fight.
It’s snowing still, maybe several hours later, when Jude wakes up to more sounds in the alley—the slamming of the van door. Crawling from his bed, still in his bathrobe and boots, he opens the window and hangs his head outside. The bottom half of his father is disappearing into the Purple People Eater, a flashlight bobbing inside. Jude thinks he must be sleeping in the camper, as he has been known, in warmer weather, to do. Instead he emerges with the sleeping bag in his arms. He’s now wearing a pair of snow boots, a parka, and the dashiki he wore to Woodstock. He’s halfway to the greenhouse, waddling through the snow, when he stops, panting heavily, then looks up at Jude’s window.
“What?” he says.
Jude doesn’t say anything. The cold air is burning his ears and his nose.
“Come on, then,” says his father, shuffling along again.
By the time Jude reaches the greenhouse, his father has turned on all the lights—twelve overhead lamps, plugged into a network of extension cords—and the warm room is getting warmer. The light is bright and orange, and the air smells sweet and spicy at the same time. It’s been a while since Jude was allowed in here.
There is no glass, no hothouse plastic, no natural light. But it’s green, and it’s a house of sorts: an aluminum shed painted the color of a tennis court. All around—on shelves, beneath tables, in a kiddie pool that neither Jude nor his sister has ever played in—are his plants. They’re the greenest green Jude has seen all winter, and some of them, the ones wrapped in chicken wire, the ones sprouting purple flowers, are taller than he is. Jude’s father takes out his army knife. From one of the dried branches hanging upside down from the clothesline, he carefully cuts away the outer leaves, removes a thimbleful of hairy bud, and then, sitting down in the old rocking chair, packs his brown glass pipe with it. The greenhouse is the size of Jude’s bedroom—big, the whole third floor of the warehouse—and as he burrows into the sleeping bag at his father’s feet, he wishes he could sleep in here instead.
“I thought the lights weren’t supposed to be on at night,” Jude says. In the orange light his father’s left cheek is an angry red. “What happened to your face?”
His father puts two fingers to his cheek. He has a soft, pale, leathery face, with splotches of pink age spots along the roots of his hair, which he parts down the middle. Since he was a teenager he’s worn it long and stringy, to his shoulders. His overgrown beard is the same copper color, the rim of his mustache stained tobacco brown. In the summer he wears cutoff jeans and flip-flops and no shirt, walking around the house scratching the copper curls on his chest. Now he pulls the hood of his parka over his head. “Born that way, champ,” he says.
Jude puts his hands behind his head, gathering his shoulders into the depths of the sleeping bag, which smells like gasoline and his mother. She used to take it camping at Camel’s Hump with Jude’s father, who now has a piece of pot caught in his beard like a crumb. Jude asks if he can try some, but his father shakes his head.
“You let me try the eggnog with rum in it.”
“Reefer is for grown-ups. But some grown-ups are too grown-up for it. Some grown-ups think it’s unfashionable now.” His father takes a smooth hit. “I’m afraid I’m not needed here anymore, champ.” When Jude says nothing, his father asks, “You know why people smoke reefer? It’s a comfort, champ. It restores you, like sleep. It makes you like a baby again, a sleeping baby. Know what I mean?”
“No. You won’t let me try.”
“You’re already a baby. You don’t need to become one again. When you’re older, you’ll know.”
“I’m not a baby. I’m nine today.”
His father rocks slowly in his chair. “You’re right. You’re not a baby anymore.”
“Do you know what Mom and Mr. Donahoe were talking about outside?”
He stops rocking. His gray eyes, which have been rolling around the greenhouse with a liquid dreaminess, fall on Jude’s face, as though he’s just spotted him there, lying at his feet. He looks almost pleased.
“As a matter of fact, I believe they were talking about moi.”
“How come?”
A sheet of snow tumbles off the warming roof.
“I’m going to tell you something, champ, because I need another man’s opinion. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Mrs.