Ten Thousand Saints (43 page)

Eliza swung her legs over the side of the bed. She struggled to reach the Keds on the carpet and to fit them on her feet. He felt that he should help her, but didn’t.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “I’m used to it. Johnny didn’t want to touch me, either.” She stood up and wiped her mouth with the back of her wrist.

“Eliza,” Jude managed, “that’s not it.”

“Don’t tell me. If I weren’t pregnant, right?”

Crossing the room to the closet, she whipped off her nightgown, turning the back of her nearly naked body to Jude. Again, he looked away.

“You and Johnny are exactly the same. I thought you weren’t, but you are. I know you both want it to be a boy. The only reason you’ve stuck around this long is because you expect me to have a little Teddy for you to play with.”

“That’s not true!” Jude sprung up from the bed. “I liked you, even before I knew about the baby.”

“Well, you don’t have to anymore. You’re off the hook, because I’m giving it up.”

She yanked her yellow dress off a hanger, pulled it over her head, and turned around.

“Eliza, you don’t mean that.”

“I do mean it. It’s not some spur-of-the-moment decision. I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided, and it’s my decision, not anyone else’s. Do you want to know why?” She put her hands on her widened hips. “Because it’s my baby. Not yours. Not Johnny’s.”

From her closet, she took out a cardigan and buttoned it over her dress.

“Where are you going?”

“To find Johnny. I’m going to tell him.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. Then, “I’m going with you,” and when he followed her, she didn’t protest.

T
he taxi could only get them as far as Third Avenue. St. Mark’s Place was choked with people, people spilling out of bars, people hanging off of balconies. An ambulance screamed toward the park, parting the sea of bodies, nudging cars to the curb. On the sidewalk, two cops on horseback galloped past.

“Hey, Eliza! Jude! Welcome to Mardi Gras!”

On Les’s fire escape, Davis and a friend were leaning over the railing, smoking cigarettes and watching the show.

“Hey, Davis!” Jude called. “What the hell’s going on?”

“The pigs are back, man. Be careful out there.”

Jude tried to cover Eliza’s body as they made their way down the street, steering her with one arm, shielding her with the other. In the cab, she’d listened to her headphones. The space between them was incalculable. If he hadn’t stopped kissing her. If he hadn’t pulled away. It all seemed like hours ago. Now, as he ushered her along, the faintly sour heat of her body brought back their kiss with violent clarity. On his lips, her saliva had dried to a delicate crust.

“This is stupid,” he said. “Can’t this wait until tomorrow?”

“I’m fine,” Eliza said, pushing her way through the crowd just as a couple of punks sprinted by, jostling her elbow.

“Watch it!” Jude shouted after them. To Eliza he said, “This is why we don’t let you in the pit.”

“What?”

He leaned close to her ear. “This is why we don’t let you in the pit!”

Tonight the pit was Tompkins Square Park. The same dark, festive atmosphere hovered over it, the feeling that you might get kicked in the nuts at any time, that it would be a night to remember. Who would show up, what were the teams. He should have turned her around and forced her back into a cab, but he didn’t.

Why should he protect her anymore? If she was giving up the baby, what did it matter? A loud pop, an M-80, sounded in the distance. They both jumped. “That was a firecracker,” Eliza asked, “right?”

The crowd thickened. Arms windmilled, shoes flew. Some people were running toward them and other people were running past them, toward the park. Near First Avenue, a stalled fire engine blasted its horn. In front of it, a wall of people was blocking its passage. “Hell, no! We won’t go!” they were shouting, and a bottle flew through the dark and broke against the side of the truck, and then another, shattering a headlight. The truck kept honking, but no one in it was moving.

The crowd surged. From behind Jude and Eliza, a team of horses came galloping toward the truck. The mounted cops were wielding nightsticks. Leaning out of their saddles, they brought their clubs down on the crowd. A polo match. Two cops thrashed their clubs against a passing bike, the handlebars, the tires, the guy’s legs. He fell off onto his side.

Jude and Eliza kept moving. “This is over a park?” she yelled in his ear, tripping behind him. “Slow down! My feet hurt!” He yanked her roughly by the hand. The smell of gasoline, a tattoo of firecrackers, a broken bottle under Jude’s foot. A cone of light from a video camera, and then a crash as it met a nightstick. “Fascists!” someone yelled. Beside them, a girl on a boy’s shoulders fell headfirst into the crowd. Men poured out of a bar carrying bottles of foaming beer. It splashed all over them, all over everyone. Somewhere someone was on a megaphone, but the voice was just a voice, without words. It was drowned out by something powerful and bright. They moved forward as if into a wind, shoulders together, heads down. They
were
moving into a wind. Trash scuffed against their ankles. Eliza’s dress whipped against her knees. Jude lifted his face. High above Avenue A, over the entrance to the park, a police helicopter hung from the black sky, its propeller churning up a dust storm in the street below. Its searchlight sifted through the crowd with a superhuman glow. An alien invasion, a hurricane. It found a soaring bottle, a horse rearing up on its hind legs.

“We’re never going to find him,” Jude shouted to Eliza.

“Fine!” Her hair was lifting off her shoulders. “Go home!”

Under the drone of the helicopter there was the weak beat of bongos. A drum line was wending its way through the mob. “Die, yuppie scum!” their voices were chanting, just loud enough to hear. One of them, a woman with two long braids, struck Jude’s hand as she thumped past him.

“
You
die!” he called after them. “
You
go home, you hippie shits!”

“I think I hear him!” Eliza yelled. “On the megaphone.”

Jude listened. From across the street through the park, a voice was speaking with a placid urgency, like the voice of God at the Krishna temple.

“Where did he get a megaphone?” Eliza wondered.

Of course Johnny was on a megaphone. What the fuck was he defending? The junkies? The dealers? He’d been handing out fruit to the homeless, playing priest to Tent City, while all the time he’d been butt-fucking Rooster. How many times had he claimed to be going to the park, or the temple, or to do a tattoo, when he’d been going to Rooster’s place?

There was no way into the park. They shoved south, squinting into the flying debris, their hands slippery with sweat. “Pregnant lady here,” Jude said. “Watch the fuck out.” There were all the times he’d gone to Johnny’s place in the middle of the night and he wasn’t there. There were all those weeks, after they were in Vermont, he’d been in New York, playing with his old band.

He spit on the ground, kept moving. The dust and dirt needled his skin.

After their first show, when everyone was crashing in the basement, Johnny and Rooster were alone in Jude’s room. In his bunk bed.

“WHOSE PARK? OUR PARK. WHOSE PARK? OUR PARK.”

“I see him! You see him?”

Eliza pointed. Facing a brigade of thirty or forty cops, two rows of demonstrators were sitting across Seventh Street like kindergartners at story time. Some were playing drums, maracas. There was Delph, and Kram, Matthew, Ben, Rooster. Johnny sat in front, leading the chant, wearing the white robe he was married in.

“WHOSE PARK? OUR PARK.”

It was a voice meant to hypnotize.
Trust me, you’re getting sleepy
.

It worked. Jude stood still in the middle of the street, under the spell of Johnny’s voice. He was suddenly very tired of moving.

Eliza’s hand slipped from his. Without looking back, she darted ahead, the space between them stretching wide, and wider, uncrossable. He watched the black broom of her head bob through the crowd. He lost sight of her, then found her, then lost her again. The dust storm lashed around him.

Slowly, Johnny’s voice came to a stop. Eliza dropped to his side. Across the crowded street, Jude watched their mouths moving. What were they saying? The things that people said. Fuck you, I hate you, it’s over. Whatever they were talking about, they weren’t talking about Teddy.

Jude floated through the crowd. Watch it, watch out. Eliza was handling her necklace. She was handing something to Johnny. It glinted dully under the streetlamp. It was her ring. Jude moved toward its light until he reached them.

“Johnny, get up.”

Johnny looked up at him. His face was in shadow, but Jude could see on it an older brother’s irritation. He was tired of Jude playing at his feet.

Beside him, Rooster put a hand on Johnny’s shoulder. “This is a fuckin’ sit-in, kid,” Rooster said.

“I’m not talking to you, Rooster.”

“Jude, go home,” Johnny said. “This doesn’t concern you.”

They were all looking at him. They were all wrong. Nothing had concerned him more.

He was thinking of Hippie and Tory as he kicked Johnny in the gut, Hippie crumpling against the fence, Tory’s screams rocking the van, and now Johnny slumping over into Rooster’s lap as Rooster pulled Jude’s other leg from under him, toppling him to the ground. Jude lifted Johnny by the back of the neck and landed two punches dead in the center of his face before they all fell on top of him—Rooster, Delph, Kram. There must have been more, but he couldn’t see. He felt the tread of rubber on his body, knuckles. The sirens howled. The M-80s popped. The fists rained down on him, cleansing him. He didn’t fight back. And yet they were the ones crying out. The pummeling slowed. The mass lifted. The cops were clubbing them off of him.

Then, through the megaphone, Johnny’s voice. “She’s pregnant!”

The helicopter swept its spotlight over them. It found a shield, a helmet, a club; Jude, struggling to sit up; Rooster on his hands and knees; and Johnny flying to Eliza, who lay on her side, her hand to her head, spilling blood on the street. Her eyes were open, and she was looking at Jude. Then the light swept away.

Twenty-One

W
hen Eliza opened her eyes, she saw their faces from left to right. Even in her state of disorientation, her brain processed the people sitting at her bedside in its trained latitudinal sequence. Jude, with a black eye, in a hospital gown. Beside him, with a suntan, Les. On the other side of the bed, holding a paper cup of tea stained with her fuchsia lipstick, her mother.

“Is the baby okay?”

Les tossed his crossword onto Eliza’s blanketed legs. “The patient speaks.”

Eliza’s voice was groggy, her limbs heavy. An IV was taped to the back of her hand, a plastic clip attached to her finger. And there was something strapped to her belly, a belt. She let her eyelids flutter closed. She remembered all the commotion in the park, a fight, screaming for the boys to get off of Jude. She didn’t remember anything after that. When she opened her eyes, Jude averted his. She remembered kissing him in her bed.

“Right as rain, darling.” Di picked up Eliza’s hand and stamped her knuckles with her lipstick. “The heart rate was up for a while, but now it’s stable. They gave you something to sleep.”

Yes, she had slept. She’d slept better than she had in months.

“In fact, you’ve been asleep for seven years,” Les said. “This is actually your fourth child.”

“Les, what are you doing here?”

“You were hit in the head last night, darling,” said her mother. “By a police officer. You have a concussion.”

“You were concussed,” Les added, miming the swing of the nightstick.

Jude said, “You passed out in the ambulance.”

“Ambulance?”

“Tell her,” Jude said.

“Tell me what?”

“Tell you nothing. She’s awake now, gentlemen. You can go.”

“I think she’s going to find out,” Les said.

Jude rubbed his scalp. “They shaved your head.”

“Just part of it, darling, for the stitches.”

Eliza lifted her hand to her head. It was wrapped in a bandage.

“Thank you very much, Jude, you can take your father to the waiting room now.”

Jude and Les rose to their feet. Les said, “You look great, sweetheart.”

“Honestly, it’s not much,” said her mother after they left the room. “It’s just a patch over your ear. You remember Randall, the one who did the stage makeup before Angie. His lover is a wigmaker. He’s got this fabulous shop in SoHo with nothing but beautiful wigs made from human hair. We’ll find you something beautiful.”

Eliza traced the bandage. Her head didn’t hurt; she couldn’t feel a thing.

“We won’t waste our time worrying about hair. Hair grows back. You’re safe, and the baby’s safe. We should be glad all we have to worry about is a little hair.”