Ten Thousand Saints (9 page)

“Here’s the thing.” Jude’s father rubs his beard. “There are lots of things that can happen to babies. Sometimes—sometimes babies aren’t born at all. Sometimes when they do get born, they get raised by their parents, and sometimes they get raised by other people. For example, what’s the name of that program you and your sister watch, with the black kids?”

“
Good Times
?” Jude is so glad to have a question he can answer he lets out a breath.

“No, the one with the two boys and the white father.”

“Oh,
Diff’rent Strokes
.”

“
Diff’rent Strokes
. So, for example, those children are being raised by someone other than their real parents. They’re adopted, right?”

Jude nods.

“So, as a matter of fact, we planned to wait, your mother and I, to tell you together, but your mother would wait forever if she could, and I don’t have that long, champ. I think you’re old enough to know.” He leans forward on his elbows, so Jude can see up into the dark spheres of his nostrils, and tells Jude that he’s adopted, too.

Jude doesn’t make a sound. He presses the sleeping bag over his nose, breathing in his mother. He smells Cracker Jacks, midnight in the Donahoes’ driveway. For a moment he thinks,
Mr. Donahoe’s my dad,
but that doesn’t make any sense, but nothing else makes any sense, either.

Where did he get this red hair?
asked a friend of his mother’s once, pawing through it as though she’d never seen red hair before.

Jude’s father places a palm on top of Jude’s head. His touch, neither hot nor cold, shouldn’t feel like anything, but it does. His dad isn’t his dad; he’s just a man. He tells Jude that his real mother was just a teenager, and that he was adopted from a hospital in New York City when he was ten days old. “You were as little as a rabbit. You could fit right here.” He puts one finger on his thigh and one finger on his knee. “It’s quite common, really. Aristotle was adopted. Lee Majors was adopted. Lots of people are, and you wouldn’t even know it.”

Jude squints up into the bright lights. He thinks of Mrs. Donahoe’s belly button and the little lump of a person inside her. Inside his sleeping bag, he dips his finger into the warm hollow of his own navel. Later, at a less finite moment, he’ll come to imagine his nine months in utero with not only curiosity but nostalgia. He’ll understand what his father meant about marijuana—its deep, peaceful sleep; its small, fragile gift of forgetting. He’ll imagine that being high is something like being unborn, alive but not present, and when he’s savoring a mouthful of smoke, he’ll sometimes find himself swimming toward that drowsy, padded place—brainless, blind, curled in the pink womb of a stranger.

Then the room goes black. The lamps blink once, then are gone. When Jude’s eyes adjust, they find the soft light in the doorway, nine candles that illuminate his mother’s stunned face. She is wearing her coat over her dress, and her unlaced snow boots, which have tripped over the extension cord. The cake looks homemade.

In the house, the party is counting backward to one. Then it bursts into a roar.

“How could you tell him?”

Jude looks at his father sideways. He’s not sure which part she’s talking about. He wishes he could unknow all of it, just tilt his head and shake it out of his ear, like bathwater.

A
fter the last guest has gone home, Jude’s mother comes to his room and sings to him. This is what he remembers most of all, years after his father is gone—pretending to be asleep while his mother sings at the foot of his bunk bed. Her face is lit by the slice of light through the bedroom door, and her breath smells like peppermint and liquor. She’s too drunk to remember all the words, but it doesn’t matter—he already knows them. It’s his song, the one he was named for, and she’s sung it since he was a baby. He knows all about carrying the world on your shoulders, all about letting her into your heart, all about making the sad song better.

Four

I
t was two-thirty in the afternoon when Eliza woke up. She couldn’t sleep on the train, too amped from the coke and Teddy and what had happened to Jude, but by the time she’d gotten home, the sun rising orange above the Manhattan skyline, she was tired enough to crash. Now she threw off the covers and looked down at her body. She was not hungover. She was not enrolled in school. And her mother was not home. She sat up and reached for her backpack on the floor, found the slip of paper on which Teddy had scrawled his brother’s address. East Sixth Street.

In the shower she reviewed the details of last night, trying to recall if Teddy had touched the parts she washed: her wrist, her belly button, her earlobe. He had not touched her excessively. He’d been quiet and polite. The only thing new was her surprise: she’d expected this time to be different. And perhaps worse, she had the feeling that Teddy would not tell Jude what had happened. The night would be lost, a secret between the two of them, as though they’d done something wrong. Only now did it occur to her that they might have. She had done it on a bathroom sink with some guy she didn’t know, in some state she’d never set foot in again. When she did it with guys who knew her, her reputation, her money, her address, at least she was not entirely alone. She would wash off the shame of one weekend with the next.

But she did not want to wash off what had happened last night, and it was because, she decided, she liked Teddy. She had not liked Jeffrey Dougherty or Hamish Macaulay or Bridge. She had only wanted them to like her. With Teddy, though, she didn’t stop when he produced no protection. “Not on me,” he apologized, and she locked her ankles around the fragile length of his torso, as though climbing an unsteady tree, and whispered, “It’s okay.” She’d come so far, the train and all, and Teddy was sweet. He was almost certainly a virgin, disease-free.

Was that it? Did she like Teddy? Perhaps it wasn’t him she’d wanted; she only wanted something to happen. She wanted access into the life Les had left behind, a tunnel out of New York, and now she had it—a mission. Teddy needed her help. When she was dressed, contacts in, teeth brushed, makeup done, she pocketed the address, donned her headphones, and rode the 1 train to the 7 to the 6. Traveling from the Upper West to the Lower East Side could take nearly an hour, but she enjoyed the busy anonymity of the subway. She wondered what Teddy was doing, if he was thinking about her at all, if he’d stayed the night at Jude’s, if Jude was okay. It had been a cold kind of shock to find him facedown in the snow. For a moment, she’d thought he was dead. The evening had been momentous enough already, awkward but complete, and then it had ended on such an unpleasant note. They hadn’t parted on clear terms. She’d wanted to stay with them, make sure that Jude got home all right, but they’d made her get on the train, and with Jude there she and Teddy couldn’t say much but good-bye. What would they have said, if Jude hadn’t been there? And if Teddy hadn’t been there, what would she have said to Jude?

The neighborhood east of Tompkins Square Park was unknown to Eliza. Her mother was the kind of New Yorker who lamented the gentrification of the Lower East Side but, when passing a junkie on Les’s comparatively safe St. Mark’s Place, would grab Eliza’s hand and hurry her by. Eliza burned through two cigarettes while she walked from the Astor Place station, past Les’s building, across Avenues A, B, C (A: you’re Asking for it, B: watch your Back, C: you’re Crazy) and approached D (you’re Dead), watching the addresses, walking purposefully, trying to blend. She turned off her Walkman, kept her ears open. “Wassup, baby girl?” a man called from the top of his steps. But most of Alphabet City was sleeping, bums dozing peacefully in snow-padded alleys and doorways. A spiral of smoke rose out of a metal garbage can, but its effect was more reassuring than spooky. On a clear afternoon like this one she could almost believe the windows had been shot out by stray baseballs. Up ahead, the East River glistened as bluely as Lake Champlain.

On the south side of the street, the buildings were numbered haphazardly. There was no answer at apartment A in the first building she buzzed, and there was no apartment A in the second. The next building was hollowed out—no doors, no windows. She could hear the faint throttle of music, but she couldn’t tell where it was coming from. In the basement of the second building was a narrow storefront. The awning and the shuttered door were both painted the same ochre as the building, and no sign hung above it. At the bottom of the staircase that led to it, the landing was carpeted with trash, but as Eliza moved down the steps, the music became louder, and then very clear. Hardcore. She stood outside for a moment, listening to it.

I’m as straight as the line that you sniff up your nose

I’m as hard as the booze that you swill down your throat

I’m as bad as the shit you breathe into your lungs

And I’ll fuck you up as fast as the pill on your tongue!

Before she could change her mind, she knocked insistently on the metal door. No answer. She knocked again. A few seconds later, the music stopped, and a voice called, “Who is it?”

“I’m looking for Johnny?” she said.

The person on the other side struggled with the door, kicking it several times. Then slowly it squeaked open. Eliza’s eyes alighted on a guitar, a drum set, a card table, a couch, and an orange cat sitting in what looked like a dentist’s chair before landing on the blue-eyed boy of eighteen or twenty who stood in the doorway. His head was stubbled, all but bald, muscular as an apple, but the hair he did have, on scalp and cheek, was as yellow as a toddler’s. His face was heart-shaped: broad forehead, severe cheekbones, chin like a spade. He wore a small gold loop through each earlobe, a strand of wooden beads wound three times around his neck, and although it was nearly as cold inside the apartment as it was out, only a pair of camouflage shorts. From his waistband, the dark, serpentine shapes of tattoos climbed up the downy path to his navel, across the ladder of his ribs, circling the pale sinew of his arms, feathers and scales and flames and gods, sea green and devil red.

Across his chest were the words
TRUE TILL DEATH
.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered, trying not to stare. “I thought you were someone’s brother.”

He tugged at one of his earrings. The nest of hair in his armpit was golden and sparkling with sweat. “What makes you think I’m not?”

Absently, she introduced herself. She must have looked like a runaway, shivering in her coat, standing on broken beer bottles in a neighborhood she didn’t belong in. Maybe that was why he was so quick to extend his hand—each tattooed from wrist to knuckle with a fat, black
X
—and smiling, as though any friend of his brother’s was a friend of his, say, “Johnny McNicholas.”

O
n the way to the pay phone at Tompkins Square Park, walking back across the four avenues, they talked about everything but the boys’ mother. Eliza was brief on that point, because it was difficult, she realized, to relay bad news to a stranger, and because she didn’t really remember what Teddy wanted her to say. She said, “I guess your mom’s missing? He wants to know if you know where she is,” but she didn’t think that was quite right.

She almost said, “He wants to move in with you,” but how could Teddy live with him there? In the glimpse she’d gotten of his apartment, it was surprisingly—even hauntingly—neat, but the couch seemed to be the only place to sleep, and the whole room was warmed by an ancient space heater. She counted three cats. He was paying next to nothing in rent, he’d said, and the place was buried enough to serve as a tattoo studio and big enough to serve as a practice space for his band. “Prewar,” he’d joked. “Private entrance.” While he’d looked for a quarter, she’d explained her tenuous link to his brother—through her mother, Les, and Jude. Acquaintances, four times removed.

They passed two clusters of pay phones with the phones missing entirely, the arterial wires flowing to nothing. Eliza offered him a cigarette, but he declined. He was straight edge—didn’t smoke, didn’t drink.

“I heard the song,” she said, exhaling. “It’s funny, you having a brother that’s, like, the opposite of you.”

“We’re more alike than we look,” he said, and Eliza worried that she’d offended him. She hadn’t wanted to get Teddy in trouble. She hadn’t told Johnny anything about last night.

“I don’t know Teddy that well, actually.”

In the phone booth at the corner of Tompkins, a man was sleeping. Johnny knocked gently on the glass to wake him and, addressing him by name, asked if he could use the phone.

“You got to call your old lady, Mr. Clean?” The man stumbled out of the booth, the smell of urine following him out into the cold.

“You know it, Jack.” One of the man’s eyes coasted luridly over Eliza, staring through her, before he wandered into the park. The tents across the park were blue and yellow and army green, made out of cardboard and bedsheets and tarps, drooping with snow, and she might have thought she was in a third world country, or on a battlefield, or at some abandoned circus, if she hadn’t known she was standing in her own hometown. The park was full of tents, and this was why it was called Tent City, and seeing it she felt a dull stab of shame and distaste. Not long ago she had heard on the news that a man had frozen to death in this park. Or maybe it was another one.