Ten Thousand Saints (11 page)

Into the pillow, he said, “I’m not fucking going. Ever.”

“Jude,” she warned, reaching to slip his earphones from his ears.

He spun around at her so fast she flinched. His eyes were distant and glazed, but they burned right through her. It was seven o’clock in the morning.

“You’re stoned,” she said, more to herself than to him. Of course he was. Why wouldn’t he be? What else were Delph and Kram bringing him in those paper bags?

That afternoon she listened for the jangle of the fire escape as they left his room, and then leaned into the passenger side window of Kram’s car as it was about to drive away.

“I know you think you’re helping, boys. I appreciate it, I do. But if you help him anymore, I don’t think he’s ever going to get out of bed.”

They hung their heads, nodded at the dashboard. Nobody felt compelled to look anybody else in the eye, and she was glad.

A
nd then there was Prudence, crawling onto and across Harriet’s bed, skulking in her nightgown like that clingy old cat of theirs, depositing her sullen head on her mother’s breast. Harriet spread her open book across her lap, removed her glasses, ashed her cigarette, and kissed the part in Prudence’s hair. “What is it, babe?”

“When’s Jude going back to school?”

Every day that Jude missed school, the attendance office called with a recorded message. Two of his teachers had called. The principal, whom Harriet had had the pleasure of meeting several times before the funeral, had sent a letter, asking Harriet to come in for a conference, which she did, not bothering to take off her coat. She could feel the disapproval steaming off of him, just as it always had, dressed up in courtesies. She thanked him for his patience. Her son just needed a little more time.

“He just needs a little more time,” she told Prudence.

“How much time?”

“Pru, stop it with the baby voice. Talk to me normal.”

“How—much—time?” Prudence sassed, propping her head up on her hand.

“Your brother’s sixteen now. If he wants to drop out, there’s not much we can do about it.”

With her finger Prudence traced one of the diamonds on the faded patchwork quilt. “People are saying he dropped out, and
I
don’t even know if it’s true.”

Harriet ashed her cigarette again in the ashtray on the nightstand. “People will say all sorts of things.”

“Someone said Teddy killed himself. He didn’t, did he?”

“Of course not.”

“And Rachael said someone said
Jude
killed him, that the drugs were all his idea.”

Harriet put her cigarette to her lips, then removed it. “How can that be true,” she asked, “if Teddy killed himself? Which is it?”

Prudence sighed. “You shouldn’t smoke in bed.”

“You shouldn’t tell your mother what to do.”

It irritated Harriet and comforted her, the persistent morality of her secondborn. She, too, had been named for a Beatles song, a fanciful name given by fanciful parents (but it was a good song!) who couldn’t have known how apt it would grow to be.

She had a funny thought: if she had a spouse, it was Prudence. Prudence was the one who shared the worry about their Jude. But now Prudence had surprised her. She would have expected her daughter to be the one to intervene with Jude, to try to speak some sense into him, but Pru was as apprehensive around Jude as Harriet was, hovering at his door but never daring to knock. As far as Harriet knew, she had not laid eyes on her brother since he’d returned home.

What were they so afraid of? He was just a teenage boy.

The next evening, the first evening his friends didn’t come, Harriet brought dinner to his room—macaroni and cheese with sliced hot dogs—and took her seat on the bunk bed. He was lying on his stomach, facing her. No headphones, but his eyes were closed. “Jude, hi,” she said, as though she’d just been passing through the hall and decided to drop in. “Look, I’m not going to bug you about going back to school. I know you’ll go back when you’re ready.” His eyes remained closed. “I just want to tell you that, if you need medicine, we can get it for you. If you need to talk to someone, someone professional, you can do that, too. If you’re not taking your Ritalin, we can—”

Jude emitted a long, painstaking groan, intended to obscure her voice.

“Jude, they’ve got drugs for depression now. All kinds of things.”

A louder groan, flat, dispassionate.

“Jude,
Jesus
.” She tapped him on the bottom again, as if to turn him off, and oddly, it worked. “I spoke to one of your doctors when we were at the hospital.” She was looking at the pamphlet in her lap, speaking quickly. “She said your birth mother might have drank alcohol, drunk alcohol, while she was pregnant, and it could be the reason you’ve been having so many problems, and apparently it’s fairly common. She said there are drugs for this kind of thing, you just have to get tested, and apparently the drugs are just
phenomenal
. . . .” She trailed off. She placed the pamphlet on the bed beside her and gave it a pat. The fact that she had a history of communicating to her son through pamphlets with titles such as
What Are Nocturnal Emissions?
did not make her cowardice any more bearable. Still staring into her lap, she didn’t see her son’s eye, the one not pressed to the pillow, peel open, slow as a budding flower, fix itself to the side of her face, and then close.

Five

D
elph and Kram began to come separately, or not at all, and when Jude’s stash ran out and the minutes were stinging and clear, the afternoons they didn’t come were like open wounds. When they did come, they didn’t bring pot. “That fruit will kill you, dude. You should keep the brain cells you have left.” Delph said he’d run dry. He was actually thinking about giving the stuff up.

“I got money,” Jude said, staring at the slats of the bunk above him, where Teddy had drawn a marijuana leaf with a pencil. Jude’s father had built this bed.

“No you don’t.”

“I’ll pay you later.”

“You get your ass out of bed,” Delph said, “and I’ll think about it.”

But the longer he stayed in bed, the harder getting his ass out of it was. Every point of his body that touched the mattress burned, no matter how much he tossed and turned. The tissue that made up his body no longer seemed to be muscle. His limbs felt like dead branches. He looked at the pale legs lying in front of him and wondered how they could be his, how his organs powered on, oblivious.

But that night, after Delph left, while his mother and sister were eating dinner downstairs, Jude swung his legs over the side of the bed. He walked past the bathroom and down the stairs, farther than he’d walked in a month. He took all twenty-eight dollars from the leather purse hanging on Prudence’s doorknob. Then he got dressed, grabbed his Walkman, and descended the fire escape. It was easy to be quiet—his body was so feeble it could barely produce a sound. Being outside was like being on Mars. The dark itself felt bright. He could smell everything: the sweet and sour Panda Palace, the methane of Dairy Road dung. A styrofoam cup whispered across the slushy street, following him.

It took him nearly two hours to find Hippie. He was smoking a cigarette in front of Birkenjacque’s, his dog hanging off a leash.

“Weren’t you the guy who threw a pool stick at me on New Year’s Eve?” Hippie didn’t entirely remember. He just remembered seeing Tory whip that belt out—
whoa
. “I had no part of that, by the way. Hippie’s a lover, not a fighter.”

“No hard feelings,” Jude said, showing Hippie his money.

“Is it your friend that OD’d?” Hippie asked.

It was his curiosity on this point, Jude suspected, that softened him. Hippie gave him a cigarette, and they walked to his apartment on Sunset Court, a room over a garage on the lake, the moon shining oily white on the water. Jude bought a bag and Hippie threw in some papers and they shared a joint, sitting side by side on the couch, under a windshield-size silkscreen of Bob Marley, watching
Remington Steele
.

Sometime around one in the morning, as he climbed through his bedroom window from the fire escape, every muscle of his body aching, Jude heard a door open and restless footsteps cross the floor below. He knew it was the sound of relief—Jude had gone out into the world, and he had come back.

Still, there was no more money after that night. They kept it where he couldn’t find it. That night, long after he heard the last door close, he tiptoed downstairs to Harriet’s room. His mother and sister were asleep in her bed, Harriet flat on her back, Prudence curled on her side. Only their hair touched, the bronze ends lost in each other on their pillows. On the dresser was his mother’s wallet, and in it was a single, soundless dime.

H
is thoughts had lingered on Eliza Urbanski, tripped across her, dragged their feet, and he had hurried them past, out of her reach, out of an unconscious respect for Teddy: she didn’t belong in the mourning of his friend. But now, sober, his head as clear as an empty fishbowl—he had finished off Hippie’s bag in two days—Jude couldn’t keep her out. He saw her red mouth, the spiderweb tear in the knee of her tights. He saw her standing over him with Teddy, elbow to elbow, silent as repentant children. Fucked up on something, fucked up in a way neither Teddy nor Jude had been before. Cocaine, someone told him later. (His mother? A cop?) No one knew whether it was the cocaine that killed him, if the huffing alone would have been enough to stop his heart. No one knew anything.

Looking for you,
Teddy had said when Jude had asked where he’d been that night. Teddy was doing cocaine, and maybe he was with Eliza, or maybe Eliza knew where he’d gotten it, or maybe she didn’t. If she was lying, she wasn’t the only one.
Looking for you,
he’d said.

He was too sober to sleep. He played Duck Hunt on his Nintendo, leaning on his elbows at the foot of the top bunk, Teddy’s bunk, the dark room silver in the light of the black-and-white screen. By the time he finally drifted off, his brain was full of arcade dreams, the gray shapes still playing behind his eyes. He counted the raining ducks like sheep.

T
wo days after the pot ran out, Jude woke up to an empty house, put on his headphones and his hooded sweatshirt, and skated unsteadily back to Hippie’s apartment. No one answered his knock. He looked around for something to open the door with, found a plastic ice scraper stabbed in the snow, and for several minutes rattled its edge in the keyhole uselessly before giving up and hunting for a spare key—under the mat, in the mailbox, on the window ledge, and finally in the wooden birdhouse, where it was entombed in snow.

Inside, the place was dead still. He opened cupboards, closets, drawers, rattled around the contents of the kitchen trash. In the bedroom, a mangy dog lounged across the bed, eyeing Jude with a restless boredom. When Jude approached, the dog didn’t move. Jude whispered, “You’re not a very good guard dog, are you?” The dog—was it a girl dog?—raised her eyebrows. Were they eyebrows? “Or are you a good dog?” he asked her, his voice strangely high. “You know I’m good?” He placed a tentative hand on her head. He could feel the grit of dirt in her fur, the bony shape of her skull. He worked his hand into the mass of her neck, her long, tight belly, smooth as the curve of a guitar. For a few minutes he lay down on the bed beside her, his arm looped around her warm body, feeling her breathe, feeling his own body tingle and pulse.

In the closet were overalls and lumberjack flannels, Birkenstocks and boots. Under the bed he found sleeping bags, a hiking pack; on the dresser was an envelope of photographs. “Where does he keep it, girl? Huh?” Most of the pictures were of Hippie and his family at Christmas, Hippie in his Santa hat, people pulling ribbons off of gifts, but the last few in the roll were of a different party—a group of stoners raising peace signs. It was Tory Ventura’s house. With a start Jude recognized an overexposed sliver of Teddy—eyes closed, midstride, his mouth forming a silent, careless word.

Jude folded the picture and put it in his wallet. Turning to go, as though it was what he had come for, he almost missed the bathroom. He ducked back in, opened the medicine cabinet, the shower curtain, and in a sealed bucket under the bathroom sink, found four gallon-size freezer bags, each packed full of pot. Jude pressed the cool plastic of one of them to his face. It smelled like a miracle. It was as big as a loaf of bread, probably half a pound. Hippie wouldn’t miss one of them. He would miss it, but it was better than taking all of them. Jude skated home with the bag tucked in the pocket of his sweatshirt. He looked pregnant.

He was halfway inside his room, one leg on each side of the open window, the skateboard tossed in on the floor, when he saw that his mother was sitting on the bottom bunk of his bed. She had an issue of
Thrasher
open on her lap.

“Where were you?”

Jude sat straddling the windowsill, looking down into the alley, three stories below. His room had begun to secrete its own body odor. He closed his eyes, exhausted and weak. For a moment he thought he might throw up.