Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [21]
“Dude,” he said now as they entered the alley behind Jude’s house, “when we go to New York, we’ll get away from that asshole. Everything will be different.”
The streetlight shone on the patch of dirt where, in the spring, Harriet planted her garden. “Yeah, for sure.” Jude stepped into the light and then through it, past the greenhouse, toward the office building next door. Teddy followed.
In front of the building’s air conditioner, Jude knelt in the snow. He put his hands on the pipes that curled at the side of the machine. Fumbling, he pinched and pulled in the dark until he found the right valve.
The last thing Teddy wanted was another experiment. His heart was still shuffling frantically, and he wanted to still it, to burrow under the warm covers on Jude’s top bunk and fall asleep. But Jude was on a mission, and he needed a partner, and after what had happened, Teddy could not refuse him. He had expected a glowing green light, something that might simmer wickedly in a test tube, but in the end the freon was a lot like the turpentine—invisible fumes, cheap and fickle, that turned you into your own ghost. They knelt, knees frozen, and sucked the valve like a straw, Jude blowing Teddy a mouthful, Teddy tonguing the night air until they were sky high, kite-light, whites-of-your-eyes fucked-up. There was a fire in the sky. There were fireworks. It was a new year. Bursts of red and gold flowered above them, petals of color fading and falling with the snow, and Teddy went up there. He felt himself float up into the alley, up over the lake, evaporating.
In the morning, it was Harriet who found them. Jude heard her before he saw her—the crunch of her boots over the snow. When he opened his eyes, the sky was twilight gray, and she was standing above him with a snow shovel hanging from her hand like a claw. He couldn’t feel his body. The world had tipped sideways.
“What on earth are you boys doing?”
Teddy was curled up on the ground beside him with his hands between his knees. His face was a mask of ice. Jude tried to answer, but he couldn’t speak.
The shovel fell. She threw down her gloves. His mother’s hand was like a hot iron on his face. She had a hand on Jude’s face and a hand on Teddy’s; she was the warm current between them. “Jude, be still,” he heard her say. “Teddy, wake up.” When Teddy didn’t open his eyes, she lifted his elbow, then dropped it. “Teddy, honey, wake up!” She clapped her hands, as though to scare a flock of crows from her garden, and the three beats echoed in Jude’s waiting ears, taking flight through the valley and up into the morning.
Three
The Atari comes on Jude’s ninth birthday. It’s three Christmases after everybody already has one, but when his father brings the package downstairs after dinner—the whole thing wrapped in that morning’s Lintonburg Free Press, the cords coiled around it and the joystick balanced on top, as if somebody had packed up the cat—Jude’s so excited he doesn’t care that his father bought it at the Ferrisburg Flea Market.
“Look at that,” his mother marvels, coming into the kitchen. She’s wearing her silky rouge-pink dress and smoking a cigarette and smelling like patchouli. She puts her hand in Jude’s curls.
“It’s got Frogger in it!” Jude says, pulling out the cartridge still wedged inside. On the wood paneling of the game system, the numbers 44.99 are written in Magic Marker,