Ten Thousand Saints (29 page)

Meanwhile, the music stabbed through the ceiling of the basement.

Harriet asked Eliza to translate the lyrics for her, but even she could make out only a handful of words. If Jude were to name his own children after the songs of his youth, they might be named Truth, Strength, or Justice. Purity, Brotherhood, Loyalty, Trust. The words filled Harriet with a measure of gratification—her son was singing the merits of purity!—but they also amused her, embarrassed her, and concerned her. What kind of teenage boys sang songs about purity? What had happened to songs about getting stoned? Getting laid? And if one had to sing songs about purity (she didn’t mind songs about purity!), why did they have to be so hard on the ears? They were awfully
angry,
these songs. The classics of her own youth, about getting stoned and getting laid, were
strummed
on the guitar, they were hummed in the shower, there were harmonicas.

Les had attempted to take up the harmonica one summer, but it was a phase. He had other passions to cater to. When Harriet had first met him, when he was not much older than Jude was now, he had embraced drugs with the same unqualified exuberance with which their son now refused them. That, it turned out, had not been a phase. She hoped Jude’s newfound sainthood was not a phase, either.

But how could it be anything else? Her son’s life story was a series of phases: scooters, BMX, skateboards; metal, punk, hardcore. He had
ADD
, he grew out of a pair of shoes in six weeks, and the songs he now sang were an average of forty-five seconds long. He would be over it by the end of the summer.

Harriet watched the boys come and go. From the basement to the van, from Jude’s room to the fridge. She listened for them on the stairs, on the fire escape, to the ring of the phone and the drone of their showers and the puerile wail of their guitars. She observed Jude’s romance with straight edge as she might have observed his first love—warily, with a mother’s pride, hoping that, in the end, his heart wouldn’t break too hard.

Thirteen

T
he Champlain Recreation Center, like Jude’s house, had over the years served Lintonburg in a number of faces. During the French and Indian War it was erected as a tavern, where the Green Mountain Boys were said to have raised their glasses and laid their heads. Burned down in the mid-nineteenth century, it was rebuilt to house the local headquarters of the Sons of Temperance. Now the brick building across the street from Ira Allen High School functioned as a voting poll, bingo hall, tutoring center, AA meeting room, and headquarters for the only Lamaze class within a fifty-mile radius. For years, the twin handrails along the front steps had been prime skating ground for Jude and Teddy, but they’d only been through the doors once.

Inside, there was not the scorched, masculine smell of armpit and feedback. The walls were not plastered with the syrupy film of dried sweat or the stickers and flyers of past performers; the bathroom stalls did not advertise Cro-Mags lyrics, anarchist doctrine, or the telephone numbers of girls who swallowed. Instead, across a scarred floor the waxy yellow of school buses and number two pencils, a pair of basketball hoops faced off. At the back of the room were a plywood platform painted barn red, a handful of old par can stage lights with the color burned out, and a sound system that was equipped to handle the karaoke nights, pageants, and poetry slams of the likes of Prudence Keffy-Horn. Jude and Johnny and Kram and Delph had moved a hundred folding metal chairs to either side of the stage, behind the piano, the volleyball net, and the chalkboard-on-wheels that said
WELCOME TO SPAGHETTI
DINNER FAMILY NIGHT! PLEASE FORM 2 LINES!
The only chair that remained was stationed at the table inside the door, and Eliza sat in it, stuffing wrinkled bills into a cash box as fast as the youth of Lintonburg could hand them to her.

The flyer—

Live Music at the
REC CENTER!

Jam Masters
PHROG

and New York Hardcore from
ARMY OF ONE

and
GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS

SATURDAY, JUNE
4, 8
P.M.
$5

ALL AGES!

—had been lettered by Johnny, photocopied at the A&P, and posted on telephone poles citywide. When they’d pled their case for an alcohol-free venue to Barb Delaney, the gray-haired lesbian who ran the rec center, she’d licked the point of her pencil and said, “When do you want to start?” Johnny signed on as chaperon. Delph, who used to supply the drummer of Phrog, called him up and asked him to top off their lineup. Now, all the kids who’d been trying for years to sneak into Jacque’s to see them play, praying their fake IDs would get them past the door, walked in as though they owned the place. Some of the crowd had carpooled up from New York, guys who ran with Johnny’s old band Army of One, which now sported a new lead guitarist. Johnny had convinced them to come up. In the dark of the gymnasium, it was hard to tell who was from New York, who was from Lintonburg, and who was from the periphery—Rutland, Montpelier, the far-flung farms of Linton County. There were hardcore kids in black jeans with chains drooping from their pockets and bandanas tied around the ankles of their boots, longhairs in layered Bajas, four or five skinheads in wife-beaters and suspenders, two black Rastas with dreads as fat as bananas, a punk with a lizard green Mohawk who was no older than twelve, and a pale-faced boy in a cape wearing what seemed to be vampire teeth. The girls could be counted on two hands. Two were fat, with silver hoops through their nostrils. One was making out with the vampire. Where did these people come from? And where were they last year when Jude was getting locker-slammed by Tory Ventura for sporting a devil lock? He’d had no idea how well he’d blend in his mask.

It was the Ronald Reagan mask he’d worn last Halloween with Teddy. He’d be onstage, but he’d be invisible. With Phrog playing tonight, Hippie might be there, too. And if Hippie was there, Jude hoped, Tory might be, too. Jude didn’t want them to see him before he saw them. He wanted to have time for a sneak attack.

“Um, welcome,” he said into the mike, shouldering his new guitar. The lights dimmed, and the crowd issued a lukewarm bellow. Jude squinted into the crowd. He didn’t see Hippie or Tory. “Welcome to Spaghetti Dinner Family Night,” he said.

Anyone in the audience that night would have seen the fortieth president of the United States, in camo pants and T-shirt, doing beautiful injury to his Les Paul.
Who the fuck are these guys?
shouted the kids in the crowd into their friends’ ears, not just because the singer’s face was concealed from view but because their sound wasn’t bad, it was hard, it was wicked.
What the fuck is this?
they asked in the beat between songs, before the next one started up.

The fact was, even before the Green Mountain Boys’ debut was over, Jude had forgotten it. The stage was a ship he was riding. His voice was a transmission from another planet. He was not on shrooms—
Get that shit,
he sang,
away from me!
—but he remembered the one time he’d been on this stage before, for a class play about the Green Mountain Boys in which he wore a tricornered hat Harriet had fashioned out of black felt. He and Teddy had sneaked a few shrooms before the call, and carousel horses had flitted in the aisles of the audience. He remembered only a single line from the play, spoken in a lisp by the kid who played Ethan Allen: “We will use violence and coercion, but we will take no lives!”

That was how the militia gave its name to the band. “They were vigilantes,” Jude had recalled one afternoon in the basement. “Guerrilla citizens.”

“Like Gorilla Biscuits?” said Kram, who was pawing through a pile of Harriet’s nude drawings.

“Outlaws,” Johnny clarified.

“It sounds like a bluegrass band,” Delph worried.

Kram said, “My mom has a dinette set from Ethan Allen.”

“It’s not bad,” said Johnny.

Jude had expected Johnny to head the band’s lineup; it was the natural order of things. Johnny had led Army of One, and he sang, and he was the superior guitarist, and he was the oldest, and the straightest; he was Johnny. So Jude had been unprepared for Johnny to hand the mike over to him one afternoon while they practiced in the basement. “You try this one.” It was as though Johnny were testing him, seeing what he could do. And before long it seemed right, Jude’s voice the band’s voice, Jude’s basement, Jude’s equipment, let’s ask Jude. And even though Johnny was the band’s spiritual taskmaster, the straight edge grandfather, he seemed to prefer the anonymity of second string. Teddy had been the same way, Jude thought. He was always willing to go along for the ride.

Teddy was not here tonight; he missed the rapturous woof of the crowd; the plea for an encore; the drunk, breathless step down from the stage. But here was his brother, finding Jude again in the humid press of the crowd, holding a plastic cup of water up to the lip of Jude’s mask, easing his head back and helping him drink.

T
oward the end of Phrog’s set, Jude spotted Hippie. He was standing at the back of the gymnasium, performing a slow, swimmy dance that required closing the eyes. Jude felt his heartbeat slowly accelerate. He put a hand to his face to make sure the mask was still there, though he could smell its oily film, see the blurry flesh-colored sockets around his eyes. When Hippie headed for the door, Jude followed him outside and watched him cross the street, safely out of range of city property, to the chain-link fence in front of the high school. Hippie’s bike was not in sight, but he was wearing his fag bag, as well as a suede jacket with tassels down the arms. Jude didn’t want to get too close yet. He stood up against the building, watching the cluster of smokers gathered out front.

“Nice set, Mr. President,” one of them called.

“Thanks,” Jude called back. His voice sounded rubbery inside his mask.

“You guys going to have more shows here?”

“I don’t know,” Jude said. “I hope so.”

Someone else joined him from the shadows, leaning an elbow on the wall. “Hey, man, can I get an autograph?”

Jude flinched.

“Fuck off, Rooster.”

Rooster nodded toward the smokers. “What do you think those posers thought of your song ‘Blowing Smoke’?”

“They’re probably going to buy the seven-inch.”

“Oh, yeah? When’s it comin’ out?”

“Soon as we record it.”

Rooster smiled again. “Fuckin’ Vermont.”
Vahmont
. Jude had never heard so much New York in his state’s name before. “Never thought I’d be playin’ here.”

Across the street, Hippie was joined by one of the fat girls, and she took out a cigarette for Hippie to light.

“Thanks for coming up, man.”

“Thanks for lettin’ us crash.” Rooster shrugged. “I didn’t think we’d see you again after Johnny left.”

Jude said, “Your new singer sounds good, though.”

“Yeah, but he can’t tattoo worth a shit.” In the wan light of the lamppost, Jude could see the dark contours of the tattoos on Rooster’s arms, as thickly woven as Johnny’s. He looked thinner than Jude remembered, his shoulders bony through his T-shirt. “So, where’s the child bride?”

Normally Jude tried not to wonder what people must have thought of the whole arrangement: husband and wife and Jude, living under Jude’s mom’s roof. He tried not to think about what
he
thought about it. At first Eliza had included herself in the activities of the boys in the basement. She presented them with a tofu cheesecake she’d baked. She clapped encouragingly from her seat at the top of the stairs. But the louder and more crowded their practices became, the less she was around.

“We sent her home early,” he said, even though she’d left on her own after the Green Mountain Boys had wrapped up, turning the cash box over to Johnny. “She needs her rest.”

“’Course,” Rooster said. Someone else exited the building; the noodley strains of Phrog swelled out into the night air, then hushed again when the door swung closed. The last of the day’s light had been drained from the sky—it, too, was bruised tattoo blue—and now it was shot through with the faintest stars. At the bottom of the hill, the Adirondacks floated on the blade of the lake. “That picture is so pretty,” Rooster said, “I just want to fuck it up.”

It wasn’t a cigarette Hippie was smoking, but a joint. Jude could smell it from across the street. Hippie’s apartment had smelled like that same breed, and Jude remembered the night they’d bonded over that smell, Hippie lighting the bowl while Jude hit his bong, Hippie telling Jude what a bummer it was about Teddy.
I heard he choked on his own vomit, like Hendrix.
That true?

“That Hippie?” Rooster nodded his head at him.

“That’s him,” said Jude. “Johnny says to leave him alone.”

Rooster shook his head. “Johnny’s gettin’ posi on me. He’s just jealous you got a new guitar instead of payin’ off some fuckin’ dealer.”