The Man Who Cried I Am (14 page)

I'll have them do the hemorrhoids too, Max thought, bouncing along the road to catch a rearward-going jeep or truck. When one stopped for him, Max turned back to the town. “C
IAO MOTHERFUCKERS
,
ARRIVEDERCI
!” The jeep groaned through the mountains which were now greening with spring and turning purple with the setting sun. Max didn't mind that he had walked through most of them, didn't mind at all. Now the mountains were pretty, even beautiful.

11

NEW YORK

Max led the way and from time to time he paused and looked across the valley at the other mountains. He thought of Italy, spring, before the end, 1945. Now it was autumn, late autumn, 1946, and he and Harry Ames were trudging over a mountain in the Catskills. The deer season had opened only the day before. Max paused and went down on one knee, the 30.30 perpendicular to his body. Harry came up and knelt beside him and started fumbling for cigarettes. “Don't smoke yet,” Max said. Harry stopped rustling with the cigarettes, somewhat resentfully. Something had changed between them and Max knew it was the war.

“God,” Max said, “smell that air.” He lifted his nose and caught the wind bearing the smells of the vast coniferous forests past them, downhill. And the earth had its own scent, rich, sturdy. Max took a pine needle and chewed it. Down in the valley, still covered with the morning frost, they heard shots. They had planned to use the high trails because there were so many hunters down below. Perhaps they'd run the deer back up. For a moment suspended somewhere in time, Max listened for the sound of mortars, for the howl of artillery. None came and he smiled to himself. It was goddamn good to be alive.
Good
. Harry nudged him and pointed off to the left. A buck was shouldering his way through the forest. He stopped and looked around, tested the air and withdrew. Neither Max nor Harry had moved. They would see just what the buck would bring back with him, thinking the coast was clear. Quietly Max and Harry spread out on their stomachs and waited.

Max felt as if he could sleep. He was at peace. In four months he had written a novel complete with rewrites and it had been sold. He had already begun another. And Harry had just published another novel. It seemed to be going well with him and Charlotte now. (Yes, it had seemed so, then.) There was nothing quite like success, American Negro writer Harry Ames, nothing quite like it. It means that you stare at the cops just as long as they stare at you and a host of other things, right, Harry?

For Max, his own novel had begun new seepages in the old well; there was something down there, something after all. His book was about the war, of course, about Negro soldiers in Italy going up the mountains and down the mountains; it was about Cinquale, Grosseto, Viareggio. In the novel the fat woman became a young, almost innocent farm girl with whom the hero of the novel, a corporal, had fallen in love. The novel ended with white MP's catching the corporal and the girl in a barn and killing them and covering them with hay and horse manure.

“Great!” Max's editor had screamed. “Daring. Honest. Dynamic …” All the words and phrases that would be sent to echo in his ears for all the years he would be writing. Some of the words would fall into disuse, then be miraculously resurrected, and each time, for a while, they would have not a new, but at least a different meaning until the literary ferris wheel took them underneath again. Max didn't care except that he could repeat them to Lillian Patch, the girl he loved.

It happened in spring, two months after his discharge from Dix, while he was still living at the Y. He would look out the window of his room, straining to see the street below, but he could only see a small line of sidewalk across the street where the Y Annex was. But looking to the west he could see the white and gray buildings of City College. Then one day, when he was pleased with his work, he hurled a silent challenge at the City College buildings: I will walk to where you are and see if I can see my room from there. He never made it because of Lillian Patch. He followed her from Seventh Avenue, up the sheer rock steps to Morningside Heights to a drugstore on the corner of Broadway and 145th Street. He followed her, marveling; she fit so well with the day. She was young and lithe and she smiled. Mostly it was her posture. Loose it was, as a drifting on the wind, and yet there was a confident control that said, I know my body. In front of the drugstore he pulled abreast of her and found himself strangely tongue-tied. She did not pull away or scowl as Manhattan women usually do. Instead a half-smile came to her face, which was small with the cheekbones riding high along the sides. And when she smiled, the brown of her eyes, a kind of puce, was transformed into brown velvet, the shimmer of them deep. He looked down at her; she was small and that surprised him; she had seemed to have great height. Her skin was as the wet sand, brown, yet suggesting gold.

“I followed you, you see. It was spring—it's spring and it was too lovely to stay in and I came out and saw—you …” He told himself, Something is happening, something is
happening
. “Well,” he tried to beat himself back, “a fine thing like you walkin' all alone on such a mellow day, and I—” He held up his hands then, and said, “I followed you. I didn't see your face until now. I want to be with you.” He flinched from his own words. Seldom had he felt so vulnerable.

“What's your name?” she said.

Hell, he thought, voice too, oh, God, why didn't you let me stay in the Y?

“Max,” he said almost too eagerly.

“Max,” she said laughing, “are you part Jewish or something?”

“No, all spook, one hundred percent spook. I think.”

“I'm Lillian. I have never been followed so far. One or two blocks, you know with the usual—‘shake it but don't break it, baby,' comments. Sometimes they make me feel good. Would you buy me a Coke?”

“Sure,” Max said, charging into the drugstore, biting his tongue to keep from saying, I'll buy you
any
thing, any
thing
. He drank three Cokes, she drank one. “You have a last name? Mine's Patch.”

“Reddick.”

“Are you a veteran?”

“I'm afraid so. Why?”

“I don't know.”

“Like veterans?” Some of these broads
still
see a uniform on every vet.

“Not particularly. Don't dislike them either, Max?”

Max almost broke his back turning around; something about her tone of voice. But she said, “Never mind. I don't want to know.”

“What?”

“What you do.”

“Oh.”

“I'm a teacher, you see. Nosey.”

“It's all right. Can we walk some more?”

“I live just down the block, but maybe we can sit in the park for a while.”

On the way down to the park, Max kept thinking, I ain't never been in love before, if this is what it feels like. Good God! Max, baby! Lookit you! He wanted to touch her arm as they went down the steep hill, but he merely looked and smiled, as she did. She pointed to her home when they passed it; she lived with her parents. They were getting old now and she was the only child and she didn't want to leave them. She had the entire second floor to herself. When, after talking in the park for an hour, she said she had to go home, he said, “But when will I see you again?”

[Now, still waiting for the buck to reappear, he remembered how she had turned ever so slowly to look at the Palisades, then back to him, saying sprightly] “How's about now, for dinner?” They held hands going back to the house, resigned, overwhelmed, aware of all the Hollywood Boy-Meets-Girl movies, American Love riddled with clichés: eyes, hands, facial expressions, the lot, and after meeting her folks, they went upstairs to her apartment (her mother did the dishes, she was a working girl), talked some more, with long, long pauses in between and many exchanges of the eyes until he simply stood up, gently holding her hand and pulled her to him. There was no resistance, and it rode them down, that thing, swept them up and left them in a silence in which they held each other desperately as if afraid to be blown away. No, Max said to himself. No, no. “What is it?” she asked.

“I am talking to this real dumb guy, Max Reddick,” he said.

“About what?”

“I'm telling him, ‘No, no, it can't be.'”

Lillian smiled. “And what is that real dumb guy answering?”

“You really want to know?”

“Of course.”

“He's answering, crudely because he is crude, ‘You're a boom-boom liar, it is
too!'
”

Later Max had run up the hill to Broadway singing at the top of his voice, shimmying when he came to a stop, one of his hands held across his stomach as he shuffled across the sidewalk.

“What in the hell are you laughing about?” Harry asked “You woke me up. Are you coming loose upstairs?”

Before Max could tell Harry about Lillian, there came a soft, uneven drumming along the forest floor, and even as they turned to watch the buck break out of the brush where it had vanished before, adrenaline pumping suddenly through their bodies, their rifles swinging up, they sighted. Perhaps frightened by someone or something on the lower trails, the deer, his head full of points, bounded clear of the brush.

But Harry Ames, too long away from a rifle and the woods, hesitated for just the small part of a second as he started to lead the deer in his sights. The deer seemed ludicrously slow, but it was in its second bound now, floating lean, long and brown against the backdrop of tree and sky. The instinct of the city man, at once envious and frightened of the abrupt display of animal grace, immeasurably distraught at the sudden gift of power (gun at the shoulder, animal in the sights), made Harry pause a little too long. His resentment of Max was like a spurt of acid. He took in Max leading the deer at the height of its second bound, heard his rifle crack sharply and echo swiftly over the mountain, saw Max's shoulder snap back from the kick of the gun, and saw life go out of the buck as it stretched its legs to land and take off again in another bound. In the middle of these observations, Harry fired too, but he knew he had fired late and had missed.

Some of the buck's antlers had dug into the ground, raking up a line of dead leaves. The shot had been clean. The buck was dead when it came down. They paused a moment and stared at the animal. “Goddamn,” Harry found himself whispering. “Man, ain't you a bitch?” Enviously he watched Max pull the buck over to see where the shot had hit. Had to be the heart, had to be. It was.

“Germans must have caught hell,” Harry said. “Big one. Meat's going to be a little tough.”

“Parboil it first,” Max said. “Get some of the taste out, soften it up.”

There are some people, Max was thinking, with whom you can share elation because they feel it with you. Harry Ames was not one of those. Max underplayed. “Sure was lucky, Harry. Right in the heart. I thought we'd have to finish it off when we got up close.” “We”—wouldn't that help make it all right? The “we” once more. “Now we've got enough venison to last for a little while.”

“Yeah, ain't we,” Harry said, suddenly mildly disgusted in the presence of death. Max also noticed but said nothing. Death disgusted him too. It was like looking at a snake and being repelled, for it reminded you where you came from and in some electrically quick way, how long it took to come from there and how horrible it had been, evolving.

In silence they secured a sturdy limb and tied the deer's feet to it; they would have to struggle with the 175 pounds of dead weight until they reached a trail. Then, maybe, they could get help from a couple of guys on their way back to the lodge.

As they struggled through the brush, Harry began to emerge from his reflections on the kill. “Max, you sure shot the hell outa this cat! Whoooee!” Harry was in front. He turned back. “I guess I knew you would, too. Hey! Do you remember that time you stayed with us on furlough, and I had just published
Though I Be Black?
”

“The party and that color-freak girl?”

“Yeah, that time.”

Max stared at the dead deer. “I remember.”

“Well, that was the last time I went hunting. I told you I was going to the Island, well, I did, but to hunt bird. Hell, I didn't want you to come because I knew you would show everybody up—mostly me. None of us got anything, Zutkin, me, whoever was with us, so we weren't doing too much talking when you and Charlotte got there, only drinking.”

Max gave the pole a little jerk. “Didn't you even see anything?”

Harry was panting now. Just ahead some trails met. They'd wait there and beg a little help; it was a good three-quarters of a mile to the lodge. “That's just it,” Harry said. “We did. Birds all over the place and we couldn't hit shit. You would have had the limit in an hour.”

“I was tired anyway,” Max said, sitting at the edge of one of the trails. “Coming all the way in from Fort Sill. Beat. I couldn't have walked a half-mile without falling on my face.”

“I'll bet,” Harry said, looking down the trail. Max slid a quick look at him. Max wanted to find out if Charlotte had known Harry was going hunting. Oh, you bitch, Max thought, you rotten stinking bitch. Saw me coming too.
But how?

“Of course, Charlotte laughed her ass off when you got there. Took me off in a corner and really gave me the old ‘I told you so.'” Harry turned toward Max and grinned. “The best I could do was give her hell for making such rotten sandwiches and filling my flask with water instead of brandy. But she knew what she was doing. She hadn't wanted me to go.” Max watched Harry stare thoughtfully at the antlers on the deer.

On an impulse, which he understood as soon as he began speaking, Max said, “Hey, man, I've got a girl, the most bee-utiful, the most fascinating, the most—”

Harry swung round once more, smiling. “So that's why you're finally moving out of the Y? Hard sneakin' them in there with all those faggots on the desk downstairs. They've got the eyes of eagles. She white or colored?”