Fortunate Son: The Mercy Debrief

This debrief post contains spoilers, so I've split it under a cut. Proceed with caution if you haven't read Part Two yet, or, better yet, go grab a copy! 

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The footsteps paused, and then resumed, shifting to quiet puffs as he ducked into the garage and stepped onto its powdered dirt floor. “I wanted you to,” Alex said, drawing up beside him at the truck’s grille. “Didn’t want to give you a valid excuse to stab me in the neck for sneaking up on you.”

“You think I need an excuse to do that?”

Alex sighed, and didn’t take the bait. “What are you doing?”

“Hand me that bottle of Valvoline,” Mercy said by way of answer. “Over on the bench.”

Alex retrieved it, and then lingered at his side, closer than before, peering into the guts of the engine while Mercy poured in the oil.

At this distance, Mercy felt a prickling awareness all down his left side. He knew it was mental, that Alex wasn’t radiating any sort of intent – he might not like the guy, but he could admit it was more a case of disliking the idea of him, his existence, than disliking the man himself – but it felt like a kiss of unwelcome electricity across his skin. The strains of Remy in their blood calling to one another, a cellular effort. They’d been here three days together, and Alex hadn’t been allowed to bring a bag. His clothes smelled of skin and sweat, his actual skin like the Irish Spring soap in the shower they took turns in each night. In a move that felt like a copy of Mercy’s, perhaps some stab at kinship, he’d laid off shaving, and his beard was growing in thick and black, too.

That sensation of looking at an old photograph of himself wasn’t going to get more comfortable any time soon.

 

It was silent in the garage, save the glug of the oil, the flutter of moths dashing against the overhead tube lights, and the quiet, overlapping susurrus of their breathing echoing against the raised hood of the truck.

Mercy had always been content with quiet when he was alone.

But there was something about sharing a quiet with someone else that stirred the storyteller in his soul. That keen remembrance of being on the water in the boat with Daddy all those years ago, the fish leaping and the frogs croaking and wisdom spilling warm and slow like honey around the cigarette clamped in Remy’s teeth. It was his ghost that filled Mercy now, and prodded him to say, “You know anything about engines?”

Alex hesitated, and Mercy watched the motion of his own hands rather than look at him, driven by instinct: he’d be more likely to answer honestly if he didn’t have to look Mercy in the eye.

Mercy could allow, in this strange, humming moment, that he’d been…intimidating. More than a little.

After a few beats, Alex said, “No. Not really. I…yeah, no.” The last said with a sigh of what sounded like true regret.

That wasn’t surprising to hear, but it was a cold comfort. How many hours had he spent bent over boat motors with Remy? Their hands gummy and black with grease, metal gleaming in the hazy swamp sun, the guts of the machines strewn across the old picnic table like a spill of jewels. That had been his thing with Remy. Not Colin’s, and not Alex’s. A knowledge Remy had shared only with his real son.

It was Ava’s voice that chastised him in the back of his mind. Baby, you’re all his real sons, even if you’re the only one who got to wear his name in public. It was his own imagination, not really her voice, but left him feeling small and chastened all the same.

“Da–” he started, and caught himself. He wouldn’t say dad. He definitely wouldn’t say daddy. “The old man never took you out to the driveway and showed you the ropes?”

When Alex didn’t answer, he finally glanced over, and found him frowning, gaze fixed somewhere in the middle distance, eyes glazed and unhappy. His voice had shrunk, when he spoke, like he’d drawn back into the past, into being the little boy who’d waited at the window for a glimpse of his father’s truck. (Mercy did not like the way that image popped into his head, liked less the way it tugged at something in his stomach.)

“No,” Alex said. “We stayed inside. Or on the back porch, sometimes.” His throat jerked as he swallowed, and the motion looked dry, painful. “He didn’t want anyone seeing him.”

“That’s fucked up,” Mercy said, before he could check the impulse.

Alex glanced up, startled. He blinked at him, and his gaze slowly cleared to make room for surprise, a surprise touched with something Mercy wouldn’t pretend to guess at. “Yeah. Yeah, it kinda was, wasn’t it?”

Mercy grunted an affirmative and bent back over the engine to cap the oil bottle and slide the dipstick back into place. His face was warm. “Here, put this back.” He passed the bottle over without looking. “And then come over here and I’ll show you a few things.”

Alex took a short, sharp breath, but hurried to do as told. 

In Tuesday's debrief post about Boyle, I mentioned the idea that, in this scenario, of the three brothers, Mercy is considered the "fortunate son" of the bunch. Of the three, he's the only one that Remy the elder properly raised up as his own, who was taught at his knee how to hunt, how to boat, how to be a man in the same way that Remy was a man. He's the eldest, and the biggest, and had his place in the world solidified before the others. 

But given the events of this book, is he really the most fortunate of the three? At this point Colin is a married father, much more settled than he was at the start of the series, and he isn't under suspicion of murder. Likewise, Alex has a successful career, independence, etc. Meanwhile Mercy is on the lam and had to fake his own death to avoid arrest; had to leave behind his family for a time, and is being relentlessly pursued by an enemy he doesn't understand at all. 

Obviously, I'm not trying to pit the three brothers against one another in a contest of Who Has a Better Life? But it's natural given the circumstances that they'd all start questioning their lots in life in relation to one another. That's where we find Mercy in Part Two of Lord Have Mercy: reflecting. 

Mercy is a very thoughtful man, and because of that he doesn't worry much. He mulls things over, comes to a decision, and sticks to it. The most stressed he's ever been was when Ava was seventeen, and hurt, and had lost the baby, and he had to leave. That and the day he found that his father and grandmother had been murdered. Otherwise, despite his penchant for violence, he keeps his head in tough situations, and he doesn't spend much time, if any, navel-gazing and wondering about what sort of man he is. 

In this book, though, Alex's appearance, and Boyle's fervor, have forced him to reflect on his father, and on himself, and the nature of fatherhood in general. He's always going to love Remy because Remy - and Gram - were all he had growing up, and Remy was a sort of Paul Bunyan mythical figure to him. Now, he's looking back on Remy as just a man, one more flawed than he even thought. He struggled with learning about Colin, chalking it up to a one-time mistake. But Alex's existence proves that wasn't the case. Mercy himself is a flawed and complicated soul, but he's finding it hard to give his father that retrospective grace. 

In truth, he doesn't hate Alex, but he hates that Alex exists. He hates that Alex is a reminder of what he sees as Remy's shortcomings. In a fun-to-write juxtaposition: Mercy has trouble loving Remy for the way he kept fathering and abandoning sons he never told Mercy about; Alex has trouble loving him because he sees him as the originator of an innate violence that lives in them all. Is violence hereditary? Is secrecy? Outlawry? My favorite thing about this series is not finding the answers to these questions, but posing them in the first place in the minds of the characters, because I think these men, given the lives they lead, would ask themselves these very things. 

In Fortunate Son, we see a reflective Mercy who is drawing back inside himself. Rather than the loud, brash clown he makes himself for his club brothers' benefit, we see him numb, withdrawn, and indifferent. Not toward Ava and the kids, never that, but putting on a brave face for them is making him brittle in its own way. 

As the story continues, we'll see Mercy come to terms with all this reflection, in an as-expected dramatic and characteristic way.