Netherland

by Joseph O'Neill

  My hangover was getting to me. I didn’t understand what he was talking about.

  “I used to take beatings for my brothers,” Abelsky explained. He rubbed his neck and examined the sweat on his hand. “If my big brother scratched the car, he paid me to take the beating. My father was aware about what was going on, but still he would beat me. He used to beat the shit out of me. I laughed in his face. He couldn’t get to me. He could beat me and beat me, but still I would laugh. What did I care? I was rich.” He added bitterly, “That was Moldova. A nickel makes you a big shot. You wanna be rich in this country, you gotta win the Mega.”

  “Tell him what the Mega is,” Chuck said. I understood what he was up to: he wanted me to see the kind of man he had to deal with. It’s possible, too, that he wanted to show me off to Abelsky—indeed that the whole encounter had been orchestrated. Chuck had this idea I was a catch.

  “You don’t know what is the Mega? Are you kidding me? It starts with ten million. The jackpot—my God, the jackpot Mega is two hundred and ten million. I play it, sure I do, why not? My grandfather used to say, A dollar and a dream, that’s all you need. Right off the bat I won two thousand bucks. Since then, my number never came up again. I play my car number, and I play my month and day of being birthed. They make it harder and harder. It used to be played only once a day. Now they play twice a day. Most of the time the winners come from Idaho, Kentucky. The potato cities win. Sure, sometimes we win right here in New York. One guy from Honduras won a hundred and five million with a ticket he bought on Fifth Street in Brighton Beach. I only want five million, that’s all. My wife said, What would you do? I said, I tell you what I would do. First off, I buy each of my daughters a house. Then I give them five hundred thousand each, cash. They can use it for the college money for their kids. Then I’d buy a condo in Miami. I figure that would leave me with a million to live on. On top of what I got already. That’s reasonable. I wouldn’t go crazy.”

  This went on for ten boiling minutes. When Chuck excused himself for a moment, one of the other men made a remark to Abelsky in Russian.

  Abelsky looked the man in the eye and said something the gist of which even I understood. There was an exodus, and suddenly Abelsky and I were alone in the American steam room.

  “What happened?” I said.

  Abelsky was muttering into the steam. In a low, white-man-to-white-man voice, he said, “They got a problem here with the Pakistan people. They come in, spoil things for everybody. It’s a problem, sure. This is a fucking Russian baths. They should make their own baths. But when I went to the hospital”—he was leaning toward me now, pointing a thumb at the door—“it’s this Paki from the islands who visits me every day. This guy handles the health insurance company, tells my wife it’s going to be OK. When I get to be fifty, he gives me a wine crate out of Moldova. It tastes like shit, OK, but it tastes like my homeland. These guys”—he gestured again at the door, this time dismissively—“I don’t see anywhere. These guys? One hundred percent assholes. I say fuck them. Fuck them where they breathe.”

  Chuck returned and the three of us stewed and steamed a while longer.

  “That’s it,” Chuck said. “Let’s get going.”

  After a shower, it was back out to Coney Island Avenue. I was ready to go home.

  Chuck said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to practice-drive in my car, and then you’re going to use it in the test.”

  In Ramkissoonian fashion, the assertion had come out of the blue, or almost so: a cloudlet of recollection brought back a conversation, the previous evening, about my misadventure in Red Hook.

  I said, “Chuck, that’s crazy. Anyway, I can’t practice unless I’m with a qualified driver.”

  “I’m a qualified driver,” Chuck said. “I’ll go with you. Look,” he said, “we’ll make some arrangement. Hans, no more discussion. This is going to happen. Right now.”

  “Now?” I suppose this was the moment I understood his modus operandi: wrong-foot the world. Run rings around it.

  “No time like the present,” Chuck advised. “Unless you have something better to do.”

  While Chuck walked home to fetch his car, I went to a diner and ordered a coffee. I hadn’t yet finished it when he came into the diner, rattled keys, tossed me a catch. “Let’s go,” he said.

  The Cadillac was illegally parked on the far side of the road. I slid onto the cracked leather of the driver’s seat, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and started the engine.

  “Where to?” I said.

  “Bald Eagle Field,” Chuck said, rubbing his hands. “We’ve got work to do.”

  We traveled the length of Coney Island Avenue, that low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto-body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistani-run lumberyard. This miscellany was initially undetectable by me. It was Chuck, over the course of subsequent instructional drives, who pointed everything out to me and made me see something of the real Brooklyn, as he called it.

  After Coney Island Avenue there was Belt Parkway, and then there was Flatbush Avenue, and then there was Floyd Bennett Field—in early summer, a sub-Saharan flat of shrubs, scattered trees, and hot, weedy concrete runways. Save for a kite flier and his son, Chuck and I were the only ones there. We drove over tarmac past the last hangar. We stopped at signs stating PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO ENTRY and KEEP OFF.

  I couldn’t believe it. In front of me was a bright green field.

  “Jesus,” I said, “you did it.”

  A man was seated on a roller that inched across the center of the field. “Come,” Chuck said. “Let’s talk to Tony.”

  We removed our shoes and socks. We were still wearing our party gear from the night before.

  The grass was soft beneath our feet. “He says he used to be a groundsman at Sabina Park,” Chuck said, nodding toward Tony. “But of course there’s a world of difference between Jamaica and what you have here.”

  We reached the square. Chuck fell to his knees and spread his hands on the shortened grass like a hallower.

  Tony, a small, scrawny fellow in his late fifties, dismounted from the roller and slowly approached. He wore a filthy T-shirt and jeans and, I’d find out, like Pigpen went around in a haze of gasoline, rum, and machinery. He slept and ate out here, in the converted shipping container that sat at the far side of the grounds and housed Chuck’s equipment. He kept a gun in that container to ensure what Chuck called “the safety of all concerned.”

  “Lord, what a way it hot,” Tony said to Chuck. He removed his cap and wiped his sweating face and gave me a blank look. “Who this?”

  I was introduced. Tony said something to Chuck that I simply could not understand. From Chuck’s reply I gathered they were talking about the mower, which sat fifty feet away. “Nothing no happen to it, boss, it good,” Tony said. He made another indecipherable remark and then grew animated as he elaborated about some “idiot thing” that had happened in connection with kids who’d been “frigging around” on the field.

  The three of us looked at the square. “We roll it and roll it,” Chuck said. “Crosswise, like a star. That way it’s perfectly level.” Chuck said, “Looking good, right, Tony?”

  Tony spat agreeably and went back to the roller and fired it up.

  “Now comes the fun part,” Chuck said.

  We mowed the outfield. We took turns driving a lightweight fairway mower with an eighty-inch cut and fast eleven-blade
reels. Chuck liked to stripe the grass with dark green and pale green rings. You started with a perimeter run and then, looping back, made circle after circle, each one smaller than the last, each one with a common center. They would be soon gone, but no matter. What was important was the rhythm of cutting, and the smell of the cutting, and the satisfaction of time passed fruitfully on the field with a gargling diesel engine, and the glory and suspensefulness of the enterprise. There was to be no cricket played on this field that summer or even the next. And in any case you never really know how a grass pitch will turn out, not even a minute before the start of play. You do not know whether a twenty-two-yard strip of turf, often cut so closely as to appear grassless, will deliver a quick or slow or high or low bounce, whether a spinning ball will deviate upon bouncing and if so to what degree and with what speed. You do not know if it will be a featherbed, or a dog, or a slow-and low-bouncing pitch dispiriting equally to batsman and bowler. Even after you’ve begun to play on it, you do not know what it holds in store. The nature of earth, like the nature of air, is subject to change: wickets have their own weather and are given to deterioration and change as a match progresses. Cracks open in the ground, ground moisture rises and falls, the surface is disturbed or compacted. Shots that can be played one day cannot safely be played on another. In baseball, essentially an aerial game, conditions are very similar from match to match, from stadium to stadium: other things being equal (for example, altitude), to throw a slider at Stadium A differs little from throwing a slider at Stadium B. In earthly cricket, however, conditions may be dissimilar from day to day and from ground to ground. Sydney Cricket Ground favors spin; Headingley, in Leeds, seam bowling. This differentness is not only a question of differing grass batting surfaces. There is the additional question of the varying atmospheric conditions—humidity and cloud cover, in particular—that obtain from time to time and from place to place and can dramatically affect what happens to a cricket ball as it travels from bowler to batsman. Likewise, soft and hard outfields will respectively preserve and roughen a ball. For all of its apparent artificiality, cricket is a sport in nature.

  Which may be why it calls almost for a naturalist’s attentiveness: the ability to locate, in a mostly static herd of white-clothed men, the significant action. It’s a question of looking. One contradiction of the sport is that its doings simultaneously concern a vast round acreage and a batsman’s tiny field of action. Baseball also demands a dilation and contraction of focus, but the task is made simpler by the diamond, which acts as a perceptual funnel, and the single batter, whose position enables us to readily imagine the tiny box of the strike zone. The uninitiated onlooker at a cricket game is by contrast puzzled by the alternation of two batsmen and two bowlers and two sets of stumps—a dual duel—and the strange activity that occurs after every six balls, when the fielders stroll, for chaotic seconds, into positions that imperfectly mirror the positions just abandoned. It can take a while before the puzzle is sufficiently solved, particularly for the American viewer. I can’t count the number of times I, in New York, fruitlessly tried to explain to a baffled passerby the basics of the game taking place in front of him, a failure of explanation and comprehension that soon irritated me and led me to give up.

  After an hour or so, Tony reclaimed the mower. Chuck got a couple of Cokes from the cooler in the equipment container and we sat down on the grass. It was on this first afternoon at Bald Eagle Field, with Tony transformed by distance into a species of half man, half mower, and my skin reddening in the heat and wind, that Chuck told me that he was from the village of Las Lomas #2, which is in the countryside of Trinidad not far from the international airport, and—here was the point of his recollection—grew up in a shack next to the village’s recreation ground. That ground was a scruffy, dusty, typical affair. On two sides were domestic gardens, with chickens and roosters and chained dogs and latrines, and bordering the remainder were cashew fields and cassava gardens. On all sides there were trees: coconut trees, a devil’s ear tree, a tamarind tree.

  Chuck interposed, “They said the branch of the tamarind is the cure for human stupidity. Why? Because your schoolteacher whacked you with it.”

  I took a swig of Coke. “So that’s where I went wrong,” I said.

  When Chuck was still a kid, Las Lomas Cricket Club decided to plow up the old recreation ground and build a real cricket field. He recalled that it took four years of plowing and digging and rolling and hauling and seeding to get the field truly flat and grassed; and after that came the struggle to drain and maintain it, with limited success: the wicket, made of black earth, was very slow, and balls pitching on it were given to popping up. Trinidad is a jungle island, he reminded me. The rains are heavy and things grow almost unstoppably. Grazing animals—donkeys, cattle—have to be kept off the grass. It took work and money to fight these forces, and some of the villagers resented it. “That’s Trinidad for you,” Chuck declared darkly. “It’s just full of people against this, against that. Negativity is a national disease. I’ll tell you something true: they never call a glass half full. Really! They always call it half empty.”

  Chuck’s father, I learned, was dead against the cricket club—so opposed to it that he wouldn’t let his two young sons set foot on the field; and so Chuck never truly played the game. Chuck remembered himself and his brother pressed against the fence at the back of his house, watching the groundsman scything the outfield on Saturday mornings, and the butterflies and ground birds going about in the cuttings, and bright creases being painted onto the black wicket, and the stumps going into the soil of the wicket, and the players taking the field, and the radiance of the players on the field, and his father dragging the two boys away from the fence and putting cutlasses in their hands and sending them off to work in the cane field—the same cane field, Chuck told me, in the shed of which he listened to the BBC for the first time: the ball-by-ball commentary on the West Indies’ tour of India. When the West Indians went to Australia under the great Frank Worrell, in 1960–61, Chuck took to sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night to join his next-door neighbor in listening to the Test match broadcasts. The eleven-year-old boy and the ancient man sat next to each other in the near-darkness, drinking coffee as the voices of the commentators, traveling in waves over the Pacific Ocean, strengthened and weakened out of a red Philips radio. You got your sense of the wider world in this way. You heard about Sydney and Calcutta and Birmingham. It was from cricket commentators like John Arlott, Chuck Ramkissoon told me, that he learned to mimic and finally perfect “grammatical English,” learned words like “injudicious” and “gorgeous” and “circumspect”: and he’d always whisper a running commentary to himself, he said, whenever he was able to escape from his father and watch a cricket game.

  The discussion (or, rather, Chuck’s disquisition) ended with the subject of grass: the pure ryegrass that grew in the outfield and the special blend—seven parts chewings fescue to three parts bent-grass—that grew on the square. He told me about thatch and aeration and watering. He told me about the pH of the loam, about how you could feel the ground binding under the rollers, about rolling the outfield in the dryness of spring, and about the layer of gritty earth underneath the square’s surface layer. He told me about the soil samples he’d sent to a pair of turf experts at SUNY and the advice they’d given him. He drew my attention to the dangers of soil compaction and earthworms and dollar spot, to the necessity of brushing the dew from the square to prevent the rise of fungi, to the very faint lipstick stain a cricket ball leaves on a track that has been perfectly prepared. Considered, too, was the depth and density of grass roots and the crucial disproportionality of a blade of millimeters-high wicket grass traveling six inches underground, and of course we talked of the constant battle to defeat moss and bluegrass and clover and the other weeds. Grassy ground is a devil to control and left alone will grow motley and wild.

  Once a weekend, then, Chuck became my driving mentor, as he put it—thereby cas
ting me as poor Telemachus—and in return I became his assistant groundskeeper, because our motorized promenades invariably ended with cutting or rolling or watering his cricket field. He and I came to pass many hours together in that car, far more than were necessary to warm me up for a driving test. What respite it was, after the working week, to catch the Q train at Union Square and to alight miles from Manhattan at Cortelyou Road Station, with its pavilion suspended over always-gleaming tracks, and to stroll along Cortelyou Road into the pooled green shadows of Rugby Road. From the corner, it was thirty steps to the Ramkissoon place. The Cadillac would be waiting in the drive, and Chuck himself as often as not would be parked on the porch, making calls. Then off we went on our little odyssey. As I chauffeured him around the neighborhood, crouching conscientiously to a halt at every junction, I became familiar with the topical sights: the chiming, ceaselessly peregrinating ice-cream truck, driven by a Turk; the Muslim funeral home on Albemarle Road out of which watchful African American men spilled in sunglasses and black suits; the Hispanic gardeners working on the malls; the firehouse on Cortelyou that slowly gorged on reversing fire trucks; the devout Jewish boulevardiers on Ocean Parkway; the sticks of light that collected in the trees as though part of the general increase. Lush Flatbush…

  The first time I traveled there on my own, I became lost. Panicking, I’d gotten off the train a couple of stops too soon. Instead of the suburban sights I was expecting, I was faced with a roaring street and scenes from the African wild: the wall surrounding the subway station hosted a tattered painting of Kilimanjaro, snowcapped and circled by clouds. In the foreground were enormous leaves and bushes and fronds, and in the middle distance—the perspectives had been mishandled, so that distance clumsily equated to size—one made out a rhinoceros accompanied by her calf. A wild ass ran across the plain. A lion, its face ravaged by holes in the plaster, stood on top of a pile of boulders. On the right-hand side of the station gates was a still larger mural in which a flowery and green rain forest was prominent. I saw a snarling leopard; a vulture; a monkey dangling from a tree by its tail; some tiny, presumably far-off, scampering giraffes; a herd of wildebeest under pale skies; a study of a hummingbird inserting its beak into a flower. A tusked elephant was headed for Prospect Park. A flock of flamingos flew south to Flatbush.