Ten Thousand Saints (3 page)

“I did,” Jude said, although he hadn’t. For several weeks he’d been selling his Ritalin pills for a dollar a pop to a kid in his homeroom named Frederick Watt, who liked to take them before tests. A few times Jude and Teddy had taken a bunch at once and wigged out a little, but it was no fun doing drugs you were supposed to do. Jude was too old for Ritalin. He preferred mellower means of controlling his temperament, and his fingers itched for a joint. “Come on, Ma, I need more than two dollars.”

“I believe you already got your birthday gift, fella.”

“Yeah, well, something
happened
to it already.”

Teddy shot Jude a look.

“What happened to it?” Harriet asked.

“Nothing,” Teddy said. “He just lent it to someone.”

“Who’d you lend it to?”

“We’ll get it back,” Teddy said. Quickly he and Jude exchanged a silent, reflexive pact. “It’s just temporary.”

“It better be,” Harriet said, picking up her burning cigarette, which she’d propped in one of the ashtrays. “I spent a long time on that.” She expelled a lungful of smoke and shook her cigarette at him, remembering something. “Your father called again. Eliza will be here at six-oh-five. She’s taking a different train. Still staying till midnight, I think.”

“Who’s Eliza?” Teddy asked.

Jude thwacked him on the sleeve. “Eliza? The chick who’s hanging out with us tonight?”

“His father’s girlfriend’s daughter,” said Harriet, crossing her legs.
“Eliza Urbanski
.
”

In the seven years since Les had left their family, Jude and Prudence hadn’t laid eyes on him. His calls and cards came once or twice a year, cash less, although not because, as far as Jude knew, he didn’t have it—he paid his child support on time, regular as rent. The last birthday gift Les had bestowed on Jude was for his thirteenth: subscriptions to
Playboy, Barely Legal,
and
Juggs
—the excess and range signifying both an uncertainty of the boy’s tastes and what Jude considered a boastful display of financial prowess.

But on Christmas night, when he called to wish his children a happy holiday, he had announced that his girlfriend’s daughter would be in town, skiing with her friends in Stowe for winter break—would Jude and Pru like to show her around? “She’s about your guys’s age,” said Les.

“How old is that?” Prudence had asked him—she, even more than her brother, had moral objections to pleasing Les—and passed the phone to Jude.

It had been known for years that Les had a girlfriend, a ballerina from England. This brief characterization had so belabored Jude’s imagination that he had been only abstractly aware that she came with a daughter. Standing with the phone in his hand, he had looked at his mother, who was scrubbing the empty sink with wanton cheerfulness, pretending not to eavesdrop, and understood that his father wanted to make her jealous. Skiing at Stowe—the girlfriend was probably loaded. Jude said okay, whatever.

Despite himself, he’d dreamt about the girl. Eliza. Dreamt, dreamed. It was a faceless, plotless, colorless dream—he knew only that she was there, the idea of her, and that, as with most dreams these days, he’d woken this morning in the viscid pool of his own anticipation.

T
he Ass Street Mall was long and dark, like a tunnel that went nowhere, and Jude had memorized every one of its uneven, roach-brown tiles. He and Teddy darted in and out of stores, up and down escalators, past the food court comprised of a Häagen-Douche and a Pizza Slut, searching for Jude’s sister, who always had money, until they found her behind the glass wall of Waldenbooks. She was standing at the magazine rack with a pair of friends, reading
Tiger Beat,
and when she saw them, she looked up for a moment, then away.

Jude didn’t see Prudence much, but when he did, he saw a girl in bloom. One recent morning, he’d walked into the bathroom and found her standing naked over the heating vent, pale and nippley and terrified. He thought immediately of their childhood pet, Mary Ann, a tabby cat who had nursed a litter of kittens on a set of pink, swollen mammaries the size and shape of his sister’s. Since then, it had taken him a great deal of effort, when coming across the pastel bras hanging from the bathroom doorknob, to ward off that horrible, wet-haired vision. Teddy liked to point out that, not sharing the same DNA, Prudence was like any other girl in Lintonburg—in another life, if he hadn’t been adopted by her parents, Jude could get a hard-on looking at her and not have to feel weird about it. There was no way his sister could give him a hard-on, but the possibility did make him feel lonely and sick. His sister was smart and pretty and she and Jude had nothing in common, and seeing her naked was seeing how irreconcilable they were.

“What do you want?” she mouthed now, flipping through her magazine. Her voice was far away, muffled through the glass.

“Forty bucks,” Jude said, tucking his devil lock behind his ear.

Prudence’s hair—ashy blond, the kind with a glint of gray in it, the kind Harriet used to have—swirled around the hood of her parka, and her braces, pink and purple, flashed like fangs. There was something sort of metallic about her, a silver, fishy glow under her skin. “Why?” she said.

“Because,” Jude said, “I want to buy you a birthday present.”

“It’s
your
birthday. My birthday’s in September.”

“I know that,” he said. He knew because Prudence was nine months younger than he was, and also because she still had the invitation from her party taped to her bedroom door, along with a Just Say No poster featuring Kirk Cameron. “I’ll pay you back,” Jude said. “You know what a fine brother I am.”

Prudence stared at her magazine; her eyes didn’t move. The two friends whispered something Jude couldn’t hear, gold hoops swinging from one pair of ears, silver hoops from the other. Were they looking at Teddy? Teddy was looking at them.

“What happened to his glasses?” Prudence asked, nodding at Teddy.

Harriet Horn, after several years of sex with Les Keffy, her college sweetheart, had been declared infertile by a Lintonburg obstetrician. Her fallopian tubes were clogged like straws full of mud, but through this obstruction, right about the time Jude himself was being born (on the last night of 1971, in a New York City hospital), one of Les’s relentless and ironic sperm prevailed. When Prudence was born, nine months after Jude was adopted, Harriet nursed them at the same time, one on each side, like two of Mary Ann’s blind, slimy kittens. Jude, his mother told him, had liked to kick his suckling sister in the face. As a toddler, standing on a step stool, he tried to drown her in the basement sink, and when they were nine, she threw a pair of nail scissors at him, spearing the hollow under his right eye. He fingered this moon-shaped scar now, finding his pale image in the window. His forehead had left an oily streak on the glass, and he wiped it with his wrist.

“I’ll pay you back, Pru.”

“No, you won’t. You’re just going to spend it on you-know-what.” With the nail-polished fingers of her right hand and the sign-language skills she’d learned the first semester of tenth grade, she spelled out something frantic.

“I don’t know what that means!”

“Drugs!” she pronounced, cupping her hands against the glass.

Prudence’s puritanical streak was a matter of mild embarrassment for their mother, but for Jude it was simply proof of their genetic divide. “It’s my birthday!” he yelled. The itch in his fingers had spread to his hands, which he mashed into fists, pressing his knuckles to the window.

“I hate you, too!” Prudence shrieked, hands flying like fighting birds. Then she and her friends disappeared into Young Adult.

J
ude scavenged. He probed a finger into the coin return slots of pay phones, vending machines, the children’s carousel that had been broken for as long as Jude could remember. He found nothing but a lone gumball in a candy machine, which turned his tongue a defeated electric blue. To spend one’s sixteenth birthday—and New Year’s Eve!—in a shopping mall, with no pot, no beer, no prospects to offer a mysterious, loaded, out-of-town girl—it was too shameful to consider. He swallowed his pride and suggested they head for the Record Room. Maybe Delph would take an IOU.

Anthrax’s “Soldiers of Metal” was playing over the store speakers. Behind the counter, Delph was preparing to thwack a pencil at the one Kram held pinched between his fingers.

“Boo!” Jude yelled, and Kram flinched.

“There will be no skateboarding in here,” Delph called, shaking a finger at Teddy and Jude. “Out with those things, gentlemen, or I’ll call mall security.”

“No!” Jude said. “Not that fat guy on the golf cart.”

“Don’t start on fat guys,” said Kram, who at eighteen had a full-blown beer gut. “I’ll pin you right here, little boy.” And he clambered over the counter and fell on Jude, digging his knees into his ribs.

Kram O’Connor and Clarence Delph III regularly put Teddy and Jude in headlocks, charged them outrageous rates for marijuana, and invented for them a seemingly tireless list of abusive nicknames. Teddy got the worst of it—Teddy Bear, Teddy Krueger, Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Ruxpin, Teddy Graham, Teddy McDickless, McDick. Never mind that Delph refused to be called by his own first name, or that Kram got his nickname from accidentally tattooing his real name backward in a mirror. They had been friends of Johnny’s, metalheads with muscle cars and big-haired girlfriends (Kram’s car they called the Kramaro), and although they would be graduating, barely, in June, and although Johnny had left town two years ago, they still let Jude and Teddy follow them around, gave them rides, came over to Jude’s every once in a while to jam and tell him how shitty his cheap guitar sounded. The purpose of their alliance they made clear: they required Teddy and Jude for news from Johnny, nothing more. Johnny was in a straight edge band. Johnny’s straight edge band had played a show at CBGB. Johnny was tattooing full-time now, had traded an eight track for his own machine and some needles, and since tattooing was illegal in New York, as it was in Vermont, he had to do it from his apartment, a studio in Alphabet City that was literally underground. He’d stopped returning Kram’s and Delph’s calls months ago; his phone was turned off when he didn’t pay the bill, he wrote Teddy, and he left it off. He could live without it.

Which meant Teddy was screwed. His mother had bolted, and his brother was the only person he could go to. But Teddy didn’t have money for a bus ticket—he’d have to write Johnny and ask him to send some. It would be days before Johnny got the letter, and days before Johnny could send him the money. Teddy couldn’t stay at home with the power gone out—he’d freeze his balls off—but he couldn’t stay with Jude, either, not forever. He didn’t want Harriet to know his mother had left. He wouldn’t be able to stand her pity.

If only Teddy were sixteen—he would have been living with his brother already. Or maybe, if he was alive, with his dad. He didn’t dare mention this to his mother, who had long ago forbidden the subject, or to Jude, who regarded curiosity about one’s missing father as one of the telltale symptoms of being a fag, but he’d been thinking about his dad a lot lately. His whole life, his mother had been telling him he was dead, but then Johnny had found out that his own dad was alive. Didn’t that mean Teddy’s dad could be out there, too? But how did you find someone you knew nothing about, not even a name?

“You guys got any money I could borrow?” Teddy asked. He kept his voice down, though there were no customers in the store.

“What for?” Kram asked, climbing off of Jude.

“I want to visit Johnny,” he said, keeping it simple and hoping Jude wouldn’t decide to elaborate. But Delph and Kram didn’t have any money, either. They’d gone broke buying Christmas gifts for their girlfriends.

“We’ll settle for some pot,” Jude broke in.

Delph snorted. “No more IOUs, Judy.”

“Come on, man! We’re dry.”

“I don’t need any pot,” Teddy said. “I just need a bus ticket.”

Delph leaned an elbow on the counter. “Listen to young Edward,” he said. He had a dark, horsey mullet and a big moon of a face, craggy with craters, so white it was yellow. “He’s gone straight edge, like his brother! Just Say No, right?”

“I still say he’s lying,” said Kram. “Michelob McNicholas? He’d go into cardiac arrest if he stopped drinking.”

“Those straight edge kids don’t fornicate,” Delph said. “That’s what I heard. Don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t
breathe
. . .”

“What, like Jehovah’s Witnesses?” Kram said, rubbing his Buddha belly.

“The music’s pretty wicked, though,” Teddy said. “Johnny made me another tape. You guys heard that Youth of Today album yet?”

“Told you, Teddy Bear. We don’t have that crazy rock-and-roll music in stock.”

“Come on, Delph,” Jude whined, impatient with the conversation. “Just a dime? It’s my birthday.”

Delph slapped the counter. “Jeezum Crow! I knew that, man.”

“Aw, Delphy, you gotta hook him up. Man’s sweet sixteen, right?”

“You finally going to turn in that V-card tonight, little man?”

Then they were talking about Eliza, the girl Jude would meet in a few hours at the train station. As if they didn’t have girls in Lintonburg; they had to import them from New York. That was the sad thing about Jude and those guys, thought Teddy—they hadn’t been anywhere. They hadn’t seen shit. The other day Jude had insisted that Wichita was a state. He thought you got a girl to like you by stealing her umbrella.