Cicadas buzzed in the background from their secret spots. The air was heavy as tea steam. Wind didn’t move it. Max steeped in it. His feelings brewed until they were strong as a tannin. He sipped his beer, which was going warm, and searched the grass, through the stems, through the black-black, for a sign of Pan and Lorne.
Excuse me if I need to go to the bathroom, said Max. Where is it?
Urinal’s right there, said Price, pointing to their field.
Max walked to the edge of the field. He tipped a stream of beer into the dry split-up dirt as he urinated. He was afraid to get drunk, to unclench his mind in that way. The field bunched together and seemed to release an outbreath of air that cooled him, as if the stalks themselves could offer their own shelter from the sweat and swamp of sky. He noticed a dead worm half buried in the dirt. He directed his urine right onto the worm. Then he bent down and touched it. The pink slime wriggled back to life.
Max flexed his biceps and balanced on his heels. He admired the smooth skin of his ankles. His shinbones dusted in white blond hair. He didn’t believe that Lorne wanted to save Pan. He’d seen the way he looked at him. He knew that look.
Back at the fire, Knox came up to Max with a plastic bottle. The liquid inside glowed a strange green.
Made this myself, Cheeto, said Knox.
The mouth of the bottle smelled astringent. Even a whiff was potent enough to snap shut his eyes.
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.