Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“You don’t know what is the Mega? Are you kidding me? It starts with ten million. The jackpot — my God, the jackpot Mega is two hundred and ten million. I play it, sure I do, why not? My grandfather used to say, A dollar and a dream, that’s all you need. Right off the bat I won two thousand bucks. Since then, my number never came up again. I play my car number, and I play my month and day of being birthed. They make it harder and harder. It used to be played only once a day. Now they play twice a day. Most of the time the winners come from Idaho, Kentucky. The potato cities win. Sure, sometimes we win right here in New York. One guy from Honduras won a hundred and five million with a ticket he bought on Fifth Street in Brighton Beach. I only want five million, that’s all. My wife said, What would you do? I said, I tell you what I would do. First off, I buy each of my daughters a house. Then I give them five hundred thousand each, cash. They can use it for the college money for their kids. Then I’d buy a condo in Miami. I figure that would leave me with a million to live on. On top of what I got already. That’s reasonable. I wouldn’t go crazy.”

This went on for ten boiling minutes. When Chuck excused himself for a moment, one of the other men made a remark to Abelsky in Russian.

Abelsky looked the man in the eye and said something the gist of which even I understood. There was an exodus, and suddenly Abelsky and I were alone in the American steam room.

“What happened?” I said.

Abelsky was muttering into the steam. In a low, white-man-to-white-man voice, he said, “They got a problem here with the Pakistan people. They come in, spoil things for everybody. It’s a problem, sure. This is a fucking Russian baths. They should make their own baths. But when I went to the hospital”—he was leaning toward me now, pointing a thumb at the door—“it’s this Paki from the islands who visits me every day. This guy handles the health insurance company, tells my wife it’s going to be OK. When I get to be fifty, he gives me a wine crate out of Moldova. It tastes like shit, OK, but it tastes like my homeland. These guys”—he gestured again at the door, this time dismissively—“I don’t see anywhere. These guys? One hundred percent assholes. I say fuck them. Fuck them where they breathe.”

Chuck returned and the three of us stewed and steamed a while longer.

“That’s it,” Chuck said. “Let’s get going.”

After a shower, it was back out to Coney Island Avenue. I was ready to go home.

Chuck said, “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to practice-drive in my car, and then you’re going to use it in the test.”

In Ramkissoonian fashion, the assertion had come out of the blue, or almost so: a cloudlet of recollection brought back a conversation, the previous evening, about my misadventure in Red Hook.

I said, “Chuck, that’s crazy. Anyway, I can’t practice unless I’m with a qualified driver.”

“I’m a qualified driver,” Chuck said. “I’ll go with you. Look,” he said, “we’ll make some arrangement. Hans, no more discussion. This is going to happen. Right now.”

“Now?” I suppose this was the moment I understood his modus operandi: wrong-foot the world. Run rings around it.

“No time like the present,” Chuck advised. “Unless you have something better to do.”

While Chuck walked home to fetch his car, I went to a diner and ordered a coffee. I hadn’t yet finished it when he came into the diner, rattled keys, tossed me a catch. “Let’s go,” he said.

The Cadillac was illegally parked on the far side of the road. I slid onto the cracked leather of the driver’s seat, adjusted the seat and the mirror, and started the engine.

“Where to?” I said.

“Bald Eagle Field,” Chuck said, rubbing his hands. “We’ve got work to do.”

We traveled the length of Coney Island Avenue, that low-slung, scruffily commercial thoroughfare that stands in almost surreal contrast to the tranquil residential blocks it traverses, a shoddily bustling strip of vehicles double-parked in front of gas stations, synagogues, mosques, beauty salons, bank branches, restaurants, funeral homes, auto-body shops, supermarkets, assorted small businesses proclaiming provenances from Pakistan, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Armenia, Ghana, the Jewry, Christendom, Islam: it was on Coney Island Avenue, on a subsequent occasion, that Chuck and I came upon a bunch of South African Jews, in full sectarian regalia, watching televised cricket with a couple of Rastafarians in the front office of a Pakistani-run lumberyard. This miscellany was initially undetectable by me. It was Chuck, over the course of subsequent instructional drives, who pointed everything out to me and made me see something of the real Brooklyn, as he called it.

After Coney Island Avenue there was Belt Parkway, and then there was Flatbush Avenue, and then there was Floyd Bennett Field — in early summer, a sub-Saharan flat of shrubs, scattered trees, and hot, weedy concrete runways. Save for a kite flier and his son, Chuck and I were the only ones there. We drove over tarmac past the last hangar. We stopped at signs stating PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO ENTRY and KEEP OFF.

I couldn’t believe it. In front of me was a bright green field.

“Jesus,” I said, “you did it.”

A man was seated on a roller that inched across the center of the field. “Come,” Chuck said. “Let’s talk to Tony.”

We removed our shoes and socks. We were still wearing our party gear from the night before.

The grass was soft beneath our feet. “He says he used to be a groundsman at Sabina Park,” Chuck said, nodding toward Tony. “But of course there’s a world of difference between Jamaica and what you have here.”

We reached the square. Chuck fell to his knees and spread his hands on the shortened grass like a hallower.

Tony, a small, scrawny fellow in his late fifties, dismounted from the roller and slowly approached. He wore a filthy T-shirt and jeans and, I’d find out, like Pigpen went around in a haze of gasoline, rum, and machinery. He slept and ate out here, in the converted shipping container that sat at the far side of the grounds and housed Chuck’s equipment. He kept a gun in that container to ensure what Chuck called “the safety of all concerned.”

“Lord, what a way it hot,” Tony said to Chuck. He removed his cap and wiped his sweating face and gave me a blank look. “Who this?”

I was introduced. Tony said something to Chuck that I simply could not understand. From Chuck’s reply I gathered they were talking about the mower, which sat fifty feet away. “Nothing no happen to it, boss, it good,” Tony said. He made another indecipherable remark and then grew animated as he elaborated about some “idiot thing” that had happened in connection with kids who’d been “frigging around” on the field.

The three of us looked at the square. “We roll it and roll it,” Chuck said. “Crosswise, like a star. That way it’s perfectly level.” Chuck said, “Looking good, right, Tony?”

Tony spat agreeably and went back to the roller and fired it up.

“Now comes the fun part,” Chuck said.

We mowed the outfield. We took turns driving a lightweight fairway mower with an eighty-inch cut and fast eleven-blade reels. Chuck liked to stripe the grass with dark green and pale green rings. You started with a perimeter run and then, looping back, made circle after circle, each one smaller than the last, each one with a common center. They would be soon gone, but no matter. What was important was the rhythm of cutting, and the smell of the cutting, and the satisfaction of time passed fruitfully on the field with a gargling diesel engine, and the glory and suspensefulness of the enterprise. There was to be no cricket played on this field that summer or even the next. And in any case you never really know how a grass pitch will turn out, not even a minute before the start of play. You do not know whether a twenty-two-yard strip of turf, often cut so closely as to appear grassless, will deliver a quick or slow or high or low bounce, whether a spinning ball will deviate upon bouncing and if so to what degree and with what speed. You do not know if it will be a featherbed, or a dog, or a slow-and low-bouncing pitch dispiriting equally to batsman and bowler. Even after you’ve begun to play on it, you do not know what it holds in store. The nature of earth, like the nature of air, is subject to change: wickets have their own weather and are given to deterioration and change as a match progresses. Cracks open in the ground, ground moisture rises and falls, the surface is disturbed or compacted. Shots that can be played one day cannot safely be played on another. In baseball, essentially an aerial game, conditions are very similar from match to match, from stadium to stadium: other things being equal (for example, altitude), to throw a slider at Stadium A differs little from throwing a slider at Stadium B. In earthly cricket, however, conditions may be dissimilar from day to day and from ground to ground. Sydney Cricket Ground favors spin; Headingley, in Leeds, seam bowling. This differentness is not only a question of differing grass batting surfaces. There is the additional question of the varying atmospheric conditions — humidity and cloud cover, in particular — that obtain from time to time and from place to place and can dramatically affect what happens to a cricket ball as it travels from bowler to batsman. Likewise, soft and hard outfields will respectively preserve and roughen a ball. For all of its apparent artificiality, cricket is a sport in nature.