Ten Thousand Saints (2 page)

“No, I didn’t.” The girl had her hands cupped around her eyes now, staring down into the dark. No one else seemed to notice.

“It fell,” Jude insisted, hoisting the umbrella up to the girl, his arm outstretched, letting it tickle one of her fingers.

“Just give it back,” said Teddy. It was the way Jude always made him feel—tangled up in some stupid, trivial danger. Teddy closed his eyes. He didn’t have time to mess around; his mother was gone. He needed money, more money than Jude could pickpocket with an umbrella. His body clenched with his last memory of her—the acrid, scotchy stink of her vomit through the bathroom door; the blathering hiccups of her sobs. Had she been crying because she was leaving, or just because she was wasted?

Then the umbrella, the pointy part, speared him in the gut.

“Ow, man.” Teddy opened his eyes.

“You were supposed to catch it,” said Jude.

Teddy looked up into the bleachers. The girl was gone. But a moment later, a pair of blue-jeaned legs appeared over the wall behind them.

They watched as the girl jumped from the ledge, her jacket parachuting as she plummeted. She landed feetfirst and fell forward to catch her balance, then strutted a slow-motion, runway strut in their direction. She stopped a car length away and stood with her hands on her hips, inspecting them. Her eyes were shining with disdain.

If you were a girl, Jude Keffy-Horn was a person you looked at, hard, and then didn’t look at again. His blue eyes, set wide apart, watched the world from under hooded lids, weighed down by distrust, THC, and a deep, hormonal languor. A passing stranger would not have guessed them to be the eyes of a hyperactive teenager with attention deficit disorder, but his mouth, which rarely rested, betrayed him. He was thin in the lip, fairly broad in the forehead, tall and flat in the space between mouth and upturned nose, the whole plane of his face scattered with freckles usurped daily by a lavender brand of acne. He wore not one but two retainers. He wasn’t tall, but he was built like a tall person, with skinny arms and legs and big knees and elbows that knocked around when he walked. He wasn’t bad-looking. He was good-looking enough. He was the kid whose name you knew only because the teacher kept calling it.
Jude.
Jude.
Mr. Keffy-Horn, is that a cigarette you’re rolling?

Teddy shared Jude’s uniform, his half-swallowed smirk, but due to the blood of his Indian father (Queen Bea was purebred white trash), his hair was the blue-black of comic book villains, his complexion as dark and smooth as a brown eggshell. By the population of Ira Allen High School he was rumored halfheartedly to be Jewish, Arab, Mexican, Greek, and most often, simply “Spanish.” When Jude had asked, Teddy had told him “Indian,” then quipped, nearly indiscernibly, for he was a mumbler, “Gandhi, not Geronimo.” With everyone else, though, he preferred to allow his identity to flourish in the shadowed domain of myth. Teddy’s eyelashes were long, like the bristles of a paintbrush; through his right eyebrow was an ashen scar from the time he’d spilled off his skateboard at age ten. Then his face had been cherubic; now, at fifteen, it had sloughed off the baby fat and gone angular as a paper airplane. He had a delicate frame; he had an Adam’s apple like a brass knuckle; he had things up the sleeve of that too-big coat—a Chinese star, the wire of a Walkman, a cigarette for after class, which he was always more careful than Jude to conceal.

What’s that kid up to?

That was the way the girl was looking at both of them now, under the bleachers. “What are you people doing down here?”

Jude stabbed the umbrella into the ground. “Hanging out.”

“Are you smoking marijuana?”

“You can’t smell it,” Jude said. “We’re out in the open.”

“Can I have my umbrella, please?”

“Why? It’s not raining.”

“It’s supposed to snow, for your information.”

“Oh, for my information, okay. It’s a snow umbrella.” Now he was pretending that the umbrella was a gun. He held it cocked at his hip, the metal tip against his cheek, ready to shoot around a corner.

“Jude,” Teddy said. “Over here.”

He clapped his hands, and Jude obediently, joyfully tossed him the umbrella.

“Motherfucking monkey in the middle!” said Jude.

Teddy walked three paces toward the girl, head down, and returned it to her.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Hey,”
Jude said.

“Brit?” In the bleachers above, two more girls were peering down at them. They never came alone, girls; they always came in packs. “What are you doing?”

“I’ll be right there!” A moment later, she was gone.

“Brit the
shit,
” Jude said, but Teddy didn’t say anything.

J
ude Keffy-Horn, adopted by Lester Keffy and Harriet Horn of Lintonburg, Vermont, met Teddy McNicholas on the second day of seventh grade, in 1984. Teddy had moved there with his half brother, Johnny, and their mother from Plattsburgh, New York, across Lake Champlain. After school, Jude showed Teddy how to smoke a joint in a gas station parking lot, in the backseat of Teddy’s mom’s Plymouth Horizon, while she shopped for groceries inside. That Jude, not Johnny, or even Queen Bea herself, had managed to pioneer the first hallucinogenic experience of the person who would become his closest and really only friend made Jude happy. He didn’t have much to be proud of, but he was good at sharing new and forgotten methods of getting high.

It was one of the few talents passed down from his father, who, before leaving for New York when Jude was nine, had grown several generations of
Cannabis sativa
in their greenhouse. Les had a year of college at Vermont State, one fewer than Harriet, followed by fifteen as a lab assistant in the botany department, a position that largely entailed mating strands of Holland’s Hope with Skunk #1, which he offered at a deep discount to the department. Although Jude had been too young to apprentice, he’d observed the objects of his father’s hydroponic ventures—Styrofoam, milk jugs, a fish tank pump—with reverence. He’d admired his father’s self-reliance, and he’d learned early that, even in a nothing town like Lintonburg, Vermont, you could find fun with a little imagination and care. With Teddy, he’d imbibed NyQuil and Listerine; tripped on dairy farm mushrooms; huffed gas, glue, and Jude’s sister’s nail polish remover; brewed beer in Queen Bea’s bathtub; and during a period when they were watching a lot of
Mr. Wizard’s World,
built a bong out of a garden hose and a coffee urn. Jude liked fucking Teddy up. He liked the dumb, happy look he got on his face, one eye roving, then the other, toward some distant, invisible moon.

Next year, Jude and Teddy were going to New York. Teddy’s half brother, Johnny, lived there, too. They’d had $140 saved up in an empty pack of smokes until a couple of weeks ago, when they used it to buy some pot from Delph and the contact lenses for Teddy and two mail-order Misfits T-shirts. But when they saved some more money and when they were both old enough to drop out (Teddy would be sixteen in May), they were going to buy bus tickets to Port Authority and stay with Johnny until they could find a place of their own.

Johnny was eighteen now, and Jude’s memories of him were obscured by the scrim of vodka he and Teddy would sneak from Johnny’s He-Man thermos. Johnny would skip school on Ozzy Osbourne’s birthday and grew his blond hair down to his ass. He’d keep notebooks full of drawings shelved in his closet, full of superhero chicks and space-age cars and guys with thighs muscled like Rottweilers. He spent a lot of time chasing the boys out of the room he shared with Teddy, but he taught them both how to play guitar, and even let them play in his band, with Delph on bass and Kram on drums, Teddy and Jude sharing one untuned, spray-painted guitar, Johnny playing another, singing without a microphone. Everyone huddled on Queen Bea’s front porch in their hooded sweatshirts and black jeans, bodies chattering in the cold. Jude’s fourteen-year-old fingers stretched into cramps, frozen as wood, trying to follow Johnny’s through Hendrix’s “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On Johnny’s mismatched stereo, they’d play their stolen tapes—hard rock, heavy metal, hair metal, black metal, death metal, thrash metal, metalcore, hardcore, grindcore, punk—Black Sabbath and Whitesnake and Black Flag—and then methodically, with ears tilted to the speakers, they’d copy them. They dragged out the old orange extension cord and chugged away on Johnny’s practice amp, decorated with Metallica stickers and glow-in-the-dark stars. They were Demon Semen, Baptism of Jism, the Deadbeats, the Posers, and finally the Bastards, which most of them were, more or less.

That was two years ago. Then Johnny turned sixteen, quit school, and left for New York with his pockets full of snow-shoveling money and two guitar cases, his guitar in one of them and his clothes in the other, to live with his father, who it turned out wasn’t dead after all, and maybe Teddy’s wasn’t either. Turned out Queen Bea was maybe a big fat liar.

Teddy and Jude, on the other hand, were going to New York to start a band, and to get fucked, and to get the fuck out of Vermont, not to find their long-lost dads. Jude wasn’t even going to tell his dad he was coming. He wasn’t even going to look him up in the phone book. If he ran into him on the subway, he’d be like, Hey, how’s it going, you fucking chump? Okay, see you around.

L
intonburg, Vermont, in 1987 was not a place of surprises. There was the second-run theater, the rec center, Wayne’s Billiards. There was the Tap House, the jock bar, and Jacque’s (Birkenjacque’s), the hippie bar. There was the drive-thru creemee place, the pawnshop-music-store, and Champlain Park, where when you skipped school you could hide in the construction tunnels and smoke up, and there was decent skating at the university if you didn’t get kicked off campus. There was enough to do so that you didn’t necessarily want to put a hole in your head. It was the biggest city in Vermont, and this fact was reflected with smugness in the busy gait of its residents down Ash Street, the brick-paved pedestrian mall; in their efficient street plowing; in their towering thermoses of coffee; in the dexterous maneuvering of their four-wheel-drive station wagons and their one or two tasteful bumper stickers:
BERNIE;
GREEN UP;
I L♥VERMONT
. Lintonburg’s relatively metropolitan status confused but did not ease the state of small-town disgruntlement that Teddy and Jude had perfected. There was, finally, the Ash Street Mall (the Ass Street Mall), where after leaving their post under the bleachers and skating down the hill through the bitter, lake-blown wind, they came across Jude’s mother. She was sitting on a stool next to the entrance, smoking a cigarette and reading a paperback. Beside her was a table disguised by an Indian print tapestry and cluttered with glass ashtrays, vases, pitchers, bowls, in blues and sea greens and swirled, psychedelic pinks. Harriet’s single professional fixture was a wooden sign, propped up against a set of mugs, that read
HARRIET HORN HANDBLOWN GLASS
.

No sign hung over the door of the greenhouse in their yard, where Harriet blew her glass and where she sold her bongs and pipes, the items that paid the bills, the items she couldn’t sell on the street and had to hawk at summer music festivals on far-flung farms, Jude and his sister, Prudence, trailing behind her with baskets of pipes over their arms. Her studio didn’t need a sign—people knew where to find her, just as they knew where to find the guy they called Hippie, who cruised town on his ten-speed bike and sold pot out of his fanny pack. They’d knock on the greenhouse door and she’d remove her safety glasses and happily make her exchange. Harriet Horn, the Glass Lady. “She can handblow me anytime,” Delph had said more than once, not because Harriet was all that fetching but because she was, to other people—especially to Teddy—cool. Now the word fumbled in Jude’s head—
handblow, glandbow, land ho!
He was vaguely dyslexic, messed up his letters even when he wasn’t high.

“I don’t have any money, birthday boy,” Harriet said. She removed her glasses—enormous, tortoiseshell, spotted with fingerprints—and let them hang on their chain of plastic beads. With the tobacco-stained fingers of her wool gloves, she dog-eared her place in the book and placed it on her lap. Jude felt his buzz die a quick and common death.

“You haven’t made any money today?” Teddy asked, sympathizing. He picked up a salad bowl and smoothed his palm over the inside of it. “This is really cold.”

“Not enough money,” Harriet said, gently taking the bowl back from Teddy. She was protective of her glass.

“Ma, not even like ten bucks?”

“And what do I get? A hug?”

When Jude refused, Teddy leaned cooperatively into Harriet’s coat. For this, Harriet produced two wrinkled dollar bills from her apron pocket. Jude paddled his skateboard over to the table and covered up the
G
and
L
of the sign so it said
HANDBLOWN ASS
. “Look, Ted.”

Teddy looked and nodded. He’d seen Jude do it before.

“You take your medicine, Jude?” Harriet asked.

“You mean pot? Yeah, but we need more.”

“Jude. You didn’t take it?”