Boys of Alabama

by Genevieve Hudson

  Max blinked at him.

  I’m a witch remember? I could tell someone died.

  Pan held a cup of Smirnoff to Max’s mouth and watched him drink from it. His eyeliner looked feline. A cat purred at him. Max pictured Pan drawing himself in with a black pencil, circling his eyes as if to confirm their presence.

  Your aura’s got a bruise on it. Pan flicked Max lightly in the middle of his forehead. Right. There. Bruised. So, tell me.

  Max heard himself say Nils’s name. The N was hard. It crunched in his mouth. Max heard himself start to tell Pan about the neighbor boy and the beet cake and the toothbrushes they’d shared. The blood in his mouth. The tongue he swallowed.

  He needed me.

  Max looked toward the window, no screen on it. It sat open. The bugs flew right in.

  And I let him down.

  The story came fully formed from Max’s mouth as if he had been waiting to tell it.

  After Nils had moved next door, it had taken exactly two weeks for Max to become obsessed with his new friend, the tow-haired Nils with a Nordic sheen to his skin and eyes as light as clouds. Elevenyear-old Nils had been so pale, he practically glowed in the dark.

  Cause I’m made of star stuff, Nils had told Max.

  But it was because he was recovering from leukemia.

  Max and Nils became inseparable. Bonded like brothers. They roamed in and out of each other’s houses as if they were the same. They built a castle inside a tree and made their wars there. They became princes and dragons and celebrated knights. They became soldiers who died only to be brought back to life. While the other boys bought skateboards, they ran through the streets of their imaginations.

  Then they grew older, touched their teenage years, and stopped spending days in the tree. They traded their wooden swords for Tintin comics. They read about Tintin’s adventures to Tibet, America, and even to the moon. Nils’s mother served them apple juice in ceramic mugs and plates of homemade beet cake. They splayed their bodies on the floor of Nils’s room, tangled together at the legs. Nils never slept through the night. The monsters in his mind stopped his slumber. He wanted to crawl into Max’s dreams instead. That’s what he told Max. Nils told him: The monsters are back.

  In one dream, Nils peeled the skin from his face, layer after layer, but he never got to the bone. Even though the blood poured out, and his eyes rolled from their sockets and his gums released his teeth, he still couldn’t make it to the skull beneath his skin.

  In another dream, Nils ran through an old house looking for Max, but when he found him, Max was trapped inside a cage of thorns being eaten by a dog, and Nils couldn’t get into the cage to save him. He had to watch Max be eaten.

  Max listened to these dreams and repeated the phrase It’s okay until the phrase meant nothing.

  Time passed. The trees turned yellow and lost their leaves. The clouds bunched together and wept a black rain. The clouds cleared, and the earth was blasted with bright rays.

  During winter, they built forts out of blankets. Nils rolled candies between his fingers before dropping them into Max’s mouth. Malted milk balls. He sucked off the thick sugar coating and spit them out to examine the naked, mud-colored pearl. The heat from their bodies wrapped around Max. The fort became a castle of heat. Nils jerked his shirt over his head. His skin was meatless. A light rash covered his bare chest and bangs clung to his flushed face. He pushed a hot forehead against the pillow they shared. Max always let Nils make the rules for the games they played but, somehow, he knew this game would be different.

  His touch made Max’s veins move. Excitement and danger swirled in his stomach until Max felt like throwing up. Max held down the sickness that threatened to jump from his body and ruin the moment. They put their faces against each other. Nils tugged at Max, and Max shut his lids tight.

  Stop, they both said at the same time. Or maybe just Nils said it.

  They could go a hundred hours without touching, and then Max would be brushing his teeth in the bathroom and look up to find Nils behind him, his face watching. Max cleaned well, for both of them, as if by scrubbing his cheeks, he was scrubbing Nils’s, too. Sometimes Nils would say Lick my lips, and Max would. Other times he would simply reach down in Max’s underwear, past the elastic of his shorts, and cup him. Max waited for these moments, afraid of them beginning, but more afraid of them never happening at all. Nils would walk into Max’s kitchen, and Max’s breath would rush to fill his chest. His breath stayed there, trapped, until the touching began.

  If Max thought, if he shut his eyes tight, he could reach the memory of the last time. Max had been kissing Nils’s thighs. He put him in his mouth, and when he looked up, blood was pouring from Nils’s nose. Max had never seen so much blood. Nils opened his mouth, and there was blood between the cracks of his teeth. There was blood on the front of his shirt, blood on the cliff of his chin.

  What is happening? Max had asked, thinking he had done something awful.

  Nils breathed his sour breath. He grabbed Max’s wrist and handed it back to him. Nils stepped away, looked at Max, and said, I’m sorry.

  Max clamped his teeth down on the tip of his tongue and watched Nils leave the bedroom. Nils’s sharp, bony shoulders punched at his thin blue shirt like they were wings trying to extend. I made him sick again. Nils’s spine looked geographic, its topography a ridge that divided his living back in half. Nils called out to his mom in the hallway. His hand slammed into the wall for balance. He tried to speak, but his throat was too weak for the weight and girth of that word he wanted to say. Mother. It sounded more like other. Max kept moving his teeth back and forth across his tongue tip, back and forth. The uneven ridge of his bucks chafed the muscle until he felt the tip sever—a tiny piece no bigger than the clip of a fingernail. There it was, a sliver of his tongue floating unrooted in his mouth. He swallowed it, then he climbed out of Nils’s window.

  It was odd how it had happened, how that day everything changed, as if they’d signed a pact never to speak again. Snow had begun to fall the day he left Nils’s house forever. The flakes collapsed from the clouds like feathers slashed from a comforter. Nils’s mother had taken him away to the hospital, where he stayed for weeks. When Nils came home, he wasn’t allowed visitors, because of the germs they might bring. Or at least that’s what Nils’s mother told him. Max showed up on the doorstep one day, rebellious with beet cake, but Nils’s mother had only said: I’m so sorry, sweetie. He’ll be happy to know you stopped by.

  A direct line of vision existed between the attic window of his house and Nils’s room. During the days that Nils was home and not at the hospital, Max would stand at the window and spy on him in bed. Light from the TV screen would strike at the golden rind that stretched over his skull. In those moments, brief and fragile as they seemed, Nils looked like no one he knew. The sight of his sunken cheeks scared Max. It was too intimate. Nils had lost so much weight. It seemed impossible this was the same person who could once climb a tree.

  Max shot messages straight to Nils’s brain waves, sweet things. Things like Do not feel sad. I am here even when I am away. You are a king and the bed is your castle. You are the real knight and knights die noble deaths. Words from their younger games, words a fourteen-year-old Max could only say in his mind. Max would then duck out of sight to hide below the window through which he spied. He had been frightened that Nils would glance up at his house and catch Max’s staring face, plump and boyish and beaming with the right kind of blood. After spying on Nils, he would peel a rotten orange just to see it come back to life. He would bite into the fruit, taste its living sugar and its juice, and it wouldn’t make him feel better.

  When Nils died, Max’s mother sat him on the leather chair in the living room and expected him to cry. She knelt before him and placed her palms on his thighs. But Max didn’t cry.

  I know how close you two used to be, she had said. But now he won’t suffer anymore.

  His mother had drawn a picture of Nils and Max from t
he time they met. It had been a quick study to help her improve with watercolors. Nils and Max had posed with such poise, she’d praised them. Max loved how they looked side by side in twin blue button-ups. He kept it propped on his vanity. But after his mother had told him of Nils’s death, he went to his room and tore the picture in half. He balled up the half where Nils had been drawn in careful colors and ate it.

  Max tried to reach out toward the knowledge of Nils’s death, that elusive, matterless thing, like it could be a banister guiding him down a set of steep stairs, but he felt nothing in his hands. He could not hold death’s weight in his palm. He could not stuff death into his ears to block out the sound. He saw the mouse come back to life under his touch. He felt the mouse’s death in his throat. What would Nils’s death taste like? He might kiss his dead lips and make him sit up in bed. But fear held him captive. He couldn’t act.

  At Nils’s funeral, snow fell again. It seemed like it had never stopped snowing since the day he left through Nils’s window. Snow fell on Nils’s casket and on the shoulders of Max’s black jacket. It fell in the white hair of Nils’s parents. Max placed his palms on the well-oiled wood of the box and tried not to remember how alive Nils had looked with his face on the pillow, his cheeks flushed, his eyes blooming with intensity. He tasted a fresh apple. Then suddenly, crushingly, the fear came.

  Dirt thudded onto the casket’s top.

  One shovel.

  Another shovel.

  What had he just done? Max wondered. Touched the casket? Touched the casket with his hands, his cursed, steal-the-dead away hands?

  A sugar cube dissolved under Max’s tongue. His nose burned with honey. In his mind, he saw Nils’s eyes opening only to discover darkness. Nils screaming into the red carpet that lined the walls. Nils hearing the thuck-thuck-thuck of dirt hitting the lid above him.

  Max sat there in a cold sweat, in a cold panic, in a metal chair. A headache thrummed low and mean. His mother dabbed her eyes and squeezed Max’s hand against her stomach. Fear dilated in his heart until it rang out in waves through every cell in his body.

  I’m sorry, Max had whispered. I’m sorry.

  Shh, his mother said. She stroked his hair. Shh. It’s okay. It’s not your fault.

  At the wake, Max punched through a glass door threaded with steel while people ate hors d’oeuvres, and his mother rushed him away. He hated himself for not saving Nils, and then for maybe saving him after all, but on accident and too late.

  Max described Nils’s sunken cheeks to Pan. He told Pan twice about laying his palms on the smooth wooden coffin, about punching through another window that night at home. Terror gripped him any time he remembered. The terror came dark and shadowy and flung itself over him without warning. He could be walking down the street and the terror would be hiding in a doorway. The terror would lay right on the ground, and he’d trip on it. The terror waited under bushes. The terror was dressed like a dead boy.

  Sometimes he felt Nils’s death spreading like a contusion beneath his skin, bruising him from the inside, corroding him to a cancer. Max wondered if Pan might decide to hate him, after hearing what he’d done, but Pan smoothed Max’s hair back, brushed it down, and lifted the cup to his mouth again so Max could drink. Pan could open him like an oyster, suck out the pearl. That’s what he was doing. I’ve never said this out loud, Max thought.

  I’ve never said that out loud, said Max out loud.

  Pan kissed his face now, wet lips on Max’s wet cheeks. It almost tickled. The gesture made him think of his mother. Max shut his eyes and let himself be held. He saw his mother kissing his cheeks when he was a child, smoothing back his hair. Gestures that said safe.

  I felt him in my mouth. I tasted his life go through me and I didn’t do anything, said Max.

  Pan kissed his chest now. He lifted up Max’s shirt and kissed his belly, the white fur around his navel. Little wet sucks. Max looked at his ears, the small brown spines of them. Their skin colors together were a contrast. Pan kissed his way back up Max’s chest, up his neck, until he met Max’s mouth. His tongue felt quick and alive. They moved clumsily back on the bed until they were no longer sitting but lying. Pan banged his head on the wall. Ow. His hand examined the skull for a cut. Pan grabbed Max by the waist and pulled him in tight. He’s nervous, too, thought Max. Pan’s face was against his bicep, and he nuzzled it as if he wanted to get closer to Max but wasn’t sure how. They kissed again and humped each other through their pants until that was no longer enough and their clothes started to fall to the sheets, to the side table, to the carpet.

  Max moved forward from one desire to the next. A muscle twitched in his calf. He knew his pits smelled oily and sodden. And here was Pan so near to them with his nose shoving into his shoulder and then collarbone. Their lips touched again, and even a clumsy kiss felt exciting. Everything sped up until Max didn’t know where his body began and Pan’s ended. His pulse quickened, and his heart beat so fast he would have to run a million sets of stairs to find himself again. Max might be bad at this. The heat strung itself from dusk to dawn, and they tumbled through it. They moved through the hallway, found themselves in Pan’s room. The tied-up dog howled outside.

  You are you, Pan said, biting Max’s lips. You are so you.

  Max bit his lips back. There was a butterfly-shaped blotch on Pan’s neck. Hives from me, Max thought. I gave him a sex butterfly.

  They dozed together in a twist of sheets in the bedroom thrumming with damp air. Then they woke as one, gripped each other in the dark, and did it all again. Max had never let himself go like this—not with Nils, not ever—but there he was soaring through the vodka, sweating Smirnoff from his pores. Max opened his mouth to give something to Pan, a sonnet or perhaps the exact way it felt to be trampled by a body more delicate than his own, but his teeth caught whatever good he could have said. He went so deep into Pan he thought he might touch the bottom of his rib cage, feel the root of his beating heart.

  Max had thought love would begin with a courting ritual: arranged dates, unbuttoned shirts, a first kiss, anticipated yet restrained, on the sidewalk before a house. Love was not a boy in Germany with blood pouring from his mouth. Love was not a witch in Alabama who slept until noon and ate cloves of garlic. But there in that room, Max wanted to buy Pan a house full of flowers.

  Nothing bad will happen, Pan said, as if convincing himself, as if answering a question Max never asked.

  He said this to Max, or he said it to the ceiling, which was where his gaze was affixed, which was lined with bone white plaster, which was the only thing separating them both from the stars.

  Finally, Max said.

  But this was always going to happen, said Pan.

  MAX WOKE UP THE NEXT morning hungover and unhappy. He wasn’t sure where the melancholy came from, but it sat in his jaw. He felt like a bowl licked empty. It wasn’t a good empty. It just felt empty. His shoulders ached. The drunk cleaved his head. Pan slept beside him curled like a question mark. A spindle of drool hung from his lips. Mascara smeared across the paisley pillowcase. Pan’s cheeks caved toward each other. Max saw that his own nails had been painted red, a detail he did not recall from the previous night. What else did he not remember? The sun was already washing Pan’s bedroom white with heat. It exposed the dust gathered on the windowsill, the streaks of wet mold on the ceiling. A poster of a Valium pill was tacked above the bed. A shrine to Billy Corgan had been erected in the far corner next to a pile of Pan’s thrift store dresses. Max heard the dog bark outside and the woman scream at the child. He listened as the woman threatened to tie the child to the bedpost or stuff her in a trash bag and take her to the curb. Vodka churned his stomach. He rolled onto his side and buried his eyes.

  Max had hoped sex would make him feel better, closer to Pan in some way. But he didn’t feel the tenderness he wanted. He just felt naked. He could not wash the image of Nils from his retinas. It was more present now. Max remembered the way his eyes had stayed on Nils as he undressed in th
e bathroom, the way Max’s body had tightened with longing under the gaze of the first boy he had ever wanted.

  ON A WOODEN CUTTING BOARD, MAX’S mother sliced black radish into lace. She recounted her latest Alabama annoyance. The woman from the corner house, whose husband owned all the Ford dealerships in town, told her Y’all come on over now, you hear? But when Max’s mother had appeared at her doorstep, the woman seemed shocked, even embarrassed.

  Oh, his mother had realized. She wasn’t supposed to come over.

  Being here is like a code you have to crack. She chopped the radish with a new fury. It’s fake. They don’t mean what they say, and I’m just supposed to understand the subtext.

  Why do you hate it so much? Max asked. I don’t think it’s bad even at all.

  The mothers feed their children Starbursts and call it fruit. A woman in the grocery store told me Starburst is one of her five a day.

  You are being judgmental, said Max.

  He had already told her his plans to go hunting with the Judge that weekend. You have to be there at what time in the a.m.? she had said, aghast, but according to her own parenting morals, she had not forbidden him from going.

  I want to ask you about Pan, his mother said. She widened her eyes as if hoping to implant some psychic undercurrent directly into his brain. She set down her knife.

  When Max said nothing, she continued.

  I want to hear more about him. Like what does he do for fun? Does he have hobbies? A pet? What was his mother like when you met her?

  Wow. Twenty questions, said Max.

  Not twenty, she said. Just four.

  I don’t know. He wants to be, uh, a magician or something, said Max. And he’s got a cat named Mr. Sprinkles. Well, it’s like a stray, but also kind of his.

  What I mean is I can tell you like him, she said. I want you to know I like him, too.

  Okay, said Max. You like him, too.

  I wonder if you like him the way you liked Nils.

  Nils made Max stand up straighter.