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by test

  "So who's the nursemaid now, scolding me because I make a bet now and again?"

  "And again and again."

  "Talk about sanctimonious."

  "Look, I don't give a shit one way or another, Tom, I'm just pointing out a fact."

  "I never bet more than I feel like. I never bet unless I can feel it in my bones."

  "Hey, throw me that brandy, will you? Let me feel some of that in my bones."

  "Why don't you make me?"

  Eddie grinned. He reached into his back pocket, unfolded his wallet and peeled off three bills. "Here's fifty bucks. Enough to settle you up for the week? Walk that bottle of brandy over here and it's yours. You'll make it, luck or not, I'll bet."

  I stepped up to the wall and started out. "As if you could spare fifty bucks." I'd win his money and give it back to him, the little shit. The wall was two feet wide, and balancing was simple if you moved slowly and carefully.

  "Don't look down!" I raised my head and stared at the moonlit water. "Okay, take the turn slow."

  "I've got it," I said irritably. I glanced down for an instant to negotiate the turn, and the vortex pulled me over; Eddie shouted as the angled wall bit into my arms.

  Holding on, I saw everything in a queer slow motion; as though he were

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  swimming miles, Eddie shinnied out on the wall. He yanked me up. Somehow I got my leg over the wall and straddled it. We made our way to the main roof, my heart pounding. I lay on the blacktop and breathed hungrily, gratefully Eddie kept pacing around and saying "shit." He stuffed the fifty bucks in the breast pocket of my coat and wiped his face on his sleeve.

  "Swear to God, Eddie." I struggled to catch my breath. "You are lucky. Some people are like magnets: it sticks to 'em."

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  Snow settled on us as we approached the elevated tracks, and above us a train roared past. We paid our fares and went up to the south platform. Eddie walked up the platform, and I took cover inside the glass shelter. What was he thinking? A heatlamp hung from the roof of the shelter and generated a small, rectangular zone of warmth.

  The lamp snapped off and I hit the ON button; the heat came in sixty-second doses. I worked my hands for warmth. Eddie was right: my life was utterly out of control. I hadn't seen a movie in two months, hadn't eaten out since Christmas. Every fucking dollar always on the line, always that tremor deep at the core when it hit me I was going to lose big. Now I was in hock and betting three hundred bucks I didn't have. The lamp went out.

  What was the point? Life is a trap, a marked deck and a gun on the table. Draw: ace of spades. What difference would it make if I were dead instead of counting other people's dough? Eddie thought I was shit. The money was still in my pocket, and I thought of throwing it on the tracks, but I knew I'd never do it and the knowledge made me want to rend myself, pound on the wall of the shelter. Eddie had given me the money in a spasm of guilt, even though he'd never ask for it back. That was his way of reacting to any problemimmediately.

  The twin headlights of a train appeared as it rounded the corner heading north from the Loop. It would be going forty when it reached our end of the platform. This summer a bag lady had jumped. "Man, you don't want to look," the cop told me. "There isn't enough to fill a bowling bag." What did it take? Three steps, andwhat? Courage? Hopelessness? The kind of curiosity Eddie pulsed with? Every time I saw a train coming nowadays I hungered for the experience, but fear kept me in place. Tonight was different. The Hawks game, the watchit was all shit when I saw Eddie waving that money around and grinning at me. You'll make it, luck or not, I'll bet. Numb, I took three steps to the edge of the platform. The train screamed toward me, a chilly wind stirring gently at its approach. I could feel the physical effects of terror but wasn't afraid; in fact, a strange pride welled up within me. I braced myself for the pain.

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  The lamp snapped on, and I turned. Eddie smiled at me as the train roared by. Its wind pushed me back a step.

  "Wrong train, you idiot. We're going downtown."

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  Before long we were descending the stadium steps to our seats overlooking the Islanders' goal. Full house tonight: beer-stoned granddads in plaid shirts, chewing on their dead cigars; square-headed prep school jocks, slamming down beer and pounding on the railings, their bellows collecting among the girders overhead. We sat with the fanatic brigade, crew-cut kids and army reserve parents, amiable dopes with their buttons and flags and stupid hats. A Spanish announcer for Channel 26 sang the national anthem to an all-white crowd.

  As a peace offering I went to the concession stand and broke one of the bills Eddie had given me on a couple buckets of beer. Each held 32 ounces of foaming Old Style, and by the end of the second period we were blind drunk. The Islanders led 53. I bought myself another bucket of beer when it dawned on me that the Hawks were out of gas and I would probably lose my bet. I'd never welshed before, and my mind was full of back-alley punishments from a thousand gangster movies. In reality, Mike would just shake his bald head, adjust his glasses, give me an extension and make my name shit all over town.

  Al Secord drew up to the net on our side, big as life and with a decent opening. He shot and the goalie dove on it. No score. I cursed and kicked the seat in front of me.

  "Cool out, Rambo, it's just a hockey game." I stared into Eddie's calm eyes, my face frozen in a confused grimace. I wanted to tell him about the watch but turned back to the game. Being shit all over town is one thing, but not at home.

  "How much are you in for?" he asked me.

  "What are you talking about?" I shot back. "I made a chintzy little fivedollar bet at work, will you get off my back?"

  "I'd love to know what your blood pressure is right now. Look at this vein on your head, look at this." I felt his cool fingers graze my temple and slapped his hand away. He laughed. "You'd think there was a mortgage on your house riding on this game."

  "I like hockey."

  In those few seconds Denis Savard had made a good drive forward and scored an open-net goal on the Islanders: 54. The Hawks crowd erupted, and I shook my fist in the air, cheering. As if the goal somehow vindicated me, Eddie went back to watching the game.

  The Hawks scored again in the middle of the last period, and with the score tied my hopes sprang into flower again. Thank God I hadn't told Eddie about the watch. Tomorrow night it would be on my wrist again.

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  The clock ran down under two minutes. The Islanders were hanging on to this one. One of their linemen drove Doug Wilson into the Plexiglas barrier facing us. With a thunderous slam his face was crushed into the Plexiglas, and his twisted nose and eye against the glass formed a cavity that filled with blood like a rising thermometer.

  The crowd shrieked and a fight broke out. Wilson was carried off. After some deliberation the referees threw the Islanders lineman out of the game. The smear of blood hung on the Plexiglas in front of us, and I shuddered as I recalled the wide, unseeing eye that stared at me through the glass in the moment before the blood leapt over it.

  The two teams bore down on each other, the crowd a barely controlled scream of fury Thirty seconds. The Hawks got possession of the puck and lost it again. My hands tightened into white fists. Eddie was saying something.

  ''What?"

  "The jeweler called. Your watch will be ready Friday."

  "The jeweler?" I stammered, confused. He was trying to trick me. The Hawks had gained possession and were surging toward us. "Your watch'll be ready on Friday."

  Our eyes met. A triumphant grin tugged at one corner of his mouth. "God damn you," I muttered.

  Al Secord found Olczyk open and gave him the puck. Olczyk had the opening, a little left of center, and I yelled even as he shot, for I knew he'd score.

  The puck slammed into the netgoal!and bounced out again. The players, still scuffling, sent it flying over the net, over the Plexiglas and straight at me. I dove for the ground, then hear
d the puck connect and Eddie cry out.

  He was arched up over his seat, his hands covering his right eye. Blood ran through his fingers. A couple of college jocks held him by the shoulders and another ran for a medic. The crowd surged up around us like iron filings to a bar magnet. We got him down in his seat and tilted his head back.

  "It's okay, Ed, it's okay, we got a doctor coming." His howl crumbled into a stuttering moan, like that of a crabbed baby fighting for breath. He clamped a bloody hand over mine. The players of both teams swarmed up against the Plexiglas for a look. "Where the fuck are they?" The college kid had only been gone a few seconds, but surely word had spread.

  "Here!" A round old woman ripped a pad of pocket tissues from its plastic wrapper and applied it to the eye; a spot of blood spread over the pad, soaking it. The woman was festooned with a dozen Black Hawks buttons, and above her head a green plastic fist signaling "thumbs up!" danced at the end of a coiled antenna.

  We commandeered a bunch of coats and wrapped Eddie up so he wouldn't go into shock. "I can't feel my eye," he told me.

  "He's on his way, man. Just hold on."

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  "Think I'm gonna be blind?"

  "Of course not." But my own words played back at me again and again: God damn you. I gritted my teeth and squeezed Eddie's hand, trying to force the words out of my head. God damn you.

  Finally the Hawks' medics showed up with a stretcher. "There's an ambulance on the way. Let's get it bandaged." They put a cotton pad over Eddie's eye, wrapped up the top of his head, took his pulse, and sedated him with a hypo. "Are you with him?" asked one of the medics.

  "I'm his brother."

  "Okay, let's move him," said the other.

  "Mister! Mister!" the old woman called after me as they hoisted Eddie up the steps. She held the puck before her. It was grimy with blood. "Take it to him, Mister. He deserves it."

  "Thanks." A wave of revulsion rolled over me as I picked up the heavy chunk of rubber. Something told me to get rid of it, some weird jinx that made my skin crawl. I sure as hell wouldn't give it to Eddie. If you had a bullet pierce your brain you wouldn't want it handed to you like a Kewpie doll.

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  They took him to Rush Presbyterian. I wasn't allowed in the emergency room, so I sat out in the waiting room in a molded chair of pebbled orange plastic, pushing hard against the floor with my legs to see if I could snap the back off it. After about an hour a Dr. Desmond approached me, rubbing his pinched, red face. Eddie was in stable condition and they had him under heavy sedation. A specialist, Dr. Mellon, would operate on the eye tomorrow morning. I couldn't get a straight answer whether he would keep the eye or not. Desmond agreed to let me sit up with Eddie, although he would be out cold until after the surgery.

  Eddie shared a room with a skeletal old man who had lost a leg to cancer and spent much of the night shifting unevenly in a restless, murmuring delirium. The room was dimly illuminated and smelled of antiseptic. They had bandaged both his eyes, the whole top of his head, in fact. An IV needle trailed down from his forearm, which was taped to a board with thin white tape. I heard a nurse pad by occasionally, and the hostile, heavy step of a doctor. The chair at Eddie's bedside was upholstered, and I curled into it, drifting in and out of sleep.

  Dawn was beginning to take shape when I heard his voice. "Tom!"

  "Hey, how you doing?" I asked, standing over him.

  "Tom, I'm falling. I'm falling."

  "No you're not. You're not falling."

  "Help me." His hands shot out and touched me, then he sank back into bed. I settled his hands and held onto the taped one. "Am I blind?"

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  "They're going to operate. A specialist is coming in to work on you. Everything's gonna be fine."

  "I can't see you, Tom."

  "It's only a bandage."

  "I can't see you." His free hand found my arm and climbed up it. He touched my face. The man on the other side of the curtain began to stir.

  "When's the surgery?"

  "Not for a while. It's about five right now. You should sleep. Do you want another shot?"

  "No. No shots. I'm scared. What if this is it? What if I just sink down and don't come back?"

  "Just go to sleep. You'll come out on the other side of this. You of all people."

  "Oh yeah, Mr. Lucky. You're the guy who won all the money tonight. How much did you rake in?"

  "Eddie . . ."

  "How much?"

  I turned away from him, bracing myself against the IV stand. Across the room the old man thrashed around feebly. "You never kept that promise," he muttered, his voice thin, "You never never never never . . ."

  Light had begun to seep through the venetian blinds. I saw the puck approaching, and a chill swept through me; I wanted to dive out of the way as I had then, and leave it to blow Eddie's eyeball open. I closed my eyes, blacking out the horizontal lines of light. The train was flying toward me, along the same path. No, it was right to run, I would run from the train if it jumped off the track after me, I would run for the rest of my life and outrace the odds, but only if I could drag him after me. Wrong train, you idiot. We're going downtown.

  "Eddie?" I said. But he had fallen asleep.

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  The surgery was scheduled for 10:30 a.m. Even by a conservative estimate Eddie would be in for an hour and unconscious for quite a while after that, so I took a cab home, showered, changed, and got on the train to go back. Staring out the window, I wondered how so much havoc could be wreaked in twenty-four hours. I could do a backflip out this window right now, and if it wasn't meant to be, the earth would rotate backwards and the lake would catch me.

  Then I saw him, in the next car. Seated before his eager students like a teacher of old, cheerful in the knowledge of his control, bottle caps moving like the gears of a fine watch as the world sleeps. I walked to the end of the car and climbed out the door onto the coupler, the wind a long metallic shriek as we flew down the subway tunnel at top speed. I wrestled open the door of the car and entered, closing the maelstrom out behind me.

  "Watch de ball watch de ball whey is it? Watch de ball. If you don't know

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  what to do, I got money in my shoe. My name is Sylvester, I'm the world's best eye-tester."

  "I thought your name was Matt."

  He recognized me at a glance, kept the shells moving. "I'm Dr. Sylvester, I'm the world's best eye-tester. You can trust you eye or you can trust you luck, but you eye ain't worth a fuck."

  "Here." The puck was still in my pocket. "I'll bet you this." He looked at the puck, studied the NHL seal as I held it up in front of his face. ''A hundred bucks. Got it at the Hawks-Islanders game last night. Game-winning puck."

  "All right, m'man, a hundred. I know a man who likes a good bet. Find the ball you win a C, lose the ball the puck comes home with me. Watch de ball watch de ball watch de ball whey is it?"

  He moved his hands away from the caps. I closed my eyes and let my hand fall on one of them. He turned it over, empty, and stared deep into my eyes, trying to burrow into my soul and claim it.

  The signs for my stop began flying past. I tossed him the puck. He caught it and studied its brown crust of dried blood. "Hey, what's this shit, man?"

  "Blood. It hit my brother in the eye. Blinded him."