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By Root 1087 0

Harriet the details of the children’s arrival, he’d placed a call to a friend in Chinatown, and thirty minutes later two guys had arrived with a truck and a dolly and four empty refrigerator boxes, which they filled with his plants, wrapped in cellophane, and carted out of Les’s apartment into the bright of day. The cash would cover a ticket to anywhere in the world, but he hadn’t bought one yet. He’d go to the airport and pick a city he couldn’t pronounce. He gave the keys to his camper van to Jude, along with McQueen, who would not pass through airport security. The keys to his apartment he left to his friend Davis, who was in need of a sublet, having been evicted from his own studio for failure to pay the rent. Jude had witnessed all of this with the dejected respect one had for people with destructive talents, like winning hamburger-eating contests. He should have known his father was exceptionally good at leaving, at transforming a crisis into an efficient and practiced good-bye. Finally, his father gave him five hundred-dollar bills, for the “reimbursement” of Jude’s dealer. “Be nice to he who keeps you in weed.” It was the one lesson he left Jude with, and Harriet’s one condition for allowing Jude to return to Vermont with his friends. She could not keep him padlocked in his room forever, and she couldn’t afford to lose any more glass. Hippie would have to be paid.

For the week preceding the wedding, to protect her from her mother, Les had established Eliza in a room at the St. Marks Hotel. To protect her from the St. Marks Hotel, he’d established Johnny there with her, in a single room with a double bed, because it was the cheapest. He said to Jude, “They can’t get into any more trouble than they already have.” They didn’t see her until Sunday evening, when she appeared at the temple in her sari, her palms and bare feet covered with henna tattoos.

At the wedding, while the priest chanted and waved his incense and spoke of sacrifice, while Johnny and Eliza exchanged flower garlands instead of rings and tied their shawls in a knot to symbolize their union, while the fire pit raged so hot that Jude’s eyes stung with the sweat from his brow, he kept his eyes on Eliza’s feet, on her ankles, her heels, the space between her toes, on each spike and whorl of ink, and imagined them in Johnny’s hands while he applied the ink to her skin.

After the vegetarian feast, Jude drove his father’s van around to the front of the building (already packed with their bags, equipment, record crates, and the three cats—Johnny’s single caveat) and held open the door while Johnny, carrying a laughing Eliza, piled into the back. The sun had set over Brooklyn, and Jude fumbled a moment to find the headlights. In the darkness of the van the rearview mirror reflected only the dimmest of shapes—the happy members of the temple waving from the curb, Jude’s father already hailing a taxi, and the profiles of the newlyweds it was his duty to chauffeur home, one indistinguishable from the other.

Part II

The Householders

Eleven

At the Texaco station on Grammer Street, the only gas station in Lintonburg open in the middle of the night, two cars sat in the parking lot, and one of them was a shit-colored Camaro with a Black Flag bumper sticker and a Pizza Hut dome on the roof. Inside the gas station, Kram had one arm lost deep in the beer case. He was wearing a Pizza Hut shirt and a Pizza Hut hat and khaki pants that matched his khaki hair. When he saw Jude and Johnny file in, he whistled. “Jeezum Crow! What are you guys doing here?”

He furnished them both with quick, back-pounding hugs, wrestling Jude in half and sawing his knuckles over his skull. “I didn’t recognize this little shit without the hair! What’d you do with your devil lock?”

“The demon has been exorcised,” Johnny said. “He’s an angel now.”

“Yeah, right!” Kram let Jude go and grabbed a fistful of Johnny’s white wedding robe. “You’re the angel! Look at this. What is this, Halloween?”

“You look the same,” Johnny said. “Still got your gut.”

“That’s all muscle, McDickless.