Boys of Alabama

by Genevieve Hudson

  After church, Max looked for Quaid again in the mass of people. Who he saw instead was Billie. She traipsed down the front steps trailed by two parent-shaped people. Traipse was a new word Max had learned, and it spoke perfectly to the condition of Billie’s walk. She wore a flowy tunic dress with bell sleeves. He caught her eye and waved. She held up a peace sign in response.

  The women moved around Max in the way that American women know how to do. They stood next to their thick-bellied men, men with chiseled features and studied masculine stances. The women wore beautiful pastel fabrics. Silk, Max thought, or cashmere. Max observed the beauty in the crowd and admitted to himself that he was impressed by it. He was superficial in that way. He wanted to touch something pretty as if, by proximity, the loveliness would wipe off on him. Max wondered what it would feel like to pull a silky blouse across his chest, to draw pumps onto his feet. He imagined standing next to the Judge, hand tucked into his elbow. He imagined whispering in his ear. The smell of Old Spice. Notes of cedar and spruce. Those rugged signifiers of virility that made him want to lick his teeth.

  Last week Max had tried on his mother’s lipstick in the bathroom. He had pulled at his ear and imagined a pearl in it. Ever since he’d met Pan, his imagination had expanded. His definition of boy had expanded. A dress on his body. Pink gloss on his lips. He touched his temples, felt growing pains, as if his mind were literally extending. Boy on his back. Boy in his hair. Max tried to sweep away the vision of Pan’s glittering face, red neck, mouth an open O. O as in orgasm. O as in uh-oh. He didn’t want the Judge to read his thoughts and see Pan in them. He didn’t want the Judge peering into the smudged mirror of his mind and think: Sin creature.

  Where’s your father and mother, son? The Judge’s hand tightened on Max’s shoulder. Max leaned into the tightening. They didn’t want to join us in celebrating?

  Not this time, said Max.

  The Judge nodded at him, a concerned eye.

  Good that you came anyway, son. It takes something brave in you to do that. To see the truth. To see the light.

  A FIGHT BETWEEN HIS PARENTS overheard at midnight.

  It doesn’t bother you that he’s involved in a political campaign?

  It’s good to have him test his morals. Think about what is real to him and develop his own opinions. How can he know what he thinks, if he doesn’t explore?

  Do you hear yourself right now? The Judge man called his supporters a Christian army. An army? Says he’s ready for spiritual war. He’s trying to draft our son!

  Have you noticed Max is not eating meat at dinner?

  Good! Let him explore his morals. It’s healthy for teenagers to experiment. Isn’t that what you just said? I’m honestly baffled that you aren’t more worried about the influence this man is having on our son.

  Well, honey, I am trying to offer another perspective.

  For the record, I think it’s wonderful he’s a vegetarian.

  You know where he got it from, don’t you?

  Yes, and it’s refreshing. I hope Pan does rub off on him.

  What’s refreshing is seeing him be part of a group. They’re building his self-confidence. He’s doing so well on the team. He looks healthy.

  The team! When he gets a concussion, you’re the one who’s going to have to deal with the medical bills and the fact that you encouraged your son to destroy his intellect for a barbarian sport.

  I just want him to become himself.

  Do you want him to become a zealot?

  A zealot! Listen to yourself.

  A SCRAWLED NOTE ON THE WHITEBOARD: Teacher Five Minutes Late Review Hmwrk.

  Students funneled in and claimed their seats around Max and Pan. They fidgeted like detained animals examining the edges of their cages. Nacho chips and peanut butter bites spilled from book bags onto the carpet.

  If you want to romanticize those gun-wielding overlords, that’s your choice, said Pan, after Max tried to convey the exact way it felt to run his cleats across the gridiron with the football players.

  Church was a secret Max kept to himself, but he wanted to go there again. Stand in that music. Stand in the stranger’s smiles until his body curved up like the lips of the approving crowd. The ballads still popped and sizzled in his throat. The Judge had explained to him how the music was the heart, the preacher’s words the soul. And that big warm ooze that seemed to seep from the ceiling: that was the love of God.

  The love of God seeps into you, seeds itself, and never, ever leaves.

  The love of God can dry out your sin. Replenish you.

  I’m just saying. Sooner or later. You are going to have to choose, said Pan, his voice dialed to a whisper.

  Why do you say it like that though? said Max. Why does everything have to so black and white with you.

  I’m from the South, hon. If things aren’t black and white, what the fuck are they?

  Max tried to show-not-tell the feeling of sprinting in a formation beside a mayonnaise-white line. Nothing was bad about that. It felt good. It felt good to get hit so he couldn’t think, to know that someone might knock his head so bad it broke his brain. There was a thrill that came from risk.

  His teammates painted black patches under one another’s eyes to protect their corneas from the sun. They unknit knots of muscle from each other’s calves with their thumbs. They slammed their helmets together until their vision was strangled in hot white dots, stood ten to a row under the showers and let the pressure of the water sting them. That was friendship. He loved catching the end of Wes’s perfect spiral and holding the warm ball with its raised, bumpy skin and running so fast no one could catch him. He loved jumping the heaps of fallen bodies, the pinch and snatch of hands trying for him. He loved finding a way to outrun it all.

  To score.

  Pan looked at him with an eyebrow arched. With one long nail, he dug food from a crevice of tooth. Max wished Pan would smile and say: I understand, baby. You do you.

  Max willed Pan to squeeze his knee and let him know he could be both/and. Everything.

  But instead he said, Cause you like to watch those tight-end asses?

  Shh, said Max. Don’t talk so loud.

  Max did not explain the effect the Judge’s grin had on his knees.

  I just want friends, said Max.

  What’s wrong with no friends?

  I have done that too long already, Max said.

  You had Nils, said Pan.

  This was the first time Pan had said his name and Max did not like the way it sounded, suffocated and drowned in Pan’s thick Southern drawl.

  That was different, said Max.

  He wished he could untell Pan about Nils. He had given over his secrets too easily. And hungrily, Pan had let them be given. Max felt the loss of secrets. The lightness of having unburdened himself, but Max wanted something for himself again. He wanted Nils’s name in his hand, to hold it to his ear. A sound no one else could hear.

  That was actually different, said Max.

  Why? said Pan. Because you loved him?

  A WOODEN CROSS HAD HUNG above Nils’s toilet. Max had stared at it while they kissed in the shower. He had been a normal boy then. Normal hands no healing in them. The cross, too, had seemed nothing special. Just two planks of wood that intersected at right angles. No one in Nils’s house had talked about the cross. No one had used the words risen or saved or sin. Jesus was not a word they said in vain or ever. He had assumed Nils’s mother bought the cross on a trip to Belgium, a trinket like the Day of the Dead skulls in the kitchen or the stone Buddha on their living room mantel.

  But the cross in the Judge’s office did not look like two planks of sanded wood. It appeared to Max like a noose or like gallows. A death instrument glorified. The wood had been shellacked until it shone. The color between brown and red and glowing. He watched it on the wall while he made his calls.

  Lorne tied to a tree in the backyard.

  Side pierced just like Jesus.

  Lorne at the next tabl
e saying Vote for my dad.

  I’m a student at the high school, ma’am, Max heard Lorne say. I am going to go to state college. I only want a fair and honest education. I do not want to worry that what I am assigned to read is going to put me on a path to sin.

  The Judge came in with an old woman. The woman dragged a breathing device behind her. It attached to her nose with a long plastic tube. The Judge knelt in front of the cross. He stood on his knees and placed his forehead to the ground. The woman was beside him, her eyes tightened into wrinkles. The Judge pulled at the hem of the woman’s dress, dried his face with its ruffle. He prayed. The woman wept. She hugged him, and they rocked together in worship.

  The Lord has risen, Max heard himself read from the sheet of paper in front of him—a way to close the conversation.

  Amen, said the women on the other end.

  Her response startled Max back into his body.

  Amen, he said back.

  And will you like a ride on election day, ma’am? Max asked her. A quiver in his voice.

  No, sir, I do not. But thank you kindly for the checking.

  PAN TOOK MAX STRAIGHT DOWN the school hallway and into the parking lot and toward his car. The idea was to listen to music and drive around and chill. Max let the sun bake his skin through the windshield. The heat tightened his cheeks. It made him sleepy. He wanted to curl on his side in the passenger seat and pull Pan into his lap. But Pan was up to something.

  So, you know it’s impossible, Pan said. That you raised Nils from the dead. I’ve really been thinking about that, about raising up the dead. And I think you couldn’t have done it with Nils. Reason numero uno is that there was a substance between you and his body. The wood.

  When Pan said it, Max knew, somewhere deep in him, that he was right.

  I mean, said Max, I’ve thought of that, too.

  Reason numero dos, said Pan, if you really, truly, madly, deeply thought you’d brought him back to life, you would have stopped the service and said something. You would have cried out. You would have told your mom. You would have caved. You wouldn’t have just let them bury him.

  I guess, said Max.

  This part he didn’t yet believe. Couldbetrue. Couldbefalse. Coward was how he felt. Max placed himself back on the day of the funeral. There he was in the chair. His mother in black beside him. The crow circling the casket. The snow falling into his hair. The memory walked through him.

  No, said Pan. Not you guess. You would have! And plus, Nils would have yelled for someone to save him, and people in the cemetery would have heard. Caskets aren’t made of soundproof metal or something. They’re boxes of wood.

  Maybe, said Max.

  Don’t look so terrified all the time. You’re going to give yourself wrinkles in your forehead, said Pan.

  He reached into the backseat and lifted a shoe box from the floor.

  Here, said Pan.

  He popped open the lid to reveal a lifeless bird. Roadkill, it looked like, or beaten with a bat. An eye unblinked at Max. The bird’s legs gleamed like wet roots. The feathers shimmered from dark blue into cloud. Pan shut the lid again.

  Put your hands on the box, and the bird won’t come back to life.

  Max saw what he was up to. Heat welled under his cheeks and pinched its way toward his eyes. He placed his damp hands on the cardboard right over the word Keds. His mouth buzzed. It tasted like autumn, like cardboard, like a stain of grass on the tongue. It tasted like paper ruined by the green shit of a bird. Not sweet.

  He lifted his hands.

  Pan opened the box.

  The bird stayed dead.

  See, said Pan. Told you.

  Then Max picked up the bird, and his teeth turned to peppermint. Stalks of lavender extended into his nose, and the wings flapped, and the bird squealed, and it would have flown right into the windshield if Pan hadn’t grabbed it from Max and thrown it through the open driver’s door. They watched the bird soar upward, a black smudge in the blue until it wasn’t even that. It left no imprint behind. The sky forgot the bird. Then Pan crawled onto Max’s lap. He didn’t have a chance to catch his breath before their teeth clinked, and Max tasted nicotine.

  See I told you, said Pan. You’re not bad. You’re not a bad boy.

  SO, THE DYE WORKED? Max asked Billie in the hallway.

  The color was fading from her hair, but he could still see hints of purple intertwined in the mousy strands she tucked behind her ears.

  I didn’t say anything in the cafeteria because you were in a hurry, said Max. But it looks cool. Looks pretty.

  The compliment just slid right out, and Billie ignored it.

  Used to compliments, thought Max. Shouldaknown.

  Davis walked past Max, pulled his arm back, sent a punch straight to the bicep.

  Save you a seat at lunch, Romeo, he said in Max’s ear as he passed.

  What up, Bill, said Davis.

  Billie kept her gaze on Max. Davis did not get a peace sign raised in response.

  I’ve been trying not to wash it out, she told Max. I’ve been trying not to wash my hair because of the chemicals. I heard that when you stop washing your hair, if you wait long enough, you never have to use shampoo again. You can just use baking powder and vinegar. Au naturel.

  Cool, said Max. If I had hair, I’d try it, too. She ran her hand through his hair, held a piece and said—you have enough to go lilac.

  Her touch sent warmth to the spine. Hmm, he thought. Interesting. The bell rang, and the hall drained through the cafeteria door. They stayed, small-talking, facing each other in front of a wall of windows that opened out to the baseball practice fields. It must be hamburgers for lunch. He could smell the beef.

  Hey, she said, don’t move. The shadows on your face are perfect.

  She slung her backpack onto one shoulder and withdrew a manual 35mm Minolta.

  It’s beautiful, right, she said, holding the camera out toward Max.

  The instrument took up her whole hand.

  I’m in a photography class, she said.

  She picked an aperture, adjusted the shutter speed, held the viewfinder to her eye. Max lifted one side of his mouth.

  Don’t smile, she ordered. Turn your head a little to the right. Make it seem like you’re thinking.

  Click.

  Cool, she said. Good shot. I think.

  Really?

  Yeah. It caught you in your element, looking stoic and strong.

  She fiddled with the strap, a kind of hippy thing with a Mexican blanket pattern woven into it. She hung the camera around her neck. Max thought of his disposable camera in his drawer at home, discarded. The undeveloped pictures of the Alabama highway. An idea he had that he couldn’t follow through on.

  Saw you at church on Sunday, she said.

  She held a finger to her temple and pulled the trigger of her thumb.

  You hated it? said Max.

  Didn’t you? she said. Before he could answer she said, Come with me to smoke a cigarette. Let’s get some fresh air.

  Max didn’t smoke, but he said sure anyway. He understood what Pan meant about auras then, because he sensed a force coming off her, a sadness. Max noted his intuition again, humming under the curve of his rib.

  They walked across the baseball field toward the dugouts. He felt a panic about skipping lunch. It wasn’t Fast Food Friday, which meant students were required to be in the cafeteria. He almost expected to see Glory under a tree turning over her tarot cards, but she was not there.

  Someone could be watching us, Max said. Won’t we get in trouble if they see us out here?

  No one’s watching, said Billie. Pinkie swear. No one cares.

  You’re not a bad boy.

  She sat on the dirt floor of the dugout and pulled a metal canister from her bag. She sprung it open and revealed a row of self-rolled cigarettes, packed tight.

  I feel like we’re going to get caught, said Max, and a small part of him wished they would get caught. He wondered what would happen
if they did. He wished that just once he wouldn’t get away with something, that he’d have to suffer a consequence, make a penance, ask to be forgiven.

  Nah, said Billie. Not going to happen. I do this every day. Plus, those teachers have bigger fish to fry than us out here smoking. It’s small beans.

  You are not hungry? asked Max.

  She shrugged, held up her cigarette.

  Lunch, she said.

  Her eyes squinted at something in the distance. Max followed her gaze, but it didn’t land anywhere. It struck some point on the horizon near the Burger Mountain sign, which reached taller than the pines. It was so clear that afternoon, a blue people write songs about. Billie reminded him of a bird. He’d heard everyone’s face looked like a horse or a bird. Hers was bird. Pan’s was bird, too. Nils had been a horse. Billie wiped her nose with her knuckle. Maybe she’d fly away.

  I’m reading this book about the Holocaust, she said. In AP English. It’s called Night. You read it? It’s about Nazis. Kind of.

  Max shrugged, a little annoyed.

  It’s good, she said. And depressing.

  Yep, said Max. It’s a subject that depresses.

  I kind of like depressing stuff, she said. It makes me feel better. Like how sad songs make me happy. Like how tragic movies make me laugh.

  That is funny, said Max. Sad songs only make me sad.

  But this book has got me thinking, she said.

  She handed Max the cigarette as if he wanted it, which he didn’t. He puffed it quickly and handed it back.

  What do you mean? Max said.

  Billie inhaled like it was serious. She exhaled toward the ground. Max watched the smoke disappear into the dirt.

  I just mean I read about all this suffering in Night. All the fuckedup things people do to each other. That shit people live through.

  Well, Max asked.

  He dug at his sole with a stick.

  I think it’s so easy to look at something bad like the Holocaust, you know, and say, that is evil, said Max. When Hitler was just one evil man who got famous for his evil, but evil is exactly everywhere.