Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [69]
It wasn’t until nearly an hour later, when Eliza returned to the waiting room, pale and smiling and still pregnant, that Jude could drain that blood from his mind. She was spotting—it wasn’t a miscarriage, but an infection—and Jude was so relieved that he clutched her arm and whispered, “Bacterial vaginosis!” as though they were the loveliest words on earth.
“I saw her on the monitor,” Eliza told them on the subway ride home. “They did an ultrasound. She’s jumping around like a jumping bean! Do beans jump?”
“She?” said Les.
“Annabel Lee,” Jude explained. The doctors said they could determine the sex of the baby, but Eliza didn’t want to know.
They begged Les not to tell Di, and Les, after enjoying their pleas for a while, agreed. “A baby,” he said, looking worried for the first time in his life. Jude told Eliza about the man who’d come in bleeding. Had he been shot? they wondered. Stabbed? Had he lived or died? Jude wanted to put his hand on Eliza’s belly, but he didn’t. He hadn’t known, before that morning, how badly he wanted Teddy’s baby to be born.
Johnny was not pleased that Eliza and Jude had confided in Les, but he did not complain that they hadn’t consulted him first, because, as it happened, Johnny had been indisposed at the time. The morning Eliza was admitted to the ER, he wasn’t in his apartment but in Rooster DeLuca’s, a scrappy little studio near Charlie Parker’s old building, making a house call for an eight-headed dragon he’d been working on for months. The first several appointments had taken place at Johnny’s, but lately he’d insisted on a new arrangement. It was risky to sneak his equipment through the street, but it was riskier to have customers visit his apartment at all hours. Most of Johnny’s tattoos were done by his friend Gomez, whose whole studio not long ago had been raided and fined by the Health Department. And last week the artist they called Picasso had quit after one of his customers fell over and died of AIDS. The city had banned tattooing in the sixties because of hepatitis B, and AIDS made hepatitis look like a cold sore. “Too dicey these days,” said Picasso, but now Johnny had a new crop of customers. He was terrified of the virus—he sterilized every needle—but he was too broke to be picky. He would tattoo anyone.
It was the most extensive single tattoo Johnny had performed: the entire expanse of Rooster’s broad back, armpit to armpit, skull to ass. It was the one empty canvas left on his generously inked body. He had a hairy fucking back, Rooster, each black hair as long as the time since their last session, since the tattoo had healed enough to allow more work. On the Murphy bed that took up most of the room, Rooster lay on his stomach. On the nightstand, Johnny’s kit, plastered with band stickers, splattered with ink, lay openmouthed. Johnny sat on a stool, spreading a sheet of shaving cream on Rooster’s back. He worked the razor down the slope of his spine, rinsing it after each stroke in a cloudy mug of water. When he was done, he mopped up the cream with his cloth, took the Vaseline Rooster kept in the nightstand, and applied a dollop to the right shoulder blade.
“How’s it lookin’?”
“I thought you fell asleep.” They spoke loudly now over the sound of the needle.
“I did for a minute,” Rooster said. “I was dreamin’ about pancakes. I’m hungry.”
“You’re always hungry.”
“You work up my appetite, baby.”
Johnny worked the foot pedal, filling in the seventh head. He was getting close to the end. “One more visit,” he said, “and I think I’ll be done.”
“Then I’ll have to come up with somethin’ else for you to do.”
The needle was riding the dune of Rooster’s back, veining the thirteenth eyeball of the dragon, and Johnny found himself picturing what Eliza’s narrow back would look like.
“Rooster?”
“Yeah?”
“You’ve been with girls, right?”
“It’s been a long time.”
Johnny wondered