Sam's Legacy (7 page)

The light changed. Ben crossed the street. Sam took long strides, feeling the shape of a large can in his left palm, through the bag. The bag in his right hand—boxes mostly, cold cereal probably—was lighter. Sam hurried, but Ben managed to stay ahead of him, by half a block. On his block, the line of people in front of the rummage shop was as long as it had been when he'd left. The cop twirled his billy club, the leather strap stretching from his wrist. Sam had—a mistake—cut diagonally across the street and had to decide now whether to backtrack to the corner and go around the line, or to try to cut through. He saw Ben, in front of the door, waiting.

A woman nodded to him, stepped back. “Let the boy go through—he lives here. I seen him working in the store.”

Sam mumbled a thank you. “Man, that boy got himself a real load.” It was a man's voice. Ben was holding the door open for him. Sam moved into the dark hallway and mounted the stairs.

Ben unlocked the door and they entered their apartment. Sam put the bags down on the kitchen table—the tear in the bag, he saw, was where the can of peaches had been, but it was only two inches long. He'd been in no danger. “Are you out of your mind?” he said to Ben, his hands on his hips. He was breathing hard, but he wasn't winded. His mind was clear.

“Calm yourself,” Ben said. “Here. Let me put the dairy products and frozen food away. Then we'll talk.” He went to the refrigerator, opened the door, and put a bag of groceries on top of the stove. “You can empty things onto the table, I'll do the rest. Believe me, Sam, I appreciate your coming. I know I could pay one of the boys, but—”

Sam tore his jacket off, moved toward his father. “Listen, cut the small talk, and don't tell me not to get my balls in an uproar. What the fuck are you trying to do to me? You just tell me that!”

Ben rearranged things in the refrigerator, making room. “To you?—nothing. Your touch is as good as it always was. I have great confidence in you, Sam. When I'm gone, I know you'll get by. I didn't, in truth, expect you to beat me, but…”

Sam stepped around the coffee table, in front of his sofa-bed. Ben stood, put his hand up, stopping Sam in his tracks. Ben's eyes danced. “I saw you there, you know, looking for me, before—”

“And you went ahead anyway—?” Sam felt some sweat trickle down the small of his back.

Ben's eyes flickered; he seemed to realize for the first time that he was still wearing his raincoat. He touched the pockets. “Oh
that,”
he said, as if he hadn't understood until now what Sam was angry about. “Don't let it bother you, sonny boy. I've been doing that for years—ever since I went on social security. It's nothing to worry about, believe me.” He smiled, and Sam saw the kindness in his father's eyes. “I'm sorry you found out. You have your own things—your worries—to think about, I'm sure.”

“Not so fast,” Sam said, as Ben turned away from him and put the butter onto the top shelf of the refrigerator.

Ben looked at him, steadily, then sighed. “I should have mentioned it before this, not to alarm you.” He closed the refrigerator door and walked to Sam, taking his son by the arm, leading him to the kitchen table. “Sit,” he said. “Sit,” he repeated, pressing Sam's arm. Sam sat. Ben pushed the shopping bags to one side of the table, stroked his chin, then came to Sam again, putting his hand on his son's shoulder, touching Sam's neck with his fingers. “All right. I'll explain: prices rising the way they have, a retired man like myself, living on what amounts to virtually a fixed income—I know you chip in with your share and, believe me, I'm grateful for all you've done, I can never say how much—but it's really, the way I figure it, the only way to keep up with inflation.”

Sam blinked. “To what?”

Ben took a can of Alaska king crab meat from his left coat pocket and set it on the table, a bottle of multi-vitamins following it. “Watch: a dollar eighty-nine, and a dollar twenty-nine makes three-nineteen.” Sam couldn't believe what he was hearing. Ben produced a bathtub stopper from his other pocket, and a jar of imitation caviar. He read the prices to Sam, adding them up as he went along, putting the tax on at the end. “…On a total of twenty-three twenty-six, that's over ten per cent, right? Which puts me well ahead of the annual rate of inflation.” He wagged his finger at Sam. “But remember, in the spring and summer, I can't wear a coat without arousing some suspicion—so we can consider this,” his small eyes twinkled, “a kind of lay-away plan.”

Sam shoved his chair back and stood, the rubber stoppers on the chair legs squealing against the wood floor. “You're out of your mind,” he said. He picked his jacket up from the sofa, where he'd thrown it. “You eat by yourself, you hear? And if you do this again, you'll—you'll have more than inflation to worry about…. Sure.” Sam wanted the words to come out quickly, like machine gun fire, but he felt that his tongue was in the way. His father had the words, the voice. “I don't care what you say, you don't fool me. You're not gonna do me in, do you hear? And that's what you'd like—to have one of those TV cameras spot you and then—and then—” He searched for words.

“Do
you
in? Listen, sonny boy, I'm not out to take anything that's not coming to me.” Sam's hand was on the doorknob, Ben's hand on top of his. “But they'll screw you any way they can, and I'm telling you that plain up and down. Do
you
in? Tell me, if you're so smart, what defense does a man my age have against the automatic workings of an economy that's endlessly inflating?” Ben laughed, angrily. “They won't do
me
in, either, do you hear? I'll make my own specials, damn them!”

“You do what you want, I'm getting out.” Sam set his teeth. “You don't fool me.”

Ben lifted Sam's hand from the doorknob. “Relax, Sam. With all the, you'll pardon the expression,
shvartzehs
they have to keep their eyes on, they never give an old man like me a second glance.” Pulling Sam back into the room, he whispered: “How do you think we've been eating so well? Answer me that! Granted you chip in, but—well, if you calculated sometime, you would have seen, long ago-”

“Look, Ben—”

“Trouble budgeting, folks?” Ben said, his voice moving down, into its favorite register.
“Steal!
In these days of soaring costs and run-away inflation, we all do our best to make ends meet. Your money will go farther when you steal. Remember—”

“No,” Sam said, and got to the door before Ben could stop him. “No. You don't fool me. Not for a minute. I don't need one of your routines.” He stepped into the hallway and, hoping to wound his father, found something to say which he thought would do the trick. “I'm glad Andy's hurrying—that he sent for you. Sure. Inflation being what it is, what'll he be worth if he kicks off in a few years?” Sam laughed, felt the laughter, sharp, as it moved from his throat and across the threshold to his father.

“I—I don't understand,” Ben said, sitting down at the table. “I think I get your drift, but, what I mean is, in exact terms, it doesn't make any
sense
, Sam—what you've just said.”

3

Something was up. The Knicks had now won their ninth game in a row, Stallworth was playing well—coming in as their sixth man sometimes, ahead of Cazzie Russell—but when Sam had telephoned Mr. Sabatini to put something on their third game (as planned, he had not bet on the second game), Mr. Sabatini had, for the first time in six years, refused to take his bet. “I'm sorry, sweetheart,” he had said. “I'd like to help you out, but the Knicks are off my board until further notice.”

Sam had telephoned again, before each succeeding game, but the reply was always the same. Whatever was up—Sam's guess was that Sabatini couldn't farm out enough of the action to cover himself: the Knicks were not only winning, but they were having an easy time with the point spreads—Sam couldn't do anything about it. He figured that any other bookie who would handle bets of three hundred and less would be in the same boat as Sabatini; Sam would bide his time, then, and when the Knick window was open again, he'd be there. The season was long.

He leafed through the newspaper, from back to front, checking the results at Aqueduct, not for the horses, but to see what the previous day's number had been: the last three digits of the day's mutuel take gave you the Brooklyn number. Six, eight, and six. Double six. The numbers men wouldn't like that. It was trickier to figure the Manhattan number—you had to put together the payoff prices on the winning horses in the first three races to get the first digit—then the same with the fourth and fifth races for the second, then the sixth and seventh. Sam never bothered. Only suckers played the numbers anyway. He checked the point spreads on the pro football games, the pro basketball games, some college games. “Look, sweetheart,” Sabatini had said the last time Sam had called, two days before, when the Knicks had been at home against the Celtics. “I'm not the Bank of Israel. Three of my colleagues went on unemployment last week because they handled the Knicks.” That was rich, Sam thought—the Bank of Israel. A lot his father knew.

It was probably true about how many people bet the Knicks. The streak helped, of course—everybody loved a winner—but Sam figured the betting had been heavy even before the string began to develop. Guys in the city were that way: about the Knicks, the Mets, the Giants. When the Dodgers had gone to Los Angeles, Brooklyn had been like a funeral parlor.

On the subway, coming home from the game two nights before, he'd tried to remember as many other guys, like Stallworth, as he could. It picked him up, thinking of guys like Ben Hogan and Pete Reiser and Ray Berry—guys who'd had the deck stacked against them and had come back anyway. Hogan from a near-fatal auto crash, Reiser from running into the centerfield wall in Ebbets Field, Berry from polio as a kid. And what, he thought, about Ed Head, who'd been a top Dodger prospect before the war, had gone into the service, had had his right arm ruined by the Nazis, and then had come back, in 1945, to pitch a no-hitter with his left hand! A sportswriter in the
Post
had suggested that Stallworth hadn't had an actual heart attack in the first place, that, given the perfect reading of his EKG now, it might have been something else—some kind of clot—but Sam laughed at that. What difference did it make? The point was, any way you looked at it, that the guy had come back: he'd had to live with the thought that he was washed up at twenty-five, he'd had to fight with the doctors and the coaches to prove that he had a right to get out on the hardwood again. And even if it had been a mild heart attack, so what? A heart attack was a heart attack. Sure. You couldn't be a little bit pregnant.

Sam slipped into his trousers, put a shirt on over the T-shirt he'd slept in, buckled his belt. He'd call Sabatini later, put something down on the Milwaukee Bucks—the kid Alcindor, all seven-foot-three-and-a-quarter inches of him, was showing a lot of class, and you could still get a good point spread there. There were others: Monty Stratton—Jimmy Stewart played him in the movie—who'd shot his leg off in a hunting accident and had returned to pitch for the Indians, and Lou Brissie, who'd pitched hand grenades into Jap bunkers and had come back to pitch for the Red Sox with a leg made out of steel plate, and a guy named Bert Shepard, with a wooden leg, who'd pitched in one game for the Senators in 1945. And others: Herb Score, hit in the eye by a line drive; Eddie Waitkus, shot by a love-crazed girl in his hotel room; and the immortal Lou Gehrig, the Iron Man, playing his heart out, building the longest consecutive game-playing string in history, and knowing he had a fatal sickness all the time. His disease had been like muscular dystrophy, only different—Flo had given Sam the technical term several times. Ezzard Charles, the former heavyweight champion, had the same thing; Sam had seen him in a wheelchair, during last year's telethon.

“I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” That was what Gehrig had said when they'd given him a farewell at Yankee Stadium—Sam had heard it on a recording—and he would have given anything to have been alive then, to have been there, to have seen Lou and Babe Ruth hugging each other. There wasn't a dry eye in the stadium, since every fan had known just what Lou knew when he had said what he did. Sure. That was what it was all about.

Sam left the apartment. Down the corridor, on the other side of the banister, the door was cracked open and the little girl—Muriel—was staring at Sam with her large brown eyes. That was a bitch, being brought up by your grandmother. When he'd first moved in, before Muriel was born, Sam had said hello a few times to the grandmother, Mrs. Reardon, but she'd only grunted. Thin as a rail, bent over, one hand on her back, the other always hiding something, as if… Sam started down the stairs. He'd seen Muriel's mother coming in at two or three in the morning: a first-class floozy, with thick make-up, high heels four inches from the floor, a huge pair of knockers, orange-red hair. The word was that she was working steady now, living with a small-time gangster in the Pigtown section. Sure. Things were rough all over—even the subways were in a hole.

Okay, too: Ben had had it rough—he granted that—working his guts out for over thirty years, wearing out the seat of his pants driving a hack around Brooklyn and Queens. The guy had been made for better things, that was what Sam believed: with his voice, and his intelligence…and then, at the end, selling his medallion and sinking all his money into that stupid school…. Well, maybe it hadn't been stupid—Sam had honestly thought it might work out, a fifty-fifty chance. Ben had been able to get bit parts now and then on radio programs, and during the war he'd given his time free, announcing. As far as Sam could tell—he tried to be honest with himself about it—he never, even now, resented the money he'd put into the school:
Ace Broadcasting School, Ben Berman, Executive Director
. Even with the way things had worked out—Ben falling sick, and the hospital, and having to move out of the Linden Boulevard place, and the bankruptcy—his father had had a right—that was the word—he'd had a right to that school.