Ten Thousand Saints

Thirteen





The Champlain Recreation Center, like Jude’s house, had over the years served Lintonburg in a number of faces. During the French and Indian War it was erected as a tavern, where the Green Mountain Boys were said to have raised their glasses and laid their heads. Burned down in the mid-nineteenth century, it was rebuilt to house the local headquarters of the Sons of Temperance. Now the brick building across the street from Ira Allen High School functioned as a voting poll, bingo hall, tutoring center, AA meeting room, and headquarters for the only Lamaze class within a fifty-mile radius. For years, the twin handrails along the front steps had been prime skating ground for Jude and Teddy, but they’d only been through the doors once.

Inside, there was not the scorched, masculine smell of armpit and feedback. The walls were not plastered with the syrupy film of dried sweat or the stickers and flyers of past performers; the bathroom stalls did not advertise Cro-Mags lyrics, anarchist doctrine, or the telephone numbers of girls who swallowed. Instead, across a scarred floor the waxy yellow of school buses and number two pencils, a pair of basketball hoops faced off. At the back of the room were a plywood platform painted barn red, a handful of old par can stage lights with the color burned out, and a sound system that was equipped to handle the karaoke nights, pageants, and poetry slams of the likes of Prudence Keffy-Horn. Jude and Johnny and Kram and Delph had moved a hundred folding metal chairs to either side of the stage, behind the piano, the volleyball net, and the chalkboard-on-wheels that said WELCOME TO SPAGHETTI DINNER FAMILY NIGHT! PLEASE FORM 2 LINES! The only chair that remained was stationed at the table inside the door, and Eliza sat in it, stuffing wrinkled bills into a cash box as fast as the youth of Lintonburg could hand them to her.

The flyer—

Live Music at the REC CENTER!



Jam Masters PHROG

and New York Hardcore from ARMY OF ONE

and GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS

SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 8 P.M. $5

ALL AGES!



—had been lettered by Johnny, photocopied at the A&P, and posted on telephone poles citywide. When they’d pled their case for an alcohol-free venue to Barb Delaney, the gray-haired lesbian who ran the rec center, she’d licked the point of her pencil and said, “When do you want to start?” Johnny signed on as chaperon. Delph, who used to supply the drummer of Phrog, called him up and asked him to top off their lineup. Now, all the kids who’d been trying for years to sneak into Jacque’s to see them play, praying their fake IDs would get them past the door, walked in as though they owned the place. Some of the crowd had carpooled up from New York, guys who ran with Johnny’s old band Army of One, which now sported a new lead guitarist. Johnny had convinced them to come up. In the dark of the gymnasium, it was hard to tell who was from New York, who was from Lintonburg, and who was from the periphery—Rutland, Montpelier, the far-flung farms of Linton County. There were hardcore kids in black jeans with chains drooping from their pockets and bandanas tied around the ankles of their boots, longhairs in layered Bajas, four or five skinheads in wife-beaters and suspenders, two black Rastas with dreads as fat as bananas, a punk with a lizard green Mohawk who was no older than twelve, and a pale-faced boy in a cape wearing what seemed to be vampire teeth. The girls could be counted on two hands. Two were fat, with silver hoops through their nostrils. One was making out with the vampire. Where did these people come from? And where were they last year when Jude was getting locker-slammed by Tory Ventura for sporting a devil lock? He’d had no idea how well he’d blend in his mask.

It was the Ronald Reagan mask he’d worn last Halloween with Teddy. He’d be onstage, but he’d be invisible. With Phrog playing tonight, Hippie might be there, too. And if Hippie was there, Jude hoped, Tory might be, too. Jude didn’t want them to see him before he saw them. He wanted to have time for a sneak attack.

“Um, welcome,” he said into the mike, shouldering his new guitar. The lights dimmed, and the crowd issued a lukewarm bellow. Jude squinted into the crowd. He didn’t see Hippie or Tory. “Welcome to Spaghetti Dinner Family Night,” he said.

Anyone in the audience that night would have seen the fortieth president of the United States, in camo pants and T-shirt, doing beautiful injury to his Les Paul. Who the f*ck are these guys? shouted the kids in the crowd into their friends’ ears, not just because the singer’s face was concealed from view but because their sound wasn’t bad, it was hard, it was wicked. What the f*ck is this? they asked in the beat between songs, before the next one started up.

The fact was, even before the Green Mountain Boys’ debut was over, Jude had forgotten it. The stage was a ship he was riding. His voice was a transmission from another planet. He was not on shrooms—Get that shit, he sang, away from me!—but he remembered the one time he’d been on this stage before, for a class play about the Green Mountain Boys in which he wore a tricornered hat Harriet had fashioned out of black felt. He and Teddy had sneaked a few shrooms before the call, and carousel horses had flitted in the aisles of the audience. He remembered only a single line from the play, spoken in a lisp by the kid who played Ethan Allen: “We will use violence and coercion, but we will take no lives!”

That was how the militia gave its name to the band. “They were vigilantes,” Jude had recalled one afternoon in the basement. “Guerrilla citizens.”

“Like Gorilla Biscuits?” said Kram, who was pawing through a pile of Harriet’s nude drawings.

“Outlaws,” Johnny clarified.

“It sounds like a bluegrass band,” Delph worried.

Kram said, “My mom has a dinette set from Ethan Allen.”

“It’s not bad,” said Johnny.

Jude had expected Johnny to head the band’s lineup; it was the natural order of things. Johnny had led Army of One, and he sang, and he was the superior guitarist, and he was the oldest, and the straightest; he was Johnny. So Jude had been unprepared for Johnny to hand the mike over to him one afternoon while they practiced in the basement. “You try this one.” It was as though Johnny were testing him, seeing what he could do. And before long it seemed right, Jude’s voice the band’s voice, Jude’s basement, Jude’s equipment, let’s ask Jude. And even though Johnny was the band’s spiritual taskmaster, the straight edge grandfather, he seemed to prefer the anonymity of second string. Teddy had been the same way, Jude thought. He was always willing to go along for the ride.

Teddy was not here tonight; he missed the rapturous woof of the crowd; the plea for an encore; the drunk, breathless step down from the stage. But here was his brother, finding Jude again in the humid press of the crowd, holding a plastic cup of water up to the lip of Jude’s mask, easing his head back and helping him drink.

Toward the end of Phrog’s set, Jude spotted Hippie. He was standing at the back of the gymnasium, performing a slow, swimmy dance that required closing the eyes. Jude felt his heartbeat slowly accelerate. He put a hand to his face to make sure the mask was still there, though he could smell its oily film, see the blurry flesh-colored sockets around his eyes. When Hippie headed for the door, Jude followed him outside and watched him cross the street, safely out of range of city property, to the chain-link fence in front of the high school. Hippie’s bike was not in sight, but he was wearing his fag bag, as well as a suede jacket with tassels down the arms. Jude didn’t want to get too close yet. He stood up against the building, watching the cluster of smokers gathered out front.

“Nice set, Mr. President,” one of them called.

“Thanks,” Jude called back. His voice sounded rubbery inside his mask.

“You guys going to have more shows here?”

“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I hope so.”

Someone else joined him from the shadows, leaning an elbow on the wall. “Hey, man, can I get an autograph?”

Jude flinched.

“F*ck off, Rooster.”

Rooster nodded toward the smokers. “What do you think those posers thought of your song ‘Blowing Smoke’?”

“They’re probably going to buy the seven-inch.”

“Oh, yeah? When’s it comin’ out?”

“Soon as we record it.”

Rooster smiled again. “F*ckin’ Vermont.” Vahmont. Jude had never heard so much New York in his state’s name before. “Never thought I’d be playin’ here.”

Across the street, Hippie was joined by one of the fat girls, and she took out a cigarette for Hippie to light.

“Thanks for coming up, man.”

“Thanks for lettin’ us crash.” Rooster shrugged. “I didn’t think we’d see you again after Johnny left.”

Jude said, “Your new singer sounds good, though.”

“Yeah, but he can’t tattoo worth a shit.” In the wan light of the lamppost, Jude could see the dark contours of the tattoos on Rooster’s arms, as thickly woven as Johnny’s. He looked thinner than Jude remembered, his shoulders bony through his T-shirt. “So, where’s the child bride?”

Normally Jude tried not to wonder what people must have thought of the whole arrangement: husband and wife and Jude, living under Jude’s mom’s roof. He tried not to think about what he thought about it. At first Eliza had included herself in the activities of the boys in the basement. She presented them with a tofu cheesecake she’d baked. She clapped encouragingly from her seat at the top of the stairs. But the louder and more crowded their practices became, the less she was around.

“We sent her home early,” he said, even though she’d left on her own after the Green Mountain Boys had wrapped up, turning the cash box over to Johnny. “She needs her rest.”

“’Course,” Rooster said. Someone else exited the building; the noodley strains of Phrog swelled out into the night air, then hushed again when the door swung closed. The last of the day’s light had been drained from the sky—it, too, was bruised tattoo blue—and now it was shot through with the faintest stars. At the bottom of the hill, the Adirondacks floated on the blade of the lake. “That picture is so pretty,” Rooster said, “I just want to f*ck it up.”

It wasn’t a cigarette Hippie was smoking, but a joint. Jude could smell it from across the street. Hippie’s apartment had smelled like that same breed, and Jude remembered the night they’d bonded over that smell, Hippie lighting the bowl while Jude hit his bong, Hippie telling Jude what a bummer it was about Teddy. I heard he choked on his own vomit, like Hendrix. That true?

“That Hippie?” Rooster nodded his head at him.

“That’s him,” said Jude. “Johnny says to leave him alone.”

Rooster shook his head. “Johnny’s gettin’ posi on me. He’s just jealous you got a new guitar instead of payin’ off some f*ckin’ dealer.”

Jude looked from Rooster to Hippie and back again. He felt dangerously unhinged without Johnny at his side to hold him back. “You seen Delph and Kram?” he asked Rooster.

Rooster pulled at his bottom lip. It was what Johnny did when he was thinking. “I know some guys. Came up from D.C. You see the guy up front in the Champion sweatshirt?”

“How many?” Jude asked.

“They’re good guys,” said Rooster.

When he returned a minute later, nine guys were panting at his side. Their T-shirts were soaked, their hair spiky with sweat. Delph and Kram, plus the three other guys from Army of One. Two more, with Xs shaved in the back of their heads, Jude recognized from laser tag in New York. The other two were the guys from D.C.: the guy in the Champion sweatshirt and another, who was missing both front teeth. Alone, they were not formidable—most of them looked too young to drive—but together, they resembled a band photo: hostile and bored. “You guys know Jude?”

Jude whipped off his mask.

“Where is this p-ssy?” they wanted to know.

Then Jude was leading them across the empty street, their sneakers scuffing the pavement, toward the dark lawn of the high school. They were in the middle of the street when Hippie looked up and saw them. He seemed to be counting. Eleven. Eleven against one. Two if you counted the girl.

Then he recognized Jude. “Whoa,” Hippie said, holding up his hands. A joint was still burning in one of them. “Look who it is. What are you, some kind of skinhead now?”

Jude stepped onto the sidewalk, smiling hugely. He couldn’t help himself—his heart felt like a coil ready to spring. “Hi, Hippie,” he said. Behind the chain-link fence, in front of the grand, stone edifice of the school, two flags—the Stars and Stripes, and the state of Vermont—flapped at the top of the flagpole. Behind Jude, the guys were spilling off the sidewalk and into the street, bouncing from sneaker to sneaker, waiting for his cue.

“You got some balls,” said Rooster, “smokin’ that shit out here.”

“You selling that shit?” someone else wanted to know.

For them, it was all about jumping some small-fry drug dealer. They were just looking for confirmation—then the fun could start. But Jude wanted confirmation of something else. “Who helped you break into my mom’s greenhouse, Hippie?”

Hippie stroked his beard. It was the kind of full, unkempt beard you see on old men, but twisted into two dreads, like a forked tongue. A look of surprise crossed his face, then recognition, then uncertainty. “Nobody helped Hippie do anything,” he said, pushing his glasses up his nose. “Hippie didn’t help anyone.”

“Where’s your friend Tory, then?” Delph asked.

“Hippie doesn’t know what you’re talking about, man.” He nodded sternly at the girl, who scurried away. His narrow, greenish eyes were cloudy and cold. “Tory’s not even in town. He’s visiting colleges with his parents.”

The idea of Tory involved in this well-behaved, adult-chaperoned venture—visiting colleges—let some of the air out of Jude’s sails. “Look,” he said, slamming his fist into his palm, “someone smashed up my mom’s greenhouse, and if it wasn’t you, you got your bodyguard to do it.”

Hippie didn’t deny that Tory was his bodyguard. But he seemed troubled by the association, his eyebrows knit under the frames of his glasses. He took an anxious toke. “Why would you think it was Hippie?” he asked. He released a series of smoke rings, like the tail of a thought bubble, and Jude could guess what was coming next. “Is it because you stole half a pound of super fruit from him?”

Jude didn’t answer. They were standing on the sidewalk in the unlit space between two streetlights, and it was difficult to see in the dark. He stood with his arms crossed, returning Hippie’s stare.

“I think you must have your facts wrong,” said Rooster, stepping forward. “This kid’s straight edge. Believes drugs of any kind are for the weak-willed. Doesn’t touch the stuff.” Rooster draped his arm around Jude’s shoulder, and Jude felt the untapped force of all the guys behind him. Why deny it? What was Hippie going to do about it now?

Jude stepped forward, letting Rooster’s arm drop. “No,” he said. “It was me. I stole your shwag. You know what happened to it? My mom flushed it. Wshhhhh. Gone. I’d do it again.”

Hippie shook his head in disgust. His dreadlocks shuddered. He walked a few paces away, rested his hands on top of the fence, and bowed his head, his hair hanging over his face. Then he turned around and launched a brown wad of spit on the sidewalk. “I wouldn’t go after your mom,” he said. “I respect her talent, man. I told Tory to leave her out of it.”

Hippie plugged his mouth with his joint, realizing what he’d said. Or maybe he’d let it slip on purpose; maybe he was giving up Tory to save himself. Either way, it was Tory who had broken into the greenhouse, maybe alone, maybe with some of his drunk friends, and demolished his mother’s work.

Jude almost took a step back. They’d given Hippie a little scare. They’d wait for Tory to return to town and save their beating for him. Jude exchanged glances with Delph and Kram. They shrugged, waiting for his call. Across the street, from the rec center, a blast of applause erupted, drunken hoots. The audience wanted an encore.

Then Hippie said something else. “Brother, Hippie’s been nothing but nice to you.” He was shaking his head again, his hands on his hips. “When your little friend died, I gave you a good deal on that weed. Why would you rip me off?”

Jude’s stomach sank to his bowels. It was what Tory had called Teddy, just before he’d pulled out his belt. Little friend. This feeling was followed not by anger or grief but by an excited relief; he’d been waiting for a reason to justify what he wanted to do.

“Call him my little friend again, Hippie.”

Hippie stood there with his jaw clenched, joint burning defiantly between his lips. For a few seconds, no one said anything. No one cared to ask what friend they were talking about. They were there to fight, their X ’d hands curled into fists, ready to swing.

“Hippie’s heard things about you straight edge guys,” said Hippie, nodding at all of them. “No sex, right? No sex with girls—too busy sucking each other’s dicks.”

They lurched and seethed behind Jude; he nudged them back. He wanted to be the one to throw the first punch. Who was this new Hippie? Why was he provoking them?

“Call him my little friend again, Hippie!”

Hippie ducked, pretending to put out his joint on the sidewalk. He was leaning over, looking up, the leather tassels of his jacket swinging.

“Is that what you and your little friend used to do? Suck each other’s dicks?”

How strange and pure this high—wanting to hurt someone, and knowing he could. There Jude was, standing above him. He swung his leg back and thrust his knee forward, clipping Hippie under the chin. Hippie sprawled backward against the chain-link fence.

They went as easy on him as eleven guys could—kicking him gingerly, roughing up his dreads. He kept squealing, “Peace, peace,” and then he was just crying. They let Jude take the lead, clamping down Hippie’s limbs while Jude pounded his shoulders, his stomach, his jaw. “Call him my little friend now, you hippie shit!” Jude’s voice visited from far away. “You worthless hippie f*ck!” Hippie didn’t answer, but he was conscious; his glasses had fallen off, and his eyes, exposed, were blinking involuntarily. Straddling him, Jude leaned back and gaped up at the black sky, gulping air.

He shouldn’t have let up. He should have known that Hippie wouldn’t have goaded them if he hadn’t expected backup. Here they came, charging across the street, led by the fat girl with the ring in her nose, the messenger. Not only six or seven hippies, but six or seven jocks, plus a dozen other hungry-faced boys in a number of uniforms. What were the teams? Who was winning? It didn’t seem to matter. Someone opened the gate and the crowd emptied into the schoolyard, plunging headlong into the tall grass. The Phrog-heads, the jocks, the rest of the college stoners in bleached jeans and boat shoes who had nowhere else to go, met the straight edge kids running, and they all went tumbling down the hill. The skinheads found themselves on the straight edge team, and the little kid with the Mohawk—his hands stained the same green as his hair—was pummeling away on a jock. Jude couldn’t account for Hippie—the guys holding him down had become otherwise engaged, and now Jude was the one on the ground. Some dude in a varsity jacket attacked him, and they rolled through the grass, Jude gripping the guy’s jacket in his hands, the guy’s stubble burning Jude’s face. Jude took a punch in the hip, gave one in the chin, took one in the nose. Then, confused, turning, the guy leapt up and tackled a hippie. Jude stood, safe for the moment, his body a frozen column in the middle of the yard. Maybe the guy was just having fun. Roughhousing. Some people were in fact laughing. It looked like a hastily choreographed dance. Rumble was the word that came to mind. Like West Side Story. Never more so than when Johnny, appearing out of nowhere, pulled a switchblade on Hippie.

Jude saw the metal gleaming white under the single streetlight, but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Johnny, kneeling, held the knife low at his side. It was all Hippie needed to see. Putting his hands up, beard dark with blood, he backed away, limping swiftly across the lawn. His glasses were gone.

“You guys! Let’s get out of here. These guys are crazy.”

Heads rose; final punches were thrown. The whole thing had lasted no longer than five minutes, and within another five, most of the field was clear. Some members of the straight edge crew remained, catching their breath, hobbling to the swings.

Jude stood in the middle of the lawn, doubled over. He was enjoying the scene. He was watching the black eyeball of the sky, the dim lights of Linton Street. In a minute Johnny would come over and put a hole in his happiness, but now the flags were billowing in the breeze, and Jude knew as he knew the inside of those high school halls, where he and Teddy had been prey, that the Vermont flag was adorned with a shield, two pine boughs forming an X, and a crimson banner: “Freedom and Unity.” He only wished that Teddy could be here, to witness with Jude the sweet taste of being on the winning team.

An hour later, ten of them were crowded in Jude’s basement, spread out in sleeping bags. Several were wearing an article of Jude’s clothing—sweatpants, a T-shirt, socks—to replace the torn or dirtied or bloodied clothes they’d arrived in. Several were in their underwear. Some held plastic bags of ice to a forehead, or jaw, or ribs; some sat with their chins tipped to the ceiling, toilet paper clogging their nostrils. Jude was one of them. In addition to the steady stream of blood, his nose issued a slimy black fluid, like oil. They assured him he was fine—it was the natural grime of a hardcore show.

Jude had already gotten permission from Harriet to put up Army of One for the night, but after they’d all come to his defense, he’d had no choice but to ask them to stay, too. Harriet liked very little about the idea. She’d come downstairs in her nightgown to find ten teenage boys standing in front of her open refrigerator, looking as if they’d been mauled by a pack of lions. “We were playing football,” Jude explained. “Tackle,” someone added. Jude took her into the living room and told her calmly, reasonably, that these guys were good guys, clean guys—like Johnny—that they just needed a place to sleep. Did she remember when she was young, when she hitchhiked and protested, remember Woodstock, when she lived in a tent with strangers? She was not accustomed to discouraging Jude from making friends—his new popularity, he could tell, relieved her—so after a round of questions and conditions, she let them stay. Everyone agreed, within Harriet’s earshot, what a rad mom she was.

Besides! they said, crashing on some dude’s floor was the whole point of being on the road. They sat Indian-style, lay on their stomachs, on the floor, on the old row of seats from the van, chugging Gatorade, staying awake through the Teen Idles’ Minor Disturbance, through Minor Threat’s self-titled, 7 Seconds’ United We Stand, Agnostic Front’s United Blood. The room was filled with the faint fumes of deodorant and the mothball aroma of sleeping bags. Tomorrow, they said, they were going to see Bold at the Anthrax in Stamford, Connecticut, then back to school on Monday morning. “Want to come?” they asked, but Delph and Kram had to work, and Jude didn’t have a ride home. They were used to that, weekends in their parents’ crappy cars, driving to shows in Boston, Baltimore, Syracuse. They were all skinny from meals-on-the-go—most of them were vegan; it was hard to find health food in drive-thrus on I-95—and most of them bore the bruises and scars of their nights in the pit. One kid had broken his ankle jumping off a stage at a Verbal Assault show. The kid with the missing teeth had lost them in a fight at the Starlight Ballroom in Philly; the skinhead who’d removed them had given him fifty cents, like the tooth fairy—a quarter for each. They talked about the people they’d met on the road: the SHARPS, Skinheads Against Racial Prejudice—you had to look hard to see the Xs through their swastikas; the fruitarians, who ate only food that grew on trees; the freegans, vegans who dove through Dumpsters for all their meals. Someone knew someone who tied bells to his shoelaces to warn insects on the ground that he was coming. Those posi guys could take a good thing too far.

Hippies, though—that was a new one.

“Dude,” said one of them, “when Mr. Clean took out that knife, I was like, whoa.”

It occurred to Jude that Johnny had been offering Hippie an out. What had passed between them in the schoolyard had been a quiet negotiation. I don’t want to use this, Hippie. Get out of here while you can. Afterward Johnny continued to hold the knife at his side while he admonished Jude, not exactly brandishing it, but offering it as evidence. “Quit starting shit!” he’d said. “I’m tired of cleaning up after you.”

“You know what he called Teddy?”

“I don’t care, Jude.”

“He called Teddy a fag.”

“I don’t care what he called him! You’re the one who stole his weed. And you’re riding your straight edge high horse?” He shook his head in disappointment. “A straight edge kid should be the one breaking bongs. You’ve got it all backwards.”

Johnny had finally pocketed the knife, but he hadn’t uttered a word as they’d all filed back into the building to load out their equipment. They’d left everything in the van, and Johnny had headed straight upstairs to Jude’s room. Rooster had followed him to try to calm him down.

“Rooster feels bad,” Jude said, “because he’s the one who helped to start shit.”

“Whatever,” said one of the guys. “It’s a hardcore show. What does Mr. Clean expect?”

“That’s why he left his first band,” said another. “He was p-ssying out.”

“Doesn’t he have a wife?” someone wondered. “What is he, eighteen?”

“Yeah, but she’s pregnant,” said someone else.

“That’s not very edge.”

“That’s totally edge. What’s he supposed to do, abandon her? He’s committed.”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “He goes around pledging a clean lifestyle, and it turns out he’s knocked up some girl he just met?”

“Whatever, man, you were seeing that girl in Ohio.”

“We were pen pals! She’s in the scene!”

“She was until she graduated.”

“True Till College, man.”

Jude shot a look at Delph and Kram, reminding them to keep quiet. “Johnny really . . . cares about her,” Jude said, even though he hadn’t seen him acknowledge Eliza in days. “He’s trying to help her.”

“I’m sure he’s helping himself to her upstairs right now,” someone said.

“I wish he was down here, though. I want him to do Xs on my hands.”

“We could borrow his kit,” said someone else.

“No way,” said Jude. “He’d kill us.”

“We can do our own,” said Kram. He peeled up the sleeve of his T-shirt, showing off the poke-and-stick tattoo he’d given himself at age fourteen. KRAM. It was inscribed across his meaty shoulder, in haphazard pointillist fashion. In Jude’s opinion, no one should take advice from a kid who did his own tattoo backward, but the guys lit up. “All you need is some India ink and a needle.”

Jude stepped over the sleeping bags and went to Harriet’s desk drawer. “Is this India ink?” he asked, holding up two black bottles. For once, he was glad to have an artist for a mother. In the sewing basket above the sink, he found a cloth tomato stabbed with needles.

Delph went first. No one was p-ssying out of this one. He offered Kram the back of his hand, eight other heads bent over them in a huddle. By the time Kram was done with one leg of the X, the rest of the room had begun their own, dipping the needles in the flame of one of Harriet’s candles, then running them under hot water. Jude paired up with the kid with the missing teeth, tracing his Magic-Markered Xs, blotting up the blood with a rag, then another when he’d soaked the first, so much blood that it was hard to see what he was doing. Then the kid did Jude’s. Only the right hand—the left was too scarred from the fire at the temple. The tattoo hurt more than he’d thought it would. It took a long time. Toward the end, exhausted and numb, Jude fell in and out of sleep.

The single X, Jude saw when he woke the next morning, was dark and fat and a little crooked, and still crusty with ink. He sat up. Everyone was asleep, feet in faces, asses in armpits, mouths quivering a lullaby of snores. His head was heavy, and he felt as if he’d been pelted by several baseballs. He lay down again, but he couldn’t fall asleep—he kept opening his eyes to look at his hand. As long as he had a hand, this X would be on it. X marks the spot. Jude was here.

Harriet and Prudence were at the kitchen counter, eating breakfast and sharing the Free Press. Arts & Culture for Harriet. Prudence was perusing a special insert on prom dresses, her face hanging three inches above the page.

“Oh, Christ. What happened to you?” Harriet looked from Jude’s face to his hand.

“Mom! He has a tattoo!”

“That’s not a tattoo,” Harriet said, leaping up from her stool and grabbing his arm. “It’s paint or something.” She wagged his wrist. “My God, is that my India ink?”

“And you got beat up!” Prudence said, slamming down her spoon.

“Shut the f*ck up, Pru.”

Harriet put a palm to his forehead. “Look at your nose—it’s purple.”

“It was just a football game. It got a little crazy.”

“One of the boys downstairs did this to you?” Jude shrugged away. “They’re lucky I didn’t see that bruise last night. Jude, Jesus, what am I supposed to say?”

“Say he’s grounded.”

“You had one good hand left,” Harriet said sadly, studying the X. “And now you’ve ruined that one, too.” She rubbed at some of the ink, hoping she might be wrong.

Upstairs, Eliza was in bed. She had been nestled here in her trundle since she’d come home the night before, dusk still settling at the window. She’d been here when she heard the boys arrive long after dark, the slamming of car doors, a set of footsteps, then another, passing by her door on the way upstairs. She was here when they left again this morning, the voices calling thank-yous and apologies and good-byes. “Are you okay?” Prudence whispered, coming back in to check on her, and Eliza had nodded and rolled over. Annabel Lee did not like her mother to sleep on her back. She did not like her mother to sleep at all.

“We’ll wait until the baby’s born,” Johnny had told her. “You’re pregnant with my brother’s baby. Wouldn’t it be disrespectful to his memory?”

When she’d asked him if she could wear his beads, he’d put a protective hand to his throat. Already the subway token he had given Teddy hung from her neck—what more did she want? “It’s not a class ring, Eliza,” he’d said.

She’d gotten out of bed only once, in the middle of the night, to empty the bladder that the baby liked to kick. She’d tiptoed up to Jude’s room and stood outside the door, wondering if anyone was in there. But the room was quiet.

He’d be lying if he said he hadn’t been counting the days until Rooster’s visit. But then, he’d been lying about so much for so long now that he barely remembered what was real. That night, as he waited for Rooster’s knock on Jude’s bedroom door, he’d imagined the sick thrill of being with Rooster in the top bunk of Jude’s bed—two boys at a sleepover, staying up late under the covers, and the relief of leaving the rest of the world downstairs. Rooster was what was real.

But when Johnny locked the door behind them and climbed the ladder to the top bunk, Rooster didn’t follow. He sank into the bean bag chair in the corner. The desk lamp bled a thin, gray light.

“Baby, I’m sick.”

Johnny sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the bed. He remembered the tree house he and Teddy had played in. He hadn’t wanted to admit to his brother that he was scared of heights, but now he felt again that the ground was very far away.

“How sick?”

Rooster shrugged. His cheeks, once meaty, had caved in, as though he’d removed a pair of false teeth. Johnny had thought he’d been protesting his absence. Fasting out of stubbornness, or too heartbroken to eat. “Two hundred T cells. Whatever the f*ck that means.”

Johnny closed his eyes. He was sitting in the tree house in Delaware, and Teddy was below him, looking up into the branches, waiting for him to fall. He clung to the edge of the bed, hands shaking.

“Is that . . . still the virus? Or . . . ?”

Rooster pulled at his bottom lip. “The syndrome.” He cleared his throat. “I got maybe a year.”

The syndrome. Maybe a year.

“Maybe?”

“Maybe less. Maybe more. You can get a free test at a clinic. Results come back pretty quick.”

And Johnny opened his eyes. The idea of needing a test—the possibility of being sick himself, something he had feared for so long—had not immediately occurred to him. For once in his life, he had not thought of himself first. And now the thought did not scare him. What scared him was being as far from Rooster as he was from Teddy.

“Come back with me,” Rooster said. He didn’t have much time. In the light from the desk lamp, Johnny could make out Rooster’s blood-limned knuckles. He wondered how much of Rooster’s blood had been spilled that night, if he knew how reckless it was to start a fight. He was a brutal son of a bitch. He would go down swinging.

But Johnny didn’t go back with Rooster. He couldn’t do it anymore—watch the people in his life drop like birds shot from a branch. Rooster slept on the bottom bunk, and in the morning he got into someone’s car and went back to New York, where he delivered his uncle’s sandwiches on his bike, fed the ducks in Central Park, and, for the first time, rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and saw the city smoking all around him. When he got back to his apartment, Johnny was sitting on his bed, folding Rooster’s laundry. It had taken him a little less than a week.