Max by Howard Fast Page A

sensation. He kept thinking of the boy’s soft cow-eyes. A few days later, placatingly, he said to Freida, ‘I didn’t want to hurt him. I had to learn him.’
    â€˜Oh, big shot!’ Freida exclaimed. ‘You’re so goddamned great. You think because you’re keeping company with that fancy teacher, you’re too good for all of us, but you can’t even talk right. I had to learn him. You don’t learn people, you teach them. You’re so smart. Why don’t you tell your teacher friend how you beat up a kid because he liked me?’
    Max was impressed. He had never thought of Freida as someone with enough guts to talk back to him.
    Freida’s anger turned into self-pity, and she began to weep. ‘Oh, Max,’ she wailed, ‘what will I do? What’s going to happen to me? All I can think of is that I have to kill myself.’
    â€˜Don’t kill yourself,’ Max said.
    â€˜What do you mean, don’t kill myself? What else?’
    â€˜I’ll take care of it.’
    â€˜What do you mean, you’ll take care of it? You think you can do anything, you think you can twist the whole world around your finger, you’re so goddamn smart and sure of yourself!’
    â€˜I said I’ll take care of it.’
    That night, sitting before his dressing room mirror, staring at his lean, hawklike face, Max felt a wave of disgust that included the rouge and cream he was smearing on his face, the ridiculous baggy checked pants he wore, the routine waiting for him and for Bert when the curtain rose, the whole way of a living that brought life and sustenance to the six members of his family. Sally, trying to smooth his rough edges, read poetry to him on occasion, hoping it might interest him. There was a long poem about an ‘ancient mariner’ and a line that went: ‘Instead of a cross, an albatross about his neck was hung.’ They were all of them his albatross.
    â€˜Do you know what a ransom is?’ he asked Bert, who was using a lipstick to double the size of his mouth.
    â€˜Kidnap money, you mean?’
    â€˜You got it. I need a million dollars’ ransom.’
    â€˜Who’d they kidnap – Vanderbilt?’
    â€˜Me, and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of this shit. I’m sick of everyone’s peckle on my back.’
    â€˜What’s a peckle? ’
    â€˜Yiddish for burden.’
    â€˜Your sister really got to you, didn’t she?’
    â€˜Eh, she’s nothing. Dumb, stupid kid. I found someone to take care of her, but it’s got to cost me fifty bucks.’
    â€˜How do you find someone like that?’
    â€˜Suzie. You got to hand it to those floozies – when you’re being squeezed, they come up with something. They always do. But fifty bucks down the drain, that hurts.’
    â€˜Are you so broke?’
    â€˜I’m not broke.’
    â€˜Then what are you crying about money for? A lousy fifty bucks is not the end of the world. If you need money –’
    â€˜Yeah, I need money, but not to square Freida. I can take care of that. It’s peanuts. Right now, I need money like a kid needs his mother’s milk, and I ain’t got it. I got maybe two hundred bucks put away, and how the hell I managed to squirrel away two yards with six yelping, shrieking hungry mouths, I don’t know. All right, I did it, and it wasn’t enough anyway, so what the hell!’
    â€˜Enough for what?’
    Max turned to Bert, staring at him as if he was seeing him for the first time. ‘You’re not even married. What do you do with your dough?’
    â€˜I live it up.’
    â€˜Ah, bullshit. You’re no looser with a buck than I am. How much you got soaked away, Bert?’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I got an idea. I been living with it for weeks, eating on it and letting it eat out my guts. It’s an idea that maybe it works, we can end up millionaires.’ He thrust a