Ten Thousand Saints

Twenty-Two





Jude took the 1 train to the 7 to the 6, piecing together Manhattan. At home, Les was on the futon, snipping dried leaves into the bucket between his knees. He packed some fresh bud into the bowl of his newest bong, Raquelle. “You look like you could use some of this,” he said.

Jude imagined the smoke rising up to fill his lungs. The sweet taste of ashes.

“No, thanks,” he said. He went to the bathroom. He took off his father’s clothes. He turned on the cold water in the shower and stepped inside. The man with the briefcase was still there in his head, Teddy’s ghost come back to haunt him.

At eight o’clock the next morning, the phone in Ravi’s hotel room rang. He rinsed the shaving cream from his face, patted it dry, and, in his bathrobe, crossed the room to the TV to turn down the morning news. On the fourth ring, he picked up the phone. It was the young man he’d met the day before, the friend of his son’s. Had Ravi had breakfast yet?

They met downstairs at the café in front of the Union Square Inn, at one of the two tables on the sidewalk. Ravi ordered a poppy seed muffin and coffee. The boy ordered a bagel and juice. Flies darted around them in the heat, over their plastic silverware, the emptied pats of butter and jam. Ravi told him what he knew—about Bonnie, his search for Teddy (he was getting used to calling him that), the letter from Johnny. From his briefcase, he withdrew the manila envelope containing the newspaper clipping, the case reports, the photo of the four of them at the beach. The boy looked them over.

“You do believe me?” Ravi asked.

Under the table, the boy rolled his skateboard back and forth.

“So she wanted him for herself,” he said.

Ravi swallowed a hard lump of his breakfast. He did not take pleasure in revealing the truth about Bonnie, but this boy, like Johnny, had to know. “She took him to spite me. It was a rash decision, a heated one, but one that she was stubborn enough to live with. Teddy was a”—Ravi fluttered his hands, searching for a word—“I’m sorry to put it this way, but he was. . . .”

“A pawn?”

Ravi winced. “An instrument. An asset. She knew he was valuable to me.” He emptied a packet of Sweet’n Low into his coffee, even though it was already too sweet. “I’ve seen it with my clients again and again. More than money, more than homes and cars and boats, parents use children to settle their scores. Of course, we had very little money, and we weren’t married. Our child was all that was of use to her.”

Jude thought of his parents, conspiring to keep Eliza and Johnny and himself away from Di, the elaborate and inconsequential game of checkers the adults were playing. “But that doesn’t mean she didn’t love Teddy,” he insisted. “All that time she’d been hiding him, and then she just left him behind?”

Ravi told him about Teddy’s wish to find his father, about Johnny’s call to his mother on Christmas, his attempt to help his brother. “If they had found me,” he explained, “I could still have pressed charges. I could have sent her to prison for the abduction of a child. So she abandoned Teddy to save herself.”

That word—abandoned—it was a spiky little briar patch. Jude tried not to think of his own birth mother, but he was caught. It was better, wasn’t it, to be abandoned as a baby, before you could be blamed, or blame yourself? “But why didn’t she take him with her?” Jude asked.

Ravi smacked his lips lightly, as though he were trying to rid his mouth of a bitter taste. “I imagine that, as her hate for me lost its edge, she ceased to care so fiercely.”

Jude squinted into the sun. Ravi was speaking abstractly, but Jude caught the compact weight of his implication, like a shot put in his lap. “To care about Teddy, you mean.”

Ravi waved his hands, as though to soften that idea. “Perhaps she meant to come back for him, to send him some explanation.” Jude knew the benefit of the doubt Ravi was extending was for Teddy’s sake, not his mother’s. “But, of course, she never got the chance.”

From the pocket of his shorts, the boy took out a Velcro wallet, patched with stickers, and from the wallet he took out a photo. He handed it to Ravi. In it, a group of American teenagers smiled widely, toasting the camera with their red plastic cups. Jude leaned across the table and pointed. “That’s Teddy.” At the edge of the picture was a boy, eyes closed, mouth open.

“It’s not a very good picture, but it’s all I’ve got on me.”

Ravi stared at the photograph, his mouth also hanging open. Edward. What was he trying to say, his son, what word was he trying to speak to him?

“Johnny hasn’t shown me any pictures,” was all he could say.

Jude put his wallet away. “You can keep it. My sister’s got another one at home. They put it in the yearbook.”

Ravi thanked him, tucking the picture away in his briefcase.

“Tell me something,” he said. “Your friend wants to give up the child. Why doesn’t she want to give it to me?”

Jude downed the last of his orange juice. He was glad that Teddy’s dad hadn’t abandoned him, that at least one of his parents was decent. But what might have been a happy reunion with his friend’s father had been poisoned by Johnny. When Di had come home, shortly after Neena, she had ordered Johnny and Ravi out of the apartment, and Jude had gathered his things and left, too.

“Because,” Jude said, “she doesn’t want Johnny to be able to see the baby. He’s just been using her so he can hold on to Teddy.”

“But why shouldn’t he see the baby? Eliza can see the baby, too. Doesn’t a child belong with its family?”

Ravi’s clipped sentences, his backward, belated desperation to control his grandchild’s future, reminded Jude of Di. It occurred to him that they would make a fine couple. Ravi and Di, filing their paperwork, placing long-distance phone calls to private investigators while they swirled wine in their glasses. It was impossible to imagine this man with the slovenly Queen Bea, who would have made a more appropriate mate for Les. How did anyone end up with anyone?

“I didn’t get to raise my son,” Ravi said. “This is my second chance.” He presented his credentials. A house with a pool in Coconut Grove, a position at the second largest law firm in Miami, a loving wife who would be a loving mother. He started to take out his own wallet, to show Jude pictures of his own, but Jude didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to know what the woman who would hold Teddy’s baby looked like. All his life, he thought he wanted to know the face of the woman who had given birth to him, but a single picture, a name—it would be too much. It was the not knowing that protected him, the blank page that allowed him to believe she might be anyone, or might not exist at all. He could have been raised by wolves. He could be the son of God or a test tube miracle or for all he knew he could have fallen to Earth with the snow from the sky.

We welcome with love our gift from above.

The waitress came by to clear their paper plates and to refill Ravi’s coffee. When he was little, Harriet hadn’t told Jude about his adoption—Les had gotten to him first. Even now, she rarely mentioned it, the glass elephant she’d built to fill their house. She, too, preferred to be blind to it, to pretend Jude had sprung from her alone. He wondered now if his birth mother felt the same way, if anonymity was a gift to her, too.

“Look,” Jude said. “All this time you’ve known Teddy was with his mom, right?”

“That’s right.”

“You pictured them together, you saw her making him lunch and dropping him off at school. First grade, second grade. All that time, you couldn’t sleep at night, right? Wondering if he was okay, if she was treating him right.”

“That’s right,” said Ravi.

“I think Eliza doesn’t want to wonder the same thing about her kid.”

Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Eliza just wanted to stick it to Johnny.

“So she’d rather give the child to a stranger?” Ravi looked exhausted.

“A stranger would want the baby because they want a baby,” Jude said. “Not because they wish Teddy was alive.”

Ravi took a final swill of his oversweetened coffee. He shook his head, but he didn’t dispute this. It was true that he hadn’t been in the market for a child. Arpita had taken some convincing. But he hadn’t been in the market for a wife, either. Surprises happen, he’d told her. Wonderful surprises, Arpita. Not long after their meeting at the restaurant, Johnny had called with the proposal that had already been forming over the Milans’ dining room table. “Ravi, how big is your house?” And that was it. Ravi could not say no.

He leaned forward and tapped his briefcase. “This is a shame, quite a shame. It would be easier for all parties if she would cooperate. We wouldn’t have to sue for custody. We could avoid the court battle, the battery of tests. We would be acting in the best interest of the child.”

The boy stopped rolling his skateboard. “What kind of tests?”

“A DNA test, a drug test. Johnny tells me the girl has been abusing drugs. If we must, we will request that the judge order a test to determine if she is fit. Fit to decide her child’s fate.” The waitress returned with their bill, and Ravi placed a credit card on the table. “I have witnessed my share of unfit mothers,” he said. “I know one when I see one.”

Rooster answered the door with a towel around his waist. He’d had a good thirty seconds between the buzzer and the knock to throw on some clothes, but he stood there at the door bare-chested, barefoot, the black curls on his tattooed chest matted and wet. He was a hairy motherf*cker, and he’d lost even more weight. He looked like a drowned black cat.

“Where’s Johnny?”

“Why? You gonna finish kickin’ his ass?” Rooster did not sound threatened, but the Band-Aid on his forehead, covering his own wound from the riot, made it difficult for Jude to take him seriously.

“I know he’s staying here. I know he sleeps in that bed with you, okay?”

Rooster thrust Jude into the apartment and closed the door. It seemed bigger, though not big, with the Murphy bed hidden away. Johnny’s army duffel was in the corner, next to his tattoo case and his guitar. “Jesus, you got a loud mouth, kid.” Rooster was half-laughing. “Tell everyone for all I care, but Johnny won’t be very happy with you.” He swaggered into the bathroom. With the door open, he sprayed a shot of deodorant into each armpit.

“I’m not happy with him, either.” Jude dropped his skateboard against the door. “Where is he?”

Rooster said, “Went out to buy some rubbers,” examining his teeth in the mirror. Rubbas. “Regular and Magnum. I won’t tell you who gets which.”

“Oh, Jeezum, don’t make me throw up.”

“You axed me.”

Jude stood with his arms crossed in the middle of the room. He didn’t want to sit. Every surface he imagined Johnny and Rooster f*cking on. He had been mostly successful in fighting off these images, but now, in this apartment, they were not to be escaped. It wasn’t long ago that he’d learned how gay men actually had sex; Teddy’s mother, laughing at them, had used the word heinie. Now he saw Rooster bending Johnny over the bathroom sink, the kitchen counter, the milk crate on his delivery bike. Johnny f*cking his hairy back, this man named Rooster who said “axed,” this bald, punk, homo Tony Danza. Rooster crying out, Ay, oh, oh, ay!

“Did you come over here to tell Johnny he’s a fag? ’Cause it ain’t news to him, not no more.”

“I need to talk to him about Eliza. His wife.”

“Soon to be ex.” Rooster came out of the bathroom. “His lawyer guy’s workin’ on a divorce as we speak. The Krishnas don’t look kindly at divorce, but it don’t look like he’s got a choice.”

“Yeah, well, Johnny needs to tell his lawyer guy to back the f*ck off Eliza. She’s not giving him her baby.”

Rooster shrugged. “The guy wants to adopt the kid. Ain’t nothin’ Johnny can do about it now.”

“He can back him the f*ck off. If they even think about making her take a drug test”—Jude was stabbing a finger in the air—“they will be f*cking sorry. He’s put her through enough shit already.”

“Man, don’t axe me, but if the girl’s been doin’ drugs, what she needs to take is a drug test.”

Jude stepped up to Rooster and stabbed his finger into his pec. “You know why she was doing drugs? Two f*cking joints? Because Johnny was here in this shithole, f*cking you. She’s sixteen and she was alone and she was scared, and Johnny didn’t give one shit about her. He’s been using her all along, as a cover for what he’s been doing with you. Mr. Clean? What a f*cking joke! And if he doesn’t back the f*ck off her baby, I swear to God, I will tell her who he’s been f*cking. I’ll tell everyone.”

“Calm down, kid.”

“You want all your friends knowing about you guys?”

“You think a bunch a straight edge kids are gonna care? We’re all fags anyways. It’s a f*ckin’ front. So shut your f*ckin’ homophobic mouth for a second and listen to yourself.” Rooster tossed Jude’s hand off him. “You sound like the f*ckin’ jealous wife.” From the bag of laundry, Rooster plucked out a T-shirt and pulled it over his head. Youth of Today. “You sure you ain’t the one that’s jealous?”

Rooster let the wet towel drop to the floor. Jude looked away, but not before he saw the bottom half of Rooster’s uncircumcised dick, fat and limp, hanging below the hem of his T-shirt.

This was who Johnny had come home to? This was his type? Had he known all the time he liked guys, had he gazed across rooms at them, at Jude?

So he was jealous. But not because he wanted Johnny to gaze across a room at him. He was jealous of that code word he’d uttered to Rooster—“baby.” He was jealous of them in the way he was jealous of Eliza and Teddy, the coupling so dear they, too, had kept it private. He was jealous of everyone who knew how they wanted to be loved.

Finally Rooster pulled on a pair of what looked like Johnny’s camouflage shorts. “He’d rather marry a girl he doesn’t love than admit that he’s with you,” Jude told him. “You think he gives a shit about you? All he cares about is Teddy’s f*cking baby. He’s obsessed with Teddy’s f*cking baby!”

Rooster sat down on a stool and leaned an elbow on the counter. He looked tired and suddenly old, the floppy bandage on his forehead doing a poor job of keeping him together. “That makes two a youse.” He pointed two fingers at Jude. “You guys gotta get over that kid. Look at you, look how pissed off you are. How long’s he been dead, six months?”

“Don’t f*cking say that, Rooster.”

“It’s a shame and all, but Jesus. You know how many kids have OD’d in this town? It f*ckin’ happens. Why the f*ck you think I’m straight edge?”

“F*ck you, Rooster! You didn’t know him.”

“Neither did Johnny! He barely even knew the kid. He hadn’t seen him in like two years!”

The small flower of satisfaction this comment brought forth swiftly wilted. Jude paced across the room, kicked the minifridge, and squatted on the floor, his head in his hands. It was true: Johnny barely knew Teddy. He barely knew Jude, either. They had both wanted to be the one who knew Teddy best, they had both been Teddy for each other, and now the make-believe had come to an end.

When Rooster spoke again, his voice was softer. “Green,” he said. It was the voice he used to talk to Johnny on the phone, to call him “baby.” He looked for a moment as though he wanted to tell Jude something. It was the distant look he had outside the rec center in Lintonburg as they admired the view together, the mountains, the lake. And then it passed.

Rooster nodded across the small room to Johnny’s bag on the floor. “The guy’s been carryin’ around his kid brother’s ashes in a duffel bag. That’s creepy, man. I’ve been tryin’ for months to get him to leave you and Eliza and that baby alone.”

Jude stood up. “He’s got Teddy’s ashes in there?”

Rooster nodded. “In a f*ckin’ flour jar, man.”

Jude took three sweeping steps over to the bag and unzipped it. Rooster didn’t stop him. Jude rifled through piles of clothes, a freezer bag of cassettes, and then his hand struck something solid. He hauled it out. A clear glass canister, like all of Queen Bea’s kitchen canisters, with the orange rubber lid. Embossed in cursive in the glass was the word Flour, but inside were the pebbled remains of Teddy, his bones and skin and teeth, bits of stone and shell in sand.

“Take it,” Rooster said.

“I’m going to,” Jude said, cradling the ashes awkwardly in his arms. They weighed perhaps as much as a newborn baby, and he looked down at them with the same terror and awe with which a new father might look at his child, holding it for the first time.

“Look, don’t worry,” Rooster said. “I don’t think John’s gonna interfere in your business no more.”

“What does that mean?”

“I got a feelin’ he’s gonna have other priorities soon.” Rooster’s voice was grave. He touched the Band-Aid on his forehead, pressing it into place. “He ain’t gonna have a choice.” Jude didn’t know what Rooster was talking about, but he felt a small spring of sympathy for him. Did he have no mother to tend to his wounds?

He stood up, propping the ashes on his hip. Then he put his skateboard under his other arm and left the apartment. He did not see Johnny on the stairs or in the street. He didn’t see Johnny again, not that day, not ever.

You’re leaving?” Eliza asked.

Jude’s own duffel was packed, slumped at his feet on the kitchen floor. He wound the phone cord around his hand.

“Something just came up,” he said. “I just have to do something back home.” His father was on the futon, pretending not to listen. Jude couldn’t say what he wanted to say. “Don’t worry—I don’t think Teddy’s dad is going to go through with the adoption.”

“Why not?”

“I talked to him.”

“I don’t get it,” she said. She sounded baffled, but resigned to, even fond of, her bafflement. She seemed to have learned that it was the prevailing wilderness in which she would have to exist. “When am I going to see you again?”

Jude unwound the phone cord, then wound it again. Through his bag, he could feel the weight of the glass canister against his ankle.

“You want to come with me?”

“Back to Vermont?”

“Just for a few days. Tell your mom I’ll get you home safe. Way before the baby’s born.”

Eliza sighed. Sixteen, and she had the sigh of a forty-year-old woman.

“I know you’re tired,” Jude said. “Just one more trip.”

When he hung up, his dad came into the kitchen. Jude took McQueen’s case out of his bag and handed it to his father, trading him for a wad of cash.

“If you change your mind, the loft is yours. Davis is going to be out by September one.”

Jude put the cash in his pocket. “I’d have to learn to get used to living off drug money.”

“A straight edge kid like you—that’s a moral conundrum.”

For some reason, Jude’s conscience, ready to fire, sent up an image of Hippie. The next generation of Lintonburg pot seller. The picture was of Hippie hobbling off the high school lawn, his glasses lost, as blind as Teddy, and Jude decided that, if for no other reason than to clear his karma, he would finally return to Hippie the money in his pocket.

Les hauled Jude’s bag up from the floor. “I’ll walk you to the van,” he said.