Sam's Legacy Read Free

who’d invented religion in the first place. That was rich, the line the guy had quoted to him, but he wasn’t out—the word stuck—to prosper. Sure. He never lived really big, rolling around in fancy cars and expensive women, but he stayed alive, ahead of the game. That was something. Playing it small and smart he could get by from feeding on the others, the dumb ones, the guys who were out for the big kill.
    He headed for Flatbush Avenue: the morning papers would be in soon—he could have coffee and a Danish in Garfield’s while he waited. The street was dark, an old couple ahead of him, walking arm in arm. He’d lived on this block for almost twenty years; he knew every cellar, every alleyway, every roof. Number 221, his old building, was across the street, inside—one of four buildings which surrounded a courtyard. They’d had a large five-room apartment on the third floor. Now, ever since Ben had become ill five years before, Sam lived with his father in a narrow two-room place on Nostrand Avenue between Martense Street and Linden Boulevard, directly above the Muscular Dystrophy Rummage Shop. At fifty-six dollars a month, rent-controlled, they couldn’t complain. What would they do with five rooms? He turned left at Rogers Avenue. When he’d been a kid, this had been the corner he had hung out at. The old stores—Bender’s Fruit and Grocery, Klein’s Kosher Butcher Shop, Lee’s Luncheonette, Dominick’s Barber Shop—were all gone. But you couldn’t, Sam told himself, go against it. Things changed. He never made any predictions: he played the games one at a time. Play what’s there, don’t bet on air….
    Ahead of him, a man was sprawled on the sidewalk, his head against a garbage can, his left leg folded impossibly backward, under his rear-end. Sam looked left, checking the doorways to see if it was the old trap. Nobody. He walked to the man, smelled liquor mixed with vomit. The guy was Negro, but with a tiny nose, flattened like an Irishman’s. His stubble was full of white hairs, he had a sky-blue baseball cap on his head, sideways, and there was something dark clotted along his lower lip. There were no cars parked nearby. Sam bent over quickly, his ear to the man’s face—he heard breathing, a low pleasant-sounding gurgle. Sam felt the guy’s hands, checked his wrists—he’d be okay the way he was, sleeping it off.
    A stranger had once saved a man’s life, a diplomat from the United Nations—Sam had seen the story in the Post —because he’d stopped when he’d seen him lying in the gutter; the man had had an engraved silver tag on his wrist, stating that he was a diabetic and who to telephone.
    Sam moved away, across Martense Street. What if—the thought made him swallow, clench his fists—it had been Dave Stallworth lying there? The cleaning store at the corner, where old Mr. Weiss used to sit in the window, sewing, was now some kind of welfare station—guys hanging out in front of it all day long. This had been the best block for punchball and stickball, and he knew the local kids still used it: not too many cars, only one or two big trees overhanging, and they were far enough apart so that you had to go some, from the first sewer cover, to loft a ball into the branches. He heard the sound of glass—a bottle—splattering on the sidewalk behind him. He crossed over: all the stores had iron grilles across their doors and windows.
    Sam walked along Church Avenue, past Holy Cross Church, past the schoolyard where he still played three-man ball some afternoons. Two policemen were walking together on the other side of the street, their walkie-talkies strapped to their sides like silver hip flasks. To the left, across Bedford Avenue, he saw one wall of his old high school, Erasmus, and, next to it, on the far side, where their synagogue used to be, there was now a parking