Netherland (21 page)

In any case, there was no need for me to conduct inquiries. Chuck was only too happy to make disclosures about himself.

He decided, for example, to let me in on his little racket.

I was rolling the outfield one hot Sunday morning when a man approached. He was an ordinary fellow in his forties, black, in sneakers and a T-shirt, and he stood around looking ill at ease. I dismounted the roller and went to him.

“Chuck there?” he said.

I took him to the hangar where Chuck was taking photographs and measurements. We couldn’t see him and were about to step out when his voice called from somewhere, “Nelson!”

They shook hands. Chuck said, “I got it right here, boy,” and from a buttock pocket he extracted a wad of bills. I watched him count off a bunch and hand them to Nelson with a great smile. Nelson was smiling, too. Chuck walked him to his car. There was a brief chat, and then the car pulled quickly away.

“Well, he seems pretty happy,” I said.

“He should be,” Chuck said.

Tony wasn’t around. It was just Chuck and me on that field. We climbed onto the roller, an ancient, peeling piece of equipment that moved on two drums filled with water. Chuck took the seat and I stood next to him on a small metal platform. The engine roared and we began to crawl toward the container shed.

Chuck shouted, “You a gambling man, Hans?” When I shook my head, he said, “Not even scratchies?”

“Maybe once or twice,” I said. I remembered rubbing a coin on a grid of silver boxes, hoping for the same dollar number to reveal itself three times in the gashes in the silver. It hadn’t, and I hadn’t cared; but the business had been sufficiently gripping to provide a clue as to why the hard-up half of New York was addicted to the experience—this being the impression I gained practically every time I had reason to step into a deli.

Presently the roller eased into the shed. We started chaining it up. Chuck said, “How about weh-weh? You ever heard of that?” Chuck and I sat down on the two chairs he kept handy. We each opened a soda and drank thirstily. “It’s an old Trinidad game,” Chuck said. The weh-weh man, also known as the banker, he explained, wrote down a number from one to thirty-six on a piece of paper, folded the paper, and deposited it at an accessible location—a shop, say, or a bar, or a street corner. “My father was a weh-weh man,” Chuck said. “He liked to pick a spot by the river. It used to be popular, that river. Maybe it still is. People would go up there to the basins where you could dive, places full of millions fish. You went up there, you cooked by the river. There was catfish, crayfish in the water, but people hardly fished. You went there to lime. One time,” Chuck digressed, “my brother Roop went off and stole a duck late, late at night. We took the duck to the river, slaughtered it, cut its head off. I remember Roop holding it up by the foot and letting the blood run off. Then we plucked it and cooked it. A white duck,” Chuck recalled. “Nobody can lay claim to a white duck.”

Once the winning number, or mark, was chosen, Chuck resumed, the runners would go out and collect the bets—which in those days might range from fifty cents to fifty TT dollars. At a fixed hour, the banker revealed, or “burst,” the mark. “Remember that guy with me at the restaurant in Manhattan? You were with the food critic.”

“McGarrell,” I said.

“That’s right,” Chuck said. “You remember his name. Anyhow, that’s how I know McGarrell. He came running down to our house to place a bet for his father. Everybody played weh-weh, even though it was illegal. I’m talking about the countryside here, miles away from Port-of-Spain or any other big town. Even my father played sometimes. Listen to this: one afternoon, it was raining heavily and we were all at home, sitting on the gallery. A one-eyed frog comes out of the rain, hopping up the step of the gallery. My father jumped.” Chuck leaped sideways, pointing at the ground. “‘Look that the frog! This is a mark for the weh-weh, boy.’ He put his hand in pocket and gave me seventy-five cents. ‘Put all this on crapaud,’ he said. And of course crapaud won.”

You chose your numbers, Chuck told me, according to what you saw around you or, especially, what you saw in your dreams. There was an art to remembering your dreams, and some people were fanatical about it. “They wake up in the middle of the night and write it down, quick, before it’s gone.” If you saw a priest or a pundit, you played parson man, number 5; or if you saw a knife or a cutlass or broken glass, anything that cut, you played centipede, number 1. “Men would lie down just to dream for weh-weh,” Chuck Ramkissoon said. “More you sleep, more you dream, my father used to say.”

Where was he going with this?

Chuck said, “After my brother died, I helped out my father a lot. I was his right-hand man. He worked in the fields, you know. The weh-weh was a sideshow. But it was where most of the money came from. People trusted him. They liked him. I learned a lot just watching him talk to them, handle them. Deo Ramkissoon.”

Chuck stood up and searched around for something. He said, “When I first began to save some money, I began to ask myself, What if I could set up a little weh-weh game here? People like to play, it reminds them of the old country. So I did. Small bets, very small bets, just for fun. I
made
it fun,” Chuck said. He told me that he devised an elaborate sign system tailored just for Brooklyn, with numbers corresponding to sights and scenes that daily surrounded the gamblers: a Haitian, cops making an arrest, a street fair, a game of cricket or baseball, an airplane, a graveyard, a drug dealer, a synagogue, “every kind of thing you see around here. People came to me with their dreams and I translated the dreams into numbers. People love that kind of thing. After a while,” Chuck said, “I figured out I could afford to take bigger bets. But I didn’t want to get into trouble. I stopped the small-time game and restricted myself to more serious customers. A boutique lottery, I call it. Very discreet, very select.” He wiped his hands clean of all dirt. “It isn’t just Trinis playing anymore. I get Jamaicans, Chinese. A lot of Chinese. When Abelsky joined me, the Jews became involved. They play five, ten, twenty thousand. Big bucks. It’s me they trust, not Abelsky,” Chuck said. “It’s my game. I’m the banker. I burst the mark.”

“Why would people want to play?” I said. It felt strange asking him this question, since there were plenty of other things that needed saying. “Why not just play the regular lottery? Or go to Atlantic City?”

“I give better odds,” Chuck said. He pulled out an old cricket bat and leaned it against his chair. “I provide a door-to-door service. It makes it more special. You know, people are desperate for something special.”

I understood, now, the point of my driving lessons. It gave Chuck a measure of cover, maybe even prestige, to have a respectable-looking white man chauffeuring him while he ran around collecting bets all over Brooklyn. Apparently it had not bothered him that he was putting me at risk of arrest and imprisonment.

“Door-to-door service,” I said. “Nice going, Chuck. You really had me there.”

He laughed. “Come on, you were never in any danger of anything.” He bent down with a groan and picked up a box of old cricket balls.

We walked together to the field’s center. This was how we ended each of our sessions of groundsmanship: by whacking a dozen balls to the edge of the field and studying the consistency of each sector of the field. We were making progress. The outfield was getting quicker and truer. In accordance with our routine, I took the bat and with one-handed underarm strokes scattered the balls in every direction. We circled the field together, picking up the balls dotted around the field like markers of hours. Neither of us spoke then, or ever again, about his lottery.

Afterward, as was usual, Chuck drove me to wherever it was I was playing that day—Baisley Pond Park, perhaps, or Fort Tilden Park, or Kissena Corridor Park, or Sound View Park. Our field and those fields were in one continuum of heat and greenness.

I
strained the summer through a strainer that allowed only the collection of cricket. Everything else ran away. I cut back on my trips to England, inventing excuses that were easily accepted by Rachel. Whenever possible I took my lunch in Bryant Park, because in Bryant Park I could lie down on grass and inhale the scent of cricket, and look up at the sky and see a cricketer’s blue sky, and close my eyes and feel on my skin the heat that coats a fielder. Not once did I think about the park as the place, say, where my wife and I watched an open-air screening of
North by Northwest
with a cashmere blanket spread out beneath us, and the tiny baby asleep on the blanket, and wine, and food bought on the hoof at a Fifth Avenue deli, penned in by summer foliage and fine heaps of man-made lights and, as darkness fell and Cary Grant wandered into the Plaza, only the boldest and most select stars.

Work, too, went down the drain. I remember one weighty evening in El Paso. My hosts had gone to a lot of trouble. Nobody expressly said so, but a big brokerage deal was on the line. When the client asked me to stay for an extra day, I almost laughed. The next day was a Saturday. There was a cricket field to be tended in the morning and a cricket match to be played in the afternoon.

Nobody understands better than I that this was a strange and irresponsible direction in which to take one’s life. But I’m reporting what happened.

That season, 2003, I invariably played both days of the weekend—played in more matches, it may be, than anyone else at my club. My status grew with my visibility. I was offered, and I accepted, a position on the club’s fund-raising committee and immediately raised a record-shattering five thousand dollars by writing a check I pretended to have squeezed out of some crazy Indian guys at work. There were Indian guys at work but they weren’t crazy, and even if they had been crazy I wouldn’t have involved them in this part of my life, whose separateness was part of its preciousness. I became so embedded in the proceedings of the club, so transparently upstanding and unavoidable a presence, that by the end of the summer I had come under consideration—so I was told—for the position of suitor to one of the Guyanese member’s nieces. “Why not?” my informant said. “We know you.” He was kidding, yes, but also paying me a compliment.

Of course, he didn’t know me, just as I didn’t know him. It was rare for club members to have dealings that went beyond the game we played. We didn’t want to have any such dealings. When I accidentally ran into one of the guys working a till at a gas station on Fourteenth Street, there was awkwardness beneath the slapping of hands.

Beneath that, though, one might find kindness. One day our leg-spinner, Shiv, turned up drunk for a match. In a colloquy with the captain he revealed that his wife of ten years had left him for another man. We made sure that someone was with him in his empty house that night and all the nights until the following Saturday. That Wednesday I left work and rode a PATH train to Jersey City and from there rode a money-up-front taxi to Shiv’s house. Another guy from the club was already on the spot, cooking up a curry. The three of us ate together. When the cook went home to his family, I stayed on with Shiv. We watched television.

At a certain moment I asked Shiv if I could crash at his place. “I’m too tired to head back,” I said. He nodded, looking away. He knew what I was offering.

I sometimes wondered why the respect of these men mattered so much to me—mattered more, at the time, than anyone else’s respect. After that night with Shiv, I thought I had the answer to my question: these people, who in themselves were no better or worse than average, mattered because they happened to be the ones, should anything happen to me, whom I could prevail on to look after me as Shiv had been looked after. It was only after the fact that I figured out they’d already been looking after me.

Chuck merged, in my mind, with these other West Indians and Asians I played with, and I suppose their innocence became confused with his innocence, and his numbers game with the one we played on a field. There was a physical merger, too. Chuck loved to watch cricket and watched us whenever he could, keeping an eye on the play as he made phone calls. Now that he had quit umpiring, he became a follower of the team and assumed the right of a follower to give advice. One afternoon, after I’d struggled as usual to hit the ball through the outfield, he said to me, “Hans, you’ve got to hit the thing in the air. How else are you going to get runs? This is America. Hit the ball in the air, man.”

I tore open my pads’ Velcro straps and tossed the pads into my bag. “It’s not how I bat,” I said.

The last league game of the season was played on August’s first Sunday. It was hot, we were playing Cosmos CC, and we batted second. Four wickets fell and I was the next man in. I pulled a plastic chair into the shade of a tree and sat alone, bareheaded and sweating. I fell into that state of self-absorption that afflicts the waiting batsman as he studies the bowling for signs of cunning and untoward movement and, trying to recall what it means to bat, trying to make knowledge out of memory, replays in his mind bygone shots splendid and shaming. The latter predominated: in spite of the many matches I’d played that season, I’d never found myself in that numinous state of efficiency we evoke with a single casual word, “form.” There was a handful of shots I could look back on with pleasure—a certain flick off the legs, a drive that streaked through extra cover for four—but the rest, all the wafts and dishonorable pokes and thick and thin edges, was rubbish beneath recollection.

And on this day, when we were chasing almost two hundred fifty runs, a big target that required quick scoring on an outfield made especially sluggish by a wet summer, I was once again confronted by the seemingly irresolvable conflict between, on the one hand, my sense of an innings as a chanceless progression of orthodox shots—impossible under local conditions—and, on the other hand, the indigenous notion of batting as a gamble of hitting out. There are hornier dilemmas a man can face; but there was more to batting than the issue of scoring runs. There was the issue of self-measurement. For what was an innings if not a singular opportunity to face down, by dint of effort and skill and self-mastery, the variable world?