Ten Thousand Saints

Part II





The Householders





Eleven





At the Texaco station on Grammer Street, the only gas station in Lintonburg open in the middle of the night, two cars sat in the parking lot, and one of them was a shit-colored Camaro with a Black Flag bumper sticker and a Pizza Hut dome on the roof. Inside the gas station, Kram had one arm lost deep in the beer case. He was wearing a Pizza Hut shirt and a Pizza Hut hat and khaki pants that matched his khaki hair. When he saw Jude and Johnny file in, he whistled. “Jeezum Crow! What are you guys doing here?”

He furnished them both with quick, back-pounding hugs, wrestling Jude in half and sawing his knuckles over his skull. “I didn’t recognize this little shit without the hair! What’d you do with your devil lock?”

“The demon has been exorcised,” Johnny said. “He’s an angel now.”

“Yeah, right!” Kram let Jude go and grabbed a fistful of Johnny’s white wedding robe. “You’re the angel! Look at this. What is this, Halloween?”

“You look the same,” Johnny said. “Still got your gut.”

“That’s all muscle, McDickless. The ladies love it.”

“Pizza Slut, huh?” Jude asked.

Kram stood up straight, hitching up his khakis. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t getting any hours at the Record Room. You know Delph made assistant manager over there?”

“Oh yeah?”

“I’m the one got him the job there. And I’ve got a hell of a lot better taste in music.”

“That’s debatable,” said Johnny.

“Shit, you grew up, Judy. You’re taller than me.”

Jude did feel older, but maybe that was just because Lintonburg felt the same. Following route 7 north past the twinkling vistas of Middlebury and Vergennes and Charlotte, past the shuttered flea market grounds and the round sheep barn and the shore of the thawing lake, past the snake’s tongue where route 7 forked into Grammer and Champlain, and then two rise-and-falls until they reached the Day-Glo torch of the gas station, Jude had felt that he could drive that road with his eyes closed, even if it was his first time actually driving it.

Nothing had changed.

“F*cking bullshit is what it is.” Kram was telling them about the P.E. credit that would keep him from graduating next month. A starting linebacker for four years, and they were talking about a P.E. credit. He didn’t want to go to college anyway; he wanted to get back into music. “This is perfect. You still got my old drum kit in your basement, Judy? You guys still got guitars? We could revive the Bastards! The Bastards live!”

Johnny put his hands on Kram’s shoulders. “You high, man?”

“No, man, I haven’t done that shit in weeks. Delph doesn’t sell no more.”

“Really?”

“He’s a working man now. More money, more hours, more responsibilities, blah blah.”

Johnny now offered Jude a look. Jude knew he was wondering the same thing he was—whether, during the time Jude had spent in New York, despite Kram’s late-night beer run, he and Delph had taken their own steps, however blind, toward sobriety. Whether they might not be so hard to recruit to their team.

“We got to let Delph know you’re in town. What are you lesbians doing back here, anyway?”

A bell jingled, and Eliza entered the store. Pregnant, barefoot, in her sari. Her cheek was impressed with the handle of the suitcase she’d slept against. “Hey,” she said, “do you think they have any Yoo-hoo?”

Harriet had been dreaming of her ex-husband, the two of them trying to catch fish in nets on a boat very much like Jerry and Ingrid Donahoe’s—had she ever been on another boat in her life, in forty-three years of living on a lake?—when the wheels of his ancient van turned over the gravel behind her house. It took her a moment to remember that he was not the one driving. She leapt out of bed, pulled on her robe, and ran a toothbrush across her teeth before stalking downstairs, where her son was filling a bowl at the sink. He’d packed some muscle on his frame, and she watched from the bottom step of the spiral staircase as he placed the water on the floor and a tiger-striped cat, purring at his ankles, drank gratefully from the bowl. Through the kitchen door, two more teenagers appeared, each of them holding another cat, and while the scene should have terrified her—six new bodies in the house, seven if you counted the baby—the way the kids carried themselves, tiptoeing, whispering, stroking the animals’ ears, reassured her.

She did not wish to be in the middle of Les’s girlfriend’s business—or ex-girlfriend, as the case may have been—but she found herself without much choice. If she’d refused Eliza and Johnny, she’d be refusing Jude, too, and the fact was she’d missed him. So she wouldn’t think about the pregnant girl, about what would happen to her when she was no longer pregnant. It was not her business. She was merely providing temporary shelter to two kids who needed help. Every summer her favorite aunt and uncle had taken in foreign exchange students, and the homeless at Thanksgiving, and in more than one winter storm along route 7, she and Les had let hitchhikers climb into the back of their van. More than once, they’d been the hitchhikers.

She was thinking of Les as she dropped off the final step of the stairs, recalling the February morning she’d woken up to find him on her couch. If the children were to find out! Seven years had passed since she’d seen her ex, since she’d been with any man at all. Could she be blamed? Did she say yes to him when he called because she’d said yes to him in her bed? The only thing she could do that morning was keep busy, keep him quiet, make scrambled eggs. She’d do the same thing now—eggs and toast and bacon, a pot of strong coffee for her guests, at four-thirty in the morning.

But none of them drank coffee, and the boys didn’t eat bacon and eggs. Johnny made buckwheat pancakes instead, and Eliza praised the Vermont maple syrup. They told her about the trip, and the wedding, and the way Les had come through for them, and Jude showed off the gruesome scar on his arm, which had healed to a raisiny, hairless glaze. After breakfast, while Jude napped, Johnny washed the dirty clothes they’d brought. “No more quarters! I could do laundry all day.” He had grown up quite a bit since Harriet had last seen him skulking down Ash Street, a cigarette tucked over his ear. She was not sure Jude knew how to operate a washing machine. That was the consequence of her indulgence, the apologetic spoiling of an adopted child. Prudence cleaned without being asked, but now Harriet wondered if she had ruined any hope of self-reliance for Jude, if she had poisoned him against helping himself. Even Eliza, who had grown up with silver spoons, who apparently knew nothing about birth control, who had Les for a role model, sprang up from the table to help with the dishes.

It was not until Harriet made her way back upstairs to shower and change that it occurred to her it might be nice to have a full house. Prudence had become secretive, eating her meals in her room, stretching the phone cord as far as it would reach up the stairs. One night Harriet had caught her sneaking down the fire escape. It was as though, in deference to her absent brother, Pru were impersonating him.

She passed her room on the second floor, climbed the next flight of stairs to the third, and, after tapping lightly on her son’s bedroom door, eased it open. He was lying on his side with his bare back to her, and she stood there for several moments watching him sleep. After Teddy’s death, it was a sight that used to send her stomach up into her throat, but it didn’t worry her now. She understood that she had Johnny to thank for that.

So he didn’t know how to do laundry. She’d do his laundry a million times.

The householders settled in. They learned how to use the remote control, to jiggle the handle of the second-floor toilet. Harriet pored over an old vegetarian cookbook, her glasses dusted with flour. “Can you eat egg whites, Johnny? What about fish?” And one rainy day, Johnny and Harriet spent the whole afternoon in the basement, Johnny admiring her old drawings, Harriet admiring his.

“So your new friends are a hit,” Prudence observed one morning. “Mom practically Frenched them both at dinner last night.” Waking up to an otherwise empty house, Jude had wandered into his sister’s bedroom, where she was getting ready for school. Harriet was in the greenhouse, and Prudence didn’t know where Johnny and Eliza were.

He stood in the doorway, examining the fixtures of the room. The trundle bed where Eliza had slept the last several nights was closed, a pillow and folded blanket piled neatly on the floor. On the door, Kirk Cameron had been replaced by a calendar of male swimsuit models. The word Frenched was licking uncomfortably at Jude’s ear, and he wondered suddenly about the question his father had asked about Prudence, whether she was having sex. He studied her smoky eyes, the medley of bracelets—safety pins, braided strings, glittery bangles. Was this the kind of girl who had sex? Who Frenched and had sex?

“You got your braces off,” he said.

Prudence grinned, revealing two rows of aligned teeth. “Tada!” she said, and in this single word, Jude swore he smelled American Spirits.

“Have you been smoking?” He came close and sniffed her. “Do you smoke now?”

With the heel of one of her boots, she shoved him away.

“What are you smoking for? It’s like seven in the morning.”

“Give me a break. You used to smoke more than cigarettes.”

“You’re not smoking pot, are you?”

“What is this? Because you’re straight edge now, you get to harass me?”

“That’s what straight edge is all about.”

Prudence shot him a look of distrust. “What did you do with my brother? The guy who used to sniff Sharpies while we watched cartoons? That was like two weeks ago.”

“Well, you were Citizen of the Week like two weeks ago. What happened to you?”

She went to her dresser and spritzed on some perfume. “I liked you better before.”

“You like Johnny, and he’s straight edge.”

Prudence shrugged. “Johnny’s cute.” In the dresser mirror, she rolled up each sleeve of her T-shirt. “So I don’t get it. They’re married, but they sleep in separate beds?”

“Prudence.”

“It’s sort of weird, isn’t it?”

Jude sat down on the bed, picked up the teddy bear, and put it down.

“I guess it would be weird, too,” Prudence considered, “if they slept in the same bed.”

“Where would they sleep, anyway?”

“Mom has that big mattress in her studio. She doesn’t give a shit. They’re married. But Eliza said Johnny said Mom wouldn’t let them.”

“Eliza said that?”

“I’m just saying. I don’t care.”

“You don’t have any idea where they are?” He was staring blankly at the calendar, at Mr. May, and now his eyes went to the thirteenth. “What’s today, Friday?”

“Yeah, Friday the thirteenth. Boo!”

Jude had known the day had been coming, but he had managed until now to push it from his mind. He wanted to smoke something, a cigarette, a joint.

“Look,” Prudence said, “she can sleep in here, whatever.”

“Thank you, okay?”

“But what is it, like a marriage of convenience?”

“Prudence! Where did you get that?”

“Well, they don’t seem . . .”

“What?” Jude asked. He wanted to know. He wasn’t sure what sort of marriage it was. They hadn’t kissed at the wedding, and their first night home, when Eliza realized she’d left her toothbrush at the hotel in New York, Johnny had gone out and bought her a new one. At eleven o’clock at night, instead of just letting her use his.

“Like, in love. Like a husband and wife.” Prudence zipped up her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. “Like Mom and Dad used to be.”

The first night Eliza stayed at the St. Marks Hotel, her mother had shown up at Les’s apartment and bullied him through the intercom until the super chased her away. Les assured her that Eliza was safe, and Eliza hadn’t heard from her since. She wondered if her mother thought she was staying at Les’s, or somewhere else in New York, if she were checking hotels by now, or calling the people she thought were still Eliza’s friends. Sometimes Eliza assumed she’d get the police involved, and sometimes she thought it was the last thing she’d do. She knew Di was as ashamed of Eliza’s running away as she was of her pregnancy—she simply wouldn’t want anyone to know. Her purpose had been served, anyway—Eliza was out of sight in a place where she couldn’t embarrass her mother. No doubt she told people Eliza was still away at school.

That first night in the hotel, Johnny had stripped to his boxers, folded his clothes neatly on the chair, stretched out on the bed beside her, and said good night. She was wearing her gray toile pajamas and she’d just washed her hair. He lay there, eyes closed, arms folded across his waist. He’d turned off his bedside lamp, but by the light of hers she admired the curve of the Krishna beads across his throat, each bead as tiny as a baby tooth, and the artwork across his belly and chest, winding around his arms. She’d never seen so much skin so darkly tattooed, the ink so heavy it looked three-dimensional, and she couldn’t help it: she placed her fingertips on the green wing of his shoulder.

He flinched, eyes bolting open. He sat up, then lay back down. She apologized, her face was burning. “We’re going to be married in a few days,” she reminded him. “Isn’t this what you meant? When you said we were going to be a couple?”

Johnny tried out a nervous laugh. “Of course,” he said, sweeping his knuckles over her cheek. But could they wait? It was old-fashioned, but wasn’t that the best way? Les had asked him to protect her here. It was just a few more days.

She thought it was sweet, how respectful he was. He reminded her of Teddy. He ended up sleeping on the floor, and they joked about it, the pregnant bride-to-be saving herself for marriage.

Then, when they’d arrived at Jude’s house, Johnny told Eliza that Harriet wanted them to sleep in separate beds. Eliza would sleep in Prudence’s room, and Johnny would bunk with Jude. “Sorry,” Johnny had whispered the morning after their first night there, handing her a dish to dry. “I didn’t know it would be this way.” It was just temporary, he said, until they found a place of their own. The arrangement was acceptable enough. Prudence mostly stayed out of Eliza’s way, offered her the first shower, cleared her a corner of the closet.

A few mornings in, while Prudence was in the shower, Johnny woke Eliza and asked her to take a walk with him. It was early, not even seven, but every boy who’d ever asked her to take a walk only meant one thing. She put on lipstick, sprayed a shot of Prudence’s perfume down the collar of her sweater. The morning was chilly, the glittering lake appearing now and then between blocks. The root-split sidewalks were stamped with children’s handprints, the telephone poles with staples from long-gone flyers. A row of close-set bungalows lined each side of the street, in white and putty and gray, with cement porches and torn screens, AC units hanging out of the windows. The one Johnny stopped in front of was on the side that backed up to the woods. It was slate blue, set up on cinder blocks, a child’s red wagon capsized in the long grass. A FOR SALE sign stood beside it. For a moment, Eliza thought he was going to knock on the door, or pull out a key. Maybe it was an old friend’s place that would be empty for a few hours. “Landlord must have put it up for sale,” Johnny said.

He’d been here to gather Teddy’s things after the funeral. He just wanted her to see it, too. They sat on the bus stop bench across the street and a few doors down, watching the tall pines behind the house bend and sway.

“It’s his birthday,” Johnny said.

“Friday the thirteenth?”

“He’d be sixteen.”

They sat in silence for a moment longer. It didn’t feel like a moment they were sharing. The breeze spun the rusty wheels of the wagon in the yard. Maybe it was a neighbor’s. She found herself wondering if it belonged to a boy or a girl. What was left of her buoyant mood was carried away in the wind, the hope of kissing her husband on a bench in the morning sun. She could only picture Teddy coming in and out of the door across the street. She supposed that’s what Johnny had intended.

The last time Johnny saw his mother, he was the age Teddy would be now. She was drunk, and he was packing his things. “He’s a snake,” she warned him. “A snake charmer. Don’t let him charm you.”

She was speaking about his father, a man named Marshall Cheshire. For most of his life, Johnny had known nothing about him. As far as he and Teddy knew, their fathers were dead, both killed in car accidents before they were born, and when they would ask their mother about them, she refused to elaborate, her silence the face of both a cold, hardened grief—two lovers killed! two tragic accidents!—and a disappointment in her sons’ frailty: big boys did not cry over their dead fathers. So when kids asked Johnny about his dad, he said he didn’t have one, because he didn’t. This was a lonely fact but, for Johnny and Teddy, not a strange one. They had no other family. Their mother’s parents had also died before the boys were born, and they had no aunts or uncles, no godparents, no cousins. They had their mother, more or less.

Until one late-winter afternoon shortly before Johnny’s sixteenth birthday, when he and Teddy were pushing the Horizon up Grammer Street to the gas station, their mother coasting in neutral, her fat arm hanging out the window. It was not the first time they had run out of gas on the side of the road, but this hill was steep and slick, and their mother had to lose some goddamn weight. The man who pulled over to help them was not a neighborly Vermonter but, Johnny guessed from the accent, a New Yorker. It wasn’t until the car was safely steered into the station and Queen Bea lumbered out of it that the man recognized her. In her youth, she had been a slimmer woman.

“Bonnie?” he said, and then: “Bonnie! Bonnie Michaels!”

Queen Bea actually jumped. She jumped backward. Then she lowered her fat ass back into the car and slammed the door. The guy had to knock on her window for a good minute. “It’s me,” he said, laughing, pressing his face to the glass. “It’s not him! It’s Max, Bonnie! It’s not Marshall!”

Johnny later gave considerable thought to what she might have been thinking about in that car. Was she considering denying it? Saying no, mister, you got the wrong lady? I’m Beatrice, Beatrice McNicholas? When she finally stepped out, she appeared to have collected herself. She began fiddling with the pump, dribbling gasoline over her boots.

“What the hell are you doing up here?” she demanded. “This is Vermont.”

The man was on his way to a hockey tournament in Montreal. He was meeting some old friends from the joint. He had just stopped to get gas! And Marshall had almost come with him! But Marshall’s probation officer had told him it was a bad idea to leave town. He and Marshall had moved from Miami back to Staten Island. Wait until Marshall heard who he saw in f*cking Vermont.

Then he seemed to remember the two boys standing on either side of him. A shadow fell over his face. He had steel gray eyes and a three-day beard and sunken cheeks carved with acne scars. He wore a navy knit cap. He looked from Johnny to Teddy back to Johnny again. “I guess that’s him?” he said, nodding to Johnny, and the instant Johnny saw the man’s sheepish, scarecrow smile, he knew his mother was a liar.

“I’m your Uncle Max,” he told Johnny. “Marshall’s brother.”

“His twin,” Queen Bea spat.

And Teddy standing there with a shadow fallen over his face, too, trying to figure out where that left him. He cupped a hand over his eyes, trying to see the man more clearly. Then his eyes slid over to Johnny.

“You think my dad’s alive, too?” he asked Johnny that night. Queen Bea had gone off to get drunk somewhere.

Of course he was alive. They were all alive! Who knew how many people their mother had killed off? Two tragic accidents!

Johnny thought about Teddy’s question. He remembered a man with a dark mustache, an accent, breath like curdled milk. Ravi. He remembered hiding in bushes of sea grape while Ravi pruned them, and Ravi scolding him for touching the marble statue on his shelf, as smooth as the inside of a conch shell. For years the memory of Ravi had lived among the memories of Queen Bea’s many ex-boyfriends. It hadn’t occurred to Johnny until now that he could be Teddy’s dad.

But Johnny, feeling guilty over his newfound father, had said, “I doubt it, Ted.”

Before long he left Vermont and moved into his father’s apartment in Staten Island. Johnny’s own brother, until then his only male family, looked nothing like him, and now here were not one but two men with Johnny’s face. All this time, Marshall said, Bonnie had been keeping Johnny from him—so much lost time they had to make up! Marshall took him to the Hard Rock Cafe, to Coney Island. Twice he took him to Madison Square Garden—first to a Rangers game, then to a Bob Seger show. After the concert the two of them got high in Max’s parked Chevy Blazer, Marshall’s usual faraway look even more faraway, his steel gray eyes drifting over the windshield, and Marshall said, “Your mom was a piece of work,” and that phrase seemed right, seemed to explain everything—she was a liar, yes, but also the kind of woman men wrote songs about and regretted loving and were helpless over, and for that night, Johnny felt like a son, as though he had a mother and a father, parents who were screwed up in a legendary, acceptable way, their romance so terrific and terrible she had written him off as dead, and so maybe his dad was as much of a drunk as his mom and so maybe he’d known he’d knocked her up, but he’d rambled on, that’s what the rockers did, Robert Plant and maybe even Bob Seger and those silly hippies, didn’t they all have love children scattered all over the map? And then the next morning, seventeen days after Johnny had moved in with his dad, the blackened husk of the Chevy was found in a parking lot off the Long Island Expressway, the Blazer blazed, a witticism at least one local paper picked up on in its back-page crime log, and not long after, Max and Marshall Cheshire were arrested for insurance fraud, shipped off to Arthur Kill—shipped back to Arthur Kill—but not before Marshall had managed to cosign a checking account in Johnny’s name and make off with all the $469 Johnny had earned shoveling Lintonburg driveways. Brothers went down together, they went down in flames, but your kids, they were expendable. That was when Johnny moved into Tompkins. He didn’t have bus fare back to Vermont, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have gone home. He would not return with his tail between his legs for his mother to say “I told you so.”

So he left his brother at home to go down in flames alone.

On Teddy’s birthday, watching his old house from across the street, Johnny had pictured Queen Bea packing up her car in the middle of the night. He’d come close to telling Eliza then that his mother had left because of him, because he’d done something stupid: he’d called her. From the same phone booth where he’d received the news of Teddy’s death, he had spoken to her on Christmas. In his last letter, Teddy had affixed a surprising PS: I want to find out if my dad is alive. Ha-ha, I know you said not to bother, but will you help?

When Johnny had finally started talking to his mother again after his father went to jail, she’d said she’d been trying to protect him from Marshall. “I was trying to save you the trouble,” she said, and Johnny had almost felt sorry for her. Who knew how far you could trust her (you certainly couldn’t throw her very far), but she said Marshall had also ripped her off, and slapped her around, and when she was pregnant, too. That was why she’d changed her name, she said. That was why she’d told Johnny he was dead. They’d shared accounts. He knew how to find her. She didn’t want him tracking her down.

But what about Teddy’s dad?

“He’s dead,” she’d said quickly. “Dead, dead. Don’t go looking for him, John.”

He didn’t believe her. But he believed she was scared. He believed that Teddy’s father must be a monster, too, a monster worse than Marshall Cheshire. He told his brother to forget his dad. “It’s not worth the trouble, Ted.”

After he got Teddy’s letter, though, Johnny stewed over it for days, the letter propped up over his sink. He remembered the white moons of Ravi’s fingernails, the black hairs on the back of Ravi’s hands. He had to be Teddy’s dad. What if he was a good guy? What if he wouldn’t break Teddy’s heart?

Finally, on Christmas morning, he called Queen Bea. He wanted to give her the chance to tell Teddy herself. “He’s asking about his dad,” he said. “I know it’s Ravi. I know he’s alive. He deserves to know him.” If she didn’t tell them where he was, he told her, Johnny would find him on his own.

And on New Year’s Eve, she was gone. What had spooked her so powerfully Johnny didn’t know, but it was enough to send her away for good. Queen Bea was the one who’d left Teddy alone for Eliza and Jude to pump full of drugs. But Johnny might as well have packed up her car and driven her away.