Sam's Legacy Read Free Page B

for whatever pamphlet it was that he’d been selling.
    Sam kept his eye on the market now and then, but he never played there. Sure, you could make a big killing if somebody gave you a tip, but where, he asked, was the control? The big boys manipulated everything; you could get your ass cleaned out overnight if some mutual fund decided to dump what you had. All you could do was read the figures in the paper, and they weren’t figures Sam could believe in. He’d make his own odds.
    He hadn’t, he knew, been getting as many games of poker as he needed—that was why he’d put two and a half on the Knicks’ first game. He didn’t like it. Sure. Maybe, in the way that pitchers were always ahead of the batters in spring training, so Sam could stay ahead of the bookies in the early going; still, the question was there: where was the control? The truth, he knew (remembering how easy it had been, a few hours before, seeing Stallworth, to let his feelings carry him away), was that you were only a spectator. If he could have given up betting on games, he’d have been just as happy.
    He felt his fingers tighten into fists. Damn though, he thought. With enough poker he wouldn’t have needed anything else. If he could have had one game every night for one year, say—five-card draw, five and ten—he figured he could have retired at the end. But games were harder and harder to come by—he’d had to go out to Newark for the last one, taking the damned tubes—and the game had been only quarter and half-dollar.
    The man had switched seats, showing Sam his back. Sam smiled, watched the man’s elbow jerking, pushing the pencil round and round in circles. With the Dow Jones average dropping every day lately, the bottom nowhere in sight, the guy was probably eating himself up. Or maybe he traded in the other stuff, which Sam never followed at all: what the fuck were pork belly futures anyway? He laughed—it picked him up, thinking of a line like that. He bit into his Danish. That, and the guys who were always talking about taking losses in order to make gains. You couldn’t sell that theory to a man who’d been in Sam’s line of work for over a dozen years. Sam knew the guys who’d bet heavy on low pairs, who’d lose hands on purpose, thinking they were setting him up; they’d never taken his money home.
    What had he made the last time, though? A hundred and twenty—and it had been his only game in six weeks. There was no point in laughing at the others. He sighed, remembering how easy it had been, playing his hands, small and smart, waiting for the others to make their moves. He could have written the script ahead of time, from the way they ran their mouths so much. When they raised the house, he knew he was home free. If he’d wanted to, in his head, he could have replayed every hand he’d had during that four-and-a-half-hour game. But the thought tired him. There’d been no need to follow the betting pattern: when his own cards were there, he’d stayed in, no matter how many they drew or what they bet. Sam felt himself tense. What good was it, being able to see through a bunch of two-bit players when, in the end, he was the one who was back where he started from, having to bet on things he shouldn’t be betting on, having to wonder if he’d get enough games to get by on, having to worry about what he’d tell Ben when his cash reserves were gone, and the bottom dropped away.
    Bundles of newspapers flew out of the back of a truck, and two black boys raced each other to get to them. Milt, the old newsdealer, made angry motions at them, but when the kids had dumped the bundles in front of the newsstand, Sam saw Milt give them each some money. The rumble of conversation in the cafeteria relaxed Sam. He remembered when Garfield’s had first opened; he remembered the Flatbush Theater, which had been in the spot