Max held up his hands like people do when they want to prove they don’t have a gun.
I am not the one trying to fuck with him, said Max. Maybe he is the one trying to fuck with me.
Ah, said Billie. She lifted her hands to her face. Took them away. Made an expression that meant unbelievable. Okay. Her tone dropped. I get it. She sighed like a lightbulb had been pulled above her head. I get it.
Get what? Max asked.
She mouthed the word wow.
I’m an idiot I did not see it sooner. That’s what Pan meant.
Meant when? Asked Max. When?
Pan, that sweet nugget. You’re crushing. You are. I get it, she said. Just don’t get too sweet on him or Lorne will kill you.
Billie stooped down and ripped a flower right out of the earth. Yellow roots dangled from the green stem. Max watched her just kill things. Just like that. She shoved the dead flower into one of her frizzy braids.
Lorne?
Billie looked at him and laughed, Yes. Lorne. Did I stutter?
I don’t crush on him, said Max in his most serious tone.
Max stopped walking. A firefly flicked through the air between them. He could hear yelling in the distance. It was the kind of ambient scream that might be laughter or might be a threat.
It’s so obvious though, she said. Now it really is. So, so painfully obvious, wow. It’s like once you see a thing you just see it. Boy. I was actually quite wrong about you.
She looked at him like she knew him, like she knew how he was. He watched how her ugly little ears wiggled as she laughed.
Don’t laugh at me, he said. Don’t laugh.
But this only made her laugh more. She laughed with a cruelty he did not know belonged to her. Her laughter was at him and not with him. This was not the Billie he knew from Davis’s house or from the dugout or from the mall. She looked at him like she saw the sin inside of him. He wanted to stop that nasty laugh as if that could stop her knowing. Her face crumpled into a twist of snout and cheek and brow. A pig girl.
Stop, he said.
He grabbed her shoulders and held her away from him. He wished he wanted her even a little. He tried to scrape his body for a shred of lust. He willed his crotch to grow. Max wanted to do something to her that would prove something to them both. But he couldn’t summon it. More power existed in the clumps of grass on the road than in him. He tightened his grip and shook her, but not hard.
Get your hands off of me, she said, and tried to wrench herself away. But Max held on. He stumbled toward her as she struggled to free herself.
Max grabbed her again. This time he wrapped his arms around her soft girl waist and held his face right against the warm dough of hers. Her cheek had the same makeup film as Pan. He smelled her fishy little mouth. She doesn’t get it. Billie doesn’t get it. She didn’t understand what he was asking her, what he wanted, but neither did he. He felt rot and salt, brine rising up inside of him, slipping over his edges.
Can I kiss you? he heard himself mutter into her cheek.
CanIkissyou, he whispered into her stupid braids.
She tried to pull away from him again. Her nails dug at his forearms, the forearms that could crush her. The forearms that no matter how completely they could hurt her could still bring her back to life. Maybe he should show her.
Don’t leave, he said, as Billie thrashed against him. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to kiss you.
I’m not fucking kissing you, she said.
He released his grip, and she stumbled back, but she didn’t run away. She stood there looking at him. She looked like she felt sorry for him.
Please, he said.
Maybe that would be all it took. Maybe he just needed to kiss this one girl. What was he doing? He felt suddenly small.
Fuck you for saying that, she said. For saying you want to kiss me.
She drew her arm back like she might punch him.
Do it, he said. Punch me. Please. Punch.
Billie looked tough. She was more boy than he was, and he liked that about her and envied it.
Fuck you for saying you want to kiss me, she said again. Fuck you for being like them.
She dropped her arm to her side. She spit at him, and the glob landed at his foot and bubbled.
Hit me, he said. Please.
You’re just a sad boy who deserves no punches.
Her forehead glistened. She pulled a cigarette from the metal canister she’d used in the dugout. Her hands trembled. She had been afraid. He saw it clear as he saw the spit before him. That’s what she’d been. He covered his face with his hands and tried to rub away the moment.
Here I was thinking you were different, she said. Here I was thinking that.
MAX WALKED TO THE POND ALONE. It must have been polluted, because the fish that once lived inside it had bobbed to the top. Max tried to skip a stone across the algae-scabbed surface. It took a few tries and then he did it. He skipped the stone three times. He picked up a rock. It reminded him of the Jesus toes at the church in Spain, gone smooth from something moving over them again and again. Max tried to hit one of the dead fish, but he missed. He could smell honeysuckle. The wind hurled itself with such sound. Shiver and sweat at the same time was something he had begun to love about Alabama.
Boys screamed somewhere in the distance. They drew beams through the night with their flashlights, hunting for cows to tip. Cows slept standing up, Max had been told, so it was possible to give them a shove and their powerful thighs would buckle right to the ground. Someone hollered when he came upon a cow. He whooped for others to join them. The cow would fall, and they would celebrate. Their joy would last until the time it took to find a second cow. Then their joy would repeat. It was simple.
Max walked into the pond. He continued to sweat even when he was hip high in the water, water that smelled nasty and of egg. He waded into it anyway. He needed the water. Above him, a plane blinked red lights. It might have been going anywhere, shrinking the vast space between continents down to a few hours. At the deepest point in the pond, the water touched his nipples. The water circled his hips and stomach and chest and lifted up the fabric of his jeans, his cotton shirt. What’s on the bottom, he wondered as he trudged over the slick muck. Nails? Rusted tractor parts? Dead dog? Something that looked like a wig danced in stringy patches off the rocks beside the water.
Billie’s face floated in the air in front of him. He held her face and kissed it. He heard another whoop, and it sounded like her.
Why did Pan go to Lorne? What did he tell him? What would Lorne do to him? He shivered in the water. I’ll lie, thought Max. I’ll just lie. They’ll believe me. Fear tightened his neck, tightened his tendons into metal wires. He didn’t want to be tied to a tree in the forest, left there all night wrapped in his own fear.
The fish squirmed. Their scales shimmered. They slipped from his hands and spilled sugar down his throat. They flipped themselves into the air, absorbed the night, and swam away from him. Even as he healed them, he knew they were only going to die again in this polluted pond. But he needed to do something good. He would heal this one thing, this last thing, then he would lie.
MAX WAS AMONG THE HANDFUL summoned to the Judge’s campaign office. It looked how it always looked. Stacks of neatly cornered papers covered the desks. A hand-stitched biblical saying from Proverbs was framed above the fireplace:
In the LORD’s hand the king’s heart is a stream of water that he channels toward all who please him.
The heating rumbled and heaved as if sick. The building was too hot, and condensation rained down the windows. It was still too warm for indoor heating, but people in Alabama could not stand any cold. Max touched the wallpaper where it peeled. Pictures hung from the walls. Photographs mixed together with spiritual sayings and campaign slogans. Max had passed them a dozen times, but tonight they seemed new. What drew him toward them, he didn’t know, but something whispered, C’mon here. C’mon here and look.
The other bo
ys assembled chairs in the biggest room in the office, the one where they made the phone calls. But Max loitered in front of the photos. He slipped his hands under his shirt and rubbed the squares of muscle on his stomach. His own stomach impressed him. Max amazed himself sometimes. He was such a boy, even when he felt otherwise.
He leaned in to look at a picture where a man held a young Lorne on his lap. The man looked familiar, but it took Max a second to realize the man was Quaid. Part of him hadn’t truly believed the connection between Quaid and the Judge, but here was proof. Even though Quaid was hardly Quaid in this picture. His body was varnished with a healthy, luminous tan. His hand was full fingered. On the table before Quaid and Lorne a fish had been licked down to its bones. Its ribs curled up from the sucked-white spine and ended in tight, menacing points.
It unnerved Max the way years had snatched color from Quaid’s skin, fat from his limbs, life from those eyes. Poisoned. Maybe it was true. Quaid’s eyes slid toward him and seemed to wink. The hat Lorne wore said vote for your judge! Lorne’s freckled legs were splayed over Quaid’s lap. His body was cocked to the side like a ventriloquist doll.
You done yet? said Lorne. He was propped against the door frame, the one that led to the hall that would take them to the big room. We’re waiting on you.
Max flinched at the sound of Lorne’s voice. He followed Lorne, lead-legged, as if on a leash. As if made to. Max remembered how Lorne had cradled his head in his lap, how he had shoved the hamburger into his mouth and moved his jaw to help him chew the meat. In Max’s nostrils, the scent stayed, like an onion skinned and sliced. He heard the slap of his belt hit the floor. He was back on the roof of the asylum. He felt the hot hair of Lorne’s calves hook onto his own. Dirt and pebbles embedded in his chin and the caps of his knees. He’d heard a thud as one of Lorne’s palms then the other hit the roof beside his shoulders.
You, all right? asked Lorne. You’re sweating like a pig going to slaughter.
It is okay, said Max, but his voice shook.
He looked at the back of his hand where a hive had formed. A red welt shaped like a halo.
Lorne and Max joined the boys drinking chocolate milk in the room. A man with a blond beard would tell them about camp.
Max placed his shaking, hive hand in his pocket, where it continued to sweat.
Where’s the Judge? Max asked Davis.
Busy, busy, said Davis.
The man in front of them talked about how his life had once been difficult and bad. He did things of the unspeakable variety. The devil took him and made him his own.
Porn addict, whispered Cole, who sat next to Max. Rehabilitated.
The man said, And you know where I was saved? I mean truly, really saved?
That’s when the flyers came out. Flyers for camp. A weekend away in the woods.
Give those to your parents if they ask about where you’re going, said the man.
Boys, we’re about to go to the deep mountains, said Price.
Jesus, said the man. Jesus is there. I can attest to it. Just wait. The Holy Spirit is there. The great Spirit of the Lord.
I’m going, said Cole to Max. You going?
Uh, Max said.
He eyed Lorne.
The team is going, Lorne said. You’re going.
A STORM WAS COMING. A hot day had wriggled into the middle of a cold week and the clouds thickened and the air hung still. Even the ozone felt sucked at and inward. No wind. Max stepped off his porch. He watched tadpoles sliver through sludge of a sewage drain in his yard, then started off on a walk.
Miss Jean stepped onto her lawn in full makeup and a bathrobe. Puss the cat ran toward the road. A man brought his dog to shit on the curb. The shit steamed. Didn’t they care it would storm? Couldn’t they feel that a strangeness had seized the air? Max walked past a dead patch of weeds. A mower had severed the necks of winter flowers. Their blooms had turned brain-gray. Max picked them up and the flowers burst back to life. Ka-pow. Vanilla. Boom. The lilac crunch. Max tried to conjure words for his feeling.
Another smell fumed through the streets. What was it? Like a match lit to mildew. Like wetness at the center of a glove. The clouds in the distant hung low and green. A billboard asked—GOT INSURANCE? Max imagined Pan next to him. He tightened his grip around an invisible Pan. There was something easy about Pan’s mascara, and the imprint it made on his white sleeve: two crows silhouetted in the sky. It felt good, and it felt temporary. A cut bouquet. A knot released in his neck. His jaw loosened for the first time in a week. It smelled like it had already rained. The soil did that. The soil reached out for the rain. Max’s chest ached. The muscles around his heart felt sore.
The night before, Max had had a nightmare. In the nightmare, he saw thousands of bodies, purple-skinned and starved, rise from the red Alabama clay and climb down from the trees. Their arms had been tattooed with numbers like the concentration camps in Germany. The bodies filled the entire town. They stood in the middle of roads. They sat on benches. They let their legs dangle from the billboards. Maybe these were the bodies he had never risen. Maybe these were the bodies he had. Max wanted to run from the bodies, but they were everywhere.
One of them crawled down from the roof of the Chicken Shop. It was a football boy. Max felt relieved. Just a football boy. Then there were dozens of football boys. They surrounded him. Then he noticed their faces. Scratched-out mounds of keloid tissue covered the sockets where their eyes had been. Other than their torn-out eyes, the boys seemed fine. They carried on with their days as if they could see fine. They threw the football. They ripped guts from the throat of deer in the field. They aimed their shotguns at the horizon. Dove, they said, looking at the earth and not where they fired. Dove. Bang. Dove. Bang.
Max’s hand made a gun. His index finger extended and cocked like a trigger. Then the bodies were gone. He touched his own face and felt the slick clump of scars piled up across his eyes, too. He shot up in bed thirsty and scared he was blind.
Now, Max was trying to walk off the feeling, but it struck him. He felt like he was walking over a grave. A thousand graves. A million graves. The trees, even the trees, felt like graves.
Pan had told Max he was scared of his own power, and he was right. Max didn’t want to know if he could raise a human from the dead. How could he live with himself? All that responsibility. All that guilt. He couldn’t. He needed to believe his abilities had horizons. Max tried to fight off the memories again, but they came for him anyway. Nils died a slow, second death alone inside the earth’s crust, his nostrils filling with the smell of soil. His throat raw from screaming. Perhaps he would have torn his vocal cords open from all the screaming. Max saw Nils start to eat himself to survive, gnaw at his own arms until the flesh was hot pulp, hoping that someone would dig him out. What would have killed him first? Hunger or suffocation? Could fear have killed him? Could one die of fear alone? Max had laid his ear to the grass near Nils’s tombstone and tried to listen for the screams. He had thought, maybe, he heard a moan come through. Terror had straightened his legs to standing.
But Max had known, even then, that if he told someone his fear, if he dug Nils up himself, all they would find was a dead boy. No drama. No second death. He would have discovered a Nils who died one time in the sterile hospital bed and never came back again.
MAX HAD TO BARGAIN with his mother to allow him to go to camp. He told her he would let her come to church with him when he got back. All she had to do was let him go. His mother studied his face when she dropped him off at the bus. She looked at him as if she were seeing him for the last time. It made Max uneasy, but he hugged her and felt himself age as he comforted her.
It’s okay, Mom, he said. Everything is fine.
He towered over her as they stood by the car. Her band of white hair was pinned back into a nest of black with a moonstone barrette. Max watched over her shoulder as the boys filed into the bus across the street. Max had never felt bigger than his mother, but he did then. His parents had
never been good at enforcing rules because they never had to. Max had always followed them.
You know, we only want to go to church with you because we love you, his mother said.
When you say we, you mean you, Max said. Dad doesn’t care.
Okay. I mean me then.
What if I want something for myself, Max asked. Something that’s just mine? Like I said. I tried to explain that.
You sound like a grown-up, said his mother. Almost. I don’t know. What if?
That’s what I want, said Max.
A cockroach was next to his shoe. It was on its back with its legs curled in. Unalive. Max wondered if he’d ever tell his mother about his power. His curse. He didn’t know what to call it in his head. Maybe one day when she was old, he’d tell her. She’d die, and he’d save her and that’s how he’d tell her. He could have shown her then. He could have picked up the bug, and she could have watched it crawl up his arm. What stopped him from doing it? She would continue to love him. Her love would reach out to cover him even after everyone else’s had receded. But no, Max needed something that was his, like he’d told her.
He watched the dead cockroach. Liquid brown shell. Eyelashes for legs. Why did everyone hate those creatures? Something so little and defenseless. It was so like the world to kill cockroaches.
You think I don’t understand what you’re going through, his mother said.
She reached out and cupped the back of his neck. She placed her thumb on the swirl of hair at his nape. He flinched her away.
How can you understand? Max asked.
He knew he sounded stupid.
You want your church? she said. Go have your church.
I don’t believe in God, Max said, but after he said it, he realized he might.
Just don’t lie to yourself, she said. Okay? Promise you’ll be truthful with yourself of all people.
She rubbed her temples. Crows landed on either side of her eyes. She, too, suffered from headaches. He placed a hand on her shoulder and let her smile. As the bus pulled out of the parking lot, his mother stayed by her car, watching. She would not leave until he was gone. Out of sight. His watcher. Max turned and saw her diminish through the glass. Her watcher. She receded into the distance, framed by the window. A miniature mother. No bigger than a drawing in a book. A paper dress of a person.
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