A populist thug, his father said. This article says he’s trying to make it mandatory for every resident of Alabama to register with a church or religious organization.
His father whistled as if that was something.
What’s next, a Kristallnacht? said his mother.
Says here he can quote the entire Bible by memory. Entire pages with not a word missing, his father said. Says God places the paragraphs right into his brain.
It’s called a photographic memory, said his mother. And many people have it. It’s not some kind of miracle.
Says here, his father continued, leaning close to the page, he fell from a cliff in his twenties and died. He was left out in the woods wandering around for days as a dead man.
Fell from a cliff? his mother said.
Says he fell the length of seven stories and survived nights out there alone. He ate nothing. On the last day, he drank a can of poison he found in an abandoned shack. After the poison, he saw God and was given new strength and suddenly knew exactly how to leave the woods and find the road to town. God turned the poison into something that healed him.
It’s called a hallucination, said his mother. This man is leading the governor’s race? People believe the story and vote for him?
From his mother’s plate, a piece of unbuttered toast stared at the wooden ceiling. She did not eat it. She looked displaced in the new kitchen and defeated. She had been excited to have more time to paint in Alabama, since she would no longer have her job volunteering at the modern art museum, but Max did not see her easel unpacked or her paintbrushes unrolled on any surface.
Well, it’s an impressive story, his father said. Don’t you think?
His son plays on your football team, am I right? Max’s mother asked, turning to him.
Yes, said Max.
He tried to appear unmoved by the story, but the truth was he found it intriguing. The Judge had cheated death. Death had entered him, and it had not stayed.
I heard him say on the NPR they should teach creationism in schools, said his mother. Creationism. As in God made the world in seven days. Is that what they’re teaching you in science class? Are they teaching you intelligent design or are you learning evolution?
I don’t know, said Max. We haven’t gotten there yet.
You’ll probably never get there, said his mother. That’s how they’ll deal with it. I don’t care what they believe. Honestly, I just don’t want it to affect your education.
What kind of things do these boys talk about on your team? They say anything that sounds off to you? said his father.
No, Max said. They just talk normal stuff. Boy stuff.
Boy stuff? said his mother.
His mother snorted and whacked the top off her boiled egg with the back of her spoon, splitting the shell. His father took a sip of orange juice and stood up, groped his pockets for something.
Okay, he said. Well. I mean, I’ve never met the man. But his story is a tall tale if I’ve ever heard one.
People love a story, said his mother.
His dad shrugged as if he wasn’t sure and didn’t care.
Max regarded the Rorschach blob of jam smeared across his yogurt. On the face of his breakfast, Max saw a raspberry boy sprinting across an organic, whole-milk field. He saw a seedless red cross rising up behind him as he ran. He saw a risen Judge bleeding life into a white sky.
AT WALMART, MAX FELT SMALL in the huge expanse of space. The shelves were filled with American treats like peanut butter cups, candy corn, and marshmallow squares his mother would never let him eat in Germany. He walked past pyramids of Kit Kat bars and displays of vacuum cleaners and shelves filled with condoms and strawberry-flavored lubricant. He walked past a wall of television sets playing three different football games. The television faces spoke in silent sentences to no one in particular. He stood in the middle of an entire aisle of Bibles. He’d never known there could be so many different kinds of Bibles. Max could have bought guns and two-liter bottles of Coke and lawn chairs in one trip. He could have bought anything at any time, because Walmart only ever closed one day out of the entire year, Christmas, Jesus’s birthday. He wasn’t in Germany anymore. He knew it for sure as he stood in aisle 7 under the hiss of the bright white lights. He wanted to fit in, Max realized, as he touched a bag of Cheetos.
You fast as a Cheeto, Knox had said. The memory made him smile. A cartoon cheetah with sunglasses stared at Max from the front of an orange foil bag. Dangerously Cheesy, promised the cartoon cheetah.
Max used to love going with this mother to the market in town for dark bread. It would still be warm from the oven as they carried it home. He could feel the weight of it in his hand now, heavy as a potted plant. He stood in the Walmart bread aisle, which smelled of nothing, especially not bread. The sterile, plastic-wrapped loaves sat slack on the shelf. There seemed to be more things to buy in Walmart than people in town to buy them. Who, he wondered, would purchase all this bread? All these TVs? All these guns?
Max asked a Walmart employee where he could find the fried chicken. The salesperson wore a scoutlike vest with many patches of smiling yellow faces pinned all over it. how may i help you? was written in bubbly font on his back. He looked too old to be working a service job. To be working at all. He walked with a plastic cane. He kept calling Max sir. Like—Yes, sir. I can show you where the chicken is, sir. Max felt he should be the one calling him sir, since he was younger, but he went along with it. Before he walked away, the man raised a speckled hand and said something that sounded like Haffagoodunnowyahhere. Max nodded and that seemed to be enough. The chicken sizzled and steamed in a paper bag below a row of blistering lights. The bag fumed as he carried it to the checkout line.
His mother drove him to Davis’s house. Max could not drive in Alabama. He did not have a license and his parents weren’t keen on him getting one anytime soon. The other boys could drive and owned their own vehicles, which they drove to school themselves and let bake on the black asphalt lot. They waited like treaded chariots. That’s freedom, thought Max. To be sixteen and own a car.
Davis’s house loomed at the end of a cul-de-sac, surrounded by smaller, lesser houses with fewer levels and puny yards. Max counted three stories out loud with his mother in the car. Sunlight hit the clean, white paint and glinted against a wide, screened-in porch where potted ferns and sculptures of rattan elephants guarded a rocking chair. Max readied to knock on the front door but voices beckoned from the backyard.
There he is, said Davis, when Max walked into the barbecue with the exact right thing. Coach surrounded Max in a hug that contained much slapping. His back stung from the flat hand hitting him.
Walmart’s got the best fried chicken in town, Coach assured Max.
Max lifted a chicken thigh to his mouth. The meat was the sweetest flesh his tongue had ever tasted. He gnawed. He chewed at the bones. He pulled barbecue onto his plate. The sauce stained his chin and got under his nails until he was marked like the rest of them. It felt like he signed his name to something important.
Max had never been invited to a party before. In Germany, his classmates had found him incredibly strange. His lonesome runs that stretched on for hours, the way he always needed people to repeat themselves, the time it took to form the right word with his mouth. After Nils died, he had sometimes worn a sling around his arm as a reminder not to touch anything dead in front of other people. He’d cinched down his fingers with ace bandages and said he sprained them. Sometimes he inflicted real harm on them. Weird boy with the weird bandages. Runner boy always running away. But in Alabama, no one had a reference for how Max should act or how he should respond. If he stared at someone without talking for whole minutes after they asked him a question, they thought it was an issue with translation. His strangeness was connected to his foreignness. If he didn’t know how to say a thing correctly, it was the language he hadn’t mastered, not living itself that he couldn’t do right. He could learn everything like it was the first time. A second chance.