Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,130

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