Boys of Alabama Read online

  Please thank you, said Max. But not tonight.

  Aw really? Cause you’re scared? said Knox. It’ll put the moon in you.

  Knox pointed to the moon above them. It looked like the bottom half of a smile.

  Please, Max said. I don’t want the moon. Not tonight.

  Knox studied at him. It was an expression Max had never seen, something between suspicion and intrigue. If he could pluck a thought from the hulking boy’s head and read it, Max would. Knox took a swig of the moon juice while staring Max right in the eyes. Then he sat on the ground and began to hum. The song sounded familiar. Knox hummed as he began to crawl a circle in the dirt. Max felt someone grab his arm. He turned, and there was Davis with his set mouth. Davis ground his jaw at something in between his teeth.

  Don’t mind him, Germany, Davis said. He needs to be in private.

  WHEN LORNE emerged from the stalks, Max was sitting on a log by the fire and Cole was sprawled out on his back in front of him. A beer bottle stood on his chest. Cole looked graceful in repose as his muscles relaxed against the twigs and pebbles. The same music played, and Max sailed through it just the same as he had all night, reliving the same feeling over and over again, the soulful shudder.

  Lorne walked toward two boys huddled near the shed playing War on a turned-over cardboard box. Max did a sweep for Pan. But he wasn’t there. He hadn’t returned. It was just Lorne, who still looked hungry. Maybe he would always be hungry. Even when Max hunched down in the bed of the pickup truck and it bounced over the dirt road back toward town, Pan was still gone.

  Dawn was revealing herself over the treetops like a lady pulling up the hem of her skirt. Dawn was a headache that was as pink and light blue as the veins that ran over Max’s eyelids. He watched the fields for Pan, watched to see skinny hips shake through the tall stems, but he saw nothing. Knox was curled up in the bed of the same truck singing, moaning for Jesus, calling out for Jesus like Jesus was a woman he could love. Max lay on his back when they hit the main road and let the air from interstate lift the night off his clothes and he shut his eyes, so he couldn’t see the clouds or the telephone wires or the billboards with their fine font and pornographic pictures showing off everything he could ever want to eat.

  MONDAY MORNING. Lifted trucks and beat-up sedans and jeeps with roll bars filled the school parking lot. Girls from the cheer squad applied makeup in the back of a pickup. Max’s mother dropped him off by the front steps. It smelled like hash browns. The sun shone bright as orange juice. Pan stood on a curb that gave way to a hill that sloped down to a freshly mowed practice field. He pouted beneath a black tiara perched in his black hair. It seemed people at school mostly ignored Pan’s weirdness.

  Pan drew in a deep lungful of his Virginia Slim and shot out a clean blue line of smoke. Max had to stop himself from grinning. He had worried all weekend. He had made up scenarios in his head of Pan being left for dead or Pan hitchhiking home on the lone highway and being picked up by an ax murderer or a truck-driving rapist, all of which could happen here in America. He had imagined Pan getting lost on the back roads and deciding, why not, to just take up home in a shack somewhere forever as a runaway. He had thought: Might not see him again.

  Pan wore mesh gloves and his bangs hit his eyebrows like they meant it. He combed the gridiron where two boys were running suicides. He turned his head in Max’s direction as if Max had called out his name. He pulled at his cigarette and dialed his eyes right into Max. It sent fish swimming through him. Max averted his eyes, pretended he was thinking of something that made him look at a variety of objects without realizing it. He pretended Pan was one of those objects. He turned and walked toward the school and its sullen brick face. He climbed the red stairs into the red building. The heat drew a smell from his armpits. Or at least Max pretended it was the heat.

  In Physics, Pan sketched concentric circles on a paper between them.

  What are you doing tomorrow night? Pan asked.

  Me? asked Max.

  No, the girl behind you, said Pan.

  Max looked behind him to an empty chair and realized a joke had been made.

  Lol, said Pan. You’re funny. Yes. You. You got plans or what? After practice, what are you doing?

  Dinner with my parents like is usual.

  We need to find a time to work on this project. I was thinking it’s a nice idea to do it outside of school. My house is a wrecking ball right now. So, can I dinner at your abode?

  You want to come over?

  Can I come over to work on our project? asked Pan. To your house?

  Pan sat straight and did not move his focus from Max. The boy’s attention unsettled him. Pan dug at his cheek to get at a mosquito bite as he waited for Max to respond. The bite bled and Pan’s finger took a smear of makeup away with it.

  You can please, said Max. Yes.

  THE YEAR BEFORE, MAX HAD attended a Gordon Parks photo essay exhibition on a school trip to Amsterdam. The exhibition documented the segregation of the Deep South. Later, when Max’s parents told him they were moving to Alabama, it was this exhibition that came to his mind. He would not live in the America of New York or California. His would be a different America. The idea delighted his father, who had grown up living in many of Europe’s biggest cities and found the American South to be a mysterious location for a family adventure. Max had never lived outside of Germany, though his father had taught him to speak English like an international, preparing him for such an occasion. His parents had given him what his father called an international name. Anyone in the world can pronounce Max.

  Max remembered one photo from the Parks exhibition where under a sign that read ice milk sold here, a black girl drank from a water fountain marked colored only. A line of people formed behind the girl but to her right stood an empty fountain. The sign painted on its front said white only. He had felt the white ice of the milk travel down his throat as if he had drunk it himself. Kept it only for himself. Sweat brimmed on the brows of the men and women who waited. Max knew people became the place where they lived and made up all kinds of reasons to justify their becoming. He knew normal kids whose grandfathers had been Nazis. Max wondered what kind of a man he would become if given the choice. No one could tell him that yet.

  Another photo at the exhibition showed two black boys and one white boy playing with plastic guns, grinning straight into the lens. The hand of one boy had extended with a pistol that pointed at the viewer, one eye closed in a squint like bang. It had surprised Max to see the black boys and the white boy playing as friends, as if they liked one another. All three boys looked poor, and Max wondered if it was the poverty that had united them. There were many things about Alabama he already didn’t understand. Max brought the photo to the front of his mind and placed it beside the image he had of Wes and Davis, their helmets in their hands, staring at him like he was the camera, walking toward him. This didn’t seem like the same Alabama from the photos.

  Wes said, We’re going to stay late today and I’m going to teach you how to catch.

  First game’s coming, said Davis. You might not start, but we don’t want to lose those legs of yours. They can be, like, a secret weapon.

  Wes stood before him in his blue practice jersey. Not the hunter green school colors they’d wear on the first game.

  Wes ran him into the ground. He arced ball after ball into the air and Max missed them all. Max looked over his left shoulder just in time to hear the ball crash into the grass over his right.

  Wes said, Let’s go again.

  Patience came easy to Wes, who explained the rules two times. Three times. Seventeen.

  Wes showed Max the three-point stance. How to burst off the line of scrimmage. Wes crouched beside him.

  Now try it a dozen times, said Wes. Then a dozen more.

  The sun tipped behind the trees and the blue above them slanted into orange and then purple. Wes kept throwing. Fireflies turned on and blinked like stars in the space over the field.

  Yo
u’re getting it, said Wes.

  Never cradle a ball to catch it.

  Hold your arms away from your body to receive.

  Keep your thumbs together, spread your hands as wide as possible.

  Beautiful. Yes, that’s how you catch. That’s how you do it, son. Three in a row. Beautiful!

  MAX HAD NEVER KNOWN PRIVACY like the kind he had in Alabama. His bedroom was giant and had its own bathroom attached. He could regard the green lawn outside his window. Down the street were houses just like his. Rows of them. He could see, if he looked, the same blue television in the window of each living room. The trees that lined the wide, well-paved lanes grew to the same height because they had been planted at the same time. These were nothing like the unkempt forests that lined the country roads.

  At six o’clock every evening, an old woman with a stick for fending off stray dogs would stride down the road in front of his house. Walking was so out of place in Delilah that the sight of her caused Max to pause whatever he was doing and observe her from his bedroom window. There was something rebellious about the sight of her. That night Max did not see the woman because he needed to get ready for Pan to come over.

  His thighs and hands ached, and Max welcomed it. Wes had called him son, had said he was beautiful. Max combed his hair slick to his head. He spat at his reflection in the mirror and watched the bubble cry down the glass. Max did not see beauty. He tussled his curls. Nothing sat right. Max’s face usually pleased him but now it made him want to rip his own shirt from his shoulders. An ogre stared back. Pan was scheduled to come any minute. They had planned to build a magnetic field that was stronger than the earth’s.

  Pan arrived late. When the doorbell rang, Max sprang from the recliner he had been sulking in as if nothing was wrong. Pan didn’t apologize for his tardiness. At dinner, he would only eat potatoes. Vegan.

  Aren’t you supposed to live on red meat and friend chicken around here? asked Max’s father.

  I don’t identify as around here, replied Pan.

  Max’s father stared at Pan for one long beat, perhaps unwinding the meaning of what he said, perhaps wondering if he should probe further into the subject of around here. Max and his mother stuck forks into the meat on their plate. The blood had been baked brown. The texture was the right amount of chew.

  Take whatever you like, Max’s mother told Pan.

  So, what do you eat then? asked his father. If not meat?

  I’m a fan of Spaghetti Hoops, said Pan. They’re my favorite. My number one. The perfect portable food item.

  Max had been relieved at the sight of Pan in Carhartt overalls, not leather chaps or a lace bodice or even a delicate dark chemise. He did not want to sit at the dinner table with Pan in girl clothing and his father stroking his khaki beard. Max could almost see the boy scout Price had told him about. He noticed the hint of another person, a previous self, in the way Pan wore the overalls almost like a man. His stubble was coming through on his chin.

  I was going to order a bucket of thighs from the Chicken Shop but now I’m glad I didn’t, said Max’s mother as she passed Pan more potatoes. I get so nervous when I think about cooking Southern food. You know I read in a regional cookbook to sprinkle potato chips on top of casseroles? For the topping.

  Common as apple pie, said Pan.

  I was maybe a vegan once, Max’s mother said. But I couldn’t manage to get the protein.

  You never were a vegan, Max said.

  I was, she said. But I ate eggs and fish. Does eggs and fish count?

  I’ll let it slide, Pan said.

  What will you let it do? Max asked, wondering if this was part of the American politeness he’d heard about. But she was not vegan. Egg is not vegan.

  I’ll count it, said Pan.

  And where are you from then? Max’s father asked, as if he couldn’t help himself any longer. Originally?

  Max looked at Pan, at his high cheekbones and deep tan. The way his genes came together on his face meant foreign, but foreign from where was hard to tell. Max would have believed it if Pan told him he had appeared from somewhere spectacular like thin air.

  Mexico? His father asked, settling back in his chair with his glass of milk.

  Max stared into his lap. He’d never felt embarrassed by his father before, but now the sensation was as real as the meat on his plate.

  I’m not from Mexico, said Pan. I’m from right up the road. Born and raised. Unfortunately.

  Where are your parents from then? Max’s father asked because the answer didn’t satisfy him. Mexico?

  Pan said his mother was from Puerto Rico.

  Puerto Rico, said his father. Bingo! He said this with pride, like he’d won a prize, like Mexico and Puerto Rico were the same thing.

  He smiled and tugged at his beard but let it go at that.

  When Max shut the door to his room upstairs, he apologized for his father.

  He doesn’t care actually where you’re coming from, said Max, feeling his face heat up again. He wants only to know because he’s curious.

  Honey, said Pan. It’s as depressing as a jail cell in here. You seriously need to decorate.

  Max stared at his blank walls as if seeing them for the first time, and at his bare dresser with the lone blue comb atop it, his clean beige carpet, and the T-shirt folded on his bed.

  Pan asked Max if he had ever met a witch in real life. When Max said he guessed not, Pan asked if he believed in witches.

  In ghosts I believe, said Max. In dead things I believe.

  Thought so, said Pan. That’s close enough by me.

  Is it? Max said.

  The way Pan stood in the center of the room, so calm and confident, made Max fidget. He tried to stand in the most normal way possible, hands tucked into his pockets, chest pitched proudly out. In his head he repeated: Not nervous, not nervous, not nervous. It was a mantra. A manifestation. And it worked zero percent.

  Want to learn how to cast a circle? asked Pan.

  It was Max’s turn to speak but he had no idea what a circle was or if he wanted to cast one. It was quiet in his room. Max heard the foundation settle and the walls creak as they breathed out.

  Say something, said Pan. His hands hung at the end of his pin-thin wrists. They fell stunningly by his side. You look nervous as a cat in a room of rocking chairs. You scared?

  Max felt like he was on a date, but he knew he wasn’t. Maybe it was that he wished he was on a date. But he didn’t know what a date even was or how to do that here or anywhere.

  Pan unzipped the jacket he’d been wearing over his Carhartt’s. Beneath his overalls was just skin, no undershirt at all. Pan wore a Band-Aid over each nipple.

  No, said Max.

  Mascara clumped in the corner of Pan’s eyes, and Max fought the urge to reach out and clean him.

  Course you aren’t, said Pan. Now sit down and be still.

  What is circle? Is that like a prayer? Like rat magic?

  What did you say? said Pan. Did you say rat magic?

  No, said Max. Fear replaced his curiosity.

  Pan smacked his thigh.

  You almost sound like someone who’s been here a minute. Have they started on you yet? Are you saved yet?

  Saved? Asked Max. What does it mean, saved?

  He thought of the Judge falling from a cliff and not dying. Was that saved?

  Okay, said Pan. So not yet. That’s good. Now just sit down. Why be saved when you can just be safe?

  He made Max cross his legs on the floor and focus on his breath as it traveled in and out of his lungs. Pan ordered Max to concentrate on the feeling of air entering the chest, expanding, and scraping through his throat and nose on its exit. Max opened one eye long enough to watch Pan point to the four corners of Max’s room and recite a mantra at each cardinal direction. He pointed up and down and then Pan flicked his own chest.

  Circle is opened, said Pan.

  Pan spoke nonsense words, a guttural sound, a spew. Max became light-headed but maybe
it was because he held his breath for a long time. They sat for what seemed like ages in complete silence. Max became bored. He wondered if he could fall asleep sitting up. He wondered if Pan had any real power or if this is what he meant when he’d said he was a witch. He peeked again at Pan and his eyes were wide open.

  This is the question-and-answer part of our séance, said Pan. Time to go deep into the tangles of our minds. Ready?

  We go into the tangles, said Max.

  What do you really want from life? Pan asked.

  I don’t know, said Max. His throat tightened. I have not so much thought about it.

  That’s okay, said Pan. That’s normal. It’s the answer I expected. No one really considers what they want from life. Unless you’re brainwashed. Then you think you know. But you don’t know. We all just walk around like robots doing what we think we’re supposed to do and then we die, said Pan. It can make one very depressed.

  Max thought he understood what Pan meant.

  Max said, I think what I want is the exact same thing as what everyone is wanting.

  Pan scrunched his forehead.

  No, you don’t, he said. I know you don’t. I can already tell. So, don’t say that and start lying like a liar.

  Sorry, said Max. What is it you can tell?

  I said you’re not like the others. I can see that plain as the day is long.

  Pan wrapped his jacket around his skinny shoulders like a lady tightening her shawl in the cold.

  Max tingled from all the attention. What could Pan see?

  What kind of witch are you? asked Max.

  Have you ever seen the television show Psychic South?

  Max hadn’t. Pan explained how during the show the producers made psychics compete by taking them to places where horrible things had happened: churches, steel mills, piers on the edge of an ocean. Then the psychics had to reconstruct the event that happened in detail—the rapes, the murders, the burnings alive. Whoever recounted the event the closest to the truth won.

  I saw a woman tell of a stabbing like it happened right before her, like she was there. She’s that in touch with the spiritual realm, said Pan.