Sam's Legacy (20 page)

“Here,” Simon said, handing Sam a glass. “This should warm you up.” The man's voice was light, young. Sam thought he looked familiar—like somebody he'd known from high school, somebody he'd played basketball with in the schoolyard. “I saw you looking at the table—you're right: the other guys called and chickened out—a night like this, I'll tell you the truth, I didn't really expect anybody to show.” The guy kept his eyes on Sam, sipped from his glass, toasting to Sam first. “I wouldn't have blamed you.” He motioned to the card table. “Look, whatever you say—I mean, if you want to play anyway, one-on-one, I'm ready—”

Sam almost laughed out loud, the guy was so obvious, but he'd save his laughs. You never knew, until later, why a guy put something up front at the beginning. There was an ice cube in Sam's glass, floating in a red liquid. Sam didn't drink. “And I appreciate your coming…” Simon said. “Ahead of time too, but if you'd waited another half-hour you probably couldn't have made it. It's freezing fast—I could tell from looking at the fire escape.”

“Ahead of time?” Sam asked.

Simon pushed back the cuff of his smoking jacket. “It's only five after nine—they told you nine-thirty, right?”

Sam thought of the clock on the Holy Cross tower; he tried to show nothing, to return Simon's look, but he saw the drink move, in his own hand, so that some of it almost sloshed over the side. He kept himself from looking at his own watch. He tried to inhale slowly, to get his breath back. It didn't matter, even if the guy worked for Sabatini—or, anything was possible, if Sabatini worked for the guy; Sam could smell it, and it wasn't roses. Sure. Something was up, and he'd been the last to get the word.

“I mean, whatever you say,” Simon said. “We could wait till nine-thirty, you get a chance to warm up that way. I know what it's like just coming in from the cold.”

“No,” Sam said. He felt dizzy—Tidewater's warning, Ben's games, Flo making him meet Stella—he wanted his life to go more slowly. He felt himself swaying forward, as if he might faint: too much was happening too fast, and Sam saw no point in trying to figure it out. Don't bet what you don't know. Sure. He needed time to get his bearings, to figure why they were shifting the odds on him. In the meantime, the best thing was to follow his own rule: when you don't know, lay low. “No,” he said again.

“No what?”

“No.”

“Whatever you say, Sam,” the guy said, and put his drink down, on an end table. “But drink up first—warm yourself before you head back home. I'll tell you the truth, it's probably just as well—if we got into a good game, by the time we were done, how would you get home? Even the taxis won't come get you on a night like this.”

Sam put his drink down. “No.”

The guy rushed by Sam, bent over. “I didn't mean to press you before—” He seemed too apologetic. Sam walked from the living room. “Whatever you say—like I said.” Simon opened the closet, took Sam's coat off a hanger, held it for him. “Some other time, right?”

Sam said nothing, walked to the door. Simon bustled alongside him, reached the door first, unlocked a series of three locks, one above the other. The guy, his eyes looking down, seemed much older to Sam suddenly. “I mean,” Simon said. “You know who to get in touch with—and, let's face it, I can say it to a guy like you, it's not so easy to get games anymore. Times are really changing.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, softly, unable to sustain the anger he'd felt a few minutes before. Outside, he pressed the button for the elevator, turned his eyes away, heard Simon's door close. Sabatini had been testing him in some way—Sam was sure of it—but it didn't matter. He'd done what he had to. He'd had to decide quickly, and he hadn't hesitated. There were a few things Sam knew, without anybody's help, and one of them was how to tell when somebody else was playing you for a sucker; even in a two hundred dollar silk robe, a deadbeat was a deadbeat. The guy's eyes had seemed, in the darkness, as Sam had glanced back from the outside hallway, to be wet. Sure, Sam thought, descending: It was rough all over. Even the dogs were bitching.

7

In a world of birds, Sam thought, Tidewater would be king. Sam liked that idea, and as he walked along Flatbush Avenue, toward Dutch's street, he laughed out loud. Tidewater had spoken to him that morning, promising to give him the second part of his story before Ben left, but Sam wasn't sure he wanted it. What he would have wanted, if not for the fact that he knew where it could have led, was to put a question to the guy: why was it that none of the Negro teams he'd talked about, and none that Sam had heard of, or read of in the library book, had named themselves after birds, the way white teams did. There were the St. Louis Cardinals, the Baltimore Orioles, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Hawks, the Red-birds—even the Brooklyn Dodgers, Sam knew, had at one time been called the Brooklyn Robins.

Still, Sam reasoned, the guy was in a class by himself; you had to give him credit. Sam turned right, walked down Lenox Road, toward Bedford Avenue. Compared to Tidewater, all the other birds in the world were pigeons—and as soon as the thought had occurred to Sam, he saw himself, one of them, on the top shelf of Sabatini's shooting gallery. Sure. There were clay pigeons and stool pigeons, sitting ducks and dead ducks, mockingbirds and jailbirds. Sam knew all about it. He remembered the jokes, from high school: there were guys with wood peckers, guys with two in the bush and your bird in her hand, and his own father, he realized, smiling, and seeing him aboard an airplane, was the original Jewbird. Sam laughed again, at that idea; he was really—the word was there—flying, thinking this way, because when it came down to it, he wasn't a bird at all; he was Sam the Lamb, and he knew it.

He crossed the street, went into the lobby of Dutch's apartment house. Stella had been on his mind, too, and he didn't like it—especially now, having to be with Dutch, having to see the old crowd. A lot of the athletes who'd become sick, like Campanella and Stallworth, had been divorced by their wives, even though the newspapers didn't go into that part of things too much. Sure. It was one thing to love a crippled kid in a TV telethon, or an athlete in a wheelchair; but if you had to touch them all the time…

Sam buzzed. “Who's there?” Mrs. Cohen asked, through the intercom.

“It's me—Sam.” He spoke into the grating.

“Come on up, darling. Dutch isn't ready yet.”

Sam walked into the lobby—the checkered floor, made of huge squares of marble, green and cream-colored, and the walls—a yellow-orange stucco—seemed especially cool to him. He thought of Simon's lobby. A doorman, sitting in a corner, was asleep on a wooden chair, his head to his chest. Sam took the elevator to the third floor, got out, walked down the corridor. There was no point in going into that—how they'd tried to set him up—with Dutch. He'd keep his mouth shut and listen, and the time until Ben's take-off would be that much shorter. He buzzed again, heard clicking sounds (Mrs. Cohen was looking through the hole, he knew—a one-way mirror, in the center of the door), then the sounds of locks turning.

When Sam had entered, he watched her fasten the locks again. She kissed him on the cheek, sighed: “You can't be too careful these days. Mrs. Lebowitz, on the fifth floor, was mugged last week right in front of her door. They took her diamond ring—which came from her grandmother; who knows how valuable it was…” She led Sam through the dark foyer, into the living room. “But I say, thank God they took the rings and left her fingers!”

Mrs. Cohen sat down in an easy chair, and motioned to Sam to sit across from her. “Dutch—Sam is here!” she called. The living room was large and there was a baby grand piano in the far corner of the room. Dutch had been the pianist for the school orchestra when they'd been at Erasmus together—and he'd put himself through a year of college by playing at weddings and bar mitzvahs. “Tell me how you've been,” Mrs. Cohen said. “You've been hiding yourself from us lately. I said so to Dutch.”

“I've been fine, Mrs. Cohen,” Sam said. “My father's moving to California soon—to visit his brother Andy. I think he's gonna stay out there.”

It amazed Sam, when he thought about it, that such a little woman could exercise such control over Dutch. But she made him feel uncomfortable too, and he wasn't even her son; he always had the feeling, sitting there, that they were both thinking of Dutch's father; as if the man had died so recently that you couldn't bring the subject up. Mrs. Cohen never mentioned him; the man had kicked off before Sam and Dutch had even known one another. Still, it was what he felt whenever he sat there, looking down, watching the gold and blue birds swirl around the corners of the oriental rug. Sure. As if Mrs. Cohen, who never left the apartment—Dutch still did all the shopping and errands—was…was what? Sam stopped. He didn't owe her anything, either, he told himself.

“I knew your uncle Andy,” she said. “He was a very handsome man in his youth. Your father's very lucky—to be getting out.” She sighed. “I wish I could…”

“They got one-room apartments in some of the places—in Florida, too,” Sam said, and he touched the moisture in his palms with his fingertips. “They're not too expensive.”

“I've looked into them. Dutch—!” she called again, raising her voice suddenly. “But I'm still rent-controlled here, and you have to make a substantial down payment…. Maybe when my child gets on his—well, his feet again.” She was whispering: “Your friendship has meant a lot to him, Sam. Why don't you go—leave me here—you go into his room. You know where it is. I don't know why he keeps…” She broke off.

“Yeah,” Sam said, and rose immediately, went back into the foyer, around and through the kitchen, and knocked on Dutch's door. He and Dutch, when they'd first become best friends, they'd had that in common—Dutch with no father, Sam with no mother. He didn't remember what they'd said to each other, if anything—but it had been a bond that the other guys had appreciated.

“Come on in, Ace—”

Sam entered. Dutch was sitting on his bed, his legs crossed under him, Indian-style, dealing out a hand of cards. “The witch get her fangs into you?”

“I told her about Ben's leaving for California.”

“Good thinking. Maybe she'll take the hint.” Dutch didn't look up at Sam. “Like you say, she's a real bird.”

“She's just an old woman,” Sam said. “There should be places for them.”

“A lot you know,” Dutch said, and looked up for the first time. “I'll tell you the truth—I don't much feel like seeing the guys now, if you know what I mean.”

“I know,” Sam said.

“Watch,” Dutch said, motioning to the cards. He dealt out two hands of five cards each, looked at each hand, threw in two cards from his own, three from his imaginary opponent's, dealt the new cards, showed Sam the results. “I win. Jacks to nines. I let him keep a lady for luck.” He pulled a piece of paper from under him. “Of course, I'm not figuring on the betting—just to show the over-all percentages—but here: since I started, it's six thousand two hundred and eighty-nine to six thousand and seven. Would you believe it could be that close?” Sam said nothing. Dutch shrugged, put the cards together, gave them a quick shuffle, and got off the bed. Dutch was two inches shorter than Sam—still, if he wanted to get mileage from it, he was the kind of good-looking guy girls went for, with his dark black hair and deep-set eyes, the full lips, the slight cleft in his chin. Mrs. Cohen said he looked like a Russian prince, and Sam guessed that there was some truth to that. “I'm waiting to see if—at particular junctures—three-three-three-three, seven-seven-seven-seven, for example—things—well, happen.”

“You're bats,” Sam said. “Come on, let's get our asses out of here. I checked. We got to catch a train at six forty-eight, which gets us out there just before eight. If we miss the six forty-eight, we got to wait another hour.”

Dutch went to his closet, stripped off his sweatshirt. His body, Sam noticed, was still in shape. That was something. “How come you've been making yourself so scarce these days?” Dutch asked.

Sam sat down at Dutch's desk, looked across, at the tropical fish tank on the window sill. “I got things on my mind,” Sam replied.

“Don't be so tight with me, Ace—like what things do you have on your mind? Your old man leaving?”

“No,” Sam said, watching Dutch wipe a deodorant-stick across his underarm. “I don't blame the guy. You know that. I mean, he's okay—he never bugs me the way you'd think—but I'll be happy when he goes.”

“Then what?” Dutch picked a shirt out from his drawer—a button-down, blue dress shirt. He slipped his arms into the sleeves, looked at Sam with his blue eyes. “I'm sorry, Ace. I really am. You know that.”

“I told you to forget it.”

“Well,” Dutch began, the story Sam had heard before—what he'd heard every time for the past half-year, no more than five minutes after they were together. “Until I split from you—I mean, when we were both in it—you did okay. And now that I've given it up, your luck has changed. What else can I think, Sam?”

“Get off my back with that line, okay?” Sam said. “Just lay off and let's get out of here.”

“Sure, Sam. I understand. I just—the truth—it's just not like old times is all.”

“The sun goes down every day.”

“I see what you mean,” Dutch said, slapping Sam on the back.

Dutch led the way from his bedroom, back into the living room. He kissed his mother good-bye. “You be careful,” she said. “Don't separate. They have very clever ways.” She looked at Sam, then kissed him too. “I mean, they even—I heard this only a few days ago—they hire nice young boys like yourselves to show their faces into the cameras in the lobbies, so that the person doesn't suspect and buzzes for the downstairs door to open. Then the other—”