Ten Thousand Saints (31 page)

Hippies, though—that was a new one.

“Dude,” said one of them, “when Mr. Clean took out that knife, I was like, whoa.”

It occurred to Jude that Johnny had been offering Hippie an out. What had passed between them in the schoolyard had been a quiet negotiation.
I don’t want to use this, Hippie.
Get out of here while you can
. Afterward Johnny continued to hold the knife at his side while he admonished Jude, not exactly brandishing it, but offering it as evidence. “Quit starting shit!” he’d said. “I’m tired of cleaning up after you.”

“You know what he called Teddy?”

“I don’t care, Jude.”

“He called Teddy a fag.”

“I don’t
care
what he called him! You’re the one who stole his weed. And you’re riding your straight edge high horse?” He shook his head in disappointment. “A straight edge kid should be the one breaking bongs. You’ve got it all backwards.”

Johnny had finally pocketed the knife, but he hadn’t uttered a word as they’d all filed back into the building to load out their equipment. They’d left everything in the van, and Johnny had headed straight upstairs to Jude’s room. Rooster had followed him to try to calm him down.

“Rooster feels bad,” Jude said, “because he’s the one who helped to start shit.”

“Whatever,” said one of the guys. “It’s a hardcore show. What does Mr. Clean expect?”

“That’s why he left his first band,” said another. “He was pussying out.”

“Doesn’t he have a wife?” someone wondered. “What is he, eighteen?”

“Yeah, but she’s pregnant,” said someone else.

“That’s not very edge.”

“That’s
totally
edge. What’s he supposed to do, abandon her? He’s committed.”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said. “He goes around pledging a clean lifestyle, and it turns out he’s knocked up some girl he just met?”

“Whatever, man, you were seeing that girl in Ohio.”

“We were pen pals! She’s in the scene!”

“She was until she graduated.”

“True Till College, man.”

Jude shot a look at Delph and Kram, reminding them to keep quiet. “Johnny really . . .
cares
about her,” Jude said, even though he hadn’t seen him acknowledge Eliza in days. “He’s trying to help her.”

“I’m sure he’s helping himself to her upstairs right now,” someone said.

“I wish he was down here, though. I want him to do
X
s on my hands.”

“We could borrow his kit,” said someone else.

“No way,” said Jude. “He’d kill us.”

“We can do our own,” said Kram. He peeled up the sleeve of his T-shirt, showing off the poke-and-stick tattoo he’d given himself at age fourteen.
KRAM
. It was inscribed across his meaty shoulder, in haphazard pointillist fashion. In Jude’s opinion, no one should take advice from a kid who did his own tattoo backward, but the guys lit up. “All you need is some India ink and a needle.”

Jude stepped over the sleeping bags and went to Harriet’s desk drawer. “Is this India ink?” he asked, holding up two black bottles. For once, he was glad to have an artist for a mother. In the sewing basket above the sink, he found a cloth tomato stabbed with needles.

Delph went first. No one was pussying out of this one. He offered Kram the back of his hand, eight other heads bent over them in a huddle. By the time Kram was done with one leg of the
X,
the rest of the room had begun their own, dipping the needles in the flame of one of Harriet’s candles, then running them under hot water. Jude paired up with the kid with the missing teeth, tracing his Magic-Markered
X
s, blotting up the blood with a rag, then another when he’d soaked the first, so much blood that it was hard to see what he was doing. Then the kid did Jude’s. Only the right hand—the left was too scarred from the fire at the temple. The tattoo hurt more than he’d thought it would. It took a long time. Toward the end, exhausted and numb, Jude fell in and out of sleep.

The single
X,
Jude saw when he woke the next morning, was dark and fat and a little crooked, and still crusty with ink. He sat up. Everyone was asleep, feet in faces, asses in armpits, mouths quivering a lullaby of snores. His head was heavy, and he felt as if he’d been pelted by several baseballs. He lay down again, but he couldn’t fall asleep—he kept opening his eyes to look at his hand. As long as he had a hand, this
X
would be on it.
X
marks the spot. Jude was here.

H
arriet and Prudence were at the kitchen counter, eating breakfast and sharing the
Free Press
. Arts & Culture for Harriet. Prudence was perusing a special insert on prom dresses, her face hanging three inches above the page.

“Oh, Christ. What happened to you?” Harriet looked from Jude’s face to his hand.

“Mom! He has a tattoo!”

“That’s not a tattoo,” Harriet said, leaping up from her stool and grabbing his arm. “It’s paint or something.” She wagged his wrist. “My God, is that my India ink?”

“And you got beat up!” Prudence said, slamming down her spoon.

“Shut the fuck up, Pru.”

Harriet put a palm to his forehead. “Look at your nose—it’s purple.”

“It was just a football game. It got a little crazy.”

“One of the boys downstairs did this to you?” Jude shrugged away. “They’re lucky I didn’t see that bruise last night. Jude, Jesus, what am I supposed to say?”

“Say he’s grounded.”

“You had one good hand left,” Harriet said sadly, studying the
X
. “And now you’ve ruined that one, too.” She rubbed at some of the ink, hoping she might be wrong.

U
pstairs, Eliza was in bed. She had been nestled here in her trundle since she’d come home the night before, dusk still settling at the window. She’d been here when she heard the boys arrive long after dark, the slamming of car doors, a set of footsteps, then another, passing by her door on the way upstairs. She was here when they left again this morning, the voices calling thank-yous and apologies and good-byes. “Are you okay?” Prudence whispered, coming back in to check on her, and Eliza had nodded and rolled over. Annabel Lee did not like her mother to sleep on her back. She did not like her mother to sleep at all.

“We’ll wait until the baby’s born,” Johnny had told her. “You’re pregnant with my brother’s baby. Wouldn’t it be disrespectful to his memory?”

When she’d asked him if she could wear his beads, he’d put a protective hand to his throat. Already the subway token he had given Teddy hung from her neck—what more did she want? “It’s not a class ring, Eliza,” he’d said.

She’d gotten out of bed only once, in the middle of the night, to empty the bladder that the baby liked to kick. She’d tiptoed up to Jude’s room and stood outside the door, wondering if anyone was in there. But the room was quiet.

H
e’d be lying if he said he hadn’t been counting the days until Rooster’s visit. But then, he’d been lying about so much for so long now that he barely remembered what was real. That night, as he waited for Rooster’s knock on Jude’s bedroom door, he’d imagined the sick thrill of being with Rooster in the top bunk of Jude’s bed—two boys at a sleepover, staying up late under the covers, and the relief of leaving the rest of the world downstairs. Rooster was what was real.

But when Johnny locked the door behind them and climbed the ladder to the top bunk, Rooster didn’t follow. He sank into the bean bag chair in the corner. The desk lamp bled a thin, gray light.

“Baby, I’m sick.”

Johnny sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the bed. He remembered the tree house he and Teddy had played in. He hadn’t wanted to admit to his brother that he was scared of heights, but now he felt again that the ground was very far away.

“How sick?”

Rooster shrugged. His cheeks, once meaty, had caved in, as though he’d removed a pair of false teeth. Johnny had thought he’d been protesting his absence. Fasting out of stubbornness, or too heartbroken to eat. “Two hundred T cells. Whatever the fuck that means.”

Johnny closed his eyes. He was sitting in the tree house in Delaware, and Teddy was below him, looking up into the branches, waiting for him to fall. He clung to the edge of the bed, hands shaking.

“Is that . . . still the virus? Or . . . ?”

Rooster pulled at his bottom lip. “The syndrome.” He cleared his throat. “I got maybe a year.”

The syndrome. Maybe a year.

“Maybe?”

“Maybe less. Maybe more. You can get a free test at a clinic. Results come back pretty quick.”

And Johnny opened his eyes. The idea of needing a test—the possibility of being sick himself, something he had feared for so long—had not immediately occurred to him. For once in his life, he had not thought of himself first. And now the thought did not scare him. What scared him was being as far from Rooster as he was from Teddy.

“Come back with me,” Rooster said. He didn’t have much time. In the light from the desk lamp, Johnny could make out Rooster’s blood-limned knuckles. He wondered how much of Rooster’s blood had been spilled that night, if he knew how reckless it was to start a fight. He was a brutal son of a bitch. He would go down swinging.

But Johnny didn’t go back with Rooster. He couldn’t do it anymore—watch the people in his life drop like birds shot from a branch. Rooster slept on the bottom bunk, and in the morning he got into someone’s car and went back to New York, where he delivered his uncle’s sandwiches on his bike, fed the ducks in Central Park, and, for the first time, rode the elevator to the top of the Empire State Building and saw the city smoking all around him. When he got back to his apartment, Johnny was sitting on his bed, folding Rooster’s laundry. It had taken him a little less than a week.

Fourteen

J
ohnny told Jude that Army of One’s new singer had a bad case of mono, so he had to take the train down to New York to stay with Rooster and play a few dates with his old band. He wanted to show there were no hard feelings. This was fine by Jude. With Johnny gone, they could go after Tory Ventura without his interference. Tory couldn’t stay out of town forever—graduation was coming up.

So Jude was left to lead the growing Vermont crew—the old metalhead friends of Kram and Delph who used to gather on Queen Bea’s porch, the skaters Jude had seen smoking in front of the mall. There was Big Ben and Little Ben. There was the Korean kid, Matthew Stein, in the grade above Jude, who wore a caramel-colored hoodie summer or winter. There were two or three freshmen Jude had known in school, and twin brothers who trailed behind them on their matching BMX bikes, fingers cut off of their racing gloves. They couldn’t have been more than thirteen. They’d been found outside the middle school one day while skipping class, eyeing Les’s old van as if waiting to be kidnapped. They climbed into the back, bikes and all.

They’d arrive at Jude’s in clumps after school, sometimes greeting Harriet or Prudence at the door, clambering down the steps to the basement. They’d sit in the school chairs and listen to the Green Mountain Boys practice, thumb through records, mine the quarts of hummus Jude had his mother buy, pen the outline for a future tattoo with a Sharpie marker. The morning after the show at the rec center, Johnny had taken one look at Jude’s tattoo and said, “That’s awful DIY of you.”

Everyone had a job. Jude strung the phone down the basement steps and made long-distance calls to remote time zones, booking hardcore bands to play at the rec center on their summer tours. Delph was talking to a guy he knew in New Jersey about how to start his own label. You just needed five hundred bucks (always five hundred bucks!) and you could send a demo off for pressing. Kram was printing T-shirts with the iron-on logo Johnny had designed, and Little Ben, who was on the newspaper staff at school, oversaw the zine. Someone was on the typewriter; someone was on pasteup on the floor; someone was on research and fact-checking; someone was on the phone, interviewing. Matthew inked the flyers for the next show, then headed to the A&P’s Xerox machine with a sock full of quarters, then led a team to the streets to post them.

DIY was Jude’s middle name.

There was no induction ceremony, no melding of spit and blood. Those who tattooed themselves did it with no pressure from Jude or anyone else. The only thing they had to give was their word—no drinking, no smoking, no drugs. Extra credit for no fucking or flesh eating.

“I heard going out with girls is okay, just no sex.”

“I heard sex was okay, just not
promiscuous
sex.”

“What about making out?” one of the twins asked.

“Look, you want to feel up girls,” Jude said, “no one’s stopping you. Just don’t come hanging around here. You can’t contribute when you’re thinking about, like, whose skirt you’re going to get your hand under in homeroom.”