Sam's Legacy (2 page)

Sam heard the names of Long Island towns being announced on the public address system. In the doorway to a bookstore, two teenagers were necking, the girl pressed back against the window, the guy's leg wedged between her thighs. “Yeah. Sure, sure,” Sam said, but when he saw the man smile, shyly, and reach into his inside jacket pocket, he found that he was darting past him, zigzagging through the crowd, bumping into people.

He cut through the lines at the information booth, moved right around the crowd of men looking through the windows of the hut in which you could light up the day's stock prices, passed ticket windows and food counters. He fished in his jacket pocket for a subway token and eyed the turnstiles, measuring the lines. He stopped, looked behind, but did not see the man. He waited his turn, dropped his token in the slot, then took the stairs two at a time and—his luck was running—slipped through the doors of a downtown IRT express just as they were closing.

It was quicker getting home, back to Brooklyn, now that the Garden was at 34th Street. He closed his eyes on the train and tried to think of the game, but instead he remembered how—unable not to think of Ben after the Bible guy had said something about praying—he'd lost his concentration and had missed Stallworth's introduction. He hadn't missed it, really—he'd heard the words—but his mind had been elsewhere. He didn't, he knew, like the feeling.

Sam left the train at Church Avenue. A few black guys got out also. “Ours is a neighborhood in transition,” Ben had said, and Sam had to laugh. A neighborhood in transition—that was rich. When he'd been a kid there, growing up, it had been mostly Jews, mixed with some Catholics, Irish and German. Sam didn't mind, though. The blacks never hassled him. Maybe the word was out that he had some kind of business with Sabatini. He touched his sidepocket. Some guys—his buddy Dutch was one—said you were crazy to keep a blade on you, that if you got cornered and they went for you and found it on you, you'd get it ten times worse. But Sam did what he wanted. He liked feeling the blade's weight against his thigh.

He pushed through the turnstile, taking pleasure in the resistance of the wood against his midsection. He stayed in shape—basketball when he had the chance, handball, swimming—it gave him an edge, knowing that his legs were tight, strong, that his waist was the same—thirty-two—as it had been ten years before. Concentration was everything. If you let yourself go to pot, you could get drowsy at a key moment. Sure. He didn't smoke, he rarely took a drink. Who knew how many—the word made him smile—pots he'd won because his body had sustained him just when some other guy's excess baggage had made his mind flabby….

Outside, at the corner of Church and Nostrand, the air was fresh. He saw some guys huddling across the street in front of the Lincoln Savings Bank: he figured he knew what they were selling. That took real brains. It was not even ten-thirty—he was in plenty of time for the eleven-fifteen sports on TV, to see how the other teams had done, to get the word on the football games coming up, to see if there were key injuries that might affect the point spreads.

Half a block ahead, just beyond Phil's Liquor Store, a man stood in a doorway. Sam thought of the Bible man, and he veered very slightly, toward the curb. He wasn't scared—it was early, a lot of cars cruising, his apartment was on the next block; if he had to, he could outrun most guys. He passed the man, crossed Martense Street, and, looking across the street, saw that there were still lights on in the windows of his apartment. With what had happened after the game still on his mind, there was no point, he knew, in going upstairs while Ben was awake. He'd had enough words for one night.

He kept walking, heard music and looked left: two teenage girls, both black, their heads covered in brightly colored silk kerchiefs, were dancing in an all-night laundromat. Sam paused, watched their behinds moving. The girls were shaking nicely, their eyes closed, dreaming—Sam licked his lips, then noticed something yellow come into focus, rising, next to the dryers. A tall black guy, wearing steel-rimmed glasses, his hair fuzzed up, a crazy bright yellow poncho draped over his shoulders, glared at him. One girl bent over slightly, wiggling her shoulders like a stripper, and Sam saw the backs of her legs, muscles rippling under brown thighs. He looked through the window—there was a ledge, where a portable radio sat, next to a box of soap flakes, and Sam figured that the guy had been sitting there before he'd stood. Sam walked away. If the guy had sounded him, he could have thought of a lot of things to say, but it was just as well that he hadn't. The girls had known what was happening, that they'd been putting on a show for him, trying to start something. Sure. Stick to a bitch, end in a ditch.

Sam turned left onto Linden Boulevard, the rock music fading out. Women—! He bet they'd been the ones who'd invented religion in the first place. That was rich, the line the guy had quoted to him, but he wasn't out—the word stuck—to prosper. Sure. He never lived really big, rolling around in fancy cars and expensive women, but he stayed alive, ahead of the game. That was something. Playing it small and smart he could get by from feeding on the others, the dumb ones, the guys who were out for the big kill.

He headed for Flatbush Avenue: the morning papers would be in soon—he could have coffee and a Danish in Garfield's while he waited. The street was dark, an old couple ahead of him, walking arm in arm. He'd lived on this block for almost twenty years; he knew every cellar, every alleyway, every roof. Number 221, his old building, was across the street, inside—one of four buildings which surrounded a courtyard. They'd had a large five-room apartment on the third floor. Now, ever since Ben had become ill five years before, Sam lived with his father in a narrow two-room place on Nostrand Avenue between Martense Street and Linden Boulevard, directly above the Muscular Dystrophy Rummage Shop. At fifty-six dollars a month, rent-controlled, they couldn't complain. What would they do with five rooms? He turned left at Rogers Avenue. When he'd been a kid, this had been the corner he had hung out at. The old stores—Bender's Fruit and Grocery, Klein's Kosher Butcher Shop, Lee's Luncheonette, Dominick's Barber Shop—were all gone. But you couldn't, Sam told himself, go against it. Things changed. He never made any predictions: he played the games one at a time. Play what's there, don't bet on air….

Ahead of him, a man was sprawled on the sidewalk, his head against a garbage can, his left leg folded impossibly backward, under his rear-end. Sam looked left, checking the doorways to see if it was the old trap. Nobody. He walked to the man, smelled liquor mixed with vomit. The guy was Negro, but with a tiny nose, flattened like an Irishman's. His stubble was full of white hairs, he had a sky-blue baseball cap on his head, sideways, and there was something dark clotted along his lower lip. There were no cars parked nearby. Sam bent over quickly, his ear to the man's face—he heard breathing, a low pleasant-sounding gurgle. Sam felt the guy's hands, checked his wrists—he'd be okay the way he was, sleeping it off.

A stranger had once saved a man's life, a diplomat from the United Nations—Sam had seen the story in the
Post
—because he'd stopped when he'd seen him lying in the gutter; the man had had an engraved silver tag on his wrist, stating that he was a diabetic and who to telephone.

Sam moved away, across Martense Street. What if—the thought made him swallow, clench his fists—it had been Dave Stallworth lying there? The cleaning store at the corner, where old Mr. Weiss used to sit in the window, sewing, was now some kind of welfare station—guys hanging out in front of it all day long. This had been the best block for punchball and stickball, and he knew the local kids still used it: not too many cars, only one or two big trees overhanging, and they were far enough apart so that you had to go some, from the first sewer cover, to loft a ball into the branches. He heard the sound of glass—a bottle—splattering on the sidewalk behind him. He crossed over: all the stores had iron grilles across their doors and windows.

Sam walked along Church Avenue, past Holy Cross Church, past the schoolyard where he still played three-man ball some afternoons. Two policemen were walking together on the other side of the street, their walkie-talkies strapped to their sides like silver hip flasks. To the left, across Bedford Avenue, he saw one wall of his old high school, Erasmus, and, next to it, on the far side, where their synagogue used to be, there was now a parking lot.

If religion meant so much to his father, then how come he never even went to synagogue anymore? Answer that, he heard himself saying to Ben—but he knew that Ben would only smile back at him, in the way which drove Sam crazy, and say something clever. Here the man was, though, sixty-seven years old, admitting he didn't believe in God and winding black straps around himself every morning of his life…and people thought that gamblers were superstitious!

Sam played the cards, just what was there. If you bluff, it'll get rough. Sure. It was no skin off his back if somebody wanted to believe something—when it came down to it, he bet his old man would have been shocked to find out what he himself believed. Ben didn't know everything.

He passed the post office, the firehouse, and Luigi's, where he and Dutch still went sometimes to split a pizza pie. The parking lot across the street, next to the Biltmore Caterers, had been Harry Gross's place of business, and even though he'd been put in the can almost twenty years before, at the time of the basketball fixes, guys in the neighborhood still talked about him. Gross had been the biggest bookie in Brooklyn, a friend of Bugsy Siegel and Mickey Cohen; and he'd always worked completely in the open. Sabatini's take was probably one-tenth of what they said Gross had controlled; the man had to be careful, sure, but Sam didn't like it, never seeing his face, only hearing his voice on the phone.

He couldn't complain, though. If the guy wanted to act as if he was king of Las Vegas, that was his right. He'd always dealt straight with Sam, for the six years Sam had been using him. Maybe he felt he had to impress the muscle men on his payroll, acting like some kind of Howard Hughes, the guy who owned the state of Nevada and walked around his penthouse with his feet in Kleenex boxes to keep germs off. Sabatini could keep himself locked in an iron mask, for all Sam cared; so long as Sam got his money at the end of the week, when it was coming to him.

At the corner of Church and Flatbush, Sam could see that the morning papers had not yet come in—the stacks were all too low—so he went into Garfield's Cafeteria, pushed through the turnstile, took his blank check from the machine, picked up a tray, some paper napkins, silverware. He got his cup of coffee and a cheese Danish, then sat down by the Flatbush Avenue window. The kids from Erasmus had probably been rioting again, he figured: there was tape going across the window in a jagged line. A lot of old people were sitting around, talking. With triple locks on their doors and round-the-clock doormen, the old people hung on, but their kids were all moving out, the way all his old buddies had done: to Westchester and Long Island and New Jersey, to California and Florida.

Sam sipped his coffee, watched the kids across the street (they sat, in rows, on the steps of the Dutch Reformed Church), and he could see Stallworth moving across half-court, then cutting left through a pack of players, his body toward the basket, and, at the last second, his left hand stretching back and swishing a beautiful hook shot straight through. The guy was right-handed too—an ace. But Sam would lay off the Knicks for the next game—they would be playing on the road, and he wouldn't press his luck. The two-fifty would last until the end of the month.

The man at the table in front of his, next to the window, was licking a pencil point with his tongue, marking things down in the margins of
The New York Times
. The guy wore an old brown jacket over a sweater with holes in it, yet there he was, figuring out the stock page. The man scribbled furiously along the edge of the newsprint, stopped, looked at Sam suspiciously, then, with his left hand, stuck a finger through one of the holes in his sweater and scratched his chest. Sam thought of the other guy, reaching into his jacket for whatever pamphlet it was that he'd been selling.

Sam kept his eye on the market now and then, but he never played there. Sure, you could make a big killing if somebody gave you a tip, but where, he asked, was the control? The big boys manipulated everything; you could get your ass cleaned out overnight if some mutual fund decided to dump what you had. All you could do was read the figures in the paper, and they weren't figures Sam could believe in. He'd make his own odds.

He hadn't, he knew, been getting as many games of poker as he needed—that was why he'd put two and a half on the Knicks' first game. He didn't like it. Sure. Maybe, in the way that pitchers were always ahead of the batters in spring training, so Sam could stay ahead of the bookies in the early going; still, the question was there: where was the control? The truth, he knew (remembering how easy it had been, a few hours before, seeing Stallworth, to let his feelings carry him away), was that you were only a spectator. If he could have given up betting on games, he'd have been just as happy.

He felt his fingers tighten into fists. Damn though, he thought. With enough poker he wouldn't have needed anything else. If he could have had one game every night for one year, say—five-card draw, five and ten—he figured he could have retired at the end. But games were harder and harder to come by—he'd had to go out to Newark for the last one, taking the damned tubes—and the game had been only quarter and half-dollar.

The man had switched seats, showing Sam his back. Sam smiled, watched the man's elbow jerking, pushing the pencil round and round in circles. With the Dow Jones average dropping every day lately, the bottom nowhere in sight, the guy was probably eating himself up. Or maybe he traded in the other stuff, which Sam never followed at all: what the fuck were pork belly futures anyway? He laughed—it picked him up, thinking of a line like that. He bit into his Danish. That, and the guys who were always talking about taking losses in order to make gains. You couldn't sell that theory to a man who'd been in Sam's line of work for over a dozen years. Sam knew the guys who'd bet heavy on low pairs, who'd lose hands on purpose, thinking they were setting him up; they'd never taken his money home.