Jude Read online

  Jude had meant to take Nick back to the neighborhood to buy just that once, but that once had turned into once a month. The one time Nick had ventured there without Jude—taking one of the crew with him instead—they had come home with oregano instead of pot. After that Nick insisted that Jude come along. “You’re my passport,” he said. “I need you, man.”

  The ironic thing about it was that Jude felt less and less comfortable in his old neighborhood. His visits back to play ball petered out after about six months, when his old friends had, one by one, started dealing, or using, or both.

  R. J. held out for a while, but finally he started dealing too; he told Jude that you couldn’t stay in school just to get some shit minimum-wage job after graduating, when all the other idiots were out there bringing in a couple of thousand a week. Jude didn’t say anything. What was there to say? But he felt sad, thinking how just over a year ago they had talked about how they weren’t going to end up like all the other dumb suckers. They had vowed together that they were going to make it. Now Jude looked at R. J. and he felt guilt and relief in equal portions because he knew that he, too, probably would have ended up doing the exact same thing. If his father hadn’t started skimming, if he hadn’t died, if the detective hadn’t turned the drawer over—the chain of events was such a thin barrier between R. J.’s life and his. He was the lucky one.

  They were still friends on the surface, but now Jude couldn’t mention failing the trig test, when R. J. was talking about a buddy who got gunned down in the street. He had tried to tell R. J. about his boxing, but his friend had laughed and said, “Yeah, see how far your fancy moves will get you when the other guy has a MAC-10.”

  R. J. didn’t touch the stuff he sold—they had that much in common—so Jude could still pretend to be able to talk to him, but these days he only went back to take Nick, and recently he found himself looking over his shoulder when they walked the short distance from the car to the benches. He had changed in the last year, and he felt more comfortable at Benton than in his old haunts, but everyone in Nick’s crew still treated him like he was from the ’hood. Maybe it was the boxing. To Nick and his friends the gym he went to had the air of the street. Maybe it was the fact that Jude failed half of his classes. That seemed to impress them, as if he failed because he didn’t care. Maybe it was the fact that nothing ever seemed to bother him, because of that blank expression he had worked so hard to achieve. So when Nick called out, “Jude, my man, you comin’ or what?” Jude tried to come up with an excuse.

  “I got boxing today, man.”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll get you back in time for you to wipe out at least three guys,” Nick promised.

  They went in Nick’s car. He pulled up along the curb just outside the projects where R. J. worked the benches. It had a small courtyard, bounded on three sides by low brick buildings. Trash lined the walls and piled up in drifts in the corners. There were some concrete tables with checkerboards carved into them and park benches lining the outskirts. These were mostly filled with teenagers and young men perched on the backs of the benches, like spectators at a match. It was considered a good spot because it wasn’t easy for the cops to watch.

  Nick peeled off to connect with one of R. J.’s boys, and Jude headed over to the benches opposite the entrance, where R. J. sat like a king on a throne. He clasped Jude by the hand and said, “My man.”

  “Hey, R. J. How’s business?”

  “Good. Pretty good. Hey, check this out,” R. J. said. “I think I’m gonna get me a Mercedes. It’s used, but it looks mint. I need better wheels, especially as now I might have to make some trips over to your side of town.”

  “Oh yeah?” Jude said. “You gonna come over for dinner?”

  R. J. broke up laughing. “Oh yeah. Shit, me and your mom would sure have a lot to talk about. Nah, man. I was thinking of setting up a pipeline right into that ritzy school of yours. Those kids got money to burn, and they won’t know the difference between good stuff and shit that’s been stepped on so bad there’s barely anything left but filler. I was telling my boss that it’s a sure moneymaker. They’ll be able to buy in the comfort of their own fucking homeroom. It’s gonna be serious cash, you sure you don’t want in?”

  “Thanks, but I can’t. You know.”

  “What’s the problem? The cops ain’t gonna touch your ass.”

  “Sorry, man.”

  “You pussy,” R. J. said, and he was only half joking.

  Just then Nick joined them. “Hey, R. J.”

  R. J. just nodded at him.

  “You ready?” Jude said, turning to go, but R. J. stopped him with a question.

  “What about this punk? Could he handle the business? Could he handle being a runner?”

  “I can handle anything you got,” Nick answered for himself.

  “I sincerely doubt that,” R. J. said. “Jude, what do you think?”

  “I guess. Yeah, he probably could.”

  “I’ll have to talk to the boss about it,” R. J. said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  Jude and Nick headed back to the car. On the way they passed a beat-up van that hadn’t been there on the way in. Jude averted his eyes. He knew that the two men sitting in the front seat were undercover cops. And he knew that as surely as he had recognized them, they had recognized him as well.

  12

  JUDE KEPT HIS gloves high, protecting his face. His opponent circled, bouncing on his toes, ducking and weaving like an idiot. Jude knew if he waited and threw a few jabs to keep the kid moving, pretty soon his opponent would tire himself out and it would be quick work to finish him off, but Jude didn’t want to wait.

  It drove the coaches crazy. They told him that he could be great if he just used his head. They told him he was a natural. They told him he might have a career if he wanted one. He liked to hear it, but he still didn’t take their advice. Instead of waiting, Jude threw a wild, desperate roundhouse. He wanted the kid to come inside. He wanted the kid to land one, but Jude’s glove connected. He knew what it felt like when the ground seemed to tilt under your feet and the mat rushed up to meet you. The kid dropped like a stone, his shoulder and head smacking the canvas.

  When Jude got back to the house, it was dark and quiet. He flipped on the hall light and called out, “I’m home.” He often did that, though he wasn’t exactly sure why—he knew there wasn’t anybody there. There never was these days.

  Jude dropped his bag by the stairs in the hallway and wandered into the kitchen. He opened the fridge—as usual, there were two plates on the shelf, covered with tinfoil. Dolores fixed them and left them in the fridge during the day. One for him, the other for Anna.

  He picked one up and peeled off the foil. Just his luck—it was the one meal Dolores made that he couldn’t stand. Liver. He could have told her he didn’t like it, and she probably would never have made it again, but he didn’t have the heart to hurt her feelings. So Jude scraped it off into the garbage, retrieved a frozen pizza from the freezer, peeled off the wrapping, and put it in the oven.

  He was eating the last quarter off the shiny metallic cardboard when he heard Anna’s key in the front lock. She must have tried to add the ay’s mail to the huge pile on the table next to the door, because he heard a slithering crash and Anna’s “Shit.” It happened every few weeks. The mail piled up until the stack grew too high and toppled. Only then did she reluctantly gather it up and wade through it.

  In a minute Anna appeared at the doorway to the kitchen, her briefcase tucked under one arm, another bag slung over her shoulder, and the pile of mail untidily gathered in her hands. She dumped it on the kitchen table, let her briefcase and the other bag fall to the floor, and sank into one of the chairs.

  Jude watched her from his perch on a stool at the counter.

  She looked up at him, then at the remains of the pizza in front of him. “Don’t tell me,” she said. “Dolores made liver, right?”

  She was joking, which meant she was in a good mood. Jude nodded.


  “Any more of that in the freezer?” She gestured toward the empty pizza box.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, I’m not that hungry anyway.” She stood and went to the cabinets, retrieved a wineglass, and opened the fridge. She pulled out a bottle of white wine and uncorked it, pouring almost to the rim. She brought both the glass and the bottle back to the kitchen table and started opening the mail. Most of it was junk, which she dropped on the floor next to her chair.

  “So how was your day?” she asked him.

  “Fine.”

  “Any tests this week?”

  “Three.”

  “And?”

  He shook his head, and her good mood evaporated.

  “Oh, Jude.”

  He hated when she said his name like that. He could feel his shoulders tightening just like they did right before he threw a punch.

  He put down the last piece of pizza. He didn’t want it anymore. The argument they were having now was an old one—the same one, in fact, over and over.

  “Did you go to the gym again today?” she demanded.

  He didn’t answer because she already knew.

  “If you spend all your time there and you don’t even pick up a book, how do you expect to pass anything? You’ve got to work for what you want. If you’d only put some effort in … you know, if you don’t straighten up your act, I’m going to have to put a stop to your boxing.”

  He kept his eyes on the half-eaten, congealed remains of the pizza. She could threaten all she wanted, but she wouldn’t do it.

  “I’m serious about this. You’re a junior now, and you don’t have much more time to mess around.”

  He could predict these fights so well now. Recently he’d given up on his part, but Anna still rolled through her lines with gusto. He supposed that there was something admirable in this. He thought it was almost like reading a tragedy over and over in the hopes that one of these times you’d somehow get a happy ending.

  “I hoped for better from—”

  “Hello? Anybody home?” Harry shouted from the hallway.

  She stopped in mid sentence, looking sheepish. Then she said, “Oh. I meant to tell you. I asked Harry to come over.” And Harry swept into the kitchen carrying a bottle of champagne in one hand and his hat in the other. He hadn’t even bothered to take off his coat.

  “Congratulations,” Harry said, handing over the bottle with a flourish and giving her a big, smacking kiss. “Shall I open it, or do you want to do the honors?”

  “But I just opened a bottle of wine,” she protested.

  “It’s a champagne night.” He picked up the wine bottle, recorked it, and started working on the champagne. “So, what do you think about it?” he asked Jude.

  “About what?”

  “About the big news, of course.”

  Jude looked at Anna.

  “I didn’t get a chance to tell him yet,” she said.

  “Well, what are you waiting for?” Harry prodded. “Tell him the good news.”

  “We won the People v. Reznik case today,” she said.

  People v. Reznik was the biggest case to hit the city in ten years. Martin Reznik was a junkie who, in the middle of a robbery, had shot a policeman through the heart. The officer—a man with a wife and a three-year-old son—had died at the scene.

  Anna had taken a big risk in deciding to prosecute the case herself. The tricky part was that it wasn’t enough for the jury simply to convict him—anything less than the death penalty would be considered a failure. The last death penalty sentence in the state of Connecticut had been handed down in 1976—more than two decades ago.

  For the last three months she had been working even later than usual. Ten P.M. was an early night. One or two A.M. was more normal. Jude realized that he should have known that something was up. It wasn’t even eight.

  “They convicted him?” Jude said.

  “And we got the death penalty,” she added.

  “And that’s with seven women on the jury,” Harry said. “It’s all over the news. Have you seen?”

  “We were watching it at the office,” Anna said.

  “Champagne because someone got the death penalty?” Jude asked.

  “No, the champagne isn’t for that,” Harry said. “It’s … no, you tell him, Anna.”

  “All right. Well, it’s something I’ve been thinking about doing for a long time, and I decided that if I got the conviction on this case, I would go ahead with it.” She paused, smiled. “I’m going to run for mayor of West Hartford in the next election.”

  “Isn’t that great?” Harry said, peeling the foil off the neck of the bottle.

  Jude just stared at her.

  “It’s goddamned exciting,” Harry continued. “Now, wouldn’t you say that deserved some champagne?”

  Harry worked the cork, rocking it back and forth in the neck till it gave with a pop.

  “Anna, if you do the honors, I’ll get the glasses. I think this is a special occasion and that Jude should join us,” he said, lining up three glasses on the counter. “How old is he now, anyway?”

  “He’s fifteen.”

  Jude looked up sharply. He had turned sixteen several months earlier. One glance at Harry showed that he was aware of the slip before Anna caught it.

  Jude stood up abruptly and left the kitchen. On his way out he could hear Anna saying, “What? What did I say?”

  ANNA FOUND HIM in the basement punching the practice bag he had hung there. She carried two champagne glasses down the stairs and sat on the bottom step. She put one of the glasses on the step beside her and sipped from the other, watching him go through the motions of an uppercut, teaching his muscles to move in just the right way so when he sped up, they would retain the correct form.

  “You forgot your champagne,” she said.

  He didn’t respond, concentrating fiercely on the bag in front of him.

  “Jude, I know you’re sixteen.”

  He hit the bag.

  “I know you’re sixteen,” she repeated. “I just forgot for a second. For God’s sake, I forget how old I am every time my birthday rolls around.”

  He slammed the bag harder.

  “So don’t you want your champagne?”

  Out of the corner of his eye he could see her sitting motionless on the steps, but he couldn’t make out the expression on her face.

  “I can’t do this, Jude. I can’t make up for the past, so it’s useless to keep on trying,” she said.

  That stopped him. “Keep on trying?” he said. “Since when did you start?”

  “Now, that’s not fair.”

  “Maybe not, but it’s true,” he said.

  “If only you’d stop for a second and put yourself in my shoes, you’d realize that this past year has been hard on me. And maybe I’m doing the best I can. You should think about that and try to be a little more understanding.”

  “You mean like how you are with my grades?” he said. “Understanding? Supportive?” He didn’t even bother to ask her how her year could have been harder than his, and why she didn’t try putting herself in his place.

  “Well, if I expect a bit more from you, it’s because you’re young.”

  “That is such bullshit,” Jude said.

  “I thought—well, I hoped—that you’d be happy for me.”

  She waited for his response.

  He struggled with the desire to please her, but he managed to stifle it. Instead he said, “You might have asked me.”

  “Asked you?” Anna was surprised.

  “You wouldn’t have done it without asking what Harry thought, would you?”

  “That’s completely different,” she said. “I asked Harry for his professional opinion. I’m going up against the incumbent, and he’ll be tough to beat.” She looked at him and sighed. “Okay. Jude, what do you think about me running for mayor?”

  “I think it stinks,” he replied promptly.

  She dropped her hands. “Thi
s is going to be a really tough time. I hoped that you would help me through it, but that’s okay.” Then she started to push herself up off the bottom step.

  “Why?” He stopped her with his words. “At least tell me why.”

  She sank back down on the step. “Why am I going to run for mayor?”

  She repeated the question gravely, as if really considering her answer, and when she gave it to him, it had the ring of truth and the weight of a confession.

  “Is there anything you’re afraid of?” she asked him. “I mean something that keeps you up at night?”

  “Yeah,” he admitted.

  “What is it?”

  He hesitated. He couldn’t tell her that he was afraid that he would always be a disappointment to her. Instead he said the closest thing to the truth. “That I’ll never do anything great.”

  “Then you should understand why I want this so much. You know what keeps me up at night? I worry that I don’t have what it takes. I want this more than I’ve ever wanted anything. If I got this, it would make up for … all the other things that haven’t gone right in my life. It would feel as if there was a reason for them. And right now, having won this latest case, I probably have about the best chance I’m ever going to have. It’s an outside chance, but it’s a chance, and I have to take it. It’s now or never, and I can’t face the idea that it might be never. I’ve come too far and worked too hard for it to end here.”

  “Ask me again,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Ask me again what I think,” he repeated.

  She started to smile. “Jude, what do you think about me running for mayor?”

  “I think you’re a shoo-in,” he said.

  They grinned at each other.