Boys of Alabama Page 2

  His mother said, Well, they certainly are proud.

  Reminds me of Rome, Max said. He snapped a picture of the picture with his disposable camera. Like the Colosseum, he said. The size of them. The stadium’s huge. People take trips there just to look, right?

  His mother snorted.

  Max took a picture of his mother drizzling honey over her biscuit like the cheerleading waitress recommended.

  I’ve never tasted something this good, said his mother. She held up her biscuit and stared at its breaded face. They imported you from heaven. I’m sure of it. Almost makes me believe in this God.

  Max chewed on something called chicken-fried steak. His craving caused him to pour syrup over his meat. His mouth stung with a sweetness that reached into the roots of his teeth. He took more pictures of the photographs above their table. The players made him think of Florence and the summer he’d seen the David statue, how he’d pushed his way to the front of the crowd to gaze at the Roman body. Here were those same lines chiseled into football players from Alabama as they reached their notched arms out to catch something coming right for them.

  MAX HAD NEVER WATCHED an American football game, but when the guidance counselor asked what he was good at, his father cut in and said: Max is a runner. Fastest on his track team.

  Max eyed the crucifix on the counselor’s wall, the daily devotional that doubled as a calendar on her desk. The guidance counselor smiled at Max with a new warmth.

  Oh, she said. You’ll be a football boy.

  Max’s father nodded. He draped his arm around his son’s shoulders.

  That’ll keep you busy, he said as they walked out into the soupy afternoon. Keep those headaches away.

  At practice, the boys on the football team towered over him. Their shadows prowled beside them like animals on the freshly sheared field. Their eyes were soft, and their teeth were tinted Coca-Cola brown. The heat did not slow them. It sat in sweaty foreheads and shimmered down their necks. Max had difficulty enduring the weather. Monday was hotter than Sunday and Sunday had been hotter than Saturday. It seemed to continue that way, each day trying to stuff more heat inside itself. Relief happened at the less-hot times, early mornings when the sun was just a promise edging at the sky and in the late afternoon, nearly dusk, when the midday rain had left a layer of cool behind it. Sweat found Max anyway. It slipped out of his body and greased his limbs.

  Coach lined the players on the edge of the field. They crouched low. Max heard himself breathe inside his helmet. He’d been tackled with such ferocity he feared his ear was bleeding, but he hadn’t had a chance to take off his helmet to check. His elbow throbbed. His knee screamed. His leg made a right angle with the earth.

  Ready.

  Coach jabbed at the air, and the whistle trilled.

  Run!

  Running was the only part of the game Max understood. The shape of the ball and the arrangement of the offensive and defensive lines puzzled him. The slow way they moved toward the goalpost. The pain of collision and the courage it took to hit someone bigger than you. But to run, he understood. His body shot forward.

  Max pulled out ahead of the pack of boys, revealing his speed like it was a kind of trick. He could hear their grunts behind him, trying to catch up. His legs burned. He lived for that feeling, that burning under his skin like his muscles might melt. He liked to reach through the pain and touch what was on the other end of it. He could run forever. As Max won each round of sprints, he felt himself becoming a prize. Suicide after suicide, he hit the white line first.

  Nazi dude sure got a talent for gassers, said a boy named Davis.

  Max winced.

  Do not please, he said, call me that.

  Davis’s corn-silk hair was long enough to slip behind his ears. He studied Max. Max hoped he hadn’t sounded too formal. He hadn’t learned the regional slang yet. He smiled because he knew that Americans liked smiles. This was something his mother had told him. Americans like smiles and they like pleasant, happy things. You should speak as though you are ending your sentences with an exclamation point. Everything should sound cheerful. Awesome and amazing.

  All right then, Davis said. He spat at the ground. We’ll call you Germany then.

  Davis didn’t smile, and Max wondered if something had gone wrong. Davis had perfected a scowl of detached evaluation that could sweep over a person and bring them into immediate awareness of their own physical shortcomings. But Max had a feeling Davis wanted to be his friend. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve it, but he basked in the promise of it.

  This here is Wes, Davis said catching a handsome player by the shoulder and corralling him. He’s like a pinch of genuine Miracle-Gro sprinkled upon our dumb, dirty asses.

  Max must have looked confused because Davis continued.

  What I mean is—he brings the magic to the team. Wes is our quarterback. His arm is a wonder of the world. So, handle him with care.

  Pleasure, said Wes. His hand extended from a limb of pure, perfect muscle. Max watched his bicep flex and felt something tighten at the base of his tongue.

  A pleasure, Max said back because he didn’t understand the context of the word, and what he didn’t understand, he repeated.

  Max here is from Naziland and we’re going to call him Germany.

  Cool, said Wes. Sup, Germany?

  Wes here is the whitest black boy on earth, said Davis.

  It seemed Davis meant this as a compliment, and Wes smiled and shook his head, but Max wasn’t sure what Wes was thinking. Max was not skilled at discerning what lived below the surface of a person.

  Max here is one fast fucker, said Davis.

  I like to run, said Max. Feels freedom.

  Davis said, Say what? You feel freedom? That’s cute, Germany. I need to remember that one. Running feels freedom.

  Davis spread his arms before him like he was visualizing the slogan written in the clouds.

  Wes began to laugh. The two of them, Davis and Wes, stood in the sun laughing until Max began to laugh, too. It felt good to laugh with other people.

  As Max got in line for the next drill, sweat pouring down his chest and his whole aching torso, he was happy. He’d never played a team sport. Never felt like another person might count on him and come to love him for how well he played a game. Coach patted Max on the back and his spine grew an inch to meet it.

  During a Gatorade break by the bleachers, Max looked up toward the parking lot at a line of trucks. He noticed a figure pacing the lot. Max had a moment of déjà vu. The figure smoked in broad daylight on school property. There was something about the angle of the elbow as it lifted the cigarette, something about the way the chin tilted to the sun. The familiarity unsettled him. The figure walked in front of a row of pickups like a kind of dark angel, beautiful and gaunt and hawkish in high heels and lipstick so black Max could see it from where he stood. The figure seemed to be waiting for something. Davis caught Max staring.

  Every town got a witch, don’t it? said Davis, who was standing in line behind him. Well, that up there is ours. Don’t worry. He don’t bite.

  Break was over. Davis shoved him forward, and Max stumbled toward the orange cone that marked the start of the sprint.

  Impress me, Coach yelled as they ran. Show me you’re faster than I think you are. Impress yourselves. Show that boy next to you how bad you want it! Show yourself how bad you want it.

  When Max finished running, he scanned the parking lot for the witch, but it was gone.

  Someone named Knox came up to Max as they walked to the locker room after practice. His eyes wouldn’t focus when he talked, a side effect Max attributed to the continual collision of helmet on helmet at high gait. Knox was missing a tooth. Not one of the front ones, but a noticeable one in the back of his mouth.

  You fast as a Cheeto, Knox said. A goddamn Cheeto Puff. He sounded pleased. Goddamn, he said. Now we just need to see if you have soft hands.

  Max stared at his hands. What did Knox know about h
is hands?

  It’s another figure of speech, Max assured himself. It’s about catching a football.

  You all right, Cheeto Puff? You look spooked.

  A patch of hair fuzzed above Knox’s lip. He licked the sweat from it. The fading light lit up his acne scars, which were driven like craters into his skin. He cares, thought Max, about how I am. Max glanced again at Knox’s missing tooth, at the black nothing between his molars, and Knox snapped his mouth shut. Max felt he’d done something he shouldn’t.

  A group of boys hollered past them and took off running up the embankment behind the metal backs of the bleachers. Knox jogged ahead to catch them. The boys’ butts flexed beneath their dirty football tights as they ran. Max averted his eyes. The scoreboard’s bulbs were off, but the presence of the dimmed lights standing sentinel along the field reminded Max of the stakes of each tackle. The gravity of each yard.

  MAX WOKE UP WITH HIVES. The headache behind his eyes pulsed white each time he blinked. He took a handful of Skittles from his bedside table and swallowed them. Running helped. He could travel through the pain. It healed him. He took off toward the highway behind his house, but he stayed on the shoulder. Cars yelled their horns at him as if running on the road was so weird, they had to comment on it, scare the impulse out of him. It worked. One truck drove so close he thought the side mirror might clip his arm.

  Get off the road! bellowed a man from the truck’s open window.

  The vehicle careened away, leaving Max in a cough of mean smoke. He jogged from the main road, down the side of the shoulder into a slant of land where something like a sewage drain carried sludge and leaves in a slow trickle. It looked almost like a creek. Beyond the creek, a wooded area thickened with spindly bushes and pine needles and tallish trees.

  He sat down on a slab of concrete and caught his breath and stared at the forestlike thing in front of him. Stuff grew everywhere. Really, everywhere. Heat pulled life out of the cracks in the concrete, gashes in tree trunks, putrid planks of wood. A purple bloom grew out of a rubber tire. But a bunch of things were dead, too, burned up and withered. Max moved his gaze over the death uneasily. The wilted azaleas, trampled clovers, a cat with a bouquet of flies buzzing above its mashed brain. People here did not take care of the land or the creatures in it. He popped every knuckle on his hand and tried to push down the urge clawing its way up from some hidden place.

  Death had begun calling out to him years ago, when puberty mounted his body. It had come as suddenly as the new creak and boom that thickened his voice. That winter had been lonely and long-shadowed. Max had been walking behind his house in Hamburg, under the naked arms of the trees when he discovered a dead mouse. Steam had lifted up from the tuft of fur, and bright blood stained the white ground. The year had been filled with sadness, and Max couldn’t take another inch of it. Not even the dead mouse. He had knelt before it and let out a sob. Snow had drenched the corduroy of his knees. That’s when the feeling had gotten into him. Like a voice whispering in his ear: Touch the body. Eat the death. Max could taste it even now in the heat of Alabama, like a flake of snow melting into his gums.

  The mouse’s life had been hovering somewhere nearby, caught in the air just outside of its body, and Max had known that he could guide the life back into the mouse if he tried. It would be like pointing the way. Max remembered taking off his mitten and directing one finger toward the mouse’s belly. He had touched it, slowly, as if to pet it. A warm blue had spilled into the back of Max’s throat. The mouse’s life had tasted like a slow stroll through a garden at sundown. The tail had twitched, and Max had watched as the guts wiggled back in as if the animal were eating its intestines. Max’s tongue had turned into a blueberry. A burst of ice. He had continued to stroke the body, and as he did, it repaired itself.

  Max had wanted to tell Nils immediately, to climb through the window of his friend’s bedroom and confess what he had discovered, his terrifying new ability, but they had stopped seeing each other by then. Max had been standing in the yard between his house and Nils’s. He had looked toward Nils’s room half expecting to see the gaunt face, pale as a plate of salt, watching him. But no one had been watching. The window had been empty and the curtains inside were drawn.

  Max had wondered at first if the mouse had just been sleeping. But he tested his ability again on a beetle and then a rose. Both burst back to life. Both left stains of sweetness in his mouth. He had felt chosen, but for what, he hadn’t known. For days after, he had sought out death and had delighted in what he could do to it. His hands were magic. They could save. The new power thrilled him until it didn’t.

  The chosen feeling turned to fear. Where did the power come from and what did it want?

  Max stood up from the log. He shook the memory away and walked toward the dead cat. Whose cat was this? Max wondered. He knelt down. It looked so dead. Maybe the cat belonged to a girl, a small girl who buried a shoe box filled with torn paper and no body. The girl must miss her cat. How evil was he, Max wondered, if he did not bring the animal to life for the sake of this catless girl? He pictured her discovering her pet returned—alive and purring.

  No, Max thought. He grabbed his right hand and shoved it into his pocket.

  Clips of memory came colliding back.

  His mom at Nils’s funeral.

  His hand a thing he hated.

  What happened to your hand, honey?

  I saw him punch a window threaded with steel.

  That’s ridiculous.

  Max had told himself: Be normal in America; watch someone kill a cockroach, walk past roadkill, let the butterfly stay withered between two panes of glass. The curse could stay in Germany along with the rest of his strangeness and darkness and shame. Max held his right hand down with his left and trudged back up the hill. A dead bush withered before him. He saw this new landscape, and he couldn’t help himself.

  He ran his hands over his arms like he was cold. He ran his hands over his face and down his neck, trying to keep them busy. Maybe it was worse to leave the things dead, Max thought. No cars charged down the road behind him, a lull in traffic. He was alone. It was so quiet now. No one would see him. He walked to the brain-smashed cat. He picked it up and felt a warm body purr in his arms. He tossed it back to the ground. It landed on all fours and meowed. He struck his hand through the dead twist of shrunken, budless branches. It felt so good.

  Burst of honey crystal.

  Wet raspberries.

  Syrupy apples.

  Max dragged his fingers through the jasmine bushes. The wilted buds burst into bloom behind him. His mouth a tart cherry. His mouth a rose and an orange. Max never knew how the soul of a dead thing would taste as it traveled into his mouth, through his body, back into form. But death always tasted sweet. Even though the sweetness never lasted. It wore him out. The recovery period required long naps that lasted an entire afternoon. His healings induced bright, burning headaches, sharper than the hiss in his eyes when he stared into the direct sun.

  A boy his age shouldn’t be sleeping all afternoon.

  Shh, he just lost his best friend.

  What’s with the sling?

  He should be playing with other kids.

  He’s sleeping with a wet cloth across his eyes when it’s daylight.

  He’s just different, that’s all.

  He’s failing his classes.

  He falls asleep at his desk.

  As Max walked through the Southern death, he used his power on everything in his way: dried-up leaves, a stepped-on spider, crushed clovers.

  He stopped, panting, in the middle of the thicket and glared. A fence stood right in front of him. This piece of forest wasn’t so big after all. It was just section of land running between the road and part of a neighborhood. His neighborhood. A dog began barking on the other side of the wooden slats. Max’s heart pounded in great, thundering blows. The traffic in the distance came charging toward his ears. He’d been careless. He was not alone.

  Something
back there, Bruno? called a gruff man’s voice. What’s back there? Who’s there?

  Max fought the urge to ram his knuckles into the bark of a tree as punishment.

  Who’s back there, Bruno? the voice graveled again, closer to the fence this time.

  Max took off running toward the incline, toward the shoulder of the main road. Running felt good, that familiar fast feeling in his legs. How could I be so stupid? His stomach turned and burned. The people in Alabama had been so nice. But would they talk to him so sweetly, he wondered, if they knew what he could do?

  DELILAH DID NOT HAVE a town square. Delilah had stores laid out in strips, one real mall, about a dozen churches, and state-famous BBQ restaurants that promised to make you lick your own fingers. It had cotton fields and enormous amounts of land owned by men. Men owned the earth in Delilah, and you weren’t allowed on it unless invited. That’s what Max’s mother explained. In Germany, you could walk anywhere not circled in by a fence, but here a man could own the ground and forbid others from it. If you entered without permission, anything could happen.

  In Delilah, you could eat breakfast at gas stations. Max’s mother dropped him off at the gas station near school so he could get a biscuit before class. He’d walk the rest of the distance to God’s Way alone. Max felt silly standing in line in his uniform. The stitched cross anchored over his left breast. In line in front of him was another student. When Max got closer, he saw it was the witch. The witch’s name was Pan.

  Pan said, I reckon you as new.

  Just have moved here, Max replied.

  Daddy’s got a job making SUVs? asked Pan.

  How do you know this?

  Vell, let me vink.

  My accent, said Max. Okay.

  Max noticed the stick-and-poke tattoos on Pan’s hands. REAL read one, LIFE the other. They weren’t sentences, but they counted. Pan held his REAL hand out toward Max as if it were something he did every day, as if his fist were anyone’s fist, as if Max could shake it and then put it away. The déjà vu feeling rose up again and unfolded around him. He had the sensation he was standing with Pan inside a memory they shared. They had met before. He was sure of it. He almost asked: Do I know you?