Ten Thousand Saints (14 page)

Inside the door, behind a chest-high counter, stood a security officer dressed in a blue shirt and tie, like a person who worked in a museum or airport. His mustache was tobacco stained like Les’s, and his name tag said
BILL T.
He gave her a brisk nod, not quite looking at her, and made a motion with his hand—
C’mere
—that implied he wanted her to hand something over. A form of some sort? Her fake ID, also from her coke dealer, which put her at twenty-two?

“Your handbag, miss.”

Eliza took off her headphones and tapped the bottom of the book bag hanging on her back. “I just have this.”

“Let’s see it, please.”

To her left, framing the entrance into the office, stood what appeared to be a metal detector. Beyond it, the waiting room was nearly full. A dozen girls, black, white, Hispanic, all of them looking exactly fifteen, sat staring into magazines and clipboards, beside mothers or boyfriends or sisters, silent. She said, “It’s just a backpack.”

“You’ll get it back directly, miss. Just need to take a look.”

One of the girls, wearing a pinafore dress and Keds, was very pregnant. About three inches from her face she held a book with a plain red cover, titled in gold letters
You Can Live Forever in Paradise on Earth
. Eliza had been trying to keep Teddy out of her head, but now she couldn’t help picturing him in heaven, a place she was pretty sure she didn’t believe in, sending down a quizzical, disappointed look.

“I’m not—comfortable,” she said, looking from the man to the girl, back to the man, “giving you, since I have some private things in here. Can I—”

“It’s policy, miss.”

“Okay.” The girl flipped a page and rested an absent hand on her belly. “I’ll leave it in the car.” Before he could say anything, she turned around and pushed herself out the door, the chime ringing blandly behind her.

When she walked in the door of her mother’s apartment on Riverside Drive, a cone of incense was burning on the coffee table beside a glass of blood-colored wine. Eliza’s mother was perched on the divan, pumping a ThighMaster between her knees and talking on the cordless telephone. It was Friday evening. Neena’s night off.

“All right, darling, she’s here,” she said and hung up. To Eliza, she said, “I thought you might be the delivery boy. I ordered from the Brazilian place.” She glanced at the watch face on the inside of her wrist. “You’re a little late.”

Eliza slipped her keys into her backpack. “I missed the first train.”

“Did you?” Her mother put the ThighMaster aside, picked up the wineglass, and padded across the wood floor in her ballet slippers to kiss Eliza between the eyes. “I just ordered some
feijoada,
with hearts of palm. I wasn’t sure.”

Eliza plucked the glass from her hand. “Can I have a sip?”

“You don’t normally
ask
. How was your week?” Taking Eliza by the shoulders, she kissed her repeatedly on the forehead, pecking like a bird, while Eliza looked deeply into the pool of wine. When the kissing was over, Eliza put her lips tentatively to the glass and drank. “That was Les. Guess what. He’s gone to Vermont, to fetch his son.”

Eliza swallowed. “To
fetch
him?”

“Yes, to bring him here, to live with him for a while. I’m
so
—”

“Why?” said Eliza.

“Well, he’s been having a difficult time. Of course he has. I think it’ll be good for Les, don’t you? And the son, I hope.”

“When will he be here?”

“Tomorrow, I guess. If that vehicle will make it back.”

“I’m going to start on some homework real quick.”

“Oh, you had calls. Nadia and Cissy both called the other night—they said they’ve been trying to reach you at school.”

“Okay. I’m going to real quick just start some algebra, while it’s fresh.”

“Darling?” Diane Urbanski had a pert, compact face, her eyes dark and round, eyebrows full, skin white as cream; she wore her black hair, always, in a French braid. Her grandparents had been Russian Jews. Together they had sailed to England from Murmansk, her grandmother pregnant with their only child, her grandfather fleeing the Great War. On the passage over, he died of the 1918 flu, and their daughter, Eliza’s Babushka, never met him. “I’m happy you’re making a fresh start,” Diane said and smiled.

In her room, Eliza locked the door, took off her coat, turned on the stereo, and emptied her backpack on the bed—sweater, wallet, keys, books, makeup bag, which she also emptied, hands shaking as she dug through it, the lipstick and mascara and contacts case clicking as they fell, and the itty-bitty plastic bag dusted pink on the outside with a bit of stray rouge. She enclosed it in her hand and held it to her heart, which was racing. The security guard wouldn’t have looked through her makeup bag. He wouldn’t have found it. And what if he did? It wouldn’t have been the first time she was caught with drugs. Why had she let him scare her away?

She dumped the cocaine on the glass nightstand, cut it into four pretty lines, and then, kneeling on the carpet, staring at it with such concentration she felt she might have an aneurysm like her father, that her brain might burst from uncertainty, she swept the powder onto the floor and collapsed crying across it, a soundless crying that hurt.

Something to remember him by
. She wondered if this was how her great-grandmother had felt, sailing across the Arctic to a strange country, suddenly alone. Eliza was pregnant by a dead boy, and whatever was growing inside her felt dead, too.

A
s a brother, Johnny had been unreliable, usually in and out of the house, like their mother, usually high on something. Perhaps because of this, his memories of Teddy were disturbingly few, and without pattern. Traveling with their mother from motel to motel. Climbing the yellow tree behind their trailer in Delaware, where someone else’s father had left a tree house. Locking him in the trunk of Delph’s car. Walking him to the emergency room when Queen Bea was off somewhere, Johnny’s T-shirt pressed to Teddy’s bloody forehead, when he fell off the porch banister trying to do a rail slide. Johnny had slept in Teddy’s bed with him that night, Teddy spooked and pretending not to miss their mom, the stitches through his brow bone as clumsy as shoelaces.

Most of his memories of Vermont did not have Teddy in them. Filling notebooks with band logos, supermen, marijuana leaves. Getting stoned before school in the Kramaro. Waking up hungover in the parking lot behind Birkenjacque’s. He had always been careful to exclude Teddy from his fun, even after Teddy was running around with Jude, stealing their mothers’ cigarettes—“Not yet, little man, get out of here”—but he, too, had huffed, he and Delph and Kram, from a gas can in Kram’s garage. He had once been stopped by a cop north of town, high on ludes, driving along the lake in Queen Bea’s Horizon without his lights on. “I’m practicing,” was all he could think to say, and the cop had let him off with a warning. That was how lucky Johnny was.

That was what he thought of, what had kept him on the morning of the funeral from strangling Jude Keffy-Horn.
He’s just a kid
. How many mornings, when Johnny was his age, could he have been the one to wake up dead?

A true sannyasi, he told himself, neither hates nor desires.

Johnny prided himself on his forbearance, his adaptability, on his skill in coexisting with all walks of life. In his neighborhood, it was a matter of survival. Before he had laid claim to it, or it to him, he had wandered into Tompkins Square Park one evening to get some sleep after his falling-down-drunk con of a father, whose couch he’d been sleeping on in Staten Island, had stolen all his money. That night in the park, his guitar case was stolen with all his clothes inside. The next day, he found the guy around the corner—the case still had the Bad Brains sticker on it—and Johnny picked it up and used it to break the guy’s jaw. Turned out the guy was blind. Robbed by a blind guy. After that, Johnny watched his back. But rather than making him enemies, the incident had made him allies. He’d broken Blind Jack’s jaw! Dude didn’t mess around. They were all scraping by together.

But there had been other rituals of neighborhood hazing. He’d been robbed again, chased, roughed up to the point of needing stitches, which he didn’t get, wearing the scars like tattoos. Compared to some, he was lucky. One night in Tompkins, he saw Rafael, one of the kids who turned tricks in the park, stumble out of the bathroom they called the comfort station soaked to the waist. Johnny kept walking, didn’t offer his help. You didn’t go in there, not if you weren’t looking for something. He’d thought that some guys had just dunked him in a toilet, but Blind Jack told him later that Rafael had been raped, that some ladies from St. Mark’s Church had taken him to the hospital to get stitched up. Johnny didn’t see him again.

Then one night Johnny ended up at a straight edge show at CBGB, alone and falling-down drunk, and met a hardcore drummer named Rooster DeLuca, the first straight edge kid he’d ever known. That was the beginning of the end for him. In no time, Johnny was staying at Rooster’s place, and Rooster had him hooked on the drug that was no drugs. Fuck the dealers, Rooster said, fuck the drunk drivers, fuck the frail-ass gutter punks with marks up their arms, fuck Robert Chambers and the prep school jocks with coke up their noses and their dicks in some crying girl.

At twenty-two, Rooster was hardly a kid. He lived on Avenue B, across the street from the park. He was built like a lumberjack—big, hammy shoulders, muscular legs—and he had a Brooklyn accent like a mouth full of chew. If he’d grown up in Lintonburg, he might have played football with Kram. But he’d grown up in Bensonhurst, and his only sport, other than skateboarding and stage diving, was running deliveries for his uncle’s deli, driving around salami sandwiches on his BMX. To the milk crate bungee-corded to the handlebars he’d attached a cardboard sign that spelled out, in black electrician’s tape,
GO VEGAN
. He’d gotten his name from the red Manic Panic Mohawk he’d sported back when CB’s was barely open. Now he was as bald as Johnny—it helped in their neighborhood to look like a skinhead, and the tattoos helped, too. Johnny’s earrings and Krishna beads did not, nor his new straight edge status. Dealers tried to bully him into buying and selling. “You too good for us, Mr. Clean?” Johnny winked and negotiated. When he got his own apartment, and then started tattooing, he offered them free work. When he and Rooster and a couple of other guys started a straight edge band called Army of One, and started getting good, and put out a record, people from the neighborhood came to their shows. Seeing those bums and drunks in the audience, wearing his band T-shirt, filled Johnny with a backward sort of pride.

Now when Johnny and Rooster walked the streets together, they got nods, they got waves. Johnny knew their names. Jerry the Peddler, Mary, Froggy. Jones, who was always jonesing. Blind Jack’s friend Vinnie, who was going to die of AIDS any day. Soon enough Johnny’s own nickname was spoken with as much affection as ridicule, and Johnny liked it. He liked the goulash of his neighborhood, the alphabet soup, the insults spoken in foreign tongues. He liked the steady comfort of the Missing Foundation—anarchists, guerrilla musicians, graffiti artists—and the territorial badges they sprayed across the Lower East Side, warning off the encroaching slumlords of the East Village.
$1500 Rent, your home is mine, 1988=1933
. It was said that the toppled martini glass meant
The party’s over,
but Johnny liked to think of it as a symbol of sobriety, like the brave anomaly of the Temperance Fountain in the middle of Tent City. Faith, Hope, Charity, Temperance—like the lyrics to some straight edge song. He liked to think of his own role in the neighborhood as a force of benevolence. Not a missionary but a monk. He led by example.

So Jude Keffy-Horn? Johnny didn’t know if he could forgive him, but he could tolerate him.

Jude was on his mind a lot as he walked these streets. His brother’s best friend, the person who’d been with Teddy when he died. One February afternoon, Johnny hallucinated him. He was on his way to Astor Place to play laser tag on the subway when he spotted him, entranced by an arcade game in front of Gem Spa. Johnny stopped. Was it him? His head was shaved. He was taller. A frosty breeze shuttled down the block. A carousel of Oakley knockoffs spun. Across the street, a cigarette hanging from his mouth, yes, Jude was on a skateboard, but he was standing still.

Seven

T
hey’d arrived just after dark, the Manhattan skyline a shadow through the van’s windshield. They might have made better time had Les not insisted on pulling over to the side of I-87, upon learning that Jude had never driven a car, to give him a lesson. For nearly an hour Jude had maneuvered the Purple People Eater ineptly down the emergency lane, the vehicle flying out in front of him, then jerking to a stop, a sequence for which Les had an odd patience, as though they had all the time in the world here in this dimly lit pod, until finally Jude got the van into gear and stayed in the driver’s seat until they had to stop for gas. It was a long drive, and both of them, exhausted, had gone to bed as soon as they were home.

Now, waking up from a deep sleep, Jude blinked his eyes at the ceiling, uncertain for several seconds where he was. He sat up and hung his legs over the ledge of the loft. From his point of view he could see the closet-size kitchen, the open door to the bathroom, and the living room, which consisted of a television on top of a barrel, a chest serving as a coffee table, and a futon, on which his father sat, packing the bowl of a glass bong. The place wasn’t big enough to turn a skateboard around in. Through the tall window was a row of storefronts across the street—one sign said simply
EAT
—against a bright winter sky.