Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  “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—”

  “That takes brains,” Sam said, and Dutch laughed.

  “I’ll lock the door well. You remember to have a good time. Tell the boys how lucky they are to be living on Long Island.” Dutch pushed Sam toward the door, Mrs. Cohen following. “And give my best regards to your father, Sam. Tell him he’s making the smartest move of his life….”

  “I don’t listen to her half the time,” Dutch said, in the elevator. “You know what she gets a kick out of, though—? I gave up all my fish except for the black mollies, and I had to give her a reason, so I quoted to her what you said Ben is always saying, about living in a neighborhood in transition.” The elevator bumped, the doors slid open. Dutch put his arm around Sam’s shoulder. “If, God forbid, they should ever come in, I said to her, you can show them my fish tank as an indication of—”

  “Why’d you get rid of the others?” Sam asked.

  They walked outside, headed toward Flatbush Avenue. “I don’t know. Okay. Maybe it reminded me too much of high school, if you know what I mean. Everytime she looked at my zebras and angel fishes and the rest she was thinking of what I could have been. You know. All that stuff about what an ace I was in high school.”

  Sam nodded. In their senior year, Dutch had been a runner-up in the National Westinghouse Science Contest, for an experiment he’d run: banging tuning forks against the sides of tanks. Sam had never understood it all, but there had been some definite difference in the way the fish had responded to different notes running through the water, and Dutch had written it all down.

  “Sounds fishy to me,” Sam said, and they both laughed.

  At Flatbush Avenue, they got on the bus, walked to the back. Sam had told Dutch—long before—about what his grandfather used to do, when Ben had made Sam take him outside. Would they, Sam wondered, allow men like his grandfather where Andy was? The bus moved along Flatbush Avenue, past Parkside, where the entrance to Prospect Park was, then to Empire Boulevard, where, years before, they’d always gotten off together to go to Ebbets Field. Dutch raised his eyebrows. “Yeah,” he said. “It still gets you—just a bunch of apartment houses now.”

  The bus moved out from the curb, past the entrance to the botanical gardens. Sam supposed Dutch’s mother wasn’t all that bats—he’d read in the papers that they’d had to begin chaining new trees they planted down to the ground, sinking weights below the root levels. They passed the zoo, on the other side of the street, then came to Grand Army Plaza, where the main branch of the Brooklyn Public Library was, set back from the street. “Look,” Dutch said. “I know you said to lay off, but give a guy a break, okay? Let me tell you what’s been happening.”

  Sam didn’t look into Dutch’s eyes. “Sure,” he said, relenting. “Sure, Dutch.”

  The bus circled around the huge triumphal arch, a war memorial. “It hasn’t happened again yet,” Dutch said, his voice low. The drivers—they protected them now too—with walkie-talkies, with exact fare
s required to cut down robberies…he couldn’t blame Ben. “A couple of straight flushes—three, to be exact, one for me, two for him—but it hasn’t happened again, like before.”

  “That figures,” Sam said, wanting to be kind. “I mean, if it would happen even once in a lifetime that would seem like—”

  Dutch pressed Sam’s arm with his fingertips. “That’s just it, Sam. That’s just it!” He lowered his voice. “I jinxed you, Ace. It’s pure and simple. I jinxed you, having luck like that.”

  Sam said nothing. He saw the marquee for the Brooklyn Fox ahead of them, stood, caught onto a metal strap, above his head. “C’mon,” he said. “We get off here.”

  They walked across the street, then entered the Atlantic Avenue station. This was where, Sam remembered, O’Malley had asked for a new Ebbets Field, in downtown Brooklyn. But the bastard had known all along the city would never give it to him—he’d had the Los Angeles contract in his pocket the whole time. Sam moved ahead of Dutch, down steps; he’d been here before, to get the train to go out to the races: Belmont and Roosevelt Raceway. In the Long Island Railroad rotunda, they bought their tickets, round-trip to Westbury, then searched, found their way to the right track. “Made it by seven minutes,” Sam said. “I told you we had to hurry.”

  “You’re a genius,” Dutch said.

  Over the public address system, somebody was reading off the names of the towns the trains would stop at. Sam thought he could see Tidewater in the back seat of Jack Henry’s car. A few stops in Brooklyn, then a change at Jamaica, in Queens, and then the crazy-sounding names of all the places: Printing Press Road, Floral Park, New Hyde Park, Rockville Centre, Garden City, Roslyn, Manhasset, Neponset, Oyster Bay, Plainview, Patchogue, Babylon, Syosset, Mineola—and Sam’s favorite: Hicksville. He laughed to himself—you spend your whole life saving your money to buy a house in a place with a name like that. That took brains.

  Sam and Dutch entered a double-decker car, one of the old ones—two sets of seats facing each other in a pit below, and two more sets of seats above. Sam ducked his head, slipped down, sat. The rocking of the train, while the motor warmed up, made him sleepy. “You can flip a penny in the air a hundred times,” Dutch was saying, “and most times you’ll get fifty heads, fifty tails—approximately. Fifty-six and forty-four, something like that. But it happens, Sam—you can get one hundred heads in a row.” Dutch sat across from him and leaned forward, his hands spread apart, his palms up. Seeing Dutch’s hands, Sam thought of Tidewater, who’d played the piano also. He watched the shadows along Dutch’s face, under the cheekbones. “Listen: I explained before how there’s a theory in physics which says that everything in a room—all the particles—can suddenly collect in one corner: everything—chairs and tables and mirrors and the rest.” Sam nodded, looked out the window, saw somebody’s shoes running by. Maybe, since he liked speculating on things so much, he should suggest to Tidewater that he sell his theories to Dutch. Sure. Let them take their trip with each other, instead of through his head. “Okay, so anything’s possible. Who knows better than you? Okay, so I pull a royal straight flush—like you say, it can happen once in a lifetime. And okay too, I pull a second royal straight flush—two in a row—after all those years, the thousands of hands, let’s say it’s like the theory in physics. Anything’s possible, right?”

  The train was moving now, chugging along slowly, away from the lights of the station. It picked up speed, entered a tunnel, went around a curve. Nobody sat above them. Dutch’s blue eyes were shining. “It wasn’t getting the two hands which made me decide, can’t you see? I thought maybe you thought that when I got two hands like that it—well, spooked me.” Dutch put a hand on Sam’s knee, tapped with his knuckles, then shook his head. “But that wasn’t it, Sam—it wasn’t anything like that. All the theories and explanations—I was covering up something simpler.”

  Dutch was flying now, Sam thought. Poor Dutch. He could say what he wanted, but he’d never be the same. There were, Sam imagined, a few things like that that could happen—he thought of Stallworth—and then everything was different afterward, forever. He could understand that. There were moments in every person’s life when things could happen that way—as if the whole universe would stop for just an instant, the part of a second you couldn’t even measure; it would stand still because of you somehow. Ben could say what he wanted, but Sam believed it. Things happened sometimes and you didn’t always ask why. That was the difference.

  “But the basic fact isn’t that I drew two hands like that, in a row—and that”—he licked his lips; Sam watched the shadow, deep black, in the cleft below his nose—“nobody bet against me.” He paused, the tip of his tongue moving across his lower lip. “Right or wrong, Ace? When a guy in our business draws even once like that, and can’t get any mileage out of it, then it’s time to get out. As simple as that—”

  Sam waved him off. “You’re bats,” he said. “You got to play the cards, that’s all. If you pulled six deuces and lost a nickel on it, it wouldn’t mean dick.” He looked out the window. The train was riding an el now, along Fulton Street, and Sam looked at the buildings below—old, red brick, empty junk-filled lots between them. “You got to play the cards, that’s all. I’ve folded with power, lots of times. Sure. I told you about the guy, in Virginia Beach, kept asking me when the Dodgers were gonna move back to Brooklyn, cause that was when I would win.” Sam found himself laughing, at Dutch. “I pulled four jacks once, he never knew it, but I reamed the bastard’s ass good anyway.”

  Dutch shook his head. “You just don’t understand,” he said. “I had my good years too; I have my bundle stashed away, till I…” He grabbed Sam’s knee between his thumb and forefinger, and put pressure on. “Listen: I drew the two hands, one after the other, nobody went in with me, and I said to myself, Dutch Gabriel Cohen, with luck like that, you don’t need enemies—it’s time to switch to something else. As simple as that, Sam.”

  “You’re—you’re…” Sam couldn’t find a word. “Fuck it. Just lay off, okay? You believe what you want, I’ll believe what I want, and we’ll all live happily ever after. I told you. I got things on my mind.”

  Dutch whistled. “You’re in a great mood, I see. I’m really glad—I mean, it’s good to share things with a buddy at times like this.”

  Dave Stallworth took the ball in bounds from Dick Barnett, and began dribbling upcourt. Suddenly, two men converged on him—his head bobbed, and, moving past half-court at full speed, he slipped between them, his silver medallion swinging from around his neck. Without looking to either side, he shot a pass to his left. Bill Bradley took it, and a second later, under the basket, Stallworth had the ball back from Bradley. He faked right, spun around left, his head directly under the net, flicked the ball upward with his right hand, and the ball spun off the glass backboard and dropped through the hoop. Stallworth wound up on the floor, a whistle blew, and the referee—Mendy Rudolph—pointed an accusing finger at the guilty ballplayer, Gus Johnson. The crowd roared, Stallworth smiled, flipped his medallion under his uniform shirt; he took a helping hand from Barnett, stood, and walked to the foul line.

  “They hacked the guy to death!” Herbie said. “But did you see that shot? Did you see it? That guy is something, isn’t he, Sam?”

  Sam lay across the bed in Herbie’s bedroom, his head on pillows. Herbie sat up next to him, his back against the headboard, a huge piece of openwork black wood, carved in the form of two giant Japanese letters. Above Sam’s head, a round white ball—a Japanese lantern, Herbie had explained—was suspended from the ceiling, giving off a frosted yellow-white light. To the right, Dutch and Shimmy sat next to each other, on chairs, and at the foot of the bed the other guys—Nate, Max, Sid—were leaning forward, their eyes fixed on the color television set. “Yeah,” Sam said, “he’s an ace.”

  Shimmy, a round, balding man who had, Sam knew, been in and out of a half-dozen ventures during the last few years, and was now, so it seemed, making a fortune in real estate, l
eaned forward, chewing on the skin around his nails. His face was pock-marked, he lifted a can of beer to his lips. Sam reached to his left, to the night table, and took another cashew nut. “C’mon, Davela baby,” Shimmy said. “Come home now.”

  The camera zoomed in for a close-up of Stallworth’s face. Despite the brilliance of the color, you couldn’t tell, Sam realized, that his gold tooth was capped in the shape of a five-pointed star. Stallworth breathed in, balanced the ball on his fingertips and flicked it up and away. Swish! The guys cheered, and Sam felt his heart pump. “That’s it! That’s it!” Max yelled, sitting at the foot of the bed. “They’re gonna do it. Sixteen in a row! One to go for the record. C’mon you Knicks!”

  “Knicks, dicks,” Shimmy said, glancing toward Max. “C’mon you beautiful greenbacks!”

  “How much you got riding on the game?” Herbie asked.

  “Enough,” Shimmy said. “Enough.”

  The Baltimore Bullets brought the ball upcourt—Earl “The Pearl” Monroe getting away from Barnett with a fancy behind-the-back dribble, but he was immediately caught in a trap—Bradley and Stallworth surrounding him, their arms waving furiously, and when Monroe tried to flip the ball away, Stallworth got a hand on it. The ball rolled along the floor, Bradley scooped it up, flipped it ahead of him, and Barnett was there, ready, taking the ball and going in alone for a layup.

  “Oo-eee!” Shimmy cried, sucking on his lips. “Ain’t that sweet!”