Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [3]
What’s that kid up to?
That was the way the girl was looking at both of them now, under the bleachers. “What are you people doing down here?”
Jude stabbed the umbrella into the ground. “Hanging out.”
“Are you smoking marijuana?”
“You can’t smell it,” Jude said. “We’re out in the open.”
“Can I have my umbrella, please?”
“Why? It’s not raining.”
“It’s supposed to snow, for your information.”
“Oh, for my information, okay. It’s a snow umbrella.” Now he was pretending that the umbrella was a gun. He held it cocked at his hip, the metal tip against his cheek, ready to shoot around a corner.
“Jude,” Teddy said. “Over here.”
He clapped his hands, and Jude obediently, joyfully tossed him the umbrella.
“Motherfucking monkey in the middle!” said Jude.
Teddy walked three paces toward the girl, head down, and returned it to her.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Hey,” Jude said.
“Brit?” In the bleachers above, two more girls were peering down at them. They never came alone, girls; they always came in packs. “What are you doing?”
“I’ll be right there!” A moment later, she was gone.
“Brit the shit,” Jude said, but Teddy didn’t say anything.
Jude Keffy-Horn, adopted by Lester Keffy and Harriet Horn of Lintonburg, Vermont, met Teddy McNicholas on the second day of seventh grade, in 1984. Teddy had moved there with his half brother, Johnny, and their mother from Plattsburgh, New York, across Lake Champlain. After school, Jude showed Teddy how to smoke a joint in a gas station parking lot, in the backseat of Teddy’s mom’s Plymouth Horizon, while she shopped for groceries inside. That Jude, not Johnny, or even Queen Bea herself, had managed to pioneer the first hallucinogenic experience of the person who would become his closest and really only friend made Jude happy. He didn’t have much to be proud of, but he was good at sharing new and forgotten methods of getting high.
It was one of the few talents passed down from his father, who, before leaving for New York when Jude was nine, had grown several generations of Cannabis sativa in their greenhouse. Les had a year of college at Vermont State, one fewer than Harriet, followed by fifteen as a lab assistant in the botany department, a position that largely entailed mating strands of Holland’s Hope with Skunk #1, which he offered at a deep discount to the department. Although Jude had been too young to apprentice, he’d observed the objects of his father’s hydroponic ventures—Styrofoam, milk jugs, a fish tank pump—with reverence. He’d admired his father’s self-reliance, and he’d learned early that, even in a nothing town like Lintonburg, Vermont, you could find fun with a little imagination and care. With Teddy, he’d imbibed NyQuil and Listerine; tripped on dairy farm mushrooms; huffed gas, glue, and Jude’s sister’s nail polish remover; brewed beer in Queen Bea’s bathtub; and during a period when they were watching a lot of Mr. Wizard’s World, built a bong out of a garden hose and a coffee urn. Jude liked fucking Teddy up. He liked the dumb, happy look he got on his face, one eye roving, then the other, toward some distant, invisible moon.
Next year, Jude and Teddy were going to New York. Teddy’s half brother, Johnny, lived there, too. They’d had $140 saved up in an empty pack of smokes until a couple of weeks ago, when they used it to buy some pot from Delph and the contact lenses for Teddy and two mail-order Misfits T-shirts. But when they saved some more money and when they were both old enough to drop out (Teddy would be sixteen in May), they were going to buy bus tickets to Port Authority and stay with Johnny until they could find a place of their own.
Johnny was eighteen now, and Jude’s memories of him were obscured by the scrim of vodka he and Teddy would sneak