Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [101]
“We won’t have money for the album until we can sell some merch. And we can’t sell any merch till we go on the road.”
“What about your old man, Jude?” Kram asked. “He’s got dough.”
But Jude didn’t know where his dad was. In May, a child support check had been mailed from Las Vegas; a postcard had arrived a few weeks later, postmarked Tequila, Mexico, and written entirely in Spanish. The only word Jude recognized was señorita.
They could wait. They were booking more shows; they were gathering fans; they were picking up recruits off the street. They were out and about, in hiding no more. More than once, Jude had watched some hippie turn around in the street and change direction—duck down an alley, cut through a yard—when he saw their crew approaching, innocent as ice cream, out enjoying the spring day. That was the clout of the Green Mountain Boys. They were all the Green Mountain Boys now; the name had bled beyond the band to its crew of scouts, its brethren.
There had been a few situations. One midnight, they attempted to liberate a herd of cows from the confines of their pen on Dairy Road (the offspring of the cows they used to tip over in their sleep), but Delph’s thigh was impaled on a barbed wire fence. No cows were freed. Delph had to get six stitches. Another time, Little Ben had called with news of a neighborhood barbecue, and they’d gone over with piss-filled water guns, fired them over the fence onto a sizzling rack of ribs. Cops were called by the neighbors, but Little Ben was the only one who got in trouble, a slap on the wrist, and the attention only made him more faithful to the cause. And another night, as they patrolled University Avenue with their baseball bats, a Jeep Cherokee full of drunk frat boys had lunged at them, and if Kram hadn’t knocked out one of the headlights with his bat, they all could have been taken out at the knees. Since then, they’d tried to travel on skateboards, or to keep the van idling close by. More often than not, the Green Mountain Boys and their hodgepodge crew went unscathed, going out under cover of night, seeking out the small-town drunks and the stoners and doling out a temperate pounding, not threatening their lives but giving them something to remember in the morning.
Hippie had proved to be a problem no longer; word was that he now did business solely out of his apartment. Jude had heard stories about Boston crews following dealers into bathrooms, beating them up, flushing their drugs, and keeping their cash, but he didn’t know any other dealers to harass, now that his father was gone and Delph was transformed.
But to Jude, Hippie’s disappearing act was a promise. Sooner or later, his best customer would sniff them out. In the mall, on the street, Jude saw the fast-fingered mirage of Tory Ventura, snapping his belt from the loops of his Duck Heads. Jude’s heart was a crowing bird, a rooster before a rain. In his mother’s studio, where Tory had taken his bat to her work, where grains of glass still glittered on the floor like sand, he practiced taking a bat to the mattress that leaned against the wall. He swung until his arms ached.
If Teddy had been there, in the troposphere of Earth, in the spring of 1988, he’d have seen Lintonburg from above, hovering somewhere over the center of town, over the oblong bell tower of the cathedral, the streets a grid of budding green beneath him, bowing at the horizon with the gentle curvature of the globe. He’d see the uniformed figures on the baseball field, hear the snap of bats and the rustle of cleats on freshly shorn grass. At the high school, the final bell would be ringing, the kids gathering on the sidewalk, the golden buses slinking through the bus loop like the conjoined cars of a train set. Beneath a purple umbrella on Ash Street, Harriet would be minding her table, and Prudence would be drinking a wine cooler on Dena Jeffries’s back porch. From Jude’s basement, he’d hear