Ten Thousand Saints

Five





Delph and Kram began to come separately, or not at all, and when Jude’s stash ran out and the minutes were stinging and clear, the afternoons they didn’t come were like open wounds. When they did come, they didn’t bring pot. “That fruit will kill you, dude. You should keep the brain cells you have left.” Delph said he’d run dry. He was actually thinking about giving the stuff up.

“I got money,” Jude said, staring at the slats of the bunk above him, where Teddy had drawn a marijuana leaf with a pencil. Jude’s father had built this bed.

“No you don’t.”

“I’ll pay you later.”

“You get your ass out of bed,” Delph said, “and I’ll think about it.”

But the longer he stayed in bed, the harder getting his ass out of it was. Every point of his body that touched the mattress burned, no matter how much he tossed and turned. The tissue that made up his body no longer seemed to be muscle. His limbs felt like dead branches. He looked at the pale legs lying in front of him and wondered how they could be his, how his organs powered on, oblivious.

But that night, after Delph left, while his mother and sister were eating dinner downstairs, Jude swung his legs over the side of the bed. He walked past the bathroom and down the stairs, farther than he’d walked in a month. He took all twenty-eight dollars from the leather purse hanging on Prudence’s doorknob. Then he got dressed, grabbed his Walkman, and descended the fire escape. It was easy to be quiet—his body was so feeble it could barely produce a sound. Being outside was like being on Mars. The dark itself felt bright. He could smell everything: the sweet and sour Panda Palace, the methane of Dairy Road dung. A styrofoam cup whispered across the slushy street, following him.

It took him nearly two hours to find Hippie. He was smoking a cigarette in front of Birkenjacque’s, his dog hanging off a leash.

“Weren’t you the guy who threw a pool stick at me on New Year’s Eve?” Hippie didn’t entirely remember. He just remembered seeing Tory whip that belt out—whoa. “I had no part of that, by the way. Hippie’s a lover, not a fighter.”

“No hard feelings,” Jude said, showing Hippie his money.

“Is it your friend that OD’d?” Hippie asked.

It was his curiosity on this point, Jude suspected, that softened him. Hippie gave him a cigarette, and they walked to his apartment on Sunset Court, a room over a garage on the lake, the moon shining oily white on the water. Jude bought a bag and Hippie threw in some papers and they shared a joint, sitting side by side on the couch, under a windshield-size silkscreen of Bob Marley, watching Remington Steele.

Sometime around one in the morning, as he climbed through his bedroom window from the fire escape, every muscle of his body aching, Jude heard a door open and restless footsteps cross the floor below. He knew it was the sound of relief—Jude had gone out into the world, and he had come back.

Still, there was no more money after that night. They kept it where he couldn’t find it. That night, long after he heard the last door close, he tiptoed downstairs to Harriet’s room. His mother and sister were asleep in her bed, Harriet flat on her back, Prudence curled on her side. Only their hair touched, the bronze ends lost in each other on their pillows. On the dresser was his mother’s wallet, and in it was a single, soundless dime.

His thoughts had lingered on Eliza Urbanski, tripped across her, dragged their feet, and he had hurried them past, out of her reach, out of an unconscious respect for Teddy: she didn’t belong in the mourning of his friend. But now, sober, his head as clear as an empty fishbowl—he had finished off Hippie’s bag in two days—Jude couldn’t keep her out. He saw her red mouth, the spiderweb tear in the knee of her tights. He saw her standing over him with Teddy, elbow to elbow, silent as repentant children. F*cked up on something, f*cked up in a way neither Teddy nor Jude had been before. Cocaine, someone told him later. (His mother? A cop?) No one knew whether it was the cocaine that killed him, if the huffing alone would have been enough to stop his heart. No one knew anything.

Looking for you, Teddy had said when Jude had asked where he’d been that night. Teddy was doing cocaine, and maybe he was with Eliza, or maybe Eliza knew where he’d gotten it, or maybe she didn’t. If she was lying, she wasn’t the only one. Looking for you, he’d said.

He was too sober to sleep. He played Duck Hunt on his Nintendo, leaning on his elbows at the foot of the top bunk, Teddy’s bunk, the dark room silver in the light of the black-and-white screen. By the time he finally drifted off, his brain was full of arcade dreams, the gray shapes still playing behind his eyes. He counted the raining ducks like sheep.

Two days after the pot ran out, Jude woke up to an empty house, put on his headphones and his hooded sweatshirt, and skated unsteadily back to Hippie’s apartment. No one answered his knock. He looked around for something to open the door with, found a plastic ice scraper stabbed in the snow, and for several minutes rattled its edge in the keyhole uselessly before giving up and hunting for a spare key—under the mat, in the mailbox, on the window ledge, and finally in the wooden birdhouse, where it was entombed in snow.

Inside, the place was dead still. He opened cupboards, closets, drawers, rattled around the contents of the kitchen trash. In the bedroom, a mangy dog lounged across the bed, eyeing Jude with a restless boredom. When Jude approached, the dog didn’t move. Jude whispered, “You’re not a very good guard dog, are you?” The dog—was it a girl dog?—raised her eyebrows. Were they eyebrows? “Or are you a good dog?” he asked her, his voice strangely high. “You know I’m good?” He placed a tentative hand on her head. He could feel the grit of dirt in her fur, the bony shape of her skull. He worked his hand into the mass of her neck, her long, tight belly, smooth as the curve of a guitar. For a few minutes he lay down on the bed beside her, his arm looped around her warm body, feeling her breathe, feeling his own body tingle and pulse.

In the closet were overalls and lumberjack flannels, Birkenstocks and boots. Under the bed he found sleeping bags, a hiking pack; on the dresser was an envelope of photographs. “Where does he keep it, girl? Huh?” Most of the pictures were of Hippie and his family at Christmas, Hippie in his Santa hat, people pulling ribbons off of gifts, but the last few in the roll were of a different party—a group of stoners raising peace signs. It was Tory Ventura’s house. With a start Jude recognized an overexposed sliver of Teddy—eyes closed, midstride, his mouth forming a silent, careless word.

Jude folded the picture and put it in his wallet. Turning to go, as though it was what he had come for, he almost missed the bathroom. He ducked back in, opened the medicine cabinet, the shower curtain, and in a sealed bucket under the bathroom sink, found four gallon-size freezer bags, each packed full of pot. Jude pressed the cool plastic of one of them to his face. It smelled like a miracle. It was as big as a loaf of bread, probably half a pound. Hippie wouldn’t miss one of them. He would miss it, but it was better than taking all of them. Jude skated home with the bag tucked in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He looked pregnant.

He was halfway inside his room, one leg on each side of the open window, the skateboard tossed in on the floor, when he saw that his mother was sitting on the bottom bunk of his bed. She had an issue of Thrasher open on her lap.

“Where were you?”

Jude sat straddling the windowsill, looking down into the alley, three stories below. His room had begun to secrete its own body odor. He closed his eyes, exhausted and weak. For a moment he thought he might throw up.

He felt himself sway, slip. When he opened his eyes, his mother had caught him by the hood. She helped him swing his leg over the sill and slide down to the floor.

“What happened to you? Where’d you go?” She closed the window against the cold. “I’m glad you’re getting out.” She gathered her skirt and squatted down beside him. The handkerchief in her hair and the moccasins on her feet made her look as though she were foraging for food in the wilderness, or coaxing an animal out of hiding. “But you’re not strong enough to climb up and down that fire escape. What is that?” She came closer, knelt in front of him, and raised a hand toward Jude’s belly. With a force that surprised them both, he smacked her hand away. She fell back on her heels and sat staring at him for a few seconds, wide-eyed with shock. Then she stood up and hurried out of the room.

He hid the stash as Harriet would, nesting it inside a jacket, then inside his backpack, then under the bed. Then he went to the bathroom and stepped into the shower, but the water hurt his skin too much to stand under it. He sat on the floor of the shower, leaning his head against the tile, half sleeping in the steam.

When he returned to his bedroom, he found that his bed—both bunks—had been made. Lying atop the fresh sheets of the bottom one was the plastic bag. Except for a glaze of fine, green dust, it was empty.

Delph came over the next evening. He did not bring pot. “Guess who came into the store today.” He sat leaning forward in the desk chair, his elbows on his knees, rubbing his palms together. “Hippie.” He’d been looking for Jude, Delph said—did he know where he was? “I’ll hand it to you, dude—you have some balls.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“That there was no way a trustworthy guy like Jude Keffy-Horn would have swiped his weed.”

“Thanks,” Jude said.

“No sweat. But you know what this means. Tory won’t be far behind.” Delph looked at his hands. “You know better than anyone that you don’t want to piss off Salvatore Ventura.” Jude could see he was struggling. Delph didn’t want to get involved in Jude’s problems, but because he’d left Jude and Teddy hanging at Tory’s party, he already was. “I’d lay low for a while. That’s all I’m saying.”

Delph left it at that, climbed out the window and down the fire escape, and when Jude woke up the next morning, his mother was outside the window, standing on the same landing. She was fastening to the railing of the fire escape what seemed to be a padlock, which was looped through what seemed to be a chain, which was looped, tight as a fishing line, through the handle at the bottom of the window. Jude watched her through the glass. “It’s for your own good,” she called, her voice nearly swallowed up by the wind outside. “And don’t you dare try to break the glass! You’ll bleed to death.”

Jude suspected his mother wanted not only to lock him in but also to lock others out, and through the teeth of his anger, he was grateful. Should Hippie or Tory or one of their comrades pay him a visit, Jude would be bolted safely inside.

He stared at the belly of the top bunk. He was so sober he could feel every particle of his fear, as distinct as the hair on his arms.

So when a man appeared at the same window several days later, Jude thought he might be hallucinating, a trick of a mind gone unstimulated for too long. He was listening to Wasted . . . Again on the stereo and playing Mario, the cord stretched up to the top bunk. A sound like a key in a door fluttered in his ear, then a series of minor crashes across the fire escape. Jude turned drowsily around, and as he watched a person climb through the window, the game control slipped out of his hands and off the bunk, then clattered to the floor. It was snowing outside, a soft, steady snow, and when the man emerged fully in the bedroom, there were snowflakes in his beard, crystalline, whole. He was wearing a pair of Carhartt’s, a white linen shirt, a lined denim jacket, and a New York Yankees cap. Only when Jude saw the shadowed eyes beneath its brim did he recognize the man as his father.

“Sorry,” said Les, blinking away the snow. “Didn’t mean to alarm you.” He held up a key in one hand and the wet padlock in the other. “Your mother sent it to me.”

Jude sat straight up in bed, his head almost grazing the ceiling. “What are you doing here?” His heart was slowing, relieved—he’d been certain that the person at the window had been sent by Hippie.

“Kidnapping you,” Les answered, dancing his fingers in the air. “I’ve come to take you away from this suicide trap they call a town.” He took off his hat and shook the snow from it, revealing a crown of matted hair, cut short now, and a glossy bald spot. He smelled of cigarette smoke. “Don’t tell the girls I’m here yet, okay? I want a few minutes with you first, man-to-man. Man-to- crazed-teenager.” He looked around the big, unlit room, at the wool rug, the yellow bean bag chair, the unmade bunks with their pillows kicked to the floor. He approached the poster hanging over the desk—H.R. of the Bad Brains, life-size, dreadlocked—and sized him up. Months ago Teddy had stabbed a cigarette in H.R.’s mouth, but last week, in a moment of desperation, Jude had reclaimed it, and now there was a hole there. The cigarette had tasted like sawdust. On the desk Les set down the lock and key, and turned on the metal desk lamp, illuminating the tapes and records scattered across the floor. The unspooled tape from one of the cassettes lay tangled on the rug. “Turn this stuff off, can we?”

Jude said nothing. In addition to Black Flag, the Nintendo music was still playing. Mario had fallen off a cliff and the black GAME OVER screen was flashing.

“I’m sorry,” Les said. “Do I have the right bedroom?” He lowered the volume on the stereo himself, then walked over to the TV—he knew right where the button was—and snapped it off. “She said you weren’t talking, but Christ. You dropped your thing,” he said, picking up the game controller and handing it up to Jude.

“You look different,” Jude said. He didn’t extend his hand. Les put the controller on the bed. “You’re bald.”

“Yeah, well, you look a little different, too. What’s with the hair?”

Jude put a hand to his mangled locks. He’d forgotten he had hair.

Les was shrugging out of his wet clothes, his head bent to his waist, tossing them on the rug in a soggy pile. “You got some dry clothes your old man could borrow?”

Naked to his underwear, Jude’s father was goose-bumped and hairy. He had wide, square shoulders and a long torso, kidney-shaped love handles hanging over the waist of a pair of red briefs. His arms were white and meaty, his legs football-coach stout. Jude recognized the lightning-shaped scar on his ankle, the one he’d had since he nicked himself with a chain saw, barefoot, while slicing their bathtub couch in half. Grudgingly, Jude eased down from the top bunk and went to his dresser. He found his navy blue sweatshirt, the one with the pocket he’d hidden the pot in, and a matching pair of sweatpants. He held them out to his father.

“So, I hear you’ve been stealing large amounts of illegal drugs.” Les stepped into the pants, almost losing his balance, and after sniffing the sweatshirt, pulled it over his head. “You making a habit out of that?” His hair was sticking up like Jude’s now.

“Not really,” Jude said, climbing back up to the top bunk.

“That’s good.” Les sank into the bean bag chair in the corner. It made a sound like a ball deflating, swallowing him up. “Smoking pot is one thing. Stealing it is another. I’m very sorry about your friend Teddy.”

Jude crawled back under the covers and pulled them tight to his chin. “Why?” he said to the ceiling. “You didn’t know him.”

“I’ve met his brother,” Les said, and Jude remembered with reluctance that it was Les who had paid for the funeral, who had lent Johnny his van.

They were both quiet for a while. On the record player, the last song ended, and the arm crossed back to its resting pose. When Jude looked down at his father, his knees were spread wide and the crook of his elbow was covering his eyes. Was he sleeping?

“Why didn’t you just come in the front door? Why’d Mom send you the key?”

Les let his arm drop to his lap. His gray eyes were small and glazed. He was exhausted, or high, or both. “For safekeeping,” he answered. “She was afraid she’d break down and unlock you.”

It was February. Black History Month, the Winter Olympics, Valentine’s Day carnations sold in the cafeteria for a dollar apiece. Prudence had no valentine, but she had long entertained the notion, as far-fetched as she knew it was, that her father might return, and that he’d bring her flowers—an offering, an apology.

But when he appeared in the kitchen one day, he was carrying only a pair of shoes, as though he were curious what was in the fridge. Her mother had warned her he was coming—her parents had agreed it was best that Jude live with his dad for a while—but still it stung that Les had come to see her brother, not her. Jude, the adopted one, had always found a way to hijack the attention of his parents and the sympathy of strangers. No one seemed to remember that Les had abandoned her, too.

“How’s it going, Lester?” she asked, with the theatrical boredom she’d practiced.

Les, unruffled, said, “Asi, asi,” seesawing his hand. “How you doing, kid?”

Prudence put her hands out in front of her, as if doing push-ups against a wall, and pumped her arms twice.

“What’s that, sign language? What’s it mean?”

“Awesome.”

She let him plant a scratchy kiss on her forehead. Then he put on his shoes and said he was going to round up some dinner.

“He’s here,” Prudence told her mother, opening her bedroom door without knocking. Her mother, who already knew, who also had been listening all day for the sound of the van, nodded but didn’t look up from her book. “Why does Jude get to go to New York?”

“Do you want to go, too?”

“With Dad? No.”

Prudence stood, studying her mother, whose socked feet were propped up on a pillow. Her cigarette hung over the ashtray, smoldering. This was the bed her parents had slept in. This is where they’d made Prudence. Prudence, visited by nightmares, had climbed into this bed a thousand times, pressed between her parents’ warm bodies.

“Are you wearing my blue eye shadow?”

“No,” said her mother.

“He’s pretty bald,” Prudence pointed out.

At this, Harriet raised both eyebrows, but still her eyes hung on the page.

When Les returned from his errand, he brought with him a cardboard carton of milk shakes and a bag of Al’s French Frys that smelled strongly of cheeseburgers. He dragged the bean bag chair to the middle of Jude’s room and turned on the Nintendo. With the fingers of one hand he played the buttons of the control pad like a keyboard, the other hand retrieving fries from the bag.

“Make yourself at home,” Jude said, taking a seat beside him on the rug. He took the controller out of his father’s hand and started playing, sending Mario leaping across the screen.

“Do you know there’s a Kmart on Garden Boulevard? And all these gas stations. I barely recognize this town. It looks like Disney World.”

In the reflection of the TV, Jude could see the two of them, the shiny blocks of their distorted foreheads.

“So that’s how you do it,” Les said, his mouth full. “Very nice. How do you make him jump?”

“A,” Jude couldn’t help answering. “The red button.”

“And B?”

“Makes you go fast.”

Les nodded. “Want a cheeseburger?”

Jude said no, even though he did.

“I got one for your sister. Her favorite.”

“She doesn’t like them anymore,” Jude said. “She mostly eats salads and stuff.”

“What for? Is she a vegetarian?”

“I don’t know.”

“She’s not having sex, is she?”

Jude fumbled with the controls, tripping over a turtle. “Definitely not,” he said.

“I need your help with this one,” Les said, sucking a sticky finger. “Do I try to talk to her, or do I give her some space?”

“Who? Prudence or Mom?”

“Prudence,” Les said, waving his hand.

Jude thought about it, zipping through the clouds, through strings of musical coins. “You could ask her to come with us to New York,” he said. He hadn’t agreed to anything himself. He was considering his options. If he lived with his father, he would have to avoid Teddy’s brother. At the funeral, Jude had been too chickenshit to approach Johnny. He had only stared at the back of his bald head, a numb sort of amazement strangling his guilt (how much the back of his head looked like Teddy’s!).

But New York was a big city. If he stayed with his mother, Hippie and Tory would surely find him. Stealing pot wasn’t a crime that could be reported to the police, but he did not want to find out what other punishments were in store. He did not want to end up in the hospital again. Plus, who was Jude going to get his pot from now? His father had pot. His father wanted Jude to live with him. So what if his mother had put him up to it? If he stayed here, his body would shrink and atrophy, like a limb in a cast.

“I don’t know if there’s anything for Prudence in New York,” Les said. “She’s sort of a small-town girl, isn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Jude admitted.

“She’d get swallowed up by New York. Besides—where would she sleep?”

“Where would I sleep?” Jude asked.

“In the loft,” Les said. “Kind of like a bunk bed, with a ladder and everything. Only below you is the living room.”

“Do you have cable?”

“Check,” Les said. “No video games, though. You’ll have to bring yours.”

“Do I have to go to school?”

“ ’Fraid so, champ.”

Champ. After Champlain’s Loch Ness monster. He’d forgotten his dad called him that.

“Forget it, then,” he said. “I’m not going to school.”

Les blew his nose in a napkin, then tossed it across the room at the trash can. He missed. “All right, fine. New York public schools are dreadful, anyway. You’d be safer on the street. But you’ll have to find some kind of gainful employment. And you have to promise not to tell your mother.”

Jude pressed the pause button. “When are we leaving?”

“First thing in the morning. We’ve got to get out of this house. Can you feel the negative vibes in this place? That’s what happens when you get more than one female under one roof. They all start bleeding on the same schedule.” With effort, he stood up from the bean bag chair and stretched. “Get your stuff together. And get a shower and a shave, will you? You look really awful.”

In the bathroom, Jude acquainted himself with the things he’d need on his trip, all of the essential items that belonged to him. His retainer case, Noxzema, deodorant. He stepped all the way into the shower this time, letting the warm water pelt his skin until the burning became uniform, sufferable. He shampooed with Prudence’s pink, perfumey bottle, but it did nothing for his hair but work it into a tangled, fragrant nest. Standing in front of the steamy mirror, bath towel wrapped around his waist, he combed at it, knot by knot. Then, with the inside of his wrist, he cleared the steam from the mirror and put his face close to the glass.

He looked, of course, nothing like his father. He had never looked like anyone. That was why it had been such a shock to open the pamphlet his mother had left him—days later, bored out of his mind—and see the faces that looked like his. He had felt as though he were looking at a family photo album, brothers and sisters he didn’t know he had. It had given him a chill. And yet he’d opened it again and again, waking up in the morning, in the middle of the night, brushing a finger over the wide path between his nose and mouth. He did so now, stroking each hair. He looked hard in the mirror. There were a lot of them. Thick, bristly, rust red hairs.

Teddy had started shaving not long before he died, had made a show of walking around with little kernels of bloody toilet paper stuck to his neck. Jude hadn’t had anything to shave. But while he’d been sleeping away the last six weeks, his peach fuzz had gotten fuzzier. He ran a finger over his chin, across his cheeks, between his nipples, under his arms, untucked the towel from his waist—he was hairy as hell. From under the sink, he took one of his sister’s pink plastic razors, and from the shower, he took her shaving cream. This time he didn’t fear the image that came, uninvited, to mind—Prudence standing naked, right here where he stood. Maybe it was because he’d finally caught up with her, or because he already sort of missed her, or because for once, luck had come to him, and not her. He slathered on the cream, uncapped the razor, and went slowly, sensibly about it. When he was done, his face was bleeding in three places, but he liked the burn of the hot water on his skin. His cheeks were as smooth as his sister’s.

And then there was the hair on his head. When he combed at the knots again, tears came to his eyes. Another hunt under the sink and he found the rusty nail scissors, the ones that Prudence had hurled at his face, and with them he snipped away at the most hopeless of the kinks. Before long a heap of hair the size of a small red rodent had amassed in the bottom of the sink. One devil-lock-size clump fell heavily to the bath mat. What was left he lathered with shaving cream, the gel foaming white, his head flowery and cool. He circled the razor around his head in a ring, from his ears to the tip of his quite nicely shaped skull, until there was nothing left but scalp.

Then he stuck his head under the faucet, letting the warm water wash the hair down the drain. He looked in the mirror. He was round and pink, like a baby. A blue vein swam up his neck from his collarbone to his temple. He was tired and sweaty from the steam.

He took another shower, scouring himself with the fresh bar his mother had stocked in the soap dish. He remembered all the ways she’d looked after him—bringing him meals, folding his laundry, the pairs of socks curled up like snails. His father had never done those things for him. That was what was so strange about imagining Les with Johnny McNicholas, comforting him after Teddy died. Until now, clean and clearheaded, Jude hadn’t thought that someone else might have needed taking care of.