Max flushed at the compliment. It was so direct. He didn’t know how else to handle it except to stand straighter, as if by perfecting his posture he could rise to meet the Judge’s praise.
I am so not good at the catching, said Max. Only my running is good. But it’s so, how to say it, hot.
Sure, said the Judge. You are adjusting to a new place. That takes time. He kept Max’s hand between his own muscular ones. He stroked the back of Max’s fingers, almost like he could heal them. Max looked at his hand captured in the Judge’s embrace. The touch sent a tingle down the back of his head and relaxed him.
After Nils died, Max had stomped on his hands with his boots. He had wrapped them in medical-grade bandages until his fingers could not get free. The doctor sent him home with slings for the sprains, once with a cast for a broken bone. They were not safe, the hands. Max longed to stop the power they had over him. If he ran and did not heal, he could cope. He could forget what they could do. But here in Alabama, he could not forget. His cravings were out of control. His old balms did not work as they once did. And now the Judge’s touch. How to describe its magic? How to put words to the first thing to soothe him since he’d stepped off the plane?
You have to learn to love the heat, said the Judge. You have to like to get a little burned. It feels good to burn. I used to love the first few minutes getting into my car in August after a day spent swimming. My car would have been out baking, all day, and I’d just sit in it for a moment before cranking on the engine, rolling down the windows. I’d just sit in that heat, let it wrap itself around me. Like a hug, you know? I used to need a hug so bad. Never knew how to just ask for it. I left it to the heat to touch me.
Max nodded.
Anyway, son, it’s going to cool down quick enough. Just wait. This ain’t the Bahamas. It’ll cool down soon.
The Judge let go of Max. More people came to stand near him, but he kept staring right at Max, as if he had something more to say. Max pictured the Judge’s younger body twisted, panting, barely alive at the bottom of the cliff from which he had once fallen. Barely alive and then completely dead. He had broken his arm during the fall and still couldn’t use the thumb of his left hand. Max glanced at the Judge’s thumb now. It looked normal.
Germany, the Judge said. You’re from Germany, is it? Fine country. Fine country indeed. You can stay, he said, making his hands into imaginary guns and cocking them at Max’s chest.
Boom.
Christians, right? asked the Judge. That a Christian nation?
Christians? asked Max.
They worship the Lord? Try to do right by him?
Max didn’t know how to answer this question. There were big, beautiful churches in the German cities and small villages, and all of Germany closed down each Sunday. But Max’s parents were atheists, and he knew nothing of what Christians did or didn’t do in Germany, if they did or didn’t do right by the Lord. Whatever that meant.
They try, Max said. I think they try for the right way.
Good, good, said the Judge. That’s what I thought. What I’d heard. Good.
The fund-raiser had a theme and the theme was freedom and life. It sounded American to Max. When it was time for his speech, the crowd gathered on the trampled yard before the Judge and the flag. The Judge remained on the porch above and the people circled around a few steps below, listening attentively as if he would tell them the secret that would bring the win. The Judge had a way of making Max feel special for a reason that was so hidden even Max didn’t know what it was. But it seemed the Judge deposited this feeling into everyone gathered. His posture told the crowd that he saw something in each of them and if they stayed close enough to that gaze, they might see it one day, too.
Freedom, the Judge said, is absolutely under threat right now. Freedom is something you have to fight for every day so that other people can take it for granted. You hear? People want to take our freedom. They want to write the rules for us. But brothers and sisters, they don’t know us. And they sure don’t know our God.
The man who looked like Max’s father said, Amen.
Life will win, the Judge said. In the end, life will win. Know why?
The people stared on. Max, too, stared on.
Why, Max heard himself say.
The Judge looked at him.
Because, son, we are doing the Lord’s work. Jesus is the way the truth and the light. Jesus himself is life. Jesus will win. No one ever said following him would be easy. No one said it would make sense. That is what faith is—it’s mystery. It’s being content with half knowledge. With living in the dark. Faith is believing in mystery even when the rest of the world tells you that you are wrong. You are crazy. You are lost. Even when the rest of the world says you are evil. We, brothers and sisters, are not those things. The rest of the world says, We know the answers. They say, We’ve solved the question. Science told us this or that. Well, listen. Science has been wrong before, and science will be wrong again. Once upon a time, science told us the world was flat. That the sun revolved around the earth. But we know more now than we did before, and such will be the case again. But do you know who has never been wrong? Do you know who knows the answer to any question our hearts or minds could ever hope to ask?
The crowd nodded. They knew, and Max, in that moment, felt that he knew it, too.
Well, listen everyone. There is an answer to the question. To every question. There is an answer you can know.
The smiling faces went still.
I don’t have to tell you. Because you know it in your hearts. God. God and our Jesus. That is the answer.
The Judge spoke about war. First, he said there was a war on Christianity. A war on our kind of people. He talked in fragmentary paragraphs and nestled interesting verbs into interesting sentences. He spoke in a cadence that drew emotion from a place Max couldn’t see. It intrigued Max, how easily the Judge could increase his pulse, how in just a few minutes he could cause his mouth to dry up. His mind to spin. The Judge spread out his arms to silence the people’s moans. He bent his head, so Max could see the dip at the top of his black cowboy hat.
The Judge told the story of his anointing. He’d been high on paint with his friends in the forest before the healing occurred. His awakening. He spoke of it as both. The Judge and his friends had set up a moonshine distillery out of a few dozen fermentation barrels they hid under pitched tarps near the Gulf.
I did shameful things, said the Judge. I am here to show my shadow to you, so that you might have the faith to expose yours, too. Integrate into yourself so you’ve got nothing to hide. There’s nothing so low-down that the Lord cannot lean in and meet you there. When you expose your shadow to yourself and to your God, you are set free.
The Judge told how he and his friends had huffed paint, shot squirrels with BB guns and roasted them for dinner. One night, the Judge wandered off in search of berries, something raw and fresh to add to the rodent feast. But he found something else.
He woke up at the bottom of an overhang without a memory of how he got there. His head hissed. His eyes shown back into the blackness of his brain. Blind. Or, as he discovered later—dead. The hospital ran tests that confirmed the Judge had been dead for three whole days in the woods before he woke up and found his way back to the moonshine distillery, his truck with keys still in the cup holder, and the country road that led to safety.
Before he found his way out, the Judge had had a vision. He had come upon a shed covered in mirrors. The mirrors caught the sun and the glint called him. In the shed sat a can of poison. The voice of God said to him, Drink it. Gulp it down. Swallow the magic.
A crazy thing, the Judge said. Faith can be a crazy thing. Faith can ask impossible things. I had none of it until that moment. But suddenly, I had faith entire. I picked up the jug of poison. I held it to my lips, and I swear to the Lord on high, I have never felt more alive. The poison went through my veins. It touched my heart. And I did not die but live.
I walked through my
self and found God in the thing that should kill me. I trusted God, and he revealed himself. I saw him in all things—in the weeds and the bushes and the dirt, in the big blue morning that opened up just enough to let me breathe. In the cracked red mud. In the wet black trees. In the silence of space. In the salt-brined soil of the land that was soggy from its closeness to the coast. The moon was full when I finally found my truck. That same moon that pulls the ocean toward it and breaks men only to heal them. It lit my path, the moon did. God’s lantern. His clear way. His eye on me always. I have never felt freedom more than I did in that moment, drinking that poison and living. It’s freedom that we all want in the end.
A boy picked at a pimple on his chin as he listened to the Judge say that God’s way would bring freedom. And that freedom was as important as love. As the moon. Max watched green ooze out of the boy’s face. He watched as the boy pinched the ooze from his chin and wiped it onto his neck.
Real freedom, the Judge said, isn’t the kind of freedom you’re thinking about. He seemed to be looking at Max when he said this, but Max hadn’t been thinking about any particular freedom. He had been wondering what the poison tasted like, what it meant for faith to come suddenly and entire, how a green ooze existed under every man’s skin.
Orations flowed fully formed from the Judge’s mouth. More than his words worked to hold the crowd captive. Something else moved them, some subtle thing. Power, maybe. Because it was power that radiated off the Judge like a kind of profound, supersonic vibration. Max could feel its buzz, like the hum of a microwave when you put your nose against its screen.
It’s the kind of freedom you find only after you find your Lord and savior in Christ. When you make the conscious choice to follow him.
Max’s mother wouldn’t believe the Judge had spoken to God in a shed covered in mirrors, anointed with a cask of poison. She would say the Judge’s vision had been summoned by the paint fumes, the shoe polish in his pocket, or from the near delirium of death. She would say it was the same as people who are pronounced dead in the hospital and see a divine light at the end of a dark path. They think it’s God. They hear spirits say their names before they are drawn back to life. But science has proven that theory incorrect. The light at the end of the tunnel is a reaction to chemicals in the brain: a splattering of synapses, nothing more or less beautiful.
Max wondered, as he often compulsively did, how science would explain his ability. He wasn’t sure. Might never be. He questioned if a god was indeed out there and if God had bestowed this power, this curse, upon him. A chemical collision in his brain, a possible origin story. No more or less beautiful.
Max would ask someone if he didn’t suspect he’d end up in an asylum, snatched up for a series of medical tests. Whom would he ask even? Not sure is whom. No one is whom. Max conjured an image of himself on daytime TV shows, Oprah making him resurrect a girl’s dead hamster in front of a live television audience. The applause. The cruel applause. The pure happiness of the girl. The love of what Max could do. Not ever the love of Max.
Better to ignore it. Better to pretend it doesn’t exist, Max thought, and then maybe, quite possibly, one day it no longer will.
The Judge stood beneath a white flag with a big red X through it. The flag of Alabama. In Germany, one could not love the flag like one could love the flag in America. People would worry you were becoming a nationalist. It would spark memories of the war, of what could happen when one loved their country blindly and too much. The flag was for government buildings and sporting events. But here in Alabama, Max saw many flags in front of many houses, on the front of many shirts, flying from the bed of many trucks. His class saluted the flag each morning, placed their hands over their hearts and spoke words of respect to it. It was an honor to raise the American flag up the pole in front of the school, to know how to fold and unfold it, and never once let the fabric touch the ground.
We’re going to pray for those who have lost their way. We’re going to pray that God uses us as his warriors in this love-lost world.
Lord, boomed the Judge’s voice. Father God, use us as your army on earth. We’re building up an army. We will not be swayed by the ways of evil. We will be your face in government. We will do your will on earth as it is in heaven.
This is Alabama, said the Judge. A state for you, Lord God. We are not great if we are not doing your will. Help us reach the hearts of sinners. Let us judge people on nothing but their love for you and how they reflect your will in the world. We will not stand by and watch the world take you from us.
When the Judge got on his knees on the well-laid oak porch, Max almost expected a beam to shoot down from the heavens. Light him up or smite him, Max wasn’t sure which. He closed his eyes. Was that what prayer was? Just closing his eyes? He wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen after that. No God spoke to him. But for the first time, he wondered if he could find a God there, in the black silence of his own brain. He made his mind say God? It was completely silent. He was alone with himself, just like always.
Max squinted at the Judge through his pretend prayer. It unsettled him to see this noble man on his knees mumbling to himself. It moved him. Max wanted to get on his knees, too. He wanted to humble himself before something great. The Judge began to shake, so Max closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see it. The Judge had the ability to change people. The bodies in the crowd had been changed. They shook and trembled in the same way the Judge did. It was as if the Judge possessed the power to twist and bend the will and the bodies of the people before him, the people who watched. Max wondered if the Judge knew the limits of his own power. The Judge’s power reached out and grabbed Max by the heart. He felt the Judge wrap around his beating pulse. Power entered him. Was that God?
I have seen death, my friends, the Judge said, quietly and slowly. I have seen death, and I have seen the devil. I’ve looked him straight in the red of his eyes. And I am here to tell you that the way of the Lord is not easy. But it is good. The world is a battlefield, and the right path is not always kind, but it will make sense in the end. God never promised us ease. He promised us love. He promised us himself in exchange for eternal life. Commit yourself to him and be free.
Praise Jesus, the Judge said. Amen!
The prayer ended and people were released back to conversation. Some strange and unsettling thing roiled through the bodies beside Max. One man began to act hyper. He laughed too loud and spit flecks of chewed burger onto the faces of the other men while he talked. Max wondered what it was the Judge just did to everyone. Max wondered because he felt it, too—a surge of cortisol cruising his veins, swelling them thick as they could go. Maybe that’s what God was. Maybe God was power. Max wanted more of it, whatever it was, even though it scared him. It scared him the way drugs scared him. It scared him the same as when a girl at school smashed a plastic bag of Ritalin into dust and licked the bag until it was a slick sack of saliva, and the girl’s teeth began to grind.
The moon remained even in the daylight. A moon so bright the sun couldn’t wipe it away. Max concentrated on its craters, the blemished and intricate topography he could trace from the backyard. He might not understand science, but it still made him feel small.
On his way out, the Judge walked past Max. He stopped. He raised a finger above him then drew it through the air and touched Max’s chest. With that gesture, Max felt like the Judge had taken some of the sky and put it inside his body. He expanded into blue.
People like you, he said, are the people we need here. People like your father are doing good things for our economy. Cars are Alabama’s biggest export right now. You need to invite him to church. We would love to see y’all come with us to celebrate the good news.
The good news? said Max.
Jesus has risen, son, said the Judge.
THE UPCOMING FRIDAY was the first game. Two days away, and although Max knew he would not start, the attention was getting to him. God’s Way did not have a strong football team. They would not go to the stat
e championship, but people still treated the players like minor celebrities. Earlier in the day, a girl had walked right into Max’s History class with his teacher in midlecture and placed a homemade brownie on Max’s desk.
Max needed alone time before the pep rally. The word pep, a mood that felt far away and uninhabitable. Pompoms would fly. The cheerleaders had memorized a dance that ended with one of them tossed into the air spinning. They would perform it for the boys to bolster them with luck and confidence. God’s Way did not have a marching band, but music with trumpets and cymbals would crash from the gymnasium speakers while Max stood arm to arm with the boys on his team, his inherited family, even though he’d known them for just a short time.
He needed a run. He needed to find a dead yellowhammer. Max pushed through the glass doors at the back of the hallway. Sun filled his lungs. Outside, relief. End-of-summer smells. Cut grass and clover. Dirt scattered by the wind. Heat hit his face. At the far part of the field, a playground. Wood chips scattered in clumps below a long stretch of monkey bars.
Taking a break? I get it.
Max startled to see Glory in her pants and polo sitting on the sidewalk. She fiddled with a pink quartz at the end of a golden chain that hung from her neck. A spread of playing cards fanned out in front of her.
Max had seen Glory around school, but they hadn’t talked since that first time, when she had appeared before him, evaluated him, and then left him to the boys.
Why aren’t you in the gym for pep rally? asked Max.
I think that question is better served to you, said Glory. People won’t miss me but they sure as heck are going to notice your absence.
I go soon, said Max. Just fresh air for a moment.
Uh-huh, she said. Take your time. I’m not here to judge. I’m just saying.
Max waited for her to ask him if he was excited about the first game, but she didn’t.
Want me to pull a card for you? she asked.
A card? asked Max.
A tarot card. You ask me a question, I’ll ask the cards. They’ll divine an answer.
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