Ten Thousand Saints (4 page)

Teddy made his way over to the
Y
section in Rock, scanning the cassettes, just in case. The Yardbirds, Yes, Neil Young, but no Youth of Today. Over the past few months, the negligible shelf of vinyl at the back of the store had been phased out by a growing bank of compact discs. Soon the Record Room would sell no more records. Teddy stood disheartened in front of the display, his hands crammed in his pockets. He was tired of Vermont, tired of the homemade drugs and the farm boy slang and the cold. He was tired of letting Jude cheat off his algebra tests. Just before winter break, the guidance counselor had called Teddy into her office and said, “Edward, have you given any thought to college?” The truth was, he had not, but the word chimed in his head for days afterward like the sleigh bells tinkling from the guidance counselor’s earlobes. When Jude asked why he’d been pulled out of class, Teddy told him he’d been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom, then faked an afternoon of detention, studying alone under the stadium bleachers.

College he could not afford, but at least Teddy knew there was a world beyond Vermont. Before Lintonburg, he’d lived with his mother and brother in Plattsburgh; before that in Newport, Rhode Island; before that in Dover, Delaware; before that in Williamsburg, Virginia; before that somewhere in North Carolina; and before that in some places he didn’t really remember, all the way down to Miami, where he was born. But he’d never been to Manhattan. In Manhattan, Johnny said, there were crates and crates of vinyl in every record store, a hardcore matinee every weekend at CBGB, endless concrete built for the wheels of a skateboard. And fathers. Jude’s, Johnny’s. That’s where the fathers were. For a second Teddy could picture himself there, standing on the street in front of a building, a set of keys jingling in his hand.

Teddy had last spoken to his brother on Christmas. When Teddy handed the phone back to his mother and left the room, he could still hear her scolding Johnny about something in a desperate sort of whisper, as though she didn’t want Teddy to hear. She was sitting on the couch, hunched over a beer, her bra strap slipped off her shoulder and out of her sleeve.

“All right, dude, just a dime,” Delph was saying. If Jude met him at Tory Ventura’s New Year’s party at nine, Delph would gift him with some kind bud.

“Tory Ventura?” Teddy said, looking up from the cassettes. “Not that dickhead.”

Tory was a senior, played football with Kram. He liked to grab Jude and Teddy by the scruff of their coats and slam them against their lockers. They all hated him, but his parents were out of town, and there would be three kegs. “It’s supposed to be wicked,” said Kram, doing push-ups against the counter, the armpits of his T-shirt dark with sweat.

“Bring your lady,” said Delph.

“We’ll be there,” said Jude.

I
n the street, an inch or two of snow had accumulated, and it was still falling steadily. Jude and Teddy stepped soundlessly into it and carried their skateboards back to Jude’s, where they made English muffin pizzas, splitting the third one in half. It was a big, bony house, first a warehouse and then a schoolhouse, and now Jude lived there with his mother and his sister. It was misleading to call it a house—it was a brick building in an alley, narrow as an ice cream truck, four stories tall if you counted the basement. Jude’s father had bought it for $1,800 in 1969; he was in the middle of renovating it when Jude, and then Prudence, were born. When Les was finished (and he never really was, according to Harriet), the house was a monument of found object art. The shutters were made from leftover chalkboards; the steps were two separate spiral staircases joined together, one pine, one steel; the living room couch was a claw-foot tub with the front sawed off, lined with an orange mattress from an old chaise lounge and throw pillows Harriet had sewn with her Singer. After the renovation project, Les devoted himself to the less architecturally challenging greenhouse, and when he took its profits to New York in the form of a Dodge camper van full of marijuana plants, he left the half-assed results of his ten-year enterprise. They had no kitchen drawers: they kept their silverware in mugs. They had no kitchen ceiling: just insulation and ducts and wires like so many guts and veins.

The basement still held the scent of antique allergens—sawdust, chalk, the fertilizer that had been stored here half a century ago. In one corner was the Bastards’ equipment, still occasionally revisited—Jude’s third-hand guitar, Kram’s beat-up drum kit, Johnny’s old amp. The rest of the room was scattered with cardboard boxes, sawhorses, an old door leaning against the wall, a bicycle with a plastic baby seat, and an assortment of wooden school chairs. Some of them, stacked yin-yang style, were turned into makeshift easels from the years when Harriet taught life drawing, slabs of plywood wedged in their upturned legs, yellowed drawings held up by clothespins. A single bare bulb hung from the low ceiling. Jude turned it on, then went straight for the bottle of turpentine over the sink. “Just to tide us over,” he said. His cold fingertips fumbled. His heart, though, was warming up like an eager, rattling engine.

“What are we doing?” Teddy asked, sitting down on the basement couch. It wasn’t really a couch. It was the row of seats Jude’s father had removed from his van sometime in the seventies.

“Give me that underwear.”

From his pocket, Teddy presented the underwear he’d stolen from Victoria’s Secret. Jude soaked the panties with the turpentine. They were silky and pink, with a pink tag still dangling. “Remember this?” He plunged his face into the panties as if drying it on a towel. It had been a long time since he’d inhaled this particular elixir, but the sensation was recognizable right away. It smelled like being twelve, being with Teddy, being a redheaded boy in pajamas, and before long Jude’s nostrils were flaming nicely, and warm, acid tears were burning his eyes.

Jude passed the panties to Teddy, and Teddy pressed them to his face; they made a little hollow boat in his open mouth. It was a moment of weakness—he wanted to smother the thought of his mother, of their dark, empty house. He breathed in vigorously, then broke into laughter. Teddy’s laugh was sloppy, muffled, embarrassed, and usually accompanied by closed eyes. He sat like a blind man, mouth agape, waiting. That was how trusting Teddy was.

“This is wicked,” Teddy said.

Jude sat down beside him and took another huff, choking on a noseful of fumes. “Is it
panties
,” he asked, “or
panty
?”

“There’s only one,” said Teddy.

A dish towel or a paper bag would have worked just as well, but it was wonderful, getting high off of a panty. Jude put his head between his knees. For a moment he felt as though he were floating on or in the ocean, he felt as though he were made out of water. Then he panicked, drowning, and grabbed Teddy’s ankle and held on.

He sat up. “Dude, you know you’re staying here, right?”

Teddy reached for the panty and breathed. Snowflakes beat against the two ground-level windows. “Maybe for a little while.”

“For good, man. For bad, whatever. Richer or poorer.”

Jude redampened the panty. Teddy was quiet. Jude said, “All right, you fag?”

Two

T
he train car was empty. She liked the long, silent chain of seats, the domed ceiling above, dark as a theater’s. She sat listening to her headphones, socked feet resting on the seat ahead while she looked through her reflection to the black screen of snow. She always felt at sea when she was outside New York—giddy but lost, disbelieving how abysmal the world was. Cocooned here on the train, she could be anywhere. She could step outside and find herself in heaven, or Alaska.

But it was better here than in the bright white terrain of the last week, the fake snow on the slopes, the fluorescent lights of the room at the resort, where she did coke and shots with Nadia and Cissy and Cissy’s older sister and rolled her hair in curlers so tight they burned her scalp. It was better than being at home, where she watched videotaped episodes of
Santa Barbara
with her mother, smoked on the fire escape, taught herself David Bowie songs on the piano, and practiced makeup on Neena, the live-in housekeeper, whom she bribed with coke—the poor woman really had a problem—to cover for her when she snuck out. And it was better than being at school, whatever school she’d find herself in when the semester began. She had been kicked out of two boarding schools in a year and a half—both times for drugs, the second while skinny-dipping in the school’s Olympic-size pool.

She’d thought finally she’d have the chance to go to public school, but her mom had pulled some strings at some desperate place in New Jersey that agreed to consider her application for the spring semester (no doubt for an increased fee). To the first question in the essay section—
What are your personal goals for the future?
—she had responded with 250 words about her ambition to become a makeup artist, written in eyeliner and beginning with “My personal goals for the future, as opposed to my personal goals for the past . . .”

While Les had applauded her creativity, her mother had tossed the essay in the trash compactor and sat down at the Macintosh computer that looked like an object from a spaceship in the ancient opulence of their apartment, the Oriental rugs and pewter ashtrays and crystal chandeliers, and proceeded to respond to the second prompt:
Describe a person who has had a dramatic impact on your life
. “The person who has made me what I am today,” she read aloud, her manicured nails typing clickety-clack, “is my mother.”

If Eliza had been forced to respond to the question herself, she would have written about Les. Her dad, an in-house counsel at a downtown brokerage, had died of a cerebral aneurysm when she was three, but by the time she was ten her mom had had the good sense to meet Les and keep him around. Les was the best thing about her mom. He was moody and lazy and seriously stubborn and he went days sometimes without showering, but from time to time he got her mom high, which was what she really needed, and he had this you’re-on-my-team respect for Eliza that continually surprised her. He’d let her paint his toenails. He’d let her crash on his futon in the East Village when she fought with her mom. He knew all the vegetables she didn’t like, and he’d tweeze them out of her stir-fry with a pair of chopsticks.

It was strange, then, wasn’t it, that he paid his own children so little attention. In the only picture Les had of them, they were toddlers in a bathtub, their hair sculpted into soapy Mohawks. These were the babies
he had deserted,
orphans, really. And one of them a
true
orphan, adopted at birth, from her own New York. “What are their names again?” she occasionally asked him, even though she knew, just to hear him say them. Now he would say “Dick and Jane” or “Simon and Garfunkel.” She wondered, as the Amtrak sighed to a halt in Lintonburg, what they knew of her.

Out on the cold platform, the world was white, even in the heavy dark. The snow had stopped. On the other side of the tracks, a wilderness of cars, frozen in the lot over the winter holiday, lay buried under it. No one was around except for two boys, lurking a few cars down—that darkly dressed, alley-dwelling species of boy you could depend on for directions if you dared ask. She was about to do so—she was a city girl, not easily afraid—when one of them called her name. She must have nodded, or waved. Here they came, trotting over, cigarette smoke trailing behind. “Hey.” They stopped at a safe distance, nodded their heads. “Are you Eliza?”

Two boys: she had not expected this. There was a black-haired one and a red-haired one, whom she deemed to be Jude. She had composed a picture in her head, an accelerated version of the children in the tub, but now, in front of these real-life faces, it dissolved. She snapped off her Walkman, slipped her headphones from her ears, and let them fall around her neck. “That’s my friend Teddy,” said the redhead. “I’m Jude.”

“Jude,” said Eliza. His eyelids were heavy. Was he high? Then, raising her voice over the roar of the train roaring away, “Hi, but I thought I was meeting a girl, too? Prudence?”

“She had plans,” said Jude, who was smiling painfully. “Plus, she’s sort of young for her age. How old are you?”

“Fifteen.”

“So’s Prudence. I’m sixteen.”

“It’s his birthday.”

“On New Year’s Eve?” Eliza asked doubtfully.

“I didn’t ask to be born then. I just was.”

“Are you getting your license?”

“No. My mom doesn’t have a car.”

“Oh.” Eliza adjusted her backpack. “Well, happy birthday.”

“You don’t have any stuff?” Teddy, the dark-haired one, asked.

“Just this.” The rest of the bags she’d taken to Stowe had gone home on the plane with her friends, who were spending New Year’s Eve in Times Square, she explained. “Fucking last place on earth I’d want to be tonight.”

“You haven’t seen Lintonburg yet,” mumbled Teddy.

“We’re going to a party,” Jude said. “But it doesn’t start for a while.”

“You don’t have another cigarette, do you?” Eliza asked. “I smoked my last one in the bathroom on the train.”

Jude unveiled the pack of American Spirits he’d taken from Harriet’s carton.