Ten Thousand Saints (7 page)

“Let me see this,” Teddy said. She felt his cold fingers on her clavicle, the weight of the chain snaking against her skin. He cupped the charms in his palm, jiggled them like a pair of dice. He inspected the locket, the Star of David, the keys, then tucked them back inside her coat. “Neat.”

“I like yours, too,” she said. She tapped a finger on the cool disk around his neck.

“It’s for the subway. My brother sent it to me, for when I go to New York.” He looked down at it, holding it just under his nose. “It’s missing the silver circle in the middle, so my brother says it’s lucky.”

“It must be,” Eliza said. “I’ve never seen one like that.” Teddy let the token hang. “How do you feel?” she asked him.

“Now? Wicked. How come you didn’t tell us you had this before?”

“I was saving it.” She crammed the plastic bag into her makeup bag and the makeup bag into her backpack. “We should turn the lights off again.”

“We should do that.”

They were little kids, playing a game. She turned the light off, found Teddy’s cold face in the dark, aimed her mouth at his, and kissed him. It was so dark she was asleep, dreaming. It was a dreamy kiss.

“So are you Indian?” It seemed safe to ask, now that they were in the dark. He was shaking a little. It was probably, she realized, his first time. This made her want to pull him close and pat him on the back, which she did.

“Yeah. Gandhi, not Geronimo. But my mom’s white.”

They kissed again, leaning forcefully into each other. “Don’t worry. We’ll find her.” They kissed until a knock sounded at the door. Eliza and Teddy held their breaths, trying not to laugh. The doorknob rattled, and the visitor disappeared.

Teddy whispered, “He’s looking for us.”

“Who?”

Teddy didn’t answer.

“I don’t think he’d mind,” Eliza said, but maybe she wanted him to. Maybe she wanted Teddy to tell Jude. Maybe she wanted Teddy to pass her on like Bridge Fowler had, like an expensive new drug.
Try it, you’ll like it.

She peeled off her coat, and the coat, electrified with static, zapped the air. A shock of blue sparks sputtered between them. “Whoa,” they said together. She found her way up onto the sink again. His cold hand found her knee, and then her hip, and then the long, goose-bumped length of her arm, and then the sleeve of her T-shirt, and then darting through this opening, the hand swallowed a breast whole.

Les was wrong. She wasn’t young. She didn’t want to save anyone; she wasn’t in love with other people’s suffering. She wanted to be consumed by it, eaten alive.

J
ude roamed. They had split up—Teddy upstairs, Jude downstairs—but Jude searched upstairs, too, wandering the hall, trying doorknobs, looking not only for Eliza but now for Teddy, Delph, Kram, anyone but Tory, for beer, for the bathrooms, all of which seemed to be locked. He drank a watery centimeter of beer from an abandoned cup, but it only made him thirstier. He found the kitchen phone and called Delph, not caring how late it was, and left a message after his father’s nerdy voice: “This is Jude. Where are you?”

Days seemed to have passed, whole, eventless weeks, since the girl had knocked on the driver’s-side window. She had a wall of blond hair and a low-cut top that Jude stared down as she leaned over, cleavage that went and went. Could they move their car, please? They were blocking her way. And hey, actually, was this their car? Um, not really. It was their friend’s. They’d go get him.

On a wicker love seat on the back porch, Hippie was passed out in a Santa hat, his glasses knocked askance. He’d graduated the year before, but he still hung out with the high school set, cruised his bike around the school parking lot each afternoon. The story was that in exchange for pot, Hippie was under Tory’s protection, which meant that instead of being robbed by Tory, Hippie chose to supply him. Leaning over, Jude nudged his shoulder, and Hippie sat straight up, palming the leather fanny pack at his waist.

Jude said, “Hey, you got anything left?”

Hippie squinted at him. An icy wind blew through the porch screen. “Who are you again?”

“Jude. Jude Keffy-Horn.”

Hippie adjusted his glasses. “Your mom’s the Glass Lady?”

“How do you know my mom?” It wasn’t until Jude had asked the question that the answer became obvious. He’d never wondered where his mom got her pot since his dad left town.

Hippie said, “We’ve traded services a few times.”

Jude did not like the sound of that. He tried to banish the image of his mother engaged in a business exchange with Hippie. “How about a dime for some of my mom’s glass? That’s a good deal.”

“Hippie’s not doing any trading tonight,” said Hippie.

“Or how about this?” Jude reached into the inside pocket of his coat and revealed two round, white pills, fuzzy with lint. “A little vitamin R. I’ll toss them in.”

“Hippie takes cash.”

“Come on, man. Be a friend.”

“Sorry, brother. Can’t help you out.” Hippie leaned his head back against the love seat. From the pool table behind him, Jude took a pool stick and thrust it like a javelin through the porch screen, startling himself and Hippie, who leapt up from the couch. The wind whistled through the hole in the screen.

“Screw you,” Jude said. “You’re lucky I don’t steal that fag bag off you.”

He kicked open the screen door, trundled through the snow, and pissed into a dark corner of the backyard, leaning a hand on the cold, slickly painted fence, drilling a steaming hole in the snow. As a kid he had done this with his father many times, stood beside him in the outdoors and pissed with pleasure into snow or gravel or grass, the sun or the moon on their faces.

It was just after his ninth birthday that his dad had left. This day was always the same. The false jubilation, the snow.

“You making pee pee, Maybelline?”

Jude zipped up. When he turned around, Tory Ventura was a black silhouette against the distant floodlight on the porch. Behind him were five or six more silhouettes. What remained of Jude’s earlier bravado quickly sank.

“That’s him,” said Hippie’s voice.

“That’s him,” said a girl, the girl who had discovered Jude and Teddy in the car.

Tory stepped closer. Jude could see only his outline, his moon-limned shoulders and knuckles. “You been vandalizing my house, Maybelline? You been messing with my car?”

The bonfire shivered at the far end of the yard, crackling with the smoky voices of the figures standing around it.

“It was unlocked,” Jude said, ignoring the first question. “We were just trying to stay warm.” How the fuck hadn’t he known that Tory Ventura drove a LeBaron?

Tory stepped to Jude’s left, and Jude stepped to the right, doing a little do-si-do. The light now fell flat on Tory, revealing his face to Jude, all but his deep-set eyes, darkened with circles below, as though with permanent paint, and Jude whiffed a swift air-gun shot of the beer on Tory’s breath. “You come to my party without an invitation,” Tory said, “and then you destroy my property?”

“I didn’t mean to,” Jude said. “I was supposed to meet someone.”

“You’re going to have to pay for that,” Tory said, and for a moment Jude thought he meant money.

Then Tory took a step forward and shoved Jude back into the snow. It wasn’t a particularly brutal shove, but he didn’t try to get up. The snow had stopped falling and the sky was clearing, a gauzy cloud traveling over a spray of 3-D stars. Down the waist of his jeans, the packed snow numbed his back.

“You think you and your little friend can just walk in here, you little freak?”

“We didn’t—”

Tory kicked at the snow, his boot stopping just short of Jude’s face. Snow pelted the molars in Jude’s open mouth, the inside corners of his blinking eyes. He had never been jumped before, and he braced himself for the boots. More than any other moment in that endless and disappointing day, he wanted to be blacked out, knocked out, out cold, gone. But when the boots came, they kicked him over, flipping him onto his belly like a fish in a pan. Coming down on his chin, he bit his tongue. Warm blood filled his mouth. He heard the zip of a belt through belt loops and then he felt the belt, not on his back but around it. The others held him down while Tory threaded the belt around Jude’s trunk, clamping his hands behind his back and cinching it over his crossed wrists. They grunted wordlessly, as though lassoing a calf. Jude closed his eyes. Then, through the ear pressed to the ground, the ear listening for his tribe to come stampeding to his rescue, he heard the gentle trickle of liquid, a tributary making its slow way through the crystals of snow, and he opened his eyes to see the golden pool forming before him. Beer. He opened his jaw for it as Tory shoveled in the handful of soaked snow—he struggled to bite down on his knuckles, but already his mouth was too full—and just as he heard the woodpecker reel of laughter above, and the halfhearted protest of one of the girls, he discerned the true contents on his throbbing tongue, and tasting the ammonia through the aluminum of his own blood, his mouth stuffed open with snow as with a pair of balled socks, he gagged, and then vomited, his mouth now filling with vomit as well.

When Teddy and Eliza found him alone in the snow, perhaps ten minutes, perhaps an hour later, they were standing elbow to elbow, as though hiding something between their bodies. They unbuckled the belt and helped him to his feet. “Oh, shit,” Eliza kept saying, her hand over her mouth, but Teddy was dusting the snow off Jude’s jeans, saying, “You’re fine! You’re fine, right? You’re fine, man, right?”

Jude tried to spit into the snow. He couldn’t feel his tongue or his face.

Teddy was sort of panting. Teddy was messed up. Jude did his best to cock his head.
Are you messed up?
he asked with his eyes, and Teddy’s black eyes blinked back, with painstaking slowness, with remorse,
Yes
.

T
hey practically had to force Eliza onto the train. She wanted to stay until they were home safely, but Jude wouldn’t let her, and Teddy pressed his hand to the small of her back as she climbed the stairs of the car. She didn’t have to ask Teddy if he was coming with her. She knew he couldn’t leave Jude now. Teddy watched the train disappear without him.

Now he let the force of the snow, falling again, carry his body down the hill, past his own street and his empty house, toward Jude’s. The antiseptic flakes burned his skin. His heart was skidding on ice.

“You okay?” he asked Jude for the fourth time.

Jude nodded, hobbling stiffly beside him. He was holding something. Out of the pocket of his jacket snaked the end of the braided belt, wet with snow. “Where were you guys?”

Teddy had hoped to find something heroic about Jude’s defeat, something that could be salvaged and spun into a story for Johnny or Delph or Kram. But now it felt unusable, a black stain, and entirely tangled with the bright memory of what he’d done in the dark while Jude lay outside in the snow. That was a story for another time, too. “Looking for you,” Teddy said.

Up ahead, the frozen lake was lit like the ocean, like there was nothing on the other side. Now that Teddy was leaving this place, he had a biting fondness for it, a feeling that was unfamiliar to him; he’d left the other cities of his childhood without regret. He kicked the snow as he walked, spraying arcs of white mixed with the pebbly dirt beneath. She’d tried to kiss him again as they dressed in the dark—he could feel her raising up on tiptoe—but he’d swooped out of the way to feel for his jacket on the floor. He’d meant to punish himself, withhold one last indulgence, but he knew by her stunned silence that he’d punished her instead. “He’s probably worried,” he’d explained, zipping up the jacket. The cold teeth of the zipper bit his hand.

“Dude,” he said now as they entered the alley behind Jude’s house, “when we go to New York, we’ll get away from that asshole. Everything will be different.”

The streetlight shone on the patch of dirt where, in the spring, Harriet planted her garden. “Yeah, for sure.” Jude stepped into the light and then through it, past the greenhouse, toward the office building next door. Teddy followed.

In front of the building’s air conditioner, Jude knelt in the snow. He put his hands on the pipes that curled at the side of the machine. Fumbling, he pinched and pulled in the dark until he found the right valve.

The last thing Teddy wanted was another experiment. His heart was still shuffling frantically, and he wanted to still it, to burrow under the warm covers on Jude’s top bunk and fall asleep. But Jude was on a mission, and he needed a partner, and after what had happened, Teddy could not refuse him. He had expected a glowing green light, something that might simmer wickedly in a test tube, but in the end the freon was a lot like the turpentine—invisible fumes, cheap and fickle, that turned you into your own ghost. They knelt, knees frozen, and sucked the valve like a straw, Jude blowing Teddy a mouthful, Teddy tonguing the night air until they were sky high, kite-light, whites-of-your-eyes fucked-up. There was a fire in the sky. There were fireworks. It was a new year. Bursts of red and gold flowered above them, petals of color fading and falling with the snow, and Teddy went up there. He felt himself float up into the alley, up over the lake, evaporating.

I
n the morning, it was Harriet who found them. Jude heard her before he saw her—the crunch of her boots over the snow. When he opened his eyes, the sky was twilight gray, and she was standing above him with a snow shovel hanging from her hand like a claw. He couldn’t feel his body. The world had tipped sideways.