Sam's Legacy (6 page)

I have been a gambler too, brother. That is why I understand your plight. For over twenty years I wandered in dens of iniquity. Let me help you by leading you to the comfort of our Lord Jesus. For are we not all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousness as filthy rags? I have been down and out, I have used women in unnatural ways, I have defiled my body. But we have all, like sheep, gone astray, and except by grace, which is the gift of God, are ye not saved. Not of works, lest any man should boast!

Like lambs would be more like it, Sam thought, crossing Church Avenue. The guy's phone number, but not his name, had been there also, inviting Sam to come and pray. Sam stored the guy's spiel away, with everything else he had to save: the words would get weaker in time, especially—and this, he knew, was what made him so angry—when he could be getting a game of poker again.

Maybe, though, the whole thing was a con and the guy would make his move just when you were on your knees with your hands clasped in front of you. But the picture didn't amuse Sam. The guy had gotten to him—he admitted it. Maybe, he thought, approaching the Bel-Air supermarket, he could have Ben speak with him: with Ben's voice, the guy might think Sam had God right there in the room with him. That would be rich, Ben quoting stuff from the Jewish Bible to Sam's—what should he call him?—to his fellow gambler. Well, Sam said to himself, this gambler will bet on this life and take his chances on the next one: you couldn't bet on what you couldn't see. Play the cards, guard your odds. That was control.

Ben had all week long, when people were at work, to do the shopping, but he always picked Saturdays, the way a lot of the old people in the neighborhood did. Maybe they liked meeting each other there on the weekend, Sam thought, going up and down the aisles together. Congregation Shaare Torah had moved away, past Flatbush Avenue, down by Albermarle Road and East 21st Street, to a better section. When it had been on Bedford Avenue, next to Erasmus, it was the place most of the people in the neighborhood had used; the new one was probably too far for most of them to walk to, unless they were very religious, the way his grandfather had been. Nothing had stopped him—every Friday night and Saturday morning, freezing rain or broiling sun, the old guy had gone.

Sam stepped on the black rubber mat that was embedded in the sidewalk and the electric-eye door opened for him. The noise inside the store, mingling with piped-in music, was louder than the street sounds had been outside. The colors—posters, cans, displays, boxes—made him stagger slightly, stop: it was as if, coming from the outside, he was inside a movie which had changed suddenly from black-and-white to technicolor. There were some Christmas decorations up already, silver tinsel hanging from transparent nylon thread, speckling turrets of cereal boxes. He searched for Ben and felt something tug on his jacket. He looked to the right. An old woman, Pygmy-sized, stared into his face. He saw powder pressed into the wrinkles that ran in circles across her black skin, and he thought of the shrunken heads he used to see advertised on the inside covers of comic books. The woman's mouth, toothless, opened: “You all save green stamps?”

Her hand moved from his jacket to his wrist, and he felt the bones of her fingers. “No. Not me, but—”

She smiled, and Sam gazed in at the fleshy red skin in the back of her throat. The woman sat down on an empty Pepsi-Cola case. “I'll wait,” she said. “Remember, I asked you all first.”

Sam thought of explaining, but decided not to bother. Maybe she'd be gone by the time he left. He walked around the row of empty shopping carts. The store was crowded—people wheeling their half-f carts up and down the aisles, chattering to one another, standing in clusters at the head of each aisle where the specials were. He checked an aisle (vegetables and juices) for Ben. Cartons of canned goods lined the floor from one end of the aisle to the other. A black kid, a pencil stuck behind his ear, was stamping cans of peas and carrots, clicking out an off-beat rhythm with his purple hand-stamper, clickety-click clickety-clickety-click. Two middle-aged black women, wearing heavy winter coats, were debating the prices on several cans of asparagus. Sam walked past them, and they eyed him suspiciously.

At the end of the aisle, to the right, salamis and cheeses were hanging from strings above the delicatessen counter. Sam turned left, passed in front of the meat counter, around shoppers comparing packages of cellophane-wrapped beef. In back of the counter were sliding glass partitions, a recent improvement, and sides of cows were hanging behind it from hooks; chickens were moving along on a conveyor belt. Sam heard a bell ring, calling for a butcher. His mouth watered.

The floor was littered with cigarette butts, candy wrappers. To the right, in the corner of the store, above a display of potato chips, a TV camera moved slowly from right to left, left to right. Sam could remember—he'd been about twelve years old—when the supermarket had opened, the first one in the neighborhood, and how all the women in front of his building on Linden Boulevard had talked afterward about how guilty they felt when they shopped there. He had made some tips, going to the local stores for them—getting a container of milk, a loaf of bread, a half-pound of tomatoes or some soup greens—when they'd been too embarrassed to go themselves.

Where was Ben hiding himself? Sam checked frozen foods, then the produce department. He turned right, around a display of beer in dark store-brand, no-deposit no-return bottles, then cut around a cornucopia of picnic supplies, paper plates and cups spilling into a green plastic basin.

“Excuse me,” he said, trying to get through a traffic jam.

“Sure, darling. Here, let me squeeze myself a little this way….”

The woman giggled, and Sam slipped past her, past flour, sugar, salt, baking needs, around and into the next aisle, and Ben was there: in paper goods, his cart almost full. Sam stopped. He was surprised somehow to see how short the man was. Ben had a box of tissues in each hand, balancing them, comparing the weights. He glanced toward Sam but didn't seem to notice him. Hunched up in his raincoat, Ben seemed smaller than ever, his face very gray in comparison with the brown and black faces around him. He was wearing his reading glasses and his nose seemed especially big, hooked out above his thin mouth. Bent over, the man was no more than five-feet-four—he'd shrunk a full inch during the past few years. Sam could see things like that, he could usually estimate somebody's height to within a half inch. He felt dizzy, and he wondered momentarily if it were possible, gazing this way—half-hypnotized by the noise and the warmth, by the music and the colors—to actually see his father shrink. All but the nose and the ears. They were—Dutch had once pointed this out to him—the only parts of the body that continued to grow after the rest had stopped.

A woman's cart banged into Ben's, but he didn't budge. Sam watched him put one box of tissues back on the shelf and place the other on top of his shopping cart.
Don't!
he wanted to call out.
It's too full, Ben!
He felt wide awake now. Ben seemed stuck—between his basket and the shelf. Sam moved forward, past toilet paper, sandwich bags, plastic wrap, aluminum foil, paper toweling, hot cups, paper plates, plastic silverware. Ben turned to the shelf, his elbow knocking the box of tissues to the floor.

Sam moved quickly, but Ben had already bent over—and as he retrieved the box of tissues, Sam saw that his father had had something in his right hand all the while, palmed, and that, shielded now by the tissues and the shopping cart, his face to the shelves, he had slipped it quickly into his coat pocket.

Ben wheeled off, turned right. The guy was out of his mind, Sam told himself. What if…he stopped: the questions spun around inside his skull, but they made him angry, not dizzy. He pushed to the end of the aisle, turned right around the stack of cereal boxes, and saw Ben, in front of the gourmet specialties. A small black jar dropped into his left coat pocket. Sam watched Ben's face: it was flushed, happy—the gray color was gone. Sam lagged behind. Ben went past frozen food, ice cream. Sam moved closer. Ben looked over his shoulder, smiled.

“Sure,” Sam said.

“I know,” Ben said at once. “I said a half-hour. But Mr. Kwestel stopped me on the way here, to talk about his daughter. She's in the hospital. You went to school with her, didn't you?” Ben wheeled away, Sam following him, cutting around cartons filled with boxes of soap flakes. “At any rate, she's in Meadowbrook Hospital, on the Island, and it's such a long trip for him….”

Ben shrugged, let his eyelids close, indicating by the expression on his face the difficulties life could bring. “Listen,” Sam began. “As long as—”

Ben's expression changed. “I know. On my trail, Sam Junior—but you didn't escape Ben Berman's eagle eye.” He lifted a can of peaches from its pyramid, on sale at forty-one cents, and dropped it into his cart. “I know you don't like to come inside, and that is the reason I apologized.”

“Listen—”

Ben shook his head sideways, his eyes closed. He moved an index finger to his lips, the fingertip grazing his nose. “Shh. We'll talk later. Dairy products now—I always buy them last. To minimize spoilage.”

Sam breathed through his lips, unable to hide his irritation. The sooner his father flew away, the better. If he loved Tidewater so much, he could take him with him, let him sweep out the shuffleboard courts. Ben put a container of milk, a half-pound of whipped butter, a container of sour cream, and a package of farmer cheese into his cart. “Do you want anything special—some cheese? The longhorn is good, as is the mild cheddar—”

“I just want to get my butt out of here.”

“Relax,” Ben said.

“Yeah. I'll live longer. I know all about it.”

“Some pickled herring, though,” Ben said, taking a jar of Vita herring, cream-style. “Nothing else—you're sure?” Sam glared. “I bought a leg of lamb, we can have it tonight. And some—but you're tired of waiting, aren't you? Come.”

They moved toward the checkout registers, Ben in front, humming. When it was their turn and Ben had begun unloading the cart, one of the kids who had been hanging around approached them. “Carry your stuff home for you, mister?”

Ben smiled. “I have my son with me,” he said.

The kid looked at Sam, showing nothing, then moved away. The old woman, Sam saw, was still there, sitting on her Pepsi-Cola case. He heard the sound of the register, and then their cans and boxes were moving along the counter, on a black conveyor belt.

“Between twenty-one fifty and twenty-two dollars, I predict,” Ben said. Sam watched another kid take a paper bag from under the counter, snap it open, and begin to pack their goods into it. Why did they all look so sleepy-eyed? “Want to bet on it?”

“Bet?”

“My dollar to your fifty cents, since I'm an old hand at this. I say twenty-one seventy-five.” Ben paused. “Come. Be a sport.”

Sam scanned the bags, the remaining items. He was stuck: if he said no, his father would have won anyway; if he said yes, at least…“Twenty-three even,” he stated.

They stood, side by side, waiting. The girl, black and heavy-set—pregnant? Sam wondered—with scarlet lipstick at the outer edge of wide lips, tapped away at the buttons: total, subtotal, tax. The figures spun, the machine whirred. Ben leaned into Sam, across the counter, his narrow head level with the girl's breasts, and the register rang, stopped: twenty-three twenty-six.

Ben reached up, patted Sam on the shoulder. “You win, sonny boy.” He slipped a dollar into Sam's hand. Sam felt warm. Ben paid the girl, and his change exploded into a tin cup. On a machine clamped to the register, high, to the left, the girl typed their total, waited; the machine moved by itself again, and then a strip of green stamps rolled out. The girl tore them off, handed them to Ben, looked toward the next customer.

Ben gave the boy who'd packed their bags a dime. The boy tipped his baseball cap to Ben. “Thanks, Cap'n,” the boy said.

“I was first, remember?” The old woman had one of Sam's wrists between her fingers.

“Here,” Ben said, loading a shopping bag into Sam's right arm. “Can you take two?” He sighed. “I should buy a carry-cart. I know—”

“I can take another one,” Sam said. The woman tugged at his wrist. “She asked me before I went in—for the green stamps.”

Ben stared at the old woman, his face blank. “So?” he asked Sam. “Did you buy anything?”

“I chip in. Sure. Fifty-fifty.”

Sam stood there, a shopping bag in the crook of each arm, Ben's thin mouth set tight, the woman hissing at his side. “You find them, then, and give your friend your half, all right?” Ben picked up their bag and walked away, the electric-eye door opening for him.

Sam set one bag down on the counter, tried to pry the woman's fingers from his wrist, but her grip was tight, like iron. “You all promised,” she said.

Were people staring at them? He shook his head, blinked. He felt furious, dizzy—and he didn't like the mixture. He didn't trust himself when he was this way, when things were blurred and he lost concentration. “I didn't,” he said, and looked into each bag. “Not really.” Damn his father's beady eyes! He reached into his side pocket. “I have to go. Here—here—” And he pushed the dollar bill Ben had given him into her hand. The woman let go, looked down at the green paper, then shoved it back into Sam's palm. “I want stamps.”

Sam had already picked up the bag and was heading for the exit.
“Dumb pickaninny!”
the woman shouted after him. Outside, Sam saw that Ben was at the corner, in front of the Lincoln Savings Bank, waiting for the light to change. Across the street, in front of Al's Lock Shop, a black policeman was talking to two tall teenagers. They had their hands out, palms up, showing that they were clean. Above them, where Ryan's Billiard Parlor had been, the windows were covered now with posters of ferocious-looking black men and signs saying that black was beautiful.