The Man Who Cried I Am (12 page)

He felt her turn toward him and he turned away. “But I love him and that's what hurts so. I can't go. Max, I only want to be held, to be loved now. I'm alone. I'm frightened. What happens to us now, Harry and me? We can't quit. It's more than just us, it's the world. They'd think we quit because we are what we are, nothing more. Oh, Max, I'm so miserable. In friendship, do it, in friendship.”

Max jerked around. “Look, just lie still. Let's both just lie still and talk and it'll go away. I want to do it. I want badly to make love to you, but I wouldn't be able to look you or Harry in the eye again. Want a cigarette?”

“Yes.” Her voice was very small.

He lit a cigarette and passed it to her, then lit one for himself. He visualized his hands touching her. There, there, there, but he remained still. “What happened?”

“I don't know,” she said. “At first we just couldn't get enough of each other, couldn't be apart. Then—it didn't take days or weeks or months—just suddenly, he was gone. He was
there
, you know, but he was gone.”

“And you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you start to go too?”

He turned toward her and saw her cigarette glow brightly, then fade. She exhaled. He took her hand. “You went too, didn't you?”

“Yes, I went.”

“And still going?”

“Not as much. There seems to be no point in it.”

“Harry know?”

“I don't know. If he does, so what? He's doing the same thing.”

“You know it doesn't work that way, Charlotte, not yet.”

“Well, I don't suppose he knows. He'd have killed me long ago if he had.”

“Feel better now?”

“No, Max, worse. It doesn't go away. Max?”

“Huh?”

“Please.”

“Charlotte—”

“Harry wouldn't hesitate one minute if he were in this position with your wife. You know that.”

“That's not fair, Charlotte. That's really hitting below the belt.”

“Oh, Max, who do you think you are, Joe Louis?”

“Nuts, Charlotte, I'm going to the Y.” Max got up and reached for his clothes.

“But what would Harry say? He'd think we made love anyway and that you didn't want to look him in the eye as you so poetically put it.”

“Tell him anything you want, but you know that when we get through fighting each other, he'll be through with you anyway.”

She touched his arm. Max stopped gathering his clothes. “Yes, I know. I'm sorry. Come back to bed, Max. I'll behave. Honest I will.”

“But you aren't doing either of us any good by being here, Charlotte.”

“One more cigarette, then I'll go.”

“You haven't finished that one. Give it to me.” Max mashed it out and lit another for her.

“We have to stay together,” Charlotte said.

“Aw, hell no, Charlotte, you said after one more—”

She laughed. “I meant Harry and me. We're going to have a child.”

“It
is
Harry's?”

“Do you think I'm a fool, Max?”

“Harry know?”

“Strange. I should have had my period two weeks ago. He's been asking me about it. It's too early for a doctor, but I know, and I think Harry knows. I don't think he wanted to be with me because of that. You know, he's a very jealous man, not of me with men, but of my attentions; he wants them, all of them, twenty-four hours a day.”

Charlotte had turned on her stomach, propped herself on her elbows. The first suggestion of day touched the window above them. Max could see her profile. Every line in her neck was clean and fast as she looked up at the sky. Her hair was swept long behind her. Good weather for game birds, Max thought. It would be very chilly outside, perhaps a touch of frost, but that would go with the ascent of the sun. And when that sun came fully out, away would go the birds.

She was looking down at him, smiling, he could tell now, and her face and neck and shoulders were all touched with a fuzzy blue-gray tint. “When Harry and I were first married, we would lie awake like this, after making love, and smoke and talk, and agree that we were going down to the Battery and watch the sun come up. We've never done it. All my fault. It always seemed the right thing to do, but somehow, when the alarm went off and Harry jumped up, I'd always tell him that we'd do it the next time. Sometimes he'd go out alone, take a cab somewhere, like 12th Avenue, and walk beneath the highway watching the meat trucks come in and unload. He'd tell me how empty the city was and how the darkness seemed to hang so stubbornly over New Jersey …” She stopped. “God, Max, I love that man.”

Max had been staring at her face, her shoulders, her breasts. Then he closed his eyes and saw Harry lumbering along 12th Avenue at four in the morning. He felt Charlotte drawing near him, felt first the tantalizing stray hairs on her head as they drifted toward him, then felt the mass of it tumble on his chest, and he lifted his mouth to hers. With one hand he pressed her to him as hard as he could. With the other, he searched for her breasts. She raised herself slightly to give him room. He broke from the kiss whispering desperately, “In friendship, Charlotte.” He felt her face melt slowly into a smile and she nodded even as she pressed hard against his mouth.

10

ITALY

Being in the Army was to be an experience. How much worse could life be? Hadn't you seen it all, all the bad life in Harlem, prowling the alleys and avenues? One must have the confirmation, Max told himself. Armies are like the societies that produce them. Max knew that. But the confrontation with that fact, logically, had to be harsher than the suspicion. The society expected, nay,
demanded
, that every black soldier within its ranks die as he had lived—segregated, deprived, discriminated against. That is, to die if ever permitted to be in a situation where that was possible. The honor of dying, on the whole, was reserved for white soldiers. And it was clear, as far as Max could see, that the Army was not going to make the mistake it had made during War I: detaching Negro soldiers to fight with the French and accumulate all those
Croix de Guerre
. It had become necessary for the War Department, with help from the French military mission, to issue a paper on 7 August 1918:
Secret Information Concerning Black American Troops
. The usual, official, vicious stuff. Max had seen copies of the report in the homes of Negroes who were veterans of the 369th.

And in one of their homes he had read the history of the division in which he was now a squad leader:

The colors of the regiment first came under fire on August 2, 1867, about 40 miles northeast of Fort Hays, near the Saline River. Company F, patrolling the railroad, was attacked by a band of 300 Indians. The troop comprised two officers and 34 men. The fight lasted six hours. The Troop, badly outnumbered, was in the end forced to retire, after inflicting heavy losses on the hostiles. Captain Armes was wounded, and Sergeant William Christy killed.

The old Tenth Cavalry, the Buffaloes, the 92nd Division. But the echoes of the Indian fighters who never made the history books and were smoothed out in the War Department records, no longer drifted through the hills at Fort Huachuca. While the Division had its beginnings as a Regiment made up of freed slaves docile and fiercely proud of their uniforms, horses and ability to track, it was now composed of bitter, questioning men on the one hand, and on the other, men who never had it so good.

Ten point six percent.

In Army Ground Forces jargon that meant that the number of black men—and officers (how did they handle that in Washington?)—had to reflect the Negro population in America. No more because, after the war, they might disturb the peace (can't let them learn too much about guns) and no less because the Urban League and the National Association wouldn't hear of it.

He was in Louisiana running hot after a Creole redhead when Charlotte and Harry's baby was born, and it was in Louisiana that he chose to write to Harry about Harry's fourth novel, a “Negro novel” the critics had said. Perhaps it was being in the Army, sheltered, that made Max do it. Where else would he have gotten the nerve to discuss Harry Ames's work? The hero of Harry's book was a black Jean Valjean and his loaf of bread which had caused all his troubles was his skin; it was that which would cause him to be hunted down all his life, in the sewers of his existence, and his Javert would be every man who lived within a white skin.

But for all that, the novel wouldn't peel, wouldn't work, and he told Harry so. To his surprise, Harry was not offended and a regular exchange of letters commenced. How did Max like the South? Did being a soldier make the crackers in the nearby towns angrier? Max did not like the South and, yes, the crackers were angry. Beneath all the questions Max suspected that however much he belittled it, Harry envied Max the experience. It was true there was no moral equivalent for war. Max wondered if such an equivalent came to America, would Americans recognize it. At the moment, however, being a man was still tied to being at war.

In the old days you had to walk up to the man you were going to kill, look him in the eye and then spit him upon your sword or spear, if he did not spit you first. Now you took your man out with a call to the Air Force, if the weather was good, or the tanks or Division Artillery. Failing that, you took cover, hoisted your M1 and took your man out at a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards. You only saw his dead face if you were winning and obliged to go forward, past him.

They boarded the transport on a gray, muggy day. They boarded silently, cold eyes mocking the commands of white and Negro officers. And soon the ship, with a gentle rumble, backed from the pier, gulls wheeling and squawking, and the haphazard skyline of Newport News, Virginia, rose up through the mist. Newport News, which had been as bad as Louisiana, and Louisiana as bad as Arizona, and Arizona as bad as any place in America.

The ship, now in deep waters, began to rumble and wallow, and Max, standing at the fantail, felt the salt water spray blowing in his face. There was not much back there, he thought, and nothing at all where we're going. How in the hell did we get like this? In a time when we fight for the things we can't have. Well, maybe, like Harry said, we'll do the war unloading ships and trucks. That, Max thought, would be survival, but would that be enough?

The 92nd was called a division, but it was not—only elements of a division; thus, from the beginning it was set that its failures would be divisional and its successes regimental. Even as the Buffaloes were making their way inland from the coast of northwest Italy, forcing through the bulwark of the Apennines, word came that the brass were already planning the invasion of France. This war, Max thought when he heard the rumor, was forgotten even before they really got into it. But if the brass had pulled out, the worst was over.

They plodded through the mountains upon which perched sentries of tall black cypress trees, slender, graceful. Then the rains came, drifting steadily down from the gray skies. Mud seemed to grow underfoot. Skirmishes grew in size until they became battles, and ahead, tucked among the mountains and behind the stark, beaten little villages with their somber people, lay the Gustav Line, or what remained of it.

Max did not know the day when his worries, his life, congealed around the ten men in his squad. Beyond that, it was someone else's worry. His ten men were various shades of black or brown, and they were hipsters from Harlem or Southside Chicago, or country boys from the South. The BAR man was from Morehouse College, a dark, thin youngster who had run track there. He reminded Max of Boatwright in many ways. They walked the trails and roads and in their fright and bitterness called out to the staring Italians, “Fuck you, dago,” or, “Hello,
paisan;
how does it feel to have niggers save your stinking skin, noble Roman bastard.”

They fought those little battles that seemed to have no reason for taking place at all. They just happened. A sniper. That meant his squad was clearing out and he had been left behind to stall the advance. Max calling and pumping his arm hard, “Hurry up, hurry up! We'll kill all those motherfuckers in there!” Slapping the backs of his men as they passed him and deployed. Wondering at how easily the idea of killing came. Or, on other days, the sun breaking through for moments, their breaths steaming up the air, shells bursting about them, Max searching for two of them, the eyes rolling, saying, Please, Sergeant Reddick, don't send me! Max, looking about ever so carefully, and deciding to go around the German position, if they could, and leave the bastards there and let the next guys up take care of themselves. Max wished to God that the next guys up were white.

Man after man was killed and replaced. Another Jones, another Jackson, another George Washington Roosevelt Brown; another Chicago accent, another Alabama accent, and the days humped together. Get up, man, we're movin' out. Overhead, shells flew, sounding like the taffeta skirt of a kootch dancer. And there goes Chicago number three.

By the time they reached the canals, only Barnes, the corporal, remained of the original squad. They followed their tanks. It was quiet then, except for the tanks themselves. Then the air started to convulse. Gigantic clods of dirt V-ed upward before the sound of the guns, the big guns that were supposed to be knocked out, came. Max saw one tank begin to list, and then, with a shudder, it bogged down. He waved his men away from the tank and only saw, fleetingly, the men inside it fighting each other to get out of it. Trapped in the bottom of the bowl through which the canals ran, and confined only to narrow tracks beside them, the tanks took direct hits or, taking evasive action, went into the canals. Steel whistled and whined through the air, punctuating the screams of rage and pain. Another tank hit, and another had its side blown out. Now the tracks were blocked. The infantry raced backward. The tanks tried to back up.