Can you say it again? asked Max.
You got a question, said Glory. I got an answer.
Max stared at Glory.
You play football? asked Glory.
I’m going to be wide receiver.
Cool, said Glory. I don’t know what that means but football is as much religion as religion is around here. Friday nights are all football. You’ll meet Davis. Might have already. Best friend status with Davis is like tying yourself to a social life raft. So, you’re good.
I’m good? Max asked.
It means you did it right. You’re all right. No one is going to mess with you. You decided who you’re going to be.
Football makes me a decision?
Sure does, said Glory.
And do you know also Wes? asked Max.
You can’t say stuff like that here, said Glory. You can’t ask me if I know Wes just because we’re both black.
Is that what Max had done? he wondered. Red crept into his face. He had done a racist thing maybe.
Everyone here knows everyone. Wes’s my brother but that’s beside the point. Just because you don’t know any black people doesn’t mean all black people know one another.
Max opened his mouth to apologize, to find the sorry word. He wasn’t sure if Glory meant Wes was her brother as in biological or brother as in friend. Brother in American could mean both. Glory changed the subject before he could get clarification.
You got a question you want answered. I got an answer. Just remember that. This school is small. I kick it with the public kids mostly. If you ever want to widen your gyre. Let a girl know.
Widen a what?
It’s a Yeats reference. Aren’t you Europeans supposed to be cultured and shit? I’m saying if you want to expand your circle to nonprivate school, I’m your person. Hey—
A girl with a red pigtail on either shoulder and a bright blue monographed backpack walked past them. The air smelled of a boiled meat sandwich. The girl with the pigtails had a cabbage odor, but Glory waved her down excitedly. The girl drove something into Glory and stole her attention. Max was no longer the center of things.
Adios, Germany, she said. Catch you when I catch you.
WHAT CHURCH YOU GO TO ANYWAY? Davis asked, threading his belt through the loops in his jeans.
The locker room steamed around them. Davis looked solid standing as the vapors rose across his chest.
Religion is fine for people who need that kind of thing.
We’re not that sort of family.
Church, said Max. We still look.
Listen, said Davis. If you haven’t been to church before or if your family doesn’t go or something, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. We all start somewhere.
Yes, said Max. Okay.
You don’t have to do what your parents do.
Davis sat down on the bench. The locker room’s steel corridors stood empty, but Max could hear the spray from a running shower and knew they were not alone.
Davis bit into a protein bar and said, Stuff tastes like a cardboard shoe. You want a bite? You’re supposed to eat protein thirty minutes after working out if you want to get swoll.
Max shook his head. He wanted a chocolate bar. The one in his backpack. A dead spider near his shoe. He tried to focus on Davis.
You ever wonder what else there is to all this, Germany? Like you ever wonder what the meaning of it all is?
Yes, Max said. Yes, I wonder.
Davis lifted his face toward Max. Max saw in Davis’s squinting that he’d said the right thing. It was good to wonder. To want more.
There’s church and then there’s God, Davis said. He used a finger, pointed at Max, to hit the end of each word. People get church wrong a lot of the time. But then God comes for you so fast it knocks the wind from you. He sends his spirit to you and you can’t help but go blind.
You go blind? Max was confused. Max had always believed that God, in terms of religious people, helped you see better. God did not obscure your sight.
Yeah, I mean it’s a speech figure, said Davis. It sounds confusing, but you just feel it. Some things are better understood in the body than the mind. Davis placed his hand over his heart when he said body, as if that’s where it lived. Right in the chest. The center of the body breathed. God will send his love to you and you’ll never be alone again. You just make sure you believe—and God, he’ll do the rest.
Max looked down at his hands, which held his chocolate bar, which he hadn’t remembered fishing from his bag. Someone opened the door to the parking lot and a brush of hot air whipped through the room. Max bit into the bar and chewed.
MAX STOOD ON HIS PORCH in his football sweatpants, hair still matted, and sleep crusted in the corners of his eyes. A fresh bruise fattened across his chin. Max pushed the bruise and thought of the boy who gave it to him. He stayed outside for a moment, loving how the rays of morning sun struck him as if to cleanse him. It was a Sunday. Church was where the boys were. He thought of what Davis said about going blind for God. Blindness might steal your literal sight, but Max understood how constriction worked. Other senses would expand to take over the deficiency. Without sight, who knew what you would hear, taste, or smell?
Max touched the ivy that lived on the bricks of his house and considered blindness, a kind of gift. The living green vine curled around a dead yellow sprig. He left the dead parts dead. He would need to run today, he told himself, as he left the browned edges as they were.
Max brought in the paper. By the door, a bouquet of tulips shot their heavy heads out of the end of a vase. He noticed his mother had removed the magnet from the refrigerator—but first, coffee! Max’s mother called church a gateway drug, so he knew better than to bring up his curiosity. He slid the paper from its plastic and spread it across the kitchen table.
Again, the Judge. Front page. The Judge, with his square-shouldered stance, looked nothing like his oafish son Lorne, who played football with Max. He looked like an advertisement for a good father or for testosterone supplements. Max spread his hands over the photograph, over his jaw and the smile lines etched into either side of his mouth. The Judge’s eyes were clear as a stream. They seemed to look up from the rough paper and straight into Max’s soul.
The smell of ground coffee rose through the kitchen. The percolator gurgled and the clink of espresso cups meant breakfast. The table had been set the night before, a routine his mother brought with her to Alabama. Max should have gone to retrieve the yogurt, but the Judge peered up at him. He held eye contact with the Judge as his father filled the table with deli ham, dry sponges of American bread, boiled eggs, and raspberry jam the neighbor had brought to say welcome.
The Judge was running for governor and his campaign announcements were everywhere: taped to restaurant doors, stuffed into mailboxes, pressed into the worn leaves of Bibles that girls clutched to their chests at school. The Judge gazed down over streets from billboards, like he was keeping watch or like he was God or God-sent. Max took a seat and his father picked up the paper to read it.
Look at this, his father said. The man’s campaign slogan is Rise up, Alabama.
Max leaned closer, so he could read the headline. His mother joined them. She had expressed many times how disappointed she was by the tasteless kitchen, the breakable appliances, the tacky stone-look laminate countertops. Her posture conveyed more disappointment. Slouched shoulders, unlike his mother. She peered at the newspaper, too.