Ten Thousand Saints (22 page)

“You just did a tattoo?”

“I can’t even see straight. I’m taking a shower, and then I’m going to bed.”

“When you going to tattoo me, man? You said.”

“You don’t want to start, man. I’m telling you. You won’t stop. Good night. Or stay if you want, since you’ve made yourself so comfortable.”

“What if I pay you?”

“Maybe,” he said, pausing in the doorway to the bathroom. “Any more questions?”

Jude stared at the inside of the wax container, the oily, electric orange residue of his meal. When he’d told Johnny about what Hippie and Tory had done to his mother’s studio, Johnny had been sympathetic, then suspicious. Why had those guys targeted her? Jude finally told him the truth—he might have stolen a little pot from Hippie—and Johnny just shook his head, disappointed.

Still, Johnny had seen no reason for Jude to dive back into trouble in Vermont. “Don’t we have enough on our hands?”

He had a point. Sitting in Johnny’s apartment, Jude felt the mass of that responsibility. He was tired. But maybe Johnny was taking it into his own hands now. “Eliza told me you’re going to pretend you’re the father.”

Johnny was tugging at his bottom lip. The tattoo on the inside, below his gums, said, simply,
NO
. “It’s the only way, man.”

“But are you guys just friends, or . . . ?”

Blood beat in Jude’s ears. He wasn’t sure which answer he wanted to hear.

“
Just
friends?” Johnny said. “None of us are just friends anymore.”

L
es was on the toilet four mornings later, hitting Gertrude and doing the
Times
crossword, when the phone bleated in the insistent, lonely way it does at sunrise, when the news is rarely good. Les allowed it to ring. Just as the sound became insufferable he heard his son’s descent from his bed, the gargle of his voice, and after several more moments, an ambivalent knock on the door.

“Dad?”

Leaning his head back and closing his eyes, Les released a billow of smoke to the ceiling. “Son.”

“We got a problem. Can you hear me?”

Les wondered if the “we” referred to Jude and himself, or to Jude and the person on the phone.

“Can it wait a sec? I’m only about one-third done here.”

“Can you just hurry up?”

“Go on and tell me. I can hear you.”

Nothing for a few seconds but the wobbling of the mirror on the back of the door.

“Eliza’s on the phone. She’s at school. You won’t get mad, right?”

Les balanced the crossword on the edge of the sink and the bong on the crossword. The prospect of helping Eliza—the prospect of helping Eliza without getting mad, as Di would—gave him satisfying pause. “I won’t get mad.”

“And you won’t tell her mom?”

“Unless she’s dying. Or she’s killed someone.”

On the doorjamb, painted over but still legible, were the pocketknife scars that recorded the stature of some other tenant’s children. Les had penciled in Eliza when she was little enough for that sort of thing—Di wouldn’t allow it at her place—but the graphite had long ago been smudged away.

“She’s bleeding.”

“What sort of bleeding?”

“You know, woman bleeding.”

Les scratched at his beard with his pencil. “Uh-huh?”

“The thing is, she’s pregnant, though.”

The pencil slipped from his grasp. As he bent to retrieve it, his forehead collided with the bong, which clattered into the sink, spilling its contents onto the newspaper.

Les put his hand to his forehead. He pressed hard, thinking.

“What should we do?” his son asked.

From the sink, Les retrieved Gertrude’s glass slide, which had snapped off at the base. It lay helplessly in Les’s palm, an amputated finger, dainty as an icicle, dumb as a dick.

“For God’s sake, kid, haven’t you heard of a rubber?”

T
he waiting room at the Mount Sinai Emergency Room, where Eliza had met them with her backpack and a look of being lost and not lost, as though she had a standing appointment for lunch there each week and was scanning the room for her date, was upholstered in a maroon a little too much like the color of blood. There were the usual amenities: issues of
Prevention
and
Reader’s Digest
that looked as though they’d survived a flood, the floor toy that involved sliding colored beads on shoots of wire, the
Today
show murmuring on the television in the corner, broadcasting from several sunnier blocks away news of the presidential race. It was early for emergencies, 8:20 according to the clock on the wall. The only other patients to make an entrance were a febrile toddler over her mother’s shoulder, and a construction worker, who on the site of the hospital addition had nailed his hand to a two-by-four.

“Maybe it’s for the best,” said Les when they were alone, feeding himself a jelly doughnut he’d had the foresight to purchase, with a twenty-ounce cup of coffee, between the subway station and the hospital. “She’s young. She’s not ready to be a mom. It’s nature’s way of taking care of things.”

Jude sat with his elbows on his knees, speaking to the hemoglobin-colored carpet. “How does it happen, exactly? Is it . . . is it just blood?”

Eliza had insisted on going into the examination room alone, had remained around long enough only for Les to whisper, “You keeping anything else from me? Are you a Mets fan, too?”

“I don’t know, champ,” he said to Jude. “You know who should be here is Johnny. If he’s the father, he’d want to know. Why don’t you call him.”

“He doesn’t have a phone. He’s going to be mad,” Jude let out.

“Why?”

“Not mad. Just—sad.”

“Sad,” Les agreed. He slurped his coffee. “But it’s a relief you’re not the father. You get tied up in it, the lady’s grieving, distraught, she’s guilty, you’re guilty, everyone’s feeling lousy. Be glad you’re not involved. Babies,” he said. He nudged Jude’s arm and indicated the walls around them. “You know you were born here?”

Jude looked at his father and shook his head.

“It’s true.” Les leaned back and crossed one hairy leg over the other. He was wearing his gray suede Birkenstocks with the broken clasp, one of the straps flapping like a tongue. His calves were the size of cantaloupes; they bore no resemblance to Jude’s. “You were tiny as a rabbit. And you had this shock of red, red hair.” He hovered his hand over his Yankees cap, indicating. “Your mom and I were sitting in the nursery in rocking chairs, in scrubs, with these shower caps on our heads, like they were afraid we were going to give you the plague. Just waiting for you.” He wasn’t watching the television now but the empty space in the room. “We waited there forever, just rocking back and forth. Your mom was terrified they’d changed their minds, that there was a problem. She wanted a cigarette so bad and all she had was this king-size bag of M&M’S. She ate the entire bag of M&M’S, waiting for you.”

Jude had not heard this story before, and it was only after hearing it that he realized he’d had a picture of his first meeting with his parents, and this was not it. He now understood why his father had chosen this inconveniently located emergency room, ninety blocks away: it belonged, in his mind, to a baby hospital. Second-degree burn: Beth Israel. Miscarriage: Mount Sinai. If Jude’s heart were not already preoccupied, it might have been warmed by his father’s lumbering logic.

“She prefers Snickers now,” Jude answered, not looking at him. Then, “Did she tell you I might have FAS?”

Les nodded. “Yes, she did.”

“Retard disease,” said Jude after a moment, because his father was cruelly silent.

“Not retard disease. It’s a disability.”

“It’s why I’m always in trouble and fuck my numbers up so bad.”

“Fuck your numbers up how?”

“Mix them up. Turn them around. Letters, too. You didn’t know that?”

“I guess not,” Les said. “Look, who cares? It’s just a fancy name for your birth mom indulged a little too much. So did half my generation, okay? We didn’t know any better. Your mom smoked like a chimney when she was knocked up with your sister. Not to mention a little wacky tobacky now and then.”

“She did? While she was pregnant?”

“She said it helped with morning sickness,” Les said, shrugging dubiously. This piece of trivia made Jude feel better and worse at the same time, but Les looked pleased with himself, as though he’d wrapped up a nice father-son conversation. The fact that his father had tossed off the story of his birth in a waiting room while watching the
Today
show, might just have easily not shared it with him (as his mother surely would not have shared it with him), was enjoying the memory like he was enjoying his jelly doughnut and the prospect of pulling one over on his girlfriend, left Jude with nothing else to say.

The sliding doors to the street blew open then. Through them came three young black men, two propping up the third, whose jacket pocket was soaked with blood. The boy’s head was rolled back on his neck, and the yellow whites of his eyes were still. He made a sound as though he were choking on his tongue. A bubble of blood came up and sat poised on his open mouth for a moment before breaking.

It wasn’t until nearly an hour later, when Eliza returned to the waiting room, pale and smiling and still pregnant, that Jude could drain that blood from his mind. She was spotting—it wasn’t a miscarriage, but an infection—and Jude was so relieved that he clutched her arm and whispered, “Bacterial vaginosis!” as though they were the loveliest words on earth.

“I saw her on the monitor,” Eliza told them on the subway ride home. “They did an ultrasound. She’s jumping around like a jumping bean! Do beans jump?”

“She?” said Les.

“Annabel Lee,” Jude explained. The doctors said they could determine the sex of the baby, but Eliza didn’t want to know.

They begged Les not to tell Di, and Les, after enjoying their pleas for a while, agreed. “A baby,” he said, looking worried for the first time in his life. Jude told Eliza about the man who’d come in bleeding. Had he been shot? they wondered. Stabbed? Had he lived or died? Jude wanted to put his hand on Eliza’s belly, but he didn’t. He hadn’t known, before that morning, how badly he wanted Teddy’s baby to be born.

J
ohnny was not pleased that Eliza and Jude had confided in Les, but he did not complain that they hadn’t consulted him first, because, as it happened, Johnny had been indisposed at the time. The morning Eliza was admitted to the ER, he wasn’t in his apartment but in Rooster DeLuca’s, a scrappy little studio near Charlie Parker’s old building, making a house call for an eight-headed dragon he’d been working on for months. The first several appointments had taken place at Johnny’s, but lately he’d insisted on a new arrangement. It was risky to sneak his equipment through the street, but it was riskier to have customers visit his apartment at all hours. Most of Johnny’s tattoos were done by his friend Gomez, whose whole studio not long ago had been raided and fined by the Health Department. And last week the artist they called Picasso had quit after one of his customers fell over and died of AIDS. The city had banned tattooing in the sixties because of hepatitis B, and AIDS made hepatitis look like a cold sore. “Too dicey these days,” said Picasso, but now Johnny had a new crop of customers. He was terrified of the virus—he sterilized every needle—but he was too broke to be picky. He would tattoo anyone.

It was the most extensive single tattoo Johnny had performed: the entire expanse of Rooster’s broad back, armpit to armpit, skull to ass. It was the one empty canvas left on his generously inked body. He had a hairy fucking back, Rooster, each black hair as long as the time since their last session, since the tattoo had healed enough to allow more work. On the Murphy bed that took up most of the room, Rooster lay on his stomach. On the nightstand, Johnny’s kit, plastered with band stickers, splattered with ink, lay openmouthed. Johnny sat on a stool, spreading a sheet of shaving cream on Rooster’s back. He worked the razor down the slope of his spine, rinsing it after each stroke in a cloudy mug of water. When he was done, he mopped up the cream with his cloth, took the Vaseline Rooster kept in the nightstand, and applied a dollop to the right shoulder blade.

“How’s it lookin’?”

“I thought you fell asleep.” They spoke loudly now over the sound of the needle.

“I did for a minute,” Rooster said. “I was dreamin’ about pancakes. I’m hungry.”

“You’re always hungry.”

“You work up my appetite, baby.”

Johnny worked the foot pedal, filling in the seventh head. He was getting close to the end. “One more visit,” he said, “and I think I’ll be done.”

“Then I’ll have to come up with somethin’ else for you to do.”

The needle was riding the dune of Rooster’s back, veining the thirteenth eyeball of the dragon, and Johnny found himself picturing what Eliza’s narrow back would look like.

“Rooster?”

“Yeah?”

“You’ve been with girls, right?”