Ten Thousand Saints Page 0,86

The only chair that remained was stationed at the table inside the door, and Eliza sat in it, stuffing wrinkled bills into a cash box as fast as the youth of Lintonburg could hand them to her.

The flyer—

Live Music at the REC CENTER!

Jam Masters PHROG

and New York Hardcore from ARMY OF ONE

and GREEN MOUNTAIN BOYS

SATURDAY, JUNE 4, 8 P.M. $5

ALL AGES!

—had been lettered by Johnny, photocopied at the A&P, and posted on telephone poles citywide. When they’d pled their case for an alcohol-free venue to Barb Delaney, the gray-haired lesbian who ran the rec center, she’d licked the point of her pencil and said, “When do you want to start?” Johnny signed on as chaperon. Delph, who used to supply the drummer of Phrog, called him up and asked him to top off their lineup. Now, all the kids who’d been trying for years to sneak into Jacque’s to see them play, praying their fake IDs would get them past the door, walked in as though they owned the place. Some of the crowd had carpooled up from New York, guys who ran with Johnny’s old band Army of One, which now sported a new lead guitarist. Johnny had convinced them to come up. In the dark of the gymnasium, it was hard to tell who was from New York, who was from Lintonburg, and who was from the periphery—Rutland, Montpelier, the far-flung farms of Linton County. There were hardcore kids in black jeans with chains drooping from their pockets and bandanas tied around the ankles of their boots, longhairs in layered Bajas, four or five skinheads in wife-beaters and suspenders, two black Rastas with dreads as fat as bananas, a punk with a lizard green Mohawk who was no older than twelve, and a pale-faced boy in a cape wearing what seemed to be vampire teeth. The girls could be counted on two hands. Two were fat, with silver hoops through their nostrils. One was making out with the vampire. Where did these people come from? And where were they last year when Jude was getting locker-slammed by Tory Ventura for sporting a devil lock? He’d had no idea how well he’d blend in his mask.

It was the Ronald Reagan mask he’d worn last Halloween with Teddy. He’d be onstage, but he’d be invisible. With Phrog playing tonight, Hippie might be there, too. And if Hippie was there, Jude hoped, Tory might be, too. Jude didn’t want them to see him before he saw them. He wanted to have time for a sneak attack.

“Um, welcome,” he said into the mike, shouldering his new guitar. The lights dimmed, and the crowd issued a lukewarm bellow. Jude squinted into the crowd. He didn’t see Hippie or Tory. “Welcome to Spaghetti Dinner Family Night,” he said.

Anyone in the audience that night would have seen the fortieth president of the United States, in camo pants and T-shirt, doing beautiful injury to his Les Paul. Who the fuck are these guys? shouted the kids in the crowd into their friends’ ears, not just because the singer’s face was concealed from view but because their sound wasn’t bad, it was hard, it was wicked. What the fuck is this? they asked in the beat between songs, before the next one started up.

The fact was, even before the Green Mountain Boys’ debut was over, Jude had forgotten it. The stage was a ship he was riding. His voice was a transmission from another planet. He was not on shrooms—Get that shit, he sang, away from me!—but he remembered the one time he’d been on this stage before, for a class play about the Green Mountain Boys in which he wore a tricornered hat Harriet had fashioned out of black felt. He and Teddy had sneaked a few shrooms before the call, and carousel horses had flitted in the aisles of the audience. He remembered only a single line from the play, spoken in a lisp by the kid who played Ethan Allen: “We will use violence and coercion, but we will take no lives!”

That was how the militia gave its name to the band. “They were vigilantes,” Jude had recalled one afternoon in the basement. “Guerrilla citizens.”

“Like Gorilla Biscuits?” said Kram, who was pawing through a pile of Harriet’s nude drawings.

“Outlaws,” Johnny clarified.

“It sounds like a bluegrass band,” Delph worried.

Kram said, “My mom has a dinette set from Ethan Allen.”

“It’s not bad,” said Johnny.

Jude had expected Johnny to head the band’s lineup; it was the natural