I didn’t tell them the rest of the story, but I was sure now that it was Johnnie Baldwin who’d come to me in my dream crying and begging me to listen. “I don’t want to hear it,” I told Johnnie. “This time, I’m not going to know about it, whatever tragedy you’re going on about.” I told him I just wanted to live my life and ignore all this Southie shit. Johnnie said that it wasn’t anything happening to my family, but I didn’t believe him, and kept walking while he followed me through the tunnels of Old Colony.
I said goodbye to my friends later that day and caught my ride back to Boston. When I got home it was one in the morning, and I checked on Seamus and Stevie as I always did when I came back home. At six I heard Ma’s heels clacking heavily down the hallway toward my room, and she opened my door to throw in piles of clean socks and underwear. “Oh, Mike, you’re home,” she said. She asked me about New York and started giving me all the latest. “Did you hear the bad news?” she added casually. “Timmy Baldwin was shot and killed two nights ago while you were away. Everyone saw it, but no one’s talking.” I didn’t respond. I froze as I realized that the night before last was the same night Timmy’s dead brother had come to me in my dream. “This shit’s gotta stop,” he said. But how? And what the hell was the point of a dream like that, telling me something terrible was about to happen, when I could do nothing about it?
“South Boston has one of the lowest rates of reported crime in the city, along with Charlestown and East Boston.” That’s what the paper kept telling us whenever a murder was reported in Southie. That’s because we don’t report crime in Southie, I thought, after reading about Timmy Baldwin’s murder on Broadway. “We take care of our own,” everyone liked to say. And I’m sure they said the same thing in Charlestown and Eastie, two other neighborhoods where the mob suppressed the truth. Jimmy Kelly assured the world that the shooting was an isolated incident, even though three other men had been shot dead on Broadway in the span of three weeks. Timmy was shot only a few months after they were, and only a few blocks further along the main Southie thoroughfare. “We are certainly not experiencing a crime wave in South Boston,” the city councillor told reporters.
It was while reading those articles, and dreaming about the day we’d leave Southie forever, that I got the summons to appear before the grand jury in connection with Timmy’s murder. Ma said the whole neighborhood was getting a kick out of that one, and she tried to hold back her own laughter. “Of all people,” she said. And then, her voice going serious, “Haven’t the cops screwed that case up enough?” After shooting Timmy twice in the head, Mark Estes ran from the crowds outside The Quiet Man pub and carjacked a woman at gunpoint to be his getaway driver. The woman eventually got home to her husband, but the police showed up at her house soon afterward, handcuffed the husband, and told him he was a suspect in the murder of Timmy Baldwin. The guy was locked up for the night while the woman spent hours at the station trying to convince the detectives to let her husband go. When the two were finally let out of the police station in the morning, they saw their car being towed away, taken in for evidence. They got their car back, but were called two weeks later by the cops, who’d forgotten to test the car for fingerprints.
Now they wanted me, of all people. I called homicide, begging them to keep me out of this. “I just come and go in this neighborhood,” I said, “ask anyone. They’re all laughing at you guys.” The detective was quietly listening to me, as if he was taking notes. “The phone’s in your name, right?” he asked. Ma had put the phone in my name; her credit with the phone company wasn’t good. “Well, there was a threatening call made from your phone to a major witness in this case. Now the witness ain’t talking.”
I told him the whole neighborhood was coming in and out of our house to use the phone, especially whoever didn’t have one. Then I remembered that just a few weeks earlier Packie Keenan had run right in and grabbed the telephone. Then he’d taken it as far as the cord would reach into the other half of the apartment from where I was watching TV, and muttered things into it I couldn’t hear. But I didn’t tell the detective that. I had finals on the same day they wanted me to come before the grand jury, and I told him I didn’t know how to tell my professors I was being called in on a murder investigation. Just then Ma grabbed the phone and told the detective she wanted to come, that she knew who’d killed Timmy, and it was her phone anyway, even if it was in my name. Ma was close to the Baldwin family—Joe was going out with Chucka Baldwin and Timmy had always been good to Kathy—and Ma thought she could help them get a little justice.
Later that week, Ma said the detective screamed the bejesus out of her for a good long time (“Twenty-five years, that’s how much you’ll get for lying to a grand jury! Twenty-five years!”), before marching her in before the jurors. But in the end it was clear Ma only knew what we all knew: the truth from the streets about who killed Timmy. They had no use for her statements before the grand jury, as much as she wanted to lie and say she’d seen the whole thing. Ma went on until they had to stop her about how much she liked Timmy Baldwin, and how he loved her playing the guitar more than the accordion. “I’m a musician you know, and some of the kids used to come around to learn the guitar from me, before they started disappearing with the angel dust and coke.” When they brought Ma back to the subject of Timmy, Ma told how when he was just seventeen Timmy had called her from Charles Street Jail to tell her he was a different person altogether on the drugs and that he thought there might be something wrong with him. Ma said she’d told Timmy, “Sure there’s something wrong with you, you’re an addict.” They finally got rid of Ma when she broke her storytelling to ask the court what they were doing about all the drugs in Southie, anyway. The only other person meant to appear before the grand jury that day had got shot in the stomach as a warning. Unlike Ma, he had no stories to tell the jurors.
After Timmy’s murder there were more articles about Southie, and for once they weren’t about busing and how everyone in Southie was a racist. At first the stories echoed the party line, and quoted only people like the city councillor, working to maintain the myths. The reporters in those days seemed to need to put in a good word about Southie in their articles, referring to the “tight-knit family-oriented neighborhood”—I guess to make up for years of anti-Southie stories since busing. But eventually news stories started to pry into the connection between organized crime in Southie and the violence that left people like Timmy Baldwin dead. One Boston Globe reporter named Kevin Cullen made it a point to mention Whitey Bulger when he wrote about Timmy, and he began to write about the “code” in Southie.
Street crime was becoming the main topic of news, along with reports about the poor getting poorer in American cities. Whitey didn’t want the kind of media attention that places like Roxbury were getting. People started to say that Whitey didn’t like people shooting guns in the neighborhood; that he said shooting a gun was “niggerish.” Word around town had always been that Whitey didn’t do any shooting himself, except during the 1960s Southie gang wars, when he’d shot and paralyzed a rival gang member. But now, with Whitey’s drugs everywhere, and more illegal guns around since busing, and bar fights turning to murder, the deaths were becoming too visible. And reporters had been finding out that, even if Whitey had nothing to do with the actual shooting of Timmy Baldwin—and others like him—he had everything to do with the drugs, guns, and the silence of all the witnesses outside The Quiet Man that night.
That’s when the killings slowed. In the late eighties, Whitey made examples of a few shooters in random bar fights. When Killer Kawalski shot someone in the leg at one of the gin mills on Broadway, Whitey tortured him for three hours, holding a gun to his head. “You like shooting off guns, like a nigger, eh?” That’s what Whitey said, according to stories on the street. So the gunshots slowed down. People just started to disappear instead. Once in a while you’d hear of a carcass washing up on the beach, or of someone hog-tied in the suburbs. But they would only merit a small news brief
, because they were mystery killings, without much of a story to report.
And so most people, at least the ones who hadn’t lost their kids yet to the culture of drugs and death, could believe that Whitey really had kept the streets from becoming like Roxbury’s. The whole neighborhood seemed to cheer in unison when Whitey forced a crack house in Southie to shut down. But one detective remarked anonymously to a reporter, “If Whitey did force the guy out, it’s because the guy wasn’t working for him.” Whitey continued to keep his hands clean, with all the stories going around about him carrying bundles for old women, and donating generously to the St. Augustine’s food pantries for all the struggling families in the projects. “We take care of our own,” I heard many a neighbor repeat like a memorized line from the Apostles’ Creed. And the Christmas turkey on the table in tough times was the proof of that saying. As the country got deeper into what they were calling a recession, we watched the news footage of growing lines of unemployed people like us. But they were in American towns that weren’t lucky enough to have a Whitey Bulger.
Kathy moved back home with us. Her subsidized apartment in New Hampshire had burned down. The couch had caught fire from her cigarette, and Kathy had grabbed her cane, put her coat on, and wandered off to a Dunkin’ Donuts on a nearby highway. She drank coffee, smoked cigarettes, and talked to herself at the counter, while the fire engines raced by. The firemen said on the news that they were looking for Kathy in the rubble. But she was fine, at Dunkin’ Donuts the whole time. What was clear to us now, though, was that Kathy was starting to lose it. She’d come back so far from the coma, but then no further. She wasn’t getting any better with her walking and speech, and she had less company these days—so many of her gang were dead. It seemed that once she realized her life would never be back to the way it was, she gave up, and took off into a world of her own, talking to imaginary friends and going into fits of crying and laughter.
“Mike, have you ever heard of North America?” Kathy took a deep breath with each word, and forced out the sentence with effort from her permanently twisted mouth. I told her with a long sigh, “Kathy, we’re in North America.” She got a great kick out of that one, laughing away. “Fuck you,” she said. “We’re in Southie,” as if I were trying to pull a fast one on her. Then one day I looked out the window and saw Kathy standing with her cane on the roof ledge above Frankie’s window, where Davey had jumped. “Kathy!” She didn’t look at me; she just kept staring down at the ground below, as if she was measuring and wondering if it was going to be painful. I ran from the apartment and made it up to the roof across the street, pleading with her but not getting too close. “Mike, do you got any drugs?” She forced the words out slow and calm, taking her deep breaths. I said I did. “Good,” she said. She put her cane in front of her and hobbled after me, following me back home. By the time we got there, she’d forgotten why she was following me, and it was a good thing because I had no drugs for her. I never told anyone in my family about Kathy being on the roof, but after that I convinced Ma to get her on medication.
Then Kathy wandered off from Old Colony one day and disappeared for a few months. When Joe came home on leave, he and Ma started visiting the area where Kathy had lived in New Hampshire. They put out pictures of Kathy, and were led to a soup kitchen where she’d been spotted. Some of the homeless people there told Ma Kathy was living in a crack house nearby. And that’s where Ma found Kathy, three months pregnant. Kathy was glad to see her, but her boyfriend pulled a gun on Ma, saying she wasn’t taking Kathy anywhere. At this point, though, Ma wasn’t afraid of anything. She got the gun away from him and beat him with it. Then she carried Kathy on her back down the stairs of the crack house, to where Joe was waiting in the Lincoln.
Ma took custody of Kathy’s daughter, after she found Kathy had tried to sell her baby for fifty dollars in Old Colony. The baby’s father was Cuban, and Ma named her Fatima Maria, because she thought Maria was a miracle baby, healthy in spite of all the damage Kathy had suffered from her head injury, and from drugs. We were all excited about Maria, a beautiful gift of new life, one sure to keep Ma going. But Kathy only got worse after the birth, making less and less sense. “Mike, she’s a cute little girl—where’s she from?” I told Kathy that the little girl playing on the floor was her daughter and she practically fell off her kitchen chair laughing. “You’re full of shit,” she said when she caught her breath again.
It was ten below outside, but the heat blasting from the radiators was enough to kill us all. I opened all the windows and sat on the couch looking out while Mrs. Mercer across the street made trip after trip to throw buckets of hot water onto her ice-covered front stoop. The hot water she was furiously throwing kept freezing over. Mrs. Mercer wouldn’t give up, though; I counted her coming and going with the buckets of water fifteen times. Ma said she was on medication for her depression, and was probably just trying to keep herself busy. “She’s a very unstable woman, and I think the pills are making her worse.”
Then Seamus, Stevie, and Tommy, along with a pack of about twenty other little kids came running up the tunnel, chasing a raccoon that must have taken a wrong turn. They ran after the animal with sticks and bats, and more kids came out of their apartments to join the fun. Then they chased it up to the roof across the street and cornered it at the ledge. Mrs. Mercer’s twelve-year-old son, Donnell, stepped out of the pack, hushed up the war chants of the little kids, and crouched down, talking to the raccoon gently, as if he was trying to talk it out of suicide. “C’mon … here we go … that’s it … we just want to help you.” Donnell inched closer and closer, one crouching step at a time. Then the raccoon jumped off the roof, landed on its feet, and in no time had the pack of kids chanting and chasing him again. The raccoon ran around an abandoned car before heading right toward Mrs. Mercer, who was carrying yet another bucket of hot water to the frozen steps. She dropped the bucket and sat terror-stricken with both feet up on the banister while the hunted animal did a slippery dance next to her on the ice-covered steps, before dashing into the project hallway and through Mrs. Mercer’s open door. The little kids followed with their weapons raised for battle, and there was a short silence on the street as they disappeared into the building.
Then screams came from Mrs. Mercer’s, and we saw the raccoon jump out of her bathroom window. Some kids climbed out of the first-floor window, while others jumped over the slippery front stoop. Mrs. Mercer’s other son, K.J., came outside now with a wet head and a towel wrapped around him. The raccoon and the pack of kids had come through the bathroom while he was taking a shower. And off the whole crowd went down Patterson Way, laughing and chanting in Southie unity, chasing the raccoon out of Old Colony Project for good.
Jesus, this is the greatest place to grow up, I thought, almost convincing myself again. I couldn’t control the feelings of joy I got from scenes like that. I was jealous of the little kids, having the time of their lives. But Ma had started to worry about what would happen when the little kids became teenagers, and all that Southie stuff about sticking together would backfire. Seamus and Stevie were already thinking the gangsters were the greatest guys in the world. And all their friends envied them the times a big fancy car pulled up and Seamus and Stevie were handed a twenty-dollar bill, just for being Frank the Tank’s little brothers. Tommy Cronin was one of the guys handing out the twenties. He knew Seamus and Stevie fought over everything, so he used to rip the bill in half and tell them they had to join forces and tape the bill back together, so they could spend it. A real lesson in sticking together. The only good thing I saw in those twenties the kids taped together with studied precision was that they kept them from stealing from Bell’s Market. Stevie and his friend Tommy had been caught there already, and Ma had had to run down to Bell’s to get Stevie after the owner had scared the two with threats about the cops and jail. But it wasn’t the threats about cops and jail that made Stevie start to ignore dares to steal candy. He later told me he never stole again after seeing Ma break
down and cry all the way home from Bell’s Market, begging him and making him promise with his right hand across his heart never to do it again. He told me he’d never seen Ma cry before and never wanted to see her cry again.
Stevie and Seamus were worked up, telling us about the gun collection their friend’s uncle had showed them. “That’s for when the niggers come,” he’d told the kids. He’d said he’d been preparing for the race wars since he’d dropped out of Southie High during the busing. “And now they’re moving them in.”
“There’s gonna be a bloodbath,” one Southie leader announced on the six o’clock news, as reports came out that Southie was bracing for what was being called “forced housing.” The BHA and South Boston’s own Mayor Flynn were planning to move minority families into the housing projects of white Southie and Charlestown. The NAACP had sued the BHA for bypassing minorities on the housing waiting list, when there were openings in Charlestown and Southie. Low-income people were usually able to pick their top choices of housing projects to move into. Most whites wouldn’t dare go to black sections of the city, and many blacks would never think of coming to Southie, since the last black families had fled Old Colony and D Street during busing. But many new immigrants from Haiti or Latin America, who’d never heard of Southie and hadn’t been in Boston for busing, simply needed an apartment, and had been passed over by BHA officials when an apartment was free in Old Colony.
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