Ten Thousand Saints

Nine





The furnace ticked, then hammered, then moaned, then ticked. From the street, the metallic thud of a Dumpster lid, a distant horn. Les, on the futon below, snored through it. Jude was so distracted by his thoughts that the sounds seemed to visit from someone else’s dream.

One-armed, he climbed down from the loft, wrestled on jeans and shoes and sling, gathered skateboard and watch and keys in the dark. By the glow of his father’s barbecue lighter, he found the slim black case under the kitchen sink. In it, blank-faced as a power drill, sleeping on its side on a bed of eggshell foam, lay McQueen. Jude slipped it into the pocket of his jacket and left his father alone with the furnace.

In the park, a boom box was blasting Warzone:

Don’t forget the struggle

Don’t forget the streets

He did not intend or wish to put the pistol to use as he coasted across St. Mark’s, along the lightless Avenues A, B, C, but he was glad for its leaden company. The shadowed figures he passed did not disturb him. No light showed at the bottom of Johnny’s door. Jude knocked anyway. No answer. He unlocked the padlock with the key Johnny had given him, hauled the door open, and turned on the light.

Blinking at the brightness, the three cats—Montezuma, Genghis, Tarzan—inspected him from their various perches. Jude smelled curry and the carbon whiff of cat litter. On a dish towel on the kitchenette counter, a single bowl and spoon lay drying. On the card table was a plastic laundry basket, and inside it, a block of bleached white T-shirts, crisp as a stack of paper.

Johnny’s skateboard was not by the door. He had told Jude he was going to bed early, that he had a headache, but Jude should not have been surprised that Johnny, too, had been unable to sleep. He was probably skating the city, trying to exhaust himself. “Well, that’s interesting,” he’d said on the train on the way downtown that afternoon.

Jude had said nothing.

“You didn’t know? About the two of them?”

Jude sat down on the couch. He propped a foot on each of the upturned record crates. Beside him, on top of a sketch pad, lay a well-thumbed paperback. The Laws of Manu. On the cover was a painting of a bejeweled god, not Krishna, four-armed, two-faced, like a conjoined pair of one-eyed jacks. Jude opened it to the place where a blank envelope marked a page.

79. A twice-born man who (daily) repeats those three one thousand times outside (the village), will be freed after a month even from great guilt, as a snake from its slough.



“Those three what?” Jude asked Tarzan, who was polishing his whiskered cheek on Jude’s knee. He would like to find those three things so he could repeat them. He flipped through the book. In another chapter, several passages were underlined in blue ink:

59. . . . let him restrain his senses, if they are attracted by sensual objects.



60. By the restraint of his senses . . . by the abstention from injuring the creatures, he becomes fit for immortality. . . .



62. On the separation from their dear ones, on their union with hated men. . . .



63. On the departure of the individual soul from this body and its new birth in (another) womb, and on its wanderings through ten thousand millions of existences . . .



Jude closed the book and closed his eyes. It was the longest string of words he had read in a while, and their shapes swam behind his eyelids. When he opened his eyes, he looked down at his mummied arm, the mitt of his hand, the blue sling busy with signatures. ELIZA. He slipped off the sling and unwound the bandage. It had been a nightly ritual for the last three weeks, and he decided he was finished. Healed. A sickle-shaped scab sliced across his forearm, and his palm was rough with scar tissue. He held up his hand, wiggled his fingers. He was supposed to see an occupational therapist twice a week, but f*ck it: the doctor said he’d play the guitar again.

Johnny had been surprised the following Sunday when Jude wanted to return to the temple, but they had accepted him back without question; most of the devotees hadn’t even noticed the fire that night. During the Vedic lecture, he believed he saw the priest nod at him. Devotion to Krishna—renouncing worldly possessions, abstaining from alcohol and drugs and meat, chanting the names of god, working only for him—was the way to end the cycle of death and birth, to cast off the guilt (this, like The Laws of Manu, was the word he’d used) of the material world. Jude wanted to be devoted. He had never been this clean before, and he only wanted to be cleaner.

Teddy’s body had been cremated; Jude didn’t even know where Johnny had scattered the ashes. But there was still something left of him. Eliza was pregnant, and Teddy was being reincarnated in this life.

He picked up Tarzan and settled him into his lap. Tarzan’s family jewels were the size of meatballs, but still, as Jude massaged the doughy, nippled Braille of his belly, he could not banish the word womb from his mind. Generally, even when his coked-up best friend was not the seed bearer (had it been in a bedroom, another parked car?), Jude was uncomfortable with the idea of babies, of sex and pregnancy and bodies and birth. He’d been sprung from another woman’s womb. He’d drunk from her umbilical cord. Babies were like girls: they were breakable and entirely mysterious; they had nothing at all to do with him.

But look: Eliza, too, had once seemed unknowable, and now he and Johnny knew something about her that no one else did.

“I wouldn’t have gotten him f*cked up,” she’d said, “if I knew you were going to.”

Jude had countered: “Well, neither would I.”

The full weight of the news descended upon them slowly, over moments and weeks, a package from a heaven-sent stork circling lazily down to earth. In the window of a stationery store near Union Square, alongside wedding invitations and business cards, Jude saw a birth announcement tied with baby blue ribbon: We welcome with love our gift from above!

Their secret had disarmed them; it had safely placed them all on Teddy’s team. They spoke of it with giddiness and gravity, or with panic, or with a sense of duty, but always with breathless disbelief at their unexpected fortune. (Science was so messed up! The friction of two bodies could make something that wasn’t there before. You could rub together two sticks and start a fire.) The conversations took place at Johnny’s, or walking down the street, or across the table at Dojo’s, or on the phone; it was one conversation, without beginning or end; it adopted its own code; it repeated itself; it spun around them, binding them like the silky threads of a web or a cocoon, an amniotic sac.

JUDE: Shouldn’t we tell your mom?



ELIZA: She’ll just make me get an abortion.



JUDE: Why would she make you get an abortion?



ELIZA: Because. She told me, “If you ever get pregnant, you’re getting an abortion.”



JUDE: What about my dad?



ELIZA: He’d just tell my mom.



JOHNNY: It’s better if no one else knows. This way we can control it.



ELIZA: Well, I can’t keep it a secret forever. People at school will start to notice. Someday the baby’s going to, you know, get born.



JOHNNY: People will find out when they find out. But at least we can keep it under wraps for now. After a certain point, you can’t get an abortion.



JUDE: But where will the baby live? Are you going to raise it with your mom? Are you going to go to school?



JOHNNY: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.



(Johnny was always saying, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”)



JUDE: What about going to the doctor? Have you been to the doctor yet?



ELIZA: I don’t know where to go. All I have is Dr. Betsy. She’s a pediatrician.



JOHNNY: What are they going to tell her? “Yes, you’re pregnant”?



ELIZA: And don’t I have to go with an adult? My ID sucks.



JUDE: Johnny’s an adult. He could say he’s your boyfriend.



ELIZA: Yeah, but he’s not my guardian. You need a guardian to sign forms.



JUDE: There are tests and things. You can find out if the baby’s okay. She did coke while she was pregnant. Isn’t that bad?



JOHNNY: Yes, it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. But what’s done is done. They put mothers in jail for that in some states. You want her to have the kid in jail?



JUDE: No.



ELIZA: No.



JOHNNY: We don’t need a doctor yet. We can live without a doctor.



You could live without most things most people depended on, according to Johnny: a family, a phone, a furnace, a taxable income, a high school diploma. And he was sort of right. Here they were, three teenagers, planning for a baby, and the sky was still high above them, winter blue; it hadn’t fallen.

Jude’s mother called every Sunday.

“Do you mean completely?”

“Completely.” He and Les had agreed not to tell her about the fire incident. There was no need to worry her.

“Even marijuana?”

“Completely.”

“Alcohol? Cigarettes?”

There was no sound for a few seconds. Then Harriet said evenly, “Good for you.”

He could picture her standing in the kitchen with the bone-colored phone to her ear, the kinky, too-long cord wrapped around her, dragging on the floor. Jude’s heart, which had been sort of holding its breath, deflated.

“Whatever. Don’t believe me.”

“Honey, I believe you. I’m surprised, is all. I hardly know what to expect anymore. One day you’re the one getting into trouble, and now that you’re gone it’s your sister, and you’re the one—”

“What’s wrong with Pru?”

“Nothing. She’ll be fine. Of course I’ve been hoping this would happen for you, this was my distinct hope, but it just seems too good to be true. Living with your dad . . . I didn’t expect . . .”

“I gotta go, Mom. I’m going somewhere.”

“Wait. How’s school?”

“Fine.” He had generated a setting and cast of characters for this lie—East Side Community High School on Twelfth Street, where he had seen some sketchy-looking kids shooting hoops behind a chain-link fence; teachers named Mr. Prabhupada and Mr. Omfug. “I got a ninety-nine on my British Lit midterm.”

Harriet paused. He’d gone too far, he realized. “Jude. You telling me the truth?”

The fact that she didn’t believe him—that his recovery was so implausible, his soul so unsaveable—made him want to hang up. She was the f*cking Glass Lady.

“True till death,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. It means you don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

Don’t be so hard on your mom,” Les said after Jude hung up. “She’s got reason to be worried.” One thing Jude knew about his father, had known about him since he turned nine years old, was that he couldn’t keep a secret. Still, he was caught off guard when Les spilled the beans. Some weeks back, Harriet’s studio had been vandalized. Smashed to shit. All the fish tanks full of all her glass pieces. Vases, bowls, bongs, pipes. A baseball bat, probably, but the only evidence left behind was a beer bottle, scattered among the broken glass.

“What? Who was it?”

Jude had been sitting on the floor in the kitchen, slumped against the refrigerator while he talked to his mother, his back still sticky with sweat from the matinee at CB’s. Now he sat up straight.

“She doesn’t know for sure. But she says the kid you ripped off came looking for you the day before with some other dude.”

Jude ran a frantic hand over his head. Hippie. Tory. He’d just spent hours slamming his body against a roomful of shirtless New York hardcore boys. The boys of Vermont seemed very far away.

He saw his mother standing over the shards of her studio, the glass twinkling around her. He saw her sweeping it into the dustpan, heard the heavy thud of the glass sliding into the trash.

“I’m going to kill those drunk f*cks,” he said. “I’ll kill them.”

“Slow down now, champ.” Les was packing the bowl of Gertrude, his second favorite bong. “For one thing, your mom doesn’t want you to get upset. She thinks you’re not strong enough. But you got to know who you’re dealing with here.”

“Why didn’t they just steal everything? Why’d they go and smash it all?”

Les shrugged. “Maybe they just wanted to scare you. Sounds like the damage has been done.”

“My ass. It’s a threat!” Jude got to his feet, opened the refrigerator, and emptied a bottle of chartreuse Gatorade down his throat.

“They’re just hicks, these kids,” Les said. “Still, you don’t really want them using their baseball bats on you. It’s a good idea for you to stay here a while, don’t you think?”

“F*ck that,” Jude said, tossing his empty bottle in the sink. “We have to go back. You can bring McQueen.”

Les lowered his lips to Gertrude and, with his barbecue lighter, took an experimental hit. He liked to believe he was the kind of father who would teach his son to fight back, but his son’s extremes made him want to offer him the peace pipe instead. The kid had come to him in a coma, and now he was raging for combat. When Harriet had called him to Jude’s rescue, he had felt a startling kinship with the boy, a sense of molecular fulfillment that, despite Les’s absence in his life, Jude had become the idle, brooding pothead that Les had been as a teenager. Now he recognized none of himself in his son. Surely this turbulent little reverend with the military haircut was not Les’s flesh and blood. And then he remembered, with a slow, dismal shame—he was always forgetting—that he wasn’t.

“Jude,” said Les. “I know you feel guilty about dragging your mom into this mess. But I hardly think firearms are necessary.”

“So you’re just going to leave her alone up there? Like you did before?”

Les let the accusation hang in the air with his smoke. As exaggerated as his son’s logic was, he could not suppress the clammy grip of his own guilt.

“Forget it,” Jude said. “We’re going out again.”

“We are?”

“Me and Johnny and Eliza. They’re meeting over here.”

“Don’t tell me. You’re going to church.”

“It’s not a church.” Jude scrounged around in the kitchen drawer, through matchbooks, rolling papers, subway tokens, the collection of MoMA magnets that Di had once stuffed into Les’s Christmas stocking—The Starry Night, the Campbell’s soup can—until he found a couple of crumpled dollar bills. “It’s a temple.”

“I thought temple was Jewish.”

“It is. Or synagogue.”

Les shook his head sadly. “My son the saint. St. Jude. You know how you got that name, champ?”

“ ’Cause of that stupid song,” said Jude.

Les waved his hand. “Your mother liked the song. I liked the saint. He’s my favorite. Kind of overlooked, but a fellow to be reckoned with. Loyal, brutal, with that club of his, his head on fire. But you know what? They killed that son of a bitch with an ax.”

“Because he was a traitor?”

Johnny buzzed, and Jude buzzed back. He cracked open the door.

“That was Judah,” said Les, whose religious training was the sum of one semester of biblical literature and thirty years of crossword puzzles. “Jude was the loyal apostle, like yourself. But too much loyalty is dangerous, too. Your mom’s a tough cookie. She can take care of herself.”

Les remembered her as he’d last seen her, when he’d come to retrieve Jude—older, sharper, her face more deeply lined. But she was the same Harriet, the only woman who’d accepted him for the dreamer and schemer that he was. She was an artist, but she had never bought him a collection of MoMA magnets.

Just then, in compelling imitation of a tea leaf reader he’d once had a fling with in Lintonburg—all sequins and gold and spookiness—Di burst through the door. At her heels were Eliza and Johnny. As often as he saw the boy, he could not get used to the earrings, which reminded him, now that he thought about it, also of the tea leaf reader. (His fortune: you will leave your wife. Had she been baiting him, or had even the gods pegged him for a bastard?) Eliza was wearing her father’s extra-large Harvard sweatshirt, which always broke Les’s heart a little.

“I finally got to meet this Johnny,” said Di. “He held the door for us.”

“Hey there, John Boy,” said Les. He couldn’t help having a soft spot for him, too, ever since the day he’d learned about his brother and showed up at Les’s door looking like the walking dead. He, too, was an underground businessman, and in a neighborhood that made St. Mark’s look like Fifth Avenue. For that he’d earned Les’s respect. But behind the competent, tattooed facade was a kid who needed a swift kick in the ass.

“How you doing, Mr. Keffy,” Johnny said. The kitchen was as crammed as an elevator.

“How about a little sundress, honey?” said Les. “It’s spring.” These days Eliza was as hard as Jude to keep up with. Now she was back in the city on weekends, running around with Jude and Johnny, no longer Bookworm Betty. “I don’t get it. The boys are dressing like girls and the girls are dressing like boys.”

“See?” Di rapped Eliza on the elbow. “I say that and she takes my head off.”

“You ready to go?” said Jude, distracted, glum.

“Wait.” Di made a gun of her hands and aimed it at Jude. “We’re having a birthday dinner for Eliza. Not this Saturday but the next. You’re coming?” She swung the gun around at Johnny. “You come, too, Johnny.”

“I told you I don’t want a party.”

“Can’t you just get her some magnets?” Les suggested.

With excruciating slowness, Di lowered her hands. The look on her face could have cracked ice.

“I like the magnets,” he said gently.

“We’re going,” Eliza said and kissed her mother’s cheek.

“Now, where is this temple?”

“In Brooklyn,” said Eliza. This seemed to satisfy her mother.

“How come Eliza doesn’t go to the matinees with you?” Les wondered.

The three of them exchanged a distinct look.

“It’s a little rough for girls,” said Johnny, just as Eliza said, “I had to study.”

Les picked up the bong and held it under Jude’s nose. “A little Gertrude before you go? Offer it to Krishna. It’s godly stuff.”

Jude said nothing as he followed Johnny and Eliza out the door.

“It was great meeting you,” Johnny called to Di. “Thanks for the invite.”

“Not this Saturday,” said Di, “but the next!”

The door slammed shut, the children’s voices disappearing down the chamber of the stairwell. Di sighed. “We might as well go, Lester,” she said, clapping her hands soundlessly together.

According to the book Jude had given her, the fetus at eighteen weeks was the size of a bell pepper. Eliza couldn’t decide if that was incredibly big or incredibly small. She was still nowhere near certain she had made the right decision, but it was too late now, and that, at least, was some kind of relief. Too late. Oh, well. No turning back. The fetus, whom she’d named Annabel Lee, had fingerprints, eyelids, and nipples.

Eliza’s own nipples had gone tender with goose bumps, expanded and purpled; her breasts, scrawled with blue veins, were full. She had been fairly certain, before getting pregnant, that they had reached their full dimensions—she had not set her hopes above an A cup—and this sort of monstrous growth was not the final spurt of puberty. She wished she had someone to show them to. Wives had husbands to marvel with. Other women had boyfriends or doctors or sisters. Teddy had handled them in the dark, more timidly than the other boys, but just as vacantly. No one had studied them, like a painting or a car or a song. They were hers alone.

Night after night she’d climbed into the narrow bed across from Shelby Divine, listening to Shelby’s peaceful snores in the dark, more awake than she’d ever been on any drug, her body riveted with her secret. And morning after morning she’d woken up sicker than she’d been with any hangover, so sick she’d felt she was full of a poison. She threw up only once. Mostly her sickness just simmered inside her, suffocating her from the inside out.

Thankfully, the nausea had subsided, and in its place, just as persistent, were Johnny and Jude, bringing her prenatal vitamins, bringing her an IT’S OK NOT TO DRINK button from a Pyramid show, calling her on the hall phone to remind her to eat breakfast (“Neither of them’s your boyfriend?” asked Shelby), waiting for her at Penn Station on Friday afternoon to fight over carrying her backpack, bearing Yoo-hoos and bags of sugared peanuts they’d bought from the street vendor outside. Throughout the week she craved those peanuts, the sweet, salty beginning of the weekend, Jude and Johnny standing at the end of the corridor like two dopey grooms.

On the following Friday afternoon, Johnny surprised Eliza by meeting her at the train station in Jersey instead of picking her up in New York. He wanted to hang out, he said, just the two of them; he wanted to see the town where she went to school, and she was so pleased to see him that she didn’t object to being away from the city for a few more hours. They walked from the train station to the movie theater, down the sidewalk lined with patches of gray ice, and saw Friday the 13th Part VII, sharing a bag of Twizzlers. When they emerged from the theater, it was dark outside. Two guys skating down the middle of the street cut over to the curb when they saw Johnny, calling, “Mr. Clean!” Turned out they’d met in the city, at a show at the Ritz. They talked for a few minutes, comparing tattoos, while Eliza watched the traffic pass by. One of them wanted DRUG FREE across his knuckles. Or maybe STR8 EDGE? Johnny told him to stop by.

“Must be nice,” Eliza said after they’d ordered at the Italian restaurant next door, “to be known by everyone.”

Anyone who needed a tattoo, or a double tape deck, or space to practice, went to Johnny. He would have made a fine drug dealer. Last fall he had organized a benefit show in Tompkins Square Park, with eleven bands and food donated by the Krishna temple. And last weekend, some band from California he’d met through the mail—the mail—had crashed at his apartment, four guys and another four roadies. Eliza had knocked on the door early the next morning to find them sprawled out over every surface, tangled in and out of blankets, in boxers of every imaginable pattern and color. She had never felt so full of desire and so undesirable, pregnant in a gray Harvard T-shirt big enough to be a dress, standing before ten half-naked boys.

“I might as well have been invisible to those guys out there,” she said. “Do I really look pregnant?”

Johnny unwrapped his silverware and pressed his paper napkin neatly to his lap. “Don’t take it personally. They’re probably not into girls.”

Eliza studied the tablecloth. She aligned her fingers in the red and white squares, as though she were playing piano. “What about you, though?” she asked.

“What about me?”

She looked up. He was leaning on the edge of the table, his chin cupped in his hand, scoring her with his watery blue eyes. She was staring back so hard, hunting for a fragment of Teddy, that she had to drop her eyes again. “I mean, we know how I got here.” She patted her stomach.

“I don’t need to know the details.”

“Well, I do. Come on, Johnny. We’re friends?”

Johnny cleared his throat. “We are.”

She leaned across the table. Dean Martin was singing “That’s Amore.” A white-haired couple was seated two tables down, each poring over a paperback. “So are you really going to wait till you’re married,” she whispered, “or what?”

“Eliza—”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that. I mean, I’m a walking advertisement for abstinence. I just mean—”

“What makes you think I haven’t . . . ?” Johnny showed his empty palms, then turned them over on the table. Through the ink on his bony hands grew the finest blades of gold hair.

“Oh.”

“Just because . . .”

“Oh. Wow, Mr. Clean. You’re full of surprises. I just figured, you know . . .”

“I mean, I’m not a freak,” Johnny said, avoiding her eyes. “I’m, you know, as red-blooded as the next guy.”

“Sorry. It’s none of my business.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I mean, Teddy—I can see why he liked you.” He managed a smile, and now it was Eliza who couldn’t look him in the eye. “You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself, okay? You look great.”

They were walking back to the train station to catch the nine-forty-five to New York when he said, as though he’d just remembered to mention it, “So when your mom finds out you’re pregnant, I think we should tell her I’m the father.”

He was carrying her backpack over one shoulder, like a schoolboy walking her home. She stopped, and he turned to face her. She was about to spout something smart-ass, but she stopped herself.

“You do?”

Johnny shoved his hands in his pockets. “People are going to notice soon. They’ll want to know who the father is. There’s no way your mom is going to let you keep the baby if she knows the situation.” Eliza said nothing. She nodded. “So this is the best way. This way we’ll be twice as strong. We’ll tell her we both want to keep the baby.” His voice was soft, apologetic, but he was sure of himself.

“But will we?”

The old couple from the restaurant tottered slowly down the sidewalk, propping each other up. Eliza and Johnny stepped aside until they passed by.

“What we’ll do is we’ll say”—he put his hands on her shoulders—“we’ll say we’re together. A couple.”

“We’ll say we are?”

“Well, maybe we should be.” Johnny shrugged, glancing out at the traffic, as if suggesting maybe they should get dessert. “I want to help raise this kid. Why not do it together?”

Eliza stared into the blank screen of his white T-shirt. When she didn’t answer, he placed his finger under her chin and tilted her head slowly, slowly up until her eyes met his, the way a parent will prepare a child for a reprimand, or the way a man will prepare a woman for a kiss. It had been a long time since anyone had touched her so intently, and a hot little hummingbird quivered in her chest.

“Okay,” she whispered. But he didn’t kiss her.

By the time they took their seats on the train, she was so exhausted, so thoroughly confused, that she fell asleep against Johnny’s shoulder, and although Jude had been in and out of her thoughts all evening, it wasn’t until the next morning, when he called her at her mom’s, more than a note of panic in his voice, that it occurred to her he might have been waiting for her the day before, at Penn Station, a bag of sugared peanuts in his hand.

“Johnny didn’t tell you? He picked me up in Jersey.”

“He didn’t tell me anything. I went to his place and he wasn’t there. I went to the station and you weren’t there.”

Eliza sat up in bed. She slipped her hand under her nightgown and over her stomach. She said she was sorry. She said she didn’t know. She told him about Johnny’s idea, relating the details as they came back to her, aware of the stony silence accruing on the other end of the line. “It’s the best thing,” she said, “don’t you think?”

Jude skipped temple the next day. He told Johnny he had a headache. Instead he went to Johnny’s, sat down on the couch, and picked up The Laws of Manu. A new set of passages was marked by the envelope and underlined in blue ink.

59. On failure of issue (by her husband) a woman who has been authorised, may obtain, (in the) proper (manner prescribed), the desired offspring by (cohabitation with) a brother-in-law or (with some other) Sapinda (of the husband).



60. He (who is) appointed to (cohabit with) the widow shall (approach her) at night anointed with clarified butter and silent, (and) beget one son, by no means a second. . . .



63. If those two (being thus) appointed deviate from the rule and act from carnal desire, they will both become outcasts, (as men) who defile the bed of a daughter-in-law or of a Guru.



“What’s with this voodoo shit?” he asked when Johnny came home, a full three hours after the ceremony had ended. Jude had been dozing on the couch, and now he did have a headache. He held up the book. “F*cking clarified butter?”

Johnny dropped his tattoo case and placed a styrofoam container of leftovers on the record crate in front of Jude. “It’s all that was left.”

“You got it for me?”

Johnny crossed to the kitchen and brought back a fork. “You can have it.”

Jude, in fact, had not had dinner. He removed his retainers, opened the box, and began efficiently to eat, unhappy with himself for being hungry. Johnny returned to the kitchen sink, the single sink in the apartment, and dispensed a caterpillar of toothpaste on a toothbrush.

“Did Eliza go with you?” Jude asked, his mouth full of naan.

“She did. She likes that voodoo shit.” Johnny jammed the toothbrush in his mouth. “She’s a spiritual person.” He cleaned his teeth with a ritual fervor that involved both arms, his eyebrows, and his hips. A yeasty lather of Colgate drooled down his chin.

“Where have you been, though? It’s like midnight.”

Johnny turned to the sink, spat, and rinsed his mouth. When he faced Jude again, a spot of toothpaste had blossomed over the heart of his T-shirt, white on white. Jude pointed it out.

“I had a house call.” Johnny peeled off the shirt and tossed it into the empty laundry basket. Across the rather pale, rather hairless plain between his nipples, Krishna was playing his flute. This among rubies and sapphires, ocean and fire, sinuous Sanskrit dictums the meaning of which Jude did not know, Xs and more Xs, TRUE TILL DEATH hanging from his clavicle like the iron plates of a necklace, none of which Jude had glimpsed but through the tissue of Johnny’s T-shirt, though he wondered now if Eliza had.

“You just did a tattoo?”

“I can’t even see straight. I’m taking a shower, and then I’m going to bed.”

“When you going to tattoo me, man? You said.”

“You don’t want to start, man. I’m telling you. You won’t stop. Good night. Or stay if you want, since you’ve made yourself so comfortable.”

“What if I pay you?”

“Maybe,” he said, pausing in the doorway to the bathroom. “Any more questions?”

Jude stared at the inside of the wax container, the oily, electric orange residue of his meal. When he’d told Johnny about what Hippie and Tory had done to his mother’s studio, Johnny had been sympathetic, then suspicious. Why had those guys targeted her? Jude finally told him the truth—he might have stolen a little pot from Hippie—and Johnny just shook his head, disappointed.

Still, Johnny had seen no reason for Jude to dive back into trouble in Vermont. “Don’t we have enough on our hands?”

He had a point. Sitting in Johnny’s apartment, Jude felt the mass of that responsibility. He was tired. But maybe Johnny was taking it into his own hands now. “Eliza told me you’re going to pretend you’re the father.”

Johnny was tugging at his bottom lip. The tattoo on the inside, below his gums, said, simply, NO. “It’s the only way, man.”

“But are you guys just friends, or . . . ?”

Blood beat in Jude’s ears. He wasn’t sure which answer he wanted to hear.

“Just friends?” Johnny said. “None of us are just friends anymore.”

Les was on the toilet four mornings later, hitting Gertrude and doing the Times crossword, when the phone bleated in the insistent, lonely way it does at sunrise, when the news is rarely good. Les allowed it to ring. Just as the sound became insufferable he heard his son’s descent from his bed, the gargle of his voice, and after several more moments, an ambivalent knock on the door.

“Dad?”

Leaning his head back and closing his eyes, Les released a billow of smoke to the ceiling. “Son.”

“We got a problem. Can you hear me?”

Les wondered if the “we” referred to Jude and himself, or to Jude and the person on the phone.

“Can it wait a sec? I’m only about one-third done here.”

“Can you just hurry up?”

“Go on and tell me. I can hear you.”

Nothing for a few seconds but the wobbling of the mirror on the back of the door.

“Eliza’s on the phone. She’s at school. You won’t get mad, right?”

Les balanced the crossword on the edge of the sink and the bong on the crossword. The prospect of helping Eliza—the prospect of helping Eliza without getting mad, as Di would—gave him satisfying pause. “I won’t get mad.”

“And you won’t tell her mom?”

“Unless she’s dying. Or she’s killed someone.”

On the doorjamb, painted over but still legible, were the pocketknife scars that recorded the stature of some other tenant’s children. Les had penciled in Eliza when she was little enough for that sort of thing—Di wouldn’t allow it at her place—but the graphite had long ago been smudged away.

“She’s bleeding.”

“What sort of bleeding?”

“You know, woman bleeding.”

Les scratched at his beard with his pencil. “Uh-huh?”

“The thing is, she’s pregnant, though.”

The pencil slipped from his grasp. As he bent to retrieve it, his forehead collided with the bong, which clattered into the sink, spilling its contents onto the newspaper.

Les put his hand to his forehead. He pressed hard, thinking.

“What should we do?” his son asked.

From the sink, Les retrieved Gertrude’s glass slide, which had snapped off at the base. It lay helplessly in Les’s palm, an amputated finger, dainty as an icicle, dumb as a dick.

“For God’s sake, kid, haven’t you heard of a rubber?”

The waiting room at the Mount Sinai Emergency Room, where Eliza had met them with her backpack and a look of being lost and not lost, as though she had a standing appointment for lunch there each week and was scanning the room for her date, was upholstered in a maroon a little too much like the color of blood. There were the usual amenities: issues of Prevention and Reader’s Digest that looked as though they’d survived a flood, the floor toy that involved sliding colored beads on shoots of wire, the Today show murmuring on the television in the corner, broadcasting from several sunnier blocks away news of the presidential race. It was early for emergencies, 8:20 according to the clock on the wall. The only other patients to make an entrance were a febrile toddler over her mother’s shoulder, and a construction worker, who on the site of the hospital addition had nailed his hand to a two-by-four.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” said Les when they were alone, feeding himself a jelly doughnut he’d had the foresight to purchase, with a twenty-ounce cup of coffee, between the subway station and the hospital. “She’s young. She’s not ready to be a mom. It’s nature’s way of taking care of things.”

Jude sat with his elbows on his knees, speaking to the hemoglobin-colored carpet. “How does it happen, exactly? Is it . . . is it just blood?”

Eliza had insisted on going into the examination room alone, had remained around long enough only for Les to whisper, “You keeping anything else from me? Are you a Mets fan, too?”

“I don’t know, champ,” he said to Jude. “You know who should be here is Johnny. If he’s the father, he’d want to know. Why don’t you call him.”

“He doesn’t have a phone. He’s going to be mad,” Jude let out.

“Why?”

“Not mad. Just—sad.”

“Sad,” Les agreed. He slurped his coffee. “But it’s a relief you’re not the father. You get tied up in it, the lady’s grieving, distraught, she’s guilty, you’re guilty, everyone’s feeling lousy. Be glad you’re not involved. Babies,” he said. He nudged Jude’s arm and indicated the walls around them. “You know you were born here?”

Jude looked at his father and shook his head.

“It’s true.” Les leaned back and crossed one hairy leg over the other. He was wearing his gray suede Birkenstocks with the broken clasp, one of the straps flapping like a tongue. His calves were the size of cantaloupes; they bore no resemblance to Jude’s. “You were tiny as a rabbit. And you had this shock of red, red hair.” He hovered his hand over his Yankees cap, indicating. “Your mom and I were sitting in the nursery in rocking chairs, in scrubs, with these shower caps on our heads, like they were afraid we were going to give you the plague. Just waiting for you.” He wasn’t watching the television now but the empty space in the room. “We waited there forever, just rocking back and forth. Your mom was terrified they’d changed their minds, that there was a problem. She wanted a cigarette so bad and all she had was this king-size bag of M&M’S. She ate the entire bag of M&M’S, waiting for you.”

Jude had not heard this story before, and it was only after hearing it that he realized he’d had a picture of his first meeting with his parents, and this was not it. He now understood why his father had chosen this inconveniently located emergency room, ninety blocks away: it belonged, in his mind, to a baby hospital. Second-degree burn: Beth Israel. Miscarriage: Mount Sinai. If Jude’s heart were not already preoccupied, it might have been warmed by his father’s lumbering logic.

“She prefers Snickers now,” Jude answered, not looking at him. Then, “Did she tell you I might have FAS?”

Les nodded. “Yes, she did.”

“Retard disease,” said Jude after a moment, because his father was cruelly silent.

“Not retard disease. It’s a disability.”

“It’s why I’m always in trouble and f*ck my numbers up so bad.”

“F*ck your numbers up how?”

“Mix them up. Turn them around. Letters, too. You didn’t know that?”

“I guess not,” Les said. “Look, who cares? It’s just a fancy name for your birth mom indulged a little too much. So did half my generation, okay? We didn’t know any better. Your mom smoked like a chimney when she was knocked up with your sister. Not to mention a little wacky tobacky now and then.”

“She did? While she was pregnant?”

“She said it helped with morning sickness,” Les said, shrugging dubiously. This piece of trivia made Jude feel better and worse at the same time, but Les looked pleased with himself, as though he’d wrapped up a nice father-son conversation. The fact that his father had tossed off the story of his birth in a waiting room while watching the Today show, might just have easily not shared it with him (as his mother surely would not have shared it with him), was enjoying the memory like he was enjoying his jelly doughnut and the prospect of pulling one over on his girlfriend, left Jude with nothing else to say.

The sliding doors to the street blew open then. Through them came three young black men, two propping up the third, whose jacket pocket was soaked with blood. The boy’s head was rolled back on his neck, and the yellow whites of his eyes were still. He made a sound as though he were choking on his tongue. A bubble of blood came up and sat poised on his open mouth for a moment before breaking.

It wasn’t until nearly an hour later, when Eliza returned to the waiting room, pale and smiling and still pregnant, that Jude could drain that blood from his mind. She was spotting—it wasn’t a miscarriage, but an infection—and Jude was so relieved that he clutched her arm and whispered, “Bacterial vaginosis!” as though they were the loveliest words on earth.

“I saw her on the monitor,” Eliza told them on the subway ride home. “They did an ultrasound. She’s jumping around like a jumping bean! Do beans jump?”

“She?” said Les.

“Annabel Lee,” Jude explained. The doctors said they could determine the sex of the baby, but Eliza didn’t want to know.

They begged Les not to tell Di, and Les, after enjoying their pleas for a while, agreed. “A baby,” he said, looking worried for the first time in his life. Jude told Eliza about the man who’d come in bleeding. Had he been shot? they wondered. Stabbed? Had he lived or died? Jude wanted to put his hand on Eliza’s belly, but he didn’t. He hadn’t known, before that morning, how badly he wanted Teddy’s baby to be born.

Johnny was not pleased that Eliza and Jude had confided in Les, but he did not complain that they hadn’t consulted him first, because, as it happened, Johnny had been indisposed at the time. The morning Eliza was admitted to the ER, he wasn’t in his apartment but in Rooster DeLuca’s, a scrappy little studio near Charlie Parker’s old building, making a house call for an eight-headed dragon he’d been working on for months. The first several appointments had taken place at Johnny’s, but lately he’d insisted on a new arrangement. It was risky to sneak his equipment through the street, but it was riskier to have customers visit his apartment at all hours. Most of Johnny’s tattoos were done by his friend Gomez, whose whole studio not long ago had been raided and fined by the Health Department. And last week the artist they called Picasso had quit after one of his customers fell over and died of AIDS. The city had banned tattooing in the sixties because of hepatitis B, and AIDS made hepatitis look like a cold sore. “Too dicey these days,” said Picasso, but now Johnny had a new crop of customers. He was terrified of the virus—he sterilized every needle—but he was too broke to be picky. He would tattoo anyone.

It was the most extensive single tattoo Johnny had performed: the entire expanse of Rooster’s broad back, armpit to armpit, skull to ass. It was the one empty canvas left on his generously inked body. He had a hairy f*cking back, Rooster, each black hair as long as the time since their last session, since the tattoo had healed enough to allow more work. On the Murphy bed that took up most of the room, Rooster lay on his stomach. On the nightstand, Johnny’s kit, plastered with band stickers, splattered with ink, lay openmouthed. Johnny sat on a stool, spreading a sheet of shaving cream on Rooster’s back. He worked the razor down the slope of his spine, rinsing it after each stroke in a cloudy mug of water. When he was done, he mopped up the cream with his cloth, took the Vaseline Rooster kept in the nightstand, and applied a dollop to the right shoulder blade.

“How’s it lookin’?”

“I thought you fell asleep.” They spoke loudly now over the sound of the needle.

“I did for a minute,” Rooster said. “I was dreamin’ about pancakes. I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“You work up my appetite, baby.”

Johnny worked the foot pedal, filling in the seventh head. He was getting close to the end. “One more visit,” he said, “and I think I’ll be done.”

“Then I’ll have to come up with somethin’ else for you to do.”

The needle was riding the dune of Rooster’s back, veining the thirteenth eyeball of the dragon, and Johnny found himself picturing what Eliza’s narrow back would look like.

“Rooster?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve been with girls, right?”

“It’s been a long time.”

Johnny wondered if he could bring himself to do it. It couldn’t be so different. A body was a body. “What was it like?” He’d tattooed a few girls before, and had felt a kind of awe at the smoothness of their skin under his hands.

“Where’s this comin’ from?”

“Just curious.”

“You thinkin’ about that girl?”

Johnny didn’t say anything. The needle throbbed in his hand.

“Well, you wouldn’t have to worry about knockin’ her up.” Rooster laughed, bumping the needle.

“Don’t laugh, man!” Johnny let up on the pedal and withdrew the needle. “You f*cked up the eyeball!” He wiped at it with his cloth. The needle had scratched the dragon’s cornea, tracing a red tail through it. “It looks like he’s crying blood!”

“Can you fix it?”

“F*cking A.”

“F*ckin’ right.”

Johnny snapped off his gloves. Rooster sat up. His chest was dark with the same stubborn, wiry hairs, and imprinted with the texture of the tousled sheets. He wasn’t laughing anymore. For months, before Johnny had gotten his own apartment, this was the bed he’d slept in. He’d never quite been able to bring himself to leave it.

“Why don’t you sleep in my bed?” Rooster had asked him that first night he’d rescued him from Tompkins, almost two years ago.

“No, man,” Johnny had said. “It’s your bed. You take it.”

Rooster had looked at him, placing the big, calloused palm of his hand on Johnny’s neck, and said, “That’s not what I meant.”

Rooster did the same thing now, stroking Johnny’s Adam’s apple with his thumb. He was gentle, always gentle, but Johnny felt his breath stop, choked with indecision.

“You want to know what it feels like? Bein’ with a girl?” Rooster dropped his hand. “It feels like bein’ a f*ckin’ coward.”