All Souls (20 page)

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.

C H A P T E R   7

H O L Y   W A T E R

A
LL SUMMER LONG WE'D SEEN “WHO SHOT J.R.?”
Commercials, billboards, and T-shirts. By that September of 1980, we couldn't wait to find out who'd pulled the trigger. But I never got to see the “Dallas” episode everyone was waiting for, because right before the season premiere came on, Ma got shot by a stray bullet, while she was standing next to me in our kitchen washing dishes.

Ma was all dressed up to go to the Emerald Isle Pub. She didn't care who shot J.R. Joe had settled onto the couch to watch “Dallas,” while Seamus and Stevie played on the floor nearby. We heard two sharp noises and Joe screamed for everyone to duck. I saw the two bullet holes in the living room window as I hit the floor. When I looked up to find Ma, she was crouching in a corner of the kitchen, holding onto her side. She just said, “I got hit,” and looked slightly bothered, like she'd been hit with a rock, not a bullet. Ma was tough.

Ma lifted her hand from her side and we saw the skin was ripped off under her armpit. Her white sequined shirt was torn and getting redder by the second. She told me to grab some toilet paper for her to stick to the wound, and she crawled fast over to Seamus and Steven, kept them lying low, and dragged them over to a corner of the house where there were no windows. They were both crying, and we had to keep yelling at them, telling them to stay put. We turned off all the lights. People were hollering throughout the building. We found out later that Frannie O'Malley on the second floor had been struck in the hand, and a six-year-old girl on the first floor had missed getting shot in the head by about three inches. Crowds of women started to gather outside and were pointing in all directions, trying to guess where the gunman had shot from. We stayed upstairs and peeked through the curtain from the corner of the window; we didn't know when the shooting might start again. We wondered who the gunman was, or if it was any of us that he was after. Before long about a hundred people had gathered out front, most of them women in nightgowns and bathrobes. Many of them were laughing and joking about the whole thing. “Fuck this!” I heard one of them say. “Never mind who shot Helen, I gotta get home and find out who shot J.R.” She said “Dallas” was coming on in five minutes.

Finally the ambulances came, and by then Ma was joking about the whole thing too. She told the EMTs she was fine, that the bullet didn't lodge in her, and that she wasn't getting into any ambulance unless they were dropping her off at the Emerald Isle where she had to play the accordion and make some money for her kids. She'd already changed into a black shirt, and had more toilet paper stuffed into the side of her bra to sop up the blood. She wouldn't take off her rabbit fur coat to show them the wound. “Sorry, ma'am, you have to get checked. You've been shot,” the EMT said. “It's routine procedure.” Finally Ma gave in, and climbed into the ambulance, carrying the accordion over her shoulder and waving to the crowds, along with Frannie O'Malley, whose hand was bleeding. All the neighbors waved them off cheering and laughing and went home to the TV. I pulled mattresses into a corner of the house that had no windows, kept all the lights out, and slept there with Seamus and Stevie in case the gunman was still out on Patterson Way.

The next morning Ma told us she'd managed to escape from the back of the ambulance when they'd pulled up to the emergency room, and off she went to the Emerald Isle. In a few days she had to go back to the hospital, because the wound was infected. But she said she'd had a great time that night anyway, playing the accordion and telling some people from Belfast how she'd just survived a shooting.

She wanted to know who had shot her, though, and why. Back at home she followed the straight line from the bullet hole in the window to where a bullet was still lodged in our wall, and extended that path to a spot on the rooftop across the street. “I should've been a detective,” she bragged. The cops never even came around to investigate the shooting, but at least Ma was looking into it. A few days later she found out that Packie Keenan had been seen carrying a gun up the stairwell to the same corner of the roof that Ma had pointed to. “That son of a bitch!” she said, and I wondered if all that investigating would have been as easy for the cops. Packie was Kevin's age, about seventeen, and when he heard Ma was looking for him, he sent her a three-page letter of apology, explaining that he was “all fucked up that night” on drugs and “just went crazy shooting the gun off.” He said he didn't mean to hit Ma, that he was just trigger-happy with all the coke in him. Ma forgave him, and joked about how she was like Wonder Woman, bouncing bullets off her. But she tried to get Packie to go into a detox. Ma was always trying to get half the neighborhood to go into detox programs those days. Packie promised he would, but he was soon darting around Old Colony again, chewing on the corners of his mouth and staring with wide eyes, like the rest of the kids in the neighborhood who were into cocaine.

Most of my neighbors voted for Ronald Reagan that November, and figured things would be getting better, with the new president getting tough on crime and drugs, tough on the liberals who were always targeting our neighborhood for their experiments, and since he talked about money trickling down to the likes of us in Southie. But the optimism didn't last. In Old Colony in the early eighties it seemed like our whole world was going crazy, and for most of us it really didn't matter who was president. One time Mr. Heaney, three buildings down from us, took his family hostage at gunpoint. I was in the ninth grade at Latin School, and I came home from the library to find all of Patterson Way barricaded by the cops. When I went into my apartment, the whole family was watching live coverage on Channel 5 of what was happening just outside the door. “Mr. Heaney's gone in the head,” Ma said. “He lost his job or something.” Everyone told me to shut up and sit down to watch the police special forces rescue Mrs. Heaney and her five kids. By morning they'd talked him into laying down his 12-gauge shotgun, and surrendering himself.

Another time I came home to find the paramedics coming out of our building carrying Chickie on a stretcher. My friend Danny was scared. His mother had tried to kill herself, taking a bottle of pills, and we didn't know if she'd live. I was always scared of Chickie, because I never knew what she'd do next. I never wanted to go into Danny's apartment, and I don't think he ever wanted anyone to come in. It's funny, I thought, how the people who seem the meanest, the people we want nothing to do with, might be in the most pain. Like many of the women in the project, Chickie was barely getting by. Who were her husbands, I wondered, Danny and Robbie's fathers? Just like Ma, you wouldn't know that Chickie had many relatives. We never saw any, except for her twin sister, Duckie, who was also living in the project. Now here was Chickie, being brought down the front steps, suspended between life and death, and Danny and little Robbie too were left hanging in the balance, looking to the adults in the gathering crowd for any words of hope. “She's gonna be fine, don't worry,” one of the ladies from the stoop said. “Your mother's just not feeling good.” But no one could look at Robbie when he asked, “Really? You sure?” with all the anxiety of a nine-year-old who knew that his mother wanted to die.

Chickie was home again in a week, but ambulances were coming down Patterson Way all the time now. My Aunt Theresa in Jamaica Plain had a police radio, and asked me, “What in the hell is going on over there?” She said Patterson Way was coming up on the scanner all night long. I told my aunt that I didn't take any notice, that Old Colony was the greatest. But I did take notice. I started to come in the back door of our building at night, to avoid having to climb over everyone hanging out on the front stoop—I was getting tired of hearing all the comical storytelling about lives falling apart. And at night the neighborhood looked darker to me. Whenever I came home late, I was scared to walk into our pitch-black hallway with all the broken lights. I might turn a corner and get bitten by the rats that were moving in, or someone being chased might mistake me for a cop and shoot me. I had a whole tragic scenario playing in my head whenever I opened the big creaky steel door to our building. A few times I yelled up to the window and had Ma open our apartment door to give me—and the hiding gunman or lurking rat—some light.

Even taxi drivers didn't want to go into my neighborhood anymore. Ever since busing, we couldn't get a black taxi driver to take us to South Boston from downtown. They sped off as soon as they heard where we were going. So we started to make sure we were in the cab first, saying we were going to Dorchester, which was in the same direction, and then making as if we'd changed our mind halfway through the ride and would be jumping out on the edge of Southie. But now even the white cabbies were hesitant about taking us home. One night when I'd said Old Colony, I had to leave my two shoes in the front seat next to the cabby. “That's so you won't screw on me without paying the fare,” he told me. We could tell them to take us to Southie, but never to Old Colony Project. I started to say City Point, and from there would walk down the hills to the Lower End. Just before Christmas, a cabby was shot in the head and killed in Old Colony. The next morning people stood on street corners, telling each other that Mrs. Coyne's sixteen-year-old son Mickey did it, after trying to rob the guy for a few bucks. They'd heard the cabby wouldn't give him the money, and Mickey was messed up. They said the guy should've just given him the money. Mickey wasn't charged with the killing, but he ended up in a federal penitentiary a few years later for other robberies.

The only order I could make in those days was in my complicated schemes for coming and going safely through the project. I was getting pretty good at that, and was even trying to ignore the frequent wails of sirens that had begun to startle me only since Davey's death.

Then the sirens came again for us. I knew right away from the fast knocks, and then kicks, that it was our turn once again. “Kathy went off of the roof,” Richie Amoroso yelled when I opened the door. He was out of breath and looked scared, holding onto his head with both hands. I had heard the fire engines going down Patterson Way, but was trying to pay no attention. I didn't know Kathy was lying in a pool of blood down the street. “She crashed onto her head,” a woman's voice outside echoed right through me. There was no way I was going to believe this. This couldn't happen twice. Ma came out of the back room, where she'd been keeping to herself since Davey died, retreating whenever she didn't have the energy to be all smiles for the world to see that she was okay after losing her son. She'd heard what Richie had just said at the door, and she held onto a wall, because her knees were buckling under her. Her back arched. Her face looked as if she was being beaten on her back with baseball bats. The house was dark except for the flashing red lights from the fire trucks outside. The little kids came out, asking questions. Stevie, who was five, asked, “Is she gonna die?” Ma straightened up then. She could never let her babies see her fall apart.

Later on, Kathy was in critical condition in the intensive care unit at City Hospital. Ma said she'd be fine. But I didn't believe her—that's what she'd said about Davey the night he died. I don't think any of us slept. When I got out of bed in the morning, I called the hospital for patient information. They said Kathy was on the “danger list.” I spoke to a doctor who told me her brain was still bleeding, and that they were working to stop the hemorrhage. I lied and said I was eighteen so that he'd give me all the details; and he did, but mostly in language I'd never heard before. He talked about contusions and neuro this and neuro that. Mary had come over from her apartment in the Old Harbor Project, and since she was going to nursing school, I handed the phone to her. “She's not feeling anything,” Mary told me after hanging up. Kathy was in a coma.

The doctor said Kathy's system was loaded with Valium, speed, and cocaine on the night she fell. Ma went through Kathy's pocketbook that a neighbor found up on the roof, and came across bottles of yellow pills and some coke. The pills were prescribed to Kathy by a doctor who lived up on “Pill Hill,” a section toward City Point where quite a few doctors had offices. Ma said she knew people who got phony prescriptions up on Pill Hill, but she was shocked that this doctor would be prescribing to kids since, as she said, he was “as sensible looking as the day is long.”

All we knew about Kathy's fall was that she'd been up on the roof with Richie Amoroso, on top of the building where she'd been staying with her new friend, Joanie. The neighbors listening at their windows that night said they'd heard Richie and Kathy fighting over drugs, and that Kathy had accused Richie of stealing her Vals. They said Richie had taken the keys to Kathy's apartment too. And some neighbors said they thought Richie Amoroso pushed Kathy off the roof in the struggle that broke out.