Ten Thousand Saints (25 page)
“He’s fine,” Les said. “More than fine. He’s clean, he’s cured. His rehabilitation is complete.”
What was he saying, Harriet wanted to know.
A dark shape spun in the corner of Les’s eye, and he slammed the flyswatter on the counter. When he lifted it, the fly was stamped to the back, its papery wing still fluttering. He had done it without a thought, and now it seemed a horrible accident. It broke his heart.
“Remember,” he said, “when you asked me for a favor?”
T
hree and a half blocks east, in the building Jude was passing on his skateboard, Johnny was eating a green apple in Rooster’s apartment. The previous phase of the eight-headed dragon had not had time to heal; Johnny had not brought his equipment with him. From the pillow where his head lay, he could see the edge of the dark, drawn curtains, into the bright morning. This sheltered calm reminded him of the motels he’d frequented during his nomadic childhood, moving from city to city with his brother and his mother, all their possessions in the hatch of their sun-roasted car. He remembered playing Marco Polo in a motel pool, a scrape on his cheek from grazing the fiberglass floor. He remembered jumping on the motel beds with Teddy. He remembered Teddy, when he was still a baby, sleeping in an open suitcase Queen Bea had lined with a towel on the floor, and now Johnny imagined carrying Teddy around in that suitcase, safe inside in the dark. He felt its handle in his palm. Now Teddy really could fit in that suitcase again. He was a few pounds of ashes in a kitchen canister he kept on his closet floor.
He did not share these things with Rooster. Rooster, unlike the rest of New York, knew Teddy had existed, and knew he was the one who had knocked up the girl Johnny would marry on Sunday. But today Johnny didn’t feel like talking about the past. “You ever been to California?” He took a crisp bite of his apple.
“I wish,” Rooster said.
“You think it’s a good place to raise a kid?”
“You ain’t movin’ to California. Not without me.”
Johnny didn’t say anything.
“I see. That’s why you gotta leave. Because I tempt you to the dark side.”
“I told you. I can’t do it anymore.”
Rooster raised his head from his pillow. His jaw, still bruised a mealy blue from a rough day in the pit, tightened. “This ain’t Vermont, baby. This is New York. Fags don’t jump off tall buildings here. They don’t have to meet in dark rooms. Here we have parades.”
Johnny chewed the tart meat of his apple. Of course they still met in dark rooms. Down in the park, a few hundred feet away, they were meeting right now. Rafael, the kid who’d been gangbanged in the comfort station, was not appearing in any parades.
A truck hit a pothole in the street outside. Johnny’s clothes were folded on the stool beside the bed, the Chuck Taylors posed on top emanating the subtlest locker-room stench. “When I finish this apple, I’m going to take a shower, and then I’m going to get dressed, and then I’m going home.”
“And what about the band? You’re sure you’re not quittin’ ’cause a me?”
“Don’t get a big head, Rooster. I’m getting married.”
“You’re sure you’re not gettin’ married ’cause a me?”
“You can pick up your drums whenever. You don’t need me.”
Rooster, lying on his stomach, tapped a single, solemn drumstick against the floor. “So you’re gonna shack up together, you and Yoko Ono and this baby.”
“Look, lots of cultures do it, okay? The Jews, the Mongols. I’ve been reading about it. When a man dies, his brother steps in to marry his wife. It’s in the Bible. It’s called levirate marriage. In Africa, they call it widow inheritance.”
“That’s goddamn romantic.”
“There’s even something like it in
The Laws of Manu
. If a guy can’t procreate, his wife takes up with his brother so they can have a kid.”
“There’s a word for that, baby, but it ain’t
widow inheritance
. It’s called livin’ in the closet. Fags have been doin’ that for thousands of years, too.”
Johnny had finished his apple. The core was browning in his hand. “
The Laws of Manu
says after the baby is born the woman and the brother can go back to being how they were. Platonic.”
“So you’re gonna be happily married to your platonic widow wife. You’ll still be kissin’ her every morning and every night, in fifty, sixty years.”
Johnny didn’t know what would happen after the baby was born. Maybe he’d love the baby so much he’d figure out how to love Eliza, too. Maybe they’d all move to California and live in a tent on an ocean cliff, and he’d walk Teddy’s baby on the beach.
Rooster added, “Unless we’re both dead of AIDS.”
Johnny looked up. Rooster had his back to him, the defeated mass of his body still collapsed facedown. They’d never said it aloud, not to each other. They talked about the people they knew who were wasting away, the bums and junkies and squatters, people whose own families refused to visit them in the hospital, and in their obituaries—if they even got obituaries, let alone funerals—were listing the cause of death as pneumonia, cancer. Cancer! Together Johnny and Rooster shook their heads at the injustice.
But wasn’t Johnny as cowardly as everyone else? In the hushed alleys of their neighborhood, where the virus glinted like the silver needles left on the sidewalk, it was easy for him to pretend that it was a junkie disease. He never talked about the possibility that one day it might catch him, too. He and Rooster were careful, always scrupulously careful, and yet it was Johnny’s unvoiced fear that this was how he’d be found out: one day he’d get sick, and even though no one would say it everyone would know why.
“Silence=Death,” the new AIDS posters went. The triangle symbol was as ominous as the Missing Foundation’s toppled martini glass.
Maybe, if things were different, Johnny could say the word back to Rooster now. AIDS. He could tell Rooster how scared he was. They’d go get tests, and put it behind them, and together they could sail down Fifth Avenue on a parade float, throwing confetti into the wind.
But now? If he was found out, no one would let him raise Teddy’s baby. And if he got sick, he wouldn’t be
around
long enough to raise the baby. Before long, he’d be wherever Teddy was. Gone. And he wanted to be alive.
Johnny sat up, but Rooster didn’t move. He didn’t show Johnny his face. Rooster was a big man, but for the first time, his body now looked like a brittle thing, each knuckle of his spine visible. What Johnny would remember was that ink-ruined plane of his back in the dim room, Johnny’s imperfect work branded forever in his pores.
“Just take your fuckin’ shower,” Rooster said.
T
o the wedding of his best friends, the first wedding he had ever attended, Jude wore the same clothes he’d worn to Teddy’s funeral. Johnny had wanted him to wear a robe, maybe in yellow or gold (Johnny’s was white), but Jude had grown tired of the details Johnny had planned—the vermilion powder he would dab on the part of Eliza’s hair, the firmness of the eggplants for the fire sacrifice. He had sent Jude out to buy six bouquets of roses, which Jude had then disassembled, petal by petal, for the guests to toss at the bride and groom—the householders, Hindus called them—while Johnny and Eliza had taken the PATH to Hoboken to apply for a marriage license. So Jude stood firm on his choice of attire, the one act of disobedience he could muster. Les, for his part, wore the suit he had worn to his own wedding in 1969, chocolate brown, with a vest that could not be buttoned.
The rest of his clothes, along with the handful of possessions with which he preferred not to part, Les had packed into his trunk. After arranging with Harriet the details of the children’s arrival, he’d placed a call to a friend in Chinatown, and thirty minutes later two guys had arrived with a truck and a dolly and four empty refrigerator boxes, which they filled with his plants, wrapped in cellophane, and carted out of Les’s apartment into the bright of day. The cash would cover a ticket to anywhere in the world, but he hadn’t bought one yet. He’d go to the airport and pick a city he couldn’t pronounce. He gave the keys to his camper van to Jude, along with McQueen, who would not pass through airport security. The keys to his apartment he left to his friend Davis, who was in need of a sublet, having been evicted from his own studio for failure to pay the rent. Jude had witnessed all of this with the dejected respect one had for people with destructive talents, like winning hamburger-eating contests. He should have known his father was exceptionally good at leaving, at transforming a crisis into an efficient and practiced good-bye. Finally, his father gave him five hundred-dollar bills, for the “reimbursement” of Jude’s dealer. “Be nice to he who keeps you in weed.” It was the one lesson he left Jude with, and Harriet’s one condition for allowing Jude to return to Vermont with his friends. She could not keep him padlocked in his room forever, and she couldn’t afford to lose any more glass. Hippie would have to be paid.
For the week preceding the wedding, to protect her from her mother, Les had established Eliza in a room at the St. Marks Hotel. To protect her from the St. Marks Hotel, he’d established Johnny there with her, in a single room with a double bed, because it was the cheapest. He said to Jude, “They can’t get into any more trouble than they already have.” They didn’t see her until Sunday evening, when she appeared at the temple in her sari, her palms and bare feet covered with henna tattoos.
At the wedding, while the priest chanted and waved his incense and spoke of sacrifice, while Johnny and Eliza exchanged flower garlands instead of rings and tied their shawls in a knot to symbolize their union, while the fire pit raged so hot that Jude’s eyes stung with the sweat from his brow, he kept his eyes on Eliza’s feet, on her ankles, her heels, the space between her toes, on each spike and whorl of ink, and imagined them in Johnny’s hands while he applied the ink to her skin.
After the vegetarian feast, Jude drove his father’s van around to the front of the building (already packed with their bags, equipment, record crates, and the three cats—Johnny’s single caveat) and held open the door while Johnny, carrying a laughing Eliza, piled into the back. The sun had set over Brooklyn, and Jude fumbled a moment to find the headlights. In the darkness of the van the rearview mirror reflected only the dimmest of shapes—the happy members of the temple waving from the curb, Jude’s father already hailing a taxi, and the profiles of the newlyweds it was his duty to chauffeur home, one indistinguishable from the other.
The Householders
A
t the Texaco station on Grammer Street, the only gas station in Lintonburg open in the middle of the night, two cars sat in the parking lot, and one of them was a shit-colored Camaro with a Black Flag bumper sticker and a Pizza Hut dome on the roof. Inside the gas station, Kram had one arm lost deep in the beer case. He was wearing a Pizza Hut shirt and a Pizza Hut hat and khaki pants that matched his khaki hair. When he saw Jude and Johnny file in, he whistled. “Jeezum Crow! What are you guys doing here?”
He furnished them both with quick, back-pounding hugs, wrestling Jude in half and sawing his knuckles over his skull. “I didn’t recognize this little shit without the hair! What’d you do with your devil lock?”
“The demon has been exorcised,” Johnny said. “He’s an angel now.”
“Yeah, right!” Kram let Jude go and grabbed a fistful of Johnny’s white wedding robe. “You’re the angel! Look at this. What is this, Halloween?”
“
You
look the same,” Johnny said. “Still got your gut.”
“That’s all muscle, McDickless. The ladies love it.”
“Pizza Slut, huh?” Jude asked.
Kram stood up straight, hitching up his khakis. “Yeah, well, I wasn’t getting any hours at the Record Room. You know Delph made assistant manager over there?”
“Oh yeah?”
“
I’m
the one got him the job there. And I’ve got a hell of a lot better taste in music.”
“That’s debatable,” said Johnny.
“Shit, you grew up, Judy. You’re taller than me.”
Jude did feel older, but maybe that was just because Lintonburg felt the same. Following route 7 north past the twinkling vistas of Middlebury and Vergennes and Charlotte, past the shuttered flea market grounds and the round sheep barn and the shore of the thawing lake, past the snake’s tongue where route 7 forked into Grammer and Champlain, and then two rise-and-falls until they reached the Day-Glo torch of the gas station, Jude had felt that he could drive that road with his eyes closed, even if it was his first time actually driving it.
Nothing had changed.
“Fucking bullshit is what it is.” Kram was telling them about the P.E. credit that would keep him from graduating next month. A starting linebacker for four years, and they were talking about a P.E. credit. He didn’t want to go to college anyway; he wanted to get back into music. “This is perfect. You still got my old drum kit in your basement, Judy? You guys still got guitars? We could revive the Bastards! The Bastards live!”
Johnny put his hands on Kram’s shoulders. “You high, man?”