey was six-foot-one, three inches taller than Frankie, and sometimes he’d mix Frankie’s dress clothes with gym clothes. We suddenly started seeing Davey with his hair slicked back and parted in the middle, wearing a silk disco shirt with Adidas sweatpants that were too tight and too high. But he was walking with a less edgy step, and even if he looked funny, he often had a more relaxed look in his eyes, living with his buddy Frankie.
At the close of the school year in 1979, everyone was thinking about the murder. Francis Stewart had gotten his throat slit by his sister’s boyfriend, Charles Fuller—a born-again minister from the neighborhood—as he’d walked alongside Fuller at Houghton’s Pond. We all seemed to be able to brush off the stories of gunfire on Broadway, and now and then there’d been vague talk of suicides and overdoses. But that was like background noise, and didn’t matter much. We were shocked that a neighbor could be killed so brutally by someone he thought was a friend. No one wanted to say much. Everyone knew you had to be careful what you said, and who you talked to, about things like this. You never knew who was on what side, or who was related in our neighborhood. But despite the worried look in people’s eyes when they opened the papers every day to get the update on one of the most brutal murders we’d heard of, the shock only lasted so long. Summer arrived, and soon everything was back to normal for most of us.
“Jesus, I love you,” Davey mumbled, pacing past me and the women on the stoop watching the black-and-white TV that someone had carried outside on another hot August night. Then he picked up his pace, and with each “Jesus, I love you,” he got louder and louder, until he screamed the words out at the top of his lungs in the middle of Patterson Way: “Jesus, I love you!” People came to their windows, and some even came outside for a better view. The teenagers selling drugs on the corners looked a little nervous. Davey was in the middle of the street now, blocking a few customers from coming down Patterson. Eventually, they just swerved around him, and the teenagers poked their heads into the car windows for a second before the customers sped off again.
Davey disappeared, and then we saw his silhouette pacing the rooftops across the street, bouncing higher than ever, and screaming at the top of his lungs: “Jesus, I love you!” The women on the stoop all looked at me, asking me why he was doing that. I just kept staring at “Happy Days” on the TV set, and started playing with the vertical knob on the set to keep the picture from jumping. “I don’t know,” I finally answered. “Maybe he thinks Jesus can’t hear him.” I wished that Frankie would get home. Since he and Davey had moved into the apartment across the street, Frankie was the only one who could make him calm down. I usually made Davey worse with all my questions. Finally Ma came walking up the tunnel with Nellie. The two of them were laughing away at one of Nellie’s stories until they heard it: “Jesus, I love you!” from the rooftop. “Nellie, go get him down, will you?” Ma said; then she came over to the women on the stoop, smiling and asking how everyone was doing, to take the attention away from Davey. Nellie walked across the street to yell up to Davey. “Get down here, will you, you son of a bitch, you’re tormenting your poor mother!” Then she started screaming as Davey showered her with the small pebbles that covered the rooftop, telling her that she had the Devil in her. Nellie came staggering over to us, laughing, “Well, he’s right about that one,” she admitted. She pulled out her bottle and took a swig. The women on the stoop all laughed with Ma and Nellie.
Davey’s silhouette disappeared. One of the teenagers selling drugs followed him for my mother, and came back to tell us that Davey had gone toward Carson Beach and looked as if he were calming down. It was nine at night now, and we turned our attention away from the TV set to watch the drug traffic, the teenage girls coming out all dressed up for a night of partying, and the arguments and fights breaking out from people’s open windows. “Ach, it’s gonna be another long hot night, huh?” Nellie said, sitting down on the stoop and taking another swig. “This is a great place. I wish I could get an apartment in Old Colony,” she added. “I’m stuck with the niggers over in Dorchester.” Nellie was trying to make conversation with the women on the stoop, but they just ignored her since Ma had gone up to the apartment to check on the babies. Nellie was an outsider, and there was no welcome for her, only looks when she took her swigs, as if we’d never seen drinking before in these parts. “Keep her with the niggers,” one of the women muttered, staring back again at the jumping picture on the TV set.
I met up with my friend Danny every day after work at the carpentry job I’d been given that summer through the welfare office. One boiling hot day we went to Carson Beach before it got dark. Davey was there, sitting on the beach wall with his head down. No pacing, no rocking back and forth, and no chain-smoking. I’d never seen Davey look so calm. As if he was letting go of all the battles he’d been waging through his August days, and nights. Only the night before he’d attacked me in the streets, calling me Michael the Dark Angel. When I was a little kid, he’d always told me about Michael the Archangel, who I was named after. But on this night, he’d said that everything had changed, that I’d fallen from the heights, just like Lucifer, who I’d thrown out of heaven, gaining favor with God myself and ruling the heavens. Now it was all over. I was no longer in God’s favor; I’d become the Dark Angel, in league with Satan. Danny had been with me when Davey said all that. I was always getting embarrassed by Davey’s crazy talk and often tried to make light of it all. I’d called my brother a fool, and he’d quoted something in the Bible that said it was a great sin to call another man a fool, and that I would definitely burn. But now Davey looked peaceful. We called over to him, but he didn’t respond; he just kept staring at the sand.
I went home to mind Seamus and Stevie later that afternoon. As usual, Ma called every once in a while to ask about “the babies,” as we still called them, and to have me feel Stevie’s back while he slept, to make sure he was still breathing. Seamus was three now, and Stevie two, but ever since Patrick, Ma never really trusted that her babies weren’t dead when they were just soundly sleeping. “Put down the phone and put your hand on his back to make sure he’s breathing,” she said. “Come on, will ya, Ma,” I said. “Just do it,” she said, “I’m not hanging up until you come back and tell me.” Stevie was on the couch on his stomach, and I felt his back go up and down a few times before returning to tell Ma. I took my time, because I knew that if I came back to the telephone too soon, she wouldn’t believe I’d done it. “All right,” she said, “I’ll be back later, I’m meeting Nellie up Broadway.”
Frankie came up that day, just like every other day, to eat something after boxing at McDonough’s Gym. He and Davey never had food in their apartment across the street, and Ma always kept the fridge loaded at our place. He woke Stevie up to tease him and to teach him to box; he said the babies had to learn to fight at an early age. Frankie loved toughening up the little kids. I heard a woman scream outside, but I didn’t think anything of it. Just another hot day in August, I figured, and it’ll only get worse when the sun goes down. Then it sounded as if someone was breaking down our door, they were banging so hard. Frankie whipped open the door ready for a fight. It was my friend Walter who lived across the street. He was crying. “It’s Davey! I don’t know what happened! He just came flying off of the roof!” Frankie ran down the stairs, yelling “No! No! No!” over and over again. I wanted to run out that door so badly, but someone had to watch Seamus and Stevie. I paced. I couldn’t look out the window. I heard more screams outside. I looked out the window. I didn’t want to, but I had to. And there he was, my oldest brother, lying face down on the pavement, his plaid shirt and dungarees soaked with his blood. I felt my heart pumping through my head, my fingers, my feet. I could’ve fought off an entire army of Davey’s demons, but I had to stay in the house with the kids. I saw him moving now, and felt I had to keep looking, to see if there was a chance that he might be all right, as if my watching might help. “Call an ambulance! Someone! Now!” Frankie was screaming. I called 911.
“Emergency, can I help you?”
“It’s my brother he’s dead—he’s dying.”
“What happened, honey?”
“I don’t know—he fell off the roof—blood”
“Umm—OK. Where are you?”
“Just fuckin’ hurry up! Fuckin’ hurry!”
“Listen, honey, calm down. Now what’s the address?”
“8 Patterson Way in South Boston, Old Colony Project—please! Oh my fuckin’ God.”
“What does he look like? What’s he wearing?”
“Huh? He’s fuckin’ covered in blood! Hurry! Please! Please! Please! Please! Just fuckin’ get here!”
“Listen, don’t get nasty with me!”
I hung up the telephone—I knew they’d come; they had enough information. I had to do something else. I still couldn’t go outside—I had to keep the two little kids away from the windows. They knew something was going on, with all the screams and me crying and pacing. They kept running to the windows and trying to pull themselves up. There were more screams outside, and the sound of crowds gathering, and people calling up to their friends to tell them what happened. Big Lisa from 19 Patterson banged on the door and walked in asking if I wanted her to mind the kids. I hated big Lisa—Ma was always trying to bring her over as if she was going to fix the two of us up. Big Lisa was really big, the fattest girl in the project, always wearing maternity shirts and pretending she was pregnant. But I was glad to see her now. I thanked her and threw on my sneakers. She started getting the little kids dressed. I asked her what she was doing. She said she was going to take them downstairs and mind them out there. I looked at her like I was hearing things. “No.” I forced a calm voice out of my mouth, “I don’t want them to see this.” I wanted to kill her for her stupidity. “Forget it then,” she said, “everyone’s outside, the whole neighborhood. I don’t want to be stuck in here.” I threw her out.
When I looked out the window again, Davey was standing up, covered in blood and throwing powerful punches at everyone in his path. What’s he fighting? I thought. Frankie restrained him and got him to calm down. The ambulance hadn’t come, and it had been a good fifteen minutes already. I tried to call 911 again. My hands were shaking and my fingers kept turning the telephone dial to the wrong numbers. This made me break down and cry, and Seamus cried too. Then I went numb, became very calm, and turned the 9, then the 1, then the 1 again.
I got into another fight with the dispatcher. “There are emergencies all over the city,” she snapped. “We’re doing our best, and there’s nothing more I can do.”
Just then I heard the sirens. Fire trucks, ambulances, and police cars filled Patterson Way, about twenty-five minutes after I’d first called. I was still numb, not feeling a thing, as I looked out the window. Tears came from my eyes, but it seemed as if they fell on their own. I watched them take Davey into the ambulance, restrained face down on a straight board, as he raged, trying to bust loose from the tight straps around his body. I knew that he wasn’t fighting for his life; he was fighting for his death. The crowds of people were now climbing on top of things to get a better look at him.
The ambulance stayed out front for another hour. While they were working on Davey I saw Kathy come down the street, laughing with Tisha Stokes and Doreen. She was high again, looking around to see what all the commotion was. I was hurt to see that her expression didn’t change much when she got up to the ambulance to find that it was her brother dying in there. She just hung out front for a while, getting the story retold to her by all the neighbors, who claimed they’d seen the whole thing and gave blow-by-blow accounts, imitating Davey’s determined punches in slow motion. She listened to their stories over and over again. Her face didn’t change. I don’t know what I was looking for in her face, pain I guess. But Kathy looked numb, and I too had already started to feel less and less, like I’d been drained.
I went away from the window, back to the kids. They were hungry and I had to make them some food. I put some leftover macaroni and cheese on the stove. I returned to the window to find that the ambulances had pulled off. Davey was gone from Patterson Way, and I suddenly felt again. I cried out loud.
Ma came home at about eleven at night with Nellie. The two of them had been at the City Hospital. Ma said the doctors were still working on Davey, but that he was going to be all right. I half believed her, or I wanted to. I stayed up late and snuck to the telephone to call the hospital for patient information. They said Davey was in critical condition. “Is he gonna live?” I asked, and was immediately afraid of the answer. I was relieved when they said that they had no other information except his status: critical. I told Ma, and she yelled at me for being a worrywart. “For Chrissake, go to bed will ya’?” Nellie screamed from the couch, getting comfortable, with only a baby blanket thrown over her torso. “You’re keepin’ us all up!” Ma reassured me that Davey would be fine; she’d seen him herself and talked to the doctors. She looked as if she believed it, and so I lay down on the other couch opposite Nellie and her snoring all night.
I actually fell asleep after a couple of hours, and when I woke up at about six, I could hear Ma rummaging around the house. I lay still for a while, faking I was asleep, because I didn’t want to ask the question I had: “Is he alive?” The door knocked and Ma opened it. It was Johnnie. He was the second oldest to Davey—they were like twins as children, being only ten months apart—but he was more like the oldest in the family since Davey’s breakdown. He’d graduated from Tufts and was now in the Navy, but was back in Southie having heard the news. He’d slept over at Frankie and Davey’s the night before; Ma didn’t know he’d come back. “Oh, John! Hi!” Ma said. I could tell she was forcing a happy voice. Then she let it out, the truth. “Davey … died last night,” she said in a low voice, and now she sounded defeated. I could tell that her heart broke when she said those words, and so did mine. I let out a long moan, and turned my face into the pillow as if I could stop the pain by stopping my uncontrollable moans. “Motherfucker!” Johnnie screamed, and he punched a dent in the cement wall. Ma said Davey lived for nine hours after his jump, that he’d died of a burst spleen, and had received last rites from a priest. Ma had arranged for the last rites, she told us, and I was mad at her then for not telling me the night before that she knew Davey would die.
Everyone came out of the bedrooms slowly at Johnnie’s voice, and when they saw him crying they knew what had happened. Kathy sat silent at the kitchen table. Kevin too came out slowly from the back room and never said a word. Joe had gone out for a walk, Ma said, and Mary came over to join the silence. Frank was nowhere to be seen, and no one wanted to tell him that Dave was dead. He’d taken care of Davey, and had been the closest to him. Nellie staggered up from the couch and went straight for the refrigerator, one half of her hair flattened and the other half standing straight up. She grabbed a whole raw onion, the way she always did when she woke up with a big head, and bit into it like it was a sweet apple. “Poor old Dave,” she moaned in low notes that sounded like the beginning of another sad Irish song, crunching away at the raw onion. We all just looked at her, silent, for a few seconds. I started laughing and crying at the same time. Then I wanted to kick her out, as if I was looking for anyone to hate who wasn’t feeling the way I was. It seemed so heartless for her to be eating—even if it was a nasty raw onion that only she could enjoy. We’d never see Davey on this earth again, and right then there was no way to understand the meaning of that. It was something I’d never understand for the rest of my life.
The morning of the funeral I watched Ma helplessly, as she tore through closets and bureaus. She was searching for a kerchief to cover her head, since she’d be entering into a Church building and wanted to look respectable for Davey’s Mass. In my own lifetime I’d hardly ever seen women covering their heads for Mass, but Ma had been brought up in that tradition, passed down by her church-going mother. And by the looks of her frantically searching through piles of clothes, looking away from us and hiding the tears in her eyes, she seemed to still believe in it.
“This will have to do,” Ma said, pulling out a black sparkly tube top and ripping it in half with her bare hands. The limos had arrived. It was almost time to see Davey at Jackie O’Brien’s funeral parlor one last time, before the Mass and funeral. Ma bobby-pinned her headpiece on neatly and straightened her shoulders for the rest of us.
“Killed himself? He wouldn’t kill himself—he must have been pushed.” Grandpa didn’t want to accept suicide. None of us did. I too wanted to think Davey had fallen, until I went up to the roof where he’d made the last decision of his life and found broken bottles covered with his blood. I stood on the rooftop looking down at the ground below, his blood on the bottle I gripped, and on the sidewalk. He really wanted to die, I thought. I brought the broken glass downstairs to show Ma that he had slit his wrists as well. It was almost a relief to know the truth, to know that he wanted it that bad, that he was in so much pain that he was able to do something that most of us could never go through with, no matter how bad things were. Ma had that crying voice with no tears, and begged me, “Get rid of that thing, please!” I took the glass back up to the roof and threw it as far as I could. Then I found more pieces of glass caked with blood, and I wanted to save some. I put a couple pieces in my pocket. I stayed up on the rooftop, to try to be with Davey in the last moments of his life, when he’d suffered alone. I looked out over the landscape of Old Colony, the maze of red bricks looking like a trap to me now. My neighbors were just starting to stir after a quiet day. The sun was going down, and in the distance the sky turned bright orange and pink and purple. But the people I saw below, moving into another humid summer night of liquor, drug sales, and fights weren’t looking up at the sky. They didn’t seem as if they wanted to see anything beyond the brick world below. I wondered if Davey on his last evening saw what I was now seeing. I slid myself down against the rooftop stairwell and sat frozen.
I couldn’t organize my thoughts. Guilt overtook me. I knew how much he’d been suffering the week before his death, but I’d laughed at him when he’d called me Michael the Dark Angel, and I’d walked away from him when I saw him looking strange and calm at the beach, and I’d done nothing to help him live. And then the anger came: What kind of asshole would do this to us anyway? Bastard! I hated Davey for not thinking about Ma, or about Seamus and Stevie having to grow up with a sad family, or about the two seven-year-olds who’d been sitting quietly on the front stoop eating popsicles when Davey’s body dropped two feet away from them. What a fuckin’ selfish monster!
Then I thought about Davey, and his sense of humor, his brilliance, his funny attempts to understand and connect to the bizarre world of Old Colony he’d come to at the height of the busing chaos. I remembered visiting him in Mass Mental, seeing him cry into Ma’s lap while she too cried, seeing him attack Ma because he loved us and wanted to be back home with us. Then there was his last Christmas, when he came up to our apartment with a Christmas present for Ma. It was a bottle of Jergens lotion that must have cost less than a dollar. He presented it from behind his back with a little uncertainty in his face, not knowing if it was enough to give. Ma told him it was exactly what she’d wanted for Christmas.