Ten Thousand Saints (16 page)
There were days when he thought this street might be his future. Getting high with his dad in the morning, chain-smoking, giggling at the news—the Supreme Court ruling against Jerry Falwell, Mayor Koch calling Reagan a wimp in the War on Drugs. A wimp! “You wimp!” they called each other for the rest of the day. Besides his father (and his mother, who had called to make sure he hadn’t run away), he talked only to strangers. When he had the energy, he did a few push-ups, trying to gain back his strength.
Some weekend, Les said, when Eliza was home from boarding school, they’d go up to Di’s for dinner. Les didn’t ask Jude about Teddy or Eliza or Johnny, or what had happened that night; he didn’t talk about school or a job; he didn’t ask Jude to do anything he didn’t want to do. Whether this was out of respect for Jude’s fragile state or because it didn’t occur to him to do so, Jude could not be sure.
W
hatchyou need, my man?
For days afterward, the question turned over in Jude’s baked brain. He imagined the hooker’s red mouth, the silk of her baby-doll hair, the sublime dilapidation of a room inside the St. Marks Hotel. He imagined the uncharted highs of some powder or serum or plant, the crinkle and weight of a plastic bag in the hand. Why the fuck had he said no? From his father, he already had a generous supply of marijuana, and money to buy whatever other vices he desired. He had only to decide what.
After a week in New York, bored and stoned and brave, he ventured eastward, toward the place he understood to be Alphabet City. Somewhere over here lived Johnny McNicholas. Wind whistled through empty windows. Bums lay mummified in doorways. When he paused to admire the two stone-faced buildings from the album cover of
Physical Graffiti,
two men across the street watched him from a set of steps. Jude kept walking, trying to keep his eyes down, noting the artifacts of the gutter. Cigarette butts. An island of snow impaled by a syringe. When he reached Tompkins Square Park, a square of land so unparklike, so like a cemetery of living dead, he turned immediately around. His dad’s block was scary enough.
“Where you going, amigo?”
The two men he’d passed before crossed the street toward him. One had his hands deep in the pockets of his coat, a posture that Jude was learning to fear. The other was sipping from a bottle in a brown bag and staring at Jude with a single, yellowy eye. The lid of the other was sealed like an envelope. Jude couldn’t help staring back. Before he could move, the first guy stepped up to him and patted him down. He dipped his hand into Jude’s jacket pocket, withdrew his Walkman, and, tugging at the wire, whipped the headphones off Jude’s head. From one of the back pockets of Jude’s jeans, he removed his wallet; from the other, a pack of cigarettes. The Misfits’
Walk Among Us
was still playing distantly. The guy ejected the tape, glanced at it, and handed it back to Jude. “You can keep this,” he said and winked.
This little tango, from beginning to end, took no more than ten seconds, and the swift, shrewd incursion of another person’s body recalled the beery breath of Tory Ventura. But Tory wouldn’t have bothered to pat Jude down. Only later did it occur to him that the guy had been checking for a weapon.
He’d had the foresight to remove the picture of Teddy from his wallet, to hide it among his father’s books. Forty or fifty of his father’s dollars—money he would have blown on the temptations of St. Mark’s—was all that was stolen from him. Who did he have to tell about girls and drugs, anyway? Whatever Teddy could reply, from Les’s dusty shelf, would come with the narrow-eyed disapproval of the dead.
And Jude was glad for a reason to stay away from Alphabet City. What he wanted he couldn’t buy on the street, and even more than hookers and dealers and bad-ass, one-eyed Puerto Ricans, he feared Johnny McNicholas.
K
effy-Horn, you son of a bitch.”
Jude looked up from the screen, where he was pedaling diligently away from a swarm of bees. Johnny was standing at the edge of the sidewalk. A woman in a headscarf steered a shopping cart between them. When she passed, Jude’s mouth was hanging open, as though he should be the one surprised to find Johnny here, living and breathing on a street corner in New York. His cigarette fell to the street. He was high as the moon.
“Hey, Johnny, hey.”
Jude stepped off his skateboard and shielded his body with it. Johnny could see him taking in the tattoos through his thin white T-shirt. “What the fuck you doing here?” He put his hand on Jude’s shoulder and gave him an ambiguous little shake.
“I’m here. I’m here, I’m living with my dad now, yeah.”
“Here?”
“Across the street, yeah.” He pointed.
“I been there.” Johnny crossed his arms. “He was real good to me, your pop. He helped out.” Johnny was about to say Teddy’s name, but he stopped. Instead he said, “Did I say you could wear that jacket?”
Jude looked down at his body. The parka was reversible, army green on the outside, bright orange on the inside, fat and shiny as a sleeping bag. “It’s not . . . it’s mine. It’s not yours.”
Johnny had once bought an identical one at the Salvation Army in Lintonburg. The thought of that store, with the ceramic bowl of freebies at the counter—broaches and buttons and little bottles of half-used nail polish and eight tracks no one wanted—and the terrified look on the poor kid’s face, this kid from Teddy’s life who now wore Johnny’s uniform—made Johnny want to give him a bear hug. He did, slapping him several times on the back.
“I’m just fucking with you, man! Shit, you live in the
Village
. We’re practically neighbors.”
When Johnny released Jude, Jude was smiling a large, uneasy smile. “I tried to find you yesterday, but I didn’t know where you lived.”
“I live, like, four blocks that way.”
“Yeah?”
“You doing anything right now?”
“Just, no, just nothing.”
“Can you drop your board at home? I’m meeting some guys at the subway, going to play some tag.”
Jude said he had not yet been on the subway.
“What color shirt you got on?”
Obediently, Jude unzipped his jacket. Under it was a Black Flag shirt, white.
A
t the cube sculpture on Astor Place, a dozen guys were selecting laser guns from a duffel bag, strapping targets to their chests. Half were in black T-shirts, half in white. Some wore sweatshirts underneath. Some had
X
s drawn on their hands. Two had
X
s shaved in the back of their heads.
“Mr. Clean!” one of them said.
“You got an extra?” Johnny asked. “I found this guy on St. Mark’s. Name of Jude.”
“Hey,” Jude said, tying his jacket around his waist. They chorused back.
“Gentlemen,” Johnny began. “Astor Place to Union Square. Use only number six trains. Anyone who gets arrested is on their own this time.” Over the St. Marks Hotel, the early moon was pale as a cloud in the ice blue sky. Jude took a gun and a target. “Stay off the third rail. And no pulling the emergency stop. Elliot.” They all glared at a kid in black, his laser gun resting sheepishly on his shoulder. “Black shirts first.” The black team filed down the uptown subway stairs, and a few minutes later, when the sound of a departing train rumbled beneath them, the white team, Jude and Johnny among them, descended behind them.
In the cold, dank dungeon of the station, the smell of urine took Jude’s breath away. Graffiti, as thick and indecipherable as the tattoos on Johnny’s arms, covered the walls. Garbage, decomposed beyond recognition, littered the floor, and it took Jude a moment to distinguish a body among the wreckage, bundled under a dust-coated blanket, alive, he hoped. Without a glance at the sleeping man or the attendant in the glass booth, each of Johnny’s crew jumped over the turnstiles. Jude did the same. When the next train arrived, a sluggish, green-eyed 6, they all stepped into different cars, except Johnny and Jude, who got in together. Then, when the train got going, Johnny led Jude to the back of the car. He yanked open the door, and they watched the black walls of the tunnel fly past. Jude’s legs felt as though they were made out of sand. He held tight to an overhead bar while Johnny dashed across the platform to the other car. “Come on!” He stood in the doorway, waiting.
Jude could feel his lungs heaving. It was freezing down here. He braced himself against the door frame to keep it open, clutching the stitch in his side.
“What’s wrong?” The door was still open, the train clacking.
Jude glanced over his shoulder. A few people were sprawled across the orange plastic seats, listening to headphones, sleeping, none of them aware of the plastic machine gun Jude held at his side. Three kids near the opposite end of the car were tagging one of the doors, two of them standing guard while the third sprayed. Jude closed his eyes. He kept them that way for a long time, or what seemed on his father’s pot to be a long time. His high had diminished only faintly, and Jude was aware of the flux of his thoughts, rocking roughly along with the engine, the open door roaring. The metallic rattle of a can of spray paint. The fumes, overwhelming. Even across the train car, they were as strong as if Jude were huffing them himself.
They’d played laser tag before, Jude and Teddy and Johnny and Delph and Delph’s cousin, who owned the set. Running barefoot on the pavement, in summer grass. Jude and Teddy hiding behind a parked car:
shhh
.
How to say how shitty he felt at that deafening threshold, how unworthy, nearly sick, so cowardly he couldn’t open his eyes, the guy whose brother he’d killed waiting for him on the other side? He shivered at the thought of Johnny finding out how low he’d sunk, stealing drugs for a free high, while all this time Johnny, sober and upright, had been hopping train cars. “Just don’t look down!” Johnny called helpfully, and it was suddenly so ridiculous, this fear of the
subway
—he’d huffed freon!—“You wimp!” said his father, “you wimp!”—that Jude opened his eyes and, laser gun cradled across his chest, crossed the platform in one dexterous leap—Mario sailing from cliff to floating bridge, Pitfall Harry traversing tar pit—and when the train screeched to a halt (“Fourteenth Street, Union Square”), Jude kept going for one slow-mo second, hooking an arm around a pole to catch himself, laser gun
ch-ch-ch
-ing to a stop.
Here he was. The noise was gone and he was inside again, in another, identical, freezing cold car.
“C’mon,” Johnny said, unfazed. He dragged Jude out through the doors just before they slid closed again. They raced down the platform, their laughter echoing against the Lego-yellow tiles, the aroma of wet garbage and hot exhaust and the cool iron earth, a man pissing in a corner, a woman shaking a can of change, Johnny winning by a good ten yards, until, halfway up a flight of stairs, he was shot. Jude heard the sound—
keo, keo, keo,
the fighter planes of Space Invaders—and saw the red light exploding from Johnny’s chest. Staggering backward two steps, Johnny clutched the target over his heart with one hand, grabbed the railing with the other, and groaned, “Go, man! Go on without me!” Jude did, but not before firing up at the top of the steps, illuminating the target of Johnny’s dark-shirted killer, who fell quickly, without ado, out of sight.
Jude turned around and ran in the other direction, up another set of stairs. He ran past a homeless mariachi band, a troupe of break-dancers, endless stretches of graffiti. He ran past a white-shirt and returned his salute as they crossed paths. He ran past a black-shirt and fired at him from the waist, but it was just a regular guy smoking a cigarette, his eyes filled with confusion and fright. At the end of the corridor, Jude followed the signs to the downtown platform and the sound of the arriving train, and slipped into the last car just as the doors sighed closed. He kept running, car to car, his legs throbbing, his breath inflating his smile. People looked at him, people looked away, some gasped or screamed, he could be arrested or chased or shot at for real, but he was too fast. Jude had not yet been told about Bernie Goetz, the Subway Vigilante, had not heard the Agnostic Front song “Shoot His Load”; he did not comprehend fully the fear of the woman he sent shrinking into her husband’s overcoat. In one car, he shot and killed an unsuspecting black-shirt who’d made the mistake of putting down his gun to tie a shoe. In another, he shot poor Elliot, whose gun, apparently broken, fired soundlessly back at Jude. At Astor Place, he ran off the train, outside, down the uptown stairs again, under the turnstile, and back on the 6. And back and forth, uptown, downtown, until he couldn’t find anyone anymore, until it seemed he was the only man left alive.
When he finally surfaced, it was dark. Aboveground, the air smelled as clean as New England, and the sky was like a deep blue sheet unfurled above him, like the sheet his mother would put on his bed, letting it hang in the air for a moment before it dropped. The stars were coming out above the newsstand on the corner, the magazines and candy bars lit up like prizes. For the first time in many weeks, he felt awake. He thought about lighting a cigarette but instead inhaled the evening tonic of the street as he walked up and down his block for a while, then home.