Ten Thousand Saints

Ten Thousand Saints - By Eleanor Henderson




Part I

Sad Song


One


Is it dreamed?” Jude asked Teddy. “Or dreamt?”

Beneath the stadium seats of the football field, on the last morning of 1987 and the last morning of Teddy’s life, the two boys lay side by side, a pair of snow angels bundled in thrift-store parkas. If you were to spy them from above, between the slats of the bleachers—or smoking behind the school gym, or sliding their skateboards down the stone wall by the lake—you might confuse one for the other. But Teddy was the dark-haired one, Jude the redhead. Teddy wore opalescent, fat-tongued Air Jordans, both toes bandaged with duct tape, and dangling from a cord around his neck, a New York City subway token, like a golden quarter. Jude was the one in Converse high-tops, the stars Magic Markered into pentagrams, and he wore his red hair in a devil lock—short in the back and long in the front, in a fin that sliced between his eyes to his chin. Unless you’d heard of the Misfits, not the Marilyn Monroe movie but the horror-rock/glam-punk band, and if you were living in Lintonburg, Vermont, in 1987, you probably hadn’t, you’d never seen anything like it.

“Either,” said Teddy.

They were celebrating Jude’s sixteenth birthday with the dregs of last night’s bowl. Jude leaned over and tapped the crushed soda can against Teddy’s elbow, and Teddy sat up to take his turn. His eyes were glassy, and a maple leaf, brittle and threadbare from its months spent under the snow, clung to his hair. Since Jude had known him Teddy had worn an immense pair of bronze frames with lenses as thick as windowpanes and, for good measure, a second bar across the top. But last week Teddy had spent all his savings on a pair of contact lenses, and now Jude thought he looked mole-eyed and barefaced, exposed, as Jude’s father had the time he’d made the mistake of shaving his beard.

With one hand Teddy balanced the bud on the indentation of the can, over the perforations Jude had made with a paper clip, lit it with the other, and like a player of some barnyard instrument, he put his lips to the mouth of the can and inhaled. Across his face, across the shadowed expanse of snow-stubbled grass, bars of sunlight brightened and then paled. “It’s done,” he announced and tossed the can aside.

Bodies had begun to fill the grandstand above, galoshes and duck boots filing cautiously down the rows, families of anoraks eclipsing the meager sun. Jude could hear the patter of their voices, the faraway din of a sound system testing, testing, the players cleating through the grass, praying away the snow. Standing on his wobbly legs, Jude examined their cave. They were fenced in on all sides—the seats overhead, the football field in front, a concrete wall behind them. Above the wall, however, was a person-size perimeter of open space, through which Teddy and Jude had climbed not long before, first launching their skateboards in ahead of them, then scaling the scaffolding on the outside, then tumbling over the wall, catlike, ten feet into the dirt. They’d done it twenty times before, but never while people were in the stadium—they’d managed to abstain from their town’s tepid faith in its Division III college football team; they abstained from all things football, and all things college. They hadn’t expected there to be a game on New Year’s Eve.

Now Jude paced under the seats and stopped five or six rows from the front. Above him, hanging from the edge of one of the seats, was a pair of blue-jeaned legs. A girl. Jude could see the dirty heels of her tennis shoes, but not much else. He reached up, the frozen fingers through his fingerless gloves inches away from her foot, but instead of enclosing them around the delicate bones of her ankle, he lifted the yellow umbrella at her feet. He slid it without a sound across the concrete and down into his arms.

“What are you doing?” whispered Teddy, suddenly at Jude’s elbow. “Why are we stealing an umbrella?”

Jude sprung it open and looked it over. “It’s not the umbrella we’re stealing,” he whispered back, closing it. Walking into the shadows a few rows back, he held it over his head, curved handle up, like a hook. In the bleachers above, there were purses between feet, saving seats, unguarded, alone, and inside, wallets fat with cash. Teddy and Jude had no money and no pot and, since this morning, nothing to smoke it out of but an empty can of Orange Slice.

Last night they’d shared a jug of Carlo Rossi and the pot they’d found in the glove box of Teddy’s mom’s car, while they listened to Metallica’s first album, Kill ’Em All, which skipped, and to Teddy’s mom, Queen Bea, who had her own stash of booze, getting sick in the bathroom, retch, flush, retch, flush. Around midnight, they’d taken what was left of the pot and skated to Jude’s to get some sleep, but in their daze had left Jude’s bong behind. When they returned to Teddy’s in the morning (this was the rhythm of their days, three rights and a left to Teddy’s, a right and three lefts to Jude’s), the bong—the color-changing Pyrex bong Jude’s mother had given Jude that morning as an early birthday gift—was gone. So were Queen Bea’s clothes, her car, her toothbrush, her sheets. Jude and Teddy wandered the house, flipping switches. The lights didn’t work; nothing hummed or blinked. The house was frozen with an unnatural stillness. Jude, shivering, found a candle and lit it. When Teddy opened the liquor cabinet, it was also empty—this was the final, irrefutable clue—except for a bottle of Liquid-Plumr and a film of dust, in which Teddy wrote with a finger, f*ck.

Beatrice McNicholas had run away a few times before. She’d go out for a six-pack and come home a week later, with a new haircut and old promises. (She was no nester or nurturer; she was Queen Bea for her royal size.) But she’d never taken her liquor with her, or anything of Teddy and Jude’s.

The boys had stolen enough from her over the years to call it even. Five-dollar bills, maybe tens, that Queen Bea would be too drunk to miss in the morning, liquor, cigarettes. She was the kind of unsystematic drunk whose hiding places changed routinely but remained routinely unimaginative—ten minutes of hunting through closets and drawers (she cleaned other people’s houses, but her own was a sty) could almost always turn up something. Pot was more difficult to find at Jude’s house—his mom’s hippie habits were somewhat reformed, and though she condoned Jude’s experimentation (an appreciation for a good bong was just about all Harriet and Jude had in common), occasional flashes of parental guilt drove her to hide her contraband in snug and impenetrable places that recalled Russian nesting dolls. In Harriet’s studio, Jude had once found a Ziploc of pot inside a bag of Ricola cough drops inside a jumbo box of tampons inside a toolbox. While Queen Bea seemed only mildly aware that teenagers lived in her midst, sweeping them off her porch like stray cats, Harriet had a sharp eye, a peripheral third lens in her bifocals that was always ready to probe the threat of fast-fingered boys. So Jude and Teddy stole what was around: a roll of quarters from her dresser, the box of chocolates Jude’s sister, Prudence, had given her for Mother’s Day. They took more pleasure in what they stole out in the world: magazines and beer from Shop Smart (Shop Fart), video game cartridges from Sears (Queers), and cassettes from the Record Room, where Kram O’Connor and Clarence Delph worked. And half the items in Jude’s possession—clothes, records, homework—were stolen, without discretion, from Teddy.

But this bold-faced thievery beneath the bleachers embarrassed Teddy. It was so obvious, so doomed to failure. Sometimes Teddy thought that was the prize Jude wanted—not the money or the beer or the cigarettes but the confrontation, the pleasure of testing the limits. Jude was standing on tiptoe, umbrella still raised like a torch, eyeing the spilled contents of a lady’s bag. His tongue, molluscan and veined with blue, was wedged in concentration in the cleft under his nose.

“Hey,” said someone.

Teddy tried to stand very still.

A pair of eyes, upside-down, was framed between the seats above them. It took Teddy a few seconds to grasp their orientation—the girl was leaning over, her head draped over the ledge. “What are you doing?” she said.

Jude smiled up at her. “You dropped your umbrella.”

“No, I didn’t.” The girl had her hands cupped around her eyes now, staring down into the dark. No one else seemed to notice.

“It fell,” Jude insisted, hoisting the umbrella up to the girl, his arm outstretched, letting it tickle one of her fingers.

“Just give it back,” said Teddy. It was the way Jude always made him feel—tangled up in some stupid, trivial danger. Teddy closed his eyes. He didn’t have time to mess around; his mother was gone. He needed money, more money than Jude could pickpocket with an umbrella. His body clenched with his last memory of her—the acrid, scotchy stink of her vomit through the bathroom door; the blathering hiccups of her sobs. Had she been crying because she was leaving, or just because she was wasted?

Then the umbrella, the pointy part, speared him in the gut.

“Ow, man.” Teddy opened his eyes.

“You were supposed to catch it,” said Jude.

Teddy looked up into the bleachers. The girl was gone. But a moment later, a pair of blue-jeaned legs appeared over the wall behind them.

They watched as the girl jumped from the ledge, her jacket parachuting as she plummeted. She landed feetfirst and fell forward to catch her balance, then strutted a slow-motion, runway strut in their direction. She stopped a car length away and stood with her hands on her hips, inspecting them. Her eyes were shining with disdain.

If you were a girl, Jude Keffy-Horn was a person you looked at, hard, and then didn’t look at again. His blue eyes, set wide apart, watched the world from under hooded lids, weighed down by distrust, THC, and a deep, hormonal languor. A passing stranger would not have guessed them to be the eyes of a hyperactive teenager with attention deficit disorder, but his mouth, which rarely rested, betrayed him. He was thin in the lip, fairly broad in the forehead, tall and flat in the space between mouth and upturned nose, the whole plane of his face scattered with freckles usurped daily by a lavender brand of acne. He wore not one but two retainers. He wasn’t tall, but he was built like a tall person, with skinny arms and legs and big knees and elbows that knocked around when he walked. He wasn’t bad-looking. He was good-looking enough. He was the kid whose name you knew only because the teacher kept calling it. Jude. Jude. Mr. Keffy-Horn, is that a cigarette you’re rolling?

Teddy shared Jude’s uniform, his half-swallowed smirk, but due to the blood of his Indian father (Queen Bea was purebred white trash), his hair was the blue-black of comic book villains, his complexion as dark and smooth as a brown eggshell. By the population of Ira Allen High School he was rumored halfheartedly to be Jewish, Arab, Mexican, Greek, and most often, simply “Spanish.” When Jude had asked, Teddy had told him “Indian,” then quipped, nearly indiscernibly, for he was a mumbler, “Gandhi, not Geronimo.” With everyone else, though, he preferred to allow his identity to flourish in the shadowed domain of myth. Teddy’s eyelashes were long, like the bristles of a paintbrush; through his right eyebrow was an ashen scar from the time he’d spilled off his skateboard at age ten. Then his face had been cherubic; now, at fifteen, it had sloughed off the baby fat and gone angular as a paper airplane. He had a delicate frame; he had an Adam’s apple like a brass knuckle; he had things up the sleeve of that too-big coat—a Chinese star, the wire of a Walkman, a cigarette for after class, which he was always more careful than Jude to conceal.

What’s that kid up to?

That was the way the girl was looking at both of them now, under the bleachers. “What are you people doing down here?”

Jude stabbed the umbrella into the ground. “Hanging out.”

“Are you smoking marijuana?”

“You can’t smell it,” Jude said. “We’re out in the open.”

“Can I have my umbrella, please?”

“Why? It’s not raining.”

“It’s supposed to snow, for your information.”

“Oh, for my information, okay. It’s a snow umbrella.” Now he was pretending that the umbrella was a gun. He held it cocked at his hip, the metal tip against his cheek, ready to shoot around a corner.

“Jude,” Teddy said. “Over here.”

He clapped his hands, and Jude obediently, joyfully tossed him the umbrella.

“Motherf*cking monkey in the middle!” said Jude.

Teddy walked three paces toward the girl, head down, and returned it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Hey,” Jude said.

“Brit?” In the bleachers above, two more girls were peering down at them. They never came alone, girls; they always came in packs. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll be right there!” A moment later, she was gone.

“Brit the shit,” Jude said, but Teddy didn’t say anything.

Jude Keffy-Horn, adopted by Lester Keffy and Harriet Horn of Lintonburg, Vermont, met Teddy McNicholas on the second day of seventh grade, in 1984. Teddy had moved there with his half brother, Johnny, and their mother from Plattsburgh, New York, across Lake Champlain. After school, Jude showed Teddy how to smoke a joint in a gas station parking lot, in the backseat of Teddy’s mom’s Plymouth Horizon, while she shopped for groceries inside. That Jude, not Johnny, or even Queen Bea herself, had managed to pioneer the first hallucinogenic experience of the person who would become his closest and really only friend made Jude happy. He didn’t have much to be proud of, but he was good at sharing new and forgotten methods of getting high.

It was one of the few talents passed down from his father, who, before leaving for New York when Jude was nine, had grown several generations of Cannabis sativa in their greenhouse. Les had a year of college at Vermont State, one fewer than Harriet, followed by fifteen as a lab assistant in the botany department, a position that largely entailed mating strands of Holland’s Hope with Skunk #1, which he offered at a deep discount to the department. Although Jude had been too young to apprentice, he’d observed the objects of his father’s hydroponic ventures—Styrofoam, milk jugs, a fish tank pump—with reverence. He’d admired his father’s self-reliance, and he’d learned early that, even in a nothing town like Lintonburg, Vermont, you could find fun with a little imagination and care. With Teddy, he’d imbibed NyQuil and Listerine; tripped on dairy farm mushrooms; huffed gas, glue, and Jude’s sister’s nail polish remover; brewed beer in Queen Bea’s bathtub; and during a period when they were watching a lot of Mr. Wizard’s World, built a bong out of a garden hose and a coffee urn. Jude liked f*cking Teddy up. He liked the dumb, happy look he got on his face, one eye roving, then the other, toward some distant, invisible moon.

Next year, Jude and Teddy were going to New York. Teddy’s half brother, Johnny, lived there, too. They’d had $140 saved up in an empty pack of smokes until a couple of weeks ago, when they used it to buy some pot from Delph and the contact lenses for Teddy and two mail-order Misfits T-shirts. But when they saved some more money and when they were both old enough to drop out (Teddy would be sixteen in May), they were going to buy bus tickets to Port Authority and stay with Johnny until they could find a place of their own.

Johnny was eighteen now, and Jude’s memories of him were obscured by the scrim of vodka he and Teddy would sneak from Johnny’s He-Man thermos. Johnny would skip school on Ozzy Osbourne’s birthday and grew his blond hair down to his ass. He’d keep notebooks full of drawings shelved in his closet, full of superhero chicks and space-age cars and guys with thighs muscled like Rottweilers. He spent a lot of time chasing the boys out of the room he shared with Teddy, but he taught them both how to play guitar, and even let them play in his band, with Delph on bass and Kram on drums, Teddy and Jude sharing one untuned, spray-painted guitar, Johnny playing another, singing without a microphone. Everyone huddled on Queen Bea’s front porch in their hooded sweatshirts and black jeans, bodies chattering in the cold. Jude’s fourteen-year-old fingers stretched into cramps, frozen as wood, trying to follow Johnny’s through Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On Johnny’s mismatched stereo, they’d play their stolen tapes—hard rock, heavy metal, hair metal, black metal, death metal, thrash metal, metalcore, hardcore, grindcore, punk—Black Sabbath and Whitesnake and Black Flag—and then methodically, with ears tilted to the speakers, they’d copy them. They dragged out the old orange extension cord and chugged away on Johnny’s practice amp, decorated with Metallica stickers and glow-in-the-dark stars. They were Demon Semen, Baptism of Jism, the Deadbeats, the Posers, and finally the Bastards, which most of them were, more or less.

That was two years ago. Then Johnny turned sixteen, quit school, and left for New York with his pockets full of snow-shoveling money and two guitar cases, his guitar in one of them and his clothes in the other, to live with his father, who it turned out wasn’t dead after all, and maybe Teddy’s wasn’t either. Turned out Queen Bea was maybe a big fat liar.

Teddy and Jude, on the other hand, were going to New York to start a band, and to get f*cked, and to get the f*ck out of Vermont, not to find their long-lost dads. Jude wasn’t even going to tell his dad he was coming. He wasn’t even going to look him up in the phone book. If he ran into him on the subway, he’d be like, Hey, how’s it going, you f*cking chump? Okay, see you around.

Lintonburg, Vermont, in 1987 was not a place of surprises. There was the second-run theater, the rec center, Wayne’s Billiards. There was the Tap House, the jock bar, and Jacque’s (Birkenjacque’s), the hippie bar. There was the drive-thru creemee place, the pawnshop-music-store, and Champlain Park, where when you skipped school you could hide in the construction tunnels and smoke up, and there was decent skating at the university if you didn’t get kicked off campus. There was enough to do so that you didn’t necessarily want to put a hole in your head. It was the biggest city in Vermont, and this fact was reflected with smugness in the busy gait of its residents down Ash Street, the brick-paved pedestrian mall; in their efficient street plowing; in their towering thermoses of coffee; in the dexterous maneuvering of their four-wheel-drive station wagons and their one or two tasteful bumper stickers: BERNIE; GREEN UP; I L♥VERMONT. Lintonburg’s relatively metropolitan status confused but did not ease the state of small-town disgruntlement that Teddy and Jude had perfected. There was, finally, the Ash Street Mall (the Ass Street Mall), where after leaving their post under the bleachers and skating down the hill through the bitter, lake-blown wind, they came across Jude’s mother. She was sitting on a stool next to the entrance, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback. Beside her was a table disguised by an Indian print tapestry and cluttered with glass ashtrays, vases, pitchers, bowls, in blues and sea greens and swirled, psychedelic pinks. Harriet’s single professional fixture was a wooden sign, propped up against a set of mugs, that read HARRIET HORN HANDBLOWN GLASS.

No sign hung over the door of the greenhouse in their yard, where Harriet blew her glass and where she sold her bongs and pipes, the items that paid the bills, the items she couldn’t sell on the street and had to hawk at summer music festivals on far-flung farms, Jude and his sister, Prudence, trailing behind her with baskets of pipes over their arms. Her studio didn’t need a sign—people knew where to find her, just as they knew where to find the guy they called Hippie, who cruised town on his ten-speed bike and sold pot out of his fanny pack. They’d knock on the greenhouse door and she’d remove her safety glasses and happily make her exchange. Harriet Horn, the Glass Lady. “She can handblow me anytime,” Delph had said more than once, not because Harriet was all that fetching but because she was, to other people—especially to Teddy—cool. Now the word fumbled in Jude’s head—handblow, glandbow, land ho! He was vaguely dyslexic, messed up his letters even when he wasn’t high.

“I don’t have any money, birthday boy,” Harriet said. She removed her glasses—enormous, tortoiseshell, spotted with fingerprints—and let them hang on their chain of plastic beads. With the tobacco-stained fingers of her wool gloves, she dog-eared her place in the book and placed it on her lap. Jude felt his buzz die a quick and common death.

“You haven’t made any money today?” Teddy asked, sympathizing. He picked up a salad bowl and smoothed his palm over the inside of it. “This is really cold.”

“Not enough money,” Harriet said, gently taking the bowl back from Teddy. She was protective of her glass.

“Ma, not even like ten bucks?”

“And what do I get? A hug?”

When Jude refused, Teddy leaned cooperatively into Harriet’s coat. For this, Harriet produced two wrinkled dollar bills from her apron pocket. Jude paddled his skateboard over to the table and covered up the G and L of the sign so it said HANDBLOWN ASS. “Look, Ted.”

Teddy looked and nodded. He’d seen Jude do it before.

“You take your medicine, Jude?” Harriet asked.

“You mean pot? Yeah, but we need more.”

“Jude. You didn’t take it?”

“I did,” Jude said, although he hadn’t. For several weeks he’d been selling his Ritalin pills for a dollar a pop to a kid in his homeroom named Frederick Watt, who liked to take them before tests. A few times Jude and Teddy had taken a bunch at once and wigged out a little, but it was no fun doing drugs you were supposed to do. Jude was too old for Ritalin. He preferred mellower means of controlling his temperament, and his fingers itched for a joint. “Come on, Ma, I need more than two dollars.”

“I believe you already got your birthday gift, fella.”

“Yeah, well, something happened to it already.”

Teddy shot Jude a look.

“What happened to it?” Harriet asked.

“Nothing,” Teddy said. “He just lent it to someone.”

“Who’d you lend it to?”

“We’ll get it back,” Teddy said. Quickly he and Jude exchanged a silent, reflexive pact. “It’s just temporary.”

“It better be,” Harriet said, picking up her burning cigarette, which she’d propped in one of the ashtrays. “I spent a long time on that.” She expelled a lungful of smoke and shook her cigarette at him, remembering something. “Your father called again. Eliza will be here at six-oh-five. She’s taking a different train. Still staying till midnight, I think.”

“Who’s Eliza?” Teddy asked.

Jude thwacked him on the sleeve. “Eliza? The chick who’s hanging out with us tonight?”

“His father’s girlfriend’s daughter,” said Harriet, crossing her legs. “Eliza Urbanski.”

In the seven years since Les had left their family, Jude and Prudence hadn’t laid eyes on him. His calls and cards came once or twice a year, cash less, although not because, as far as Jude knew, he didn’t have it—he paid his child support on time, regular as rent. The last birthday gift Les had bestowed on Jude was for his thirteenth: subscriptions to Playboy, Barely Legal, and Juggs—the excess and range signifying both an uncertainty of the boy’s tastes and what Jude considered a boastful display of financial prowess.

But on Christmas night, when he called to wish his children a happy holiday, he had announced that his girlfriend’s daughter would be in town, skiing with her friends in Stowe for winter break—would Jude and Pru like to show her around? “She’s about your guys’s age,” said Les.

“How old is that?” Prudence had asked him—she, even more than her brother, had moral objections to pleasing Les—and passed the phone to Jude.

It had been known for years that Les had a girlfriend, a ballerina from England. This brief characterization had so belabored Jude’s imagination that he had been only abstractly aware that she came with a daughter. Standing with the phone in his hand, he had looked at his mother, who was scrubbing the empty sink with wanton cheerfulness, pretending not to eavesdrop, and understood that his father wanted to make her jealous. Skiing at Stowe—the girlfriend was probably loaded. Jude said okay, whatever.

Despite himself, he’d dreamt about the girl. Eliza. Dreamt, dreamed. It was a faceless, plotless, colorless dream—he knew only that she was there, the idea of her, and that, as with most dreams these days, he’d woken this morning in the viscid pool of his own anticipation.

The Ass Street Mall was long and dark, like a tunnel that went nowhere, and Jude had memorized every one of its uneven, roach-brown tiles. He and Teddy darted in and out of stores, up and down escalators, past the food court comprised of a Häagen-Douche and a Pizza Slut, searching for Jude’s sister, who always had money, until they found her behind the glass wall of Waldenbooks. She was standing at the magazine rack with a pair of friends, reading Tiger Beat, and when she saw them, she looked up for a moment, then away.

Jude didn’t see Prudence much, but when he did, he saw a girl in bloom. One recent morning, he’d walked into the bathroom and found her standing naked over the heating vent, pale and nippley and terrified. He thought immediately of their childhood pet, Mary Ann, a tabby cat who had nursed a litter of kittens on a set of pink, swollen mammaries the size and shape of his sister’s. Since then, it had taken him a great deal of effort, when coming across the pastel bras hanging from the bathroom doorknob, to ward off that horrible, wet-haired vision. Teddy liked to point out that, not sharing the same DNA, Prudence was like any other girl in Lintonburg—in another life, if he hadn’t been adopted by her parents, Jude could get a hard-on looking at her and not have to feel weird about it. There was no way his sister could give him a hard-on, but the possibility did make him feel lonely and sick. His sister was smart and pretty and she and Jude had nothing in common, and seeing her naked was seeing how irreconcilable they were.

“What do you want?” she mouthed now, flipping through her magazine. Her voice was far away, muffled through the glass.

“Forty bucks,” Jude said, tucking his devil lock behind his ear.

Prudence’s hair—ashy blond, the kind with a glint of gray in it, the kind Harriet used to have—swirled around the hood of her parka, and her braces, pink and purple, flashed like fangs. There was something sort of metallic about her, a silver, fishy glow under her skin. “Why?” she said.

“Because,” Jude said, “I want to buy you a birthday present.”

“It’s your birthday. My birthday’s in September.”

“I know that,” he said. He knew because Prudence was nine months younger than he was, and also because she still had the invitation from her party taped to her bedroom door, along with a Just Say No poster featuring Kirk Cameron. “I’ll pay you back,” Jude said. “You know what a fine brother I am.”

Prudence stared at her magazine; her eyes didn’t move. The two friends whispered something Jude couldn’t hear, gold hoops swinging from one pair of ears, silver hoops from the other. Were they looking at Teddy? Teddy was looking at them.

“What happened to his glasses?” Prudence asked, nodding at Teddy.

Harriet Horn, after several years of sex with Les Keffy, her college sweetheart, had been declared infertile by a Lintonburg obstetrician. Her fallopian tubes were clogged like straws full of mud, but through this obstruction, right about the time Jude himself was being born (on the last night of 1971, in a New York City hospital), one of Les’s relentless and ironic sperm prevailed. When Prudence was born, nine months after Jude was adopted, Harriet nursed them at the same time, one on each side, like two of Mary Ann’s blind, slimy kittens. Jude, his mother told him, had liked to kick his suckling sister in the face. As a toddler, standing on a step stool, he tried to drown her in the basement sink, and when they were nine, she threw a pair of nail scissors at him, spearing the hollow under his right eye. He fingered this moon-shaped scar now, finding his pale image in the window. His forehead had left an oily streak on the glass, and he wiped it with his wrist.

“I’ll pay you back, Pru.”

“No, you won’t. You’re just going to spend it on you-know-what.” With the nail-polished fingers of her right hand and the sign-language skills she’d learned the first semester of tenth grade, she spelled out something frantic.

“I don’t know what that means!”

“Drugs!” she pronounced, cupping her hands against the glass.

Prudence’s puritanical streak was a matter of mild embarrassment for their mother, but for Jude it was simply proof of their genetic divide. “It’s my birthday!” he yelled. The itch in his fingers had spread to his hands, which he mashed into fists, pressing his knuckles to the window.

“I hate you, too!” Prudence shrieked, hands flying like fighting birds. Then she and her friends disappeared into Young Adult.

Jude scavenged. He probed a finger into the coin return slots of pay phones, vending machines, the children’s carousel that had been broken for as long as Jude could remember. He found nothing but a lone gumball in a candy machine, which turned his tongue a defeated electric blue. To spend one’s sixteenth birthday—and New Year’s Eve!—in a shopping mall, with no pot, no beer, no prospects to offer a mysterious, loaded, out-of-town girl—it was too shameful to consider. He swallowed his pride and suggested they head for the Record Room. Maybe Delph would take an IOU.

Anthrax’s “Soldiers of Metal” was playing over the store speakers. Behind the counter, Delph was preparing to thwack a pencil at the one Kram held pinched between his fingers.

“Boo!” Jude yelled, and Kram flinched.

“There will be no skateboarding in here,” Delph called, shaking a finger at Teddy and Jude. “Out with those things, gentlemen, or I’ll call mall security.”

“No!” Jude said. “Not that fat guy on the golf cart.”

“Don’t start on fat guys,” said Kram, who at eighteen had a full-blown beer gut. “I’ll pin you right here, little boy.” And he clambered over the counter and fell on Jude, digging his knees into his ribs.

Kram O’Connor and Clarence Delph III regularly put Teddy and Jude in headlocks, charged them outrageous rates for marijuana, and invented for them a seemingly tireless list of abusive nicknames. Teddy got the worst of it—Teddy Bear, Teddy Krueger, Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Ruxpin, Teddy Graham, Teddy McDickless, McDick. Never mind that Delph refused to be called by his own first name, or that Kram got his nickname from accidentally tattooing his real name backward in a mirror. They had been friends of Johnny’s, metalheads with muscle cars and big-haired girlfriends (Kram’s car they called the Kramaro), and although they would be graduating, barely, in June, and although Johnny had left town two years ago, they still let Jude and Teddy follow them around, gave them rides, came over to Jude’s every once in a while to jam and tell him how shitty his cheap guitar sounded. The purpose of their alliance they made clear: they required Teddy and Jude for news from Johnny, nothing more. Johnny was in a straight edge band. Johnny’s straight edge band had played a show at CBGB. Johnny was tattooing full-time now, had traded an eight track for his own machine and some needles, and since tattooing was illegal in New York, as it was in Vermont, he had to do it from his apartment, a studio in Alphabet City that was literally underground. He’d stopped returning Kram’s and Delph’s calls months ago; his phone was turned off when he didn’t pay the bill, he wrote Teddy, and he left it off. He could live without it.

Which meant Teddy was screwed. His mother had bolted, and his brother was the only person he could go to. But Teddy didn’t have money for a bus ticket—he’d have to write Johnny and ask him to send some. It would be days before Johnny got the letter, and days before Johnny could send him the money. Teddy couldn’t stay at home with the power gone out—he’d freeze his balls off—but he couldn’t stay with Jude, either, not forever. He didn’t want Harriet to know his mother had left. He wouldn’t be able to stand her pity.

If only Teddy were sixteen—he would have been living with his brother already. Or maybe, if he was alive, with his dad. He didn’t dare mention this to his mother, who had long ago forbidden the subject, or to Jude, who regarded curiosity about one’s missing father as one of the telltale symptoms of being a fag, but he’d been thinking about his dad a lot lately. His whole life, his mother had been telling him he was dead, but then Johnny had found out that his own dad was alive. Didn’t that mean Teddy’s dad could be out there, too? But how did you find someone you knew nothing about, not even a name?

“You guys got any money I could borrow?” Teddy asked. He kept his voice down, though there were no customers in the store.

“What for?” Kram asked, climbing off of Jude.

“I want to visit Johnny,” he said, keeping it simple and hoping Jude wouldn’t decide to elaborate. But Delph and Kram didn’t have any money, either. They’d gone broke buying Christmas gifts for their girlfriends.

“We’ll settle for some pot,” Jude broke in.

Delph snorted. “No more IOUs, Judy.”

“Come on, man! We’re dry.”

“I don’t need any pot,” Teddy said. “I just need a bus ticket.”

Delph leaned an elbow on the counter. “Listen to young Edward,” he said. He had a dark, horsey mullet and a big moon of a face, craggy with craters, so white it was yellow. “He’s gone straight edge, like his brother! Just Say No, right?”

“I still say he’s lying,” said Kram. “Michelob McNicholas? He’d go into cardiac arrest if he stopped drinking.”

“Those straight edge kids don’t fornicate,” Delph said. “That’s what I heard. Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t breathe . . .”

“What, like Jehovah’s Witnesses?” Kram said, rubbing his Buddha belly.

“The music’s pretty wicked, though,” Teddy said. “Johnny made me another tape. You guys heard that Youth of Today album yet?”

“Told you, Teddy Bear. We don’t have that crazy rock-and-roll music in stock.”

“Come on, Delph,” Jude whined, impatient with the conversation. “Just a dime? It’s my birthday.”

Delph slapped the counter. “Jeezum Crow! I knew that, man.”

“Aw, Delphy, you gotta hook him up. Man’s sweet sixteen, right?”

“You finally going to turn in that V-card tonight, little man?”

Then they were talking about Eliza, the girl Jude would meet in a few hours at the train station. As if they didn’t have girls in Lintonburg; they had to import them from New York. That was the sad thing about Jude and those guys, thought Teddy—they hadn’t been anywhere. They hadn’t seen shit. The other day Jude had insisted that Wichita was a state. He thought you got a girl to like you by stealing her umbrella.

Teddy made his way over to the Y section in Rock, scanning the cassettes, just in case. The Yardbirds, Yes, Neil Young, but no Youth of Today. Over the past few months, the negligible shelf of vinyl at the back of the store had been phased out by a growing bank of compact discs. Soon the Record Room would sell no more records. Teddy stood disheartened in front of the display, his hands crammed in his pockets. He was tired of Vermont, tired of the homemade drugs and the farm boy slang and the cold. He was tired of letting Jude cheat off his algebra tests. Just before winter break, the guidance counselor had called Teddy into her office and said, “Edward, have you given any thought to college?” The truth was, he had not, but the word chimed in his head for days afterward like the sleigh bells tinkling from the guidance counselor’s earlobes. When Jude asked why he’d been pulled out of class, Teddy told him he’d been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom, then faked an afternoon of detention, studying alone under the stadium bleachers.

College he could not afford, but at least Teddy knew there was a world beyond Vermont. Before Lintonburg, he’d lived with his mother and brother in Plattsburgh; before that in Newport, Rhode Island; before that in Dover, Delaware; before that in Williamsburg, Virginia; before that somewhere in North Carolina; and before that in some places he didn’t really remember, all the way down to Miami, where he was born. But he’d never been to Manhattan. In Manhattan, Johnny said, there were crates and crates of vinyl in every record store, a hardcore matinee every weekend at CBGB, endless concrete built for the wheels of a skateboard. And fathers. Jude’s, Johnny’s. That’s where the fathers were. For a second Teddy could picture himself there, standing on the street in front of a building, a set of keys jingling in his hand.

Teddy had last spoken to his brother on Christmas. When Teddy handed the phone back to his mother and left the room, he could still hear her scolding Johnny about something in a desperate sort of whisper, as though she didn’t want Teddy to hear. She was sitting on the couch, hunched over a beer, her bra strap slipped off her shoulder and out of her sleeve.

“All right, dude, just a dime,” Delph was saying. If Jude met him at Tory Ventura’s New Year’s party at nine, Delph would gift him with some kind bud.

“Tory Ventura?” Teddy said, looking up from the cassettes. “Not that dickhead.”

Tory was a senior, played football with Kram. He liked to grab Jude and Teddy by the scruff of their coats and slam them against their lockers. They all hated him, but his parents were out of town, and there would be three kegs. “It’s supposed to be wicked,” said Kram, doing push-ups against the counter, the armpits of his T-shirt dark with sweat.

“Bring your lady,” said Delph.

“We’ll be there,” said Jude.

In the street, an inch or two of snow had accumulated, and it was still falling steadily. Jude and Teddy stepped soundlessly into it and carried their skateboards back to Jude’s, where they made English muffin pizzas, splitting the third one in half. It was a big, bony house, first a warehouse and then a schoolhouse, and now Jude lived there with his mother and his sister. It was misleading to call it a house—it was a brick building in an alley, narrow as an ice cream truck, four stories tall if you counted the basement. Jude’s father had bought it for $1,800 in 1969; he was in the middle of renovating it when Jude, and then Prudence, were born. When Les was finished (and he never really was, according to Harriet), the house was a monument of found object art. The shutters were made from leftover chalkboards; the steps were two separate spiral staircases joined together, one pine, one steel; the living room couch was a claw-foot tub with the front sawed off, lined with an orange mattress from an old chaise lounge and throw pillows Harriet had sewn with her Singer. After the renovation project, Les devoted himself to the less architecturally challenging greenhouse, and when he took its profits to New York in the form of a Dodge camper van full of marijuana plants, he left the half-assed results of his ten-year enterprise. They had no kitchen drawers: they kept their silverware in mugs. They had no kitchen ceiling: just insulation and ducts and wires like so many guts and veins.

The basement still held the scent of antique allergens—sawdust, chalk, the fertilizer that had been stored here half a century ago. In one corner was the Bastards’ equipment, still occasionally revisited—Jude’s third-hand guitar, Kram’s beat-up drum kit, Johnny’s old amp. The rest of the room was scattered with cardboard boxes, sawhorses, an old door leaning against the wall, a bicycle with a plastic baby seat, and an assortment of wooden school chairs. Some of them, stacked yin-yang style, were turned into makeshift easels from the years when Harriet taught life drawing, slabs of plywood wedged in their upturned legs, yellowed drawings held up by clothespins. A single bare bulb hung from the low ceiling. Jude turned it on, then went straight for the bottle of turpentine over the sink. “Just to tide us over,” he said. His cold fingertips fumbled. His heart, though, was warming up like an eager, rattling engine.

“What are we doing?” Teddy asked, sitting down on the basement couch. It wasn’t really a couch. It was the row of seats Jude’s father had removed from his van sometime in the seventies.

“Give me that underwear.”

From his pocket, Teddy presented the underwear he’d stolen from Victoria’s Secret. Jude soaked the panties with the turpentine. They were silky and pink, with a pink tag still dangling. “Remember this?” He plunged his face into the panties as if drying it on a towel. It had been a long time since he’d inhaled this particular elixir, but the sensation was recognizable right away. It smelled like being twelve, being with Teddy, being a redheaded boy in pajamas, and before long Jude’s nostrils were flaming nicely, and warm, acid tears were burning his eyes.

Jude passed the panties to Teddy, and Teddy pressed them to his face; they made a little hollow boat in his open mouth. It was a moment of weakness—he wanted to smother the thought of his mother, of their dark, empty house. He breathed in vigorously, then broke into laughter. Teddy’s laugh was sloppy, muffled, embarrassed, and usually accompanied by closed eyes. He sat like a blind man, mouth agape, waiting. That was how trusting Teddy was.

“This is wicked,” Teddy said.

Jude sat down beside him and took another huff, choking on a noseful of fumes. “Is it panties,” he asked, “or panty?”

“There’s only one,” said Teddy.

A dish towel or a paper bag would have worked just as well, but it was wonderful, getting high off of a panty. Jude put his head between his knees. For a moment he felt as though he were floating on or in the ocean, he felt as though he were made out of water. Then he panicked, drowning, and grabbed Teddy’s ankle and held on.

He sat up. “Dude, you know you’re staying here, right?”

Teddy reached for the panty and breathed. Snowflakes beat against the two ground-level windows. “Maybe for a little while.”

“For good, man. For bad, whatever. Richer or poorer.”

Jude redampened the panty. Teddy was quiet. Jude said, “All right, you fag?”