Sam's Legacy

by Jay Neugeboren

  Tidewater held an iron ring in his hand, and pulling the ring, Sam saw, lifted up a square section of the floor. “Now you will understand,” Tidewater said, “why I said what I said. Are you with me?”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Come with me.” Tidewater reached toward Sam, a hand outstretched. “Don’t be afraid.”

  Sam stepped closer, aware suddenly that the man was already halfway into the hole, his chest only above floor level. Fear was not the right word for what he felt, he knew, and yet he did not want to go below—the thought did cross his mind that, if he did, he might never return. Still, he felt safe somehow, with the cool skin of the man’s palm in his hand, with his own sweat dripping along his body, under his clothes. It was all the same to him, even this. “You got a light down there?” he asked.

  “Don’t be afraid. When they were changing from coal to oil—that would have been just before you and your father moved in—they discovered this door, but thought nothing of it.” He paused and Sam, as he let himself down into the hole, finding the iron rung of a ladder with the sole of his right shoe, felt somehow—the association was pleasant—the way he felt when he was in the midst of a good poker game: as if he were both there and not there, as if he were, as he descended below the cellar, watching himself do what he was doing. He smelled chalk. “You are the first to see what I have discovered.”

  In the blackness, Sam could not tell how big the space around him was. He had let go of Tidewater’s hand once he’d started down the ladder and he reached out now with his right hand and touched, not even a foot from the ladder, a dirt wall. He had forgotten to count the number of rungs on the ladder. He reached up, but his hand did not touch the cellar floor. There was light behind him. His foot touched ground, and he realized he had not heard Tidewater’s voice or step for a second or two. He turned around, both feet on the ground, his shoulders brushing the dirt wall of the crawlspace, and saw, below him, that another door had been opened and that, in a dirt-walled chamber, perhaps six feet along each edge, the chamber sunk below the level of the earth Sam stood upon, Tidewater waited for him, his head nearly grazing a low ceiling, his hands at his sides. “I work here,” he said.

  Sam ducked his head, stepped down, and entered the chamber. If he stuck his hands out, he knew, he would touch both walls at the same time. A lightbulb hung from the ceiling, the wire attached by large iron staples. In the corner, behind Tidewater, Sam saw the desk, with a typewriter on it and paper stacked neatly at the side. “How do you get air down here?” Sam asked.

  Tidewater motioned behind Sam; Sam looked over his shoulder and saw, in the corner next to the door—to the right—diagonally across from the desk—that there was a round hole in the wall, next to the ceiling. “I wanted you to know,” Tidewater said. “This room has been here for over a hundred years.”

  Sam nodded. He kept himself from saying anything because he did not, where he was, want to anger the man. He wondered if the room had been some kind of storage place for coal, but he didn’t ask.

  “I buried them there, in that corner,” Tidewater said, pointing to Sam’s left.

  “Sure,” Sam said.

  “There were only bones, and clothing. The clothing was remarkably well preserved. I buried it with them.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. He looked up, seeing the man’s face inches from his own, the bulging eyes looking like hollows in the skull, as if things had been inverted. It was, Sam knew, the light from above which was playing the tricks.

  “The rest you can guess,” Tidewater said. “There would be no fooling a man of your mind. You are not the kind who listens to the grass grow.” Sam saw the man’s tongue, inside a smile. His breath, like the room, smelled of chalk dust. “I will, when I have completed my work, join them here.”

  “Sure,” Sam said. “Thanks for showing me. But I got to get going now—I told you.”

  Tidewater’s hands gripped the lapels of Sam’s mackinaw. The man hissed into Sam’s face, spacing the words, flicking his tongue. “You are supposed to listen to my words, do you understand?” Sam felt himself being lifted slightly from the floor. He touched his right sidepocket, he was ready for anything. But he had to be careful, he knew—when they were bats, people had superhuman strength.

  “Who’s buried here?” Sam asked, registering Tidewater’s sentence for the first time.

  He heard Tidewater’s breath, felt himself fall; the man’s hands came away and Sam stood on the ground again, solidly. He had said the right thing. “Yes,” Tidewater said. “You do recall the house I told you about, where Ben and I played—”

  “Sure,” Sam said, and he heard the pieces fall into place. “I mean, things can happen that way sometimes. My buddy Dutch—he once drew two royal straight flushes, one after the other. Things can happen.”

  “Ah,” Tidewater said. “I knew. I knew you would understand, and yet—” He turned his back to Sam and sat down at the desk, so that Sam found himself looking at the top of the man’s head. The hair was straight and sandy-colored. Sam saw no gray. “I have checked, of course, and it is not so unusual—there are many rooms like this in this section of Brooklyn. The church was active in the Abolitionist cause—hypocritical, as most were, but active nonetheless. I have checked old maps. I find no records for this building before 1906, so we are—if you will forgive the phrase—in the dark there, but that is no matter. The wonder of the discovery is grounded in things plausible—”

  “Forget it, then,” Sam said.

  “There were two of them, of undeterminable age, and they sat against the wall, appearing very calm and relaxed.” Tidewater stood, pushed his chair under the table. “I feel at home here. You do understand that. And here—there is something I would like you to have—I found it here.”

  Tidewater bent over, reaching a long arm under the table. His knees remained straight; Sam believed the man had been an athlete. You could see things like that. Tidewater held a bundle made of newspaper in his hands. “They—or one of them—must have worked on it in the time spent here. There was a knife, which I buried also, and this, my gift to you, had already been buried, wrapped in cloth, and so was preserved. I found no wooden chips, though perhaps they had been used to create warmth.” Tidewater unwrapped the package. “The work is exquisite. My father—and brothers—would have commended it.”

  Tidewater held the doll forward. It was, Sam saw at once, beautifully carved: a naked black boy, with a round belly and rounder eyes. The wood was so shiny that, if Sam hadn’t been told, he would have thought the doll had been carved and polished only a week or two before. The right hand rested below the belly, covering the boy’s nakedness; the face seemed to show nothing in particular: an ordinary, typical Negro boy—full-lipped, broad-nosed, healthy—the kind Sam had seen in illustrated books when he’d been a boy himself. “A pickanniny child,” Tidewater said. “From the Spanish pequeño, meaning little. We used the term as one of endearment.”

  “It probably means more to you,” Sam said. “Why don’t you keep it—?” He stopped, hearing the other thing Tidewater had said. His mind was moving backward, fast, recalling everything it had to. “Christ!” he exclaimed. “Do you mean you’re going to come down here in—”

  “Here,” Tidewater said, smiling at Sam, as if to thank him again for having understood. “I can’t be sure whether or not our anonymous craftsman did this for amusement—or for some practical purpose—for carrying a message perhaps. It seems unlikely, in truth. He must have been, for a time at least, visited regularly. Why he was left here in the end, we don’t, of course—”

  Sam watched the man’s long fingers twisting the top of the doll’s body. “But here—” Tidewater said. The doll came apart, the boy’s torso and head lifted, and inside it Sam saw another doll, identical to the first, only smaller. “The work is exquisite,” Tidewater said, pushing his gift forward, in front of Sam’s eyes.

  “I need air,” Sam said, and turned away, toward th
e entrance. He tripped on the step, forgetting.

  “Please,” Tidewater said calmly. “Don’t be afraid. I’d like you to have it. Please—”

  “Some other time, okay?” Sam grabbed the sides of the ladder in his hands. He didn’t wait to hear anymore, he didn’t bother to think of anything else to say. He climbed, one rung at a time, relieved to find the door at the top still open. He braced his hands against the floor, on either side, and hauled himself up. If Flo stopped him, he decided, he would ignore her. As for Sabatini’s buddies—feeling his heart race, and touching his sidepocket—they had better watch out: keyed up the way he was, ready for anything, being scared just enough to give an edge to his reflxes, he’d be more than they bargained for if they approached him now. He stopped at the side of the furnace, before heading upstairs: he did not hear Tidewater coming after him and that was just as well. He dusted his hands, rubbed them against his coat to get the grit off. It was just as well, too, that the doll had stayed down there. Sam took the stairs two at a time and remembered, before he closed the door to the hallway, to turn the cellar light off. Living there for as long as he had, Tidewater would know his way around blindfolded.

  Sam did not look up to see if Muriel was still there. He did not glance at the door to the rummage shop. He headed straight outside. He’d let the sweat dry on his body—that was the best way to get cooled off. The light outside, although evening was almost upon him, made Sam raise his right forearm in self-defense—to shield his eyes from the white glare. The streets were clean, free of snow and ice and slush. Mrs. Cameron was not sitting on her stoop. Nate the Numbers Man, when he saw Sam passing, lifted his sunglasses and nodded in greeting. Sam had an idea: he would surprise them—he didn’t think they’d really do anything since he was still small-fry—but he wouldn’t take any chances. He’d cover all bets this time by taking the offensive. He pulled his mackinaw tight to his body. It was cold out. Steam rose from a manhole cover at the edge of the street, next to the sewer, where, below, the water flowed. Sam saw Tidewater, blindfolded, sticking half out of the hole—and he realized that, in the basement, he had had the sensation that the hole—even though it was a square—had been cut into ice. A blindman’s bluff—something to watch out for in poker, if you could get a game.

  Sam headed up Martense Street, for Garfield’s. He wanted to see Willie the Lump. In front of one of the wood houses, a crowd of men stood around, shooting craps, drinking beer. Something rolled out in front of Sam: a baby carriage. It bumped into a car and Sam heard a mother yelling at her child for having let the carriage go.

  “How’re you feelin’, man?” A black guy, eyes glazed, stuck his hand out for Sam.

  “Beat it,” Sam said and walked by, not changing his course, bumping the guy with a shoulder. Despite the cold, some black kids were chasing each other in a game, running back and forth across the street in zigzag fashion. He saw one of them jump on the sewer cover. Sam had used it for home plate during most of his childhood. Sure. There was a lot of stuff below the city. He’d read once—in a book he’d given a book report on—that they’d found the ruins of an old circus, when they were building the subway; and old tubes, for trains, which had worked on a vacuum principle. They had known a circus had made its home there because the elephant dung had been preserved. It wasn’t so unusual, a room under the floor—you’d see an article in the papers every now and then about workmen finding a place like that. There’d been skeletons in some of them. Tunnels and old pipelines and sewers and wires, abandoned rooms and remnants of old buildings—you could probably find lots of things you wouldn’t expect if you started digging under the city. Everybody knew, of course, about the baby alligators that had been flushed into sewers and had supposedly grown up there, living on garbage, but—seeing steam emerge from a grating at the corner of Rogers Avenue, Sam thought of the story Dutch had told him—what people didn’t know, since they kept it quiet: that there were mothers, in the ghettos mostly, who’d flushed unwanted kids down, and that sanitation men had actually reported that they’d seen a few of them—like wolves—living below the city and running in packs.

  Sam clenched his fists inside his pockets. It burned him to think that anybody could let go of something so small and alive and healthy, when people like Flo—and even Marion—would have given their lives to have had normal kids. Sam didn’t like what Tidewater had confided in him: it was the guy’s own skin, of course; still, Sam thought, life was precious. There was nothing, he supposed, that he could do with a guy like Tidewater, but if someone like, say Stallworth, who’d almost died and had come back—a black guy who knew what it was all about now that he’d been through his experience—if a guy like that could talk to Tidewater… Throwing away life as if it were a gift you didn’t want was something no man had a right to do. Tidewater may have had the words, for whatever they were worth, but Sam could feel the anger also.

  “I thought I’d stop by and say hello—for old time’s sake,” Sam said, taking a seat at Willie’s table in Garfield’s.

  “How are you feeling, Mr. Benjamin?” Willie’s good eye looked past Sam’s right shoulder.

  “Now that we don’t have business together, I thought we could be—you know—just friends.” Sam bit hungrily into the cheese Danish he’d bought.

  “Be careful, Mr. Benjamin. Pay up.”

  “I appreciate your interest, Willie,” Sam said. “But you don’t have to lose any sleep over me. I look out for number one.”

  Sam enjoyed the warmth of the cafeteria. He stood and took off his mackinaw, glancing around, then sat again. There were a lot of elderly people sitting at tables and talking, cups of coffee and tea in front of them. Sam wondered what Pioneer Estates had that could match Garfield’s. Maybe Tidewater was right, though: at a certain point, memory began to take over—maybe Sam was attached to Garfield’s because of all the hours he’d spent there when he’d been in high school, waiting in the back room on Friday nights after basketball games, cheering when the guys from the team would come in carrying their satchels. Nate had always sat down at Sam’s table. “You can pay me,” Willie was saying. “They told me to tell you, if you came.”

  “What—?”

  “You can pay me. They told me to tell you, if you came. You have until tomorrow for the first payment. I’ll be here from noon until eleven at night.”

  “You work for them too?”

  “You can pay me,” Willie repeated. “They told me to tell you, if—”

  “Okay, okay,” Sam said. “You got a crack in your record.” He shook his head, then spoke to Willie in a kindly voice. “They got you from all sides, don’t they, Willie? Everybody owns a piece of your body.” Sam laughed. “You should hold an auction and get it over with.”

  Willie gazed into the distance, unmoved by what Sam said. “How are you feeling, Mr. Benjamin?” he asked again in a flat voice.

  “Listen, now that I’m off Sabatini’s books, you call me Sam. We don’t have to—”

  “I collect for the others also. You can pay me. They told me—”

  “Up yours, Willie,” Sam said, matter-of-factly, and drank from his glass of milk. He liked the cold white feeling, as it coated his throat. Sam watched Willie’s face, but saw nothing. “But look—I got a friend, an old buddy—if you’re looking for some work, for a change, if you know what I mean—I think he’d give you a good deal. He’s in real estate, around Brooklyn.”

  “Be careful, Mr. Benjamin,” Willie said, his glass eye focused on Sam’s face. “You always treated me good. Pay up.”

  Sam stood. “This was just for old time’s sake—stopping by,” he said, pushing his chair back. “You’re looking good, Willie. You take care of yourself.” Sam slipped into his coat, then laughed and leaned forward, balancing his hands on the back of a chair. “Listen, I got something to ask you—personal: how many kids you got, Willie?”

  “You can pay me,” Willie said, without showing anything. “They get mean, Mr. Benjamin. Pay me.”

&nb
sp; Sam hitched his shoulders. “If you change your mind—about seeing my friend—you get in touch, right? Remember—this could be the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.”

  At a table by the window, where the man had sat the night of the opening Knick game, scribbling on The New York Times stock page, Sam now saw a young boy, perhaps seventeen years old, trying to raise a cup to his lips. The boy had beautiful straight blond hair to his shoulders. His shirt was open, revealing a smooth hairless chest. His hands trembled uncontrollably. The boy saw that Sam was watching him and Sam averted his eyes quickly; he didn’t want the kid coming up to him, trying to make a touch. The boy’s eyes, deep blue in color, reminded Sam of Dutch’s eyes. If the kid was smart, Sam figured, he could, with his looks, get some older woman to pay his bills.

  “How are you f-feeling, Sam?” Milt asked.

  “No kicks,” Sam said. He took a copy of the Sporting News.

  “How does your father l-like his new life?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “He did the smart thing,” Milt said. Milt handed Sam his change and brought his lips to Sam’s ear. “Be careful,” he whispered. “B-be careful. The word is out.”

  “I appreciate your interest,” Sam said. He thought Milt’s eyes, behind the thick glasses, were wet. It might, however, have been the cold. It really got him, though, the way people were watching out for him. But when it came time to put up or shut up, where would they be then? Sam walked away. What mattered was knowing who you could depend on in the clutch, and there—it moved him—Sam knew he could still put Dutch at the top of the list. Even if they didn’t see one another for months—for years—Sam knew that Dutch was a friend he could always count on, no matter where, no matter when, and no questions asked.