Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,8

of Today. Over the past few months, the negligible shelf of vinyl at the back of the store had been phased out by a growing bank of compact discs. Soon the Record Room would sell no more records. Teddy stood disheartened in front of the display, his hands crammed in his pockets. He was tired of Vermont, tired of the homemade drugs and the farm boy slang and the cold. He was tired of letting Jude cheat off his algebra tests. Just before winter break, the guidance counselor had called Teddy into her office and said, “Edward, have you given any thought to college?” The truth was, he had not, but the word chimed in his head for days afterward like the sleigh bells tinkling from the guidance counselor’s earlobes. When Jude asked why he’d been pulled out of class, Teddy told him he’d been caught smoking in the boys’ bathroom, then faked an afternoon of detention, studying alone under the stadium bleachers.

College he could not afford, but at least Teddy knew there was a world beyond Vermont. Before Lintonburg, he’d lived with his mother and brother in Plattsburgh; before that in Newport, Rhode Island; before that in Dover, Delaware; before that in Williamsburg, Virginia; before that somewhere in North Carolina; and before that in some places he didn’t really remember, all the way down to Miami, where he was born. But he’d never been to Manhattan. In Manhattan, Johnny said, there were crates and crates of vinyl in every record store, a hardcore matinee every weekend at CBGB, endless concrete built for the wheels of a skateboard. And fathers. Jude’s, Johnny’s. That’s where the fathers were. For a second Teddy could picture himself there, standing on the street in front of a building, a set of keys jingling in his hand.

Teddy had last spoken to his brother on Christmas. When Teddy handed the phone back to his mother and left the room, he could still hear her scolding Johnny about something in a desperate sort of whisper, as though she didn’t want Teddy to hear. She was sitting on the couch, hunched over a beer, her bra strap slipped off her shoulder and out of her sleeve.

“All right, dude, just a dime,” Delph was saying. If Jude met him at Tory Ventura’s New Year’s party at nine, Delph would gift him with some kind bud.

“Tory Ventura?” Teddy said, looking up from the cassettes. “Not that dickhead.”

Tory was a senior, played football with Kram. He liked to grab Jude and Teddy by the scruff of their coats and slam them against their lockers. They all hated him, but his parents were out of town, and there would be three kegs. “It’s supposed to be wicked,” said Kram, doing push-ups against the counter, the armpits of his T-shirt dark with sweat.

“Bring your lady,” said Delph.

“We’ll be there,” said Jude.

In the street, an inch or two of snow had accumulated, and it was still falling steadily. Jude and Teddy stepped soundlessly into it and carried their skateboards back to Jude’s, where they made English muffin pizzas, splitting the third one in half. It was a big, bony house, first a warehouse and then a schoolhouse, and now Jude lived there with his mother and his sister. It was misleading to call it a house—it was a brick building in an alley, narrow as an ice cream truck, four stories tall if you counted the basement. Jude’s father had bought it for $1,800 in 1969; he was in the middle of renovating it when Jude, and then Prudence, were born. When Les was finished (and he never really was, according to Harriet), the house was a monument of found object art. The shutters were made from leftover chalkboards; the steps were two separate spiral staircases joined together, one pine, one steel; the living room couch was a claw-foot tub with the front sawed off, lined with an orange mattress from an old chaise lounge and throw pillows Harriet had sewn with her Singer. After the renovation project, Les devoted himself to the less architecturally challenging greenhouse, and when he took its profits to New York in the form of a Dodge camper van full of marijuana plants, he left the half-assed results of his ten-year enterprise. They had no kitchen drawers: they kept their silverware in mugs. They had no kitchen ceiling: just insulation and ducts and wires like so many guts and veins.

The basement still held the scent of antique allergens—sawdust, chalk,