Ten Thousand Saints

Three





The Atari comes on Jude’s ninth birthday. It’s three Christmases after everybody already has one, but when his father brings the package downstairs after dinner—the whole thing wrapped in that morning’s Lintonburg Free Press, the cords coiled around it and the joystick balanced on top, as if somebody had packed up the cat—Jude’s so excited he doesn’t care that his father bought it at the Ferrisburg Flea Market.

“Look at that,” his mother marvels, coming into the kitchen. She’s wearing her silky rouge-pink dress and smoking a cigarette and smelling like patchouli. She puts her hand in Jude’s curls.

“It’s got Frogger in it!” Jude says, pulling out the cartridge still wedged inside. On the wood paneling of the game system, the numbers 44.99 are written in Magic Marker, but the first 4 is in a different color than the second, and in his dad’s handwriting.

“You shouldn’t have spent so much money,” says his mother dryly to his father, who is flossing his teeth at the table.

“Nothing’s too good for my birthday boy.”

It’s the night of his parents’ New Year’s Eve party, and for once Jude doesn’t mind sharing his birthday with his parents’ friends. The house is full of eggnog and balloons, which that afternoon Jude helped to blow up. His dad rubs a stray one on Jude’s head, letting it hang above him like a cartoon thought bubble. Then he sends him upstairs, promising he’ll wake him at midnight.

In the bean bag chair in his room, on the black-and-white TV with the rabbit ears, he plays Frogger, winning again and again. He’s played it at Frederick Watt’s house, and each time he’s kicked Frederick Watt’s ass. There is no greater exhilaration than the mad dash of the frog against heavier and heavier traffic, the leap from log to log across the croc-infested waters, the perfect dance of plunking oneself safely in one of the boxes at the top of the screen, unless it’s watching one’s little sister being squashed repeatedly by a truck, two leaps into the street. No matter what those boxes at the top of the screen are or why a frog would want to be in them—each time the circus music begins again, death has been evaded, shelter has been found.

But after Prudence, crying, tired of dying, goes to bed, Frogger ceases to jump. The screen is a storm of grays, the street, the river, a jumble of shapes just out of reach. Jude removes the cartridge, blows mightily into it as he’s seen Frederick Watt do, but the thing’s broken. His heart beats with disappointment. Downstairs, Paul Simon is singing “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover,” to which Jude and Prudence know all the verses. There’s laughing, and that high-pitched delight in women’s voices. Just slip out the back, Jack. He puts on his bathrobe and his boots and climbs out the window, down the rusty fire escape from the third floor to the first.

Through the thin yellow curtains, he can see the party taking shape in the living room, just below eye level. There are the Hausers and the Mayhews, and the lady who poses for the life drawing class Harriet teaches (she’s wearing clothes), and the Donahoes, and the rest of the botany professors and their pretty wives. The glasses in their hands are filled with liquid the color of fluoride rinse, except for Mrs. Donahoe’s, which looks like it’s filled with ginger ale. She’s wearing a sheer white dress with a slit up to her thigh. Jude kneels to find the part in the curtains. He can see Mrs. Donahoe’s nipples, and her outie belly button, which looks like a SpaghettiO. She’s examining the ice in her glass. She looks, Jude thinks, sad.

He sits up straight. He’s on the bottom rung of the fire escape, his legs dangling over the edge, and when he turns around, he can just see the roof of the greenhouse. He can see the Christmas lights blinking in the window of the office building next door—red, green, red—and the wreath of mistletoe his father has hung on the front of the camper van parked in the alley below. He can hear the front door of the house opening and closing, and he can see Mr. Donahoe, the department chair, come around the corner in his overcoat. He’s big and tall, with a shock of white-blond hair and a nose with a cleft in the middle, like one of those monster strawberries. He leans up against the side of the van, in its shadow. Jude sits very still, thinking that if he can make himself invisible, something will happen. What seems like many minutes later, his mother comes out of the house, her camel-colored coat draped around her shoulders, a martini glass in her hand. In her unlaced snow boots, she walks to the van and, unsurprised to find Mr. Donahoe there, lights a cigarette beside him. The two of them are talking close, so close Jude can’t hear them, their lips moving just a few inches apart. The van is called the Purple People Eater, because Jude’s dad painted it lavender and once fit twenty-four friends inside it.

The Donahoes have been coming over to play poker for years, dancing in the living room and smoking the Donahoes’ hookah after sending Jude and Prudence to bed. One night that summer, when his parents went to the Donahoes’ house for dinner, they left Jude and Prudence in the van parked in the Donahoes’ driveway, too cheap to hire a sitter, with their comic books and Cracker Jacks. A slumber party, Les said. Jude told Prudence ghost stories, swallowing the orange glow of the flashlight in his mouth, until she cried herself to sleep in her sleeping bag.

And one morning not long ago, when Jude asked his mother where his father was, she looked at Jude as though trying to think of a good lie, and then, changing her mind, said, “He’s on the Donahoes’ boat with Mrs. Donahoe.” She was emptying a glass ashtray in the garbage can, and she banged it so hard it split down the middle and sliced her finger open. Jude has been on the Donahoes’ sailboat before. It’s named Feelin’ Groovy, and below deck there’s a bed.

But the way Mr. Donahoe is leaning into Jude’s mother’s hair is more businesslike than romantic, conspiratorial in the way Jude and Prudence occasionally are. They look worried, Jude thinks. He can’t hear their whispers, only the music inside, and the early fireworks bursting here and there over Tamarack Street, and over the lake, where other people are having parties. Jude’s mother pours the green liquid from her glass into the snow, drops her cigarette in the puddle, and goes inside. After she leaves, Mr. Donahoe, who once for no reason gave Jude a very valuable collector’s copy of Captain America 100, takes a piss beside the van, then follows her. The snow has started again, white flakes floating down like feathers in a pillow fight.

It’s snowing still, maybe several hours later, when Jude wakes up to more sounds in the alley—the slamming of the van door. Crawling from his bed, still in his bathrobe and boots, he opens the window and hangs his head outside. The bottom half of his father is disappearing into the Purple People Eater, a flashlight bobbing inside. Jude thinks he must be sleeping in the camper, as he has been known, in warmer weather, to do. Instead he emerges with the sleeping bag in his arms. He’s now wearing a pair of snow boots, a parka, and the dashiki he wore to Woodstock. He’s halfway to the greenhouse, waddling through the snow, when he stops, panting heavily, then looks up at Jude’s window.

“What?” he says.

Jude doesn’t say anything. The cold air is burning his ears and his nose.

“Come on, then,” says his father, shuffling along again.

By the time Jude reaches the greenhouse, his father has turned on all the lights—twelve overhead lamps, plugged into a network of extension cords—and the warm room is getting warmer. The light is bright and orange, and the air smells sweet and spicy at the same time. It’s been a while since Jude was allowed in here.

There is no glass, no hothouse plastic, no natural light. But it’s green, and it’s a house of sorts: an aluminum shed painted the color of a tennis court. All around—on shelves, beneath tables, in a kiddie pool that neither Jude nor his sister has ever played in—are his plants. They’re the greenest green Jude has seen all winter, and some of them, the ones wrapped in chicken wire, the ones sprouting purple flowers, are taller than he is. Jude’s father takes out his army knife. From one of the dried branches hanging upside down from the clothesline, he carefully cuts away the outer leaves, removes a thimbleful of hairy bud, and then, sitting down in the old rocking chair, packs his brown glass pipe with it. The greenhouse is the size of Jude’s bedroom—big, the whole third floor of the warehouse—and as he burrows into the sleeping bag at his father’s feet, he wishes he could sleep in here instead.

“I thought the lights weren’t supposed to be on at night,” Jude says. In the orange light his father’s left cheek is an angry red. “What happened to your face?”

His father puts two fingers to his cheek. He has a soft, pale, leathery face, with splotches of pink age spots along the roots of his hair, which he parts down the middle. Since he was a teenager he’s worn it long and stringy, to his shoulders. His overgrown beard is the same copper color, the rim of his mustache stained tobacco brown. In the summer he wears cutoff jeans and flip-flops and no shirt, walking around the house scratching the copper curls on his chest. Now he pulls the hood of his parka over his head. “Born that way, champ,” he says.

Jude puts his hands behind his head, gathering his shoulders into the depths of the sleeping bag, which smells like gasoline and his mother. She used to take it camping at Camel’s Hump with Jude’s father, who now has a piece of pot caught in his beard like a crumb. Jude asks if he can try some, but his father shakes his head.

“You let me try the eggnog with rum in it.”

“Reefer is for grown-ups. But some grown-ups are too grown-up for it. Some grown-ups think it’s unfashionable now.” His father takes a smooth hit. “I’m afraid I’m not needed here anymore, champ.” When Jude says nothing, his father asks, “You know why people smoke reefer? It’s a comfort, champ. It restores you, like sleep. It makes you like a baby again, a sleeping baby. Know what I mean?”

“No. You won’t let me try.”

“You’re already a baby. You don’t need to become one again. When you’re older, you’ll know.”

“I’m not a baby. I’m nine today.”

His father rocks slowly in his chair. “You’re right. You’re not a baby anymore.”

“Do you know what Mom and Mr. Donahoe were talking about outside?”

He stops rocking. His gray eyes, which have been rolling around the greenhouse with a liquid dreaminess, fall on Jude’s face, as though he’s just spotted him there, lying at his feet. He looks almost pleased.

“As a matter of fact, I believe they were talking about moi.”

“How come?”

A sheet of snow tumbles off the warming roof.

“I’m going to tell you something, champ, because I need another man’s opinion. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Mrs. Donahoe, she’s pregnant. You know, she’s going to have a baby.”

Jude absorbs this information. As cold as it is outside, he’s hot in his sleeping bag, his forehead sweating under the lights. “Then why were they talking about you?”

“Well, because I’m the one who made her pregnant. You know how that happens and everything?”

Jude nods slowly. He knows, more or less. When he asked his mother where babies came from, she drew him a diagram in colored pencils.

“And what do you think about that?”

“Is Mom pissed?”

“Yes, she is. She’s very pissed and doesn’t want to be married to me anymore. And she’ll probably be even more pissed that I told you all this, but you should know the truth. You’re a big guy. You can handle it, right?”

Jude is lying perfectly still, even though he wants to crawl into his father’s lap and touch the red spot on his cheek. He wonders if it was Mr. Donahoe who hit him, or Jude’s mom.

“What will happen to the baby?”

“We find ourselves in a strange position. Do we keep the baby? What happens to the baby?”

“Where will it go? Does—will it be Mr. and Mrs. Donahoe’s?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“But where will the baby go if they don’t?”

His father takes a quick hit of his pipe, then puts it down on the workbench beside him. Reluctantly he exhales the smoke.

Then something occurs to Jude. “The baby’s going to be my brother or sister, isn’t it?” He was just a baby when Prudence was born. He doesn’t remember his mother being pregnant.

“Would you like a baby brother or sister? Would you like that?”

“I guess,” Jude says, because his father sounds as though he needs cheering up. His eyes are glassy and wet, like they are when he tells scary stories about Vietnam, stories he’s stolen from friends who were there. Jude remembers one about an arm in a tree, waving.

“Here’s the thing.” Jude’s father rubs his beard. “There are lots of things that can happen to babies. Sometimes—sometimes babies aren’t born at all. Sometimes when they do get born, they get raised by their parents, and sometimes they get raised by other people. For example, what’s the name of that program you and your sister watch, with the black kids?”

“Good Times?” Jude is so glad to have a question he can answer he lets out a breath.

“No, the one with the two boys and the white father.”

“Oh, Diff’rent Strokes.”

“Diff’rent Strokes. So, for example, those children are being raised by someone other than their real parents. They’re adopted, right?”

Jude nods.

“So, as a matter of fact, we planned to wait, your mother and I, to tell you together, but your mother would wait forever if she could, and I don’t have that long, champ. I think you’re old enough to know.” He leans forward on his elbows, so Jude can see up into the dark spheres of his nostrils, and tells Jude that he’s adopted, too.

Jude doesn’t make a sound. He presses the sleeping bag over his nose, breathing in his mother. He smells Cracker Jacks, midnight in the Donahoes’ driveway. For a moment he thinks, Mr. Donahoe’s my dad, but that doesn’t make any sense, but nothing else makes any sense, either.

Where did he get this red hair? asked a friend of his mother’s once, pawing through it as though she’d never seen red hair before.

Jude’s father places a palm on top of Jude’s head. His touch, neither hot nor cold, shouldn’t feel like anything, but it does. His dad isn’t his dad; he’s just a man. He tells Jude that his real mother was just a teenager, and that he was adopted from a hospital in New York City when he was ten days old. “You were as little as a rabbit. You could fit right here.” He puts one finger on his thigh and one finger on his knee. “It’s quite common, really. Aristotle was adopted. Lee Majors was adopted. Lots of people are, and you wouldn’t even know it.”

Jude squints up into the bright lights. He thinks of Mrs. Donahoe’s belly button and the little lump of a person inside her. Inside his sleeping bag, he dips his finger into the warm hollow of his own navel. Later, at a less finite moment, he’ll come to imagine his nine months in utero with not only curiosity but nostalgia. He’ll understand what his father meant about marijuana—its deep, peaceful sleep; its small, fragile gift of forgetting. He’ll imagine that being high is something like being unborn, alive but not present, and when he’s savoring a mouthful of smoke, he’ll sometimes find himself swimming toward that drowsy, padded place—brainless, blind, curled in the pink womb of a stranger.

Then the room goes black. The lamps blink once, then are gone. When Jude’s eyes adjust, they find the soft light in the doorway, nine candles that illuminate his mother’s stunned face. She is wearing her coat over her dress, and her unlaced snow boots, which have tripped over the extension cord. The cake looks homemade.

In the house, the party is counting backward to one. Then it bursts into a roar.

“How could you tell him?”

Jude looks at his father sideways. He’s not sure which part she’s talking about. He wishes he could unknow all of it, just tilt his head and shake it out of his ear, like bathwater.

After the last guest has gone home, Jude’s mother comes to his room and sings to him. This is what he remembers most of all, years after his father is gone—pretending to be asleep while his mother sings at the foot of his bunk bed. Her face is lit by the slice of light through the bedroom door, and her breath smells like peppermint and liquor. She’s too drunk to remember all the words, but it doesn’t matter—he already knows them. It’s his song, the one he was named for, and she’s sung it since he was a baby. He knows all about carrying the world on your shoulders, all about letting her into your heart, all about making the sad song better.