Max pictured himself in New England with Pan. He pictured them walking through campus drinking chai lattes. Pan was older, and his long hair was tied back in a bun. Max had a thick blond beard and an arm draped over Pan’s shoulder. Pan might find a way to love him again. Max spread his bruised hands into the blank space in front of him. He held them up and studied them. They shook slightly, as if he was going through a withdrawal. He dropped his hands by his side and let them hang. He wondered if touching Pan with uncharmed palms would feel different. In his mind, he placed a finger to Pan’s pulse. He might recoil and think, The magic’s gone.
Pan did not appear in Physics. Hadn’t been there for days. The seat beside Max was empty. Max checked his phone to see, but no messages were received. To know that Pan missed him could have been enough.
ON HIS WAY TO LUNCH, Max saw Glory and Wes at the end of the hall under a hunter green pendant that said God’s Way. The pendant was suspended from the ceiling by thin metal rods. Max slipped behind a locker and watched them. They were out of earshot so he could not hear their conversation. Max grabbed onto a padlock that hung from a locker. The cold steel anchored him. Glory was animated, the one doing most of the talking, and Wes shook his head if he didn’t want to listen. He seemed annoyed. When Wes tried to take a step back, Glory grabbed his wrist, and Wes let her hold on to him. She drew his face close and whispered something. Then Glory shoved him and laughed. Wes laughed, too, but they both still seemed upset.
Max wondered if Wes had ever been baptized. If he knew what happened at camp and if it was Glory who had held him back from going or if it had been his own decision not to go all along.
Glory turned in Max’s direction, and he couldn’t duck away in time.
She raised a hand.
Max, she called.
Wes waved. Sup, dude.
Max knew he was interrupting something private. He felt like an intruder. He wanted Glory to whisper into his ear whatever she’d said to Wes. He could tell they didn’t want company. They glanced at each other. Sibling code that no one else could decipher. Max found himself walking toward them anyway.
Wes’s eyes were red. Had he been crying? Max couldn’t imagine Wes doing that.
Dude, I’m late for lunch.
Wes saluted them and walked away, leaving Max standing next to Glory. Her locker was open. The door cracked to reveal a clutter of paper and books. Taped to the wall inside was a painting of the cosmos. A swirl of candied constellations.
I’m sorry, Max said. Did Wes leave because I came?
Glory shrugged. She reached out and touched the cross on his necklace.
I would have told you not to go, she said. But Wes said you wouldn’t have listened anyway.
She left her fingertips on his chest for a second too long. Max felt his teeth begin to kick against one another. What did Glory know?
MAX HAD HEARD THAT INTUITION was a muscle one could train to become stronger, like a bicep or an abdominal. He could develop the ability to answer questions before they were asked. He might learn to hand his mother the milk before she knew she wanted it. There were people who held knowledge in their mouths that addressed the hopes people kept only in their minds. For six nights, Max called Pan’s phone, and every night, the phone rang and rang. No one answered. On the seventh night, Pan’s mother picked up.
She cleared her throat like you’ve done something wrong, but her voice held a warm and sympathetic hand out toward him.
He isn’t here, pumpkin. I’ll tell him you tried to call.
Max’s intuition purred beneath his rib. He felt Pan on the other side of the static.
THE BOYS ONLY WANTED TO TEST THEM.
Freak the witch out.
Chase the devil from their bones.
Clean out the sin.
That was what Davis said, frightened, yes, Max could hear he was frightened, when he answered Davis’s call. His panic was as hard and real as the teeth rooted in Max’s mouth. Max sat up in bed. Black middle of the night.
Just don’t do anything else, Max said. Just do not move.
Come fast then, said Davis. We can’t do nothing much longer.
The balloon in Max’s chest expanded with each breath, pushed against the sides of him, made him feel like he could float away or lose touch with the ground under his toes. Just the night before, Pan was safe in his trailer.
He told us you could fix it, said Davis. What does he mean fix it? What does he mean?
Max took his parents’ car keys from the loop by the front door. He’d never driven in Alabama, but his father had taught him how in Germany. Adrenaline led him down the front steps into the driveway. Adrenaline opened the car door. He drove out toward the field where he had first seen Pan run off with Lorne, where he tried to gather enough lust to desire Billie, where he had waded into the polluted pond and healed everything he could touch. His palms slipped from the wheel. They landed in his lap again and again. Sweaty, useless things. The tires yelled when he cusped the shoulder of the road. He had to swerve back to the center line.
Once in the field, the fence came into view. A body was propped up against it. There was Pan’s mother’s car—the burnt orange paint and the rust streaking up the side. The boys huddled around, hunched over, walked in circles that went nowhere. Max drove toward the scene, holding the slacken body in the headlight’s eye. Max turned off the engine. He stepped out into the field. The boys held their phones like lanterns outstretched toward Max and then toward the body, and in the white light Max saw that it was not Pan, but Lorne roped to the wooden post. Lorne’s face was no longer his face but a hot pulp of skin that had been pulled off in strings like the paint on the front door of the insane asylum. His lips were not lips but red strands that dripped down his chin. His ear was a folded, scary color that an ear should never be. His face was like every hue Max had ever seen the night contain.
A tin cup stood in the dirt beside him. It looked like the same cup Max drank from in the barn. He tasted the liquid when he looked at the cup. It washed through him as if he’d sipped from it again. Sharp and tinted and ready to take.
Lorne tried to pull his face off after he drank the poison, said Cole, voice trembling.
Lorne’s face spilled the inside of him out. There was Pan standing off to the side. His white Walmart dress touched its hem to the mud. He held his own cheeks. He’d been crying and was still crying.
Pan. Max tried to focus on Lorne, but his attention drifted to Pan. Pan would not lift his eyes to Max. But Max felt Pan look without looking. The look was psychospiritual. The look said: help.
We found them together, Davis said. He was out of breath. Found them together, doing things, so we made them drink poison to get their sin out. To test if God was in them. And then Lorne went crazy.
Foundthemtogether.
Davis’s voice caught in his throat. He coughed. Couldn’t release the word.
Max placed his hands over his eyes. Pan thought Max could save Lorne. That’s why he’d had Davis call him. Pan didn’t know his powers had left him. Pan sat down in the mud and held his legs to his chest and rocked back and forth. Max felt snakes in his stomach. They swam in circles. The back of his hands looked up at him from the place on his knees where they steadied him. They gripped his thighs as he wrenched over to vomit and catch his breath and vomit. His vomit was pine needle green as if to say he, too, was of this world. Max, too, was the land. He stood up like a normal boy with no power at all.
Lorne did not see Max because Lorne was not there. He was unconscious, or he was gone. If Max were to turn and walk away, Lorne would never know. But Pan rocked and shook beside Lorne like a ghost who could not be killed. Pan would observe Max’s failure. Pan’s trust in Max had brought him there. He expected Max to move toward Lorne, take his broken face in his hands and heal him. If Max walked away now, Pan would never speak to him again. It would be the same as if he’d killed Lorne himself.
I’m broken, Max wanted to tell Pan. I can’t do it.
Pan would tell him to try. Try to bring back Lorne, who dragged him across the roof in his dream. Bring back Lorne, who Pan loved like Max had loved Nils: wholly and completely like only a child knows how to love. His first husband. Price had collapsed on the ground and was supine gazing at the stars as if they could take him. A terrible scene, something Max wanted to wish himself away from. Cole leaned against a dogwood tree, held a wound on his neck, and hummed a song.
This, too, was the boys’ destiny. Their arms knew how to dig holes that fit a body, how to remove the skin of a person still alive. How to loop a noose around a neck and hitch it up in a tree. They knew how to burn flesh, how to withhold water and food. They knew what part of their clothing would make the best whip, which part could make a weapon. Max felt it then, what Pan had told him about the energy, the lesions in the air, the blackening. He saw their jaws grinding. He saw the power of every bad thing that had been done before them on this land stand up inside of them and say: yes.
Lorne bit Cole, Davis said. He went crazy and tried to bite us all. We thought he could drink it and be fine. We thought God would save him. We thought Pan—
He couldn’t finish his sentence, because Pan had been the one to swallow the poison and survive and no words could explain it.
A hole had been dug into the ground next to the fence. The hole was big enough for a burial. The red dirt let out its earthworms.
No one can know, said Davis, what’s happened here.
Davis walked in a slow circle. The shovel he carried leaned against his shoulder. It was the shovel from the back of Pan’s car, the shovel they would have used to use to dig up the graves. The shovel Pan held when Max watched him grow older right before his eyes under the sodium lights in the parking lot of the cemetery.
Max saw that it was not a rope, but a red football jersey that held Lorne to the fence. His arms were extended like the cross Max wore beneath his shirt. His wrists were bound tight. Max wondered if Lorne had ever wanted to hurt Pan or if he only wanted to love him, and the hurting had just happened. He wondered if Lorne had ever done a truly bad thing like leave a boy in a coffin buried alive or drag a boy to the edge of a roof and force himself inside. Max knelt at the foot of Lorne’s freckled body, but he didn’t touch him, because he was not sure he could do that, touch him, in front of everyone. If he did and Lorne woke up, what would they say? What would it mean? The end of everything. Would they descend on Max, too? A witch, in their presence, the devil among them? Would they force the poison to his lips? Could his body take it again?
Max felt Pan behind him. He felt Pan step closer. He didn’t have to look to know it. Max stared at Lorne, at the dangled skin that used to be his face, and he prayed that Lorne moved without his hands. Then he prayed that his hands could move him. Max lifted up his palms and clasped them in front of his heart. He felt the boys gather behind him, ready to tear Lorne down from the post where they had bound him. He felt Pan’s belief radiate and radiate. Magic only works if you believe. Max dug his knees into the rocks so that it hurt. Good. Make it hurt. He stared up at Lorne and said, Come back, and he didn’t know, he still didn’t know, if he would be able to make it so.
He reached out and felt heat. He placed a palm on Lorne’s thigh, and he thought he sensed the body twitch, the leg kick. He heard bees, and he tasted wasps. The wasps meant a bad life. They meant tied to a fence by a father. His hands could do nothing. They fell from Lorne’s thigh. Gravity pulled them off. Nothing moved through Max. Death rattled against his human body, the body with no alchemy or magic left. Life pushed against his skin, but it couldn’t get in. Then Lorne’s leg twitched, and Max placed his hands upon Lorne again. Max felt Pan’s belief reach toward him. His belief circled him and Lorne. It moved on the margins as Max kept his hands against Lorne’s twitching body. Max held Pan’s belief inside of him. It rose up like a poem. He would catch the poem. When Max opened his mouth, he almost expected hornets to pour out.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, my writing, exists because of the friendships, experiences, and works of art that have shaped me. I am grateful for the people I have encountered along this journey through literature and life, especially the following:
For my agent, Monika Woods, for believing in this novel from the beginning and for seeing what it could become. Thank you for the notes, the conversations, and the brilliance you shed onto each page.
For my editor, Gina Iaquinta, for reading each line with care and openness. This book is better, is more fully itself, because of your time. Thank you to Peter Miller, Nick Curley, and the whole team at Liveright for championing this book and for helping to shepherd it into the world.
Thank you to Tom Bissell, Charles D’Ambrosio, Rachel Kushner, Jon Raymond, Michelle Glazer, Renee Gladman, and to all of my teachers over the years. I am especially grateful to Leni Zumas, mentor and friend, for challenging me to make familiar things strange and for showing me how to listen to the sound of every sentence.
For the places and organizations that generously supported me and gave me precious time to write, think, and create: the MacDowell Colony, Caldera Arts, the Vermont Studio Center, Tin House, and the Fulbright Program. For the MFA Program at Portland State University. Thank you for investing in my process of creativity and artmaking.
For Maaike Muntinga, Jamie Carr, Kristin Dombek, Daniel Cecil, Jessica Walter, Mikkel Rosengaard, and Kevin Sampsell, for reading entire drafts of this book in earlier forms. For your patience, time, and brilliance. Thank you to Jeff Buckingham for your knowledge of high school science and to Chris Horton for the passages you read with care.
To my community of wise writers, of whom I am in awe, especially T Kira Madden, Kimberly King Parsons, Kate Jayroe, Annabel Graham, Tomas Moniz, MJ Kaufman, Jane Lewty, Anna Arov, Jing-Jing Lee, Alma Mathijsen, Leah Dieterich, and all the others.
Thank you to the writers whose work has shaped me in profound ways. Especially Anne Carson, James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, Alison Bechdel, Susan Sontag, Claudia Rankine, Clarice Lispector, Frank O’Hara, Roland Barthes, Audre Lorde, Maggie Nelson, Lynda Barry, Eileen Myles, Simone de Beauvoir, Michelle Tea, Alexander Chee, Garth Greenwell, and Melissa Febos. Thank you for writing my canon.
For Chelsea Bieker, my family and my fire. For sharing my dream of writing and having the same conversations with me over and over. For being the Duris to my Dennis. Thank you for being my unconditional, my constant.
To Matthew Zaccari, my Der. For the tarot cards you pulled on your bed in Brooklyn. For that night in Charleston, in my backyard, when you stood on the milk crate. You have the kindest heart of anyone I know. Thank you for giving me space inside it.
For Lisa Meersman and the most romantic of friendships. For embodying community and empathy. For holding space for every story, every moment, every laugh, and every gasp.
And for all of my dear friends, my chosen family, my community of queer people, thank you. To Emily Kingan and Zeyah Rogé, for letting me live in Narnia and showing me the truest kind of love. To Megan Watson, for pointing out the light where the trees meet the sky. To Katie Peterson, for holding space for me on the steps of Maybank so many years ago. To Timothy Pakron and your booming laugh that I can hear from your kitchen in New Orleans. To Sara Sutter, dearest Scorpio, who I would languish with any time under any summer sun. To Marc Tobia and David Nokovic and everyone who I haven’t named but who I hold a candle for in my heart.
For my father, Jerry Hudson, who showed me how to fall in love with literature. For reading me To Kill a Mockingbird out loud from your chair in the living room. For writing stories with me in notebooks. For being Alabama.
Lastly, and most importantly, for my mother, Carmen Hudson, for your love of imagination. For your curiosity and quick laugh. For answering the phone whenever I call, wherever you are. For wanting me to build that treehouse. For believing that one day I would.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the aut
hor’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Genevieve Hudson
First Edition
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Jacket design by Zoe Norvell
Jacket artwork by Travis Bedel (Bedelgeuse)
Book design by Lovedog Studio
Production manager: Lauren Abbate
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Names: Hudson, Genevieve (Genevieve Katherine), 1986– author.
Title: Boys of Alabama : a novel / Genevieve Hudson.
Description: First edition. | New York : Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company, [2020]
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051376 | ISBN 9781631496295 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781631496301 (epub)
Subjects: GSAFD: Bildungsromans. | Occult fiction.
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