Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  Across the street, next to the TV repair shop, old Mrs. Cameron sat on the stoop, a large purple cushion under her skinny bottom. The woman was in her late eighties. Maybe Ben could take her with him when he flew off, Sam thought. She could—Sam read the caption in his head—dance the buckles off her shoes. He laughed at that thought. Once, perhaps fifteen years before, during a heavy snowstorm, he’d carried a bag of groceries up to her apartment, on the third floor. But she hadn’t let him inside and all he could see, looking through the doorway as he handed the bag in to her, was a dark piano with a gold framed picture of a soldier on it.

  Her eyes were very blue: Sam could see that from where he was. He could remember reading, when he was ten or eleven, that Ted Williams had had such good eyesight he could read the titles off 78 rpm records as they spun around. Sam shrugged. He’d been able to do the same, but it hadn’t gotten him to the major leagues. In public school his eyes had tested at fifteen over twenty. Big deal, he thought—that and twenty cents would get him a ride on the subway.

  In the bathroom he relieved himself, fixed his hair, then walked back through Ben’s room, pulled the telephone from its place under the TV table, and dialed.

  “Cohen residence. Dutch Cohen, number one son, speaking.”

  “It’s me,” Sam said.

  “Hey Sam—how’s the Ace?” Dutch asked. “I was just thinking of you, did you know that?”

  “I picked up two and a half on the Knicks last night—I wanted you to be the first to know.”

  “Great, Ace,” Dutch said, but his enthusiasm—like a teenager’s—irritated Sam. “I mean, with the way things have been going ever since—”

  “Forget it,” Sam said. “I just thought I’d tell you.”

  “Did you get a train schedule last night?”

  “Schedule?”

  “At Penn Station—for going out to Herbie’s, remember? To see the old crowd.”

  “I forgot,” Sam said, remembering what had happened to upset his concentration. “But it’s still a few weeks away—I’ll pick one up next time.”

  “I’ll be able to go,” Dutch said. “Things are pretty good here. I mean—anytime—it’d be great to see you, Sam.”

  Dutch’s voice, too sweet, made Sam uncomfortable. “I thought maybe I’d get over your way today,” he said, “but I got to see what’s going on in the store—if they need me.”

  “Sure. I was just thinking about you—did you know that?”

  “Yeah. Well, I’ll try to come by. I wanted to check if you were home. And to tell you about the Knicks.”

  “Sure, Ace.”

  Sam slipped into his jacket, locked the door behind him, went down the steps, turned right, behind the staircase, and walked in the dark until he found the door. He knocked, twice.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me—Sam.”

  The door opened. Tidewater was standing there; Sam nodded to him. “My old man around?”

  Tidewater motioned toward the front of the store. Sam thought of saying something about what Ben had told him, but no matter which way he worded the question, as to what Tidewater had for him, it wouldn’t come out right. He’d let the other guy make the first move. When in doubt, wait it out. “Thanks a lot,” he said, and left. What do you think God gave you a tongue for, he wanted to ask—but he knew where that would have led. The guy would only have stared down at him from those bulging eyes; Sam had never seen a guy, except for an albino, with larger whites in his eyes.

  The crowd in the back room, where Tidewater stood guard, was thick with children. They kept the comic books and records and cartons of junk there—mixed with furniture: chairs (one dollar) piled upside down on each other; tables (five dollars) full of cartons and dishes and pots; sofas (seven dollars) piled to the ceiling; mattresses and headboards stacked against the far wall. A boy and girl were wrestling under some chairs; at a yellow Formica kitchen table, between two hefty black women who were sorting dishes, an old man, no more than five feet tall, searched the contents of a carton. The man’s face was almost green in color, and he stooped over, holding a dull gray handkerchief to his mouth. His eyes were close together, tiny, his nose drooped. Forget it, Sam said to the man silently: Flo checks everything out before she puts it down.

  He made his way into the front room, looking for Ben. The blue and white Corning Ware coffee percolator was unplugged: NO COFFEE ON SATURDAYS—SORRY—one of Flo’s hand-lettered signs. At the store’s entrance, Flo’s sister Marion was at the cashbox, taking in the money. Next to her table was a big carton, with paper bags and newspapers and bits of string in it.

  Tidewater was only an inch taller than Sam, no more, but Sam didn’t like that inch: he remembered the first—and for that matter the last—time he’d had a run-in with him, perhaps two and a half years before, when he had said something innocently enough, he’d thought, about the colored people moving into the Nostrand-to-New York Avenue section of Martense Street; Tidewater had puffed his pigeon chest, risen to his full height, and glared down at Sam, declaring that he was one of them, a black man himself.

  Sam believed him, he supposed—why would anyone lie about being black if he could pass for white?—and there was something, once you’d been told, in the way the man’s nostrils flared out. Still, the guy gave him the creeps, no matter what stories Ben could spin about what he’d been like when they’d first known one another. Sam heard Flo’s voice, from the other side of a rack of coats. He turned, made his way around a table where women were picking through a pile of sweaters and blouses.

  “One minute, dear,” Flo said, glancing his way. Her eyeglasses were, as always, hanging around her neck on a silver chain. A woman reached over, grabbed something under the rack, and pulled it out: it was a boy, his mouth stuffed with potato chips. She dragged him away. A black woman with dull red hair was helping a man get into a wide-shouldered tweed sport jacket. Men’s clothing, for some reason, was always at a premium: jackets were five dollars, suits from five to ten dollars. When a new shipment came in, it would usually be gone within twenty-four hours. Even some of the high-stepping local dudes would come in and go through the stuff, and Sam himself saw nothing wrong with picking up a jacket or a coat in the store. Who would know the difference, after all. The money was better in his pocket.

  Flo’s hand was on Sam’s arm, and Sam smiled at her. She motioned him to a corner. “Did you see the woman I was talking to—?” Sam nodded. Flo smiled and her smile made Sam feel warm, made him smile too; she was probably in her mid-fifties, Sam figured, but it wasn’t apparent unless you looked closely. She could have passed for thirty-five, perhaps forty. “She wanted to know if she could return this—” Flo showed him the black dress which was draped across her arm. “She said she didn’t need it anymore. Do you know why?”

  Sam looked toward where the woman had been standing. “I don’t know—a night out, I guess.”

  Flo shook her head. “It was for a funeral. She didn’t say, of course, but I know. It’s happened before.”

  “It takes all kinds,” Sam said. Then: “You need any help this morning?”

  “No. Things are going smoothly. Marion’s here—which helps—and two volunteers from the organization should be along by ten-thirty.”

  “Ben?”

  “He said to meet him at the supermarket. He said to give you the message if you came down—he forgot to tell you upstairs.” She looked at her watch. “He left about twenty minutes ago. He said to give him a half hour.”

  “He wants me to help carry packages home,” Sam said, and as soon as the words were out, he felt foolish. “I was supposed to take care of something else, but…”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, and Flo, squeezing his arm slightly, left him. Sam stepped around a rack of dresses and, without glancing behind—he figured he didn’t need Tidewater’s eyes more than once a day—moved to the front of the store. There was, when he thought about it, nobody he admired more than Flo. She’d had it rough. That she seemed to
like him, to take an interest in his life—this meant a lot to him. She was a real queen—to be able to do all she did for others when her own life had turned out the way it had.

  Marion glanced up. “How’s tricks?” Sam asked.

  Marion shrugged, embarrassed. Behind her, at Sam’s eye level, was another of Flo’s signs: THOSE WHO STEAL FROM THE HANDICAPPED ARE DOUBLY PUNISHED—BY THE LAW IN THIS WORLD… BY THE LAWD IN THE NEXT!

  “Pretty busy,” Marion said.

  “Yeah,” Sam said. She was younger than Flo, by ten years perhaps—more attractive at first—but somehow he always thought of her as the older sister. Her eyes were tired, and her body seemed to have a sag in it somewhere. She wore a soft wool sweater, pale blue, but she kept her shoulders so tight to her that the sweater seemed a few sizes too large. Ben had said something once about her, and he hadn’t paid attention: something about before she was married, and about what Flo had thought of it all. Flo was always so full of—energy was the word which occurred to Sam, and Marion was always so glum, that you had to wonder how, to use one of Ben’s sayings, they could have come from the same womb.

  “I got to meet Ben,” Sam said. “He’s waiting for me.” Marion nodded, but her eyes did not meet his. Sam waited while Marion took a dollar from a woman—the woman counted out pieces of children’s underwear into a paper bag. “I’ll see you around,” Sam said, and gave a half-wave.

  He crossed the street, away from the line of shoppers. He didn’t mind the small errands now and then, helping to carry the groceries home on Saturdays, when Ben usually did their big shopping for the week—in fact, in this case he was just as glad Ben liked to do it. The less Sam had to go into stores, the better. Having to do his shopping by himself would be a small price to pay, though, for the day Ben would be gone, baking his ass in the California sun. Sam figured he could get a lot of what he needed at some of the local delicatessens.

  At the near end of Martense Street there was a touch football game in progress, and Sam stopped, leaned against a tree. The kids were too young for him—twelve or thirteen, he figured—but they were good. Sam smiled: a little kid, the shortest player on either team, took a lateral, got a good block, and jitterbugged past the corner man, leaving the guy frozen. He ran for ten yards, then got pinned against a parked car. The kid wore a big grin on his face, laughed at the guy he’d faked out, said something, and the guy went for him; the kid slipped away easily, went back to the huddle rolling his eyes, shuffling his feet to invisible music.

  Sam watched another play, this one botched, then left. It picked him up—it always did—just to be able to watch some guys playing. The air was fresh, people were out—there was always a lot of action in the streets on Saturday morning. Some teenagers were pitching pennies in front of the laundromat, and, in the bakery, a fat black woman in an orange bandanna was mopping up. Sam sniffed in, caught the odor of melting butter. Dutch claimed that most of those odors—popcorn, pizza, bread, charbroiled hamburgers—were artificial: little bottles of the stuff set up in front of exhaust fans.

  When Ben had been telling him about Tidewater—that the guy had something to give him—Sam had thought of the Bible man. The guy was still on his mind, but Sam figured that was natural: it wasn’t every night that some bird followed you from Madison Square Garden and tried to save your ass for Jesus. If he showed up again, maybe he could sic him on Tidewater. Sam laughed to himself: sure—kill two birds with one stone. He liked that idea. He had, before he’d gone to sleep the night before, torn the pamphlet up and thrown it away, but he could remember, nonetheless, just what had been written inside. Not, he thought, because it had made that great an impression upon him—though, for sure, the guy had reached him, with that silk voice, and having known somehow where he lived—but because Sam had a memory like that. He couldn’t forget things, even when he wanted to. Ordinarily, in his line of work, it was an asset: in different kinds of card games, he could remember every card that had been played; even in five-card draw, he could increase his edge by keeping track of which pairs from the previous hand—the chances were slightly better than average, the way most guys shuffled—might still be sticking close to each other. It annoyed him now, though, not to be able to forget; he might have had a word or two wrong, but he could still see the guy’s blue photo, and hear the smooth voice:

  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-full carts up and down the aisles, chattering to one another, standing in clusters at the head of each aisle where the specials were. He check
ed 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.