The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams Page B

Mary.
    â€œWhat?”
    She came close. “What are you thinking?”
    Goddamn it, they ate you up with their stinking quiet, beaten ways. “Nothing,” he said.
    Harry’s house seemed strangely empty the next day. All the furniture was there, in place. Perhaps it was Harry’s demeanor that suggested a change. At first he was hearty and as usual, Harry. He had made the spaghetti and meatballs and bragged about them. But lunchtime was growing to a close; Crockett didn’t like for city desk people to be out long if they were not on an assignment. Finally: “Wanda’s gone. Been gone four days now.”
    Max nodded.
    â€œYou know why, don’t you?”
    â€œCharlotte.”
    â€œYeah, Charlotte. We’re getting married.”
    Max looked up, then speared another meatball and chewed it cautiously.
    â€œSay something,” Harry said.
    â€œWhat do you want me to say?”
    â€œYou don’t like Charlotte, do you?”
    â€œJesus, Harry, I don’t know her that well. But, are you really getting married?”
    â€œYeah.” Harry looked out the window at the ugly rooftops. “Imagine, me from Mississippi, black, burly, marrying her. For months I’ve had to examine it alone. Charlotte because she’s white? Jesus, Max, in the past five years I’ve had more fay pussy than black. Once I stumbled on a cute little Negro chick in Chicago and I cried when I held her. I remember (I was a little high) watching my tears run down her brown back, a brown back with soft, almost invisible little black hairs.”
    Max felt the softest of weights descending upon his shoulders; the last part of his meatball went down hard. A phrase from a current song drifted through his mind: Why are you telling me your secrets …?
    â€œI want to feel happy, you know, wild , but I feel like Sisyphus rolling that goddamn stone.” Harry smiled. “I guess I’m worryin’ you with my troubles. Okay, you can worry me sometime. Max, do you know the day will come when a black man will not marry a woman he loves simply because she’s white? Well, not simply, it’s not that simple. He’ll be afraid to. There’ll be too much there, history, all kinds of people, work, play, revenge.” Harry threw up his hands. “I’d like you to be the best man.”
    In that moment when Harry looked at him, Max knew that Harry too was alone and that jolted him. He pictured Harry, when he was not with him, in the center of a crowd at a party talking, gesturing, with every eye following; he pictured Harry practicing lines for Wanda so he could get out to see someone else. He did not picture Harry Ames alone until now.
    The weight. It was down now, heavily. The phrase from the song came again: Why are you telling me your secrets …?
    â€œOkay,” Max said. “Be glad to.”
    Harry went off to Alabama for his divorce. That was the week Max received the note from Moses Boatwright with a covering letter from the warden at Sing Sing. The note, written the afternoon before the execution said:
    Dear Max,
    Thanks for coming. There won’t be another Negro there. I guess we took advantage of each other, but, they say, all’s fair in love and war. To answer your question of some months ago, I took the heart and the genitals, for isn’t that what life’s all about, clawing the heart and balls out of the other guy? Thanks.
    Moses L. Boatwright
    Okay, Moses, what was it like to walk out of the corridor and into a room filled with composed white faces? No anger, no revulsion, no hate, Moses, because they had you! I see you, Moses, coming out, scanning those rows of faces, scanning again and again because you told yourself there were shadows and maybe you were missing me. Then, Moses, the chair, and you peering out still, growing afraid, the fear gnawing at you like a hundred sewer rats, and the mask, the straps for the legs and wrists, the