Hey, buddy, he said. What up, Germany.
Max knew by now this was a greeting. Wes did not require a thoughtful response from Max. He nodded back.
Sup, he said.
Max filled his paper cone with Gatorade. He sipped and watched the yellow jerseys scrimmage the red jerseys. Yellow was offense. Red was defense. Red versus yellow. Yellow versus red.
You guys in red! yelled Coach. Keep your feet moving!
The American flag snapped and rolled on a skinny metal pole, always above the field, always looking down. Max thought he’d never experienced an afternoon of such searing blue or boys as real as these boys as they ran with busted noses and sore knees toward one another, their arms outstretched, their fingers reaching just a little farther.
He heard a voice. The Judge stood beside him. His straight-backed body, his regal black Stetson hat, and his Ray-Bans. Max couldn’t believe how excited he was to see the Judge.
Good moves out there, son, said the Judge. He seemed to purr as he spoke.
Or did he say God moves out there, son?
Max couldn’t tell, but he thanked him anyway. Thanked him even though Max had not played well in any scrimmage. But he had won the suicides again. The suicides he would always win. Max felt the Gatorade stiffen into a mustache above his lip.
Son, I’m not going to beat around the bush, said the Judge. I have a favor to ask of you.
Me?
Yes, sir, said the Judge. I’m looking for some more volunteers for my campaign. I came here specifically to discuss this with you. And you know, I am a busy man. I don’t take my time lightly.
I will do it. Anything I can, Max said and realized he meant it.
That’s kind of you. That’s real kind. I need someone to join my canvassing team on the weekends, maybe make some phone calls. You’re new to town, so I was thinking it could be a good way to get you involved. My son says you are a team player. You’d be going out with him and the boys. Riding the state going door to door. Maybe sitting in the HQ and placing some calls to voters.
His son. Team player. Max’s sides ached from where Lorne had hit him. Max shook on it, what else could he do? The Judge came all the way across town to see him, to see Max.
I’d like to get to know you, son, said the Judge. Would you like that?
Yes, sir, said Max. I like that.
He tightened the grip on the helmet in his left hand.
All right. Now terrific, said the Judge. Terrific.
The Judge paused, like he wanted to say something else and wanted to say it right.
This is part of something bigger than just you or me or one office. You understand that, right? This is about the heart and soul of people in the community. This is about goodness and the great love of God.
Max said yes that he understood because he wanted to understand, and he hoped that if he feigned understanding long enough that the understanding would find him. What Max knew was that he wanted to be around the Judge a little longer. Just a little longer.
The Judge smiled that smile.
He said, Good, son. That’s good.
Max heard himself agree to go hunting with the Judge and Lorne the following weekend. He heard himself admit to the Judge that he’d never been hunting. Never even held a gun. The Judge seemed to have expected this and the thought also excited him.
Shooting a bird is just like shooting a skeet. Just aim a little out ahead of it and bang.
Bang.
Bang.
Sounds fun, said Max, but a great fear filled him.
I know it! said the Judge. I know it does!
The Judge marched back to his truck through the hiss of lovebugs that clouded near the bleacher puddles. The man’s attention felt too good but not good enough to stave off the foreboding feeling that had entered him and would not leave.
PAN HAD BEEN TO MAX’S HOUSE for dinner three times in two weeks, and each time he brought Max a present for his sterile, straitjacket room.
Get the juju buju moving, if you know what I mean, Pan said.
He gave Max a quarter he left on the train tracks. The train smashed it into a golden flower, a sun ring, a perfect metal petal. He presented a satchel of dried lavender that he told Max to leave in his underwear drawer. Then came a smooth tiger stone whose middle stripe glowed the same golden brown as Pan’s irises. Pan didn’t want anything in return as he curled Max’s fingers around the tiger stone and said: Just hold this when you need it. Just kiss it when you’re scared.
Pan brought a poster of Kurt Cobain pouting into the camera with his hands clasped against his knees.
The most beautiful girl in the world, Pan said, as he affixed the poster over Max’s bed.
What I wouldn’t do to that tortured sulky sulk, said Pan, stepping back to admire it. What I wouldn’t do.
This was the first time Pan said something so explicitly sexual about anyone, much less a boy, much less a boy Max thought looked like Max would look if he let his hair grow out, let his true feelings float to the surface of his face. How brave. How brave Kurt’s eyeliner looks. It made Max shudder, run his hand along his jaw, and cast his eyes away from his witch.
MAX IMAGINED HOW PAN’s HOUSE might look as his mother drove toward it. They passed through the center of town, which wasn’t a center at all, but a collection of shopping malls, a sprawl of chain stores, Italian restaurants that had nothing to do with Italy, and Mexican dives. The car headlights blinked on.
His mother remained mostly silent. Paint stained her jeans, a sign that she had spent the morning in front of a canvas. Her new project captured her thoughts. Max could tell by the way she pulled at her top lip. Her thinking face. She was doing a study of the packaged foods of America. In her series so far, a Pop-Tart on a plate, an Eggo sliced down the center, one of Max’s prized Hot Pockets oozing orange cheese.
You should paint sour straws, said Max.
A what?
It’s a thread of candy coated in sour powder. It makes the face pucker. It’s fun. You can slurp it right in.
Max mimicked the slurp.
Fun food, said his mother. Now that is America. I like how that sounds. Title, perhaps?
A little on the nose, don’t you think? said Max.
A smile found his mother’s mouth. Amused. Miss Jean was right. The sun had changed her. Her hue had deepened. The new tan looked healthy. She cleared her throat as if to clear the moment, as if to scatter Max’s gaze, which took in his mother’s flared nose and swoop of onyx hair with its strip of white running through it in one contained band. She called it her badger streak. Sontagian, his father would suggest. Nah, his mother would say—badger. She reached over and patted Max on the leg.
If they turned right at the Chicken Shop and kept driving for fifty miles, they’d hit the university campus, another world entirely. The university had a coffee shop that roasted its own beans. It had a bookstore. It had rows of colonial mansions that housed fraternities and sororities. The road that led to the stadium was lined with life-size copper statues of the former football coaches.
Pan kept saying that he’d take Max to the university to drink a chai latte at the coffee shop, as if that was the most exotic thing he could imagine. The way Pan said chai—like chia, instead of chai—made Max wonder if Pan had ever even tasted one. He called it a coffee. A chia coffee latte.
Pan lived just outside of Delilah toward the scrawled edge of the county line, where the football boys went mud riding through dried creek beds and drank warm beers in cotton fields and where many of their fathers and grandfathers had once stood, huddled around a fire, spitting secrets into the dirt. The two-lane forest road became a red dirt one, and the trees and their twisted limbs ignored them, couldn’t care less if the car sped beneath them or not. His mother turned left at the wooden board nailed to a rusted fence post that read jam fresh n sweet. They went right on Lower Snake Road. Max’s thighs ached and pulsed under his shorts. Sore from practice. From running each morning before school. He h
ad a craving for a cold glass of water. He was used to craving. He would put honey in his water. Drink it down.
Max liked it better when Pan came over to his house. He could anticipate the order of events—how his mother would say Dinner’s ready and what serving spoons she would use. He and Pan would sit on his back porch. The sun would slant in through the screen. He could picture it. They had started a routine. Routines eased him. But his routines needed to be handled with care. Once Max did something three times in a row, he could do it forever. The smooth tracks of familiarity soothed him. They added guardrails to his life. But here was so much new. Here he was coming to Pan’s house for dinner. Here he was turning toward a clump of trailers perched at the end of a road he’d never seen.
Pan reclined across his front steps like they were a chaise longue. His legs were crossed, and one hand was flung over his eyes as if to protect them from the cruel angle of the setting sun. A comic book lay unfolded across his lap. He was pretending to be busy. Pan looked up only after the car hummed into place on the loose pebbles.
Max watched his mother wave to Pan. Her eyes swept over the house and took it in. A wooden porch extended from the mobile home, anchoring it into the plot of land under it. Its care was marked by the hydrangea bushes planted in the front square of the yard. Less care could be said of the adjacent mobile home, where starved kittens roamed from underneath cement blocks that lifted up the trailer.
Max noticed the white tips of his mother’s knuckles on the steering wheel. Her audible exhale.
Well, she said.
You don’t need to come in and say hello, said Max. Please.
Call if you need anything, she said. Okay?
When Max exited the car, he tried not to look at the woman who sat in a rocking chair on the neighboring porch, toothless and sunburned, and reprimanding a young child who seemed to be her relation. The words NEVER FORGET were penciled onto the back of a Bud Light box and taped to the inside of their neighbor’s window. The space behind the mobile homes was a jumble of kiddie pools and lawn chairs and discarded wheelbarrows and buckets that once carried something but now held only rainwater.
Max anticipated Pan’s impending hug as he exited the car. Before Max reached him, Pan bounded to his feet, jumped up the stairs, disappeared through the front door. Max had nothing to do but follow. Inside, the smooth laminate floors smelled stringent and clean. The walls were thin as dresses. The pictures that hung from them showed faces of smiling, Pan-shaped people. Pan’s mother stirred a pot of hot marshmallows and Rice Krispies on the stove while something savory hissed in a skillet.
Pan’s mother spoke Spanish into the phone clenched between her shoulder and cheek. It was a relief to hear someone not speak English. She looked younger than Max’s mother. The youthfulness presented in the flush of her face, the bounce of her arms. She mouthed hello to Max. Big smile. White teeth made whiter by the red of her lips. She seemed more masculine than Pan. He was the lady of the house. He flitted and spun around his mother in his pink shift as if to prove it.
You ever eat plantains? Pan asked.
Max shook his head no.
I hope you like them, said Pan’s mother, who was now off the phone. If you like fries, you’ll like them.
She had scrubbed out most of her Puerto Rican accent. Max wondered how she’d done it, if he would ever be able to do the same. He hated the sluggish way he spoke, so tense and halting. Something felt sanitary about the shortness of his sentences. He wanted to hold those American sounds in his mouth, for them to exist in the air as they did in his mind.
During dinner, they ate from paper plates and wiped the grease from the fried plantains and black bean burgers onto red paper napkins bunched up beside them on the table. They drank grape juice from clear plastic cups and pinched off pieces of Rice Krispies treats. Max noticed flatware in the cabinet, sitting untouched, a whole tower of ceramic plates and bowls.
Plastic and paper is easier to clean, explained Pan. You just trash it when you’re done.
Max found this to be a strange reason, but he let it go. He liked the informality of dinner. It didn’t matter how slow he made his way through the pile of food before him or if he even used his napkin at all. He noticed Pan reach down and smear the sticky from his fingers onto the edge of his sock. Pan’s mother saw it, too, but she continued to talk about a colleague at work who was going to get gastro bypass surgery. There was an intimacy to the dinner that Max envied. Maybe this is what happened when two people lived alone for a lifetime. What would that do to a person, to be the sole object of someone’s affection? To be the beloved of a single mother? Max tried to imagine a world where he lived with just his mother, but he couldn’t. Max wondered if anyone could ever know Pan as well as this woman cutting her bananas, coughing into the canvas elbow of her button-down, smiling with those thick blocks of white teeth. He felt almost jealous of her.
Ma, Pan said. His voice turned serious. We don’t care about your fat colleague. Tell Max about Grandmama.
Oh, said Pan’s mother. You tell him. You’re better with stories.
Pan let his head roll toward Max.
My mom’s grandmother, said Pan, died last year at the ripe young age of 117 in a convent on the outskirts of San Juan. But her whole life she was the healer of her village. She cured sickness with her magic. She could lift the suffering off of someone. She was better than a doctor. We were going to go visit her. But she died. So, I never met her. But she was, you know, she had powers like you wouldn’t believe.
A joke, his mother’s face seemed to say, an exaggeration. But then her head nodded like, yes, it’s true.
She was not a witch, his mother said. She was an herbalist.
She was a witch, said Pan. I come from a witch family. A whole lineage of witches.
No, no, no. Not a witch, baby, said Pan’s mother. She was closer to a doctor. A natural healer. She just had a knack for the body.
That’s what I said! said Pan. She would heal people. A witch doctor.
She could tell by intuition, said his mother. The exact reason why someone was sick. No one knew how exactly she could tell this, but she could. She never went to school. Of course, she didn’t. But if she just took a look at someone’s tongue or smelled their urine, she saw what was wrong with them.
A witch, said Pan.
WHEN PAN’S mother left for her graveyard shift on the university campus, Pan took Max into her room, so he could try on her clothes. Her bedroom was smaller than Max’s. Pan handed him a bottle of Smirnoff Ice and two Dixie cups. He brushed his hair with an antique bone comb and stared at himself in front of the full-length mirror hung from the back of her door. Max poured two tall cups. They ate chips for dessert. Pan’s mother’s slips, cardigans, and navy, flat-front slacks were soon strewn across her lavender dresser, the camel-colored carpet, the lumpy armchair pushed into the corner near the window. The furniture in her room was tacky and it didn’t match, but it still made more sense to Max than the couches and chairs in his family’s rental home. Here, the furniture felt lived in, where the pieces in Max’s home seemed empty and without taste—the too big cushions and lumbar pillows with uplifting words and slogans stitched into them. Joy! Peace! Blessed!
In her closet hung a tough leather jacket and dirty black jeans. Pan fondled the clothes and made a face that said EW and GROSS as he moved through the white blouses and many shades of salmon. He held up a red workman shirt that Pan said his mother liked to wear to game days and college tailgating. He drew it over his arms and bunched up the bottom, so his belly showed.
Nice, huh? he said. It’s like butch meets femme.
Max pretended to flip through a magazine on the bedside table but kept one eye always on Pan.
Super nice, Max repeated.
He watched Pan in his mother’s clothes and thought of the Judge’s words on TV: Imagine a boy in girl clothes in the locker room with your daughters. The Judge would not like him in this bedroom, even though nothing had happened
. Max was a clean slate, a pure intention. But if the Judge and his God were real, then that God would be watching him watch Pan. God would observe the pleasure Max took in this boy dressed as a girl, how Max pined over the small hill of his hip and his smooth, hairless belly.
Have you ever known someone who died? Pan asked.
He held up a negligee to his torso and pivoted his hips.
The question shocked Max. He felt his lips move, an attempt to snatch a word that hovered just outside of his mouth.
Yes.
Pan nodded into the mirror. He gave himself a twirl, dropped the negligee, and examined the way the workshirt looked tied to the side with a scrunchie. Pan caught Max’s gaze in the mirror. He cocked his head.
Girl dressed as a boy. Boy dead in a box.
Have you? said Max.
Nope, he said. But I saw a dead body. Tied up in a burlap sack ready to be hauled off somewhere in the night.
I am not following you, said Max.
Something in Max swirled, as if he’d been stirred with a spoon. A burlap sack. Hauled off in the night. Before Max, a winding road, a field encroaching, trees sweating above boot-torn leaves. His own death-filled torso overflowed with waste. Pan could set a scene with so little. Max wanted to know more but couldn’t think of a way to ask for it.
Oh yeah, hon, said Pan. Scary shit, but I told you this place is a trash can. He mimicked a cheerleader and threw his hands into the air like he had pompoms. Can I get a T? Can I get an R? Can I get an A-S-H? Can I get a CAN? TRASH CAN!
Gothic AF, Pan added.
AF? said Max.
As fuck! Pan shrieked. Honey, you need a language course.
Pan walked over to where Max sat on the bed and looped a leg over his lap and straddled him.
So, who died? said Pan. Tell me.
Their noses were close. They would touch if they moved a centimeter. Max didn’t know what to do with his hands. He let them rest beside him, useless and limp. This is what people meant when they said spark.
Who died that you knew? Pan repeated. Tell me.
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