All Souls by Michael Patrick MacDonald

Author:Michael Patrick MacDonald [MacDonald, Michael Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2010-02-04T13:00:00+00:00

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.

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