They had convened in an old lot outside town where no one would see them. Pan wanted to test Max’s abilities. Max stood there squinting. His neck throbbed like a fresh bruise. He massaged it and stared at the flies gathered and floating above the bodies.
The sky had a faint red bleed, especially at the bottom, at the spot where the tips of the pines sank into the sky like a row of jagged bottom teeth. That’s what it looked like to Max, like fangs dug in and blood dripping down the chin of the sky, pooling at the horizon. The heat hung steady and dank without any wind, and the heaviness and the stench from the animals made Max’s vision skew red. Everything had that tint.
Max had tried to keep from using his power like his father tried to keep from eating salt. It tasted too good to be good. An X-ray of his midsection might present a radioactive glow. It had to go somewhere, all that rot and death. Maybe it started in his toes, and it filled him from there like someone was holding a bucket of death-water above his head. With each animal he healed, another soul deposited in the bucket of death-water. He had a word for it now, since the Judge’s BBQ, all the darkness swirling around inside of him. Maybe it was sin.
Do it, Pan said and stood back.
Max wished Pan would come closer. Place an elbow on his shoulder to steady him. What Max needed was a body against his, even if he couldn’t ask for it. Move closer. Step in. He needed to be grounded into the bigness of the moment. He needed Pan to tell him this was okay. That he was okay. He never realized how much that mattered to him until now. It mattered that someone could watch him use his power and not think: wrong, contaminated, criminal.
Pan’s pink shirt collected the sweat from his back and stuck to him. Max studied Pan’s neck and the scales of dry skin behind his ears, the pimples on his shoulders that peaked through around the tank top. He’d never tried to heal so many animals at once. He stalled. Max reached out to stroke the neck of three different felines: alley cat, tomcat, black kitten. The shock was ultrasonic. He knew it in his jaw. After seven healings, his mind went one hundred miles per hour toward something he could not see. The smack of cinnamon burned the roof of his mouth. It was sweet and hot, and Max’s face dripped, and Pan wiped it with the bottom of his tank top. He was on his back in the unmowed grass.
Pan stood over Max. He stood in the middle of his blinking and drilled a feeling of wordless wonder down on him.
He said, I knew it. I just knew you were magic.
Max heard a dog whimper. Out of the corner of his eye he observed a black kitten walk across the lot.
Did I do it? he asked, but he already knew the answer.
His temples hummed like a quiet country song, like a bonfire snapping and flaming. Puppies barked in his inner ear. A robin sung against the back of his eyes.
Pan leaned down and kissed Max on the cheek.
PRACTICE WAS CANCELED ONE AFTERNOON, and Max hung at Davis’s house with him and Boone. Max enjoyed the hanging, as they called it. Hang: to be suspended in time together. His head still hurt from the mass animal healing. His cheek still hummed from the kiss. Max had to stop what he was doing and touch the skin, try to calm the pain. He didn’t know what to worry about more, the fact that Pan knew he could heal things or that Pan had kissed him.
Kissed. Him. Kissedhim. On the cheek, but still. Like a friend. Like the French. Or more?
Pan had been elated after Max healed the animals, as if it was something to celebrate. Maybe it was. Max had started to think maybe it was. For the first time, Max had felt proud of what he could do. They had gone for celebration sorbet. Pan called it vegan ice cream.
We can start a coven, Pan had said. He had looked at Max like he was some kind of angel, some kind of real special.
They had sat on the front of Pan’s mother’s car. Its cloth upholstery had come unstapled and sagged down almost to the crown of their heads when they drove in it. They reclined on its hood like it was a metal blanket rolled out for them at the edge of the Atlantic, but no waves had licked the sand at their feet. There had been only asphalt and car exhaust. The hood was boiling to the touch. Max tapped every smashed bug on the windshield until they were buzzing in the air around them and Pan was howling with crazed joy. Max had made Pan happy. His power had made him happy. Max and Pan put the ice cream in their mouths, not even using a spoon, just licking the melting balls that were almost too cold to eat. Above them a billboard said jesus saves and beyond that was the Judge’s face, his blue eyes watching them.
Max sat in Davis’s living room and observed Boone mash the Xbox buttons. Boone held a Capri Sun between his knees. He huffed like it was him and not his avatar who was running through a bullet-laced landscape with his gun barrel pointed in front of him, dodging the orange blasts of bombs, searching for a war enemy to kill. Boone grunted. His avatar’s boots crunched over the destroyed, rubble-strewn ground. Nazi flags dropped down from the façade of a building in the distance. Oh, thought Max. Oh. His heart sped up to catch his excitement. He sucked his own Capri Sun dry as Boone navigated the war-torn terrain on screen. The helicopter blades slashed audibly and the screams of troops killing or getting killed rippled through the heroic background ballad that set the tone of the game. The animation looked so real. Max stared at the body of two German enemies as they ran toward Boone’s scope and were thrown back, caught in Boone’s fire.
Double kill, said the game.
Boone clenched his teeth. Fuck yes, he said.
Boone had given Max a ride to Davis’s in his old Chevy. They’d stopped by Boone’s house on the way, so he could feed his pit bull, Dog. Dog was old with bad hips, and he struggled to walk. Boone explained this as they drove. He had to check on him and feed him. The house had looked older than it probably was: a dirty ranch home missing its shutters. Max was careful not to walk on the piss-colored grass of the lawn as he followed him toward the front steps. Inside, a man with the same curly black hair as Boone sat catatonic in a wheelchair, watching a daytime law program. The TV judge stared at screaming defendants and asked questions that seemed to expose them as lazy or as liars.
Max had stood in the doorway, not daring to come all the way in, and watched the man sit straight as a beam in the spine, mind folding inward, and not registering a thing, not him, not Boone. Boone carried a plate of food to the man’s chair and set it down beside him. This was the real reason they came.
The man, eyes still on the TV said: Not a goddamn vegetable on the plate, Bo. You trying to deplete me?
Then without looking at Max, he spoke to him.
He said, Who the fuck are you?
Max and Boone left without saying a word.
That’s my oldest brother, Boone had explained when they were back in the truck. He’s been in that chair for a few months now. Doctors say he might not walk again. He was doing a construction job and fell from a third-story window. Should have died but didn’t. It’s a miracle. A miracle from God.
And his legs will not work now, said Max. Or ever again?
Well, that’s the saddest part. Yes, probably not ever again. And he wanted to be a dancer. A ballet dancer. He turned our mom’s old bedroom into a studio, hammered a barre right into the wall. He’d dance for hours every night.
Boone grinned and Max glimpsed the little boy he had been. The image of the dancing brother pleased Boone. Pale veins wound through his forearms. Boone fastened his eyes on the truck’s dashboard, as if he could see an image superimposed over the mileage meter. What was he looking for? A shadow spilled over his face.
He said, Not no more though. Now he just sits in that chair and watches TV. Used to hate the TV. Called it the brain drain.
Max didn’t ask where Boone’s mother was because it had been explained to him that Boone’s sister had killed her when Boone was still little. His sister had been fighting with the mother over whether or not she could spend senior week at Gulf Shores. His sister had pulled out a shotgun that had been wrapped in a towel and hidden under the mother’s bed. In the story, she never mean
t to pull the trigger, just scare the mother, show her she meant what she was saying, but she shot her in the chest. She’d called the police after the accident, screaming that three hooded men had broken into the house with a weapon. The police found the sister in the driveway on her knees crying, face nuzzled into the grass. The following day, right on the spot where Boone’s sister had cried into the lawn, a long-stemmed rose had bloomed. Max had looked for the rose as they left the house, but not a single flower lived in the yard.
While Boone played his video game, Davis leaned against the dark wooden bookshelf, where biblical fictions about the end of the world stood spine to spine beside romance novels named after different Southern locations—Nantahala Nights, The Prince of New Orleans, Natchez Blues. Davis’s doorbell rang. The ring interrupted the explosions of video game bombs and presented to the living room three girls. Davis grinned. The girls looked bored as they surveyed the room and pined their eyes on the three boys waiting for them. Davis clapped his cracked palms together, and one of the girls jumped.
There was one girl for each of them. Max did the math and understood the consequences immediately. One of the girls would be his. Max recognized a girl Davis regularly talked about in the locker room. Renata. The girl who let him ejaculate on her naked breasts. Davis called Renata his experimenter. What they did sexually was experimenting, not serious, but practice for the people they would one day marry.
It’s not sex unless you name it sex, Davis had explained to Max. Sex is an intentional act. What we are doing is playing. Experimenting. Getting good.
The boys were supposedly babysitting Davis’s half brother, Duke, a toddler with a demonic laugh, but mostly the baby went untended. Left to his mischief. As if to greet the girls, Duke marched around the room. His nose leaked green fluid. Davis grabbed Duke, picked him up, and shook him until his hands unclenched dirt from a potted plant.
That’s nasty, Davis said. Don’t be nasty and eat plant matter, he growled, nose pushed to his brother’s cheek. Your mom will ground my ass if she knows you’re eating her plants under my watch again.
Davis must be excited about the girls, about the nearness of his experimenter, Max thought, because he’s showing off and acting cruel. Normally, he’d ignore Duke.
Stop it, said Davis. Stop crying.
He put his brother back on the carpet and pretended to kick him but stopped his cowboy boot just before it would have made contact with the face.
Y’all sickos, said one of the girls. Quit your yelling. You’re not going to fix anything by screaming at a baby. What you’re going to do is make it worse.
She walked over to Duke and scooped him up, bounced him on her hip. Max couldn’t imagine how she knew how to do it, because after a few moments the baby cooed and grabbed at her ears and dribbled chewed dirt from his mouth.
You got something it can color with or whatever? she asked.
She patted Duke’s sweaty hair. On her thumb was a giant Ring Pop like the kind Pan sometimes wore. The baby tried to shove it in his mouth.
This was how it went: Davis and Boone disappeared with their respective girls. Davis went to the basement. He appreciated it because it was insulated. No one could hear what happened down there. The Christmas lights that hung year-round from the rafters made for romance. The big-screen TV could be set to a station that played love songs. Private was how Davis liked it. Boone claimed the girl called Amy Grace. Renata and Amy Grace both had hazel eyes and high ponytails and lipstick the color of pink fruit with a smell between cookie batter and ripe flowers. Renata left a binder behind on the coffee table. Inside the see-through sleeve was an illustration she’d drawn of a Widespread Panic song. The lyrics exploded in an acid trip of color. A school bus flew over a rainbow. The sun gazed stoned and cross-eyed from behind a purple cloud. A dog sprinted across a mountain.
They gave Max the plainest yet prettiest girl, Billie, and he felt like it was an act of kindness on their part, as if Davis extended an olive branch for pummeling him into the dirt during practice that week. Billie was square-faced and tiny-eared with eyes set far apart. Remnants of baby-bang, scant wisps of hair, clung to her forehead. There was something boyish about her that Max liked. It didn’t even have to do with her name. She drank water out of a metal canteen, and her house keys dangled from a purple carabiner that hung from a loop on her shorts. Her wrists were wrapped in macramé bracelets she made herself. She yawned to reveal a gap between her front teeth. It was the kind of gap a girl on TV might have. She pushed her tongue into the gap. It seemed like a sexual provocation.
Billie was the girl who had come to the aid of Duke. She still bounced Duke on her bony, cocked-out hip. The on-pause noise from the video game played on repeat in the background. The steady fire of a machine gun set to a threatening tune of chords signaled an enemy could be around any corner.
Want a Capri Sun? Max asked. He knew there were a bunch of the fruit crush flavors in Davis’s fridge, and he wanted to get out of the living room.
Sure, said Billie.
Max’s mother hated the word sure. She said it lacked commitment.
In the kitchen, they sat beneath crocheted curtains and talked about nothing. She was not a boring girl. Max decided it was him that was boring. He couldn’t think of a single interesting thing in his head that he could unfile and hand to her. He realized then how little talking out loud he did with the boys and even with Pan. He might be limited, he thought, in his capacity to distill an original thought into a sentence.
Billie set Duke down on a towel and Duke smashed his toys together and laughed maniacally to himself. The smell of shit came from his diaper. They ignored it. Max had no idea how to change a diaper or clean a baby butt. Billie spoke about Renata, whom she called her Ultimate Best Friend. She seemed vaguely worried about her Ultimate Best Friend, who was now in a soundproof basement not drawing stoned suns or flying dogs but enacting her role as the experimenter. Billie told of how Renata had created a recipe for purple hair dye. That weekend, the painting of hair would happen.
Max listened to Billie talk and wondered what kind of things Davis and Renata did in their experiments, and if Billie also wondered or if she already knew it and knew it better than Max. Max understood he should be admiring the distance between Billie’s eyes and the slow rise and fall of her chest bones beneath her white shirt that so clearly showcased the outline of her jersey blue bra. He should want to put his fingers between the young, muscular legs that extended from her jean shorts like two brown relics of summer. He should want to take her as his experimenter. If he were a girl, Max would not mind looking like Billie. If he were a girl, maybe he would even want to kiss her.
What’s it like in Germany? said Billie.
I don’t know, Max said. How to describe a place you’re from. You see it too close to see it. I cannot think of anything to interest you.
I’m sure there are a dozen things that would interest me.
She told Max she wanted to move to Paris to be a writer when she grew up. She said it like he should know all about Paris, even though Paris was in another country. Max had only been to France a handful of times, and he had been a kid then and he couldn’t speak more than a few sentences in French. Either way, Max told her she would love Paris, though he knew nothing about this girl or what she loved. But he wanted Billie to love Paris, because he felt grateful to her for sitting a respectable distance away from him and not looking at his lips when she talked to him. She looked right into his eyes or right into her own hands, which were opening and closing in her lap. Or she stared at the curtains. She read a lot of poems, and she showed Max the side of her sneaker where she had inscribed quotes from her favorite dead poet, Sylvia Plath. She asked Max to repeat a line to her in German. She nodded at Max’s sentence and tried to say it back but what she said did not sound like German.
Very good, Max told her. Almost there.
Billie did not smile when Max praised her, but she wanted to. Max could tell.
M
ax decided he liked her and hoped that Renata was okay. He was glad that even after Duke had fallen asleep on the kitchen tiles and dusk’s shadows had slipped over them, that he was there with her.
THE BOYS LOST THEIR SECOND football game. The dark mood dissipated once they left the locker room and emerged into the steamy night outside. It had to do with the absence of Coach, whose disappointed admonishments receded into the back of their brains as soon as they were out of his earshot.
Let’s eat, fellas, said Davis.
Max rode in the bed of Boone’s pickup because Davis called shotgun. Davis spit sunflower seed shells out of the window. The wet shards hit Max in the face, but he didn’t mind. He’d played for the first time in a Friday night game. The team had been too far behind for it to matter if he fumbled a ball. But he had not fumbled. He had caught what Wes had thrown, and, for a moment, the crowd had sung for him. Roared. They chanted God’s Way, God’s Way. Max had turned. He had dug his toes into the field to push off. But he had delayed, taken a long moment to orient himself before running. He had let the mind slip in and overwhelm his instinct. The tackle that had come for him sent his head back. A white, hot star slammed against his eyes. Grass stained his nose. His helmet seemed without cushion. The world did not have cushion. What it felt like to be tackled. He had stood up grinning and initiated.
Wipe that smirk off your face, Germany, Coach had yelled. This isn’t funny.
Max leaned back against the side of Boone’s truck bed, elbows hooked over the edge, as they sped into town. Max’s lip was busted straight open. The restaurant signs blinked their neon and the streetlights overhead made him feel like he’d entered a real city in America where important things happened and stores never closed. But here, all anyone did at night was drive around or eat, which was fun enough for Max. When Lorne and Knox pulled up next to them at the stoplight, Knox stood up in the truck bed, held up his football jersey, and howled. Lorne hit the gas when the light flipped green. Knox doubled over in the back, still howling and waving his wet jersey like he wanted to surrender something. Lorne turned his truck down a one-way road going the wrong direction. Max gripped the metal edges of the truck bed, terrified. Boone was trying to find a shortcut to the Chicken Shop, so he could beat Lorne there, get there first and win. Max felt Boone accelerate, the engine let out a grinding metal sound, and Max knew they were going to race. He slammed his eyes shut.
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