Max by Howard Fast

the film’s no good without the camera. You got to have a special camera, and I guess there ain’t but half a dozen anywhere. Well, how about it, sonny? You got five bucks’ worth?’
    â€˜Was it worth five dollars?’ Sally asked him when they got outside.
    â€˜You bet your life.’
    â€˜But why? I do think it’s extraordinary, but the sight of two men beating each other to death – I could live without that.’
    â€˜No, that’s nothing. I don’t give a damn about the fight. It’s the camera and the projector. Can’t you see, it’s the beginning of something that never existed before.’
    â€˜It’s just a trick, Max. We’ve always had the magic lantern. This is a magic lantern that moves, that’s all.’
    â€˜Yeah, that’s all it is.’
    â€˜Where are you?’ she asked him as he turned east down the street. ‘You’re going the wrong way.’
    â€˜Oh?’
    â€˜Max, what’s come over you?’
    â€˜I don’t know –’
    â€˜You got to be crazy,’ Bert said to Max. ‘You got a brain in your head, you’ll leave it alone.’
    â€˜It’s my sister.’
    â€˜So it’s your sister. So it’s the queen of England. It’s the nature of a broad to get knocked up. Where’s it get you to beat him up?’
    â€˜He learns. It’s the only way.’
    â€˜There are times,’ Bert said, ‘when you show a nasty streak.’
    â€˜That’s the way I feel.’
    â€˜You could make him marry her.’
    â€˜I need that. I got her on my back, I don’t need two of them. Anyway, she says she’d kill herself first.’
    His name was Joe Greenthal. Max got his name out of her by the simple process of threatening to turn his back on her if she tried to protect the boy or cover up for him, and then he went down to the corner outside the candy store on Pike Street and he asked around for a boy called Joe Greenthal. Compassion was not something Max had a large store of, but he almost felt sorry for this kid called Joe Greenthal, who was pudgy and had a round face and soft brown cow-eyes, and he might have walked away from it had he not spelled out his position to Bert. In all truth, what he had spelled out was only what he could articulate: the complex of pride, of family honor, of his own male macho, of his feelings about the stupidity and witlessness of the rest of his family with only himself to put some stamp of worth and importance upon them – these things he could not put into words.
    Nevertheless, they drove him to acts hardly basic to him. He had a deep inner disgust of violence that was almost genetic and certainly tribal and cultural, but he told the boy, Joe Greenthal, that he had to talk to him, alone, concerning Freida, walking him away from the candy store toward the river.
    The boy was frightened. ‘Geez,’ he whimpered, ‘I didn’t know it was going to happen. I didn’t mean anything bad. I like Freida.’
    â€˜That’s why you knocked her up? Because you like her?’
    â€˜I didn’t know it was going to happen, I swear I didn’t.’
    â€˜So what do you think? The stork does it, right? So I’m going to teach you different. I’m going to teach you there ain’t no stork, just snotty little shits like you.’ And with that, Max drove a fist into his belly. When the boy doubled over, Max brought up his knee and laid him flat on his back. He lay on the pavement, doubled up, whimpering with pain, and Max shouted at him, ‘Stay away from her, you little son of a bitch, or I’ll come back and break both your arms.’
    The next day Freida said to him, ‘You’re a crazy lunatic. You knocked out two teeth from Joey. I hate you. I’ll always hate you.’
    â€˜So you hate me. He has to learn. He learns. You learn.’
    But Max hated himself, which was also a new