ON THE DRIVE TO CHURCH CAMP, tires kicked up clouds of red dust. The man with the blond beard from the campaign office walked up and down the center aisle of the bus and led them in song. His fingers waved through the air, but he waved out of tune. The song was about dry bones and dead hearts coming back to life. It was about how God’s love could find what was dead and call it all back.
Max had trouble singing. He stared out the window instead. The trees on the side of the road looked starved of water even though it had stormed that week. There were miles of dead trees. Their naked branches curled through the air. Their trunks sloughed off long pieces of bark, which were littered like brown ribbons across the swollen roots.
In the middle of the chorus, Max nudged the boy next to him.
What’s with all the dead forests? he asked.
The what? the boy said.
The trees. They’re dead.
Beats me, he said, then turned back to the game on his phone, his mouth moving around the words:
We call out to dry bones.
Come alive.
Max searched the seats for Wes, but he was not on the bus. He had hoped he would be. They could experience camp for the first time together. Nerves swarmed his stomach. He could not pin down the origin of his nerves. Anxiety or excitement. Maybe both. Lorne sat a few seats ahead, an Alabama cap pulled down over his face. He didn’t sing. Each time the boys yelled for the dead souls to come to life, which was often, Max shuddered. Nils in the casket. The poisoned men and women in their caskets. Dry bones. He’d never thought of it like that: that this religion was about the dead rising up and coming to life. He wondered if Jesus had known he was going to come back or if it startled him to wake up with his limbs wrapped like a mummy in a dark cave. Maybe he hadn’t meant to be a miracle. Sometimes crazy stuff just happened to people. With no good explanation at all.
THE LEAVES IN THE HILL town were devil red. When the bus rolled into camp, the sky tore open and rays shot down as if Jesus were trying to speak to them. That’s what the man from the campaign office said; he said, Sweet Jesus knows we’re coming down the mountain.
Amen.
The foothills of the Appalachians crammed together in a vague smoky blue. Max followed the way toward a wooden structure. Cole walked in front of him. What he saw: just a brown barn and a couple of two-story cabins and a fire that raged by a river and a still black lake.
Max watched Davis’s spine against his thin white sweater as he led the way to the cabin. Once inside, Davis dropped his army duffel and jumped onto his mattress, dirty sneakers still on. He picked the only single that wasn’t part of a bunk bed. He jumped a few times in preparation and then did a backflip. He landed on his knees, crooning.
I’m going to land it perfect soon, Germany. Just you wait.
I believe, said Max.
Max threw his backpack onto a bed made with sheets covered in illustrations of praying angels. He’d chosen the top.
Capital of Suriname? Davis asked Max, jumping again, trying to gather momentum.
Of Suriname, said Max. Oh. I don’t know.
You heard of it though, right? Small country in South America. Right there on the coast. Poor as fuck-all.
Max nodded. But he had not heard of it.
Paramaribo, Davis sung. Paramaribooo. I’m going to visit it when I graduate. I’m going to visit every country in the world, and then I’m coming right back to Alabama, so I can look at all these folks in the face and promise them that they’re in the best place on earth. Ain’t that right, Germany? Alabama the beautiful.
Max smiled. He pictured Davis walking through the streets of Hamburg, or on a bus like the confident Americans he’d seen. Davis would project the same poise, that buoyant self-assurance Max so wished he had. Davis would dash up the stairs that zigged through the city as if he’d done it a million times and knew exactly where they would take him.
Davis collapsed on the bed, out of breath from his jumping.
He turned his head toward Max. That cocky grin. The pit in his chin like a movie star. His corn-silk hair untangled.
Knox kicked open the door from the adjoining room.
I’m starved almost to death, he said.
Hush your mouth, said Cole. God’ll hear you and test you, and we’ll have to fast and go without dinner or something.
Strange, Max thought, how this God would punish them for their wanting.
They left the cabin and headed for a barn. Outside, Max’s jaw knocked together. He wished for a better jacket. The mountains brought the cold. Max walked into the barn and his eyes fought to adjust. The only light was firelight. Torches lined the walkway from the door to an area in front that looked like a stage. Rope had been tied around piles of hay to hold them together. The piles became rows on which some boys already sat. The piles formed an ascending semicircle that faced the stage. Boys whom Max had never seen rested on the hay, chewed on the hay, stuck hay behind their ears. They must have arrived on another bus from another town. Everyone Max saw was young, except for a small group of adult men at the center of the ring who wore masks.
Max climbed through the pig smell of the barn to the top of the hay with the boys. They sat with their elbows on their knees. Max did not know what would happen. A banjo played, and a small choir of men sung in high voices. Beautiful voices, thought Max. A cottonmouth snake slid across the loose strands of straw at the bottom. Max knew it should scare him, should prove something to him, but it didn’t. The snake swam through the ground like it was water.
Minutes passed while the men sung. Maybe an hour. Max grew tired and the hay under him itched. He felt like sleep could enter him at any minute. He might sleep as he sat. Then the Judge appeared at the door and walked toward the front of the barn. Max’s throat didn’t feel right. His eyes widened. The Judge was like a magnet that pulled every gaze toward it. He tipped his cowboy hat to the crowd. He didn’t wear a mask like the other men.
Max felt like the Judge was whispering just to him, at him. Look, the whisper said. Just look. Just watch. His black hat glowed holy as a halo. He held a book in his hands and started to sing. The song reached to the rafters of the barn. As if on cue the snake moved toward the men who had formed a circle around the Judge. The Judge reached down to pick up the snake. He held the snake’s living body to the air and the head hissed. Then they danced together. The men around him picked up plastic buckets and lifted snakes out of them. They shook the snakes and danced behind the Judge.
That one’s got poison in the teeth, said Lorne. But God is on his side.
The Judge walked with the snake held out before him. The snake straightened and stayed rigid in the air. Then the music stopped and so did the Judge. He dropped to his knees.
Hallelujah. God is good, he said.
Amen! said the men. A groan moved through the barn.
Something red came from the Judge’s hands. It looked like blood, but it couldn’t be blood. Max’s heart beat faster. He wiped sweat from his palms onto his shorts. A snake’s tail rattled. It sounded like a cymbal, the tinny high-hat on a drum. The Judge held his snake out in front of his chest. It hung from his huge hands. The snake tried to straighten out again. The Judge stood and moved around onstage, bending his knees up and down in a kind of dance, almost trembling. Then the Judge stopped dancing, and he began to tell them, to tell everyone, the story of love.
Max felt hot. So hot. Burning.
Drink this, said Lorne, as if he felt the heat, too.
He handed Max a tin cup, and Max swallowed a liquid that tasted like licorice but also like the back of a dirty hand. Where did Lorne get the cup? Max didn’t ask. Max swallowed, licked his lips. Something sticky remained on them.
The Judge told of his bad past. Yes. He was lost once. So lost. Snorting pharmaceuticals lost. High on paint fumes lost. Cumming on the chest of cheerleaders bad. Something was missing. A great hole. A hole bigger than any girl or any cigarette or any cold bottle of beer or joyride through the sweet devil
of midnight. Max’s mind drifted toward Pan and for a moment he was sure that the hole inside of him might be Pan’s exact size. When he lay next to Pan, stretched out on the blanket of his yard, his hole felt entirely full. Max wouldn’t know where to put anything else, much less something as big as a god.
The boys beside Max rose to their feet. They rose to the tips of their toes as if they might fly away. Max felt delirious. The barn was hot as steam or hell or the place you go before you go to hell. Everyone poured sweat now and it collected in the dander above Max’s upper lip and stung his eyes and he went dizzy. Why dizzy? He didn’t know. He was hoisted up, and his arms slung around the strong shoulders beside him. Then Pan was in front, down near the Judge and Max called out to him. Pan, he said—but no sound came out. The Judge turned, and Pan was gone. Pan disappeared, or he was never there to begin with. Max didn’t know which. Which witch. Witch.
Come down here, son, said the Judge. Come down here, Max. Bring him on down.
Max felt hands on his wings and on his spine, the dry sandpaper tongue of teenage boy palm. They pushed him forward toward the snake and toward the Judge’s body where life was winning. No one needed to die just to be shown they could come back to life. Jesus already did that. And who did Pan think Max was? Max took off his shirt because God it was hot, and the Judge placed the snake onto the thick wads of flesh that were sculpted godlike on Max’s chest. He was a warrior, and the snake was so cold and so good.
WHEN MAX woke up, the Judge was holding him like he was his baby. They were in the middle of the black lake. Max’s thighs crested the water. It felt precious to be held like this. The Judge cradled Max to his chest and held him tight whispering for him to shush. Just shush. He rocked Max back and forth. Max concentrated on how the rocking felt. How it felt to be swayed, gently, carefully, by the arms of another man, held so that he might never fall. He let the water spin and twirl and churn below him, and he thought this was what it felt like right before you became born. The Judge dipped Max’s head back into the water. Dunk. Another dunk. It felt refreshing. It felt so clean. Above the Judge’s square jaw, a pair of pink lips frowned. His body walked waist deep through the black lake and in Max’s eyes millions of stars burned out in the great big universe. Max saw the fire on the edge of the woods. He heard the boys praying. The fire leapt. The Judge whispered a line of words whose meaning fell outside of Max’s comprehension.
Max saw the fire leap again. It leapt in a great orange dazzle toward heaven. It leapt with each Father God that tumbled from the boys’ lips as they prayed loudly for him, for Max. The boys called out for their fathers. They stripped off their dirty flannels and undid the tired blue of their jeans. They prayed. They approached like pack animals—no, like a gathering of disciples—from their spots on the shore of the lake and walked right into the water. Their backs ached, and their wrists were sore and every one of them had tendinitis. Max knew their pain because it was his pain. He knew their pain in a way he could never know Pan’s pain. He knew their pain because it was Max who’d bruised his knees and broken his fingers alongside them, just like it was they who had caused blood to burst from his nose.
The boys moved through the water as if the water, this lake, had the power to heal every one of them. And Max thought—Well, I’m here, well, I’m here in the water with my hands, so maybe, just maybe, the healing will happen. But for him to heal them, first they’d have to die, and Max was done with death. A comet carved its way through the night, and he decided it was a sign this was where he should be. He wondered if he could stuff something else in the Panshaped hole inside of him. He wondered if God could fit any hole. If he had the ability to shrink and expand to the proportion of his pain.
Max filled his mouth with water and let it flow from his nose and let urine go from his penis as he floated. He was done with healing. Finished. He was not a prophet. He was someone who had to be saved just like anyone else.
A mayfly drifted dead on the lake. Its paper-thin wings were drenched and broken. Max picked up the bug and held out his palm so he could watch it fly away back into the night, but nothing happened. No sweetness flooded into his mouth. Nothing moved the bug. It stayed crumpled and wrecked. He dropped it back into the water, where it drowned. Lorne floated up beside him. Lorne’s eyes were wet, and his lips were blue. He let his eyes follow the entire length of Lorne’s body, from bony feet to neck. He wanted to reach out and touch Lorne on the cheek. To slap him.
Lorne made a church steeple with his fingers and said, We’ve got to put an end to the evilness that lurks in our presence.
He said, We’ve got to kick the devil out of him or the devil’s coming for us, too.
MAX HAD A HEADACHE FOR days after the lake. It haloed everything in a neon blue. He stumbled through school reaching for something to hold on to: a door, a wrist, a waist. He fell to the ground only to get up again. He limped when he walked. Water still sat in his ears. He wondered if the water had drowned his sin, extinguished his power like Billie did with the cigarette she snuffed out in her mouth. Max had gotten what he wanted. His curse was gone. How could he explain it? It was magic. If these boys weren’t witches, then what was a witch?
Two nights after he’d returned from the lake, he cleared the dinner table and told his mother he would wash the dishes. He filled the sink with hot water and squirted a stream of soap into it. In plunged his hands. They felt lighter than they ever had, like he’d gotten a cast removed. He needed to relearn his mobility. He dropped a glass on the floor and watched it shatter. Its broken side bared jagged clear teeth at him. He had the desire to step his sockless foot onto the glass. He slammed his knuckles into the sink. An accident. He didn’t know how to not bang his hand into something. Max looked at the back of it. Bruises darkened his pinkies and blended into the veins strung through his skin.
Baby, his mother said. The pull of her energy beside him at the counter. You okay? Did something happen? Did something happen at camp?
I’m fine, said Max. He tried to smile. Show teeth. Lift the corners of his mouth. He coughed and turned back to the sink.
With his powers gone, the headache, too, should have fled him. But it clung to the edges of everything. He burped. Up rose a dark orange feeling that sat raw in the throat. He feared that the lake had not drowned out his sin, but that his sin was now sealed inside him.
He did not feel free but trapped inside this body that couldn’t do anything to save itself. His body, he felt, would die. The world would erode him, like it eroded everything. Maybe this is what being human felt like. The revelation blew through him and filled him with wind.
A body is not yours forever, Max thought. It is lent to you and the earth will take it back.
Max pictured all the bodies decomposing in the ground. In graveyards everywhere, bodies slept in different levels of fester and rot. He saw an ear sprouting from a garden, a corroded eye rolling across the brown back of a hill, an arm reaching out like a root under the base of a tree.
You’re a waste.
He should have gone with Pan to the graveyard.
Hope drained into his feet. Pan had been right about him. Max hadn’t used his power for anything good, and now it was gone. It had been taken from him. God had given him a chance to heal, and he had dashed it.
Max picked up a plate flecked with gravy, stained with the dark red of a raw steak. He scrubbed. Lorne’s words rose to the surface of his thoughts, We’ve got to kick the devil out of him.
Is that what the Judge thought he’d done to Max, kick the devil out? If this was saved, Max didn’t want it. He wanted to go back and climb from the Judge’s arms and swim toward the fire instead.
MAYBE IF MAX WANTED IT bad enough, he could will the power back. Maybe he could reclaim it.
Magic is only real if you believe, Pan had said. Magic only works if you believe.
On a morning run, slow and sluggish and worse than any run he’d done, Max saw a run-over deer on the road. He laid his hands on the cold body
to test himself. Flies roamed the open spaces of the deer’s skin. Max held his hands to the deer’s fur for a long time, stoked it, even kissed it, but the deer stayed dead. All that came was another headache. His mouth tasted like a handful of soil. Not sweetness as in life, but bitter as in death. That afternoon, he picked up a moth by its lifeless wing. Crushed coffee beans chalked up his tongue. No honey, no sugar. Max wanted to know why he had been imbued with power only to have it taken away. Why had he been chosen, and who had been the one to choose? A god or a devil and did it matter?
A poet does not make the poem, his Literature teacher in Germany had told his class. Poems exist in the world and on the back of the wind. A poem comes hurling through space. If the poet doesn’t catch it, if a poet isn’t listening close enough, the poem moves right through them and goes to someone else. Someone who will write it down.
I lost the poem, Max thought. I didn’t listen.
IN FRONT OF HER OFFICE, the guidance counselor hung a clipboard with a sign-up sheet. Students could schedule an appointment to meet about college applications. Max scrawled his name in lean capital letters under someone named Mikey Sunman. The pencil in his hand kept slipping. His grip was still wrong. A blue cross grew from the bottom edge of the sign-up sheet. Max fought the urge to color the cross black.
College. Max had never considered college until now. He’d never considered much else but the moment he stood in or the moments from which he fled. The power had done that to him, he realized. His power pinned him to the present and to the past. The future had been a thing he ignored.
Max stood in the hall. In two years, he would be in college. Would he go somewhere in America? Would he return to Germany? His parents only planned to stay in Alabama for three years. Suddenly, that number sounded infinitesimal. A dot chewed out by the great jaw of the universe. Max wanted to stay, he realized. Maybe not in Alabama, but here. In America. Max pictured Pan at college somewhere in New England, a place he couldn’t visualize, though he did conjure images of cardigans, fall leaves, fresh espresso. He thought of Billie in California drinking strawberry juice in the sun. Davis and Lorne would enroll at the University of Alabama. Max pictured himself with them, the easier road. He could meet a woman, fall in love, get married, have a child. A child. Max touched the open grate of a stranger’s locker. No. A paper heart had been taped to the door. LUH U said the heart.
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