Ten Thousand Saints (27 page)

T
he last time Johnny saw his mother, he was the age Teddy would be now. She was drunk, and he was packing his things. “He’s a snake,” she warned him. “A snake charmer. Don’t let him charm you.”

She was speaking about his father, a man named Marshall Cheshire. For most of his life, Johnny had known nothing about him. As far as he and Teddy knew, their fathers were dead, both killed in car accidents before they were born, and when they would ask their mother about them, she refused to elaborate, her silence the face of both a cold, hardened grief—
two
lovers killed!
two
tragic accidents!—and a disappointment in her sons’ frailty: big boys did not cry over their dead fathers. So when kids asked Johnny about his dad, he said he didn’t have one, because he didn’t. This was a lonely fact but, for Johnny and Teddy, not a strange one. They had no other family. Their mother’s parents had also died before the boys were born, and they had no aunts or uncles, no godparents, no cousins. They had their mother, more or less.

Until one late-winter afternoon shortly before Johnny’s sixteenth birthday, when he and Teddy were pushing the Horizon up Grammer Street to the gas station, their mother coasting in neutral, her fat arm hanging out the window. It was not the first time they had run out of gas on the side of the road, but this hill was steep and slick, and their mother had to lose some goddamn weight. The man who pulled over to help them was not a neighborly Vermonter but, Johnny guessed from the accent, a New Yorker. It wasn’t until the car was safely steered into the station and Queen Bea lumbered out of it that the man recognized her. In her youth, she had been a slimmer woman.

“Bonnie?” he said, and then: “Bonnie! Bonnie Michaels!”

Queen Bea actually jumped. She jumped backward. Then she lowered her fat ass back into the car and slammed the door. The guy had to knock on her window for a good minute. “It’s me,” he said, laughing, pressing his face to the glass. “It’s not him! It’s Max, Bonnie! It’s not Marshall!”

Johnny later gave considerable thought to what she might have been thinking about in that car. Was she considering denying it? Saying no, mister, you got the wrong lady? I’m Beatrice, Beatrice McNicholas? When she finally stepped out, she appeared to have collected herself. She began fiddling with the pump, dribbling gasoline over her boots.

“What the hell are you doing up here?” she demanded. “This is Vermont.”

The man was on his way to a hockey tournament in Montreal. He was meeting some old friends from the joint. He had just stopped to get gas! And Marshall had almost come with him! But Marshall’s probation officer had told him it was a bad idea to leave town. He and Marshall had moved from Miami back to Staten Island. Wait until Marshall heard who he saw in fucking Vermont.

Then he seemed to remember the two boys standing on either side of him. A shadow fell over his face. He had steel gray eyes and a three-day beard and sunken cheeks carved with acne scars. He wore a navy knit cap. He looked from Johnny to Teddy back to Johnny again. “I guess that’s him?” he said, nodding to Johnny, and the instant Johnny saw the man’s sheepish, scarecrow smile, he knew his mother was a liar.

“I’m your Uncle Max,” he told Johnny. “Marshall’s brother.”

“His
twin,
” Queen Bea spat.

And Teddy standing there with a shadow fallen over his face, too, trying to figure out where that left him. He cupped a hand over his eyes, trying to see the man more clearly. Then his eyes slid over to Johnny.

“You think my dad’s alive, too?” he asked Johnny that night. Queen Bea had gone off to get drunk somewhere.

Of course he was alive. They were all alive! Who knew how many people their mother had killed off? Two tragic accidents!

Johnny thought about Teddy’s question. He remembered a man with a dark mustache, an accent, breath like curdled milk. Ravi. He remembered hiding in bushes of sea grape while Ravi pruned them, and Ravi scolding him for touching the marble statue on his shelf, as smooth as the inside of a conch shell. For years the memory of Ravi had lived among the memories of Queen Bea’s many ex-boyfriends. It hadn’t occurred to Johnny until now that he could be Teddy’s dad.

But Johnny, feeling guilty over his newfound father, had said, “I doubt it, Ted.”

Before long he left Vermont and moved into his father’s apartment in Staten Island. Johnny’s own brother, until then his only male family, looked nothing like him, and now here were not one but two men with Johnny’s face. All this time, Marshall said, Bonnie had been keeping Johnny from him—so much lost time they had to make up! Marshall took him to the Hard Rock Cafe, to Coney Island. Twice he took him to Madison Square Garden—first to a Rangers game, then to a Bob Seger show. After the concert the two of them got high in Max’s parked Chevy Blazer, Marshall’s usual faraway look even more faraway, his steel gray eyes drifting over the windshield, and Marshall said, “Your mom was a piece of work,” and that phrase seemed right, seemed to explain everything—she was a liar, yes, but also the kind of woman men wrote songs about and regretted loving and were helpless over, and for that night, Johnny felt like a son, as though he had a mother and a father, parents who were screwed up in a legendary, acceptable way, their romance so terrific and terrible she had written him off as dead, and so maybe his dad was as much of a drunk as his mom and so maybe he’d known he’d knocked her up, but he’d rambled on, that’s what the rockers did, Robert Plant and maybe even Bob Seger and those silly hippies, didn’t they all have love children scattered all over the map? And then the next morning, seventeen days after Johnny had moved in with his dad, the blackened husk of the Chevy was found in a parking lot off the Long Island Expressway, the Blazer blazed, a witticism at least one local paper picked up on in its back-page crime log, and not long after, Max and Marshall Cheshire were arrested for insurance fraud, shipped off to Arthur Kill—shipped
back
to Arthur Kill—but not before Marshall had managed to cosign a checking account in Johnny’s name and make off with all the $469 Johnny had earned shoveling Lintonburg driveways. Brothers went down together, they went down in flames, but your kids, they were expendable. That was when Johnny moved into Tompkins. He didn’t have bus fare back to Vermont, and even if he did, he wouldn’t have gone home. He would not return with his tail between his legs for his mother to say “I told you so.”

So he left his brother at home to go down in flames alone.

O
n Teddy’s birthday, watching his old house from across the street, Johnny had pictured Queen Bea packing up her car in the middle of the night. He’d come close to telling Eliza then that his mother had left because of him, because he’d done something stupid: he’d called her. From the same phone booth where he’d received the news of Teddy’s death, he had spoken to her on Christmas. In his last letter, Teddy had affixed a surprising PS:
I want to find out if my dad is alive.
Ha-ha, I know you said not to bother, but will you help?

When Johnny had finally started talking to his mother again after his father went to jail, she’d said she’d been trying to protect him from Marshall. “I was trying to save you the trouble,” she said, and Johnny had almost felt sorry for her. Who knew how far you could trust her (you certainly couldn’t throw her very far), but she said Marshall had also ripped her off, and slapped her around, and when she was pregnant, too. That was why she’d changed her name, she said. That was why she’d told Johnny he was dead. They’d shared accounts. He knew how to find her. She didn’t want him tracking her down.

But what about Teddy’s dad?

“He’s dead,” she’d said quickly. “Dead, dead. Don’t go looking for him, John.”

He didn’t believe her. But he believed she was scared. He believed that Teddy’s father must be a monster, too, a monster worse than Marshall Cheshire. He told his brother to forget his dad. “It’s not worth the trouble, Ted.”

After he got Teddy’s letter, though, Johnny stewed over it for days, the letter propped up over his sink. He remembered the white moons of Ravi’s fingernails, the black hairs on the back of Ravi’s hands. He had to be Teddy’s dad. What if he was a good guy? What if he wouldn’t break Teddy’s heart?

Finally, on Christmas morning, he called Queen Bea. He wanted to give her the chance to tell Teddy herself. “He’s asking about his dad,” he said. “I know it’s Ravi. I know he’s alive. He deserves to know him.” If she didn’t tell them where he was, he told her, Johnny would find him on his own.

And on New Year’s Eve, she was gone. What had spooked her so powerfully Johnny didn’t know, but it was enough to send her away for good. Queen Bea was the one who’d left Teddy alone for Eliza and Jude to pump full of drugs. But Johnny might as well have packed up her car and driven her away.

Twelve

W
hat was there to do, back in Lintonburg, but start a band? “We’ll bring straight edge to the people,” Jude told Johnny. “It’ll be a sight to behold.” Kram and Delph were on board. They’d both been dumped by their girlfriends. They had no college plans. The grassy summer stretched before them.

And so one Saturday morning in May, the former members of the Bastards gathered in Jude’s basement for their first practice in two and a half years. They dusted off their equipment; they plugged in; they tuned. Johnny, the only one of them who’d been in a serious band, ran them through the hardcore standards, Delph thrashing over his bass, Kram trying to keep up on the drums, and Johnny and Jude each on a guitar, like the metal gods they’d once dreamed of being. Jude’s guitar was in bad shape, but by the end of the day, they’d even pieced together one and a half songs of their own.

“Shit’s fast,” Kram said, sweat dripping from his chin.

But the Bastards was no longer a sufficiently menacing moniker. After practice, Jude armed himself with chalk, leading the band name brainstorm on the basement chalkboard:

The Ass-Kickers

The Righteous Ninjas

Salvation Army

Just Say Hell No

The Underground

The Law

X-Ray

X-Men

X-ecute

X-emplify

Against All Odds

Origin of Trust

What Peril Falls

When Truth Hurts

Friend or Foe (???)

It was very likely the greatest number of words Jude had voluntarily composed, and he felt a frenzied sense of accomplishment.

“They all sound like the title of a
60 Minutes
story,” said Delph, who had cut off his mullet and was now sporting a crew cut. Kram chuckled, and Delph said, “Shut up, moron, you’ve never seen
60 Minutes
.”

“Why don’t you just call yourselves the Get-Along Gang?”

Everyone had forgotten Eliza, who was sitting at the top of the stairs. She had been drifting in and out of their practice all day. She didn’t look up from the toenails she was painting.

“Ha-ha,” Jude said. “Hilarious.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t make fun of things you don’t know anything about,” Johnny told her.

“How could I know about it?” she asked. “You wouldn’t take me to any shows.”

“That was for your own safety,” Johnny reminded her.

“Whatever,” she said, blowing on her nails. “I don’t really care what you call yourselves.”

“I don’t like any of the names either,” Kram admitted.

“There are a lot of
X
s up there,” said Delph.

Kram and Delph had adapted quickly to the presence of Johnny’s new wife, treating her with a distant awe. Jude had told them that the baby was Teddy’s. It had been a relief to tell someone, and he hadn’t thought twice about it. Wouldn’t Teddy want them to know? But Johnny had gone ape. What if it got out? Jude didn’t see why it mattered. It wasn’t like he’d told his parents. And Johnny and Eliza were married now.

Jude doubted it was a coincidence that Delph and Kram had jumped back into the band with such little resistance. Kram, he was a pushover—he would have joined an a cappella group if Johnny had asked him to—but two months ago Delph was selling pot, and now he had joined a band that was, at present count, 50 percent straight edge. It was the baby they were in awe of, Jude thought, the little punk Eliza carried in utero, the embryonic offspring of drug-ruined Teddy. As they’d inventoried their ancient equipment this morning, lifting the sheet off the rusty drum kit, the heady, homesick feeling of being together again sparkled with the slow-falling dust, and Jude recognized what was holding them together. It was the unspoken absence of the missing band member.

But it appeared Jude still had some convincing to do. He did care about this band. He hadn’t cared about much before. He didn’t care about school, or girls, or his family; he’d cared only about getting fucked up, about getting Teddy fucked up, about getting Teddy to laugh that fucked-up laugh, and now that laugh tormented him. He wanted to wipe that laugh off the face of the earth. He wanted to wipe the smile off the face of every hippie he met.

“This isn’t boarding school,” Jude said. “This is not the talent show, this is not your mom’s church bake sale, Kram.” Now he had his place at the front of the classroom, stabbing the air with his chalk, and Johnny took a seat in one of the schoolhouse chairs, as though to say,
Let’s see what you’ve got, grasshopper
. Now Jude was the one who had something to sell Delph and Kram, even if they’d already been sold. Pictures of the insides of clubs they’d never even heard of. A record label, distribution, tour dates. In Delph’s expression, Jude could see the familiar battling forces of excitement and suspicion. But no. It’s true. Go to New York. Go to D.C., L.A., Boston, even Connecticut. You’ll see. This was not MTV. This was not Ticketmaster. This was not get-discovered-in-a-shopping-mall. Start-a-record-label-in-your-dorm-room-and-turn-into-millionaires. Make-your-dad-your-manager-so-he-can-sell-your-rights-and-fuck-you-over. Fuck millionaires, fuck managers. This was 100 percent grassroots—of the people, by the people, for the people. This was jump off a stage and know ten guys will catch you. This was fuck your dreams and make your destiny.