Ten Thousand Saints (20 page)

Teddy’s body had been cremated; Jude didn’t even know where Johnny had scattered the ashes. But there was still something left of him. Eliza was pregnant, and Teddy was being reincarnated in this life.

He picked up Tarzan and settled him into his lap. Tarzan’s family jewels were the size of meatballs, but still, as Jude massaged the doughy, nippled Braille of his belly, he could not banish the word
womb
from his mind. Generally, even when his coked-up best friend was not the seed bearer (had it been in a bedroom, another parked car?), Jude was uncomfortable with the idea of babies, of sex and pregnancy and bodies and birth. He’d been sprung from another woman’s womb. He’d drunk from her umbilical cord. Babies were like girls: they were breakable and entirely mysterious; they had nothing at all to do with him.

But look: Eliza, too, had once seemed unknowable, and now he and Johnny knew something about her that no one else did.

“I wouldn’t have gotten him fucked up,” she’d said, “if I knew you were going to.”

Jude had countered: “Well, neither would I.”

T
he full weight of the news descended upon them slowly, over moments and weeks, a package from a heaven-sent stork circling lazily down to earth. In the window of a stationery store near Union Square, alongside wedding invitations and business cards, Jude saw a birth announcement tied with baby blue ribbon:
We welcome with love our gift from above!

Their secret had disarmed them; it had safely placed them all on Teddy’s team. They spoke of it with giddiness and gravity, or with panic, or with a sense of duty, but always with breathless disbelief at their unexpected fortune. (Science was so messed up! The friction of two bodies could make something that wasn’t there before. You could rub together two sticks and start a fire.) The conversations took place at Johnny’s, or walking down the street, or across the table at Dojo’s, or on the phone; it was one conversation, without beginning or end; it adopted its own code; it repeated itself; it spun around them, binding them like the silky threads of a web or a cocoon, an amniotic sac.

JUDE
: Shouldn’t we tell your mom?

ELIZA
: She’ll just make me get an abortion.

JUDE
: Why would she make you get an abortion?

ELIZA
: Because. She told me, “If you ever get pregnant, you’re getting an abortion.”

JUDE
: What about my dad?

ELIZA
: He’d just tell my mom.

JOHNNY
: It’s better if no one else knows. This way we can control it.

ELIZA
: Well, I can’t keep it a secret forever. People at school will start to notice. Someday the baby’s going to, you know, get born.

JOHNNY
: People will find out when they find out. But at least we can keep it under wraps for now. After a certain point, you can’t get an abortion.

JUDE
: But where will the baby live? Are you going to raise it with your mom? Are you going to go to school?

JOHNNY
: We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

(Johnny was always saying, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”)

JUDE
: What about going to the doctor? Have you been to the doctor yet?

ELIZA
: I don’t know where to
go
. All I have is Dr. Betsy. She’s a
pediatrician
.

JOHNNY
: What are they going to tell her? “Yes, you’re pregnant”?

ELIZA
: And don’t I have to go with an adult? My ID sucks.

JUDE
: Johnny’s an adult. He could say he’s your boyfriend.

ELIZA
: Yeah, but he’s not my guardian. You need a guardian to sign forms.

JUDE
: There are
tests
and things. You can find out if the baby’s okay. She did
coke
while she was pregnant. Isn’t that bad?

JOHNNY
: Yes, it’s bad. It’s very, very bad. But what’s done is done. They put mothers in jail for that in some states. You want her to have the kid in jail?

JUDE
: No.

ELIZA:
No.

JOHNNY
: We don’t need a doctor yet. We can live without a doctor.

You could live without most things most people depended on, according to Johnny: a family, a phone, a furnace, a taxable income, a high school diploma. And he was sort of right. Here they were, three teenagers, planning for a baby, and the sky was still high above them, winter blue; it hadn’t fallen.

J
ude’s mother called every Sunday.

“Do you mean
completely
?”

“Completely.” He and Les had agreed not to tell her about the fire incident. There was no need to worry her.

“Even marijuana?”

“Completely.”

“Alcohol? Cigarettes?”

There was no sound for a few seconds. Then Harriet said evenly, “Good for you.”

He could picture her standing in the kitchen with the bone-colored phone to her ear, the kinky, too-long cord wrapped around her, dragging on the floor. Jude’s heart, which had been sort of holding its breath, deflated.

“Whatever. Don’t believe me.”

“Honey, I believe you. I’m surprised, is all. I hardly know what to expect anymore. One day you’re the one getting into trouble, and now that you’re gone it’s your sister, and you’re the one—”

“What’s wrong with Pru?”

“Nothing. She’ll be fine. Of course I’ve been hoping this would happen for you, this was my distinct hope, but it just seems too good to be true. Living with your dad . . . I didn’t expect . . .”

“I gotta go, Mom. I’m going somewhere.”

“Wait. How’s school?”

“Fine.” He had generated a setting and cast of characters for this lie—East Side Community High School on Twelfth Street, where he had seen some sketchy-looking kids shooting hoops behind a chain-link fence; teachers named Mr. Prabhupada and Mr. Omfug. “I got a ninety-nine on my British Lit midterm.”

Harriet paused. He’d gone too far, he realized. “Jude. You telling me the truth?”

The fact that she didn’t believe him—that his recovery was so implausible, his soul so unsaveable—made him want to hang up. She was the fucking Glass Lady.

“True till death,” he said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. It means you don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

D
on’t be so hard on your mom,” Les said after Jude hung up. “She’s got reason to be worried.” One thing Jude knew about his father, had known about him since he turned nine years old, was that he couldn’t keep a secret. Still, he was caught off guard when Les spilled the beans. Some weeks back, Harriet’s studio had been vandalized. Smashed to shit. All the fish tanks full of all her glass pieces. Vases, bowls, bongs, pipes. A baseball bat, probably, but the only evidence left behind was a beer bottle, scattered among the broken glass.

“What? Who was it?”

Jude had been sitting on the floor in the kitchen, slumped against the refrigerator while he talked to his mother, his back still sticky with sweat from the matinee at CB’s. Now he sat up straight.

“She doesn’t know for sure. But she says the kid you ripped off came looking for you the day before with some other dude.”

Jude ran a frantic hand over his head. Hippie. Tory. He’d just spent hours slamming his body against a roomful of shirtless New York hardcore boys. The boys of Vermont seemed very far away.

He saw his mother standing over the shards of her studio, the glass twinkling around her. He saw her sweeping it into the dustpan, heard the heavy thud of the glass sliding into the trash.

“I’m going to kill those drunk fucks,” he said. “I’ll kill them.”

“Slow down now, champ.” Les was packing the bowl of Gertrude, his second favorite bong. “For one thing, your mom doesn’t want you to get upset. She thinks you’re not strong enough. But you got to know who you’re dealing with here.”

“Why didn’t they just steal everything? Why’d they go and smash it all?”

Les shrugged. “Maybe they just wanted to scare you. Sounds like the damage has been done.”

“My ass. It’s a threat!” Jude got to his feet, opened the refrigerator, and emptied a bottle of chartreuse Gatorade down his throat.

“They’re just hicks, these kids,” Les said. “Still, you don’t really want them using their baseball bats on you. It’s a good idea for you to stay here a while, don’t you think?”

“Fuck that,” Jude said, tossing his empty bottle in the sink. “We have to go back. You can bring McQueen.”

Les lowered his lips to Gertrude and, with his barbecue lighter, took an experimental hit. He liked to believe he was the kind of father who would teach his son to fight back, but his son’s extremes made him want to offer him the peace pipe instead. The kid had come to him in a coma, and now he was raging for combat. When Harriet had called him to Jude’s rescue, he had felt a startling kinship with the boy, a sense of molecular fulfillment that, despite Les’s absence in his life, Jude had become the idle, brooding pothead that Les had been as a teenager. Now he recognized none of himself in his son. Surely this turbulent little reverend with the military haircut was not Les’s flesh and blood. And then he remembered, with a slow, dismal shame—he was always forgetting—that he wasn’t.

“Jude,” said Les. “I know you feel guilty about dragging your mom into this mess. But I hardly think firearms are necessary.”

“So you’re just going to leave her alone up there? Like you did before?”

Les let the accusation hang in the air with his smoke. As exaggerated as his son’s logic was, he could not suppress the clammy grip of his own guilt.

“Forget it,” Jude said. “We’re going out again.”

“We are?”

“Me and Johnny and Eliza. They’re meeting over here.”

“Don’t tell me. You’re going to church.”

“It’s not a church.” Jude scrounged around in the kitchen drawer, through matchbooks, rolling papers, subway tokens, the collection of MoMA magnets that Di had once stuffed into Les’s Christmas stocking—
The Starry Night,
the Campbell’s soup can—until he found a couple of crumpled dollar bills. “It’s a temple.”

“I thought temple was Jewish.”

“It is. Or synagogue.”

Les shook his head sadly. “My son the saint. St. Jude. You know how you got that name, champ?”

“ ’Cause of that stupid song,” said Jude.

Les waved his hand. “Your mother liked the song. I liked the saint. He’s my favorite. Kind of overlooked, but a fellow to be reckoned with. Loyal, brutal, with that club of his, his head on fire. But you know what? They killed that son of a bitch with an ax.”

“Because he was a traitor?”

Johnny buzzed, and Jude buzzed back. He cracked open the door.

“That was Judah,” said Les, whose religious training was the sum of one semester of biblical literature and thirty years of crossword puzzles. “Jude was the loyal apostle, like yourself. But too much loyalty is dangerous, too. Your mom’s a tough cookie. She can take care of herself.”

Les remembered her as he’d last seen her, when he’d come to retrieve Jude—older, sharper, her face more deeply lined. But she was the same Harriet, the only woman who’d accepted him for the dreamer and schemer that he was. She was an artist, but she had never bought him a collection of MoMA magnets.

Just then, in compelling imitation of a tea leaf reader he’d once had a fling with in Lintonburg—all sequins and gold and spookiness—Di burst through the door. At her heels were Eliza and Johnny. As often as he saw the boy, he could not get used to the earrings, which reminded him, now that he thought about it, also of the tea leaf reader. (His fortune: you will leave your wife. Had she been baiting him, or had even the gods pegged him for a bastard?) Eliza was wearing her father’s extra-large Harvard sweatshirt, which always broke Les’s heart a little.

“I finally got to meet this Johnny,” said Di. “He held the door for us.”

“Hey there, John Boy,” said Les. He couldn’t help having a soft spot for him, too, ever since the day he’d learned about his brother and showed up at Les’s door looking like the walking dead. He, too, was an underground businessman, and in a neighborhood that made St. Mark’s look like Fifth Avenue. For that he’d earned Les’s respect. But behind the competent, tattooed facade was a kid who needed a swift kick in the ass.