Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [86]
Jude let his chalk rest at last. He was sweating. Johnny, legs crossed, gave him a nod of approval. When Jude looked up at the top of the stairs, Eliza was gone, and he couldn’t say when she’d left.
Delph and Kram, though, they were still there.
“Well, hell, man,” Kram said, picking up Johnny’s tattoo machine and pointing it, like a gun, at some undetermined target, “let’s play a show.”
Unless you counted the bruises and Indian burns he’d exchanged with Teddy and his sister, or the routine wedgies and noogies he’d endured from Delph and Johnny and Kram, Jude had never been in a fight, had bullied his way haltingly toward fights with kids several years younger than he was, had talked on various playgrounds about kicking so-and-so’s ass, but his efforts had proved unheeded. The incident on New Year’s hardly qualified as a fight, fights requiring mutual advancements of opposing sides. But New York and the pit and rehab had pumped Jude full of a giddy courage. In his bedroom in Vermont, he listened to Project X’s “Straight Edge Revenge” again and again, dragging the needle back to the beginning when it was over. He wanted to go after Hippie and Tory. He wanted revenge—for New Year’s Eve, for Teddy, for the final insult of involving his mother. The beer bottle they had left behind, as carelessly as Tory had left his belt, was all the authorization he needed. They were asking for it.
Jude had learned in New York that bands weren’t just bands. They were troops. They were tribes. And now he was no longer an army of one. The Bastards were back.
But Johnny wasn’t about to be drafted into a stone-throwing youth crew—he’d survived that scene in New York, and he wanted to leave it behind. “Let’s play music,” Johnny said. “No rough stuff, Jude. Okay?”
Jude said, “You don’t know what an asshole Tory is.” He told Johnny what he’d done to him on New Year’s Eve. “It could have been Teddy,” he said. “And now he did this shit to my mom?”
“We don’t know it was Tory,” Johnny reminded him. Ever since they’d found out about the baby, Johnny had gone all civil disobedience. It was like he’d found religion, and his religion was Teddy’s kid. He went on about nonviolence, the Upanishads, the five moral virtues. Sure, in Alphabet City, they were hard to follow, Johnny said, but he didn’t pick fights; he only finished them. “I’ve got a kid on the way,” Johnny said. “I’m not landing in jail just to settle the score with some dickhead jock and his dealer.”
“Fine,” Jude said. “Stay out of it, then.”
After the band’s second practice, during which Jude became increasingly less devoted to his third-hand Ibanez, he went with Kram and Delph to the pawnshop on University, where Jude and Teddy used to play Metallica songs until they got kicked out. This time, though, Jude’s wallet was full of his father’s cash. Over his shoulder, he hung a Les Paul Classic in Bullion Gold. Gently used, but it gleamed.
“Aren’t you supposed to use that money to pay for the pot you took?” Delph asked.
Every morning since Jude’s return, his mother told him that, before things got worse—before God forbid those boys came back and broke into the house—he’d better pay back Hippie. A peace offering. Jude promised her that he would.
“Never liked that guy,” Kram said. “Got a stick up his ass. Oh, my weed is so divine.”
“Stuff’s weak,” Delph agreed.
“Fuck him,” Jude said. “He waged war on my mom’s greenhouse. He’s not getting a penny from me.”
“I’m telling