Ten Thousand Saints (12 page)

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.

D
elph 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.”

I
t 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.

W
hen 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?”