Ten Thousand Saints (39 page)

“I’m going to raise the baby,” said Johnny. “But Teddy is the father.”

Ravi ceased stroking his mustache. Johnny was wearing an inane smile as well.

“Edward?”

Johnny nodded. “Edward.”

The waitress brought his drink and served their food, and it cooled in front of them. A sixteen-year-old girl was going to have his dead son’s child, and Johnny had married her in order to raise the baby. The baby was due in September. Very soon! Johnny spoke of levirate marriage, and
The Laws of Manu,
but Ravi wanted to know the details. Where were they going to live? When could he meet the wife? When could he meet the child? Ravi’s heart was beating so fast that he was sweating. He stood up, took off his jacket, and hung it on the back of the chair. He wanted to call Arpita. Arpita was at the Epcot Center with her sister and her nieces. Remember the talk they’d had, after they’d found out about Edward, about no one carrying on the family name? (At forty, Arpita said her dogs would be her only babies.) Well, Ravi’s son, who had been a baby when he’d last seen him, was going to have a baby! Was it possible to call the Epcot Center? Had she left the number for their hotel?

“Well,” said Johnny, “we’d like to go back to New York.”

Ravi returned to his seat. “So far away?”

“We were staying with a friend in Vermont for a while, but we’ve been forced to relocate again. My wife’s mother—she’s not too hot on the idea.”

“Hot,” Ravi said.

“She wants us to give the baby up. She thinks I’m the father.” Johnny stabbed a tomato, then, reconsidering, withdrew his fork. “Everyone does, actually. We thought she’d be more likely to support our decision if she saw that we were serious about each other, that we wanted to be good parents.”

Ravi didn’t understand. “But why not tell her it is Edward’s? Teddy’s? It is a wonderful thing.”

“She’s going to find out soon enough. But first, we want to make sure we’re . . . protected.”

Of course. It was legal advice he wanted.

“You are married, my boy, yes?”

Johnny nodded.

“Good. You are a smart boy. Now, did she give consent? Your wife’s mother?”

“No, but it was in New Jersey. You don’t need it there if the girl is pregnant.”

“Then she has no legal recourse, none whatsoever. It does not matter who the father is.”

Johnny relaxed visibly.

“Unless,” Ravi said, “she sues for custody.”

“Sues for custody?
She
doesn’t want the kid. She wants us to give it up for adoption.”

Ravi smiled sadly. “Not your mother-in-law, my boy. Your wife.”

Johnny was tugging on his lower lip. On the inside, beneath his youthful gums, was a tattoo Ravi could not quite read. Why on earth would anyone put a tattoo there? “Why would she want to do that?”

He was still a boy, unschooled in the depravity of the fairer sex. Ravi would die for Arpita, but he had a prenup. When he got home, he would pray to Shiva that his grandchild would be a boy.

“Against women,” said Ravi, “we cannot protect ourselves enough.”

H
ow much did he give you?” Rooster wanted to know.

“A lot,” Johnny said. “At first I said no, but he said it would be an insult.”

“You wouldn’t wanna insult the man.”

“He said it’s for the baby.”

“It’ll be a well-diapered kid.”

Johnny was calling from the pay phone in the McDonald’s parking lot in Vero Beach, Florida, where the band was letting off steam in the Ronald McDonald playground, pelting one another with the plastic balls in the ball pit.

He had told himself he wouldn’t call Rooster, not yet. But the excitement of meeting Ravi had sent him to the phone. He needed to share it with someone.

“How are you feeling?”

“If I tell you I feel like shit, will you come back to New York?”

“You know I can’t. They think I’m talking to some guy in Cleveland.”

“Why Cleveland?”

The recording interrupted to request another quarter, and Johnny complied.

“We’re supposed to do a show there.”

“Well, cancel Cleveland and come back to New York. Ain’t nothin’ you want to see in Cleveland, baby.”

Johnny closed his eyes and imagined the month that lay before him, empty, endless. He didn’t know if he could spend thirty-one more days in the Kramaro, listening to Kram and Delph complain about Jude, or in the van, listening to Jude complain about Kram and Delph, or worst of all, listening to Eliza’s silence. He certainly couldn’t tell them that he’d met Teddy’s father (he’d told them he was going to the local Krishna temple). He couldn’t tell them that Teddy’s father had warned him to keep an eye on Eliza at all times, or that Johnny had already been doing just that.

Through the door of their Philadelphia motel room, while they thought he was sleeping, Johnny had listened to Eliza accuse Jude of accusing her of being on drugs. It had not exactly been a revelation, but Johnny had to fight the urge to jump out of bed. He’d let his guard down. He’d been distracted by Rooster. The next morning, he found his duffel bag open on the floor, and since then, when going through her suitcase and her makeup bag and her backpack, he made sure to zip them back up. He never found any drugs, but this morning he did find a drawing, folded in quarters and tucked inside her pregnancy book. It was a nude drawing of Eliza, and in the corner was Harriet’s signature, and it was so beautiful—the drawing, the girl—that he nearly confessed everything. It seemed such a waste, this pregnant body no one would ever see. He hated himself for squandering her, for using her as he was.

Now, on a bench under a palm tree, Eliza was watching the ball pit through her white-framed sunglasses.

Rooster said, “We’ll say you guys have a show to play back here. Actually, you do.”

“We do?”

“At the Pyramid. When I hang up the phone, I’m gonna set it up.”

“What if they don’t have space?”

“Johnny, Jesus, they always have space. If they don’t, someone else will. We’ll play at fuckin’ Tompkins. Do you know how crazy it is here this summer? The Missin’ Foundation don’t book fuckin’ shows. They’re just showin’ up on the street. There’s a show every night, and our fuckin’ singer is in fuckin’
Paraguay,
and I’m here slam dancin’ with myself, waitin’ to croak. Where else you want to be but New York?”

Johnny pictured Rooster up there without him, throwing himself into the pit, looking for someone to spill his blood. “You’re not starting shit with anyone, are you? You know you can’t be getting into fights.”

“Who’s gonna stop me?” Rooster asked. “You?”

Jude waded out of the ball pit and sat down on the bench next to Eliza. Eliza raised a hand to shield her eyes against the sun. Johnny couldn’t hear what they were saying.

“I can’t do both, Roo. I can’t take care of you and the baby, too.”

Now Delph and Kram were drowning Ben in the ball pit. “Quit it, fag!” Their shoes lay in a pile at the edge of the chain-link fence, like the shoes in the hallway of the Krishna temple. Johnny missed the Krishna temple. He missed the smell of the subway, and Blind Jack, and his cats, whom Prudence had promised to take care of. He didn’t want to be on the run anymore. He wasn’t like his mother. He wanted things to be the way they used to be, before his mother disappeared and Teddy died and Eliza got pregnant, before Rooster got sick. He wanted to need no one.

But he’d done what he’d come to do. He’d met Teddy’s dad. He’d cased him out.
Call if you need anything else,
Ravi had said at the bank as he’d handed over the envelope of cash.

“Just come until the baby,” Rooster said gently. “When will you be able to come, after the baby?”

Again, the operator demanded twenty-five cents.

“Baby, when will you be able to see me, after the baby?”

W
e need to go back to New York,” Johnny told them.

“Why?” Jude asked. “What’s wrong?”

“We have a show at the Pyramid.”

“What about Cleveland?”

“Cleveland canceled. And you”—he pointed to Eliza—“haven’t seen a doctor in three months. And we need to find a place to live.”

“They just
canceled
?” Delph said.

“So the tour’s just
over,
” Kram said.

Eliza said, “I thought we don’t need a doctor.”

“You want me to deliver this kid in the van?” he said, forcing a smile, and even a little laugh.

“What about Di?” Jude asked. “What if we run into her? What if the doctor has to like, report to her?”

“I got it under control, Jude. I talked to a lawyer. He says we’re safe. Di can’t make us do anything we don’t want to do.”

“You talked to a
lawyer
?” Eliza said. “When?”

“While you guys were eating your Happy Meals. Let’s go.”

T
he first thing Jude wanted to do when they were back in New York was eat a bean burrito at San Loco, but Eliza wanted to go by her apartment. Not inside. She just wanted to stand on the street and look up at it. “That way I won’t run into her. It’s like, lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice. Or like being in the eye of the hurricane—we’re safe there.”

“Be careful,” Johnny warned them before they left Rooster’s, after they unloaded all their stuff at his place.

“Aye-aye,” Eliza said, dragging Jude out the door.

“I don’t like the way he talks to you,” Jude said finally as they boarded the uptown 1 train at Times Square. It was the middle of the day on the last Saturday in July, and about 150 degrees in the train car.

“You mean like he’s my dad?”

“I don’t like the way he treats you, either.” The car wasn’t full, but they took seats side by side. “I don’t like the way he thinks he calls all the shots.”

“Now you’re talking about the band.”

“Yeah! We make all these plans together, and then he just cuts the tour short, just like that? Without even talking about it?”

In truth, Jude didn’t mind being back in New York. He was tired of the packing and unpacking, of not knowing where he’d sleep from night to night. Johnny thrived on that—he could sleep anywhere, he’d grown up in motels—but maybe Jude was a homebody after all.

“You’d tell me, right,” Eliza asked, “if Johnny was seeing someone else?”

Jude looked at her sideways. She was wearing the Yankees shirt Les had tie-dyed for her, and the cutoff shorts she rolled down at the waist. His own shirt was like a second skin, and Eliza’s knee and elbow were glancing moistly off of his.

“Who would he be seeing?”

“I don’t know. Don’t you think it’s strange that he keeps coming up with an excuse to come back to New York? That all of a sudden he wants me to see a doctor and find us a place to live?”

“Johnny can’t be seeing anyone. He didn’t even see anyone before he was married. Not since he’s been straight edge, at least.”

“Okay,” Eliza said. “Okay.” She was fanning herself frantically with a newspaper she’d picked up.

“That was always his thing.” Jude reached for a sheet of the newspaper on the seat and crunched it into a baseball. “No one’s allowed to go anywhere near girls, and then you come along, and the rules suddenly change.” He hurled the ball at a window. It fell dully, then tumbleweeded a few feet down the aisle. He’d been carrying around this silent little orb of injustice, and when he’d finally discharged it, it sounded like an accusation. Maybe it was.

Eliza stopped fanning. She said, “The rules haven’t changed that much. He still hasn’t come anywhere near girls. At least this one.”

Jude gave her a long look. The lights flickered above as they bounced along.

“We haven’t consummated. Okay?”

Slowly the train came to a halt. Eliza’s weight bore into him, then caromed off. A few yards away, a guy in sunglasses and a leather jacket—leather in July—looked up at them, or at least Jude thought he did, as though he, too, were surprised by this news.

She hadn’t slept with Johnny. How was it possible to be so weightlessly happy when she, the bearer of this heart-lifting news, looked so miserable? She did not look relieved to have shared this truth with Jude. She looked at him as though he were responsible for her misery. As though he should have had his eyes open. He should have known.

“You haven’t?” was all Jude could say.

“And I find it insulting,” she said, “that you assumed we did.”

“Eliza, you’re married to him.”

“So you think I’d just marry anyone? I’m some helpless girl who needs a guy to take care of her?” The guy in the leather stood to exit the train, and then, apparently changing his mind, sat back down. “You think I’m some indiscriminating slut?”

“
No,
Eliza.” Jude unsealed his body from hers. “You’re the one who married him. Why did you, then?”