Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [112]
For the first time since Jude had transported the householders to Vermont, the three of them were alone in the van. Now they were leaving New York again, and he was in the backseat, sharing it with Eliza’s oversized suitcase. Johnny was at the wheel, and on the other side of the blusterous engine, sitting above the front axle, was Eliza, sunning her bare feet on the dash. The Kramaro, crammed with the rest of the crew, darted ahead of them; Delph hung his middle finger victoriously out the passenger window. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and it was summer, and these were the best years of their lives, and they were crossing the George Washington Bridge, the Hudson a spangled blue ribbon laced through it. On the boom box that served as car stereo was the new album by Side By Side, with whom they had just performed; behind Jude were one thousand copies of their own seven-inch record, which had just been pressed in Haworth, New Jersey, and released on Green Mountain Recordings, the label Delph had produced out of thin air.
On the front jacket was the logo Johnny had sketched—two pine boughs forming an X. In light of the band’s name, Jude had requested bayonets instead, preferably dripping with blood, but he’d acquiesced, and the logo now decorated their bass drum, their T-shirt, their sweatshirt, and their bumper sticker. On the reverse side of the album was a photo taken by Ben, the four of them posed in the band shell at Tompkins, where Mayor Koch was trying to enforce the 1:00 A.M. curfew. Wasn’t going to happen. Curfew? said the look on the faces in the picture. Fucking curfew? Ben and Matthew and Delph had never been to the city before; Kram had once visited a Long Island aunt who’d said, “Manhattan? You got a death wish?” During the week that they’d crashed at Rooster’s place, Eliza and Jude and Johnny had done their best to show them around. They spent an entire day skating Washington Square Park, waited three hours for the ferry to the Statue of Liberty, which Delph insisted on seeing. Went to shows at Wetlands, the Ritz, the Pyramid. Ran into guys. So many guys. On any given afternoon twenty of them could be found hanging out at Some Records on the Lower East Side, selling demos and T-shirts, posting flyers for the next show. It was there they ran into two guys from the show in Vermont; their poke-and-stick Xs had healed thick and dark. Then they all found their way back to Rooster’s, whose apartment was as packed and disheveled as Tent City. Delph slept in a chair, and Ben slept in the bathroom, curled around the toilet like a cashew. And though they imagined once or twice that they saw Di walking out of a building, or thought they heard her calling their names, they never did. The city sheltered them.
Harriet had reported, when they’d called collect, that Di had come and gone. “I think she might have said something about heading for Chicago.”
“Chicago?”
“She might be looking for Eliza there.”
“Why there?”
“She might have been . . . thrown off.”
Jude’s mouth dropped open. “Mom, did you tell Eliza’s mom we’re in Chicago, because if so, thank you.”
As for Tory Ventura, Big Ben had learned through his girlfriend that Tory, who had three broken ribs, a few missing